Halloween! (And Sansotei Ramen review) (And Dia de los Muertos!)

I took yesterday off of work to prepare for Halloween and I just BARELY MADE IT.  Seriously, pumpkins were being lit, I was yelling at the Dotytron to throw the Big Yam outside and dinner clean-up still had to happen by the time the first kids started knocking on our door.  I don't know how you do it if you don't take a vacation day.  

These are my pumpkins this year:

Golias from My Big Big Friend.  My one Halloween concession for the Big Yam was this pumpkin.  He was so happy when he saw it!  He also insisted on bringing the wet, slimy, pumpkin-smeared paper template I used to the drop-in centre with him.

Prince because I like to keep things thematically sound.

I was pretty crazy productive yesterday, so that made things worth it.  I banged off a batch of snickerdoodles, made a double recipe of pie pastry for the freezer, made yesterday's dinner and tonight's dinner, made a lemon meringue pie, went to the drop-in centre, carved 2 pumpkins, and squeezed in a trip to Kensington market and back for a (fruitless) search for Day of the Dead decor for dinner tonight.  Oh, and I also made a last-minute batch of pumpkin butterscotch blondies because if there's one guarantee in life, it's that rainy evenings make me yearn for something warm and homebaked.

I took the Big Yam out trick-or-treating.  He didn't really get it.  He was just happy to be outside after dinner for a change.  He walked up to people's houses and when I coached him with, "what do you say?" he said, "please!"  It was pretty cute.  But I can tell you that I wasn't about to go traipsing around all night in the wet and cold so we were out for about 20 minutes and then headed home (20 minutes in toddler trick-or-treating time is like, 5 houses).

On Tuesday I went to see Thomas Keller speak with JJ (the Discerning Coyote's big sister).  Thomas Keller was a bit of a robot.  He's not really a cook anymore - he's a restauranteur, and the interviewer was lobbing really soft questions and he was answering them in a really boring way - it was all standard stuff: "learn from your mistakes" "practice" but delivered in a paternalistic, vaguely patronizing style.  I wasn't a fan, but it was fun to go and get the cookbook, and hang with JJ.

Beforehand, I took advantage of the time in between work and the start of the talk to check out this ramen place that's had Toronto ramen aficionados all abuzz, Sansotei Ramen.  The last time I tried to go with Dr. Rei, they ran out of broth and posted a sign on their window (which is pretty hardcore, in my humble opinion).  There are also frequent line-ups.  I got in around 5:20pm and sat down and looked at their slim menu.  I'm a purist (as everyone who knows me is already aware) so I almost always get a tonkotsu ramen or a shio ramen.  I'm not a fan of Kenzo-style "king of kings" or spicy ramen with corn and stuff.  It's just not for me.  Anyway, this place caters to purists.  Your choices are tonkotsu, tonokotsu shoyu, shio, or miso ramen.  There are 3 or 4 other items.  I ordered the zangi (bits of fried chicken thighs) and the tonkotsu and it was without a doubt the best ramen I've ever had in my life.

The ramen noodles were perfectly cooked, still chewy and al dente.  The egg was divine, with a gorgeous, golden runny yolk.  They serve their ramen with fungus and a tasty piece of rolled pork shoulder.  But the broth - the broth was perfection!  Sweet, milky, creamy with all the rendered goodness of pork bones long simmered.  The pork shoulder was juicy, rich, and ever-so-slightly smoky tasting.  The balance of seasoning was on point - unlike so many other places, it wasn't too salty.  At Kinton, they thwack the extra fat on top, but I didn't notice this here, which means that the broth is less rich, but more tasty for it.  The zangi was crisp, juicy, but a bit paltry for the $4.50 price tag.  I couldn't think of a more satisfying meal on a rainy day.  I also can't wait to go back with the Dotytron in tow.  The flavour of that broth and the juicy, fatty pork haunt me.  I loved the chewiness of the fungus.  With ramen places opening up at the rate of one a week in Toronto, that Japanese font (that Guu brought to TO) is really getting a workout!  

Last night's dinner: wild mushroom barley risotto with a poached egg and bacon.  Salad of fried green tomatoes (properly breaded this time) on dancine lettuce with bacon and buttermilk-chive dressing.

Today is the Day of the Dead!  We are observing this year to remember Poppa and Poppa D and my Kung Kung.  I set up a little altar in the living room with photos and candles.  We will eat posole and I made a lemon meringue pie (Poppa D's favorite).  We will hopefully talk about them and remember them and laugh and hope that their spirits come back for a visit and a nosh.  I love Dia de los Muertos.  I think it's such a wonderful idea - to celebrate and laugh and remember the dead fondly instead of being all super-white person repressed about it and burying our feelings.  The dead do walk among us, and just because they're no longer occupying a flesh-based dimension, doesn't mean that we shouldn't invite them into our homes.  I'm going to get on the ball and order some proper decor for next year.  Sugar skulls and skull candle holders and those beautiful tissue paper cut-outs garlands and the like.  If the weather wasn't so rotten we'd be doing something at Poppa D's grave, but we might save that for this weekend instead.  

Here is a photo of those butterscotch pumpkin blondies.  I made them to rid my fridge of a tupperware of leftover pumpkin puree from Thanksgiving pie making.  I tinkered with the recipe a bit and came up with something I really enjoyed.  It's quite light, and not dense like a brownie/blondie is.  I added an extra egg and doubled the amount of pumpkin and changed the chip type from my base recipe.  It's like a soft, mushy (but in a good way!!!) pumpkin square with warm, spicy, toffee notes.  I think my messing with the recipe resulted in a lack of that crackly top that you usually get with blondies/brownies, but I've been getting rave reviews for this, so I've attached the recipe below.

Happy Dia de los Muertos, everyone!

Fin.

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Pumpkin Butterscotch Blondies
makes 20 squares

1 stick of unsalted butter
1/2 c. brown sugar
1/3 c. white sugar
1 t. vanilla extract
1 c. pumpkin puree
2 eggs
1 c. flour
1 t. salt
3/4 t. cinnamon
1/4 t. allspice
1/4 t. cloves
1 c. butterscotch chips

- melt the butter in a small saucepan and cook until the milk solids are caramelized and the butter smells nutty and toasty (do not burn!)*
- whisk the butter with the two sugars until well combined.
- stir in the eggs, pumpkin, and vanilla.
- add the dry ingredients.
- fold in the chips.
- pour into an 8" square baking pan lined with two strips of parchment paper laid crosswise with overhang.
- bake in a 350F oven for about 35-30 minutes or until a toothpick comes out clean.
- let the blondies cool for 15 minutes, lift out of the pan with the help of your parchment overhang and cut into 20 squares.

*note: the original recipe called for browning the butter.  I didn't notice that I could taste the browned butter so I think you could easily omit this extra step.  

in which i almost vomit in bed

...from laughter.

last night, after dexter, in bed, i flipped the last page of my fantasy book, reluctantly closed it shut and sighed with contentment. i turned to the dotytron, "this book was SOOOOO GOOD! it's like 'lord of the rings' but without the singing!"

to which he replied, "what, you mean you didn't like the songs?" and broke into this little ditty, sung in a soft, nursery-rhyme cadence:

here i come from above
with a dragon's sword in my side
i see my friends through the fog
rumplety tai rumplety tai

remembering the interminably long verse passages that interrupted my reading of the tolkien series and recalling no accompanying sheet music, i turned to him and asked, "how did you know what the music was like?"

and he said, again all sing-songy, "i made it up."

which made me laugh so hard i almost puked. "i see my friends through the fog"?!!!??? ahahahahahahahahaha! "with a dragon's sword IN my side"?!!!? LOL!!!!! "RUMPLETY TAI RUMPLETY TAI"?!!!!????!! eternally funny. it's a measure of how ridiculous BOTH the dotytron and tolkien are, that i actually believed the dotytron was reciting lyrics from "lord of the rings."

i almost lost it during our weekly debriefing meeting this morning thinking about that song. it's going to be a classic.

times like these i'm so glad i have a little blurg so that i can catalog and recall all the funnies.

tonight it's after work drinks with my colleagues and then book club and then home to get a good night's sleep before my glorious DAY OFF! tomorrow.

note: i'm kicking off my day off with a physical. boo

note#2: i'm following up the physical with a massage. yay!

note#3: we're having a deep frying dinner at J & S's house tomorrow night featuring L's chicken sandwiches, onion rings, my hazelnut churros, and J's chocolate pudding. yay!

note#4: i AGONIZED over whether i should bring anything to the book club and then buckled and bought cheese and crackers because i didn't want to show up empty handed and be THAT GUY. you know, that guy who is young and doesn't have kids and is chinese and doesn't know that when white people say: "don't bring anything" and you DON'T bring anything they're going to talk about how ill-bred you are after you leave in a cloud of ignominy. this may or may not actually happen with white people. i don't know. but i suspect it does. or maybe (probably) those are my anxieties talking. either way, if i've offended any white people in my readership, i apologize. but you should know that we (and by we, i mean, "i" and by "i" i mean, "that guy") suspect that about white people.

note #5: i'm very excited for my day off. i've almost finished piecing all my quilting blocks and i'm chomping at the bit for the next step.

fin.

obsesso

it's my day off! so happy. it coincides nicely with my complete and utter obsession with quilt-making. i'm consumed! it's been on my radar for the past year and a bit - i've been buying fat quarters on ebay and etsy, slowly envisioning the colour scheme, plotting it in my head...but it always seemed so daunting. there were always other crafts to do, stuff i could wrap my head around a little easier, that i already knew how to do. then i came across this quilt-along from oh, fransson's wonderfully inspiring blog and it kick-started me into action. at the end of it...i should have a quilt that resembles this:

except my colour palette is blues and oranges. tomorrow i'm having the dotytron drive with me to the quilt store so i can pick up my sashing fabric and coordinating fabrics for the back and the binding and some small supplies i need. oh joy! this is HOURS of entertainment right here, let me tell you. this will be my thrifty entertainment over the long months of not spending a single cent to come!

the big block was getting all my photos for albums organized. i printed off like, $400 worth of photos from the past 7 years with the dotytron and my goal was to put them all in chronological order in albums. i picked them up in the summer but then the pesky performance and move got in the way so they languished. until i decided to take 20lbs of photos on the road with us to montreal and sort them in the 5 hour car ride there. it was a brilliant idea as it provided endless minutes of laughter-fodder for the goosetang. i totally over-printed, though. big time. i realized this when i was editing and came up with a shopping bag full of photos that i didn't know what to do with. my idea was to dump them in the dumpster behind st. hubert's in cornwall, but dr. rei and her irrational fears of identity theft (from dumpster photos?) prevented me. lol! so i held onto them for the duration of the hamcamp in montreal excursion until i was given permission to dump them in the garbage can of a random gas station on the way home. lol!

anyway, i finally did the final sort last night so all that's left is a night in front of the tv when i can throw them all into albums and be done with it (minus the chronicles of 2009). so i can fully turn my attention to this:

it's a lot of precision work. i just started cutting my pieces last night. i've already complained to the dotytron, "making a quilt is so freakin' hard!" to which he replied, "well, you probably chose something that's way advanced for a beginner in typical you fashion." which is true. lol! i could have started with just a quilted square, or a napkin, or a placemat...but no. i'm diving straight into a 56" x 66" monstrosity. it's been pretty enjoyable so far. my friend J invited me to join another book club, and they're reading michael chabon's "manhood for amateurs." i didn't necessarily want to buy the book and the wait list at the library is huge so i used my audible.com credit and bought the audiobook. so enjoyable! so i'm listening to chabon's ruminations on masculinity and fatherhood and cutting out pieces and i'm happy as can be.

oh, fransson has all these rules about colour theory and whatnot...but i'm just making do with what i got. some of the combinations i'm not entirely pleased with, but i figure, once it's in a quilt, it's going to look pretty bomb regardless. i found the following tip in particular kind of handy. she has you put your cut out pieces for the blocks onto pieces of labeled and divided cardstock. so you can keep them organized. when it comes to piecing, you'll have block F1, F2, B1, B2 etc:


see? so logical and neat and tidy!

tonight we're heading over to my buddy L's place for dinner. he graciously decided to host the whole goosetang clan for film club, which is SUPER nice considering he barely knows them! lol! i'm in charge of getting the movie. i'm not sure what i'm going to get, yet. i want to get "the hurt locker" for tomorrow night when the dotytron and i are staying in (we're possibly having s-dawg over but i might just cancel him). the short list is: "jules et jim" (so we can finally put this french new wave stuff to rest), "total recall" or "willow" - film club is very inclusive! lol!

the other night i was regaling the dotytron with stories of miss ramona from my sister. apparently she's decided that she wants to be a clothes designer (heretofore, she wanted to be a very chinese-acceptable doctor). rico and my sis were trying to gently steer her away by telling her that she might not make enough money to go to disneyworld by being a clothing designer, to which miss ramona replied, "you can make MONEY being a clothing designer?!?" with big, surprised eyes. lol! the dotytron was saying that there's no point trying to steer kids away from a career path at that age and you shouldn't bother until high school. and i was like, "well, you kinda should if it means they're not going to be scholastically engaged, like if they say they don't want to do math because they want to be a poet" to which the dotytron replied, "well YEAH, that's when you say, 'f**k off, kid. poets suck!'" AHAHAHAHAHAHA! PARENT OF THE YEAR.

then we were talking about what would happen if we can't get preggos...and i was like, well, i don't really care, we'd just adopt a kid...same diff to me. i'm not so hung up on bio kids that i would want to drop mad scrilla on fertility treatments and whatno. and he was like, "yeah, me too" and then i said, "as long as i can get a black baby." lol! so basically it goes: bio kid, then black baby. those are the only two options i'm going to accept. they're just so cute! i know i'm being a racist fetishist. but they're just so damn cute!

last night i skipped dinner entirely because i was so stuffed from being treated to swiss chalet by G at work. i love my work girls. they make work so much more fun.

okay...back to quilting and audiobooking.

fin.