last weekend, it was rather cold outside, and pretty white. i did a walk to the nose hill park, enjoying the beautiful snowscape as well as the icy wind. here are some impressions.
posts for 2009.
it’s white outside. for a couple of days now. after a few white days during october, and rather warm temperaturs during most of november, the coldness finally returned, and with it the whiteness. an unfortunate companion of snow is ice, and by now, there’s plenty of it. mostly on sidewalks, sometimes on the roads. let’s see when the next chinook is coming.
after sharing one pancake recipe more than ten days ago, i thought i’d write about another one which i tried more often. it’s the result of preparing enough spinach sauce for a few days, and trying to combine that with pancakes.
i again made a lot of spinach sauce today, so i can eat a few days from it. i took one onion, one garlic bulp and one red chilli and chopped them. then, i put them in a pan and roasted them gently, adding “some” cayenne pepper.
after that, i added the frozen spinach, and let it defrost. during the process, i added some hot water, some more water with corn starch, and some whipping cream.
as usual, i prepared pancakes and added some of the spinach sauce on one half.
finally, i flipped the other half over, and obtained a small stack of spinach pancakes.
often, i experiment when cooking. adding or removing or exchanging ingredients, changing the result a little every time; i guess this is not that uncommon for anyone used to cooking. sometimes, i do some more experiments, like today. two days ago, when shopping, i got a spontaneous idea, namely to try a omlette with zucchini and cheese. well, i bought everything i needed, but on the way home, i continued to think and planned to replace the omlette by pancakes. well, and today, i finally tried it out. first, i cut the zucchini into small slices:
then, i prepared pancake dough – flour, a few eggs, salt, milk, and mixing it together. then, i started baking pancakes.
for the first try, i took the done pancake out of the pan and placed it on a plate. i added grinded mozzarella on one half, put on some of the zucchini slices, and flipped the other half over:
it tastes good, but i thought i can do better. so i tried to add some spices, in particular cayenne pepper, after putting the cheese on. i also put on the cheese while the pancake was still in the pan, as otherwise the cheese doesn’t really melt. it then looks like this:
finally, i had a small stack of pancakes, part of whom i enjoyed eating, while putting the rest in the fridge to enjoy it at tomorrow’s lunch.
on one of the last days, we did a small trip to calgary’s nose hill park, where i have been before as well. here are a few impressions:
one of the most beautiful parts of our trip was the drive south the icefields parkway, connecting jasper to lake louise. here are a few impressions from our stops. we wanted to drive up mount edith cavell as well, but the road was closed.
astoria river bridge and athabasca river.
a beautiful lake and the athabasca falls.
mountains, and the columbia icefield.
our car, and the upper waterfowl lake.
the bow lake and the crowfoot glacier.
lake louise.
after two days in vancouver, we rented a car and drove up to the beautiful town of jasper. from there, we visited, among others, patricia lake, pyramid lake and maligne lake, whose photos can be found below as well as a photo taken at a rest stop somewhere north of kamloops.
after yellowknife, we flew to vancouver. things you can see in the photos are the steam clock, vancouver city, stanley park, a spider, views from the capilano bridge and its park, and a sunset at the pacific ocean’s beach.
on our last night in yellowknife, we had the luck to see an aurora borealis. experiencing an aurora is something hard to describe. the following photos and videos just give a small glimpse of its wafting beauty.
for the more technically interested people, the camera settings i used for most photos are a shutter speed of 8 seconds, aperture of f/4.0 and iso sensitivity of 800. this was the first time where i was really happy that i have a remote for my camera’s shutter and a tripod. below you can view some videos, taken with these settings (hence, between two frames there are around 8 seconds delay). there are six frames per second, whence the videos are around 48 times faster as the real aurora was. each video comes as a flash player together with an avi download (the avi files contain essentially a sequence of jpeg files, so no fancy codec is required).
another day, we did a trip to the great slave lake, a huge lake (its area takes 7% of germany’s area, or two thirds of switzerland’s area).
