Photo Finish Friday: City Bison

This is some art work behind the Shaw Conference Centre, discovered while wandering around with my friends from down east.

Have a good weekend all.

PFF is brought to us by my brilliant cousin Leah over at The Goat's Lunch Pail.

Photo Finish Friday: Baby

We went out to Elk Island Park again before my surgery and found this lovely pair in the paddock.

Have a good weekend all.

PFF is the brainchild of Leah over at The Goat's Lunch Pail.

You can't rollerskate in a buffalo herd

The photo is of the Bison Herd at Elk Island National Park, located just East of Edmonton, AB. You can actually drive through the paddock and see them up close and personal, just don't get out of your vehicle. These are massive beasts and although they look slow and docile they aren't. Especially when they have their cute babies to protect.


For those that are not familiar with it, here is the RCMP crest, it features a Bison head in the centre and way back when they were the Northwest Mounted Police, they wore Buffalo coats in the winter.

The reason I mention this is because there is a real stuffed Bison head, mounted in a plaque hanging at the landing of the stairs in the RCMP S/Div HQ office building where I used to work. That was the first time I had ever seen one up close and they are massive! I think the stairs were the standard three foot width, therefore the landing would have been 6 feet wide. The plaque only had about one foot clearance on either side and it was positioned high enough on the wall that someone six feet could walk under the head without getting knocked out. I know this because I had to walk under it and this was back when I was still able to wear three or four inch heels and did - all the time. It probably stuck out from the wall a good 2.5 - 3 feet and was about four feet from chin to the top of the head. I am guessing at the measurements as I tended to avoid that stair whenever I could and I never actually measured it.


You are probably asking "Why is she going on about Bison today?" Well, we had roast Bison for supper Monday night. Bison is very lean meat, so lean it needs to be marinated before you cook it or you wind up with shoe leather. This was a first attempt on the part of my friends to cook Bison and other than being less well cooked than is our preference for roast meat it turned out rather well. They found the recipe on the web, just picked one at random that sounded good. Next time they try it though, I think they will opt to cook it a bit longer. There are a few Bison farms in AB and they picked up the roast at the local farmers market. It is rather more expensive than beef, so it will not be something we do often, but it made a nice change.

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In other news, I got my new mattress today, it is clean this time, but there are a few pulls in the fabric on the top of the mattress, so I have to phone again and see what they will do.

So, what adventures in food have you experienced?