A Weekend in Victoria BC & Thanksgiving Treats

I can’t believe Thanksgiving is one month away! Thanksgiving always comes up quickly in the whole line of holidays because it’s usually the same week as my Dad and Sister‘s birthdays, because it’s the first holiday after school begins and regular routine sets in, and because it’s the one holiday of the year that we host lol. So, I’ve been thinking long and hard about what we are going to serve this year. We always do a Thanksgiving turkey because… Tradition and because Ninja loves turkey. This year we have been taste testing some sides and have settled on a few of our favourites.

I love decorating for the holidays and I don’t just mean Christmas! Every season deserves a little special decor and let’s be serious, buying a centrepiece for your table is a lot easier than repainting your walls when you feel the need for change. I bought a beautiful fall centrepiece six years ago, but I haven’t found one since that I like so we have stuck with fall leaves and fake apples for the last half a decade. This year we went to Michael’s and bought beautiful fall foliage, a pool noodle and some dollar store glasses and made a beautiful and full Thanksgiving Centrepiece that is exactly the way we wanted it and probably cost less than the small centrepiece I bought at Winners so long ago. SBean sat and decorated it while she watched a fall romance movie and it turned out spectacular.

We love waffles. These Pumpkin Waffles are my favourite waffles of all time. All time! I can only do one pumpkin spice latte a year, and then I am absolutely done with pumpkin flavour, lol but these waffles have such a delicate flavour that the fall spices reminded me more of cinnamon dinky doughnuts than pumpkin waffles. These waffles would be good for breakfast, brunch, Halloween dinner, or anytime you want your Kids to think you’re the best lol because these waffles were absolutely divine!

I grew up eating a lot of cream corn. It was gross. Like seriously absolutely disgusting. I remember it slooshing out of the can and shuddering lol. When I mentioned cream corn to Ninja he made a physical reaction that reflected my revulsion lol. So I thought, maybe we should try again, but make our own this time! I’m so glad that we did! This Perfect Creamed Corn side dish was ridiculously easy to make and my favourite vegetable dish of the season! Ninja LOVED it too! And that’s saying a lot because we ate a lot of really good arugula dishes over this summer! This cream corn is not your Mom‘s cream corn out of a can. This cream corn was sweet, creamy, and absolutely delicious. Trust me, this is a Thanksgiving winner!

We tried our hand and making Garlic Bread Rolls… again. And again they didn’t quite turn out. They were flavorful, they were chewy, but they just didn’t rise the way fluffy rolls should. However, I think it’s our issue not the recipe! We put these in the freezer and popped a few out with our dinner over the last few weeks and even though they’re a bit dense lol we really enjoyed them. SBean did a great job baking these rolls, thanks Bean!

I love pumpkin pie. In fact, early on in my relationship with Ninja, we had a falling out and broke up. In the next semester, we ended up in the same economics class and began talking again. We ended up at Boston Pizza one evening with our economics homework. When the bartender called for last call, we didn’t want the night to end so he invited me home for a slice of his Mom‘s homemade pumpkin pie. We joke that I never really left after that lol and we always say that his mom‘s pumpkin pie renewed our love and relationship! So obviously I have never tried to bake one because, who can compete with that?! Lol I thought we would try this Marshmallow Pumpkin Pie instead to see if it holds up. It was absolutely delicious, but it had nothing on my MIL’s homemade pumpkin pie! She makes the best pumpkin pie I have ever tasted! However, this was really yummy. It was super sweet, super easy to make and required absolutely no baking, I’m in lol!

The Reason You Walk by Wab Kinew A biography of a favourite performer/figure/person. This book starts with a Sundance, the ceremony of Thanksgiving. I was crying reading the prologue. I have admired and respected Wab Kinew as a politician from my home province of Manitoba for a long time but right away I can tell, I am going to see him on a whole new level after reading this book. In the beginning, there was Mother Earth and Kinew tells us the story of his grandfather, his father, and himself. He knows that the people that came before us are the ones who truly made us.

The stories of residential school survivors, and the stories told of those who weren’t, broke my heart. Every time I read stories about residential schools I think there can’t be anything worse and then I read another story like the story of Wab’s 4-year-old uncle who was punched in the jaw and knocked out, or his father‘s friend who is murdered, or the despicable controlled experiments done on the children while withholding medical/dental care. Nauseating and absolutely heart wrenching. As someone that was born in Winnipeg, it was super interesting to hear about the floodway being constructed and hearing so many names of places that meant so much to my childhood and what made me. Like Kenora was always a rough and racist town even when I was a kid in the 80s. The Kelly Boys of Kenora sound like they did a lot, and I would be interested in reading more about them and their lives. It is fascinating and very impressive to me that 3 men that grew up under such horrible conditions purposely used to hurt them, grew up to be politicians and people striving to make life better for their people. A few years after Wab was born in the Lake of the Woods hospital, I would find myself in the waiting room of that same hospital while I waited to get my broken nose looked after.

I want to go out for dinner with Wab and his sister they seem fun lol. I just can’t believe that we are lucky enough to have this man as a politician during this time in history. There was a family (the Nepinaks, who have a mention later in the book) at my Winnipeg elementary school that wanted to bring their culture to our school and did powwows with us. I remember feeling very humbled knowing that I got to participate in something that was bigger than me. It was an incredible feeling. I also remember hearing those exact dirty slurs growing up in Manitoba. I took economics at University Manitoba probably that same year actually, I wonder if we were in the same class? Wab‘s University life sounds very familiar lol. Wab made mistakes in his early adulthood but he takes responsibility for his actions and tries to be better. He is meant to be a leader for his people and all Canadians. I was in high school when Beeper Spence was killed, I remember it because it was so shocking. My family was from the North End and we spent a lot of time down there in the 80s and 90s. It’s funny, during Wab’s time at CBC doing journalism, I worked at the Winnipeg news radio station CJOB. I’m sure our paths crossed many times. I too sat in front of my TV in my living room in Winnipeg in June 2008 and watched Prime Minister Stephen Harper make his apology to the residential school survivors. That was two months before I moved to BC, near the Kamloops residential school where just a few years later, they would find 215 graves. There’s still so much more work to be done.

I was touched by his father’s story about offering the eagle feather to the Pope. I too had a friendship with James Weisgerber, who was a Bishop then but later became Archbishop of Winnipeg. We had discussed my minor in university, Catholicism, many times. His father‘s testimony at the TRC is an amazing story. The entire Kinew family epitomizes what it means to be Anishinaabe AND Canadian. I really love how he puts himself into other people’s moccasins and gains appreciation for other people and the struggles of their day to day life. He also recognizes the village that helps him raise his children along the way. Something we should ALL do and often. I had no idea the number of Indigenous suicides, shocking. What I get from this book is that Kinew is genuine, happy and thankful. It’s funny that his vision was about smiling because that’s all I see when I look at him. Even when he is serious and strong, it is with a smile. He gives me hope. He reminds me of all that I have to be thankful for. The 3rd part of this book was incredibly sad. I still think about all the “lasts” my Mom had so every time he noted that, I felt it for him. Even knowing what is coming, I felt like we as a nation were losing something, someone so integral to history and the future. It is beautiful that his son can write such an honest and loving swan song to his Ndede. When I was done this book. I hugged it, what a beautiful and thoughtful memoir of a truly remarkable man that we are lucky enough to be watching in real time rather than reading about him in history books many years from now.