The days of our lives might be wasted in some way if each one didn't present, among other things, a living experience with the opportunity to learn something new every day. Nothing spectacular necessarily, but new insights, the chance to alter an opinion, to explore the world of reason and of nature. There's a little bit of awe in every new thing discovered. Matters that are permanent or transitory, it hardly differs, each new discovery is a bonus.

 

 

In all my kitchen-chemist years, for example, I cannot remember even once using cake and pastry flour in making pastry. Not as in 'pastries' denoting delicate little baked desserts, but rather pastry dough used in baking pies. Cake and pastry flour has always been used in my kitchen to produce light and airy cakes and cupcakes. I use hard-wheat flour for other types of baking, particularly for bread-making.

 

I've used ordinary  hard-wheat, all-purpose flour more latterly interchangeably with unbleached flour. Until I understood by the finished product that I should differentiate in using one or the other depending on what I was baking. I was surprised to find pastry dough firmer and tougher, not at all flaky with the use of unbleached dough. Croissants came out flaky and light with ordinary all-purpose flour, but not with unbleached flour. It is denser and 'harder' than ordinary flour that has been bleached. It even feels different in your hands when you're kneading dough.

 

Today it occurred to me to use cake and pastry flour for the pastry I planned to make to go with a fruit filling. So I did, and it felt as different being kneaded and rolled out, from ordinary flour as the ordinary flour felt from the unbleached flour. Far more delicate, needing greater care in handling. I produced a nectarine-plum pie with it. It baked twice as fast as all-purpose flour pie crust. Its delicate texture browned quicker.

 

I had bought nectarines and plums (both, I think, imported from Spain or the U.S.) Ordinarily smelling and handling fruit will tell you of it's ripe. That's no longer possible. For one thing, they're packed in transparent plastic clamshells, so you can see them, but can't touch or smell them. These days, with greater distancing and care because of COVID transmission one mustn't dare open those lids to handle the fruit, much less sniff it.

 

Sometimes these purchases turn out fine; the fruit at the peak of ripeness. Sometimes they're over-ripe, sometimes they're tough and hard, a long way to ripeness and they won't ripen off the vine or the tree. Although growers and shippers plan for perfect timing from orchard to point of sale, that no longer applies with the deliveries chaos resulting from the pandemic. That was what happened with the nectarines and the plums. So I had little option but to use them in fruit compotes, or today as filling for a fruit pie. Stone-hard, they had to be processed before going into the pie shells. Which meant simmering gently until soft, in a mixture of sugar, cornstarch and water.

 

The finished product looks fine, but it's how it all ends up tasting that's important. And we'll find that out later in the day. And this has been a beautiful weather-day. Still cool, but relatively so, at 12C. Light wind in comparison to the brisk, icy wind we've been experiencing of late. But the sun was full out, lighting our world and warming our house. Once I'd done the pie, put on a chicken soup to simmer for dinner, and pre-prepared a small yeast-raised dough to refrigerate until I plan to use it (probably, since it's a simple, plain dough, for pizza later in the week), we thought we'd better take an earlier advantage of the day than usual.

 

Jackie and Jillie agreed and off we went for a leisurely hike through the ravine.  Lots of birds about; hairy woodpeckers, cardinals, song sparrows, but no sign of the owl today. Amazingly, there was a distinct acceleration discernible in deciduous trees' and shrubs' beginning output of foliage from the day before. There's nothing quite like April rain and sun to spur that regenerative process. Even the occasional blip like the snow we had a few days back doesn't interrupt nature's blueprint.

 

The forest floor is beginning to host all manner of new growth, from tiny emerging strawberry plants, to the first glimpses of trout lilies and woodland violets forging through the leaf mass along with ferns and flowering Coltsfoot. The first sighting occurred today of Foamflower, a woodland plant with a close resemblance to cultivated garden Heuchera.

 

Finally, the trails are beginning to dry up, inviting us to take longer and more variant trail networks in our stride. When we do that, access trails we don't normally use in our circuits, Jackie becomes really enthused and picks up his pace, his curiosity and sense of adventure piqued. As it was today, when we ventured to another portion of the ravine we often bypass because it's so low-lying and tends to remain  muddy for longer than the trails at a higher elevation. 

 

There, at an offshoot of the main creek running through the ravine, we saw dirty remainders of our winter snowpack, not yet melted. Shelves of ice remaining, posed alongside and over the rivulet, too stubborn to melt just yet in areas that see little sun. There are so many micro climates in the forested ravine, one area can be colder, or alternately warmer than another. And similarly, host different types of vegetation. All of which expose us to a multitude of different little discoveries.