MEGA-POST! Canmore, Golden, and more

a random picture I took on the way to Canmore

Hey everyone in blogland, I'm back! My few days in the Rocky Mountains were fantastic :)

We stayed one night in Canmore, then two days in Golden, BC.

In Canmore, we got to stay in a place with a TRIPLE-DECKER-BUNK-BED! Guess who slept on the top bunk? :) It was very thrilling indeed.
The lovely Kicking Horse river!
We stopped at Emerald Lake, in Yoho National Park. Isn't it gorgeous? My parents spent their honeymoon here fifty billion years ago, too.

In Canmore, we came across the best farmer's market ever. My beloved eggplant, a wide variety of squash, bell peppers in every colour of the rainbow, gargantuan elephant garlic, broccoli, beets... The fresh fruit was all so beautiful (perfect apricots that ranged from the size of a marble to a fist! fragrant plums! yummy little berries and cherries!), so we couldn't resist buying some. The yellow watermelon was super-sweet and extremely juicy.


Um, it's a bridge. My mom wanted me to take this picture, haha.

In Golden, we camped out in the backyard of my cousin and his fiancee. That little town, snugly nestled in the heart of the Rockies, had now earned a place in my Top 5 Places I've Visited. Lots of great running trails, a grocery store with lots of vegan staples (!), a nice small-town feel, and a great location, of course. We were real close to all the lovely hiking trails, so of course that's what we did.

Our hike up to Gorman Lake was AMAZING. My favourite hike ever, probably, and that's saying a lot. Unfortunately... I left my camera in the car. Arghagrhagrhargahrg. I did take a quick picture of the scenery at the end, though:
:D

I wasn't really into taking tons of photos on this trip, I guess, so that's all for now. I won't impose a bunch of family pictures on you!

However, when we got back, we found a big shipment of fresh fruit from Osoyoos waiting for us (from some friends of ours). BIG boxes of peaches, plums, and apples! Mmm! We usually get apple-pears/Asian pears too, but they weren't ripe yet.

I'll be living of fruit for the next week or so :D I made a reallllly yummy applesauce and it's good on EVERYTHING.

To top that off, one of my dad's work buddies gave us a big box of sour cherries: (sorry for the bad picture)

I made some juice from them, and wow was that ever refreshing.. sour for sure, but in a nice way.

Before our short trip, my awesome littlest sister and I baked the Lemon Cake from How it All Vegan. Well, it turned out great, of course. We didn't have time to ice it, so it looked a bit like Pac-Man once we cut into it:

Yesterday, when I was making some whole-wheat blueberry biscuits (mm!) my awesome littlest sister wanted to show off what SHE could do. She took two slices of leftover lemon cake, plated them each with some chocolate sauce, and then put a mint leaf on top of a nice little puddle of agave nectar. She begged me to take a picture:

That's pretty good for a 7-year-old, isn't it? :D


We had a real simple dinner last night- green beans, oven fries, and a stir-fry. I bought a can of baby corn the other day, so I decided to open that up to share. Of course, I couldn't resist trying to make it look un-boring:
(cute baby corn, cucumber, some kind of yellow summer squash from Canmore, and Edamame)

We're making a ton of jam from all the fresh fruit. Like, a TON. We don't even bother measuring anything anymore- dump in fruit, pour in some sugar, and let bbble nicely until thick. I'm not a big fun of eating jam, but I love to make it! This rings especially true on those cold days of late summer, when it doesn't feel like August at all.

Plum jam:

Eugh, doesn't look so appetizing to me...

*****

You may have noticed that I haven't posted a recipe in, like, forever. I'm sorry and I feel real bad about that. But of course, there's a reason!

Especially in the early days of the blog, I would just post the recipe to whatever I'd whipped up for lunch, even if it wasn't AMAZING or could have used some refining. Now, I've decided that I should set the bar a bit higher and only post the recipes that have been fined-tuned enough. Maybe not to perfection, but enough.

Anyways, the point is that I'm making my standards a bit higher and I'm going to aim for QUALITY of recipes on this blog, instead of quantity. :)