Catching Up

Predictably, this post has taken me two weeks to write.

Two weekends ago, I went to Ladies Night with my neighbourhood ladies on Friday night.  We had Middle Eastern food at Tabule.  It was delicious!  I'm super-into Lebanese style food lately and the renditions there are sooo tasty.  Fresh, vegetable-focused, centred around shareable plates and finger foods.  Love it.

Thanks to an armada of babysitters, we were able to keep up our tradition of going to Hot Docs, which has been going on almost as long as we've been together.  This must be at least our 10th year or something.  Our friend L is one of the programmers and hooked us up, large!  We are so lucky to have her and to have such a ground-breaking, world-renown festival in our city.

On Saturday we saw Return to Homs, which is essentially about the gritty, numbing isolation of armed revolution.  It was a Sundance winner.  It's harrowing.  Constructed mostly of amateur footage, it follows a young Syrian football star, Basset, who becomes a leader in the Free Syrian Army.  What started with him leading crowds singing in the streets as part of the Arab Spring movement, it ends up with him leading an armed resistance to the government crackdown on the city of Homs.  People get shot.  It is grim.  The rebels are cut off from food and supplies.  You see the city become a literal shell of what it was.  I was reminded, nonsensically, of Les Miserables and the youthful fire of the young men who lead that revolution, and their disillusionment in the face of losing so many of their peers and the crushing force of the government.  It's so easy to criticize from our cushy remove in the West the seeming chaos and lack of momentum in the wake of the Arab Spring.  When you are a few generations removed from civil war, it's hard to see how entrenched dictatorships can be, and how disorganized resistance movements are.  I kept thinking that this Basset character is just a kid.  A 22 year old kid who is trying to hold a city, with other 22 year old kids.  At a certain point, it's so obvious that they are so weary from fighting, so tired of being beaten into a corner, out-manned and out-armed.  During a lull in the fighting, Basset is asked if he would consider coaching football, when this is all over.  He dismisses it out of hand, "I can't be a coach.  To coach football, you need an education, a degree..." and the irony of the fact that without an education, without a degree, he's trying to re-draw the world order in Syria is lost on him.  This is not the kind of documentary one enjoys, per se, but it is important, and necessary.  

The next day, on a completely different note, we saw a doc called Beyond Clueless, which purported to be an examination of teen movies in the post-Hughes era (late 90s into the 2000s).  I was like, SOLD!  My first misgivings surfaced when at the start of the screening, the "filmmaker" was introduced.  My first thought was like, "who is this kid?" followed by: "oh no, he's British, this can't be good."  Well folks, it wasn't.  Narrated by Fairuza Balk, the film is a stitched-together montage of fare like Bubble Boy, Cruel Intentions, Mean Girls, and The Craft and features analysis that tells us that teens in films are punished when they try to subvert the status quo, or that teens are disempowered by adults, or that teen sexuality is fraught.

UHHH, DUH.  The kid filmmaker as it turns out, is 23.  Soooo, I'm sure you can guess the level of discourse he's capable of.  It was THE WORST.  He must be so loaded.  To get the rights for all those clips (which make up the WHOLE FILM?)  It was so annoying.  If we had stayed for the Q&A we would have torn him a new one.  You know what's worse than British kids?  ENTITLED BRITISH KIDS (Prince George excepted of course).  

So the docs weren't exactly a home run.  BUT!  The Dotytron and I got to participate in a Dotytron-Lagerfeld tradition, and we got to be together, just the two of us, and eat out.  A win all around.  On Saturday we had lunch at my current obsession, Sud Forno.  From the people who brought you the Terroni empire, this place is as close as I've come in Toronto to an Ital-towns experience.  They serve a variety of sweet things, breads, and flat pizzas and sandwiches, and these stuffed flatbreads which are delicious.   We had the sausage pizza type thing, a salami and arugula one, this cold fried eggplant, ricotta, and tomato sandwich (my favorite thing in the world right now), and their flatbread stuffed with proscuitto and more arugula.  This year has been the year of arugula for me.  I love everything there!

Then I went a little bit crazy and spent like $30 on that box you see up there.  I HAVEN'T HAD A BOMBOLONE IN LIKE, 7 YEARS PEOPLE.  THAT'S A LONG A** TIME.  What the heck was I supposed to do?  NOT overpay for delicious, custard filled doughnuts?  Pah!  I also got zeppole which I love, but I could probably make at home (choux paste stuffed with whipped cream and candied cherries), but my favorite thing was the little whipped-cream topped thing on the far right, 2nd row.  It's a little sponge cake with whipped cream and limoncello.  So tasty.  This is what I love about Ital-towns desserts and baked goods: they really know the value of slathering whipped cream on dough.  That is basically the definition of my wheelhouse.  If you were to draw a picture of my wheelhouse, it would be made of dough and an excess of lightly sweetened whipped cream.  The best was that this old school, OG, Italian lady came in and had the internationally recognized grumpy old lady exchange with the staffer regarding how exorbitant the pricing was and all but spat on her way out the door.  She was like, "are you kidding me with $4 bombolone?" and I was like, deeply embarrassed BUT STILL UNABLE TO RESIST.  

The next day we had brunch at The Saint on Ossington.  It's a really pretty space, all sparkling white subway tile, black bar, brass fixtures.  I'm super into that combo lately.  White and black and grey with warm wood and brass with pops of colour.  I tried floating the idea with the Dotytron of painting our downstairs all white and he put his foot down.  We currently have a deep plum accent wall and he loves it.  I'll have to get this black/white/brass fixation out of the way when we finish the basement (so, like, never, or after I'm already onto something new).  

These are more gold than brass and I find the contrast a little jarring.  Maybe if there was more warm wood in there to act as a bridge between the start white and shiny gold?

Kitchen/bath reno is basically a go.  I've got a to-do list a mile long.  There are toilets and tubs to research, fixtures to be brought back from the States (shouts to my sis and Uncle Rico, who are being amazing about acting as a glorified warehouse for me at the moment), a million details to go over (what height for the beadboard in the bathroom?  How to trim the tile?  How to cap the beadboard?  What kind of robe hooks?).  When I've been telling people our (read: my) plan to do the kitchen/bath and then dig down the basement and do the waterproofing all this year, I'm predictably getting a bit of side-eye and bemused-face about the whole thing.  But listen: a flipped house on our street, 10 down from us, sold for $742,000.  THAT'S THREE QUARTERS OF A MILLION DOLLARS, PEOPLE.  FOR A HOUSE OUR SIZE.  The guys who flipped it were super-nice so I wanted them to do well, but when I walked through (they gave the neighbours an exclusive preview), I just thought it was aight.  I actually didn't like the design at all and the finishing was a little shoddy and they didn't even pick high-end fixtures.  The taps were MOEN, people!  MOEN!  FOR $742,000!!!  It was like what a condo designer thinks is a nice layout.  So not my taste.  I'm fussy.  I'm an oil-rubbed bronze kind of a girl, ya know?  I'm a crystal doorknob kind of a person.  I don't want my house to look builder-new.  Anyway, I'm feeling pretty good about our decision.  Even if you figure that $75K of that is due to the market being "hot", we're still going to cover what we're sinking into our renos and then some.  

Where was I?  Oh yes, The Saint.  Food was tasty - the Dotytron ordered the duck egg scramble with duck confit.  His only quibble was that there wasn't enough duck confit.  I ordered the duck egg benny on a cheddar biscuit.  Both come with potatoes lyonnaise, which basically means "potato deliciousness."  I would definitely go back.  The service was nice, they were bumping (we didn't make resos and had to sit at the bar), but they could accommodate kids (saw quite a few families there).  

The rest of my week(s) have been preoccupied with reno business and trying to do some spring cleaning/downsizing/getting rid of baby stuff.  I'm surprisingly unemotional about the baby purging.  I think the fact that in 4 weeks, I'll be bringing in zero money is really helping to motivate me to sell and any lingering pangs watching Bumbos and play mats and such leave the house are attenuated by the cash I'm getting in their stead.  If I have another baby, it won't be for some time, and then I can just re-up all that shiz anyway.  I won't have to buy it because everyone will be in the state of unloading their baby ish.  When you have twin infants, switching over your summer clothes or re-upping the kids' summer inventory or poring over the Ikea kitchen planner for the MILLIONTH TIME will take you weeks of your life to accomplish.  I basically spend my days measuring and writing little notes of measurements and dimensions to myself that I then refer back to, and without any context, then have to re-measure again and again.  FUN.

SMckay came over on Friday and when they Dotytron came home, he became obsessed with trying to sort out a profile to see if he could still get chicks.  This involved him looking through old photo albums to find a TWELVE YEAR OLD photo of himself to use as a profile pic.  This also involved him trying desperately to create his profile with the user name: "URBEINGCATFISHED" which is pretty much the best online dating user name of life.  SO GOOD.  

We also hung with Dr. Rei and Hanbo this weekend and had a hilarious time talking about what 9 out of 10 Serge Tankians would think of anything, as well as how FUBU (for us, by us) Hassidic Jew communities in Montreal are.  There was also an extended, "What the shih tzu" bit that I know means nothing to you all, but I'm recording it here for posterity because that's what this blog is for, and also, because Dr. Rei laughed so hard that she almost had her baby, so it's worth remembering.  

My Mother's Day was pretty boss.  The Dotytron knows what I like, which is to do work, so he made me breakfast and then we went to town trying to get our backyard in order.  It's looking good back there!  I know people probably think we were silly to make such a giant deck, but when we're out there, we love it so, so, so much.  It's like a dock.  It's like having a giant outdoor room.  We moved things around and bought these recycled rubber tiles (Envirotiles) and laid them out on the concrete pad.  We're going to put a kiddie pool and a sandbox there, so we wanted something a little softer on wee kidlet feet than the bare concrete.    I bought a new dining table from IKEA and now we're either going to build a bench out there or have our carpenter do it.  That and a thing to store our recycling/garbage cans and stuff and some plants and we're done.  I can't wait!  

One of the things I asked for was a decent picture of all of us.  The backdrop on this one is horrid, but look at my cute family!!!  Look at how much Quincess' head shape has changed!  

Fin.

David Attenborough, Junior

The Big Yam has lately been obsessed with watching episodes of that old BBC Series, Blue Planet on Netflix.  It's his go-to, and we're willing to indulge him (during his allotted TV/iPad time, of course - i.e., only on weekends) because the worst thing that happens is he's learning a s**t tonne about rando ocean creatures.  As in the video below, where he recites a little lecture on the migration habits of Atlantic lobsters, which he has pulled word for word from the series.  He's also watched so much of it, that he's picked up little David Attenborough-isms, which you can hear in the way he says stuff like "Atlantic lobster" in a stuffy, Brit voice.

"The increasing warmth is the cue for an Atlantic lobster to start on a long journey.  She spent the winter 250 meters down, far beyond the reach of the storms.  But, it was cold down there, and now she needs to find warmer water, so she's marching towards the shallows.  They however, are 150 kilometres away.  After a month of walking, she finally arrives at her favorite sandbank."  

Other choice Blue Planet-derived Big Yam funnies: he's been going around talking about how "blue whales don't have butts!" "crabs don't have butts!" but his most consistent assertion in his treatise on the existence of butt-less sea creatures has been "lobsters don't have butts!"  Cue to the other night, when he was nattering on about lobsters not having butts, lets out a GIANT fart, gives some side-eye, smirks, and says, "I guess lobsters DO have butts."  

We're a little unsure how to mediate his absorption of the amoral vicissitudes of underwater life.  He's watching a lot of carnal violence and coitus (shrimp and coral coitus, but still) and we're not sure whether it should be addressed.  Last night, he was watching a segment where an orca is shown in stunning slow-motion detail, eating a grey whale baby (technically known as a "calf" - we are ALL LEARNING THINGS).    In a direct parroting of David Attenborough's narration (though far removed from DA's sombre tone), the Big Yam said, "The killer whale has gotten its prize!" The Dotytron tried to insert some empathy for the plight of the grey whale baby, "Yes, but the killer whale is eating the grey whale calf.  It's dead now." The Big Yam: "The grey whale did not get its prize."  LOL.

Low key times at Casa Dotytron & Lagerfeld high this weekend.  Our friend A is visiting from NYC so the Dotytron went to his show on Friday night, chilled with him again on Saturday, and then we had our friends B & G over on Saturday night for dinner.  Sunday I took the Big Yam with me out and about while the Dotytron treated Momma D to her birthday present  - which was a special breakfast with the babies followed by watching a week's worth of Coronation Street with her.  The Big Yam and I had a pretty fun day - we helped do the Earth Day clean-up at our local park, we went to swimming lessons (where he was a giant pill and I had to be stern with him while all the other kids in the change room averted their eyes and cowered in fear), then we rode the rails (streetcar and subway) to do some errands downtown.  

The wind rustling in the background and the eerie creak of the swings, in addition to the babies (save for the Quincess' last-minute animation) disaffected demeanour is so funny to me.  It's like a Terrence Malick film.

The Quincess is a mischievous little Bonobo monkey.  Periodically, when we leave the Wonder Twins to do their baby scrum on the floor and run wild while we're in the kitchen cooking or something, we'll hear Lindsay unleash a very girlish, high-pitched wail/scream, which generally means that the Quincess has back-arched his way over to Lindsay and ripped the toy he was playing with out of his hands.  It's so funny because Lindsay is so much bigger than Quincess, but somehow, Quincess is surprisingly strong and Lindsay's always getting owned.  Lindsay also has a very classic "dismayed" face, that's kind of like classic exaggerated clown, which makes his anguish all the more laughable.  Then Quincess will give us a very bland, serious, look and basically, the long and short of it is: I could watch the Wonder Twins show all day.

I've all but finalized the haggling for the appliances for the kitchen and have almost finished winnowing down the haggling for the bathroom/kitchen fixtures.  I realize I'm not being very strategic about the process.  I'm not viewing Lil' Ugmo with the jaundiced eye of someone who only sees their house as an asset.  I doubt that future potential buyers would care as much about a 36" Wolf range, but I've lived SO LONG without a proper gas stove and I am not planning on moving in the next, say, 10 years, so I'm going to TREAT MYSELF.  My hot dog and KD game (which is going to be most of what Friday Night Takeout Night will consist of come 3-kids-in-childcare times in September) is going to be NEXT LEVEL.  

I will say it has been nice to sit and stew over a kitchen/bath remodel for the almost-five-years we've been living here.  My tastes have changed over that time frame and I've lived in the house and have a better vision of what I want Lil' Ugmo's best self to be.  A friend was curious about what the original bathroom sink was going to be.  For those of you with the coin to spend, I would encourage you to get the Duravit Vero:

My preciousssssss.

With some brass fixtures like this picture?  GET OUTTA HERE.

So beautiful.  Yeah, I get it.  It's a f**king sink.  But like the our Paleolithic ancestors in the caves of Lascaux, I believe that your home should be beautiful.  A space that reflects you.  Listen, we are all stardust, so why not make our brief time in the corporeal realm one in which we spit our Sensodyne toothpaste into a beautiful wall-mounted sink with brass fixtures?  

Speaking of being stardust, You Are Stardust is a recent picture book that we borrowed from the library, one that I consider worth owning.  Canadian made, beautifully illustrated with wonderfully tactile DIORAMAS, this book talks about how we are all connected by our stardust ancestry.  It's beautiful, poetic, and inspires the reader to situate themselves on a continuum that encompasses dinosaurs, pollen, our oceanic roots, and our future in the stars.  The cadence of the text is thought provoking, informative, and rhythmically comforting.  I highly recommend.  

Last night I took Dr. Rei out for her birthday.  My friend B's restaurant, Porzia, does a Monday $33 prix fixe that is pretty good value and a whole heap of food.  You each get an appetizer, then you share a pasta, and you each get a main.  Half priced bottles of wine, too, although we didn't avail ourselves of that.  We also went a bit buck and ordered an extra vegetable dish, and a hamachi crudo (as I've said before, and I'll undoubtedly say again, I love me a crudo).  It was A LOT of food.  But it was delicious.  My friend B is, as Dr. Rei so eloquently put it, a bit of a babe show:

He's always been super-nice, decent, and has good taste in 'chunes.  Nuff said.  Hard to find in the cooking world, which runs thick with weirdos, pumped up machismo, and small minds (more often than not, that dizzying cocktail in one person).  Also, total babeshow.  So is his wife.  

I didn't take any photos (for once), because I was too busy catching up with one of my favorite people in the world.

Fin.

After All These Years...

On the weekend we went to visit my Poh Poh at the home (super depressing - we walked in when they were doing "karaoke" in the main area) and then went for lunch at Phoenix.  The Dotytron made us order like, 5 dishes (which still only cost $37) so we would have leftovers to take for lunch.  So we have leftover Malaysian beef curry and this Korean stone pot rice left and I'm getting containers from the waitstaff and the Dotytron seems to be getting tense.  I say, "So one of us will take the curry and the other person can take the Korean rice," and he's all like, "Well, why don't we split it so we get half of each one?" I'm against it because I don't like the two flavours mixing.  I'm packing things up and then I say, "That makes no sense - we're going to get small tastes of each one" and he bursts out, "FINE! I'LL TAKE THE KOREAN RICE!" and I'm like, "Wait - I want the Korean rice" and he's like "Oh well then, okay, I wanted the curry, anyway."

Here's the thing: 2013 marks the TWELFTH year of us being together.  You would think that after 12 years together, your partner would feel okay just telling you which of the leftovers he wants for lunch, instead of doing this whole, song-and-dance around the issue, wouldn't you?  

For some reason, I found this hilarious.  I also found it hilarious when later, that evening, hanging with Dr. Rei and Hanbo, the Dotytron said, "Ummm...I have Don Henley's body."  LOL!!!  (We were talking about how musicians like D'Angelo categorically can't maintain their level of peak hotness because they burn out.  We were trying to find other examples of people who have maintained).  

We had a pretty low-key weekend.  Friday we were going to go to the Fun Fair near our school but instead opted to stay in and do a movie night.  We watched My Neighbour Totoro again, which the Big Yam loves and which also meets our standards.  It's like pure fantasy.  I love Miyazaki films because very often, they reflect a very small portion of life - there's no big "journey" or "event" or "adventure" - it's just a little peek into the daily world of some kids.  Usually the kids have some kind of parental trauma/distance happening - in this case, they've moved to a new house and their mom is in the hospital - that serves as a springboard into their imaginary life where they meet characters like Totoro.  It reminds me very much of the British children's books I devoured as a kid - Enid Blyton, Edith Nesbit, The Secret Garden and the like.  I especially like that the Big Yam pronounces Totoro "To-Oh-Ro" - it's pretty cute.  

Saturday was all about visiting with my Poh Poh and then selling this vintage steamer trunk to some dude off Kijiji.  *Cue: Terminator 2 "easy money" scene* and then visits with Dr. Rei and Hanbo.

Sunday the Dotytron spent preparing for his friends to come over and jam at our house.  It was supposed to be a test run for "Guitarbecue" and he spent SO MUCH TIME cleaning up the back yard only to have the weather refuse to cooperate.  My job was to keep the Big Yam out of his hair, so we went on a long walk and had some one-on-one time, featuring - joy of joys! - a street car ride home (after walking 2km) and a bacon sandwich from Rashers.  We served the Dotytron's band of musician friends a feast, considering they're all bachelor/musician types - grilled chicken thighs, tuna macaroni salad, broccoli salad with bacon and almonds, and a strawberry-raspberry pavlova for dessert.  Proof that Lil' Ugmo isn't so lil' - we had a drum kit, an upright bass, a guitar, and a saxaphone all in our living room.  They jammed for about 4-5 hours with breaks in between.  We had one neighbour from one street over come knocking on our door...to ask if they could turn the music up.  OH SNAP!  The Dotytron loooooooved throwing that in my face, LOL!  It was pretty cute.  If you're going to terrorize a family-oriented residential neighbourhood with a four piece band involving a drum kit - then I suppose jazz is a good genre to be playing around in.  

It was pretty cute and I was happy that the Dotytron could make it happen.  I know how important playing is to him and how he seldom gets time to hang with his musician friends so it made me happy that I could facilitate that in some capacity - even if it did mean that I ended up cooking for his friends (only because I didn't want our household misrepresented in the culinary realm).  

So yeah, it was a busy, but fun-filled weekend.  

Here are some photos of what we ate:

Grasshopper pie.  Courtesy of this Martha Stewart recipe - goosed up with a bit of spearmint extract (1/4 tsp or so) and no creme de menthe.  Also, the recipe in my book called for 1 1/2 cups of milk in the custard instead of cream.  I actually found the taste of the filling a little too "milky" - so maybe I'll try it with all cream instead.  This was nice and cool, but not my favorite.  The crust was a little too firm.  Definitely needs some rejigging if I'm going to revisit it.

The pavlova I served to the boys.  A touch too much sugar in the meringue, but otherwise, delicious!  I love crispy meringues with macerated fruit and whipped cream.  Can't help myself.

A blurry photo of us from the May 2/4 fireworks in the park.  The Big Yam was hiding his face in terror.

Finally, here are some shots of the Big Yam's big room.  I worked pretty hard on it and feel pretty pleased with how my vision materialized.  Some of the photos are blurry, unfortunately, but you get the drift.  We love it in there so much - especially because it's a new room and everything has its place and there hasn't been a chance for it to collect clutter - we want to trade rooms with him sometimes.

Bed: Ikea Mandal.  Mattress: 10" memory foam from Costco.  It's sooo plush.  A little softer than our mattress but we love being able to lie down with him in between us and read stories and sing songs with him before bed.  It's cute.  The accent wall paint color is Benjamin Moore's Old Navy.

Dresser: Mandal dresser from Ikea.  The birch and white ended up looking pretty sharp with the white walls and the navy - the whole room has this Scandinavian modern vibe.

Storage bins: "Down to the Wire" bins from Land of Nod.  Lack shelf from Ikea.  Chalkboard from Ikea. 

The FLOR carpet design I did myself - including cutting the triangles and piecing it all together.

Found the perfect throw pillow cover fabric from Ikea.  It's a thicker material - almost like bark cloth.

The Neil deGrasse Tyson I paid entirely too much for on Etsy.  The industrial light fixture that I bought custom off of Etsy, held up with an IKEA $2.00 shelf bracket.

Ex Astris, Scientia ("From the Stars, Knowledge") chalkboard print I bought for $5.00 and had printed at Staples.  The white little shelf/table is something I pulled from the garbage and repainted ages ago..it's been sitting in the basement waiting for a room.

Even though Lil' Ugmo is lil' - there's still a good amount of floor space for him to play in the middle of the room, and when he outgrows the chalkboard, we can set up a desk there and a small bookshelf (assuming kids of the future have any use for storage spaces for paper books).  

I'm not gonna lie, folks...kinda feel like this space is Apartment Therapy worthy (assuming I can stop with the heroin hands and get some unblurry shots).  

Fin.

Pleased to Meat You

I have so many problems deciding whether to capitalize the blog titles like titles or just follow regular sentence style.  Decisions!

So Meat Club.  The friends we know who are part of Meat Club didn't show, so the only person we knew was the principal organizer, who we had only met once before, at our last Supper Club.  It was still fun though.  We lucked out and sat with the loveliest people by far and we had a grand time.  Richmond Station is themed like a subway station (kind of - I only read that it's supposed to be such and didn't really think so myself) but the decor is ho-hum.  The restaurant was bumping though - filled to the brim and busy the whole time we were there (from around 8pm to 11pm).  Here's what we had:

The charcuterie board.  I kind of hate it when the board features this many things and the server just comes over and rhymes them off to you in one long list.  How am I supposed to remember anything?  Just print out a piece of paper or something, or else don't bother telling us.  The charcuterie was served at the perfect temperature, but sliced a touch too thin for me.  Everything was paper thin which didn't allow you to enjoy all the textures of each type.  It was all good, it kind of got lost in the jumble.  

Presskopf (headcheese) fritters with grilled tongue, and a fried egg and greens.  This dish was outstanding.  The little breaded triangles of headcheese were hot, crispy, not the least bit greasy and so, so light.  The grilled tongue is a no-brainer for me (I love tongue) and the egg was properly runny.  This might have been my favorite bite of the night.

Seared côte de boeuf and braised beef cheeks with potatoes, sautéed spinach, roasted root vegetables and brown butter hollandaise.  They brought out the GIANT rib steaks for us to view - they were Flinstonian in scale, before whisking them back to the kitchen for finishing.  They steaks were a touch over for my liking, but there's nothing not really to love about seared meat, hollandaise, and thinly sliced gratin potatoes that are cut into triangles and then deep fried until they're little, dreamy puffs of deliciousness.  I enjoyed the steak more than the beef cheeks.  I find that braised meat treated like this can get very same-y tasting.  I actually felt that way about the côte de boeuf.  Maybe that's the problem with meat club?  The meat-centric focus means that you're getting food that isn't particularly ground-breaking or inspiring.  It's not something I couldn't get at some other restaurant. It was well prepared, though.

The Richmond Station burger - tender meat on an even more tender milk bun.  Served with textbook fries.  It's hard to really get a sense of a burger when you're only getting a quarter of one, but this was tasty enough?  

Dessert was a cinnamon bun with a walnut crumble, candied bacon, and beer sauce.  These buns were delectable - so soft and fluffy and warm.  The candied bacon was a stand-out too, taking the bacon firmly into sweet territory from the savory side.  This was delicious.  I ate two and then gazed longingly at the ones that were left, wondering who was the lucky sod who got to take the extras home (we left early to relieve Momma D from her babysitting duties).  I easily out-ate everyone there.  I even went so far as to mistakenly think that this nice guy I had just met was challenging me to an eating competition.  So charming, am I!  The Dotytron had my back though.  I take my ability to out-eat most people as a very serious skill.

Friday night was lovely.  Our neighbour kid came and knocked on our door and came in to play after daycare and then invited the Big Yam over to their house for popcorn and movies.  So cute!  I love living in a neighbourhood where the kids just knock on each other's doors asking if so-and-so is coming out to play.  It's so darned cute.  After we ate dinner we dressed up the Big Yam in his jammies and sent him over with his milk.  FOR TWO HOURS.  It was kind of the best and obviously the Dotytron and I immediately started scheming of how we could formalize the arrangement so that you did a rotating Friday Night movie night at a different neighbour's house every week.  LOL!  We're such schysters.  We offered to take the neighbour kid this coming Friday in exchange.  If we're home, I certainly don't mind having a pizza, pajama, and movie party with the kids from the 'hood.  It's cute and the Big Yam was totally and utterly THRILLED with the novelty.  

The Captain started flashing weird brake-related warning lights on our way to Chinese school on Saturday.  I think the Dotytron would have continued driving it, but because I am a GIANT nerd who thinks that we are always one dashboard indicator away from our car exploding and consuming us in a fiery inferno, I looked it up in the book and they were all like, DON'T DRIVE.  So we missed Chinese school AND missed our long-planned, oft-delayed visit with J & Tillers in KW.  It was the WORST.  I can't even tell you how annoying it was.  The Captain INSISTS on making us look bad!  It doesn't even break all that often, but it's always when we're en route to visit people from out of town.  Ugh.  As Tillers said, we probably could have driven with the indicator lights like that for a good long time but I'm a nervous nelly.  Our mechanic thinks it's just a brake fluid issue.  Le sigh.

On Sunday we had R & R over for dinner with their adorable, sweet-eyed little bambino, M.  Little babies are so cute!  They are so light!  She was experience some sleep regression and was thus a little cross.  I keep somehow convincing myself that babies are so low-key and it'll be SO EASY to juggle the twerps when they come but I feel like I might be fooling myself.  We somehow had an easy time of it with the Big Yam but that probably means the twerps will be colicky, fussy, messes.  Why is having babies so jinxy?  I just read a story about a woman who lost her baby at 38 weeks.  Worst.  

Cutest thing ever: we watched part of Mary Poppins with the Big Yam (this is after I vetoed Star Wars as age-appropriate viewing - ummm, hello, Uncle Owen and Aunt Beru's charred bodies, much?  Not cool for a 2.5 year old!), and the Big Yam was calling it: "Miss Muffin."  

The Big Yam's room is slowly coming together (conceptually).  I ordered his bed frame, dresser and mattress today.  Here is the photo that inspired me: 

I just thought this was a great, fresh, gender-neutral color scheme.  I already have orange accents going in the Big Yam's baby room, so I wanted to carry that over so I could re-use certain things.

For the bed and dresser I went with the Ikea Mandal line.  I wanted a platform bed for the low profile, and there aren't a lot of options with storage.  It'll be nice to put his bedding in there and other lighter items.  I'm not crazy about the birch outsides.  I've heard of people painting them or staining the wood a less birch-y colour, but after seeing how it's been styled, it will go well against the blue accent wall.  The rest of the shelves will be white.  I saw the bed and dresser styled in this New York Times house and it does look nice with blue and orange accents.  If it drives me crazy I'll paint or stain it in the future, but for now, I think it'll look bright and airy.

We ended up going with a deeper, more navy paint than the one in the inspiration photo - Benjamin Moore's Old Navy.  

I saw this photo that totally inspired me:  

That's a $2 Ikea bracket, people!!!  Then I searched high and low for an affordable industrial cage pendant lamp and found someone on Etsy who will make one for me with an orange cord for about $60.  Not bad!  Considering the other lighting will be Ikea, I thought it would be nice to splurge (if you can even call $60 for a light a splurge) on something not from Ikea for the room.  I'm going to paint the bracket white.  

I also ordered these sale FLOR carpet tiles in orange and bone and designed my own design on graph paper.  It's going to involve investing in a carpet knife from Home Depot, but the cost of the knife (around $11) is still way cheaper than having FLOR do the cutting.  It's a triangle based pattern so lots of cuts and FLOR charges $3 a cut!  Ridiculous!  

We'll see how everything looks when it all comes together, but I'm happy with what I'm seeing in my head.  

The Big Yam has been having the time of his freaking life with the bowl from my Kitchen Aid mixer, some styrofoam packing peanuts I saved from our stroller box, a mixing bowl and a measuring cup, a whisk, a spoon and some water.  That alone guarantees us a minimum of 45 minutes.  If I want more time, I throw in some shaving cream and some food coloring and he's good for at least an hour and usually a lot longer.  It's the best!  Clean-up is okay.  It's not hard to wash off the oil cloth and the water on the tile in the kitchen is a bit of a pain, but at least it's tile so not a big deal.  We might get a giant rubbermaid bin to contain the mess for the future, though:

Here's what we've been eating lately:

Friday night's iron-boosting dinner: a roasted crouton, asparagus, and chorizo salad with seared skirt steak.

The Big Yam pointing at which New York Times chocolate chip cookie he was going to eat as his "special treat"

Sunday breakkie: fried green tomatoes, on top of mashed avocado, with English bacon and a fried egg on sourdough toast.

What I made for Sunday dinner - that radicchio tagliatelle with bagna cauda.  Not pictured: raw kale ceasar salad.

Dessert was a roasted vanilla pineapple tart with a coconut crumble.  My first time serving pineapple as a dessert not in upside-down-cake form.  Pretty good!  I'll post the recipe below.

Fin.

------------------------------------------------------------------

Pineapple Tart with Coconut Crumble

serves 10-12

1 pie crust, enough for a 9" pie

1 large pineapple, peeled, quartered and cored

1 vanilla bean, scraped.

1/4 c. brown sugar

1/4 c. white sugar

2 T. dark rum

For the crumble topping:

1/2 c. whole wheat flour (you could use all purpose - I was trying to be healthy !)

1/3 c. brown sugar

1/3 c. oats

1/3 c. shredded coconut

1/4 t. salt

4 T. butter, melted

- put your pie crust in a 9" tart pan with a removable bottom.  Chill.

- slice the cored pineapple quarters into 1/3-1/2 inch slices

- place the pineapple slices with the sugars and vanilla in a large sauté pan.  Cook on medium heat until the juices run and the sugars are evaporated, tossing/stirring occasionally.  Increase the heat to high, add the rum, and cook until almost all the liquid is evaporated.  Set aside to cool

- meanwhile, mix all the dry crumble topping ingredients together in a bowl.  Stir in the melted butter until loose clumps form.

- with a slotted spoon, spread the cooled pineapple in the prepared crust.  Top with crumble topping.  Bake in a preheated 350F oven for about 40-50 minutes or until the pie crust is golden brown.  The coconut in the crumble will brown rapidly, so it might be necessary to tent the top with foil when the crumble is brown and finish baking this way.  

- serve with whipped cream, vanilla ice cream, or coconut ice cream.  

Brown paper packages

...tied up with string.

For the few presents we bought this year, because I'm an obsessive freak who likes my presents to be as art-directed as other elements of my life (read: all wrapped in a uniform fashion, simply), I decided to fill my urban-crafter destiny and go with baker's twine (what took me so long?) and brown kraft paper:

Ta-da!  They look pretty hype, don't you think?  The lettering was done with one of the spoils from working at the Public Library oh so many years ago - an office self-inking stamp.  It's the kind with five lines, and a little case of teeny-tiny letters and punctuation that you push into the ridged lines to make whatever message you choose, using a pair of plastic tweezers developed for precisely that purpose.  I've had the stamp for years and years, on the assumption that such a thing was going to come in handy someday, and lo, did it ever.   Is it fussy?  Yes, but LOOK AT HOW HYPE THEY LOOK!  Just look!!!  Ugh...I couldn't even deal with how pretty the packages were.  I could have personalized each one, but since we bought so few, it's easy for me to tell which package belongs to who.

This is my new signature wrapping style.  It's pretty cost-effective too.  I almost invested in a 1000ft roll of commercial brown kraft paper before my friend G hepped me to the fact that Canada Post sells them for $3 a roll.  Perfect!  And the baker's twine, while expensive, comes in a GIANT roll.  Like, epically long.  Long enough that paying $14 for one roll in a delicious aqua is a difficult decision to make when there are so many delicious colours of baker's twine and you can't justify spending another $14 on another roll just so you have variety.

In other news...I don't have much in other news.  I am working at night on my last Christmas craft and then baking off the last of the cookies for gifting and then I am done.  DONE DONE DONE!  And even though we didn't buy many gifts this year, December STILL came and kicked our accounts in the nuts.  Having to pay $400 yesterday for the Captain's misfiring engine was a bit of a pisser, too.

But!  But I am tremendously excited that as of tomorrow afternoon, once I'm finished pigging out at the Annual Hart House Holiday Buffet Lunch (which is the closest I get to eating in the Hogwart's mess hall), I don't have to come in to work for a glorious, glorious SEVENTEEN days (including weekends).  BLISS!!!

I am so excited for this I can't even tell you.  I want to take the Big Yam to the zoo (even though I'm ethically opposed to the zoo, I feel like it's okay for the stuff I think he'd get a kick out of  - like the giant snakes and things) and to sleep in and eat lazy breakfasts and drop him off at daycare so we can watch an afternoon Oscar contender movie and see friends and hopefully meet R & R's new baby and spend QT with our respective families and eat lots of good food and see Ping and Montréal I and and and...!

Tonight for dinner we had leftover brisket paninis with horseradish mayonnaise and cheddar cheese.  Alongside leftover brussels sprouts & carrot casserole.  So yum!  I was looking forward to this alllll day:

Here are some photos of Daughter of Smoke & Bone author Laini Taylor's house in Portland:

I love it!  She's pretty "Portland"-y.  Her daughter is named Clementine and she has fluorescent pink hair. Like me, she can't resist a Shiny Brite ornament. Her home is filled with all manner of quirky cute knickknacks and tchotchkes which are set off beautifully with by the stark white walls.  Looking at how all her collections can pop against that white background is making me regret (slightly) painting the grape wall in the Lil' Ugmo.  White really does allow things to pop!  But I do love the calming effect of the purple in Lil' Ugmo...so it will stay as-is (it better! After what we paid the painter!)  I don't know that an all-white space is for me, but I do appreciate it, especially when people do it up as Liani does and use it as a backdrop for crazy, colorful and bright.  I'm not a fan of stark, minimalist, white and wood Swedish style interiors.  They're calming, but have no personality, to me.

Tomorrow I will hopefully have time to unleash a slew of pop culture reviews on you.

A demain.

Fin.

The story

of a boy and his stuffed rabbit.

So cute. Here's the Big Yam taking a wee before-bed catnap with the bunny his Great-Nany bought him (provisional name: Mr. Mistoffelees). Right now he stuffs everything into his mouth, either as a mode of sensory exploration or to ease the ache in his gums from the jaggedy tooth poking through. The result is, when he gets his chubby mitts on the rabbit, it looks like he's bringing it in for a big, juicy kiss.

Tonight's dinner was a shepherd's pie. I used ground lamb from the Mennonites and also used a pack of stewing beef from the Mennonites that I "ground" in the food processor. I added thyme, onions, garlic and threw that in the baking dish. As a thrifty housewife measure I added the creamed spinach on top of that, and topped the whole off with the leftover champ. Baked it in a 400F oven for about 1 hour covered with foil and then an additional 20 minutes with some grated sharp cheddar cheese on top. Sided it with some sautéed brussels sprouts:

Took some initiative and hoofed it to the Beaches branch of TPL (which is as tony as you might expect from the location) to sign up the Big Yam for the baby story time. We'll see if we get in - it's a lottery. Picked up some new books for him as well - classic Ezra Jack Keats and Bill Peet and Maurice Sendak stuff - I like the tried and true.

I also wasted A LOT of time on Pinterest today. It's like an online (cloud?) bulletin board/inspiration board for images you come across on your web travels. I find it a more useful Delicious because of the visual element - and most of the time I'm flagging images for inspiration rather than webpages anyway. It's incredible and astonishing how many "me" types there are out there and how similar the aesthetic is. Not that I'm under any delusions that I'm a special star...but the crafty, visually-oriented, terrarium-obsessed, mid-century-modern enthusiast, parent, knitter, cook, thing is a real thing, ya know? I'm okay with it though - it's nice to know that there are more people with similar taste out there sharing the love of all things pretty and cute and whimsical and fun. Although, I am a bit chagrined that my grey-acid yellow home decor colour scheme is catching on.

Fin.