or not? If you were to draw my outline these days, I'd look like a sawtooth blade. I don't have a lot of patience to smooth over the rough edges brought on by the following: lack of sleep, too many kids, too many chores, a boob that's been sucked raw (literally!), and a sore throat.
Last week was a blur. This one is much the same. I know that somewhere in there, we celebrated Chinese New Year with my family (I'm Chinese, so I get to call it Chinese New Year, okay?) and it was wonderful spending the day with my sister and her family, even if it did result in my CHILDLESS brother, Bruce Wayne, piping up in the most patronizing way when we were discussing how I don't let the Big Yam watch the rebooted My Little Pony cartoon, "See, my concern is that he's going to grow up without knowing these cultural references and be outcast because of it." REALLY, CHILDLESS YOUNGER BROTHER? THAT'S your concern?!? For serious?! Granted, he's an idiot. But it's galling, the way it's always galling when people who don't have kids and lack the imagination/creativity to even empathize with people who are in a different situation from themselves, weigh in. The Big Yam is a scared little butt! He's just like that! I didn't make him that way because I didn't let him watch Saw 1-10!!! Geez.
The Dotytron had the pleasure of taking the Big Yam to his dance class on Saturday and brought home video. Guys, it is AMAZING. Nothing will prepare you for how awesome it is to watch your little kid in a class full of tuu-tuu'd and tricked out girls, all of whom are at least 8 months to a year old than he is, trying to learn a hip hop routine and getting lost in a shoulder-shrug reverie and missing the next count. NOTHING. Apparently the Dotytron overheard some boys who had younger sisters in the class make a comment from outside - something along the lines of: "There's a BOY in that class!" and if the kids' dad hadn't piped in, I think the Dotytron would have gone postal. I'm not usually the kind of parent who defends their kid. I'm the kind who is way harder on my own kid than anyone else. But picking on the Big Yam for dancing? I WILL CUT YOU. We had SMckay over for a sleepover and hang on Saturday night and we decided that we're going to make the Big Yam a "Dance like there's nobody watching" t-shirt to wear to dance class. SO GOOD! LOL!
I think one of the things contributing to my funk is that I don't have a lot of non-parenting/domestic input going into my head right now. I'm reading a meh book (Meg Wolitzer's The Interestings), don't have a good show I can marathon currently, and no time to catch up on movies. I'm out of the loop in terms of the news cycle generally, and no time to do the things I love - like knit and sew and create things with my hands.
But I don't want to do to whingy posts in a row. I promise you I will write wonderful book and movie reviews shortly. Yesterday Momma D came and helped me out and guys, it was HEAVENLY. She took care of dinner! She brought lunch! She helped wrangle the babies while I went to a doctor's appointment! She hung out and helped fold laundry! She did dishes! Thanks to her I was able to mop the kitchen floor!
It made all the difference in the world. I was able to hang out with my babies and enjoy them. There is much to enjoy. Lindsay Lou-Lou is all about giving you the biggest, widest, scrunchy-faced, open-mouthed grin lately, one that shows off his bottom gums. It's so cute. The Quincess is all about sticking his fingers in my mouth and making his weird noises. I know the Big Yam hasn't been getting much love photo-wise lately, maybe be cause he is such a ball of activity that it's hard to catch him standing still, but I can't say enough how wonderful he is. He is a treat. A sweet, fun, funny, little guy who wants to do everything by himself, and yet is still young enough to insist on morning cuddles with me. He is all about framing his requests in the negative: "Mama? It's a school night tonight. I can't have iPad." and I think the idea is that he frames what he can't have, to manage his expectations, on the off-chance that we bend the rules. It's so funny and endearing. So is calling "yellow" "lallo." I never want "lallo" to go away.
Look at that sweet little expression! What a sweet elf with devil eyebrows!
I can never resist a good finger gun picture.
Simple meals lately:
Bratwurst, a cheddar-broccoli brown rice casserole with garlic panko topping, and roasted Brussels sprouts
Freezer Greek spinach-lemon soup, a tartine of garlic butter, fresh mozzarella, and roasted grape tomatoes, and a salad of romaine, caramelized pear, and toasted pecans.
I was supposed to have my friends R & M come over today, but the snow curtailed cross-city travel, so I had my street ladies who are also on maternity leave over instead. I made a bacon, fig, and brie quiche, and these blueberry muffins. I can't resist a warm blueberry muffin soaked in salted butter. I will post the muffin recipe tomorrow.
Yes, yes! One more paper handed in - one less monkey on my back! Now I just have to finish ONE MORE RESEARCH PAPER and I will be fully caught up on school! I'm giving myself the week off and tackling it once I get back from Boston, though - so from here on in, I am free!
What a weekend of craziness. Friday we made plans to head out to the kdubs to visit with Tillers & Jen and see their sweet new bébé. I'm kicking myself that we didn't get any photos - she's a perfect little bean with a full head of dark hair in a very monk-ish style. Even though she weighs a full pound more than when the Big Yam was born, I was flabbergasted at how wee she was when I was cradling her tiny little form. It's shocking how quickly you forget that your kid was once that tiny. It's only been 7 months and I can't believe that the Big Yam used to be just that clueless and frail, making tiny little bird sounds and staring into the middle distance with his mouth stupidly agape, smacking his lips absently at the air. And now look at him - sitting up on his own:
He started being able to consistently and reliably sit up last week...no more tottering and lurching to one side, no more squawking with his legs and arms up in the air like an upended beetle. Nope, you can plop him down with a toy and he will stay put...it makes him look so grown up that we're quite taken with the novelty of it. He looks so darned cute! This age is really fun, I have to say. He's becoming more independent and yet he's still not so big that he's been corrupted by the world and still invariably wakes up every morning by my side with a slow fluttering of the eyelids and upon espying me, a gummy, beatific grin that envelops his whole face. I love waking up to that. I love his joyful squirming when you cover his fat cheeks with kisses. I love how he ducks his head down like he's bashful and sleepily rubs his chubby fists against his eyes when we've kept him up past his bedtime. I love it all and I don't ever want it to end.
Aside: there is NOTHING cuter than a baby boy in madras print shorts. I'm obsessed! He's such a cute little gaffer!
I'm so excited to have dear friends like Tillers & Jen embarking on parenthood - I want our kids to grow up never having not known each other. No doubt time and interests and growing autonomy will pull them apart but I want them to be able to look back and say, "So-and-so is my oldest friend." I want to kvetch with them about how wack-a-doo our kids are turning out to be and commiserate with them when our kids turn into pre-teen dorks and we have to deal with the attendant attitude that comes with.
Ahhhh, feeling sentimental after a weekend of good times with good people. Saturday night we had a lobster dinner with our friends S & P who put my hosting abilities to shame. Fresh lobsters from Halifax, a smoked salmon & cream cheese spread with toasted baguette, potato salad, a beet & pear salad, and I provided my rosemary olive loaf and dessert - a blackberry macaroon tart, recipe courtesy of Smitten Kitchen by way of 101 Cookbooks:
The tart is divine - so simple and satisfying. A whole wheat short crust enriched with the toasty warmth of coconut, topped with halved blackberries and dotted with little tufts of chewy, crunchy, golden coconut macaroons...so good! And it would definitely lend itself to cherries and raspberries when they're in season, too. Can't wait to try it out again - the whole thing comes together in minutes.
Thursday night we had a throwback meal of French onion soup with a BLT salad (mixed greens tossed with crisped bacon, hothouse cherry tomatoes from the Mennonites, all dressed in a creamy, tangy, celery-seed-sparked ranch-style dressing):
Academic book club was interesting and engaging, although it did reveal that there are fundamental differences in the parenting styles between the members - it was very illuminating how people's reactions to Chua reflected on how they were raised and how they raised their kids. The next book we're reading is The Hunger Games, which I'm super-pumped about.
Friday morning I made French toast for myself and the Big Yam (it was a big hit) for breakfast with blackberry rhubarb compote. I'm rhubarb crazy at the moment and am desperate to throw it into anything I can find:
Saturday morning we had croque hermaphrodites:
On Sunday we met up with S & A at the Bloordale Pantry which is previously uninhabitable neighbourhood of Bloor/Landsdowne. The fact that the presence of this restaurant is one of the first harbingers of oncoming gentrification means that you can go for brunch at 11am on a Sunday and STILL GET A TABLE FOR FIVE (!!!!!!!!!) This is UNHEARD of in our neighbourhood. The menu is quite good - nice and varied with something for everyone. I ordered this pancake dish consisting of pancakes stuffed with cheddar and bacon and served alongside onion potato hash and 2 perfectly sunny sunny side up eggs:
Then we went over to S & A's house to take a look at their kitchen reno - which was totally inspiring for me. It only took a month!!! That's incredible!!! I've heard a lot of horror stories so that was very heartening, even if everything in their house, top to bottom, is covered in a thin film of dust.
I had a serious case of 'itis all Sunday because of white people. By that I mean, white people not eating the lobster tomalley in their lobsters on Saturday night meant that I had FOUR LOBSTERS' worth of tomalley myself - it's quite rich and my gut was hurting. So Sunday I bowed out of making dinner and instead applied myself to making a blackberry rhubarb bread pudding that I ate late at night, after fasting all day (my stuffed pancakes aside) and served with bourbon toffee sauce and ice cream:
I also had a visit from Xtina with her new baby, H - who is the spitting image of his father, Buns:
What a little Aryan prince.
I baked off 3 loaves of onion bread variations. 1 GIANT (2lb!) roasted garlic, caramelized onion loaf, 1 smaller version of the same, and 1 caramelized onion and parmesan bread. They are now nicely wrapped and ready for the freezer. The dough begins with a sponge that's based on my sourdough starter, but the final bread also gets a boost from commercial yeast as well:
Tonight for dinner I made us a spicy salmon brown rice bowl - to kick start our healthy eating/getting back into shape movement:
my wii age is 46 (i had the heroin hands when i was doing the calibration and my centre of gravity was all kinds of messed up.) the good news is, that according to the genetic juju people at mount sinai, my eggs and fallopian tubes have a reproductive age equivalent to a 15 year old. i'm still kind of thinking they might have gotten the results of the first trimester screen mixed up - but i think i'm just too superstitious.
this weekend was super-busy but super-fun. on saturday we saw another documentary, "cooking up dreams" which is about the unifying cultural significance of food in peru. it uses food as the basic unifying thread tying together the disparate cultures of peru (japanese, african, indigenous, spanish, mestizo) and champions the unique ingredients of the amazon. both high-end chefs and the cooking of the jungle are given equal attention...i thought it was great - it elicited a few reactions: intense hunger, desire to try peruvian food, desire to travel to peru. here's the trailer:
the director was there and he was so cute! such a smiley, good natured dude who you could tell was so happy to be there. i'm definitely putting toronto peruvian restos on my "to eat" list. it doesn't look like there's that many - the two main ones are el fogon and el plebeyo.
saturday night i got to scratch my hong kong style cafe itch (cha chaan teng) so we went to phoenix - the location on woodbine. i ordered a million dishes. usually at these places, you can get a "set meal" which includes a soup, some kind of bun, and a hot beverage - they're known for serving stuff like ovaltine and horlick's (the brit influence in hong kong) as well as a hot, very milky tea.
i upgraded ONE of my entrees to the set meal. the soups are generally something creamy and a borscht. i got the "seafood bisque":
this was a sweet-ish, thick, tomato-y bisque with bits of shredded crab. i drank this so quickly that the dotytron didn't get more than a couple of bites.
i also ordered a baked porkchop rice in cream sauce on rice (which has bits of scrambled egg mixed in.) this wasn't the best iteration of this dish that i've had - sometimes they mix in frozen veggies which breaks up the cream sauce but it was still really good. tender, fatty pork chop cutlets and a sauce reminiscent of the goop served on the classic yin-yang rice dish.
this was my ox tongue spaghetti (my SECOND entree) which again, while satisfying, was n't the best rendition of this dish that i've ever had. more veggies would have been nice and the sauce was really just canned tomato soup or something - it's always kind of tomato soup-y, but they usually add a little something something to gussy it up a bit. anyway, imagine super-tender pieces of ox tongue on a bed of spaghetti with ketchup/tomato soup sauce. i know it SOUNDS gross (and the dotytron certainly thought it WAS gross) but i like it.
dotytron got his beef flank malaysian curry with rice. so good.
then we met up with my little bros and we saw "kick-ass"
can i first say that we're finally feeling the results of the hollywood writer's strike? the summer movie previews have been A** ON A STICK. how many times do i have to see the trailer for "the expendables"? or "macgruber?" so brutal! there's nothing coming out this summer that i super-duper want to see. i mean, obviously "iron man 2" and maybe "salt" and definitely "eclipse" for kicks - but there aren't enough summer blockbuster tent poles. laaame!
anyway, "kick-ass" was okay. not really memorable...people were laughing in the theatre but i think it trades a lot on your ability to find an 11 year old saying the word "c**t" - i find those kinds of cheap laughs not really my style. i get it: it's shocking! the violence was pretty stylized and graphic - but i was kind of meh about the whole thing - it was empty spectacle and not particularly all that clever or winning (unlike say, rdj as tony stark in "iron man") it wasn't that it wasn't entertaining, it was just kind of forgettable overall.
the next morning we got up at SIX THIRTY AM to be keeners and to plant all the stuff we bought on saturday in the garden. the neighs were losing their minds. lol! this is what it looks like now that we mulched it tonight:
we put in a hydrangea and a wackload of perennials - some bee balm, some echinacea, some shasta daisies, and some creeping ground cover to hold in the edges of the garden, which are elevated. we also bought some blue fescue, which i like because it looks like a cute little sea urchin. i'm not doing food growing - there isn't room for that in the front and i didn't know how to elegantly divide the garden between food and flowers...we went the easy all perennial route. we also chunked up stuff from momma d's garden that she generously donated and planted that.
we mulched it tonight because we wanted to get a good rain in before we locked that moisture in - it's been so dry this april! the stepping stones we bought at this place called milliken farms, across from pac mall - we were going to do flagstones but the concrete circles were $3/piece! can't beat that. i think i'm going to lay out planter boxes along the lip of the enclosed porch and do herbs in there. it's looking pretty good! we'll shore up with a tonne more bulbs in the fall and see how things settle into place - we didn't pay much attention to when things bloomed, so we might have a spectacular late-summer show but nothing in early summer. it's a work in progress, right?
anyway, the neighbs are losing their minds about it. ha! the lady attached to us just had someone come in and give her a quote on designing their frontage - which i think is kind of ridiculous for such a tiny patch of ground, but whatevs.
after our morning being insane-o early riser gardeners (in our defense, we find it really relaxing working in the garden), we headed out to meet buns & xtina at stockyards for breakkie. now, we've been there before for dinnie and had a fairly negative experience, but the brunch card was too irresistible for a southron hound like myself. we WOULD have been on time (seriously, getting up at 6:30am on a sunday for a 9am brunch date? how could we be foiled?!?) except the dotytron refuses to ever check traffic and weather on the 1s (on am 640) and thus always gets PWNED driving - so we got owned by a stupid sporting life marathon down yonge street, which we HAD to cross to get to the west side of toronto. so aggravating!
xtina had the biscuits and sausage gravy which was a GIANT portion of creamy, crumbled sausage milk gravy on a split biscuit (biscuit was a leetle tough, but very tasty) served with soft-scrambled eggs. it was definitely the biggest portion of the day. she also got a side of the pit beans.
the dotytron and i went halfsies. he got the smoked meat hash which comes with two deep fried poach eggs (poached eggs that are lightly dredged in a sesaoned flour and fried) and a chive sour cream. this was REALLY good as well - the hash was basically almost mashed up potatoes mixed with smoked meat - so it didn't have any distinct potato-yness left to it - but it was hella tasty.
me and buns both ordered the "eggs tommy" which is a split biscuit, topped with andouille sausage, deep fried poach egg, cajun shrimp and a lemony hollandaise. it was also delightful. my only quibble is that the twice-cooking of the egg requires you to poach the egg way under so that it emerges from the fryer with a runny yolk intact. one of the eggs i received wasn't runny anymore, which is TOTALLY the point of an eggs benny, right? the andouille was fan-freaking-tastic in there. so good!
because i'm a giant hog, i also got a side of their house sausage - which consists of very thin patties of seasoned pork - the main seasoning i could taste was salt, so they could up the spice blend a bit more (sage, thyme, etc.)
it was really quiet in there - i was expecting a madhouse because toronto is SO brunch crazy and they've been written up recently in the free weeklies. i don't know if it was the rain, or the early brunching time, or where it's located, but it was very quiet - even when we left around 11ish it wasn't that busy - which is pretty darned ideal if you ask me. i hate lining up for brunch.
we spent the afternoon watering our garden and doing small house-y finishing things - hanging pictures, etc. and then we had dr. rei and hanbo over for dinner.
i made ginger-pear jam glazed ham, roasted asparagus, a mint and pea puree and scalloped potatoes and fennel with cheddar cheese. the scalloped potatoes were exceptionally good. i also made that orange cake again, this time upping the zest amount to 2 oranges' worth as well as increasing the sour cream by 1/4 c. i baked it in a 9" pan (i'm not sure how you'd fit it in an 8" pan) and frosted it with chocolate buttercream. it was a big hit. i could eat that thing all day. the recipe is at the end of the post.
today i spent a good chunk of my lunch hour on the horn with daycares putting spumante on the waiting list as well as calling contractors. it was negative fun.
for dinner i made us a spring pasta of spaghetti with the last of my chunk of guanciale, sliced artichoke hearts (so much prep!) and grated parm. we also had olive garden salad because i love it so.
1/2 c. unsalted butter, softened 3/4 cup sugar zest from 2 medium sized oranges 2 large eggs 3/4 cup sour cream 1/4 cup fresh orange juice 1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour 1 teaspoon baking powder 1/2 teaspoon salt 1/2 teaspoon baking soda
- preheat oven to 350°F. grease a 9-inch round baking pan and line bottom with parchment, and then grease parchment. - beat together butter, sugar, and zest in a large bowl with an electric mixer until creamy, about 2 minutes. add eggs 1 at a time, beating until incorporated and scraping down bowl. - stir in sour cream and orange juice, then add remaining ingredients stirring until just combined. - transfer batter to baking pan and bake in middle of oven until golden and a wooden pick inserted in center comes out clean, about 30 to 40 minutes. - cool cake in pan on a rack 10 minutes, then turn out onto rack. discard paper and cool. - frost as desired.
notes: this would be equally tasty for an afternoon snack with just a dusting of confectioner's sugar, but could be gussied up with cream cheese frosting, an orange syrup (orange juice, sugar, maybe some orange liquer, heated together - poke holes in top of cake with skewer and pour syrup on top), chocolate ganache, or my favorite, with chocolate buttercream.
my name is karl lagerfeld. i'm a lucky button, buckshot shorty, and an industrious pig. i write about food, popular culture, film, books, politics, theory, and the ephemera of my life. a can of chinotto once ruined my night. the rest, as they say, is history.
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