a compendium of oddities

this is going to be a real mish-mash of random tidbits.

so on wednesday, i walked out of work and went to the bike rack, only to find that my front tire was COMPLETELY flat. i deliberated for a bit and then opted to lock it back up, rather than wait around for an hour until the ttc says it's okay to bring bikes on the trains.

i IMMEDIATELY suspected that someone had let the air out of my tires and i was a little put out by it. i mean, i know i'm a brassy broad, but who in the world at large would hold such ill will towards me? what had i done to insult, offend, give umbrage (i know you can take umbrage, can you also give it?) the next day, i walked my bike over to the nearest bike repair place and the guy offered to put a new tire on for me while i waited. as he took the tire off the rim, i said, "when the tire is off, can you see what happened? i suspect foul play." without missing a beat, the dude said, "you're irrational." lol!!! it's funny cuz it's true! he then went on to say that most people suspect foul play but that it's rarely the case. phew. so all my haters in the public service are still deeply bored into the woodwork. when i retold the tale to the dotytron, he agreed, "you ARE irrational."

i was mad hormonal this weekend. i cried like a billion times and picked like 20 different fights with the dotytron. it was kind of awesome. i haven't been cranky like that in a long while. we barely fight ever, anymore. in between being a testy mofo, i did manage to find the time to bawl like a giant baby when s-dawg showed me the following youtube clip. LIKE A BABY. so embarrassing! all weekend he was like, "have you seen the 'christian the lion' video on youtube yet?" and i was like, NO (it sounded kind of ghey.) he kept bringing it up until finally he had me and sister as a captive audience and fired it up on his iphone. i CRIED and got goosebumps like the carefully hidden inner marshmallow i am.



i also finished knitting my niece's sweater. i'm really happy with how it turned out. this is what the original pattern is supposed to look like:

there's an inner button and button hole and the sleeves are long and the collar is floppier.

this is what i did with mine:



i made mine with short sleeves, and i shortened the collar. i also put both buttons on the front, because i thought a thick button on the inside of the sweater would be irritating, and this way, you have some options about how you flip it over. it also looks cute and symmetrical.

little miss up there was being super squirmy with the pictures. more shockingly, we had an incident that i will heretofore refer to as "chunkygate '09" my sister and i were researching a disney world vacation. more correctly, i was researching while my sister kept me company. somehow she took it upon herself to project manage the family's disney vacation, even though she HATES doing stuff like that. within half an hour, i had taken her scribbles on random pieces of paper and had organized a tidy chart complete with footnotes.

anyway, my niece was playing dress up quietly by herself while we were researching. she had put on one of my mom's old jumper from the late 80s and was looking at herself in the mirror when she idly asked, "does this make me look chunky?" my sister and i immediately gave each other significantdangereyes. injecting a forced tone of casual inquiry into our voices, we asked, "why? what's wrong with being chunky?" and my niece said, "i don't want to be chunky, like ____" "who?" i asked. "___" she repeated. my sister looked me in the eye and imperceptibly nodded, "like ___," she said, mouthing the words, "he's kind of chunky" lol!!!!! poor little chunky gaffer. so then we told her there was nothing wrong with being chunky.

later on, when we were having dinner at my grandparent's favorite restaurant she was throwing a pretend costume party for everyone while we were eating and we started giving her the gears, "can i have a chunky costume?" (me) "can i have chunky peanut butter at the party?" (dotytron) etc. exasperated at the teasing, she burst out, "why does everyone want to be CHUNKY?!??" and then we said, "what's wrong with being chunky?" and she said, "don't you see the sign?" (pointing at an imaginary spot on the wall.) me and my sister gave each other dangereyes again. "what does the sign say?" and you could totally see the expressions flicker across her unguarded, impatient little imp face. she paused, and then we prodded her. "it says: no chunky persons INVITED!" terrible!!! the poor little lamb! where is she getting this stuff from? chunky isn't even a kid word! she's only four! but kids are so crafty. when we asked her point blank, "is it okay to be chunky?" she's say yes, but you could see in her eyes that she didn't believe it.

le sigh. it's hard to know what to do and how to approach it. you don't want to turn it into a giant thing, but at the same time, there's going to be a good 10 years of the vicious cruelty of kids/young teenagers ahead of her...there's no need to get a jump on it now.

tonight for dinner i made us meatball subs with leftover frozen cooked meatballs, simmered in defrosted frozen tomato-basil sauce, and topped with provolone cheese and broiled in the oven. served with a mixed generic salad with thousand island dressing.

in other news...my family is going to disney world this summer. eeks! and then the dotytron and i are going to follow that up with a week and a bit in hawai'i. the prices at disney are SO MUCH LOWER in august. it's their low season (coinciding with hurricane and typhoon season.) we used to go in august when i was a kid. it was hot and muggy and humid and there'd be periodic flash thunderstorms when the skies would open up and unleash a torrent upon you and then five minutes later the sun would be back, turning the water into tacky, sizzling vapour. the weather we're not concerned about. we'll bring rain gear. plus, the other alternative was going during the holidays when you get GANKED on the prices and when the park is teeming with people. as i said to my sister, if disney can't protect us during a hurricane, then i don't know what can. lol!

i was worried the dotytron would feel robbed of his lune de miel by piggybacking it on a family vacay, but he was surprisingly amenable. since i'm doing all the vacation planning, it's actually kind of nice for me. before i had to worry about researching all 4 major islands and then somehow whittling it down. if we only have just over a week, we can focus on one island. because seeing the volcano and hopefully catching some lava is our primary goal, that limits us to the big island, hawai'i. much easier! i've found us some cute b&bs to stay at...i'm excited!

this is all provided of course that the upcoming ontario budget doesn't obliterate my job. *weak laughter*

no seriously. i hope i don't get laid off.

fin.

food and culture

this is what i've been eating lately:

that pile of barfy-looking slop is actually vegan shepherd's pie, featuring my THIRD reincarnation of the french onion soup from weeks back. thrifty domesticity strikes again! observant readers will remember that i transformed the leftover french onion soup into a caramelized onion gravy for our sunday roast dinner (not this past sunday, the one before.) i then used the leftover gravy to add some moisture, flavour, and viscosity to the filling of my veggie shepherd's pie. the filling also featured leftover bacon-fat and sage roasted kabocha squash from the same meal that i had been hoarding in my fridge like a creepy miser. the filling also had onions, garlic, carrots, mushrooms and tvp. i topped it with leftover mashed potatoes (also from sunday roast chicken night) with some newly mashed potatoes to bulk it up, that i mashed with dill and buttermilk. then i topped the whole thing with grated cheddar cheese and threw it in the oven. it was quite nice with a squooge of ketchup.

on saturday, to go with out movie watching and our desserts-on-the-weekend edict, i made beignets. the dough was really nice, we dusted half of them in powdered sugar and the other half in cinnamon sugar and were eating them piping hot straight out of the fryer. they were delectable! they lost their lustre and toughened up in a direct relationship with how removed they were from the hot kiss of fresh canola oil, but they were still good. the dotytron had an inspired moment where he realized that donut holes play the role of evening the distribution of mass in a donut so that they're easy to flip and don't roll over (my first batch of un-holed donuts - sorry, beignets - were refusing to flip and overbrowning on one side).

with the donut trimmings we made these cute little guys, our donutty men from a donutty planet (corporeal integrity was a bit of an issue...a lot of them did not emerge from their boiling canola oil bath intact):


this is my sad sunday breakkie corned beef hash, complete with busted yolk fried eggs:

and finally, the banana tart of love - this was AMAZING, if i do say so myself:




tonight for dinner we had a roasted butternut squash, sage, and gorgonzola pasta. it was SO easy! it's like a mash-up between my roasted squash and brown butter pasta and the spinach and mushroom pasta with two cheeses.

that's enough out of me. i have to finish seaming up that baby sweater so that i can fully put it in the can and i've got some pleasure reading to do. the pleasure reading includes: RESEARCHING A HAWAII VACATION!

that's right, i think we might go to hawaii for our lune de miel (doesn't that sound like, 70% less ghey than 'honeymoon'?) the dotytron has been gripped with the desire to check out volcanic activity since he took that correspondence geoscience course last year and it JUST SO HAPPENS that hawaii is home to some of the world's most active volcanoes. AND you can get a return flight from honolulu for SIX HUNDRED DOLLARS. THAT'S CHEAPER THAN VANCOUVER. IT'S LIKE THEY'RE PAYING US TO GO! lol! that justification only goes so far because hotels in hawaii are muy expensivo. i'm kind of thinking i might want to bling out for the first few days and stay at a top-flight place and then return to our usual mode of travel for the adventuring/volcano-chasing/hiking part. anyway, right now that's number 1 with a bullet. i want to sit on a white sand beach and roast in the sun and relax and then go snorkeling and scuba diving. the dotytron is pretty hell-bent on us getting our scuba certification in toronto first so we don't waste time being n00bs in hawaii. lol! i can't believe this is kind of sorta in the preliminary stages of happening.

i know this is a pretty dinky post...i really want to finish that baby sweater and i'm kind of zonked right now. i'll be back with book reviews tomorrow.

fin.


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butternut squash, sage, and gorgonzola pasta

serves 4-6, main course

1 large or 2 small butternut squash(es), peeled, and cut into 1/2"-1" cubes
1/4 bunch of sage (like a 1/4 c. chopped)
150 g. gorgonzola cheese (the dolcette kind), cut into smallish pieces
4 T. of butter, cut into small pieces
1 lb. of dry, short pasta of your choice
olive oil
salt and pepper

- toss the squash cubes in olive oil, salt, pepper, and the chopped sage. throw these on a sheet pan in a 450F oven and roast until golden brown and tender (about 30 minutes)
- meanwhile, have a pot of boiling salted water going.
- when the squash is close to being done, cook your pasta.
- when the pasta is al dente, drain it, and toss it with the gorgonzola, butter, and cooked squash. season to taste with salt and pepper.