giant pictures yesterday aside

...not much happening around these parts, lately.

oh, except we might be squandering some of our tax return on a new couch. because our existing couch, whilst lovely, is rather narrow and it's difficult for the both of us to be comfortably prone while watching the tube of the boob variety. and we LOVE BEING PRONE while watching the boob tube. also, we only have the one couch in the living room, which means that whenever we have people over (which is often), we all have to sit in a row...not good!

plus this store on the danforth is having a 20% off sale on custom couches so i think we're going to hit that up. the problem is...our living room is quite narrow so it's going to require some rejigging - mostly involving condensing down our bookshelves. i'm always in favour of getting rid of books anyway - but the dotytron is a known and recalcitrant pack rat who likes holding onto EVERYTHING in the universe. it's super annoying. i mean, really...how often do we re-read books? barely ever, that's how often.

therefore, for the next little while, our living room might be a bit of a cramped pen...but that's just the way it'll have to be until we get our basement dug out and finished and can turn that into the rumpus room/den. if we're finding that it's ridiculous, we can always sell the now old, formerly new couch and just stick with the new new one.

i also want to repaint the dining room cuz it's driving me crazy and has been driving me crazy for nigh on 7 months. it's a small job, really - more inconvenient than anything else - but once it's done, it'll be done - now it's just a matter of finding the right colour. we also have to do the switcheroo on all the doorknobs in the house and work on the garden. those are the immediate concerns that don't cost an awful lot of money.

in other news...i've got the travel bug, bad. specifically, i've got the travel to hawaii bug, bad. we both want to go back, like yesterday. that's a tough bug to scratch (mixed metaphors, much?) here's the thing - i was looking up vacations on red flag deals and at all inclusive resorts in the caribbean and it seems to me, that when you're at that kind of a place, where ALL YOU DO is sit at the resort, then you kind of want to be at least 4 star and up, because anything else is kind of skeevy looking and suspect. once you get into the 4 star and up range in countries that are actually remotely interesting (ie. not cuba or the dominican or cancun) then you're looking at spending a good chunk of change, once taxes and all the rest are factored in.

and if it's the difference of a grand, total, i'd rather go to hawaii. it's PERFECT there - it really, really is. there are places to explore (ie. you're not trapped at your hotel), breathtaking vistas, sights, and the food! the food!!! i was thinking that next year we might go to oahu, stay at a B&B (why anyone would ever stay at a hotel when you can stay at a B&B that's nicer, comfier, way more chill and less expensive, is beyond me), rent a cheap car (because we're not on the big island, we wouldn't need a jeep wrangler) and probably have a very nice vacation for under $1500 each. i love hawaiian food - we both do - i found a place in oahu that has a make your own poke bar (poke is basically chunks of raw fish mixed with ponzu, soy, and tobiko) and thinking about eating moco loco in a greasy diner somewhere is enough to make me hop on a plane right now. plus, i love hawaii because you feel less bad about exploiting the peoples (they're american!) and you have the regular, north american amenities and because everyone is so active outdoors, the place shuts down at 9pm. love it. love it love it love it.

b&bing it up in hawaii is basically me and the dotytron's perfect vacation. we love staying at places where your exposure to randoms is minimized. if i close my eyes, i can totally recall the feeling of driving through the big island with the windows down, smelling the insanely fresh air and listening to classic rock. i can totally picture it now - the two of us, zipping along in a little compact, the windows down, with some poke and a fresh fruit shake in our belly, going to watch surfers on the north shore. so perfect.

alas, it's but a pipe dream currently. we won't be doing anything about it until next year this time, at the earliest. we gotta save some monies and pour some more monies into the house and our debt first...but a gyal can dream, right?



tonight for dinner we had spaghetti, tossed with a long-simmered tomato sauce made from canned san marzano tomatoes with a big handful of basil thrown in at the last minute. the pasta was topped with a spoonful of homemade ricotta, which in turn was drizzled with chili oil and sprinkled with fleur de sel and pepper. so good! we also had a fake caesar salad with croutons.

homemade ricotta is dead-easy to make and it tastes amazing - your yield sucks though...1L of whole organic milk and a 1/2 cup of cream makes approximately 1 c. of ricotta.

fin.


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homemade ricotta
yields approximately 1 cup ricotta

1 L whole milk
1/2 c. heavy cream
1/4 t. salt
1 1/2 T. lemon juice

- combine the milk, cream, and salt in a heavy saucepan.
- line a colander (i just used a fine-mesh strainer) with cheesecloth and set it in a large bowl. measure out the lemon juice and set it aside.
- bring the milk mixture to a simmer over medium high heat, stirring occasionally with a spatula to prevent scalding. once the mixture is simmering, add the lemon juice and stir gently with the spatula.
- let the mixture sit for about 1 minute, turning down the heat slightly so it stays at a simmer but doesn’t reach a boil.
- stir with the spatula after about 1 minute, then let it sit another minute until it looks like most of the liquid has separated into curds and whey.
- drain the mixture into the cheesecloth-lined colander set over a bowl, and let it drain at room temperature until you get the desired consistency.
- transfer the ricotta to an airtight container and refrigerate.

notes: i felt that you could have upped the salt in this recipe, at least double. i'm going to try that next time. we drained ours for about 30 minutes and it was very firm (you can see that it almost quenelles in the picture above - if you wanted it creamier, i'd check it and stir it after 15 minutes of draining - it's up to you what your desired consistency is.

so...what's been doing 'round these parts?

hi! remember me? i'm back! we got back yesterday around dinner time and then i made us unpack and hyperventilated and had 60 thousand anxiety attacks about how busy our lives are and how much shiz we have to do and then we ate pizza and i organized my life some and fell asleep.

toronto feels like a BIG city after hawaii. but first things first - the disney vacation with the family, which was renamed the "pineapple whip tour 2009". there's a link to some photos 'pon the facebook for those who like such things.

the resort we stayed at was called the "port orleans - riverside" formerly known as "dixieland" (replete with confederate flags until someone realized how INCREDIBLY OFFENSIVE that is.) the resort consists of a bunch of low lying, antebellum mansion type lodgings grouped around a man-made (everything in disney is man-made) river. it was STINKING hot. unbearably hot. instant crankers hot. step outside to be enveloped in the smothering embrace of a hot, wet, woolen blanket hot. it was so humid that every part of you chafed. it is a testament to what a hardcore amazing packer i am that we went down with 1 carry on roly luggage and 1 knapsack each. and that's it! eff you united and your $15/checked bag ways! not on my watch! the key to surviving is 100% cotton aka all american apparel, all the time. it saved my butt.

the pineapple whip is this AMAZING thing that they ONLY have in ONE location in all the park (the whole compound consists of: the magic kingdom, EPCOT, animal kingdom, hollywood studios, and downtown disney). outside of the tiki room in adventureland, dole has a stand that sells "pineapple whip" which is *wait for it* PINEAPPLE FLAVOURED SOFT SERVE. I DON'T EVEN LIKE SOFT SERVE! it's THE BEST! they serve it swirled with plain, vanilla soft serve in a cup, OR you can get a PINEAPPLE WHIP FLOAT which is pineapple whip in a cup of pineapple juice. it's SO refreshing! when we wore our t-shirts people would pass us and either give us the thumbs up or say, "i've heard about this pineapple whip" or just puzzle over what it meant. i also made up a song and a dance for it. it has to be seen to be believed.

here are our photos from hawai'i - what we did and what we ate. i'm going to be honest, i wasn't expecting much because everything i had read was like, "oh there's no fancy hawaiian food, it's all diner-y" etc. then i came to and realized that I LOVE DINER FOOD MORE THAN ANYTHING. most of the hawaiian restaurants worth going to are in shady looking strip malls spattered in industrial areas...but the food is SO GOOD! we chowed down like kings and the portions were HUMONGOUS. now we know how brother iz got to be so ginormous. there's so much ahi tuna you think you're going to drown in it. platters and platters of cool, thick slices of carnelian red tuna. it's insane. spam and portugese sausage everywhere. sweet bread (from the filipino/portugese influence), taro/guava/passionfruit bread. so much pork! loco moco (hamburger patty topped with egg on white rice and canned gravy), poke (cubes of ahi tuna or salmon in a marinade), puupuu platters (appetizers/hors d'oeuvres), and lunch plate style meals (protein, rice, a scoop of macaroni salad). we feasted and our costs were pretty low.

as per usual, we avoided tours. you really don't have to do them. before we left we considered getting a tour to go up mauna kea (the mountain with the observatories up top) which would have cost us $180/person and included dinner. but we just trucked up there on our own. the stars atop the mountain were like nothing you've ever seen before. you can see the swirls of galaxies and jupiter!

what we did

what we ate

the big island is breathtakingly, achingly beautiful. within two seconds of driving you'll go from arid lava desert to misty rain forest. it's the biggest of the chain of 8 hawaiian islands and thanks to the most continually active volcano in the world spewing lava into the ocean (kilauea, going since 1982), it's still growing. there's only 177,000 people on the whole island, so it's not very densely populated. the major towns feel small and poky. everything shuts down by like, 9pm...we'd be driving around looking for things to do - which is why we saw a billion movies while we were gone. we got a little paranoid that everyone at the b&bs were avoiding us because we never saw anyone - we thought there might be a secret party room somewhere that we didn't know about.

it was really hard to leave. i fell in love with the place. it's not just the beaches or the marine life or the nature - the pace of life is so easy going. if you go to hilo, the county seat, you're away from the tourist hubbub and you can really picture yourself making a life there. i've been on other vacations where i've been DONE with the place once it's been over - like, feeling worn out and looking forward to resuming the "regular" pace of my life back in toronto, feeling bored and restless. that wasn't the case with hawai'i - i feel like we have unfinished business. it was enjoyable being still for once (me! still!) - sitting quietly, soaking in the elemental sublime of your surroundings, feeling it reverberate and thrum in concert with some primordial, evolutionary timbre. i will definitely go back.


for dinner tonight i made us a chopped salad of blanched green beans, just-cooked corn off the cob, grape tomatoes, cucumber, and orange pepper in a creamy dill dressing, with grilled sea bream stuffed with lemon and thyme, finished with a slug of olive oil, a squeeze of lemon, and sea salt. it was delicious!

i gotta get a good night's sleep. our second purchaser's visit tomorrow morning. today at work was crazy, made even crazier by the fact that I'M NOW A PERMANENT EMPLOYEE! yay benefits! yay personal leave! yay sick days! yay glasses! yay varicose vein compression stockings! yay to staying in a job i love with people i like! yay!

so many movie and book reviews!

fin.

whirlwind

it's been a whirlwind 4 days at home, lemme tells ya.

tuesday after work was all about laundering, cleaning, putting things away, and getting things together for our 20 day vacation coming up. it's crazy! because the plan is NOT to come home-home between disney and hawaii and impose on the good graces of A & C and use their spare bedroom as home base, we had to pack for both trips simultaneously, with the idea of leaving some stuff that's earmarked ONLY for hawaii at A & C's so we can do a swap when we come back from disneyworld. hectic!

the problem is that hawaii has SO MANY climates represented that depending on our activities for the day and where on the island we'll be, it's going to be a crap shoot what we'll be wearing/requiring.

there are worse issues to be dealt, i know.

tuesday dinner was lovely. i took some thin slices of pancetta, crisped them in a pan and removed them to drain. then i took some portobello mushrooms, skinned them, sliced them thick and sautéed them in the rendered pancetta fat with a few fat cloves of roasted garlic, seasoning them liberally with pepper and stringently with salt. i took two ace bakery rosemary focaccia rolls (my new favorite all-purpose sandwich bun - adjudicated solely on the basis of the scattering of sea salt flakes that graces their cherubic tops), split them in half, and layered on the pancetta and then the garlicky portobello mushrooms. i fried two eggs over-medium and put those on top and served this glorious sandwich with a rustic greek salad of cucumbers, tomatoes, red onion, and kalamata olives with chunks of greek feta. sooo good and a welcome vegetal-laden respite after my geneseo excesses (i think there was lettuce on my aunt cookie's sub and after that point, i draw a blank on verdant items i consumed).

wednesday we worked and then had dinner with the ex roomie at king park, which is fast becoming my new favorite restaurant. they had the rotisserie going in full force so we had lamb AND the spit roasted pork - both of which were succulent with crunchy flakes of salt and redolent of oregano and melting lamb/pork fat. divine. their onion rings are also the stuff of legends and i absolutely ADORE their "village salad" (think your standard greek salad without the lettuce and with the addition of green peppers) that comes topped with a thick slab of feta for your to break off into creamy shards as your desire.

after that, we headed down to the rex to see our buddy A's band, the AG:6 play for the last time (A's heading to NYU to study under the likes of john scofield. you know, that hackjob. it's not like he's one of the lions of jazz guitar or anything. no biggie). A is spectacularly talented and while i will miss our couch-driven ruminations on life and love and culture, i'm unselfishly willing to loan him to nyc for the purposes of furthering his compositional ambitions and my own new york/brooklyn couch-surfing ones.

that was a late night! it was a nice reunion of the dotytron's jazzamatazz crew.

last night i booked it home from work, we met with our NEW lawyer (points in her favour: 1) she seems to know what she's doing; 2) no visible evidence of wonderland excursions; 3) she has an actual office space with different rooms. emphasis on the plural). after a reassuring visit we headed out to dodgeball and then met up with our friend S after dodgeball for some post-dodgeball dinner at the golden turtle and ice cream at the big chill. i like her...she's super nice and funny and talking to her is easy.

see? it's been a social whirlwind! and i've been filling every spare moment with tying up loose ends, sending a million copies of documents/identification/itinerary iterations to far flung corners of the world, and otherwise preparing for the closing day/contractor maelstrom that will greet us upon our return. yikes! taxing! we've vowed not to let this ruin our vacation though. we're going to relax and rejoice in every minute (not that we're the types to let outside stuff really affect our downtime anyway).

tonight we're meeting up with our friend P and the roomie and l'army who are all going on a temagami camping trip together. P has generously offered to give us a ride to A & C's house tonight. i had planned on depriving myself of sleep so that i can show up at A & C's at like, 9pm and then conk out because our airport taxi is picking us up at 4:30am. the forethought wasn't necessary. we've been so busy with all of the above that i'm lucky if i've gotten 5 hours of sleep a night all week.

there'll be mega-posts aplenty upon my return, stuffed to the gills with photos of me and my beloveds cavorting with animatronics (my favorite), characters, rides, and whatever else the disney "imagineers" can conjure. followed by even MORE photos of the dotytron and i in search of exotic fruits, loco moco, white sand beaches, sea turtles, "point break" surfing prowess, mountaintop sunsets, and volcanic activity. what i'm hoping to avoid: poi (i hate taro).

fin.