food

niagara grapes & guilt and more grapes please

~ carin ~ 5 Comments

Being originally from Niagara I’m wired to think it’s a kind of viticultural sin to eat grapes from anywhere else and normally I don’t. I very happily wait for the deep purple Coronation ones of September, which every year take me back to an abandoned vineyard I used to walk through on my way to school, picking whole bunches en route.

This year I’ve even planted my own crop (oh that’s rich—my crop—who am I kidding? the birds and squirrels are already huddling, scratching out complicated plays in the cedar mulch)—a single seedless dark purple called Mars.

But I digress.

The point of this post is confession.

I wouldn’t normally eat grapes outside grape season—much—but having recently been to Chile and fallen in love with the country, I’ve been making some [many] off-season exceptions.

So sue me.

Question: If a grape falls in a Chilean table grape forest, and there’s only one semi-remorseful Southern Ontarian there to hear it—does it make a sound?

can we all just get along?

~ carin ~ 2 Comments

So the woman down the street says this damn rabbit, have you got rabbit problems too, it’s a complete nuisance, look what it did to the bark of this tiny sapling over winter, it was just planted in the Fall, can you imagine?

I ask does she mean can I imagine being clever enough to fend off starvation by finding a tender sapling to eat amongst all the concrete…

She doesn’t answer, continues, tells me that’s not all, now it’s after the just planted snapdragons.

I say aren’t you supposed to wait until the 24th?

She says, her lovely display of varying heights and colours, all planned and perfectly arranged, which would have filled out to become a striking focal point beside the goldfish pond, is ruined. She points at holes where clumps should be, makes fists and says this can’t go on, something must be done! She looks around the yard, helplessly, hopefully (yearning for a rabbit sheriff to stroll by with bunny handcuffs?).

I suggest we stop building subdivisions where woodland used to be, we’re confusing the wildlife, we’re in their backyard not the other way around. In fact, I say, they’re pretty reasonable about sharing it with us, wouldn’t you agree—notice how they don’t eat all the snapdragons…

A lovely clump of sorrel mysteriously disappears in April—probably makes a good lunch for someone.

(Excuse me, is that a bit of sorrel in your teeth?)

By May—before I even have a chance to die of starvation—it grows back.

And so becomes another good lunch.

Plenty to go round. No need for pawcuffs.