i'm gonna be a great dad

i spent all of yesterday doing fun, house-chores type stuff like making a batch of chicken soup for the dotytron, who is capable of psychosomatic-ing/manifest destiny-ing illness at the slightest provocation or in response to any perceived stress. i also prepped and painted the white wall in the dining room, edging and giving it 2 coats. i also puttied up a hole that resulted from us moving a picture, tidied, dusted, and supervised the installation of new shelving in the bathroom. it was IMMENSELY satisfying, even if sunday will go down in infamy as the time the dotytron made his preggos wife paint the dining room by herself. any time i can wear my home depot painting hat:

and walk around with a measuring tape and level and prep a room for painting and otherwise work on the house on the kind of gorgeous, hot, early-summer day that makes everyone else play hooky from house stuff and flock outside in droves, is a good day. i was seriously born to be a dad. i'm totally going to be angry dad sports team coach. or, futzing around the house in overalls dad. the dotytron has generously offered to step up and be the mom, which is kind of awesome.

here are my painting rules for success. the first rule is really, SET YOURSELF UP FOR SUCCESS. which means do all the boring prep work and make sure you have all the tools so that when you're ready to go, you're READY TO GO and all you have to do is paint:

1) USE THE 3M BLUE PAINTERS TAPE. green tape is poo. don't even bother. you're just throwing money away.
2) get one of the paint can plastic lip things:
- you stick it to the edge of the can and then it curves around and lets you get a clean pour
3) get a paint can opener:


4) tape down your drop cloths and do all the boring taping (note: i'm assuming that most people are NOT like me and find taping supremely boring - i am a freak that loves doing this kind of prep work)
5) have all your tools out and ready to go

saturday night was the funnest. we hitched a ride with lolls to kdubs and had a FEAST OF EPIC PROPORTIONS including: grilled sausages, chicken breast, veggie burgers, portobello mushrooms, vegetables, red quinoa salad, asparagus risotto, orzo salad, bacon-wrapped grilled jalepeno poppers, green salad, macaroni salad, chocolate hazelnut mousse cake, and key lime pie. it was so the best. there was also a spirited discussion on the proper use of the semi-colon and hair cuts. lolls also played the marriage ref for me and the dotytron on the way home. it was cute.

however, we got home super-late and i've been battling a low-grade headache and feeling like i need to sleep like, all the time since friday, so i was a bad daughter and bailed on my mum for brunch. i was supposed to take her to the black hoof for breakkie but i knew we'd have to leave the house super-early to get a table and i needed the extra sleep. she was very cute and sweet about it though...even though she woke up at 7AM ON A SUNDAY to make sure she got downtown in time! lol.

this was sunday breakkie:

 

a bacon, egg, avocado, lettuce, tomato, and mayo sammie on a whole wheat kaiser.

later in the afternoon our buddy L came over to help measure our kitchen and help us conceptualize how the redesign might go. then our supper club met for dinner. i suggested queen margherita pizza. the dotytron got the prix fixe and i got just a pizza. the good news is: they've improved on the bread situation. this time the bread came out and it was nicely toasted and was of a better quality than the tuesday night visit. he started with the capicollo appetizer, which had 2 strips of capicollo, a small pile of diced roasted peppers, and a small pile of olives:

 

this appetizer was kind of ill-conceived and poorly executed. the peppers were cold and the portion was kind of small. i much enjoyed the ricotta with honey and the potatoes, sausage, and peppers from last tuesday. i can appreciate that they want to change the apps every day, but i kind of think that they should make sure they have a roster of like, 3 or 4 equally good ones, first.

the dotytron got a pizza that was supposed to have spicy sausage, olives, and tomatoes, but was absent the sausage and with no good reason or explanation:

 

i got the pizza quattro formaggio with funghi, which was curiously absent the funghi:

 

mine was really good though. the four cheeses (ricotta, fior di latte, gorgonzola, and something else) really melded together nicely. the advertised mushrooms would have definitely added to the dish, but they weren't missed. what WAS missed was the complete lack of acknowledgement that they were supposed to be there in the first place!

the dotytron picked an arugala and pomegranate seed salad for his post-pizza salad:
i have to say, the prix fixe is A LOT of food. the pizzas are pretty big (12") and very filling. i ended up getting a nondescript panna cotta for dessert, served with a strawberry water.

tonight i was working the late shift at work which means i packed my dinner. it was the aforementioned chicken vegetable soup and that moroccan potato, pepper and egg sandwich with harissa that i make:



fin.

no motivation, zero energy

that's pretty much me right now. last night i went to bed at 8:00pm. more correctly, i passed out while re-reading e. lockhart's "ruby oliver" series of young adult fiction (that i adore more than life itself) huddled under an afghan in my freezing cold living room only to wake up an hour later with a crick in my neck and a cloudy mind. i managed to haul myself through the wet wool torpor that made my limbs and consciousness sodden and sluggish upstairs whereupon i announced to the dotytron in as pathetic a voice as i could muster that, "i don't feel so good" and then threw off my clothes and curled under the covers only to wake again at 6:00am this morning when the alarm went off.

on the plus side, i managed to pick up a whole new slew of paint chips for the dining room and they're much more promising. i just have to muster the courage to actually see my vision through and go a deep, dark, green-y teal/turquoise on the walls. 3 walls will be that colour and one wall will be white. technically, it's not even 3 full walls, as 1 of the walls has the archway into the living room and the other wall is mostly the window. do i have the nads to go dark, jewel tones in the dining room? stay tuned and find out!

anything has to be better than the namby pamby slightly too-blue/grey combo we have in there. ugh.

i've read a tonne of books lately, but i have no motivation to review them. i somehow convinced my academic book club (which i'm hosting - eek!) to read "twilight" by stephenie meyer. lol! we'll see how they do. there was some resistance but i'm like, ladies - let's find out what this is all about, shall we? having them come over in the second week of june is giving me a very fixed deadline to work towards in terms of getting the dining room ready. hopefully couch numero dos gets here in time, too. there's nothing like having a whack of people over to get your jazzed to get your house ready.

tonight we had dinner with the roomie at queen margherita pizza. i forgot my camera because forgetting things is part of my life at the moment and i've made peace with it. i have another opportunity to capture the chewy-crusted goodness on sunday as we're taking the supper club there. my capsule review is very favorable. they push the prix fixe on you but will allow you to order pizzas a la carte. some of the pizza topping combinations are lacking (plus one, libretto) but most hardcore pizza heads will tell you that pizza is ultimately about the sauce and the crust. the crust is pretty damn amazing. it's not as uniformly thin as libretto's but to me, has a more textbook correct brawny, puffy chew to it, with some nice char spots on the underside. it's more reminiscent of the naples-style pizza we had in florence (which i know is a locovore/slow foodist's nightmare, but i didn't go to naples, so suck it, aight?)

l'army couldn't make it so we ordered 2 à la carte pizzas and 2 prix fixe. first they brought out terrible, terrible bread. like, IGA generic "baguette" bread - tight, snow-white crumb, no flavour, etc. with olive oil and balsamic to make a slurry for dipping. i'm not particularly fond of dipping my bread in olive oil and balsamic under the best of circumstances and when it's crappy bread, i'm even less inclined. i don't know why they don't just send out pieces of their pizza dough - straight from the wood-fired oven.

one of our antipasti was sausage, red peppers and potatoes which is exactly as it sounds - fluffy skinless yukon gold potato chunks, big pieces of denuded fennel-flecked italian sausage and strips of red pepper in a jolly melange. this was very tasty. the other was buffalo milk ricotta with chopped pecans, cranberries, and honey. we all felt that the ricotta was delicious with the accoutrements, minus the honey - which made everything taste like honey instead of letting the milky sweetness of the ricotta shine through. plus, the cranberries provide a lovely sweet-tart counterpoint, you don't need the heavy, treacly hand of honey on a dish that delicate - throws the whole balance off.

when the pizzas arrived we passed slices around so that we got to try all four. the dotytron's pizza was the best - it had italian sausage, cheese, tomato sauce. the other fantastic thing about queen margherita is the sauce. full of pulpy, bright tomato flavour. i can't remember what the sauce at libretto tasted like. i got a vegetarian pizza that was okay, the roomie went off the rails and got a smoked salmon pizza with mascarpone that was pretty bad (but i don't really think a neapolitan style pizza place should even have smoked salmon pizza on the menu anyway), and we tried l'army's which had proscuitto cotto and olives. i will say the topping combinations at libretto are better - but again, i think if margherita dialed it back to just a few basic topping combinations, they would knock it out of the park. scrap the smoked salmon (ugh), don't do a vegetarian if you've already got the margherita, limit your topping numbers to 3. on the strength of the crust and the sauce alone, i think margherita has libretto beat.

libretto has a more extensive menu though, so they get points for that, but they're also in one of the most annoying neighbourhoods in toronto, so minus points. ultimately, margherita will win because they're a 5 minute walk from my house, they take resos, and no pizza in the world is so good that it warrants a 2 hour wait. and the crust and sauce at margherita are insanely good. you just have to pick your pizza judiciously. i think on sunday i'm going to go the classico route and order a margherita pizza - the pizza standard.

the prix fixe follows up your pizza with a salad, in this case a mixed greens with a honey drizzled pear. the dressing was pretty ace - vinegary and sweet at the same time.

we also split a dessert, "nonna's" tiramisu which apparently is ACTUALLY made by "rocco's" nonna. it was good - boozy and light. points off for the highly unorthodox whipped cream topping. additional points off for being a saucerfull of tiramisu for 7 dollars.

i'll post pics on sunday (if i remember to bring my camera).

here's an installment that we haven't had in a while:

roll call of awesome:

dan style's art prints - available here:




the world maps from these are things:


i love futura font. i think the aqua print would look great in the fatburger's room (or even ours), but we just bought this ork poster toronto print in black and white for the big wall leading up the stairs:

so i feel like the hyper-masculine black and silver one would go better with the colour story i'm developing there. i'm thinking black and greys against the pale-pale grey wall with some black and white significant photos hung with bulldog clips.

this light shade is pretty boss. it's also $950 (excluding delivery)

wylie dufresne. so awesome. we've been watching "top chef masters" and i just love his little face and his mannerisms and the fact that he uses thomas' english muffins in the deconstructed eggs benedict dish at his restaurant wd-50 because he says there's nothing better (and i totally agree - thomas' english muffins are THE BEST.) i think he's super-talented, inspiring, and still totally approachable, unlike cerebro weirdos like grant achatz.

fin.