Chinese New Year!

ZOMG - we had a crazy freakin' weekend.  It was fun and very sociable, but exhausting.  

Friday night was chill, but the hectic nature of the day and the week preceding it meant that the Dotytron and I passed out at like, 9pm in pools of our own drool, laid out on our respective couches of choice.  It was pathetic.

Saturday we spent going buck, cleaning up a storm to get the house ready for Chinese New Year, which is technically just the lunar new year, celebrated by a lot of East Asians, not just Chinese people, even though we like to think we have exclusive purview over it.  False!  

We did get to start Saturday off with cheese blintzes with blueberry sauce and bacon though.  Which the Big Yam turned his nose up at, because he's a weirdo.

Then we went and grabbed our friends Paul & Sandra to take them to Paul and Sandy's Real BBQ out in the wilds of Etobicoke.  Just take a minute to appreciate that thematic unity.  We ate with a Paul and Sandra at Paul & Sandy's.  BEST.  We really like the food there.  The Dotytron and I split ribs, chicken, brisket and meatloaf.  The brisket at Paul & Sandy's is some of the best I've ever had.  So juicy and tender and flavourful - falling apart but with a nice, robust, even layer of fat melting across the top.  So freakin' good.  The Big Yam ate like a pig, because when it comes to barbecue - he's not a weirdo.

I had spent considerable effort procuring supplies to make the Momofuku Milk Bar Birthday Cake for our dessert, but then was a total loser and forgot it at home.  Luckily for us, but unluckily for P & S, we got to have a slice.  They missed out.  The Momofuku cakes are frustrating and labour intensive, because they're all build in a 6" round cake mould.  So you make all the composite elements (in the case of the cake below, that's 4 - the cake itself, the birthday cake "crumb" - little crunchy bits of salty, sandy goodness, the frosting, and the milk soak), then stamp out the cake layers out of the sheet you've baked and layer it all together.  It's nuts.  Not only that, but of COURSE you have to go out and buy sheets of acetate to line your cake mould and so that you have something to support the finished height of the cake.  Then, you also have to go and buy speciality ingredients like glucose and 

citric acid.  Yes, that's right.  Glucose and CITRIC ACID (which you use like, a pinch of in the cake).  It's bonkers.  Needless to say, the Big Yam was over the moon happy about all the Kitchen Aid mixer use in the service of the Birthday Cake.

At the end of it though, I can safely say that this cake is FREAKIN' delicious.  It's mean to invoke the spirit of boxed cake mix (the funfetti variety, specifically) but it's a particularly delectable iteration.  The genius thing about Christina Tosi (the pastry chef at Milk Bar) is that she has one of those born and bred understandings of texture and flavour balance in a dessert.  The crunch of the crumbs against the tender cake, the tang of the frosting ameliorating the sweetness, the punch of salt crystals, they all work together to invoke and play to the elemental cravings of a person.  It's all about balance to the excess.  It's all about understanding the best part of a something - be it the awesomeness of the graham cracker crust, or doing a dessert shout out to those people who love the nutty, crumbly bits of crunchy streusel on top of a fruit crisp - the people who will eat the crisp and leave the fruit, or the ones who love the buttery, toasty taste of unadorned pie crust (she has a pie crust frosting that is mind-blowing).  It's clever, but also grounded in giving people what they want and not over-intellectualizing things.  It's pleasurable AND smart food.  This cake is divine:

Sunday was the most buck.  Big Yam slept in until 7pm (that's good!) - but that meant it was a MAD scramble to get out the door and up to the burbs to make parent & tot hours at our preferred pool (that's bad).  Do you have ANY idea how much we have to pack to go swimming in the burbs?  It's insane.  The prep to swimming time ratio is like, 95:1.  Then we went to T & T and Costco.  Then it was home, to sew my Poh Poh's pants (my mum made me), then taking Poh Poh out to lunch (at Phoenix, yum!), then it was back home to hang out with my mom and Poh Poh some more, then over to R & R's house so that the Dotytron could give R a guitar lesson, then picking up takeout and then home.  It was EXHAUSTING.  Also, our car almost exploded from all the crap we were carting around by the end of it.  It was also the best guitar lesson of the Dotytron's life, because R & R gave him beer, bought Babu samosas and mutton patties, made chocolate chip cookies, AND R gave me a pair of jeggings that didn't fit her (!!!!!!!!!!!!)  You know what I did?  Brought over HALF OF A CAKE (the cake pictured above, actually).  WHAT THE HECK?!?  So imbalanced an exchange!  


Yesterday I took a 1/2 day off work (even though I really should not have because of the volume of work I have to do) to attend to final preparations for our Chinese dinner.  We had Momma D and her friend/roomie R over for dinner.   Even though about half the dishes were bought from T & T - it ended up being a bit of work.  The dishes I was making aren't the kind you make in advance - you can't steam a fish in advance of boil dumplings in advance.  We had 8 dishes: fried turnip cake, steamed rice with Chinese sausage, Buddha's delight (vegetarian dish), steamed green bass, roasted pork & bbq duck, oyster omelet, and pork & chive dumplings.  I also got this coconut & red bean pudding that we ate cold slices of for dessert.  I obviously made a TONNE of food and now we have leftovers for days.

Warning: don't look at the photos below if you have issues with toddlers wearing hilarious (and possibly racist?!) cultural attire.  We bought the Big Yam this outfit at Pac Mall two weekends ago and I dressed him in it for dinner last night.  It was AMAZING.  He was so cute in it that we could barely stand it.  He was also very slippery because of the silk/polyester.  LOL!  Seriously, we could barely get a grip on him.  I keep looking at these photos because he's just so adorbs that it makes me happy.  We'll definitely have him sporting these threads more often.  

Fin.

Attack of the blob

Have you guys ever had congee?  It's like a savory rice porridge that my people generally eat for breakfast in the homeland, but has been adopted as more lunch/dinner fare here.  We made it for dinner last night and even though I KNOW that it's like the most cost-effective, high yielding food of all time, I stupidly decided to double the recipe like a total n00b.  The thing with congee is, that rice is like the most absorbent starch of all time (this is not a scientific  method-based observation.)  So it CONTINUES TO ABSORB for like, a full week after you started putting the dish together.  Anyway, 2 cups of rice and 20 cups of water later, I have vats and vats of preserved egg and pork congee to keep me warm at night.  

It's been a very Asian week so far for dinners - spicy beef kimchi udon on Monday, followed by congee yesterday.  The Big Yam has been so-so about it.  He's a big fan of spicy food though - he was very nonplussed by the chili heat of the spicy beef udon.

On our way home from the Dotytron Family Xmas to-do, I was pondering aloud about what kind of kid I want to raise.  Having been forced around the company of adults from a very young age, dragged to business dinners for my mom and Big D's clients and such, all my siblings and I were forced to learn to sit and smile and be pleasant through interminably long, multi-course epic mealtimes with people who we shared very little in common with - either they were old (meaning adults) or they were weird, nerdy, future doctors of America (the children of said adults).  I may not have acquitted myself with grace back then, but it's kind of important to me now that my kid is able to be well-rounded, well-read enough to be comfortable keeping company with adults.  I want my kid to have the social skills so that they don't clam up if they're forced into situations where they don't appear to have a lot in common with their companions.  I want my kid to okay striking up a genial conversation with all kinds of people, not just other kids.  I want my kid to be able to know how to ask questions and find commonalities with others - not just talk about themselves and their own narrow interests. 

I want my kid to be the opposite of narrow.  I want the Big Yam to have broad interests, to be intensely curious, to be interested and engaged.  

This might all be a pipe dream.  Right now he's pretty self-absorbed.  He can fake it pretty well though.  He has this fake curious sound he does, which is a super-exaggerated, "hunnnnh" followed by a "hmmmmmmm" that goes up at the end so it sounds like a question.  It's pretty cute but can also be pretty infuriating - especially when he unleashes it after randomly calming down after being a bear.  Suddenly he's all like, professorial inquisitive guy, going "hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm?" after you've been dealing with him lying on the floor wanting to be picked up for half an hour when you're trying to make dinner.

Ahhhh, life.

Fin.

Year of the Rabbit

Hoppy Year of the Rabbit (see what I did there?)!

Yesterday was a snow day - the first one in 12 years for the TDSB. This meant that when I woke up, the Dotytron was doing a little happy dance that involved much swiveling of the hips - trust me, his hips don't lie. This also meant that me and Master T had the unexpected pleasure of having the Dotytron home with us ALL DAY. It was GLORIOUS! But the time went really quickly - it just made us realize how it would be so nice to have a whole week of snow days.

A lot of our time was spent preparing the house for Chinese New Year, which meant cleaning the house from top to bottom. You're not supposed to sweep on New Year's day, as you're "sweeping" away all your good luck/prosperity, etc." For similar reasons you're not supposed to shower or bathe on New Year's day. I had originally planned on making this lamb and eggplant stew with tadiq (the crusty bottom on Persian rice), but the Dotytron kept balking at it and kept wanting for us to go out for Chinese food for dinner. I didn't want to brave the questionable downtown Chinese restaurants after navigating the questionable, post-storm downtown streets in the Captain, so we settled on a compromise, going to T&T, where we assembled a hodge-podge Chinese meal of randomness, behold:

We made dumplings (pot stickers and soup-filled), and steamed gai lan, and made rice with Chinese sausage (lap cheong), and bought prepared tofu with mushrooms and roasted bbq pork. It was a very pork heavy meal. We followed it up with pan-fried gow (a sweet cake, we bought 2 - 1 coconut and 1 osmanthus flavoured) and black sesame ice cream, because the Dotytron is OBSESSED with any and all things black sesame flavoured. He loves it more than anything. I went a little crazy at T & T and quickly filled up a basket full of random goodies - at one point, as I chucked a tray of coconut buns in the cart, I turned to the Dotytron and said, "I'm going a little crazy here" and he gave me a deadpan, dry, intensely sarcastic, "No. No. Please stop." As we all know, T & T is like the Dotytron's mecca. He loves it there and he loves Chinese food like few other things on earth.

This is what else we've been eating around here:

This was a random meal of homemade falafel balls with tahini-yoghurt sauce, served low-carb in Boston lettuce leaves (I had been remiss in defrosting the pitas.) It ended up working out rather well - I think I might actually prefer this way of eating falafel balls. Makes everything less bready. Alongside I made quick pickled beets.

We were supposed to host our friends S & A for dinner before things went all haywire with our weekend. I was planning a Southern-style menu with a baked ham, zucchini casserole, biscuits, sweet potatoes with marshmallow topping, etc. Upon my return home, faced with a fridge full of zucchini, I turned it into a pasta with whole wheat fusilli, T's chilies, ricotta, and zucchini. It was really tasty - creamy and spicy and chock full of tender bites of zucchini in every forkful.

We watched The King's Speech on the weekend. It wasn't my cup of tea (snork, British reference, snork!) I found it kind of stilted and predictable and Oscar-baity. The performances were decent but I was strangely unmoved by Bertie's plight. I think the real story would have been more stirring - the reluctant monarch who needs to rally the country during a time of crisis crippled with a speech impediment...but the film's depiction was lacking a certain momentum and urgency. They didn't manage to draw me in and make me care. Although I did particularly respond to Helen Bonham Carter as the future Queen Mum - she managed to convey the repressed cheekiness and twinkle the Queen Mum always had in her eye.

We also watched Blue Valentine. Opinions on this film are mixed in the Dotytron-Lagerfeld household, with Lagerfeld pro and the Dotytron con. Lagerfeld feels that the film is beautifully acted and beautifully shot - gorgeous, naturalistic shots suffused with the golden light of sunset on the Brooklyn bridge, or the eerie blue tones of a cheap, future-themed room in a campy sex hotel. I also loved the performances - so real (a lot of the dialogue was ad-libbed) and believable. The Dotytron contends that the story is uber-depressing and he has no interest in seeing these kinds of movies (an opinion shared by Dr. Rei, who has recently come out as wanting only to see movies about extraordinary people and/or the Harry Potter universe.) I believe that sometimes, the art of a film is in its exploration of the mundane. Watching Williams and Gosling (two of the finest actors of their generation) inhabit so fully the roles of Cindy and Dean as they meet, fall in love and subsequently fall out of love, is a treat, as is the dissection of a relationship in decline. The early love is so beautifully depicted - much has been made of Williams' charming tap-dance to Gosling's ukulele-accompanied warbling as one of the more charming scenes of nascent, young, sort-of-poor love ever and it's made all the more poignant by being cast into sharp relief with the rancor that follows.

The nuance in their relationship, the push and the pull of two people who have grown out of love sharing equal blame, is really well done. I can't say that I loved this movie - but I really liked it and thought it was worth watching. I'd take it over the pap of The King's Speech any day.

Tonight we're having dinner with the Roomie and L'Armi at their place. A late dinner as we have a contractor coming by to quote us on some stuff we can't afford.

Fin.

loves me a good deal

score! so you know how i was talking about how redonkulously expensive those glass doorknobs were at the door store? i told my colleague and she sent me a link to a bucket of glass knobs that just got deposited at the habitat for humanity restore in north york. people and businesses make donations of new and gently used stuff to the restores, which they sell at discounted prices. they had a heap of knobs for $25/set!!!

so i sent the dotytron and he snagged 5 for us...for the same price (actually, much less) than we would have paid for ONE at the door store! wooee! now we just have to buy the rosettes and latches - i found a guy on ebay selling retrofit sets including rosettes and latches in a variety of finishes for $25 USD/set...but we're still going to see if home depot or lowe's has any first. SO ACES! so we're going to get the entire thing done for less than $60/door which i can totally live with. $180 door when you have cheap doors is just silly. i think they're going to look pretty amazing when we have them set up.

the colour of our dining room is starting to drive me kind of crazy...i really want to repaint it, but i'll probably be sensible and wait until we have our kitchen done (a year or two? depending on when i win the lottery?):

this is the kind of colour i'm going for. i think that kind of rich, jewel tone will look lovely against the deep purple in the living room and provide a gorgeous backdrop to bring out the tones in the sideboard and will make the white accents in the room (the chairs, the centrepiece) really pop.

okay...so here's the annoying thing about the dudes on my dodgeball team (the dudes and ladies) which you might be able to chalk up to the fact that they're young, but mostly due to the fact that they're dummies. so i put together this dancehall, hip-hoppy mix of tunes with some ragga jungle thrown in to get the team (read: me and doty) pumped. there's been some controversy because s-dawg has been playing his mix which includes your standard kind of stadium fist-pumpers along with the theme from "rocky" (the orchestral theme), which when it came on, totally through two members of the team (they're young girls) for a loop and they were all like, *curled lip* "WHAT IS THIS?!" and being all snarky and one of them turned it off, even though the dotytron and s-dawg were getting all hype because they've actually SEEN "rocky" (i haven't, but i don't get ruffled by the tunes that people play during dball, generally. like, most of the time my team when they play on sundays plays really stupid metal and i just shrug it off.)

ANYWAY, sister nancy's "bam bam" comes on:



and AGAIN the two girls are curling their lips (p.s. one of them DOESN'T EVEN PLAY DBALL AND IS THE GIRLFRIEND OF ONE OF THE PLAYERS AND IS LIKE AN ELEVENTEEN YEAR OLD WHO WORKS RETAIL - NOT THAT THERE'S ANYTHING INTRINSICALLY WRONG WITH THAT) and asking incredulously, "what IS this?!?" like they've NEVER HEARD DANCEHALL or reggae or music made by black people before.

and i'm like, b***h, SHUT IT. it's infuriating. like, i don't expect everyone to know EVERYTHING, ça c'est impossible. i get it. but you don't have to be all like, "what is this freak music for jerks" about it, when really IT JUST SHOWS THAT YOU are a small-minded, sheltered weirdo from HICKSVILLE, WHITEYTOWN! (your standard caveats about context, blah blah blah) like, there's an opinion about music after having listened to it and giving it a chance and then there's just showing your ignorance and being a jerk about it.

like, how come i can take the time to know what fleet foxes and ok go and tragically hip and ALL THAT OTHER CRAP I THINK IS THE WORSTEST sounds like, so that i can say, "you know what? it's not my thing" but you can ONLY know the tragically hip and think all songs written by non white hairy dudes that aren't derivative to the max is "weird"? COME ON. and as usual, HAVE YOU MET YOU?

and then the dotytron told me that when then this tune came on:



and one of the tithead girls comes running up and is like, "i know this! it's sean paul!" and was all crestfallen when she realized it wasn't dance mix 2005. not that there's anything wrong with sean de paul. but they're BABIES. who DON'T KNOW ANYTHING. and most egregiously, DON'T KNOW THAT THEY DON'T KNOW ANYTHING AND MASK THEIR PROFOUND AND TOTAL IGNORANCE WITH DISGUST.

gah. it just makes you feel old. but i mean, i don't think there should be an age limit on being as well-rounded as you can be. there's no time when it's okay not to be curious about stuff.

yesterday's meals were all about the poultry and fries. my colleage T took me to lunch at this place on yonge called the coach house which is the kind of old fashioned diner-type places with vinyl seats, an ancient cash register up at the front, and formica tables and where they serve the classics like hot turkey sandwiches on white bread with boiled veggies and fries with real chunks of turkey and fake gravy. it was awesome. we went halfsies on the club and hot turkey and ate fries and i was stuffed. then after dodgeball we met up with old kitchen friends of mine M and F who are married and ate duff's wings and fries for dinner. i worked with M at bymark but he got out of the business and now does landscaping and F is the sous chef at george and is trying to get out of the business or at least reduce the hours/time spent in the kitchen. it's a hard mentality to break. only working 10 hours days instead of 12+ and leaving at a reasonable time and not feeling guilty when you say goodbye to the other line cooks that you know still have 6 hours of service and clean up ahead of them.

tonight we're heading up to markham to visit with my sis and the kids, sans outlaw bro. sis is in town to go with s-dawg and myself to my uncle's funeral tomorrow. it's my deadbeat dad's bro. we've only met him a handful of times so i'm feeling a little removed - but it's always sad when people go before their time.

for dinner the dotytron and i are going to phoenix, which is famous for their hainan chicken rice and hk style food (well, this type of restaurant tends to do like, hong kong takes on singaporean and malaysian style food - and hong kong style western food. malaysian curries, ox tongue spaghetti and whatnot.) i'll take a photo of our meal and post it. hainan chicken rice is rice that's been poached in a chicken stock that gets re-used over and over to produce an ultra-flavourful, concentrated stock. the accompanying rice is cooked in a fatty, rich chicken stock resulting in fragrant, perfumed rice with a distinct unctuousness and separate, fluffy grains. it's traditionally served with a piquant ginger-scallion relish for dipping. it's so addictive. totally comfort food all slippery and slightly neutral and gentle on your stomach. the best is now restaurants make the hainan chicken BONELESS. sweet mother of all that is good that was a major step forward in hainan chicken rice preparation.

fin.