Poor Long-Form Written Word

This poor, poor blog!  So few posts compared to the halcyon days of yore.  And yet, I can't stop won't stop.  I won't give up on blogging.  Not now, not ever.  I will hold true.  There is room for the long-form reflective written word and this is my space.  You can't supplant it with all the Snapchats and Instas and FBs and Twitters...you just can't.

What have I been up to?  ONLY HAVING THE TIME OF MY LIFE.  The weekend before this past one was literally insane in the membrane.  That's the technical designation for what I did.

Friday was my day off and I spent the day running around like a maniac.  I helped out at the book fair, went back to the Big Yam's school to do sub lunch, did mad errands, and that night I met my friend M in Kensington and then had tortas from Torteria San Cosme which were DELICIOUS.  We split the chicken milanese and the cubano, and I also bought a cochinita pibil one for home.  The sandwiches are priced at around $9, which is kind of pricey, but they're substantial and so well made and they griddle the bread, which is key.  It's a nice touch.  I'm of the belief that hot sandwiches should be served on buns that have been kissed with some kind of fat and then burnished on a flat top - it provides a texture barrier and just ups the general ante.  Anyway, the space is super-cute - it looks like a little cafeteria lunch counter with excellent floor tile work.  I'm a little in love with it.

That Friday was one of the nicest spring days we've had yet, and I was running around in my very ancient, vintage Mexican embroidered shirt that I've had for over 10 years.  The moms at the Big Yam's school were going apes**t and one of them asked me if I got it from Anthropologie.  There's been a lot about cultural appropriation in the media of late (see: Justin Bieber's dreads) and I was like, damn, am I culturally appropriating?  Should I not be wearing this shirt?  Then at Torteria San Cosme, one of the Latin American women working the grill (and it was super-amazing that the whole crew behind the counter was women - assuming they also have a say in the means of production), pointed at my shirt and mouthed the words, "I love it."  That made me feel a little bit better, but also: am I just being lazy and relying on a "native insider"?!?  WHO EVEN KNOWS ANYMORE.  The point is, those sandwiches, that I might have zero business in the world eating, were freakin' delicious.

Then we saw a Frida Kahlo documentary that was meh.  It was very "classic documentary" which meant long, still shots of the light on a wall and the sound of birds chirping.  It was about this Japanese photographer who went to Kahlo's house and took photographs of Kahlo's stuff and then they framed it by also interviewing women in Oaxaca who produce the embroidered clothing (it was just a random coincidence that I wore my shirt that day, I swear) that Kahlo wore.  I get what the documentary was trying to accomplish, linking Kahlo's embrace of her Mexican heritage and work as a woman artist with the traditionally female craft work and domesticity, but it was a bit of a slog and the thesis could have been tightened up a bit.

Saturday we played in the Regent Park playground with the Wonder Twins and then followed that up with dinner at Bar Isabel with Dr. Rei and Hanbo.  Such a fun time.  I love those guys.  My mum watched the kids and was hilarious about it.

Sunday was Mother's Day.  Mother's Day has been AMPED UP in recent years.  My FB exploded with heartfelt and sentimental tributes to all mothers...it was a bit much for me, to be honest, but the Dotytron was lovely and took the kids away for a couple of hours so I could work on a quilt.  Then we went on a nature walk, and then Momma D came over and watched the kids so we could have dinner at A3 Napoli (one of my favorite restaurants) with JJ and S and then we went to see the Noma documentary at Hot Docs, Ants on a Shrimp.  

This documentary felt like a slog, to be honest.  It's ostensibly about the time the chef, Rene Redzepi, packed up the whole restaurant and transplanted Noma to Japan, for a 3 week engagement.  What emerges is this slavering fanboy flick that doesn't critique anything.  You don't get any sense of the thought processes that go into the dishes, what they're after, how the dishes taste, what the reception of this endeavour was...basically, as a viewer, you're supposed to take it on faith that the stuff tastes good.  It was very acritical and all I got out of it was flashbacks of my time on the line.  There was also all this hyper-masculine, macho stuff: the film opens with the chef de cuisine and the sous chef charged with conceptualizing the menu, both of whom are heavily tattooed dudes, and are shown in the opening scenes of the film doing weird cross-fit type stuff like pull-ups and working on rowing machine until they get blisters.  Just, ew.  Get over yourselves, stupid macho kitchen mentality.

The Don is so magical

Comic book nerds are also magical

Some of the awesome stuff I picked up.  Love that Prince and Bitch Planet poster!

This weekend we had my friend C64 and his partner over for dinner on Friday, then on Saturday we went for a rainy walk in the Don Valley with the Wonder Twins, and hung with SMckay that night.  The Dotytron went to see Lee "Scratch" Perry and on Sunday, SMckay and I hit up the Toronto Comic Arts Festival.  I dragged the Big Yam which was, in retrospect, a bit of a mistake.  Although I was gazing longingly at some of the other parents who had children, seemingly younger than the Big Yam following them throughout the crowded halls, with their noses buried in comics.  Really want to share my nerd interests with my kids, yo.

That being said, the Big Yam has been hilarious.  A few week's ago we went to see Peppa Pig at Boston Pizza.  They were blasting Peppa Pig on the screens and Peppa came around to all the tables.  At a certain point, as she was making her way, the Big Yam craned his neck to see, and announced: "Peppa Pig is coming!  ... Jesus."  LOL!!!  He's so funny.  The other night, we had our neighbours over for dinner and were having a big conversation about wants versus needs.  I asked him, "So, can you think of something that you really need, versus just want?" and he said, "Ummm...wifi?"  Touché.  Can't really argue with that, can we?

Some snaps from around here, lately:

Sleepiest bubbies

B-b-b-b-bath time!

These two.  Finally starting to get along and be friends.  They're doing more collaborating and colluding and are frequently in cahoots.  During their increasingly fraught nap times, I'll hear Quincess test the door knob of their room (we have one of those door-knob protectors which means they can't turn the knob), and report back to Twin B, "It's locked."  So cute.

Eats around here, lately:

Company dinner: tagliatelle with radicchio and bagna cauda, with a poached egg and crispy croutons

Made a pretty kickin' chicken biryani with green beans thoren.  There are some refinements to be made, but it's definitely a good foundation.  Next time I might add some plumped raisins and will make some extra rice.

Saw some stunning artichokes so we roasted them, I made chorizo potatoes, and seared some ling cod and served everything with romesco.  GAH!  Love romesco so damn much.

Fin.

Frivolous (But At the Same Time Vitally Important) Question

Okay, here goes:

Denim harem jogging pants with high tops, yay or nay?

I think I'm gonna go for it.  We'll see how this shakes down.

I recently splurged on my first grown-up lady powder blush and it has CHANGED. MY. LIFE.  My go-to Benefit Benetint is good, but it kind of dries out my skin, somehow, and sometimes the flush was a little subtle.  I went with Nars blush in Torrid, which is a darker, deeper pink with a little less glittery bits than their all-star product, Orgasm, which is the blush that's supposed to look good on everyone.  It did look good on me, but this deeper tone works better with my darker skin.

I also scored the score of life!

This coat retails for $420 at J. Crew and I nabbed it (in excellent used condition) for $100!  It's such a lady coat.  I love it.  I was on the fence for a bit because I wasn't sure the sandstone colour would suit my skin tone and I was kind of heartset on a grey, but this looks and feels so luxe.  I'm obsessed.  You know I loves me a deal.  Combine a grown-up lady coat with my addiction to the thrill of second hand clothing finds, and this is a big, big score.  It looks so good with my skinnies and runners!  Obsessed.

Dr. Rei gave me a gold, Nars eyeshadow pencil thing and all in all, I've been really feeling myself lately.

I'm very loved up on my network of people at the moment.  Friday was my day off and I had brunch with my new friend, N, who is a brilliant, beautiful, woman of colour doing interesting research and has amazing style to boot.  Then, I had a massage and my RMT went to a book launch and Chester Brown was there and we both had a moment of being all "ewwww, he's so gross!!!" and she made a crack about how, if she ever saw Seth, she'd knock that porkpie hat right off his head and I felt SO GLAD that I know someone who knows/appreciates/can make that joke.  I so want to meet Chester Brown so I can ask him if he knows he's gross.  That's very important to me.  It's really hard to tell from his work.  He's very honest about the the gross things he does and the gross ways he does them, but there's a certain flatness in the delivery and a lack of self-reflection that also makes it seem like he doesn't know he's gross?  Like, if you were gross the way Chester Brown is gross, shouldn't you be contextualizing/feeling guilt/wanting to ameliorate your grossness?

To wit, I recently read his comic, Paying For It which is about a period when he became a client john, during this tumultuous time in his life when he was still technically the significant other of Sook-Yin Lee, and was living with her, but she was pursuing a relationship with this drummer (!) and eventually moved that drummer into their apartment (!) and effectively ceased to be Chester Brown's partner.  But he still lived there for a while.  Anyway, as with The Playboy, I appreciated Brown's honesty, but that doesn't make his dealings with the prostitutes and his editorializing any less gross (he's very superficial when describing the prostitutes).  I get we're all superficial, and he's entitled to that (maybe?), but at the end of the comic there's a big position paper on how he feels prostitution should be legalized, but nothing about his own sexism and grossness and situating that in any critical, self-reflexive, trying-to-be-a-better-person way.  It was just icky.

Related, we started watching this show, The Girlfriend Experience, which is tangentially related to the Steven Soderbergh movie of the same name.  It's shot in Toronto (but isn't set in Toronto) and it features Riley Keough as this law school student who takes a demanding internship and becomes an escort.  It's shot in a very dark, dim, moody, Soderbergh-y way and has that same, voyeuristic, detached tone.  It's not hugely compelling but the episodes are only half an hour and at this point, we're mildly interested.

Last night, as we readied for bed, the Dotytron was reading Paying for It and I was reading my own thing and I suddenly had the thought that guys secretly might want the escort type experience...like they really just want to see themselves pandered to, and have this blank slate woman to reflect themselves back, so I decided to try.  This is not going anywhere sexxxay, don't worry.  I mean, so much of the time I feel like we barely even listen to each other (I mean, we do, but not about mundane shiz).  So I thought it might be a good way to focus and really pay attention to my partner if I adopted the persona of someone who is basically being paid to listen to you.

The character in the Girlfriend Experience always has this blandly interested expression on her face and speaks in a coolly detached, neutral voice (again, very Soderbergh-y) so I affected that and turned over to face the Dotytron, and the exchange went like this,

Me: *Adopts a cool, demur, low tone* "You're reading the Chester Brown?"
Dotytron, reading, "Yeah,"
Me: "What do you think about it?"
Dotytron: "I don't know!"
Me, soldiering on, still with the low voice, "You can tell me anything, you know"
Dotytron: "AGH! WHAT?!!? WILL YOU SHUT UP!?!?"

LMAO.  At that point, I told him what I had been trying to accomplish and we both laughed at what a colossal fail it was.

Not very scientific though.

A narrow house me and Merrick came across on a walk

Black sesame steamed milk!!!

Two babes, now with babes, a little older, a little wiser, a little babe-ier

 I'd be remiss talking about how loved I am on my peeps if I didn't mention as always, the inimitable Dr. Rei.  We went to see Rihanna on Wednesday and had the best time of life.  A long walk, Banh Mi Boys, followed by black sesame steamed milk, then Travis Scott and Riri giving the best show ever - so many medleys and so many hits!  I love her.  She's such an open and real performer.  I love how imperfect she is and how she owns that.  It was such a fun night of dancing and women being amazing.  Love!

We went to visit my sister this weekend and it was filled with the usual: Cracker Barrel, Delmonico's, playing in their backyard, picking up all the goodies, cousin shenanigans:

Little Little Cuz put on these fake glasses and went around claiming he was an "old man." The old man's name?  Timothy, of course.

I bought Twin A a pair of tights because he's obsessed with mine.  Anytime I wear tights, he comes up to me and touches my leg, "These your tights, mama?" and our caregiver told us that he likes to pull his socks up as high as possible.  I got him these and he loved them so much.

These are the perfect high-tops for a short legged person like myself.  Wahhhh - they were too big!!!  They come in men's sizes so I put my considerable research skills to use and tracked down a pair in my size.  Can't wait til these are on my feet! The style is the Vans Sk8-Hi Slim.  Pretty ubiquitous, but the colour is hard to find.  It's a cream colour which is easier to wear than the more readily available bright white.  They're sold out everywhere!

 Good hair. Solar flare. 

Nature is the bomb.

Sister selfies. This is AFTER Twin A barfed on me at Brian's USA Diner. Sorry Brian, we owe you one.

This is a picture of how Twin A sleeps.  He's hardcore into the sleeping with his eyes open in the creepiest way imaginable, tip.

Cousins gonna cuz.

Back at home on Sunday night...Twin B being a maniac.  I was trying to capture him knocking himself on the head like Donkey Kong while making those grunting noises, but then it turned into him doing that disgusting stuff with the food because he's a nutjob.

Snapchat fun.

Last Monday was one of those epic comic working mom days.  Our caregiver was going to be late, so I had planned to stay home an hour to drop off the Big Yam at school, and then meet her back at our place for a twin hand off. Running late, I was upstairs trying to throw on some clothes and brush my teeth when I heard Twin A shout, "HE BARFED!!! LINDSAY BARFED ON THE CARPET!!!" and while, like most witnesses, he was a little unreliable when it came to the details, he got the gist right.  But I had to get the Big Yam to school, so I bundled everyone up, and shoved them all in Eddie VAN Halen, and then listened helplessly as Twin B barfed AGAIN.  Then, because we were late, I had to hustle all three out with me and carry the barfy Twin B in my arms to the office for a late slip, before delivering the Big Yam to his classroom.  At that point, I called it a day and took the rest of the day off so our caregiver wouldn't have to bring the twins with her to pick up the Big Yam from school.

Of course, as I'm learning about Twin B, he needed to barf the sickness out of his system, pass out for a solid, deep 2 hour nap, and then he woke up from said nap and behaved like usual.  It's a very intense, odd, methodology his immune system has, but it's pretty consistent.

Then, that night, bedtime, we hear a thump from our bedroom and then Twin A starts wailing...but that's par for the course, until he ran out and we saw that he had blood streaming down his face and had a small 1.5" cut on his forehead.  So I had to take him to the ER, which was a s**tshow (it is true what they say about ER's being the busiest between 6pm and midnight).  We were triaged and then I think the nurse didn't believe me when I said there were no signs of a concussion or loss of consciousness, because she sent us to the waiting room of the damned.  By the time we got to the WROTD, we had already been in the hospital for 2 hours.  Some people in the WROTD had been there for 3 hours at that point and still hadn't been called.  Finally, because I am nothing if not a good advocate for my own health care, I was like, "the last time we were here we were taken to another area where they do stitches and fractures?  Can I go there?" Which got us fast-tracked to that waiting room, but I had the misfortune of dealing with a doctor bro who told me he was in the middle of switching over with another doctor, who would be there in "5 minutes" and since the freezing agent takes 20 minutes to set in, and new doctor is the one doing the stitches, that I should just wait.  Well, cut to 45 minutes later, and I finally said to bro doc, "Uhh, if the freezing agent takes 20 minutes to set in, can we at least start the process?"  

Then, when new doc finally showed up, she was pushing for the glue for Twin A and I had to say, "Nuh-uh, last time he picked that out the next day," and push for stitches, which Twin A slept through, because my kids are champions at the doctors.  Twin A slept through the stitches, but even better, slept through them injecting a needle full of freezing agent into his forehead.  It was pretty gross.

The upside is, the stitches lasted all of 2 days before he picked those out, too.

Oy.

Fin.

Living and Thinking and Carrying On

Things I've been thinking about, lately:

1) Decentreing whiteness (and heternormativity) and how so many (white, heteronormative) people get so bent out of shape as soon as they're not the focus of like, everything.  It's like, seriously?  Have some chill for once in your damned lives.  The number of assumptions that get made on a daily basis by white people about what the cultural touchstones should be has been really chafing me lately.

2) Further to the above, I've been thinking about how annoying white moms are on the internet.  I mean, as was rightly pointed out to me, "that's on you." Haha!  That's true, I don't have to go looking for anxious, spun up, privileged intensive mothers who are going to make my blood boil with their neuroses and anxieties and constant need for validation from randoms.  But sometimes...I come across it and it makes me SO ANGRY that capable women are choosing to be oppressed and neurotic about the dumbest s**t, that I just can't even.

I got into it with this woman on my twins forum who was basically ready to fire her nanny because of some small infraction (the woman's son wouldn't let the nanny leave because he wanted to hold the nanny's umbrella and so the nanny told him to go take a bite of an apple and then she would let him hold the umbrella and when he went to eat the apple, she snuck out - this of course led to a chorus of [all white] women freaking out about how "deceptive" a practice this is, etc.,) and then of course the conversation spiraled into these wackadoos and their wackadoo expectations for the less privileged (almost universally), women of colour (ditto) who look after their children for not very much money at all.  These employers expect gold-plated service but certainly don't pay the amount that you would assume if you expect your caregiver to basically have a Phd in child psychology, or be an exact proxy for the parent.  There's a different between a caregiver and a parent.  There are huge structural differences between the (often vulnerable) people we pay to look aft our children and us.  It sucks, and you know what, lady?  Some people have real problems.  Why don't you go to Emergency a few more times because your kid has a "strange rash."

Further to the above, someone posted this thing on Facebook that was women's stories of being "assaulted" in child birth by medical practitioners who performed c-sections "without consent" and where women were "shackled" to fetal monitors and "strapped" to hospital beds and "forcibly" coerced into one "medicalized" procedure or another.  My immediate reaction was, that this whole thing of women thinking they know better than medical professionals about what's safe and natural for their children is what lead to the anti-vaccine movement?  I ended up running it by my midwife friend who had some smart points - namely, there's a difference between trauma and assault.  Lots of births can be traumatic - she said that she even found my birth, with the twins, traumatic, but that there is a fundamental difference between trauma and assault.  Like, having to have your baby's collarbone broken so that they can fit through your pelvic opening is super traumatic.  Labour and delivery is such an intimate experience that it's kind of already poised for trauma - you're dealing with life and death!  I think it's wonderful that evidenced-based decision making and women becoming their own health advocates is more and more of a thing, however, we need to strike that balance and dichotomizing the issue so that you have midwives on one hand and evil, military-industrial complex OBs on the other doesn't really sense.  As I was looking into this, I saw that some people use the term "birth rape" which is hugely problematic.

3) I have so many thoughts on the Ghomeshi trial, which is obviously a flashpoint for feminists.  I think ultimately, I feel like I can support and believe women who have been the victims of sexual assault and at the same time, feel like he is absolutely guilty in the court of real life, but that also, the judge's verdict does not constitute a miscarriage of justice.  I don't know how the courts will reconcile the fluidity of consent with the necessary standard of guilt required by the law, I don't know that the courts are the place to do this, even as they are so much a necessary piece of the larger framework.

Right now, I have a kid who likes to strum his junk like a guitar and thinks it's hilarious to do so in mixed company.  I don't know what I'm supposed to do with that and how to manage that, in a way that preserves his innocence and still doesn't allow the calcification of misogyny.

I recently read Chester Brown's The Playboy, which is a comic that was originally published in 1990 and was reissued.  It details Brown's (author of Louis Riel, among other comics) anxiety and guilt around masturbation and purchasing Playboy magazine.  The Dotytron and I both read it, and even though we both agreed that Chester Brown, as a person, is kind of gross, the Dotytron thought that Brown does a good job of honestly representing the shame spiral that happens for adolescent boys faced with the driving compulsions of their desire.  Like, apparently it feels like your brain kind of shuts off and your primordial lizard brain takes over when you're masturbating and then when it's done and you've had an orgasm, then shame comes flooding in.  Shame at what?  He (the Dotytron) posits that the shame is rooted in how quickly the lizard brain takes over and how subsumed the person is to it - like your desire to masturbate is so all-consuming that you're embarrassed and how you let it control your life.

This spurred a conversation about how to negotiate this, as the parents to three boys.  Is the shame and guilt necessary?  Does it have to be that way?  My favorite podcast, Pop Rocket recently had a sex-themed episode and two of the hosts, who are around my age talked about going into bookstores or the library and taking out the sex manuals and moving to a different part of the store/library and furtively thumbing through the pages.  HOW INNOCENT IS THAT?!?  Like, now, you can see the most depraved, disgusting, dehumanizing stuff with the right search string (or even a very wrong search string!).  How do you mitigate THAT? How do you make sure that your kid is processing and on some level, critically engaging with the stuff that shapes their sexuality?

Hell if I know.

Snapchat is kind of the best.

Last weekend was B-A-N-A-N-A-S.  But it was the kind of soul-affirming weekend that grizzled parents need sometime to remind us that we are multi-dimensional people with brilliant, smart, funny, dear friends.

Auntie Em got the twins these jackets recently and they are THE BEST.  Look at these guys!  It's almost like they get along!

I made a new friend!  At JJ and S's house, we were invited to brunch along with their colleagues, whom we had never met before.  At first, the Dotytron and I were like, "no new friends" and were kind of being sour pusses about it, but it turns out these people are AWESOME.  They live in our 'hood, they are both professors at U of T, they are funny, and the woman was automatic kindred spirit.  We are both obsessed with American Crime Story and Togetherness and she is just lovely and smart and their daughter is adorable.  This is a woman who described author Junot Diaz as: "His 'decolonial' love' shtick is kind of catnip for woke WOC" - a million heart eyes emojis.

 Corned beef hash is pretty much the best dish post-late-night dancing dish in the world.

That night I went to Pusha T with my buddy Merrick and it was everything this ol' gal needed.  Pusha T was incendiary.  The crowd was a beautiful multi-ethnic mix of hip hop heads and I got to dance my butt off and it was amazing.

Came home and Record Club was in full swing, which meant that I got to swan in, high off an amazing hip hop show and try to weasel my way in as the only woman in Record Club with my thoughtful insights into Kamasi Washington's album, The Epic.  Late night, and the next day the Dotytron was pretty ruined, so I made myself some corned beef hash and eggs, and then the Dotytron rallied enough so that we could take the kids to an east side indoor play space, which we love, because it's big and clean and the Dotytron and I can go head-to-head on the pop-a-shot game:

Twin A is terrible at this.

Our general modus operandi when doing stuff with the kids is to act like giant idiots and have all the fun while our kids tool around untended.  Half the time we take the kids to a playground, the Dotytron and I are challenging each other to weird parkour or rock climbing stunts while our kids give us the side-eye and other kids stand staring at us, mouth agape, because we generally cavort like fools.  Being able to be a ding dong around kids is very important.  Never lose your silly.

 Then on Sunday, our supper club of mostly high school friends met at Magic Noodle on Harbord. They do Northern Chinese hand-cut noodles in broth and some small shareable plates.  I got the brisket soup which was delicious, and the noodles were fantastic (nicely chewy), but the small plates were hit or miss.  In the top right of the picture above you can see there's a chicken dish which had this weird, mala-style Sichuan peppercorn based sauce that just tasted weird and funky.  We got this potato salad which was good, and lamb skewers (also good).  I don't know if I'd go again, especially given we're on such a ramen kick lately.  

 Quincess wearing his goggles.

Speaking of ramen, we took it easy this weekend and visited my grandma in Markham, followed by Sansotei with my mum.  This crew.

Sansotei why are you so damned delicious???

Some of what I'm doing on Snapchat - a van full of Peppas on the way to the pool.

 

My classic bin of beans made its first appearance for the twins this weekend.  It kept them quietly occupied and giggling for about 30 minutes?  Which is next level.  But then they started dumping beans everywhere which was annoying and inevitable.

Twin A double-fisting this disgusting breakfast concoction I force them to eat: steel cut oats, mixed with full fat cottage cheese, apple sauce, vitamin D droplets and hemp/flax oil.  It's so gross!  

 

Twin B singing the Totoro main theme in Japanese.

Twin A has a huge sweet tooth and loves all things cake, cookies, ice cream, chocolate, etc.  When we had Momma D and Ehmdo over for dinner last night, we took a break after finishing dinner to tidy up the kitchen, pack away leftovers, and open presents before the cake portion.  I popped my head out of the kitchen and saw that Twin A was still sitting in his high chair, so I asked Ehmdo to take him out.  She said that she had tried to do that, but he refused.  As it turns out, he was doggedly sitting in the chair because he was waiting for the dessert portion of the meal.  He sat there for 30 minutes, craning his neck to see the action in the living room, and refused to let us even turn his chair to face the living room.  Such a crafty little sugar butt:

Wanting to be involved, but wanting more, for cake.

For the birthday dinner I roasted two chickens, made gravy, roasted potatoes, roasted cauliflower, and roasted brussels sprouts.  It was an all-oven meal:

I also made this cake, which is known as "The World's Best Cake."  It's Norwegian in origin and features two duplicate layers of butter cake, with a layer of almond-flecked soft and marshmallowy meringue adhered to the cake, and the two layers held together with whipped cream.  I think next time I might add some sliced strawberries to the middle layer, but otherwise, it might not be quite the "world's best" cake, but it's pretty damned delicious.  I've posted the recipe below.

Other things I've eaten/made lately:

I made Smitten Kitchen's spaghetti pie (which is based on cacio e pepe) and I thought it was kind of meh.  I used good fontina and the cheese flavour was kind of pungent but the overall dish was bland and the baked spaghetti texture just wasn't a good fit.  We had this with a classic chocolate cake (I used this Food52 recipe), which turned out good, but not as fudgy as my go-to devil's food cake recipe and the frosting was only so-so.  Still on the hunt for the perfect quick and easy chocolate frosting (not buttercream).  This cake was adapted from the classic Hershey's chocolate cake recipe and I honestly think the Hershey's is better.  Can't improve on that.

Breakfast burritos: scrambled eggs with spinach, piled in a large flour tortilla that's been spread with refried beans (I made mine but easily could be canned), with some grated cheddar.  Rolled up burrito style and then pressed on a panini press and served with tomatillo salsa, sour cream, and guacamole.

Ribollita - basically a version of minestrone with kale, and lots of vegetables and plump canellini beans.  Topped with a very necessary dollop if Italian style salsa verde (parsley, mint, garlic, capers, etc.) and big slices of my sourdough bread with grated parm, toasted for dunking.

Yellow dhal with coconut and muttar paneer and brown basmati rice.

Leftover Micelli Monday taco meat became a giant taco salad - a whole heap of greens, diced tomatoes, sliced black olives, tossed together and topped with the taco meat, optional beans, guacamole, salsa, sour cream, and crunched up tortilla chips for extra texture.  

The Big Yam is obsessed (OBSESSED) with pulses of all shapes and sizes.  Good thing this year is the year of the pulse, according to the WHO.  This is an oldie, bacon-braised lentils, atop a bed of baby spinach, and breaded, fried pucks of goat's cheese to be smeared on crusty bread.  It's a go-to meatless meal.

My St. Paddy's day meal.  Once I started baking corned beef, I've never gone back.  I smear it with a paste of brown sugar and grainy mustard and then bake it in a foil packet until tender. With champ and roasted brussels sprouts and maple carrots.

This was the birthday bundt cake that I made for my mom that she didn't care for.  The recipe (from Baked Occasions) had me right up until I was supposed to mix a portion of the batter with cocoa powder and chocolate and use that to make the dark tunnel.  I dunno, I think I just like a classic, pound-cakey kind of bundt cake.  The chocolate-coconut tunnel was kind of dry and crumbly and tasted neither chocolately or coconutty.  I wouldn't make this again.

 Fin.


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The World's Best Cake
Serves 10-12, technique adapted from Sweet Paul Magazine

10½ tablespoons (1 stick plus 21⁄2 tablespoons) butter, softened

1 2⁄ 3 cups granulated sugar, separated

1 1⁄ 3 cups unbleached all-purpose flour

1 teaspoon baking powder

5 large eggs, separated

1⁄ 3 cup whole milk

1⁄4 cup sliced almonds

1 cup heavy cream

1. Preheat the oven to 350°F, with a rack in the middle position. Line 2 8" round cake pans with parchment paper. Grease the pans and the paper.  The original recipe recommended using metal pans over glass. I had metal pans so that's what I used so I can't comment on the glass.
2. Beat the butter and 2⁄ 3 cup of the sugar in a large bowl with an electric mixer until light and creamy, about 3 minutes.
3. Add the flour and baking powder and mix well on low speed.
4. Mix in the egg yolks and milk.
5. Scrape the batter into the baking pan (the batter will be thick - I used an offset spatula to spread it).
6. In a large clean bowl, beat the egg whites and the remaining 1 cup sugar to soft peaks. Spread on top of the cake layer. Sprinkle with the almond slices.
7. Bake for 30-35 minutes, or until the meringue is golden brown and puffed. Cool on a wire rack in the pan. Gently unmold one of the cake layers and place cake-side-down on a serving platter.
8. When the cake is cool, put the cream in a medium bowl and add some vanilla extract (I used 1/2 tsp. of vanilla bean paste). Beat to medium-firm peaks with an electric mixer, about 3 minutes.
9. Cover the cake on the platter with the cream. Gently unmold the other cake from the baking pan.  Place the other half, meringue side up, on top.
10. Let the cake sit for 1 hour in the fridge before serving.