jump to navigation

On Dasher….On Dancer….Canada’s Caribou Recovery Strategy November 30, 2011

Posted by cheesefish in : Uncategorized , add a comment

I just got an email from the David Suzuki Foundation talking about the new Caribou Recovery Strategy, which doesn’t protect the habitat of these increasingly pressured populations. I went to their auto letter site, which was great, but didn’t have the flavour I like.  A smart, political friend of mine once told me that she always started her letters to government officials with appreciation for their service and felt they were better received that way.  Sort of links to the empathy idea from Redefining Beauty.  So I wrote them a short, new letter which I posted below. Please let the government know in whatever is your own way if you are concerned about this issue! The link above on David’s name will get you to the site that will link to the auto letter…

Photo Credit: Mike Jones, Courtesy Flickr

To Environment Minister Kent and Staff:

Everyone wants to be good at their job and as a voting Canadian, I need the environment minister and his staff to be very good at their job since I cannot enact strong legislation to protect Canada’s natural resources. I have the utmost respect for the minister and his government, for choosing to serve Canadians, but the current Caribou Recovery Strategy that was released is inadequate. All animals need their habitat protected, as was recognized in the Nooksack Dace court case and the strategy does not currently do this. Although culling predators can be one tool in managing prey species populations, it is not the only thing that needs doing in this case. The strategy needs to be based on good science.  Please take a stand for the preservation of important resources and modify the Caribou Recovery strategy to be effective and an example of good governance.

Regards,
Dr. Cheesefish

Animal, vegetable…. mineral oil? October 18, 2011

Posted by cheesefish in : Randomness , 3comments

I went looking around Nelson a few weeks ago for a non-toxic, non-petroleum based product with which to treat my wooden fruit bowl.  I could only find mineral oil at a few places, which despite its ‘I am from the earth’ nomenclature is a petroleum distillate. When you look up the definition of mineral oil on Wikipedia you learn that mineral oil is “any of various colorless, odourless, light mixtures of alkanes in the C15 to C40 range” and that “it is considered generally safe for human contact and consumption and has been approved by the American FDA in personal care and cosmetic products, as well as for an additive for food to 10 mg/kg of daily consumption” yet at the same time the World Health Organization classifies mineral oils as Group 1 carcinogens to humans”.  I found the list  of the 25 pages of known Group 1 carcinogens and there on page 3 of 25 sits clear, innocuous seeming mineral oil.  Yikes.  Okay, maybe you need a lot of oil to spur on the oncogenes, but whether logical or not, I decided it was not something I wanted to rub on the wood that cradles my organic fruit.

The Building Tree provided a product that was food grade hemp oil so in theory I could make salad dressing at the same time as treating the furniture (though I am sure they don’t recommend it) and a beeswax based sealant.  I am currently treating the side tables after a successful fruit bowl refurbishing with first the hemp oil and then the beeswax.  I like that if my nephews come and take a nibble on the side table, I don’t have to call poison control and hide it from my sister.

I found out after further investigation that the beeswax sealant has some amount of mineral oil in it as well as carnauba wax. Sigh.  Carnauba wax is from the wax palm (Copernicia cernifera)

Photo credit: Roberio Dias, Wax Palm

and incidentally is harder than concrete and one of the hardest natural waxes in the world.  I didn’t have a problem with its inclusion, but again with the mineral oil. I made inquiries to the manufacturer of the beeswax sealant to find out more about the mineral oil in the sealant.  He replied very promptly and cogently, and told me they had considered using jojoba oil, but determined that the price point would be too high and that they use food grade mineral oil and all their research showed this to be a safe and affordable alternative that would not go rancid.  After doing a bit of reading in the toxicology literature it seems like the highly refined food grade mineral oil is the safest of the mineral oils out there and is certainly allowed in many foods and drug coatings.  I likely eat it or use it in cosmetics or personal health products without knowing.  However, there is equivocal evidence that even very refined mineral oil is still linked to some cancers when ingested and strong evidence that food grade mineral oil does not cause skin cancers like the less refined mineral oil may.

“Highly-refined foodgrade mineral oils did not produce skin tumours when applied to the skin of mice, although after intraperitoneal injection they

Knockout Mice by Wellcome Images under Creative Commons

produced plasma-cell neoplasms and reticulum-cell sarcomas in certain strains of mice. It was agreed that, in accordance with the previous evaluation, the significant latter finding is difficult to interpret.”.  Source: IARC Monographs on the evaluation of the carcinogenic risk of chemicals to humans Vol:Suppl. 7 (1987) pp 252-4

On the whole food grade is definitely much better than non-food grade mineral oil and I am happy to know that it is the oil in their product.   I will be honest. I find it difficult to make this much time to investigate products. I try to be ethical and green, but sometimes, I just get overwhelmed and just want a goddam can of paint to finish a project in the 2.34 hours I have coming up free that evening.  But, for some reason this little project got me going. For now, I will use the product with the food grade mineral oil component to it and I have let the producer of the beeswax sealant know that this consumer would pay a couple extra dollars for something I could spread on my furniture and on my toast if I was so inclined.

Not Useful at the Moment or the Slowvolution of a Filing System September 14, 2011

Posted by cheesefish in : Uncategorized , 1 comment so far

Yesterday, in a fit of procrastination from some work I knew I would just start and then have to put aside in a most unsatisfying, unfinished manner when other work came sliding back in my door for review, I did some filing.  My office is now squeaky, minty-fresh clean and all my files are in order. Goody for me. While I was filing, I came across several hanging folders that I have used and re-used since grad school and one of them was labelled in bold, black, thick Sharpie script as ‘Not Useful at the Moment’.  I laughed out loud and put a label on it instead that said ‘FiscalYear_Project Title_Client Name_ProjectComponent’ and I reflected on the slowvolution of systems when one is learning to be a professional in a field.

No one in the science department teaches you how to create a file structure on your hard drive that will make data and drafts findable without resorting to page matching with the hard copy you submitted 2 years later.  No one teaches you what words to use and not use in your field notes so that if you get called to be an expert witness you don’t look utterly witless and like you are reaching beyond the scope of your practice and no one, but no one, teaches you how to file.  ‘Why would they’, I hear you cry, ‘when you should have professional office managers and assistants to do such things for you?’, but the reality is that the remote or small office is more and more prevalent these days.  In these situations, the support network of persons who have learned the arcane art of filing is minimal to non-existent.  I remember, perhaps oddly, the use of the ‘NUATM’ file and it made perfect sense at the time.  I was writing a paper and had reviewed hundreds of articles.  The draft I had created used many of the articles, but several were tangential though potentially interesting depending on the reviewers’ comments that would come back in several months’ time.  They went in the clever little hanging folder to wait their turn at being cited.  It made sense then, but I still am evolving a system that will be understandable through long periods of time.

Irrational Mind and a Few of its Little Animal Friends October 16, 2010

Posted by cheesefish in : Randomness , add a comment

There are two parts to my mind.  The part that converses normally with people, can learn and figure and use logic and then there is the part  of the mind that was trained in its abilities solely by exposure at a young age to the bad horror films of the 80′s.  This part of the mind has no link to reality or at best, a tenuous, snaky tendril of a link that wouldn’t bear up under scrutiny or a large finger flick. This is the Irrational Mind.  The one that keeps me awake at night with endless loops of senseless, salty fear and terror.  And it has friends, animal friends.  I have met them and they are legion.

I travel for work.  Work is often dictated by tight budgets and timelines.  This usually involves staying at the cheapest motel that can still be described by local denizens as ‘clean’ and ‘family owned’ in the small towns where we work.  I have never had a problem, but the recent media furor over bed bugs has been on my rational mind.   Irrational mind obviously was out for a stroll around my gray space sometime and picked up the high potential fear quotient rampant in the topic of bed bugs.  Irrational Mind held this knowledge in reserve for just the right moment…  I was walking up the home-welded safety metal steps of a clean, family-owned motel recently when my co-worker said ‘I had some bites in a line on my neck last week.  I found out they were probably bed bug bites’.   My clanging footfalls on the steps slowed as my mind raced. We had stayed at this same motel last week.  She quickly followed up her statement by saying, ‘but I am pretty sure they were from the other place I stayed’, but the seed of fear had already blossomed and was swiftly bearing fruit.  I opened the door of my room and was somewhat surprised not to be overrun immediately by a leggy, scuttling horde of bedbugs.  I quickly determined that the only place to sleep was, in fact, the bed (the carpet didn’t seem any safer somehow).  Although I had not had any bites from the week before, now I was itching all over and quite sure that it was only a matter of time before I had a rampant infestation that would force me to throw out all home furnishings and never enjoy a peaceful sleep again. The eerie theme music from a horror film was on repeat loop in my head as Irrational Mind pulled out all the stops.  I irrationally decided (which is the only type of decision that can be made when Irrational Mind is in control) with no scientific basis whatsoever that I would be safer from the bedbugs if I slept under just the duvet and on top of the sheets.  This ridiculous decision allayed my fears enough that I could turn out the light and scratch for no reason and not sleep for the rest of the night. Watch this video and play along! You too can scratch the night away with the good time antics of Irrational Mind…

A few nights later, I was again at work while snorkelling at night.  My logical mind was innocently doing its job counting spawning kokanee and trying to keep track of where I was in my lane of observation as I finned slowly forward in the dark.  This part of my mind was fully engaged and therefore unprepared for a sneak attack from Irrational Mind’s animal friends.  I scanned left with my underwater spotlight, repeating my search pattern, I started to swing right with the light and as I illuminated the greenish haze in front of me, I saw a very large, rather rotund beaver steaming towards me and only about 1.5 metres distant.  Irrational Mind took over bodily control and frantically started avoidance manoeuvrings which involved frantic back finning, arm splashing and general flailing as well as squealing into the snorkel, thus alarming my co-workers. A large, non-domesticated furry mammal swimming towards me at speed was all it took to flip the switch.

I had visions of killer rodents, large, yellowing teeth gnashing off my snorkel mask and various other non-logical thoughts.   Irrational Mind was sure it was a killer beaver rather than just the ordinary Castor canadensis who is cute as a button and the poster child for industriousness.

Another treacherous animal friend of Irrational Mind is the ruffed grouse. They lie camouflaged and quiet as you stroll innocently in the fall forest.  Your rational mind is thinking things like ‘what a beautiful autumn we have had, and I wonder what I will do with that unfinished bathroom later today’ and other normal, inane internal banter when Irrational Mind notices a lurking grouse animal friend and gives him or her the special signal.  When you are most vulnerable, the grouse leaps up, beating its wings to simulate a small bomb explosion and causes a near heart attack reaction while Irrational Mind rubs its metaphorical hands in glee.  Another triumph….

October Cheese of the Month- Parmigiano Reggiano September 30, 2010

Posted by cheesefish in : Cheese of the Month , add a comment

I can’t say I am a foodie. I was informed by a real, dyed in the wool, veritable foodie that my poor taste in liking to occasionally eat the pollock-dyed-pink- imitation crab meat will never allow me to take on that title, but I like food. I especially like cheese as you may have already guessed from the name of the blog so I have decided to write a cheese of the month post for several reasons. The first reason is that I like learning about things that interest me and delicious chunks of ripened milk interest me greatly.  The internet allows all of us to find out a lot of information in a short amount of time, but I like merging information in my own way. The second reason for a cheese of the month post is that I like making cheese and I hope that by trolling the internet and other sources for information on cheeses in which I have an interest will help me make better cheese that is closer to the type I am aiming for.

When I was at university, I took a course in cheesemaking (a prize of a chunk of homemade cheese to the first person  who doesn’t know me who can guess what university I went to that offers such an amazing course!) in my third year.  I loved this course. I still have my notes from it tied together with butcher’s twine in the cupboard over the stovetop where I can refer to my ‘make notes’ and my scribbles on milk chemistry.   The lab sessions were conducted in a mini-commercial style cheese manufacturing room where we donned hair nets and white lab coats and poured 100L of milk at a time  into gleaming, stainless steel tanks shaped like a fat infinity symbol and turned it into curd, then cheese through a series of culturing, cutting and heating and salting steps. Pure alchemy with dairy. Now, I make cheese in a stock pot inside of an enamel canner on top of an electric element in my kitchen. Different scales of production, but the same processes.

Cheesemaking is a series of quite simple processes, but there are layers of complexity within each of the processes.  To make truly great cheese is something that may take a lifetime of dedication to just one style of cheese. It is a parallel story to that of making bread.  Anyone can make bread by following the recipe printed on the back of the flour bag at the supermarket, but to make truly amazing bread with rich flavours, the crust the way you like it and the crumb perfectly open and flexible, well there are colleges in France that deal just with that and courses in North America that get you started before you go to France and potentially embarrass yourself. And cheese may arguably be more complex than bread due to the whole ripening process and the natural bacterial flora found in milk as well as the terroir of the milk depending on the time of year and the pasture on which the cows, goats, sheeps or yaks are sitting and munching.

October is a month of giving thanks for the harvest and the time of first frosts and coloured leaves so I picked a cheese that goes well with the transition foods – the foods filled with late, fresh vegetables from the garden but with the complex starches we all crave coming into the colder weather. Parmigiano reggiano. I don’t mean this type of parmesan which was all I knew of this cheese as a child…

Parm but not parm

I mean chunks of well aged, dry Italian goodness made in the province of Parma, Italy, and also in the provinces of Bologna and Mantua. True parmigiano reggiano is a D.O.C. cheese with its name branded into its rind and a distinctive fruity flavour that comes partly from the spring pasture on which the cows graze to produce milk traditionally used in this cheese  and partly from the process for making the cheese. Cheese of this style that cannot qualify for the D.O.C. ranking is simply called parmesan and there are many fine cheeses that go under this name as well, but if you want to taste the real deal, look for the full PR name.  This cheese is made from partly skimmed milk so is not a very high fat cheese though the cheese made in summer is higher in butter fat than those made in winter. It is a grana style cheese which refers to the grains of crystallized amino acids that form within the cheese matrix during aging and give an amazing mouth feel to the cheese with tiny crunchy moments nestled in the smoothness.  To be called a true parmigiano reggiano, the cheese needs to be aged at least 12-14 months and at this stage it is still known as giovane or young.  It can be aged for up to four years to achieve different textures and flavours. The only additive allowed in this cheese is salt which is added by soaking the infant cheese in a saturated solution of Mediterranean brine for 20 days.  This type of cheese was well documented already by records from the 13th century so has likely been made since at least the 12th century – eating cheese like this links you to a place and a history of a artisanal process passed along through the centuries.

The famous diary of Samuel Pepys, English Member of Parliament during the restoration period describes how he took the time to bury his ‘parmezan cheese’ along with other key possessions to protect them from the Great Fire of London in 1666. Smart man – save the cheese!

We all think of grating this cheese on our pasta and it is fantastic in this traditional capacity, but branching out with this granular beauty is just as satisfying. Grate it on popcorn with a bit of local butter for a decadent movie time snack as per Joe Fiorito’s suggestion in his lovely book exploring food, nibble on it with fresh fall apples, grate it over rich winter squash roasted in the oven with some olive oil, have a traditional dessert of fall pears and fresh walnuts with a slice of parmigiano reggiano or just try it in a sandwich for something different from the usual cheddar. Happy October!

Hypoglycemic in Ikea or One More Reason to Shop Local September 15, 2010

Posted by cheesefish in : Randomness , 4comments

For its size, Nelson has a lot of shops. I appreciate the diversity and quality of merchandise afforded by living in a town that makes its living partly based on the tourist trade since I have lived in a lot of small towns across Canada and often I could, and did, buy  my underwear, power tools and lunch at the same store.  However, there are times when the big city calls for meetings, workshops or flights that don’t get cancelled and whatever reason I am there for,  I try and take the opportunity to visit stores we don’t have or that can’t be found by a wee drive to Castlegar or Trail or Rossland. One of the stores on this list is likely Ikea for decent looking furnishings that are affordable for the starting Cheesefish trying to set up their house.

Last week I drove to Vancouver and was somehow struck by the brilliant idea that after 9 hours of driving, it would be far more convenient to go to Ikea in Coquitlam IMMEDIATELY after driving. I had packed a lunch of delicious cheeses from Creston, homemade bread and dark chocolate, but all that was done and gone by Midway and by Hope which is always so, so, so much farther from anywhere than I think it is no matter how many times I drive from the interior to Vancouver, I was entering the weird surreal world induced by the hum of highway speed and lack of food.

First obstacle for the hypoglycemic Nelsonite with the brilliant immediate shopping impulse  was finding the entrance to the parking lot due to the major construction panic that sets in across Canada in September when every contractor realizes snow is only a breath away and they start randomly placing orange blinky lights and tearing up asphalt willy-nilly in hopes of meeting their completion goals before the site turns into a slushy nightmare from Siberia. It looked like a sugar frenzied game of pick-up-sticks crossed with Hallowe’en.

Safely negotiating my way into the parking lot and into the voluminous entrance of the blue and gold world, I stared blankly at the fat, well-thumbed catalogue for some time before I remembered why I was there. By this time, my husband had gotten irritated at my lack of apparent focus and had wandered off.  I remembered why I had to be here – bookcases, bookcases, bookcases. Index? Yes, but the index is for every Ikea store in the entire solar system, so no guidance on where to actually find them in this particular store so that I can find the magic red card that has the aisle number and pick up spot for the flat pack of my dreams. After uncountable minutes with the index though, I now  know the meaningless (to me) Swedish word for the bookcase that looks like it might work. Time to start the endless wandering through fake, perfectly clean and coordinated little rooms and shelves and shelves of mass produced swedish cleverness. The sheer scale of the store coupled with walking after sitting for far too long and low blood sugar made me dizzy and confused.  I stumbled around and wondered aloud (and scared a nice Vancouver family) if this might be the occasion where I finally tried the meatballs with lingonberry sauce.The wandering could have gone on for hours had I been left to my own devices, but my husband managed to hold it together and directed us past the large blue and white arrows through the dashed line ‘shortcuts’ to get to the bookcase zone. After accomplishing this mission, he then went totally hypoglycemic and started mumbling about ‘we have to get out of here’ and uttering random Swedish words which prompted my windsprint with the cart through the zone of Ikea where you actually find things to get out of here.

I see this whole hypoglycemic adventure as one more encouragement to shop local. Have a balanced breakfast or lunch and make decisions calmly in a store that matches its scale to you.

How Our Chickens Became Pets August 31, 2010

Posted by cheesefish in : Uncategorized , 3comments

My husband just asked me if I had a fever when he saw the title of my new blog post.  I was not sure what to make of that, so I laughed manically and continued writing. The farming gene is one that seems to be expressing itself all over the Kootenays right now. Accidental farmers, intentional farmers and sideline farmers (aka. hobbyists). We might be a different category even still – the abstracted hobbyist farmer.  You might know one of these yourself – they read Barbara Kingsolver and decide virtuously to give up bananas and have raw rhubarb on their corn flakes, but then enthusiasm, time and effort wane and you become the abstracted hobbyist, with a few green tomatoes and a couple eggs to show for hours of hyper vigilant effort earlier on in the growing season. Self sufficiency is in a galaxy far, far away, but the intentions are good.

Last year we decided to get chickens, but we were far too disorganized as the abstracted hobbyists we were to order them ourselves.  I was still shaking my head at the reality that I ordered animals that came by Canada Post when the deadline came and went, and my more organized and more sideline farmer friend down the way got her chicks in the mail.  She generously offered us two chicks since she graciously demurred that she had ‘too many’ and our flockette was born (flockito if you are of Latin descent).  The former owners’ treehouse was converted into a coop and away we went to buy a whole lot of organic feed. The chicks were cute, but they grew like those spongy things you throw in water and they inflate.  Soon we had two full sized sex-linked brown hens on our hands. They were wild and we had a few occasions where we chased them around the yard with a small seine net trying to get them into the coop before we realized that they pretty much cower and roost up for the night and let you pick them up as soon as the sun is setting.  We decided that chickens are not great pets and celebrated how it would be ‘no problem’ to kill them after their laying days were done since they were so reptilian, pecked at shiny things on our bodies when we were in the coop and virtually guaranteed that if you passed out in the coop with them, they would not, Lassie-like, run for help, but would peck your staring, comatose eyes out with genuine relish.

But something has happened in the last year. We abstracted hobbyists never finished the chicken run under the coop, so we hand carry our named girls out to the pasture and their customized, moveable cage every sunny day. They sometimes flap like possessed archangels and scratch the beejesus out of you, but mostly they are warm and quiet and you give them a couple pets as you drop them at their destination. Sometimes, they follow me like dogs when I walk around the yard and their eggs are the tastiest, yellow-yolks-like-July-buttercups, protein packets you could wish for. I have gotten fond of them. They have become part of the group. I was talking to myself/the chickens when I was carrying them out the other day and realized I had just said ‘I hope I don’t have to kill you because I don’t think I can’. Sigh

Steps to take if you want to turn livestock into pets.

1) Name them. Swear that it won’t matter when you have to chop their heads off, but it will. Oh yes, it will.

2) Carry them around like the chihuahua in Legally Blonde.Do it daily so you have plenty of bonding time.

3) Make their coop in a treehouse that used to be the property of children. That way, every time you climb the ladder to feed them you have childhood flashbacks intermingled with horror film images of dead chickens.

4) Take pictures of them as chicks with your yuppie dog. Thus, creating a ‘pet montage’ photograph that is so adorable it could be one of those nauseating greeting cards with sepia toned children holding blush-orange roses.

5) See how hard they work to effectively give birth daily to an egg that is as delicious as anything you’ve ever eaten. Admire their tenacity and subverted fecundity.

6) Grow fond of them. Game over.

Welcome to Cheesefish…Randomness by any other name is still random August 27, 2010

Posted by cheesefish in : Randomness , 2comments

I sometimes wonder if I have undiagnosed ADD. I seem to skip between work, picking up chickens and running them around the property, making bread, reading blogs, seeding grass, throwing the kong for the flying monkey dog, rummaging around for chocolate in the baking supply drawer,  and back to work. Today, it seems more random than ever. This is the joy and pain of working based out of the home and based off of the home computer. My potentially undiagnosed issue may have been exacerbated today by a new coffee.  I purchased the coffee it in a post-huckleberry picking, hypoglycemic gas station stop blur, and have regretted it since.  I am quite sensitive to caffeine and moderate my dosage accordingly. 2 scoops decaf, then 1 scoop of the usual caf coffee and I am golden. Woken up, but not jittery and scattered. Today, that more delicate than a jelly kitten balance was ruptured. In theory, blogs have to have a purpose, but I am not sure this one will. Just ramblings about life, the cheeses and everything might be enough for me.  The new graphic inserted in this post is my first attempt to create some MS Paint art. I have been inspired by others in the blog world (or if you must use the icky blogosphere word, insert it in your mind) by their MS Paint art, so here is the first draft of the cheesefish.  I work with fish and I love cheese and that is as profound as the name of this blog is. Yours in randomness, the cheesefish.