Hiatus

As it turns out, managing a major renovation, moving out, hiring a nanny, and having 3 kids can be a slightly stressful experience.

I'm not gonna lie folks, this reno has beaten me down a bit.  I'm a changed person.  The Little Dynamo has been broken.  More about my reno trauma in a later post.

For now, let me do some catching up.  We spent a glorious week at a rental cottage with Momma D and Ehmdo and it was lovely.  Going to the cottage was adding to my stress, initially.  It was finally looking like we would have a fully operational kitchen and then - BAM! - we had to pack everyone and everything up and head out of dodge and our house was going to lie fallow with no one around to tie up all the finicky loose ends for a week.  Also, while we were dealing with (to be detailed later) reno issues (the use of the word "issues" is a bit of an understatement) we were ALSO interviewing nannies and the Dotytron was teaching summer school and the Big Yam is home with me 3 days a week instead of just 1 and it was just...a lot.

I just wanted to be home, you know?  Home in my beautiful new kitchen, cooking on my beautiful new stove and using my beautiful new fridge, and chucking the mess in my beautiful new dishwasher.  But no, I had to go to the cottage and oh, did I resent it.  At first.  We drove up, unpacked all our boxes and once the initial frenzy of arrival-at-the-cottage wore off, all of this happened:

 Yes, that is Lindsay unabashedly stuffing his fat face with sand.

That grin kills me (my lower half edited out for unapologetic vanity purposes)

Naked  dockside snacks

Our neighbours tipped us off to a reconditioned steam train that runs in Huntsville so we took the Big Yam on a rainy day.  It was pouring and we were drenched and cold to the bone, but that smile made it so worth it.

Near the tail end of the week, this little nugget realized that you can go swimming naked at the cottage and he ran around with his gitch out thereafter.

The cottage was near-perfect.  On a point of land, so you couldn't see your neighbours.  A giant dock, a sandy entry for the kids, small enough so that the water was warmish but big enough that you got a decent canoe ride out of exploring it.  The fire pit was on a separate stretch of sandy beach and there was a horseshoe pit.  You could tell it was a well-loved and well-maintained family cottage, striking the perfect balance between homey, without you being slapped in the face with family photos of ugly kids you don't know doing cannonballs off the dock, and not being a suburban style McMansion.  It was just the reset I needed.

Things that have been making my summer so far:

- hangs with a very pregnant, due-any-day-now Dr. Rei, where we reminisce about old times (like, the time she wondered what life would be like if Evan Dando's real name was Evan Anne Dando), or older times like back in the raving days when everything I wore was basically a pocket square tied together with dental floss, or when the Dotytron is impersonating Prince and his adroit and uncanny ability to erase his internet footprint: "Police officers are always coming into schools and telling you that everything you put on the internet is forever, but Prince is all like, 'nuh-uh' *click*"

- Micelli Mondays.   Last year, we set up weekly themed movie nights with Lolly and SMcKay that involved a movie and an appropriately themed meal.  These eventually turned into just watching episodes of Who's The Boss.  The 2014 edition has been dubbed "Micelli Mondays" after the proto-feminist protagonist of the series and actually has never taken place on a Monday, but I love alliteration so there.  We've gone swimming and then to Country Style Hungarian and Baker Bots (which was supposed to be tied to a viewing of the Grand Budapest Hotel, but we couldn't squeeze that in).  We have made meatballs and watched Meatballs.  This past week's iteration was a mixed bag featuring: AYCE Japanese, a trip to Pacific Mall for the iPad mini cover pictured below, a random grab bag of fridge-clearing snacks for dinner, and a viewing of Divergent.

- The continued and progressive awesomeness of the Big Yam.  Quotes from this summer:

While watching one of his BBC Blue Planet documentaries - "'Meet the manta ray' means the manta ray eats meat."

After going to the beach, insisting on bringing rocks from the beach home despite the lack of pockets, shoving them into his underwear, and walking bow-legged back to our bikes - "The rocks are talking to me.  They're saying, 'I want hot dogs!'"

"Nana misses us." Me: "Yeah, she does."  BY: "She's saying, 'I wish they would come back so I can poop on them!'" The day after we moved back home after the renovation.

"What's diarrhea?"

- General good times with our friends and family and the neighbours.  The usual good stuff: swimming in the pool, wading pools, beach, backyard, etc.

These are the things that have been sustaining me while I think about the imminent BASEMENT UNDERPIN in our future.  UGH!  My mantra is: "it's cheaper than moving. It's cheaper than moving."  My actual coping mechanism is to ball up all the associated stress of 4 weeks of jackhammers and concrete and more dirt and dust and no laundry into a stress singularity that sits in the pit of my stomach, ignored except when the reality of packing up a whole floor of our house in the next three weeks comes to the fore.

Excuse me, I have to go curl up into a ball and cry silent tears of anxiety.

Fin.

Recipe

for a perfect Sunday:

- having a friend sleep over and then hanging out in the morning in our pajamas, eating breakfast
- clean house
- going braless all day
- no outdoor activities planned
- two noise machines, 3 kids sleeping
- freezer bolognese on the menu
- smell of roasted garlic

You know how people talk about life hacks?  I find those compendiums very idiosyncratic.  A life hack for me is to roast garlic cloves in oil in bulk and then have a jar of them sitting in my fridge, ready to be milled into mash, or turned in my award-winning (self-adjudicated) garlic bread at a moment's notice.  Garlic roasting days are days when I'm pretty happy that we don't have a working hood vent in the kitchen.

Lovely weekend winding down, gone too soon.  I skipped Book Club on Thursday night because my neighbour had my car.  It was for the best.  We were discussing Alice Munro's Dear Life and I think for the first time in Academic Book Club history, I didn't finish the book.  Alice Munro is terrible (sample size: this one collection of short stories).  So not my bag.  Stories about small-town Ontario white women dealing with not-so-very trying small domestic issues that are given the weight of REALLY BIG DEAL, stuff?  NO THANKS.  I can't relate to that level of repressed passivity and layered, repressed introspection.  It's just not the stuff I'm made of.  I found the stories went nowhere and I didn't see the point or where the meat of the story was and I was by and large not interested in the characters.  They don't speak to me.  It was a snoozer of epic proportions, in my humble opinion.  But I have a feeling my Book Club would have loved it, which probably means I made the sound decision to bow out.  This way, feathers would remain unruffled by my blunt dismissiveness.

Friday night was Ladies Night.  We went to a newish restaurant in the neighbourhood, the Brooklyn Tavern (before you write off the name, it's at the end of a street named Brooklyn).  The menu is a right hodgepodge of stuff but what they do there is done decently, I guess.  I had the pork flautas which came with purchased green salsa and were decent.  More of an appetizer size but I had eaten my weight in doughnuts earlier in the day.  I was tipped off by my neighbour about Von Doughnuts, and he claimed they were as good as NYC's esteemed Doughnut Plant.  I made the mistake of listening to my neighbour, even though we rarely see eye to eye on food (let's just say that he went to Guu and ordered 3 dishes.  'NUFF SAID.  Ordering 3 dishes at Guu basically means that you and I are diametrically opposed from a culinary standpoint).

From left to right, top row then bottom row: chocolate mint, lemon meringue, peanut butter and jelly, salt and pepper caramel, and bacon banana.

I was so excited by the size of the doughnuts and the appearance and the relatively tasty creme brulee one I housed immediately upon returning home that I prematurely posted a favourable capsule review on Instagram.  After sampling the rest (you can see why I didn't have much of an appetite for dinner after), I revised my opinion.  The good: doughnut size.  All the yeasted doughnuts have the same base, which is okay, but a little dense and chewy for my liking.  They are skimpy on the flavourings.  Whereas at Doughnut Plant, your creme brulee doughnut comes impregnated with a squishy, pillowy ring of fluffy custard, the creme brulee doughnut here was a yeasted doughnut cut in half, smeared with a rather pedestrian pastry cream.  The lemon meringue had a paucity of lemon curd (I can't reiterate enough that at Doughnut Plant, EACH BITE features lemon curd!) and the salt and pepper caramel was okay.  Peanut butter jelly was an afterthought: same yeasted doughnut base with a topping of peanut butter American-style buttercream and some jelly piped on top.  The cake doughnuts were ATROCIOUS.  The mint one used fresh mint in the glaze but it had been over infused and so tasted acrid and bitter.  It was disgusting.  The chocolate cake base was dry as f**k, tough as Bette Midler in Gypsy, and flavourless as an Alice Munro short story.  The bacon one featured a similarly egregious banana cake doughnut base.  I won't be going back.

Yesterday we walked the Big Yam to his dance class, this time with our neighbour's hand-me-down ballet slippers in tow.  It was a substitute teacher and while her ballet program was okay, her hip hop program was terrible.  She didn't even play hip hop music!  The Dotytron watched her start the class and said aloud, "What the - ?! Highly unorthodox hip hop."  I can't even describe it.  It was like a half-time ballet class taught by someone with a severe iron deficiency.  The Big Yam loved it though, so I can't complain.  It was so cute watching him.  We had SMckay and Lolly over later and he was so proud showing them what he learned.  We spent the night Youtubing videos of Steven Sondheim and Les Miserables numbers and singing along, which basically means: BEST NIGHT EVER.  The Dotytron, SMckay, and Lolly have basically decided that they're going to take advantage of the lack of an age limit enforcement at Kiwanis Music Festival and enter in the musical theatre category.  If they actually pull this together it's going to be hilarious.  They will be competing against kids.  People half their age!  This all started when the Dotytron enquired about whether they were strict on the age limit and was told that while, if he did take the highly unorthodox route of competing as a grown man, he wouldn't be able to progress to provinicials, they would still allow him to enter.  The thought of 3 adults competing against teenagers in a music competition, with the fervour that I know these three will bring to the table, is the stuff that lesser comedies are made of.

The cookie recipes promised last post are at the end of this one.

Now I'm off to lose myself in The Interestings.  Omnibus post of recent films/books to come this week, I hope.

Fin.

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Nutella Chocolate Chip Cookies

pulled from a blog that took them from a Giada recipe, apparently

1/2 c. butter, softened

1/2 c. nutella
1/2 c. brown sugar, packed
1/2 c. white sugar
1 egg
1 t. vanilla
1 1/3 c. flour
1/2 t. baking soda
1/2 t. baking powder
1/2 t. kosher salt, plus more for sprinkling on top
1 c. semi-sweet chocolate chips (but preferably bittersweet if you can find them - it cuts the sweetness of the cookie)

-  cream the butter and nutella together with the sugars until light and fluffy
- add the egg and vanilla, mix well
- stir in the dry ingredients, then the chocolate chips
- bake in a preheated 350F oven for about 10 minutes (based on tablespoon sized balls), sprinkling the dough balls with additional kosher salt before baking.  You want these cookies to be very chewy, so underdone is better than overdone.

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Chewy Malted Milk Chocolate Cookies

1 c. unsalted butter, melted
1 c. packed light brown sugar
2/3 c. malted milk powder
1 T. vanilla extract
3/4 t. salt
2 c. plus 3 tablespoons all-purpose flour
1 t. baking soda
1 c. milk chocolate chips

- stir together the melted butter and the sugars and malted milk powder.
- add the remaining ingredients, stirring well
- bake at 350F for 10 minutes.

"Sometimes...

...you gotta do the best you can with the apples you got." - SMcKay, 2013

Nothing sums up our first week of the new normal like that little adage, made up on the fly when our little movie club held a Jewish edition on Saturday, in honor of Rosh Hashanah (she was actually being self-deprecating about her apple sauce contribution to the dinner, but as soon as that little gem slipped from her lips, we realized that truer words have perhaps never been spoken).  More on that night, later.

First week of no Ian debrief: s**t ain't easy.  Tuesday was great and I think I got overly optimistic and, like Icarus flying towards the sun, my hubris was rewarded with two rough days on Wednesday and Thursday.  It just felt like we were in high adrenalin mode all day.  As soon as the Dotytron comes home, I want to hand off the babies, but he's got the Big Yam, and so we need to pay attention to him, get dinner on the table, deal with the 6-9pm witching hour when both babies are basically yelling at me and want to be fed nonstop, and then collapse exhausted into bed as soon as the babies get their last bottle.  To say nothing of stuff like: laundry, dishes, tidying, grocery shopping, taking a shower, the Dotytron doing any prep for his next day of work, etc.  We were purely in survival mode.  On Friday, my mum came over and it was a godsend.  She was lovely.  She held babies so that I could shower and get dinner ready and tidy up and put away laundry and clean the bathroom and all the other things I hadn't been able to do.

All the things that people complain about when they have one baby, that we never, ever experienced (being unkempt, sleep deprived, the standard "I've got vomit on my clothes and no time to address it" malarkey is finally biting us in the butts now.  I am unshowered, greasy, and I leave the house in workout clothes entirely too much for my self-esteem's liking.  I can still get a good dinner on the table, but at the expense of being Pigpen from the Peanuts and feeling mild anxiety from having the house be a mess.  One baby is a joke.  One baby and a preschooler is less of a joke.  But seriously, talk to me when you got two at once (or more!) and a preschooler.

Okay, whine over.  Really, we're doing okay by most people's standards.  I just have insanely high standards.  I mean, I got to cut some quilt pieces and we still went to the farmer's market on the weekend and I made a brisket dinner on Saturday, so it's not like we're eating takeout every night and slowly mouldering away in a pile of feces.  We're not that bad (yet).  It is tiring and we do need help though.  My mum has been lovely.  So has Momma D.  Our neighbour's mum, who we call halmeoni (Korean for "grandmother") is so sweet and has offered to come and help us clean the house and tidy the yard.  Our neighbour's kids are in school and the youngest just started daycare this month, so Halmeoni is going to have more time on her hands.  She told me that she might start volunteer work but that she'd rather volunteer for me (!!!!!).  I told her it'd be nice if she could just hold a baby now and then so I could clean the bathroom, but she said she preferred to do that work so that the parents could spend quality time with their children (!!!!!).  I relayed this to the Dotytron and he was like, "She really IS our halmeoni!"  Seriously: how sweet IS that?

One of our saving graces this past week is that the Big Yam had some kind of maturation while at the cottage (even though you wouldn't know it WHILE at the cottage, since he was constantly acting up and belting Little Big Cuz).  For better or worse, he tends to learn new things whenever he has an extended visit with the cousins (generally, it's been for the worse in the past).  He's been LOVELY this past week.  No hitting, listening, helpful, amendable to the earlier bedtime, really cute and cuddly and playful and hilarious.  He says so many funny things and seems to have made a big cognitive/linguistic jump.

He's really into My Neighbour Totoro now.  He started requesting the "Totoro song" (opening and ending credit themes) so we would watch those on Youtube.  Then the Dotytron found this:

Studio Ghibli, which is the studio founded by Hiyao Miyazaki (the director of Totoro and Spirited Away, etc.) held a 25th anniversary concert at Budokan featuring music from all the animated films.  They were all composed by Joe Hisaishi, who conducted and plays during the concert.  Guys, it's THE BEST.  We are obsessed.  The Dotytron put on the Totoro part (1hr 31 min mark) and the Big Yam was ENTRANCED.  It's the big finale of the concert and by the end of the first time watching it, the Dotytron and I were both openly crying.  Joe Hisaishi is so cute!  It's a retrospective of his life's work!  It's a testament to this long-standing partnership between him and Miyazaki!  The music is amazing!  The are like, 7 different choirs!  The orchestra is huge!  All new arrangements!!!  Joe can write a movie theme like no other.  It's sick.

Anyway, the Big Yam's favorite thing is watching what he calls the "Totoro saxaphone song" and trying to sing along in Japanese (!).  So right now, the sum total of the Big Yam's top of the pop charts is: Kendrik Lamar's Swimming Pools (Drank), Kendrik Lamar's Real, and the Ponyo theme and Totoro themes, in Japanese.  Obviously, we are willing to indulge his current fixation with live orchestra as much as he wants.  I would rather listen to this kind of "children's" music than the cloying garbage that accompanies most children's programming and movies.

There's a scene where one of the characters, Mei wants to bring an ear of corn to her mom in the hospital.  Last week's CSA had corn and the Big Yam was thrilled that they had corn, "like Mei!" and insisted on carrying an ear home the way she does in the movie.  I just about died from cute overload when his hands slipped and he stopped walking to carefully rearrange his grip so that it was just like hers.

I asked him if he wanted to be Totoro for Halloween and he said he wanted to be Satsuki, Mei's older sister

who looks like this: 

He could have done it with his old haircut, but SMcKay chopped off his hair (in a hilarious bungle) on Saturday night so he's lost his Teen Wolf bowl cut.  He looks super-cute now and you can see more of his face, but he looks a lot more like a little boy so I love it and it breaks my heart at the same time.

We had Lolly, her hubby, and SMcKay over for another movie night.  It was supposed to be movie themed and we were deciding between any number of films - Woody Allen, Dustin Hoffman, before Lolly's hubby remembered (fortuitously!) that Judith Light is actually Judith Licht, so that we could continue watching Who's The Boss?  Ummm...AMAZING!  

So we had a Rosh Hashanah meal and dipped apples in honey and ate a new fruit and I made brisket with latkes and Lolly made a beet and pear salad and SMcKay brought apple sauce.  It was delicious:

I made this torte from the Smitten Kitchen website.  I love hazelnuts and I love meringue desserts.  To make it dairy-free I made 7 Minute Frosting in lieu of the whipped cream.  It was good, but I think the whipped cream would have been better.  It's a surprisingly easy dessert which yields impressive looking results.

The gnome hats make their appearance!  Nothing is better than babies in gnome hats.

Things people say about the Great Gazoo: "He has the face of an angel."  "He's so handsome." "He just has the sweetest face."

Things people say about Prof. Gantok: "It looks like his eyes are upside down."  

We also get a lot of: "Twins!" *looking at the Great Gazoo* "Oh, so it's one boy and..." *glancing at Prof. Gantok* "- one girl?"  I don't think he looks particularly girly, but maybe I'm too close to the subject.  People definitely seem to have a clear favorite in the looks department and it's the Great Gazoo.  Poor Prof. Gantok!!!  It's not his fault he is all cheeks and a small mouf.  I will say that the Great Gazoo loves to stare deeply, lovingly, and placidly into your eyes - he's been that way since birth.  But he really only has two expressions: it's either beautiful-angel-baby or Jean-Chretien-lip-face-crumple.  Whereas, Prof. Gantok is a man of a million different expressions - all of them hilarious.  It balances out.

Sunday we had Momma D over for dinner.  I made barbecued chicken, steamed green beans tossed with coconut oil & sesame oil, stuffing from the freezer (November 2012!!! Almost a year old and tasty as the day it was born!) and corn on the cob.

Prof. Gantok's follow-up ultrasound is tomorrow morning.  I talked to my doctor again and I asked if the presence of cysts in that area automatically means PVL and he said no.  It is something they have to monitor though, and there aren't really any good kinds of brain cysts.

Fingers crossed, por favor.

Fin.

Gooby eyes, full hearts, a wrecked butt

That is a basic synopsis of how this extra-long family day weekend went down.

On Valentine's Day, I picked up the Big Yam from daycare and took him on a V-Day treat ride on the bus, subway, and then to Country Style Hungarian Cuisine for dinner with the outlaw mum.  Schnitzel jawns for days, yo.  Peep this:

People complain that the prices at Country Style have gone up.  This is true.  A schnitzel dinner runs you around $17.00 nowadays.  HOWEVER!  That schnitzel is easily a foot across and comes with taters and a vegetable side.  It's a pretty sweet deal, in my books.  

I took Friday off so that I could do my road test for my G license.  Against all odds: I passed!  The examiner was a black dude, and a few years ago my brother, Bruce Wayne imparted this little nugget of know-how: black people love Asians.  ESPECIALLY Asian women.  I passed before even getting on the highway.  The examiner and I basically talked football, travel, and growing up in Markham and as I was getting on the DVP he said, "Just go one exit - as far as I'm concerned you've already passed, so don't even worry about this part."  AMAZING!  He was also a fan of my whole, "the old ball and chain" routine that I do sometimes.  This is a valuable ice-breaking lesson I've learned in my years of social interaction.  Generally, when dealing with people in the service industry, if you want them to come over to your side, it's always effective to play the stereotypical, "my husband is an inept blah blah blah" or "my husband is from Mars and I'm from Venus" thing.  It works like a charm.  So like, when we're checking in at the airport and trying to get seats I do a whole, "...but lord knows HE doesn't know how to pack for a trip, amirite?!?" thing that almost always wins over the desk clerk.  My driving examiner was also a huge fan of our short list of names for the twerps, as our names tend to skew towards the black barbershop variety.

Contrary to what I thought it was going to be, it was the most unstressful testing experience I've ever had.  So I obviously treated myself to a Harvey's hamburger and onion rings.  Why doesn't Harvey's get more love?  They really do make a hamburger a beautiful thing.  I followed that up with a trip to Diana's seafood for oysters and then a trip to Arz, my favorite (only?) Lebanese grocery store for za'atar and labneh and delicious dips like muhammara.  Scarborough rules!  Diana's and Arz are so close to each other and there is so much happiness to be found in between their walls.  I saw gorgeous razor clams at Diana's that I'm going to snag in the future so that the Dotytron and I can relive our Barcelona days.

That night the Dotytron and I had dinner at this new restaurant, Porzia, that was opened by a friend of mine. He was actually the first person I met the day I started at North 44.  It's a cute little resto in Parkdale with warm lighting, a good soundtrack, and a non-hipster-y vibe.  Italian-influenced menu and a killer bartender who made me the best virgin cocktail I've ever had.  Better than what I got at Alinea, and that's saying something.  It was like pear and rosemary and citrus.  Delicious.

 A special from that day - this warm, potato-dough stuffed pizza thing with proscuitto and mortadella served with a fennel & kohlrabi slaw.  

Hamachi crudo.  Ye gods, I love me some crudo, so hard.  I wish we had an all-crudo restaurant in Toronto.  This was served with beets and radishes and lightly dressed, but nothing competed with the flavour of the rich yellowtail.  I literally took a bite and got goosebumps.

A treatsie from the chef.  Cotechino crostini with warm rapini.  I LOVE COTECHINO.  It's a small thing, but the restaurant gets the crostinis PERFECT and that's a good foundation.  The bread is charred but not overly crisped, with a giving chew.  This was warm, rich, and salty with just the right amount of bite from the rapini.

Chicken liver agnolotti with honey mushrooms.  You know who loves chicken livers?  Me and the Dotytron.  What's not to love about a delicate, punched up chicken liver filling encased in perfectly cooked fresh pasta tossed up with a tangle of woodsy honey mushrooms in a light brown butter sauce?  NOTHING, THAT'S WHAT. 

This was another treatsie dish.  Grilled octopus served over semolina with peanuts and apples.  The octopus was perfectly cooked and the flavour combination of the semolina, apples, and peanuts was a revelation.  I'm not sure that the dish was harmonious, in that it seemed to comprise two distinct components, but both those components were individually executed perfectly.

Sweetbreads.  You know who likes sweetbreads?  Me and the Dotytron (probably slightly more me).  With bacon and romesco and sunchokes.  UGH.  I LOVE SWEETBREADS SO DAMNED MUCH.  I would say that the sunchokes were a little under and disrupted the overall textures of the dish, but the sunchokes themselves were delicious - they were raw so they had a nice, woody, earthy taste that you usually lose when you cook them.

Bone marrow and snails.  You know who loves bone marrow?  THIS GUY.  This was sauced with a delicate brown demi-type sauce and the snails were garlicky and the bone marrow was bone-marrow-y and everything was deliciously sopped up with more of those perfect crostinis.  I literally punched the air a million times when this dish came out to the table.  I could make a meal of this dish and this dish alone.

Chocolate hazelnut mousse.  This dish was fine, the plating could use a bit of work, but compared to the heights of the previous dishes, next time I might skip dessert and just double-down on the marrow.

All in the all, the meal (minus the treatsies) was reasonably priced at $125 or something for the two of us with 2 cocktails, and 2 beers for the Dotytron, not including tip.  We were stuffed.

The good eating continued on Saturday with Lolly and SMcKay over for dinner and haircuts.  I made us ribs, stuffed potato skins, 7 layer dip, and a chocolate pudding with Skor bits and whipped cream.  There was a round of haircuts all around AND a viewing of Silver Linings Playbook.  

Then on Sunday, we had our amazing friends H & A come and visit from Cleveland for 24 glorious hours.  I LOVE THOSE GUYS.  They are seriously the best.  They are kindred spirits of the highest order.  I put out this spread: 

Not pictured: the oysters I snagged from Diana's - fat bastards from WA and French Kiss from N.B.

That night we went to Pizzeria Libretto on the Danforth and continued our time-honoured tradition with these guys of ordering at least 1-2 more apps and entrées than there are diners at the table.  We tried to go to Bar Chef to try this Manhattan cocktail that H had heard about, but it was closed, so we went to Ceili Cottage for drinks and then home.  Somewhere in there, my piriformis finally went on strike and I had shooting pains up and down my leg when I transitioned from sitting to standing (or vice versa) and by the end of the night I was basically incapacitated and my leg would give out.  Fun!

The next morning, we went to Lady Marmalade for breakfast.  Ugh.  I love that place so much.  Best breakfasts in town!  So good!  So beyond what I am usually up for making myself, which is the hallmark of a good brunch place.  

Two Cleveland cuties.

The breakfast poutine: homefries, hollandaise, aged cheddar

Cheddar and spinach waffles with bacon

My croque monsieur with poached eggs and more of their superlative homefries

I can't even tell you the amount of pain I was in at that point.  It was excruciating.  We went home, had naps, the Big Yam came back from his sleepover at Momma D's, which somehow resulted in him pooping everywhere.  Like, this is the report I got from him.  He walks in the door.  Me: "How was your sleepover at Nana's house?" Big Yam: "I got poo in my socks."  I don't even know how such a thing is possible.  

Then we went on a death march to Pacific Mall (on a weekend, during Chinese New Year), which meant we had to park a million miles away, which meant that of COURSE my sciatica was mad aggravated.  In the end, there was nothing for me to do but lie on the couch all night, writhing in pain each time I moved my leg the slightest bit.

I called in sick on Tuesday and because the Big Yam had pinkeye, he stayed home with me, a situation I only countenanced on account of the fact that the Dotytron took a half day off of work so I wouldn't be stuck with the Boobla all day (which would have been impossible, since I couldn't really move) AND because the Roomie came over and was amazing and made me lunch and fed the Yam and ran me a bath and watched him.  I love my Roomie.  She's the best.  

I think I basically have sciatica from my piriformis being compressed around the sciatic nerve.  It's not uncommon, and my piriformis has given me trouble for a while.  It just went on strike.  Think, sharp pain in your glutes that makes you leg give way from under you.  Fun.  Stretching in the morning and night and hot baths and moving around and the heating pad are all working together and I was able to go back to work yesterday.  I'm just making an effort to get up every hour after sitting at my desk and walk around for a bit.  That helps.  My manager also gave me permission to bring in a stability ball to sit on at my desk, so I'm hoping that makes things better too.  I've said it before and I'll say it again: I really need to find time for some regular yoga practice.  

So that was our weekend.  Stomachs and hearts full of food with lovely peeps in our life.  Eyes extruding mad crud.  A butt that went on strike.  All in all: still fun times.

I love this baby so much.  Look at how cute she is.  She's just the cutest little muffin I've ever seen.

Butternut squash and red lentil soup AND tuna melts with the Roomie last week.

On Tuesday, I made myself get up and make a long-simmered bolognese.  It was delicious to the extreme.  My body was glad because making it got me up and moving and my stomach was glad because it tasted like heaven.  I mean, not as good as Ragu's bottled sauce, but close.

Wednesday night we had French onion soup with gruyere crostinis and a big Olive Garden-style salad.  We've been eating this salad all week but it hasn't gotten old (for me).  

Last night we had tagliatelle carbonara.  Which was SOOOOOOO GOOD.  I had been dreaming about it all day and basically inhaled two servings.  Talk about cheap eats!!!  Ugh.  So delicious.

Today is my day off.  Massages, errands, and tonight is ladies' night on the street.  We're going for Ethiopian food.

Fin.

Oh Captain, My Captain

Sorry it's been silencio...things have been stressful here lately.  

We had a pretty wide-open weekend with few commitments, and so when SMckay called me with an idea to piggyback Lolly's trip to Guelph for haircuts and visits on Saturday, I jumped at the chance.  The Dotytron had already made plans to jam with his friends that day, so I was going to be rolling solo with the Big Yam and was feeling slightly daunted by the (imagined) interminable afternoon hours with just me and him.  So I loaded the Big Yam up into the Captain, and drove to Lolly's and she drove us in the Captain to Guelph.

We had good times all day and I got to see J and her baby V and be mortified by the fact that the Big Yam proceeded to smack V upside the head with, among other things: a tractor, a teacup, and, in dire situations, his bare hand.  The poor little Hungarian Princess was a mass of welling eyes and quivering bottom lip and I felt like the worst parent in the history of the world.  I don't know what the Big Yam's problem is with the hitting, but right now he has mad issues!  I know it will pass but it's trying.  Being the parent of a hitter (and I'm told it's the same for parents of biters) is the worst.

It's Lolly's birthday today so we discussed our options and she wanted to go to Mandarin so we planned to meet up with the Dotytron and Lolly's hubby in the west end of Toronto.  We're in the Captain, it's 6pm, we're all peckish, we're on the 401 eastbound, just outside of Guelph, and then the battery indicator comes on the dash (or at least, I notice it's lit up).  So I'm like, "Uhhh, the battery light is on." To which SMckay replies, "It's fine, I'm sure it's nothing, keep going."  But because I'm a paranoid nerd when it comes to cars, I look it up in the book, and it says it has something to do with the alternator belt and you should pull over (which Lolls says she's NOT going to do on the 401) and check it out, and if the belt is fine (not that I have any earthly idea what an alternator belt looks like), then get it checked at the earliest possibility, but if it's worn, then your car could overheat.  I'm reading this out loud and look at the temperature indicator and me and Lolls notice that it's cranked all the way to "H."  I call the Dotytron and fill him in on what's going on.  He calls me back five minutes later and is like, "the boys say that if it's the alternator, just keep driving, because otherwise, once you stop the car, it won't start again," and I get all shrillsville panic mode and I say, 

So we're both like, "we gotta pull over" and she doesn't want to pull over on the 401 (rightly) so we're trying to get to the next exit.  From the back, SMckay is like, "Ugh. Don't pull off at 312, cuz there's like, nothing there," and Lolly and I got all snappy with her (in retrospect, this is funny), about how we DIDN'T CARE ABOUT THE AMENITIES AT THE EXIT BUT WE HAD TO STOP BEFORE THE CAR EXPLODED.  We just manage to pull off and pull into this car stop thing just as our power steering gives out.

6:30pm.  In a random, rape-y car stop off some deadsville exit (SMckay was right about that) outside of Guelph. With a sleeping Big Yam (thankfully) and a car that's getting colder by the minute.  So I'm calling CAA and the dude is all like, "Is the Dotytron in the car with you?" and I say no, and then he does that apologetic "hmmm" sound that phone customer service people do when they're about to screw you.  BECAUSE CAA COVERS THE PERSON, NOT THE CAR.  Which is the STUPIDEST THING I'VE EVER HEARD IN MY LIFE.  He puts me on hold for a million hours to "see what he can do" and the solution he comes back with is that his "supervisors" are willing to waive the waiting period and sign me up for automatic basic coverage, which gets me a free ten kilometre tow and then I would be responsible for paying the rest of it to Toronto.  I was like, "Uhh, why don't you ask your supervisors if I can just G-D pay for the premium coverage now and they can waive the waiting period for that?" (premium package covers towing your car to wherever you want within 200km) and he puts me on hold for a million more hours and finally agrees.  THANK GOD.  So we wait for a million hours for the tow truck driver to show up and SMckay convinces her adorable and nicest Papa in the world to come and drive us all to Toronto.  Seriously. Best Papa ever!!!  Meanwhile, the Dotytron calls me and is like, "So...the guys here are going out to eat soon...so what's going on with dinner?  Should I wait for you guys, or..." and I almost reached through the phone and strangled him.

When we finally get to Lolly's house to meet up with the boys, it's 8pm.  Everyone is STARVING. Tempers are short.  We show up at the Mandarin and there is a FORTY FIVE MINUTE WAIT.  We go to a nearby restaurant and there's ANOTHER hour long wait.  It's tragic.  People are getting to the point where they're like, "I just don't want to do anything any more" (you know when people are so dispirited and crochety that you give up having an opinion because you just want to be a foul owl?   We were all that).  Anyway, we somehow pulled through the badness, decided to make Lolly happy and give her the Mandarin meal she wanted, and we were sat within 30 minutes and we ate and instantly regretted life.  But this happened:

So it was all worth it in the end.  Also, the Big Yam was a trooper.  He was up until 10pm and ate the latest dinner of all time and was just lovely about it.

This was great because on Friday, I kept the Big Yam home with me on my day off for the morning, and he was a monster and it was non-stop time outs and lots of me yelling and I just felt awful and guilty and at the same time, mad at him for not being a peach.  So his behaviour on Saturday made up for it, big time.

The good thing to come out of our Friday hours together was that we made this cake:

It was AMAZING.  Think: the best, classic, chocolate cake with white (vanilla) frosting you can imagine.  It used a new (to me) frosting called butter roux frosting which creates something so light and fluffy, it belies the fact that there is flour in it as a base.  It's the perfect marriage between true buttercream (based on a Swiss or Italian meringue - my favorite for it's lightness, but it's actually heavy on the butter and labour intensive) and what I call fake buttercream (icing sugar and butter, which makes something kind of thick and gritty, but which can also be delicious, in a homespun kind of way).  This frosting was so light!  The cake is a classic, oil-based chocolate cake, which means that it comes out very chocolatey and very, very moist.  You can also make it all in one bowl with a whisk - no mixer required!!!  I used this recipe, from the blog Posie Gets Cosy, here.  The only change I would make is to line the pans with parchment (I had some sticking issues) and to switch to a whisk attachment for the frosting after creaming the butter with the paddle attachment.  I also omitted the almond extract (didn't have it) and put the beans and scrapings of a 1/2 of a vanilla bean in the flour-milk roux mixture.  The Dotytron and I are obsessed with it and are eating this cake like it's going out of style.

 For dinner on Friday night I made us shepherd's pie.  I mixed leftover mashed potatoes (from my turkey dinner last week) with mashed cauliflower for the topping and it was awesome!!!  A great way to add more vegetables and it adds a nice flavour.  The two textures meld together so that you don't notice it at all.  I made enough to freeze a giant pan so that was also a bonus.

I spent all of Friday night toggling between the menu for East Side Mario's and Red Lobster.  Guys, Red Lobster has SHRIMP FETTUCCINE ALFREDO and it's ALL I CAN THINK ABOUT.  I want a giant plate of fettuccine alfredo so bad...I can hardly stand it.  We're hoping to head down to Geneseo in a couple of weeks just so I can go to Delmonico's and get my fix.  I just lost about an hour of my life salivating over the Delmonico's menu.  I want veal parmigiana AND alfredo and that giant rib-eye steak!  With fried calamari and fried mozzarella triangles!!!  LOOK AT THOSE PRICES, PEOPLE!  They are not fooling!  And best yet: the quality is good!!! It's not garbage food (the way East Side Mario's is).  UGHHHHHH, I want it so bad.

Last night we had dinner at Momma D's and she made us prime rib and we had mashed potatoes and beans and beets.  She also made the Dotytron a birthday cake - a classic mom cake - golden cake with mocha fake buttercream.  It was DELICIOUS.  It brought me around again on the fake buttercream and the sweetness of those old-fashioned cakes.

Tonight we tried to get our lives back on track with that spicy grain soup and quesadillas.

Found out from my mechanic that the alternator belts just got worn.  The repair isn't that pricey, thank goodness.  Captain Save-A-Ho is on my bad side, lately.  I guess this is what you get when you buy an 8 year old car, for $6000.  This hasn't put me off of buying used.  I can accept that cars break and they have a limited life span, and I think it's ludicrous to buy new.  To me, it's six of one, half dozen of the other.  If I bought the Captain new, I would have had to put in this amount of money at this point in the car's life anyway, but I would have overpaid (in my opinion) for those first 5 years of driving worry-free.  Rotors and belts wear out, that's just natural.  However, I will concede that next time, we're going Toyota or Honda and everyone else can go eff themselves!

I've been meaning to post about these for ages but it kept slipping my mind.  In the Big Yam's stocking this year, we got him a pair of slippers from this Etsy seller, Wooly Baby.  These are the coolest slippers ever and I'm in love with them.  First of all, they're made from recycled materials.  The uppers are felted recycled sweaters and the bottoms are suede, which makes them non-skid.  The elastic around the ankle coupled with the height means that they stay on and they're so warm and cozy and stylish.  I love them.

I also knit the Big Yam this cabled hat and mittens and they were in his stocking.  Apparently at daycare J asked him who made him the beautiful hat and whether it was his Mama, and the Big Yam was very serious and said, no, Santa brought them.  I get no cred, but at least we know that Santa indoctrination is working.

This morning when he woke up we did our customary, being cosy and smushy in my bed routine while he drank his milk and he said to me very seriously, "I go to work."  Haha.  You sure do, buddy, you sure do.

Fin.

U.S. Election Day!

Aside from the choices made to elect the next POTUS, I'm extra nervous and on tenterhooks today on account of the fact that my outlaw bro will find out whether he gets elected to be District Attorney.  It's nerve-racking!  I semi-strongly believe that the differences between Obama and Romney are largely negligible and I'm worried about what the Republican party is likely to do in the wake of a loss (whether they're likely to go more far right and abandon the moderate centre), but my investment in this election is mostly from the perspective of wanting Uncle Rico to win.

Go go Uncle Rico!  

At the very least, I'm happy that my lovely sister and her family no longer have to participate in the absurd farce that is US electoral politics and campaigning.

Yesterday I had a terrible, awful, no good very bad day.  I came home and dinner wasn't ready and so we ate late and I was crochety.  As an attempt to re-align the family, I started the "What was your favorite part of the day?" round.  

Me: "Big Yam, what was your favorite part of the day?"

Big Yam: *not missing a beat* "Meatballs."

LOL!  He looked right into my eyes, too.  He believed it.  So funny!  He's a bit of an unreliable witness - I'm not sure that he actually had meatballs or came in contact with meatballs yesterday.  

In other funny news.  I was emailing my sis to find out what I should get for Little Big Cuz's 2nd birthday.  She emailed me back, "I just asked him and, no joke, he said 'Big Yam' and when I asked him if he wanted to SEE the Big Yam, he said yes."  !!!!!  So cute!  I love that the two cousins love each other so darned hard.

This weekend was legit.  Friday night was Ladies' Night on my street.  We went to the Riverside Public House.  It was pretty good!  I ordered the burger but I should have ordered the fried chicken.  You get two drumsticks and a thigh (I tried my neighbour's) and it's perfect, crunchy, juicy fried chicken served with a heap of mashed potatoes and kale with gravy.  All this for $14, which I think is a great price.  I highly recommend it and wished I had ordered it instead of what I did get.  I ordered the burger, which was fine - delicious, juicy, with skinny salty fries, but the fried chicken was much better.  I split some appetizers with my neighbour as well - a mussel and lobster chowder and chanterelles on toast.  I love love love chanterelles - what's not to love about a pile of buttery, rich, gorgeous sautéed mushrooms piled on toast?  Absolutely nothing, that's what.  

Saturday was Lolly's wedding - it was a beautiful affair in a beautiful space with amazing food.  We sat at a table with the full slew of kdubsguelph crew and it was one of the few times we've ever had to sit at a table at a wedding without the (seemingly) obligatory random couple shoe-horned in.  It was great!  Uncle Jesse made this video that they screened during the reception - it's adorable.  He's so talented.  

The Irish Artist - A Wedding Film from Jesse A on Vimeo.

Then SMckay slept over and we woke up the next morning and gave the Big Yam a haircut and she bought us McDonald's and we gossiped.  Maybe it's a by-product of being raised by super-strict Asian parents who were always like, "why would you ever want to sleep somewhere OTHER than your own bed?" but I don't think I'll ever get tired of friend sleepovers.  I've said it before and I'll say it again: I'm particularly well suited to communal living.  I just think it's the funnest to come home to your besties!  I would happily lose the ability to walk around the house naked for living with friends again.  I'm a big proponent of it taking a village.  Which is all to say that I love it when SMckay sleeps over.  

Anyway, I drove her home and picked up Momma D, who had extensive hand surgery last Tuesday, which means that she's not really equipped to be on her own for long stretches until she gets the hang of doing everything one-handed.  She came over and we napped and snoozed and watched movies and ate pizza.  It was lovely.  I banged off another batch of cookies (hazelnut thumbprints) and made hot chocolate and we were cozy on the couch.  I didn't feel like I particularly got the benefit of the extra hour, but we made up for it that night by going to bed at 8:30pm and not waking until 6am the next morning.  Bliss!

Last night's (rescued) dinner: sunchoke soup with bacon, cheddar cheese, and chives.  This was soooo good!  I love Jerusalem artichokes so much.  The flavour is so unique.  I had wanted to smoke the sunchokes but didn't get around to it on Sunday.

Tonight we had the roomie and T over for dinner.  We had a baked pasta with ricotta, mozzarella, and a turkey tomato sauce.  With an arugala & radicchio salad with parm and lemon juice.  I also made us ginger molasses cookies.  That up there is the PERFECT blanket of cheese with the PERFECT amount of browning for chew/goo.

We got our MPAC assessment in the mail today.  Ugh.  It's so bittersweet.  The good news is: according to MPAC, our house has increased 135% in value since we bought it (and actually, the appraised price then was more than we paid for the house).  The bad news is that our property tax rates will go up accordingly.  

Fin.