Naming Conventions

Last weekend we went to an extended Dotytron family function.  We were talking about potential names for the twerps and someone was trying out one of the names on our shortlist and said, "____ Dotytron" and I interjected, "How do you know the last name is going to be Dotytron?" and was met with a pregnant silence and pregnant-with-multiples significant looks.

Now, I am a known contrarian, so the surest-fire way to get me to do something is to express disapproval (even by way of pregnant pauses and significant looks) about the opposite choice.

I am ALSO a known feminist, and nothing rankles me more than getting mail addressed to "Mr. and Mrs. _ Dotytron."  Sometimes they cut the Dotytron out of the picture and refer to me as "Mrs. Karl Dotytron."  This mail ALWAYS comes from the Dotytron's side of the family.  ALWAYS.  Paternal side and the maternal side.  It is infuriating to me and one of the reasons why I'm always asking the Dotytron to divorce me.

We talked about what last name the Big Yam was going to have quite extensively.  At the time, it was decided that since my last name is actually my deadbeat dad's surname, and that the Dotytron's last name meant a lot to him, and coming on the heels of Poppa Dotytron's passing (Poppa Dotytron the elder was very much into genealogy and took great pride in the fact that there had been a Dotytron on the Mayflower), that the Big Yam would have the Dotytron's last name.

I was (am) okay with this decision, but I didn't assume then that subsequent Lagerfeld-Dotytron progeny would necessarily bear the Dotytron's last name.  We have had passing, brief, conversations about it and I had expressed an interest that perhaps if the next kid was a girl, we could follow in the footsteps of my friends J & S and have the daughter have my last name.  The Dotytron always dismissed these notions, which made me mad, but in a light-hearted way because I knew he was needling me.  He knew that the speed with which he outright rejected my proposals was an easy way to get my goat (along the lines of say, denying responsibility for a toot that was OBVIOUSLY his).

The weighty silence and askance eyes on the weekend (made more galling by the fact that they were directed at the Dotytron, as in, "Are you sure you, the man, are okay with this?") resulted in a very angsty, defiant reconsideration of the issue that same night (angsty and defiance all mine, it should be noted).  I was hoppin' mad.  I am reacting to a few things:

1) the underlying assumption that being a Dotytron is just SO DAMNED GREAT that of course you would have the Dotytron last name.  Well you know what?  Being from the clan Lagerfeld is ALSO pretty great.  It means that there's always PLENTY of food put out and that people love eating and that it's always pretty much okay to wear your pajamas to Xmas dinner and that you're eating with people who have heard of butter chicken.  It means that you can move quickly from political conversations to airing family dirty laundry and having it out to having screaming arguments about popular culture.  It means a lot of pretty great things.  It means that you can always pretty much be yourself and don't have to put on a polite façade.

2) that it's important to me that the Dotytron and our progeny are aware that they come from two individuals.  The Dotytron is as much a part of the Lagerfeld family as I am a part of the Dotytron family.  Our kids are a mixed and blend of us both.

3) What's so great about your ancestor being on the Mayflower again?  It's not like England was like, "Hey newly established Colony, take our best and brightest captains of industry and go forth and flourish!"  The people on the Mayflower were separatists and weirdos and outcasts who ended up stealing from Natives.  It is well known that the actual Dotytron on the Mayflower was a drunk and ne'er-do-well...so why is this a point of pride again?

4) gender roles, etc.

To illustrate the difference between the families, my family generally refers to ourselves in group emails by using this hyphenated version of all our respective last names.  Like, family vacations are "Ho-Lee-Shi-Do" family vacations and Uncle Rico had that printed up on our matching t-shirts we got when we went to Disney World.  The Dotytron family assumes that you become a Dotyron, when as woman (of course!) you marry a Dotytron male (of course!)

Anyway, so I went on this huge, reactionary tirade using the reasons listed above as the basis for why I want the twerps to have my last name and the Dotytron was basically very agreeable about the whole thing and reasonable and listened and in the process basically took all the angry, angsty wind out of my sails.  To each of my points he just said, "Yes, but I don't think that" and even though I don't know if that will be enough in the long term as an expression of praxis, it reminds me that in my home, we are socialists and feminists and we have are living a praxis that is coordinated and negotiated and meaningful.  That goes a long way.

The surname of the twerps hasn't been settled yet, but I feel better knowing that we'll come to some kind of consensus and that like, I'm not being oppressed by my partner.  That's pretty important to me.  Not quite as important as finding the bolognese I packed for lunch and thought I had left for home, but close.

In Big Yam news, he is being pretty adorable.  He found this plastic construction hat that Momma D bought for him and fussed around for a few minutes trying to put it on so that it faced the right way and balanced properly.  When he did, he said, "I'm beautiful" and it was the cutest thing ever.  He also says, "Hello!" to my belly and then says, "I'm your big sister!" which is also pretty darned sweet.

We've been rejigging things a bit around the house to get things ready for the Big Yam's room move after the arrival of the twerps.  This means that the record player is now in the living room, which means that each night after dinner we unwind by napping (me), playing independently or pestering the parental units (Big Yam), or drinking a scotch (the Dotytron) while listening to jazz records.  Guys, we're like the freakin' Huxtables!!!  A dream come true!  The basement has been co-opted by the Dotytron into a guitar practice space, which seems to be working out well.  It's so separate from the rest of the house and I avoid going down there which means he really gets uninterrupted time to focus on his playing.  The Dotytron's aunt also gave us this OG Fisher Price record player and we love it.  It must be at least 30 years old and it works beautifully.  The re-issue version they're selling isn't the same.  The original version is a music box and you have to crank it to get it to go.  Love this thing.

Tonight for dinner we had a Middle Eastern mezes type meal of dips, fried halloumi, warmed pita, a tomato-cucumber-lemon-mint salad, and sliced leftover lamb.

Fin.

Asplode

I promise to not post excessively about gestating the twerps, but let me just say this: I HAVE EXPLODED.  I AM HUGE.  Huge!  I don't know what happened, but somehow, I went from barely showing to being as big as I was when I was 7 months pregnant.  It would be somewhat alarming, if I had room in my brain for things other than pasta carbonara and roasted leg of lamb.  Fortunately, keeping hunger headaches at bay by constant grilled cheese sandwich consumption is relegating anxieties about my increasingly Barbapapa-esque likeness to the distant ether.

We had a fairly calm weekend.  I had ladies night with the ladies on my street and we went to Lalibela for Ethiopian.  I don't dislike Ethiopian food, but I'm not the biggest fan of it either.  I absolutely loathe that they serve the injera lukewarm or outright cold.  It's not enjoyable to scoop up warm vegetables and meat with stone-cold bread.  It was overall a pretty meh experience, foodwise, but a wonderful experience, lady-neighbour bonding-wise.

We (and by "we" I mean "I") made dinner for Momma D last night which served the simultaneous goal of facilitating a visit AND allowing us to piggyback her cable so that we could watch the Oscar's red carpet. I made us roasted leg of lamb (marinated for a day and a half in rosemary, oregano, thyme, garlic, lemon zest, syrah, and olive oil), roasted tatties, a broccoflower mash, and a brussels sprouts and almond salad.

I also made us Momofuku milk bar chocolate cookies which we ate with little dishes of Tahitian vanilla bean ice cream from Ed's.  Delicious!

We sold our stroller on the weekend.  We bought it in 2010 (it's a 2009 model) from some lady who had it for a few months and kept it in pristine condition.  I think we bought it for $540 (she paid $909).  I sold it for   $475, which means that we basically paid $70 to rent a $900 stroller for 3 years.  Pretty solid ROI, if I do say so myself.  Every time I sell something on Kijiji or Craigslist, after the transaction, the Dotytron and I always turn to each other and say, "easy money" like John Connor in Terminator 2.  I always feel like I got away with something.  It's weird, I know.

We also test drove our next one.  The thing is a tank.  There's no way around it when you're going for a tandem double.  It's the City Select Baby Jogger.  It comes with a single seat as a base but then you can buy the second seat and adapter to turn it into a double.  I've seen quite a few people with twins with this stroller and I asked them about it.  It's also got some great features - better than the Uppababy in some cases.  You can lock the wheels so that they don't pivot, the brake is really smooth and accessible, and unlike a lot of the other doubles, you can buy two car seat adapters so you can use it when the bambinos are very wee.  The seats are also super-configurable.  They can face each other or you or any combination thereof.  The Dotytron is gunning for us to buy this one new with a warranty, since this will likely (haha, j/k, MOST DEFINITELY) be the last stroller we'll ever buy.  That being said, we'll probably also get a lightweight umbrella type stroller too, for travelling.

In other news: I feel like I've read A LOT lately.  So many books!  Here's a recap.

Gillian Flynn's Gone Girl is beach reading for winter - immensely readable and disposable, but with a dark undertone.  There were elements I wasn't a huge fan of: namely, the ending, but if I take a step back and don't get so emotional about it, I get what Flynn's overall goal was.  This is a book told from the alternating points of view of a ne'er-do-well overgrown child of a husband, and his game, saintly wife.  Wife goes missing and the chief suspect in her murder is the husband.  What unfolds is a character study of a marriage that has ambitions towards a commentary on our true-crime/Nancy Grace obsessed culture but is at its best when it sticks to being a compulsively breezy novel about the ultimate unhealthy codependent relationship.

While the latest Jonathan Tropper book didn't ascend to quite the same heights as This is Where I Leave You, it was still a pretty good read about yet another sad sack man who doesn't have his life together.  The tone of this one was still comic, but veered a bit more towards the melancholy (the protagonist, Silver, is dying, so yeah, I guess there's that).  I like Tropper's balance between humor and sadness, and I also like that he delves into the male psyche within the framework of the sadsack loser, which is a perspective you don't get all that often.

I was looking for a few quick reads and wanted to get some some of the YA that's being turned into movies off my list (gotta stay ahead of the zeitgeist, don't ya know).  I had read the first book in Ally Condie's Matched series a while ago (review here) and at the time, wasn't so taken with it that I wanted to continue.  It's okay, as far as near-future dystopian YA goes.  All the books kind of drag - there's a lack of action (it's like, diametrically opposed to The Hunger Games in that regard), and it centres the story around a kind of milque-toast heroine who is supposed to be relateable because she is inwardly steely though outwardly compliant and confused (as most teenagers are) and that steeliness has to be discovered over time.  For a book where there's an entire overthrow of the ruling system, the pacing is plodding at best.  Lots of internal here, not a lot of external.  The world hasn't really been well-conceptualized.  I might be experiencing anti-Mormon bias because I found out that the author went to Brigham Young University, which to me, based on my admittedly limited understanding is a fake university that churns out Mormons and probably doesn't teach evolution (or offer a science curricula).  I keep looking for Mormon under/overtones.

This is my Academic Book Club's next pick.  It is SERIOUS fiction (of the National Book Award-winning ilk) but because it is told from the perspective of a 13 year old boy, it avoided some of the trappings of high falutin' literary novels that I am lately not so into.  The story is about the brutal rape of the boy's mother.  The family is Native American and they live on a reservation in North Dakota.  The events take place in the early 1980s.  This is expertly written fiction.  I read up on Erdich and she is (rightfully, I would say from my limited exposure) considered a forebearer of the Native American Renaissance movement in American arts.  This book deftly weaves together politics, family relationships, mystery, and the coming-of-age of a boy.  It's like Stand By Me but better.  What I loved about this novel is that it again forced me to confront the gaping lacuna of my knowledge of reservation life and the experiences of Native Americans.  It is unflinching in its portrayal of the realities of life but also provides a historical, social, and legal context that underpins these realities.  The boy's father is a tribal judge with shades of Atticus Finch.  One particular moment in the book, when the father uses a food metaphor to describe the tenuous, rotten foundations of reservation law, lingers with me still.  It was punishingly good fiction.  Fiction that makes literary fiction less unappealing to a low-brow reader like myself.  

After the brutal violence of The Round House, I needed a break.  So I turned to Where'd You Go, Bernadette? which was everything I wanted and needed it to be: funny, acerbic, entertaining, and a breeze.  Bee is a gifted, precocious teen with an eccentric mum and a Microsoft whiz of a dad, going to a private school in Seattle.  Through email exchanges between characters interspersed with Bee's own musings, you get this cutting look at liberal, wealthy west-coast-isms and the times we live in, wrapped around the story of the sudden disappearance of Bee's mother, Bernadette.  It sends up all kinds of things that I love to see sent up: helicopter parents, the privileged, the west coast and its polar-fleece-swathed-elitism-masquerading-as-populism, gifted kids.  Bernadette is my kind of mum.  Pettiness born out of thwarted creativity, dismissive of small-minded people, eccentric, and a passionate champion of her daughter.  This was a fantastic novel.

The last few nights' dinners have been good, but I'm too busy shovelling food into my gaping maw to take photos.

Monday we had a seafood chowder with croutons (I love love love croutons in a chowder) and salad.  Last night we had cheese tortellini tossed with pesto and blanched broccoli and more salad.  

Fin.

Gooby eyes, full hearts, a wrecked butt

That is a basic synopsis of how this extra-long family day weekend went down.

On Valentine's Day, I picked up the Big Yam from daycare and took him on a V-Day treat ride on the bus, subway, and then to Country Style Hungarian Cuisine for dinner with the outlaw mum.  Schnitzel jawns for days, yo.  Peep this:

People complain that the prices at Country Style have gone up.  This is true.  A schnitzel dinner runs you around $17.00 nowadays.  HOWEVER!  That schnitzel is easily a foot across and comes with taters and a vegetable side.  It's a pretty sweet deal, in my books.  

I took Friday off so that I could do my road test for my G license.  Against all odds: I passed!  The examiner was a black dude, and a few years ago my brother, Bruce Wayne imparted this little nugget of know-how: black people love Asians.  ESPECIALLY Asian women.  I passed before even getting on the highway.  The examiner and I basically talked football, travel, and growing up in Markham and as I was getting on the DVP he said, "Just go one exit - as far as I'm concerned you've already passed, so don't even worry about this part."  AMAZING!  He was also a fan of my whole, "the old ball and chain" routine that I do sometimes.  This is a valuable ice-breaking lesson I've learned in my years of social interaction.  Generally, when dealing with people in the service industry, if you want them to come over to your side, it's always effective to play the stereotypical, "my husband is an inept blah blah blah" or "my husband is from Mars and I'm from Venus" thing.  It works like a charm.  So like, when we're checking in at the airport and trying to get seats I do a whole, "...but lord knows HE doesn't know how to pack for a trip, amirite?!?" thing that almost always wins over the desk clerk.  My driving examiner was also a huge fan of our short list of names for the twerps, as our names tend to skew towards the black barbershop variety.

Contrary to what I thought it was going to be, it was the most unstressful testing experience I've ever had.  So I obviously treated myself to a Harvey's hamburger and onion rings.  Why doesn't Harvey's get more love?  They really do make a hamburger a beautiful thing.  I followed that up with a trip to Diana's seafood for oysters and then a trip to Arz, my favorite (only?) Lebanese grocery store for za'atar and labneh and delicious dips like muhammara.  Scarborough rules!  Diana's and Arz are so close to each other and there is so much happiness to be found in between their walls.  I saw gorgeous razor clams at Diana's that I'm going to snag in the future so that the Dotytron and I can relive our Barcelona days.

That night the Dotytron and I had dinner at this new restaurant, Porzia, that was opened by a friend of mine. He was actually the first person I met the day I started at North 44.  It's a cute little resto in Parkdale with warm lighting, a good soundtrack, and a non-hipster-y vibe.  Italian-influenced menu and a killer bartender who made me the best virgin cocktail I've ever had.  Better than what I got at Alinea, and that's saying something.  It was like pear and rosemary and citrus.  Delicious.

 A special from that day - this warm, potato-dough stuffed pizza thing with proscuitto and mortadella served with a fennel & kohlrabi slaw.  

Hamachi crudo.  Ye gods, I love me some crudo, so hard.  I wish we had an all-crudo restaurant in Toronto.  This was served with beets and radishes and lightly dressed, but nothing competed with the flavour of the rich yellowtail.  I literally took a bite and got goosebumps.

A treatsie from the chef.  Cotechino crostini with warm rapini.  I LOVE COTECHINO.  It's a small thing, but the restaurant gets the crostinis PERFECT and that's a good foundation.  The bread is charred but not overly crisped, with a giving chew.  This was warm, rich, and salty with just the right amount of bite from the rapini.

Chicken liver agnolotti with honey mushrooms.  You know who loves chicken livers?  Me and the Dotytron.  What's not to love about a delicate, punched up chicken liver filling encased in perfectly cooked fresh pasta tossed up with a tangle of woodsy honey mushrooms in a light brown butter sauce?  NOTHING, THAT'S WHAT. 

This was another treatsie dish.  Grilled octopus served over semolina with peanuts and apples.  The octopus was perfectly cooked and the flavour combination of the semolina, apples, and peanuts was a revelation.  I'm not sure that the dish was harmonious, in that it seemed to comprise two distinct components, but both those components were individually executed perfectly.

Sweetbreads.  You know who likes sweetbreads?  Me and the Dotytron (probably slightly more me).  With bacon and romesco and sunchokes.  UGH.  I LOVE SWEETBREADS SO DAMNED MUCH.  I would say that the sunchokes were a little under and disrupted the overall textures of the dish, but the sunchokes themselves were delicious - they were raw so they had a nice, woody, earthy taste that you usually lose when you cook them.

Bone marrow and snails.  You know who loves bone marrow?  THIS GUY.  This was sauced with a delicate brown demi-type sauce and the snails were garlicky and the bone marrow was bone-marrow-y and everything was deliciously sopped up with more of those perfect crostinis.  I literally punched the air a million times when this dish came out to the table.  I could make a meal of this dish and this dish alone.

Chocolate hazelnut mousse.  This dish was fine, the plating could use a bit of work, but compared to the heights of the previous dishes, next time I might skip dessert and just double-down on the marrow.

All in the all, the meal (minus the treatsies) was reasonably priced at $125 or something for the two of us with 2 cocktails, and 2 beers for the Dotytron, not including tip.  We were stuffed.

The good eating continued on Saturday with Lolly and SMcKay over for dinner and haircuts.  I made us ribs, stuffed potato skins, 7 layer dip, and a chocolate pudding with Skor bits and whipped cream.  There was a round of haircuts all around AND a viewing of Silver Linings Playbook.  

Then on Sunday, we had our amazing friends H & A come and visit from Cleveland for 24 glorious hours.  I LOVE THOSE GUYS.  They are seriously the best.  They are kindred spirits of the highest order.  I put out this spread: 

Not pictured: the oysters I snagged from Diana's - fat bastards from WA and French Kiss from N.B.

That night we went to Pizzeria Libretto on the Danforth and continued our time-honoured tradition with these guys of ordering at least 1-2 more apps and entrées than there are diners at the table.  We tried to go to Bar Chef to try this Manhattan cocktail that H had heard about, but it was closed, so we went to Ceili Cottage for drinks and then home.  Somewhere in there, my piriformis finally went on strike and I had shooting pains up and down my leg when I transitioned from sitting to standing (or vice versa) and by the end of the night I was basically incapacitated and my leg would give out.  Fun!

The next morning, we went to Lady Marmalade for breakfast.  Ugh.  I love that place so much.  Best breakfasts in town!  So good!  So beyond what I am usually up for making myself, which is the hallmark of a good brunch place.  

Two Cleveland cuties.

The breakfast poutine: homefries, hollandaise, aged cheddar

Cheddar and spinach waffles with bacon

My croque monsieur with poached eggs and more of their superlative homefries

I can't even tell you the amount of pain I was in at that point.  It was excruciating.  We went home, had naps, the Big Yam came back from his sleepover at Momma D's, which somehow resulted in him pooping everywhere.  Like, this is the report I got from him.  He walks in the door.  Me: "How was your sleepover at Nana's house?" Big Yam: "I got poo in my socks."  I don't even know how such a thing is possible.  

Then we went on a death march to Pacific Mall (on a weekend, during Chinese New Year), which meant we had to park a million miles away, which meant that of COURSE my sciatica was mad aggravated.  In the end, there was nothing for me to do but lie on the couch all night, writhing in pain each time I moved my leg the slightest bit.

I called in sick on Tuesday and because the Big Yam had pinkeye, he stayed home with me, a situation I only countenanced on account of the fact that the Dotytron took a half day off of work so I wouldn't be stuck with the Boobla all day (which would have been impossible, since I couldn't really move) AND because the Roomie came over and was amazing and made me lunch and fed the Yam and ran me a bath and watched him.  I love my Roomie.  She's the best.  

I think I basically have sciatica from my piriformis being compressed around the sciatic nerve.  It's not uncommon, and my piriformis has given me trouble for a while.  It just went on strike.  Think, sharp pain in your glutes that makes you leg give way from under you.  Fun.  Stretching in the morning and night and hot baths and moving around and the heating pad are all working together and I was able to go back to work yesterday.  I'm just making an effort to get up every hour after sitting at my desk and walk around for a bit.  That helps.  My manager also gave me permission to bring in a stability ball to sit on at my desk, so I'm hoping that makes things better too.  I've said it before and I'll say it again: I really need to find time for some regular yoga practice.  

So that was our weekend.  Stomachs and hearts full of food with lovely peeps in our life.  Eyes extruding mad crud.  A butt that went on strike.  All in all: still fun times.

I love this baby so much.  Look at how cute she is.  She's just the cutest little muffin I've ever seen.

Butternut squash and red lentil soup AND tuna melts with the Roomie last week.

On Tuesday, I made myself get up and make a long-simmered bolognese.  It was delicious to the extreme.  My body was glad because making it got me up and moving and my stomach was glad because it tasted like heaven.  I mean, not as good as Ragu's bottled sauce, but close.

Wednesday night we had French onion soup with gruyere crostinis and a big Olive Garden-style salad.  We've been eating this salad all week but it hasn't gotten old (for me).  

Last night we had tagliatelle carbonara.  Which was SOOOOOOO GOOD.  I had been dreaming about it all day and basically inhaled two servings.  Talk about cheap eats!!!  Ugh.  So delicious.

Today is my day off.  Massages, errands, and tonight is ladies' night on the street.  We're going for Ethiopian food.

Fin.

Favorite part of the day

Here's a short little video of one of my favorite parts of the day.  When we all sit around the table and the Big Yam asks us what our favorite part of the day was.  Lately this has involved a confession from him about pushing or hitting one of his daycare peeps.

Another thing I love is that he has a big, stuffed (it's 2 feet tall) Bernard from Where the Wild Things Are toy in his room and he calls it a "wild things are."  As in: "There's my 'wild things are.'"  So cute!!!

He also answers almost everything you say with "yes" except it's his lispy version: "yesth."  So we'll say stuff like, "You're not supposed to hit T.  It hurts him."  "Yesth."  "We're going to eat hamburgers for dinner." "Yesth."  It's so definitive and sure and hilariously non-topical at times.

I've been sitting on a lot of opinions about the ongoing dispute between elementary and secondary school teachers in Ontario represented by the ETFO and the OSSTF respectively, and the province in their labour negotiations.  Since I am paid to be professionally non-political, I am loathe to take to a public forum (albeit one with an teeny tiny readership) like this blurg to express my views.  What I will say is that the tactics employed by the union in this case have shown a marked and deplorable absence of political savvy or acumen.  Also a gross misunderstanding of public opinion and a reliance on a short-term game (if you could even call it a game) that is extremely amateurish.  I also don't know why I expected teachers as a whole to be more rational and critical than the general electorate, but I did, and I'm finding the level of mis-information that is circulating from the government AND union alike appalling.

As an information professional and a proponent of informed choice, it is galling to me that the information most people need to make informed decisions is readily available and yet people are still so easily swayed by rhetoric and ideology.  I can't tell you how many people I spoke to on both sides of the argument who didn't even bother to read the text of the legislation in question (Bill 115) or the Memorandum of Understanding upon which the contracts were to be based.

Like young master T's shirt says:

Ask questions.  All the time.  Find the source.  It's all about the information, Marty!

This is all to say that I think that I really, truly believe I missed my calling as a political strategist.  I'm good at this game, yo.  We'll see what happens if I decide to run for school board trustee in a decade.  This is also to say that I should re-watch Sneakers again (which is true, all the time, erry day)

I can't reiterate enough how good that mattar paneer was.  I've NAILED the recipe.  It's so quick and easy, too.  I also think that sauce would work really nicely as a hybrid chicken tikka/butter chicken sauce with some boneless skinless chicken thighs or some such.

Tonight was pancake Tuesday.  As I said on Twitter, it's so telling to me that the most excessive thing white people could think of to make before giving things up for Lent is like, pancakes...which aren't even that RICH.  Gimme some doughnuts!  Some fried chicken!  Some lasagna!  A freakin' Cinnabon!  Let's DO IT UP, FAT TUESDAY!

All that being said, we ate pancakes for dinner, LOL.  The Dotytron was in charge.  Pancakes and bacon.  We've been in search of the perfect buttermilk pancake and my FB friend posted a slightly adapted Cook's Illustrated recipe today in honor of Mardi Gras that is now our go-to recipe.  I've posted it below.  It's fantastic.  The addition of sour cream is key.  As you might recall, from my sour cream pancake adventure a few weeks back, sour cream makes a nice rich-but-light pancake with a good spring in its step that's still tender.  That last recipe I used was almost entirely sour cream - this recipe veers more towards your standard, classic pancake, with just a bit of sour tang to elevate it.  Highly recommended.  The Dotytron made banana, chocolate chip, and plain ones.

Fin.




------------------------------------------------------------------------
Best Buttermilk Pancakes
a Cook's Illustrated adaptation
makes about 16 4" pancakes

2 c. all purpose flour
1 1/2 T. sugar
1/2 t. salt
1 t. baking powder
1/2 t. baking soda
2 c. buttermilk
1/4 c. sour cream or yogurt
3 T. butter, melted

- whisk together dry ingredients in a bowl.  In a separate bowl, whisk together wet ingredients.
- mix wet into dry, stirring just until combined.
- cook on a buttered griddle until browned on one side and bubbly, flip and cook through.
- keep warm in a 200F oven.

Ballers

This was a ballin' weekend of epic proportions.

SNOWMAGEDDON HAPPENED.  In a big, big way.  Between when I woke up at 6 on Friday morning and when I next looked out the window at 7:30am before leaving the house, it was a totally different landscape.  I'm not going to lie, it was hard getting the Big Yam into daycare.  I had the brill idea to tow him in our sled but our sled is one designed for babies and he weighs a metric tonne and it was like pulling a Loony Toons anvil behind me.  It took me half an hour to go a distance that usually takes me 7 minutes.  I left a nasty, nasty message on the Dotytron's celly to the effect of: LET ME HAVE THE CAR FOR ONCE YOU G-D SADIST.  YOU LOOK AFTER CHILDREN, I ACTUALLY HAVE TO DEAL WITH CLIENTS, IT'S WAY MORE IMPORTANT THAT I'M AT WORK ON TIME.

It was the worst. But I came home and something magical had happened: our neighbours who had the good fortune to work from home had shovelled all our sidewalk and walkways for us!  So sweet!  And my other neighbour who drives a sweet Audi SUV (ballers) gave me a ride in their car to go grab the Big Yam (good thing, since it took the Dotytron 2 hours to get home - the snowplows in their infinite wisdom plowed in all the exits on the 401 so he ended up in like, Whitby, before he could get off and turn around).  I love my neighbourhood.  The people on my street are so darned sweet.  This is what makes a community happen.

Our friend R's birthday party was being held on Friday night so against all odds, we managed to traverse the Hoth-like streets and get to Spin, which is that ping pong place that's kind of like a club.  It's also co-owned by Susan Sarandon, aka Ehmdo's boyfriend's Tim Robbins' ex.  MHui and R are ballers so we had a private room and there were DELICIOUS snacks.  Guys, Susan Sarandon is a really good cook!  We had devilled eggs (pictured above), fried chicken and waffles, Philly cheese steak skewers, mini grilled cheese sandwiches, crab cakes, and shrimp'n'grits in little cones. So good.  I made two kinds of cupcakes for the bday boy: vanilla with salted caramel buttercream and chocolate with brown sugar buttercream.

Two people thrilled with overnight babysitting

I didn't think I'd have the mustard to make it through the night, but as soon as I played one round of ping pong I was like, filled with typical competitive, steroid-like juice.  Unfortunately, we had to take the Big Yam to Chinese school the next morning so our overnight babysitting opportunity to sleep in was squandered.  We only had about 5 hours sleep and it was rough getting through Saturday.  

We had lunch at Congee Queen whereupon I ordered about 6 dishes for 2 adults.  It was obscene.  We followed this with dinner at Chung King Garden with our Discerning Coyote friend and JJ and S and their kids.  EPIC PEKING DUCK PARTY.  Then, because S loves cream puffs, we took them to Beard Papa for their inaugural Japanese cream puff experience.  

As an aside, My Fitness Pal insists that a Beard Papa cream puff is only 220 calories.  Uhhh, sure My Fitness Pal, if you say so.  I'm not complaining.  What's the word for when you know something is wrong but you choose to believe it because it suits your delusion?  Whatever, that's what my belief that Beard Papa cream puffs are only 220 calories is.  

Somewhere in there I was so crunked from lack of sleep the night before that I left the house in my pajamas with one of my mom's fur coats thrown over top.  The best line my mum said in relation to my grandma being in a nursing home:  "I have to find her [my Poh Poh] new tops, they [the nursing home] are having trouble laundering her clothes because they're all cashmere."  This is so revealing on so many levels.  ONLY MY MUM WOULD SEND SOMEONE TO A NURSING HOME WITH CASHMERE TOPS.  ONLY MY GRANDMA WOULD HAVE A WARDROBE CONSISTING ENTIRELY OF CASHMERE AND FURS.  LOL!  P.S. I told you all the way back in 2007 that I come from a long, long line of ballin' cashmere lovers.  

This kid needs a haircut like whoa.  So bowl-tastic right now!!!

At the nursing home visiting Poh Poh.  Poh Poh is wearing one of her new, non-cashmere tops.

Sunday we did a big Chinese New Year meal at my mum's house featuring 10 different kinds of preparations of dried and subsequently reconstituted mushrooms (my favorite!  Not being sarcastic!) and a bunch of different fungi.  All the names of the dishes mean something so you have to eat them because of auspiciousness.  We also had goh, which phonetically sounds like "rising higher" so all people who work salaried jobs are supposed to eat it because it means promotions and the like.  My favorite goh is lo bak goh (turnip cake) which some of you have probably had at a Cantonese dim sum place.  The sweet goh are less my thing.  

Then we headed back downtown to finally go home.  The Dotytron was CRAAAANKY.  Only like, 4 people in the world have seen the Dotytron be cranky.  Sometimes he's not even all that mad, but the volume and timbre and matter-of-factness of the delivery make it seem like what he's saying is extra withering.  Like, the last time we went to the cottage with the kdubsguelph crew, SMckay made burgers for dinner and the Dotytron was all like, "YOU ONLY BOUGHT A SMALL JAR OF PICKLES," which for him was just an observation but it makes it sound like a huge criticism.  I would say something like, "are there any more pickles?  No?  It's okay, I don't always eat them on my burger anyway," but the Dotytron is always like, full-steam ahead with the whole, "YOU ONLY BOUGHT A SMALL JAR OF PICKLES," thing.  

In this case, he was full-on cranky because he hadn't had a chance to play guitar all weekend and we were going to Momma D's to shovel her driveway and he knew that meant his night was a write-off.  Sometime between the morning and the evening he had also somehow gotten heart-set on Cinnabon and at first our drive home wasn't going to allow for a Cinnabon stop so he was being extra persnickety.  I convinced him we could do it and the turnaround in his demeanor once I got back in the car with the Cinnabons in hand was like, galling.  

Momma D is kind of notorious for under-ordering pizza.  She eats like a bird, so she thinks two pieces per adult is totally enough.  I thought I would have to do some finagling to get her to order a large instead of a medium, but she was fine with a large...it still meant that the Dotytron and I got 2.5 pieces each.  To give you some perspective, when we order from Pizza Paul's in Geneseo, we order two large pizzas (and the larges are LARGE down there), and 40 wings, for me, the Dotytron, and two kids.  LOL!  And we nearly finish everything, too.  Lucky we had the Cinnabons to chase it down.  I feel like this is a classic white person thing.  Okay, I just checked My Fitness Pal and one Cinnabon is 880 calories, so maybe the reduced pizza serving was okay.  I'm just an inveterate glutton.

Last night I got our lives back on track and we had brown rice with muttar paneer and red lentil dhal w/ yogurt & lime.  This entire meal is still less calories than a Cinnabon.  Heh.  

Fin.

So much junk

I had an extra ultrasound today to check for the growth of the twerps.  The good news is: they are both still in there and one hasn't eaten the other and they're not doing anything super-weird yet (as far as we can tell).

I asked the ultrasound technician if she would mind telling me the sex and she said that at 15 weeks it's a little early and you can't be sure.  I was lying on the table and she said, "I know the sex of one of them" and by that I knew that she meant they were boys.   With boys there's something to see, whereas with girls they're always less sure because you're dealing with the absence of junk.

So I'm having boys.  It was like that Homer Simpson, "and WHAT A BOY!" type moments.

This pregnancy becomes more Phil Collins, Against All Odds by the moment.  Twins not by IVF - statistically lower.  Asians having twins: statistically lower.  Identical twins: statistically lower.  Identical male twins: statistically lower.

I am happy that they are not being super-weird in there but the Dotytron and I did feel a moment of disappointment that we won't get the opportunity to raise girls and that in about 10-14 years we're going to be eaten out of house and home.  SO MUCH MILK AND PIZZA POCKETS (or their future-equivalent).  Then I instantly felt guilty.  It's not the twerps' fault that they're boys.  They're just doing them, and here I am feeling a twinge of disappointment about their junk.  WORST!

What does sex mean anyway?  One of them (or both of them) could be super femme-y.  Really, what does being a boy or a girl ultimately matter?  I don't feel like I'm going to be gender-outnumbered.  I do want to raise them to be feminists.  But I would want to raise any and all of my progeny to be feminists, so no difference there.  I just want them to be in my life forever and ever and for some reason, I feel that daughters stay closer to their families than sons.  That probably says more about my own unfounded gender-biases than any actual lived reality.  What will be, will be.  I also thought that having girls would make the Big Yam still feel special, but he's going to be going through his own shiz anyway, regardless of the twerps' sex, so I think that's just me projecting a possible best-case scenario.

Any way you cut it, I'm carrying around mad junk in my trunk.

Tonight for dinner I made us spicy beef & kimchi udon.  Which was DELICIOUS, and precisely what you want to eat when peeps are all up in your grill about a coming snowmageddon.

Fin.