All my ideas seems soooo glorious before the follow through

It all began during one of the many trips to the store to buy the weekly allotment of food for the family. I was tasked with a list that was by no means long but was difficult to execute, such as kids cereal (the kind they want or the kind I want them to want), and yogurt (again, so many damn options, and flavours, and delivery methods of yogurt I was doomed to get the wrong kind), I believe I bought the wee little kids cups when I was supposed to get the tubes!

Anyways, before I actually got bogged down in all those damn choices I came across a large box near the end of fruit and veggies. It was full of 4 to 5 foot lengths of brown-ugly-bamboo-looking things. I almost walked right by with a smirk that everyone would have read as "Ha! no one wants to buy a 4 foot piece of creepy bamboo. Am I right?", but my eye caught the label as I passed by.

"Raw Sugar Cane - $1.98"

Well holy crap I stopped in my tracks and pulled the nicest piece of raw sugar cane I had ever seen (it was also the first piece I had ever seen) out of that box and strutted away with an amazing coolness and unconcerned look of "Oh this, I buy raw sugar cane all the time, I feed my 27 year old box turtle* Gorki and then transform the rest of the stalk into a crude flute that I use to express my worldly angst with."

* I really don't think you should ever feed sugar cane to a turtle, it just seems like something someone else would do.

Though I am sure that in those 30 seconds I went from smug smirk to excited as hell and then to cool calm I looked like an idiot that buys something without knowing what he is going to do with it.

..........sigh

See, I have not idea what to do with this thing.The drive home I envisioned the family being excited to see thing new 'food' and rally around plans to consume it in what ever ways we saw fit. Instead all I got was my oldest boy grabbing it shouting "COOL!" and taking a swing at the cupboards with it, resulting in a loud crack. Boy did he look sheepish until we saw that no damage was done to the cupboard door.

Mom asked, "So what do we do with it?". To which I replied "Eat it!"

Well that was the end of that conversation and she wandered off.

I heard her shortly after share a laugh with our daughter when she said "Dad is going to eat a branch for supper."

After a few quick minutes on the Google and I had a whole list of ideas to utilize my length of sugar cane for.

• Soup
• Chew it
• Cook with it
• Kebob skewers
• Tea sweetener
• Boil down in to a natural sweetener
• Coffee stir stick and sweetener (seems like the coolest idea ev-er!)
• Fruit kabobs

...and the list goes on.

I then got out the cutting board, my biggest knife, and a wee paring knife. The directions I found said to cut the cane as close to the knuckles or joints and then peel the hard exterior to get the sweet juicy sugar cane.

Well it was like cutting a piece of 2x2! I had to slam the palm of my hand on the back of the butchers knife over and over and over to get the damn thing to cut. 

So I chopped and swore, and peeled and chopped, and worked so damn hard to turn this stick into nice pieces of soft sugar cane. 

The pictures online made it look so much easier!So with my tiny pile of yummy sugar cane I approached the family for a taste. The one site said to chew the sugar cane and suck all the sweet juice out and then spit the pulp out afterwards. So I thought the kids would be excited to chew some natural sugar.

......sigh

I only convinced the middle guy to give it a try. And after he spit out the pulp he said "This is the best thing I have ever had before in my whole life Dad!". So I offered him as many as he wanted because it would be just him and I, he said "No thanks." and walked away. 

I ended up trying a few different recipes with the sugar cane and not a one of them really worked out. Oh well, at least I have a two foot piece of sugar cane in the pantry and a deep tissue bruise on my palm to remind me of what it could have been. I can still recollect a faint image of the family sitting around, tlaking and laughing while chewing on the fresh raw sugar cane and drinking some home made iced tea lightly sweetened by nature.

I don't think I will ever learn my lesson, because  on Monday I bought a giant can of Gulab Jamun. I plan on cracking it open tonight, when Mom is at her university class, and subjecting the kids to this yummy hot sweet dessert. Deep fried dough balls soaked in sweet syrup, they should just give up and get used to me forcing new strange foods on them, because I don't plan on stopping.

Best way to finish off a fantastic Indian buffet!

Kids pancake cutters

We have been working hard on the pitch and now we are ready to present our idea to the Dragons Den.

Get ready Canada for the soon to be patented product, the Kids Pancake Cutter!

Some of you may mistake this technological wizardry as a pizza cutter but you would be ass wrong.

This is a pancake cutter, and it only cuts pancakes. To some it may seem like a trivial kitchen utensil to have but when you are continuously trying to keep pancakes on hungry kids plates cutting pancakes manually with a fork and knife is an absolute waste of time.

With the pancake cutter you can hand over the cutting duties to your kids! And with all the free time you can lean on the kitchen counter while a fresh batch are cooking away and watch your kids make a horrible sticky buttery syrupy evil mess!!!!

Pancakes sure taste good but I hate the stickiness they create, the devil's breakfast of choice. I touched syrup on the bottom of my little one's plate and almost threw up...

Good ole outdoor winter cooking!

So before we get into the winter cooking I want to go back 6 months to whne a friend stumbled upon a great little outdoor wooden stove online. We both think that we could sruvive for weeks in the forrest with just our wits and a hatchet, so this stove was like candy to us.

Stovetec sells numerous stoves and such but we were fixated on the 2 door recreational stove. We talked big and made palns but our pizazz petered off and we forgot about it. Then one faithful day in November last year he email ed me and said "I am getting myself one for Christmas! Do you want one?". 

"Yes please!!! You are getting the one with two doors right?" I asked. A few shortly weeks later we were in possesion of out new beautiful mean green wood burning stoves. 

NOw fast forward to last weekend when we were lookign at my daughters Brownies book to see what Brownie badge she would like to try for this month. And we fell upon the Outdoor Cookout badge. Now my mind opened up and shot straight to the Stovetec stove that had beenin the garage for a few weeks now and had not been used, and that was it!

Our daughter wrote a list of the materials she would need and proceeded to gather them up and get ready.

we are now ready to cook in the snow!

So the oldest attempting to earn a badge was in chage of the whoel endeavour, and I was the safety officer. Most of my conversations ended with "...and then you will burn the house down."

After she cleared a spot on the deck (don't worry a good 1.5 feet from teh house) and placed a board to hold everything we all got excited to light the stove and get a water-boiling-on!

burn baby burn! and once hte fire was lit and hte bottom door closed the flames dropped and the heat roared.And then we had to wait, which seemed to take forever, for about 10 minutes until the water began to roll and boil. 

Only the hardiest of outdoor winter chefs sit on a purple IKEA chair.

The stove does have an adjustable sleeve, that you can see surrounding hte pot of water, that focuses the heat onto the pot or pan used to cook with, the tiny pot we used had a low handle which would not allow us to tighten the sleeve snuggly to the pot. So I would guess that with a tight fit on the pot it would have reduced te boiling time by a few minutes.

Well with the macaroni in thewater and steam rising all over the palce we were one excited bunch. And htat made me.....beside myself with pleasure!!! I hoped they would enjoy this, and I hoped even more that this would actually work. And I was pretty proud of myself when she had a huge smile stirring the macaroni.

the miners came out hte hills that afternoon. Drawn by the smell of the famous Elbow Noodles a la Torgerson. Their fascination with the stove was first, second was watching the wooden spoon steam after stirring the noodles.

After we successfully cooked a wee pot of noodles we went on to thfe best food eveer...boiled weiners. YUM!

THe middle guy was sooo excited to stir the hot dogs and talk almost not stop in the 5 minutes it took to 'cook' them, about camping, cooking,  fire, pots, wood, fire again, steam, spoons, steaming spoons, and how he could cook all our suppers like this, even tea!

"...the water we would get from a stream that was by the tent. And then I would cook supper with it, and wash dishes in it, and then we would build a bridge over the stream so we could play soccer in the field on the other side...."It was a lot of fun and the weather made it absolutly awesome. The amazing thing about the stove that I haven't mentioned was that all we used was 4 short pieces of wood, maybe an inch around and 10 inces long, to cook the noodles nad the hot dogs. 

So it would even come in handy when the zombies come and you don't want to be out with the hordes gathering armfuls of wood for every meal.

I love Cheeeese! we went to a cheese farm today.

Little guy in a giant wooden shoe outside the Dutch Grocer

The evil waves will be defeated by Weenie the Brave

Trying to catch lunch at Dinghy Dong Dock Pub

Chowing on the chowder!

Kids loved the bunnies at the Cheeseworks.

Making a doomed sand castle as the tide is coming in

So we are going to combine yesterday and today into one epic, monstrous post! And as well we are going to have a contest, details at the end of the post.

Yesterday we booked it out of Sooke bright and early and headed back to Nanaimo. Along the way we stopped at a little art gallery just off the highway.

During our trip our oldest has been taking an interest in totem poles, as we have come across a lot of amazing ones on the Island. And in Sooke she found a piece of drift wood and said she was going to make a totem pole, she used her markers and made a cute little totem pole of her own.

So Mom and her went into the little art gallery and came out with a nice little replica totem pole for her to keep in her room.

By the time we got to Nanaimo it was lunch time, so we hopped on the ferry and went to Protection Island in the Nanaimo harbour for lunch at Dinghy Dock Pub. It is the only restaurant on the island and it is at the end of the dock that the ferry uses, so the kids loved that they ate lunch at a floating restaurant, and they serve pretty good meals too. Mom had a tuna sandwich and Dad had to try their clam chowder and then ate a honey ginger glazed salmon salad with a wasabi dressing!!  

A really neat thing for the kids is that they have a place outside where we sat where the kids could fish. They had little fishing poles and line with corn on the end. Little fish kept coming by and nibbling but no one took the bait and was caught. But it did not stop the kids from trying and trying and trying and trying.

We did not get back to our home base in Nanaimo until late afternoon so Mom ran out for some groceries while the kids played and relaxed for the rest of the day.

And of course Mom and Dad rocked the tea on the deck in the evening relaxing and enjoying the scenery.

Today, we had a much busier day because we had no travelling to accomplish. We started out by heading to Qualicum and checked out their beach. Because the tide was just about all the way back in the kids played in the sand and were constantly being pushed back closer to land every few minutes as the ocean kept washing their shoes away from the dry spot they had placed them.

We think the little guy was still choked about getting thrashed in Tofino because he had a wooden sword and was very angry at each wave as it crawled up the beach at him, and it ended in tears when the ocean first took the kids shoes from an earlier dry spot and slowly washed them about.

After we were evicted from the beach by the water the kids voted and we decided to go to Parksville and play at their playground and spray park.

On our way there we came across a sign that read,

"Moonberry Winery and Little Qualicum Cheeseworks"

So we of course veered off the highway and searched for this amazing combination of a place. What we found was perfect! It was a dairy farm that produced cheese and also made wine, AND they also had a cool self guided tour for kids that was a scavenger hunt taking us all around the farm to get different stamps for each clue. The kids played with a few rabbits they had, they saw some baby dairy cows, which caused the youngest to shout "Be-be Kow! Be-be kow!", over and over again for a good 10 minutes, even after we left the cows.

We were able to see the barn where they milk the cows and check out the horses they have on hand for trail rides, all in all a great stop.

Oh, and we ate cheese! The kids were sooo excited to be at cheese farm because they could then tell a friend of theirs, who LOVES cheese, that they were at a cheese farm.

So we left the Cheeseworks with a bottle of wine and some cheese and finally found ourselves at the playground and spray park in Parksville.

2 hours later we packed up and drove off with a van full or rosy cheeked kids, and stopped again at that nice little restaurant Avo's Eatery in Parksville. Mom had the Santa Fe wrap with broccoli sprouts and carmelized onions and Dad had an avocado, tomato, and Asian salad on noodles. We both agreed that Mom's was the best!

On our way back to Nanaimo we were again sidetracked!

A sign that read,

"70 flavours of Licorice" caught our eyes. Sooo we pulled off the highway again and found a neat little Dutch grocery that indeed had at least 70 different flavours of licorice. The kids dug through the bulk bins and selected quite the assortment of licorice tp give Grandpa once we get home. And the nice lady who owned the store gave the kids a bag of chocolate soccer balls and Dad a dried farmers sausage.

The kids loved the chocolate but the large farmers sausage made Dad's stomach feel - bletch!

Once finally home we ate a buffet of random foods we had on hand, had a quick evening dip in the hot tub and then bath and off to bed with the lot of them.

Tomorrow we leave the Island, which will be a sad moment. We had a hell of a good time here and I think we would all galdly spend another couple weeks checking out what it has to offer.  

But it works out well for us because tomorrow we are going to meet up with someone in the family who the kids adore and have a super fun time in Vancouver at an amusement park.

Thanks for a good time Vancouver Island, stay classy!

Now for the CONTEST!!!!

We have so far taken a lot of pictures on vacation, and more than a few of them are completely ridiculous! So we thought it would be fun to have a caption contest.

Take a look at the picture below and in the comments section below write your best caption for the picture. I don't think there will be a prize but we can all enjoy the stupid and silly captions that everyone comes up with.

What's your best caption for this picture?

Eating what we 'catch'

   A wee breaking of our fast on the front porch in Sooke.

  Morning walk on Wiffin Spit in Sooke. Wiffin Spit from our pilotless drone that came with our new Nikon D3200. We are that dark spot beside that light area. 

Our first pothole we splashed in, nice and shallow here.

A little dip in the second pothole we visited. Being submerged in the icy water was quite the shock to the human body!

Our youngest did not want to part with his egg that he picked.

After dropping and cracking his precious egg he was more than happy to eat it!

Our middle child prepared with the lid in case the crab escaped the transfer.

Our first morning in the cabin in Sooke was pretty decent, except for the early birds wanting their worms. But it seems that when in a cabin or camping early mornings are a guaranteed occurrence.

We started off with pancakes, waffles and toast and some strong (new coffee makers are always fun to learn) and finished off on the front porch planning our day.

We first headed off to the natural peninsula in the Sooke Inlet called Wiffin Spit, cue the wild crazy laughter from our oldest boy. It is a full kilometer long and almost stretches across the whole opening of the inlet. We were advised that is was a good spot to see sea otters, sea lions, and seals.

After a good hike out on Wiffin Spit, and disturbing many early morning walkers peaceful stroll, we headed back with nothing to be seen.

Until we spied two sea otters diving and swimming near the shore! The kids were excited and watched them for a good 53 seconds and were then off to the Boardwalk down the coast a bit.

The board walk was a cool little walk down a bunch of stairs and then along the coast for a couple hundred yards. It was a great view of the inlet and is supposed to be a great place to watch whales that happen by the area, no sea animals for us though.  We dis meet a nice boxer named Lola though.  She was rescued by the "Without Borders Boxer Rescue" and taken in by this super nice family when she was only a pup.

Once we made it back to the van we were off to the destination that everyone was excited to see...the Meadery!!!

I think it is called a meadery?

There is a little farm outside of Sooke that is a honey farm and a meadery (they make their own mead!) called the Tugwell Creek Farm and Meadery. After our trek down the coastline we found out that meaderies are closed on Tuesdays. Crap.

So we went back to the cabin to drown our sorrows in lunch, and a nap for the wee one.

After the rest we were off to what the locals called the Potholes, well I gues the government calls them the potholes too because it is called the Sooke Potholes Regional Park. But this is a place along the Sooke river where over many years the water has worn away the rock to form these little pools along the bank that are great for swimming.

So we vanned it up to the park and hiked down to two of the different pools. They we great!

The water was cold, clean, and clear. It was a popular place for people to hop in a tube and float around, swim the little pools (the first one was about 100 feet wide and in the middle we couldn't see the bottom), or to bask on the pebbly beaches.

It was a great afternoon in the sun. And we are amazed at how many different places to swim we have found that have been absolutely different than each other.

It was supper time by the time we left the potholes (which by the way look absolutly nothing like a pothole.) and so we were going ot stop for some fresh prawns at one place and some lettuce at another.

At the first stop we bought some prawns but Dad, in his wisdom, also bought a live 2 lbs Dungeness Crab to boil and eat.

At the second stop we bought some mixed fresh greens and jam and in talking to the owners Ellen and Dick ended up spending an hour and a half touring their farm. It turns out Ellen is from Saskatchewan and has been turning her little plot into her little prairie oasis.

She has a great garden (which she plants wheat and oats!), a few sheep, some goats (which they milk and make cheese out of), a few geese and ducks, a dwindling flock of chickens (a pesky racoon has been taking the hens), and a great little orchard of fruit and nut trees!

This was an absolute fantastic evening! The kids got to pick eggs from the coop, eat mulberries and thimble berries, feed the goats, see all the trees (they spun around the mulberry bush, and picked artichokes from their garden.

Ellen and Dick, or Grandpa Dick and Grandma Ellen as they introduced themselves to the kids, were amazing, and sweet to the kids. Ellen showed everything to the kids and did not just talk to the adults and even picked up our youngest and excitedly walked him to the almond tree they had.

If you are even in Sooke keep your eyes open for a little sign that mentions fresh veggies and baking, Ellen and Dick are busy people (their veggie and baking stand in the yard is a self serve and pay deal with a slotted tin to put your money in) so hopefully you get the opportunity to meet them!

We wantd the kids to eat the eggs they had gathered so we planned on making some scrambled eggs with supper, except our little guy had different ideas. He did not want to part with his egg. He carried it back to the cabin and would not hand it over. But he ended up cracking it pretty good when he was playing with it and toy car he had. Then he was ready for the circle of life to take place, once he realized that the egg that he had gathered from the hen house was nothing but...an egg.

Supper was a buffet of sandwiches, salad, scrambled eggs, veggies, crab legs (receipe below), prawns, hot dogs, and yogurt tubes. We ended the evening with a marshmallow roast over a little fire and plopped the kids to bed before 9:00 pm.

We did end up finding some of the local mead at a pub in town, so Dad enjoyed a glass of honey mead and Mom a cup of tea.

Tomorrow we are back to Nanaimo for two nights then homeward bound.

Dad's Not Famous Crab recipe

ingredients

1 -2 lbs dungeness crab - as live as possible

1 big pot

lots of water

1 stove

First you put lots of water in the big pot. Then you put them both on the stove and boil.

Once the lots of water is boiling, place the as live as possible crab in the water, bottom down, and slam lid on pot as fast as possible so you don't have to see the angry crab boil.

After 20 minutes remove cooked crab and consume!

Feeding Wild Seals and Other Shenanigans

This was the best part!

Sharing at the Soda Shoppe in Victoria

Traditional banana split from the soda shoppe in Victoria Someday we will see the end of the highway!Just in the woods near SookeWild harbour seals in VictoriaThe Forest House in Sooke

We left Nanaimo early and headed out to Victoria and then Sooke.  After a very disappointing visit to the "Undersea Gardens" (seriously, just because you can see fish in a tank does not mean you are an undersea garden and should charge a family $40 to see it), we walked around downtown Victoria. 

It was pretty hot and sunny so we found a super neat restaurant called "The Soda Shoppe".  Dad had a pineapple fizzy and then we ordered a traditional banana split.  The kids had only ever seen a soda shoppe in cartoons so they loved sitting on the stools and looking out the windows while enjoying some ice cream.

Then we found "Mile 0" of the trans-Canada highway.  Mom loved having pictures taken there...someday we will have our pictures taken at the end of the trans-Canada highway. We also showed them the Terry Fox statue at Mile 0, our oldest had learnt about him in school so she thought it was neat to see where he had been.

The best find of the day was HARBOUR SEALS... real wild ones! 

We heard from a local fellow that there were a few seals that hung out in the Oak Bay Marina.  We walked around the dock and found them right away.  For $1.99 the marina shop will sell you a bag of frozen, dead, cut in half fish to feed to the seals. 

The kids loved the fact that the fish were frozen, dead AND cut in half. We didn't get it but to each their own.

OMG!  So much fun!  Our middle child didn't want to touch the fish, so he just dumped his entire bag into the water and the seals went nuts. They swam around the dock and nabbed the fish every time we threw some.

One seal even floated there and waited to have the fish thrown in his mouth, if you waited to long he would splash you with his flipper. The kids loved watching and feeding seals!

The dumb lady who dropped her sun glasses in the harbour while watching the seals was almost as entertaining. She freaked out when they fell and then stomped around trying to figure out how to get them out...they were 30 feet down. he he he!

Everyone then rested, except for Dad who had to drive, as we went to our cabin in Sooke.  The cabin was nestled in the forest.  Even though it was hot and sunny our cabin 60 feet off thehighway was cool and refreshing.  A nice dog named Tobi met us there and even showed us around the inside of our cabin.

We had supper at a local favourite spot called, "Stickelback".  We sat overlooking the water and watched a game of kayak ball.  Our youngest got so excited when they scored a basket though that he would cheer and clap (which normally would be alright, but it was a more upscale restaurant and the cheering and clapping didn't really fit in). 

We had a great seafood supper...well mom (pesto mushroom crusted halibut) and dad (salmon and sun dried tomato salsa) did...the kids had spaghetti (noodle) and meatballs (balls of meat) and chicken fingers, all of which were served in cardboard pirate ships, and came with ice cream.

Back at the cabin we lit the fireplace and cuddled up in blankets...one of the best things about winter...but it is summer, so it is a real treat. The temperature must have dropped to high single digits because Mom and Dad saw their breath just before bed time.

The Forest Cabin

Room 5/5 (The cabin interior was fabulous! It had two big super comfy beds, one in a loft, a full bathroom, kitchen, living room, front porch, and back patio. For the cost of a regular hotel room we had a great cabin with a fire pit and BBQ. Even though it was a cabin it was super super clean! The fridge was clean and did not smell bad at all. The cabin even receives our patented 'No Spider' award.) 

Pool 0/5 (...There wasn't one. It had a shower and tub but no other H2O options.)

Location 3/5 (It was close to Victoria, maybe 20 minutes away, and only 3 minutes from Sooke. It was just off the highway and still very secluded.)

Cabin 5/5 (We planned on staying there from the beginning but once we were there we realized how amazing it was to have a little break from the regular hotels. Being fully stocked we cooked full meals and had the little extra room and outdoor space to spread out a bit. We would recommend it to anyone.)