Roll out those...

lazy, hazy, crazy days of summer indeed. Once again, my heart is full to bursting after all the lovely time spent this past weekend.

As it turns out - I'm NOT the worst player on our softball team! Wahoo!!! I caught a pop fly and felt really good about it...but my problem is I have to remember that unlike dodgeball, where a certain degree of showboating is forgivable (or so I like to think), in softball, hooting and hollering when you catch a pop fly isn't the best strategy, because as my teammate said, your opponents "keep running." So I got to check that impulse and instead complete the play. In this case, it was fine, but for future reference, don't ya know. I also took a line drive to the shin and was a total tough guy about it, but it hurt like a mother. I was playing second and the Dotytron, who was on third, was laughing later about how when it happened, he saw the ball smack dead onto the bone of my shin, saw me grimace for a second with an "oh that smarts" expression on my face (somewhat akin to Sideshow Bob's expression getting hit in the face with a rake in the "Cape Feare" episode of the Simpsons), take a deep breath, and then pick up the offending ball resignedly and complete the play. LOL! I'm still laughing about how it must have looked from the outside because it was a bit of a doozy.

I kind of feel sorry for people who don't use fans to cool their house. I find something so soothing about the rhythmic whirring of an oscillating fan. On Friday, the Big Yam was being a bit of a fuss in the afternoon so I took him up to our room and nursed him while I read on my Kindle. Our room gets beautiful light during the day, diffused slightly by our sheer curtains, and with the sound of the fan the only other noise punctuating his contented nursing at my boob, it was perhaps 20 of the most relaxing, perfectly content minutes of my life. Especially when it was punctuated with the Big Yam detaching himself with a breathy sigh and falling asleep looking like this:

That face!!! I love his face in repose. I love his little hand on his stomach all happy and relaxed. I love thinking about what happy dreams he's having, lulled by the sun, a belly full of milk, and the metronomic regularity of the fan.

Friday night I made us a white pizza on homemade pizza dough of ricotta, mozzarella, baby arugala, and proscuitto:

Saturday morning we took my mum and Poh Poh out to lunch at Phoenix. I ordered the ox tongue on fried rice with cream sauce and black pepper sauce:

We also had the spicy ground pork Korean rice bowl:

Saturday I handed over the Big Yam to the Dotytron so I could finish my assignment for school, which I managed to do! And I submitted it 3 days early! Yay! Then we met up with R & R at the Ceili Cottage for cask-conditioned ales and oysters and kettle chips and mac'n'cheese and a whinging, whiny, yelly Big Yam disturbing the dining experiences of an entire patio. Ugh. Some madness compelled me to invite R & R over to our (uncleaned!) house and give them a tour of what $350,000 will buy you in Leslieville (which I think effectively scared them off from ever moving - the piles of dirty laundry are an effective deterrent). On the bike ride home I was frantically shouting instructions to the Dotytron: "Okay, when you get home. Put the Big Yam to bed and then rip the Slanket off the couch!!! Wipe off the coffee table!!! Sweep and vacuum the floor!!!" and then I realized the madness of trying to accomplish any of that (did I mention that R & R were driving from Ceili Cottage?) and said, "You know what? This is stupid. We like these guys. They're just going to have to see us warts and all." So instead we plied them with scotch until (hopefully) the state of lil' ugmo blurred into the edges of a warm, fuzzy, single-malt buzz.

Sunday we hit the newly launched Leslieville Farmer's Market (upwardly mobile urban parent check 1!), after grabbing the Dotytron a coffee from the best coffee shop in town, Voulez-Vous Café (upwardly mobile urban parent check 2!), which was deemed thus by our rabidly coffee obsessed/food snob neighbour. Then we came home, set up our window unit a/c (which works so unbelievably well that I am not even batting an eye at the projected heat wave to come mid-week. Seriously. We closed the door and turned it on for 15 minutes and when we went in, the room was a meat locker), cleaned the house, and took the Big Yam to Withrow Park for some catch and swings.

In case you were wondering if the Big Yam looks ADORABLE in his helmet riding in the Chariot, I'll let you decide for yourself with the following photographic evidence:

The kid loves a good swing more than anything. He's always found the near/far thing hilarious, so whenever you put him in a swing, you get the following reaction:

He's also recently discovered his tongue and is always sticking it out/touching the tip of his tongue to his upper lip which is freaking hilarious (and a precursor to being able to make "l" sounds, methinks?) He's been a bit of a mega fuss lately and he's been gnawing on anything in sight, so I think more teeth are imminent. I'm going to miss the just-the-bottom-two action because it's so freakin' cute...but I suppose I can't relegate my child to a life of gumming food for my personal amusement. Besides, what's cute in childhood is faces-of-meth in adulthood.

Sunday was a perfect day. It was the first day in a loooooooooooong time (maybe all year) when we could set our own schedule, do things on our own time, where we didn't have school/work-related stuff that we HAD to do occupying our time. And it was STILL productive! (C'mon, you didn't really think there could be a perfect day without SOME productivity, do you?) We still cleaned the house and got dinner ready and set up the a/c - but it was our choice when/how these things were accomplished. And it was interspersed with big stretches of being together and enjoying ourselves and leisure. The perfect balance, seriously. I don't really get how people who DON'T have work they bring home or who AREN'T doing a Master's degree on their maternity leave have any excuses not to get shiz done.

We had Lolly over for dinner and I made us a mezes meal of: fattoush salad, baba ghanouj, fried haloumi, charmoula-spiced beef strips, warmed pitas, and purchased crab, asiago & wasabi dip from Leslieville Cheese Market. Delicious!

For dessert I made us a coconut-lime semifreddo, which was easy and delicious (I'll post the recipe at the end). So good! My only quibble is that I found it a little too sweet, so I might reduce the condensed milk by half. I'll reproduce the recipe as I found it - since I haven't tried reducing the condensed milk and can't vouch for how that might affect the texture - it was cool, creamy, spiked with lime's brightness with chewy bites of toasted coconut for texture. Soooo good:

Today the plan is to take the Big Yam to the drop-in centre, get some school work done, and make us a tasty dinner. I went for a run this morning and I'm going to follow it up with yoga in the afternoon and maybe some catch tonight in the dusk. The Dotytron and I have a new plan to keep us on track, fitness wise...we're fake boot camping. We're basically going to put the money we would have spent on boot camp in a pot and just make sure we work out for the same amount of time (3 hours/week) pushing ourselves but doing our own activities (ie. I'm not into circuit training, so I'm going to do a mix of cardio and yoga), and if we keep it up all summer we're going to spend that money on something we want. We'll see how this goes!

Fin.

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Coconut Lime Semifreddo

adapted from Martha Stewart's Everyday Food Magazine

serves around 8-10

1 can of coconut milk

1 can of condensed milk

zest of 2 limes

1/2 t. salt

1 1/2 c. of cold whipping cream

1 c. of unsweetened, shredded coconut

- line a loaf pan with plastic wrap, making sure there is overhang on all sides

- toast the coconut in a 375F degree oven for 10 minutes, or until evenly golden brown, stirring every 3 minutes or so to make sure it toasts evenly

- heat the coconut milk and condensed milk in a pot over medium heat until it comes to a boil, reduce the heat and simmer for about 10 minutes or until thickened

- remove the milk mixture, stir in the lime zest, and about 1/2 c. of the toasted coconut, and set aside until cool and no longer warm to the touch (you can stick it in the fridge)

- whip the whipping cream until stiff peaks form, and then fold in the cooled coconut mixture until pretty evenly mixed

- pour the mixture into the prepared loaf pan, sprinkle the top with the remaining 1/2 c. of toasted coconut and wrap the top with plastic wrap.

- freeze for 6 hours or overnight until firm.

- before serving, take it out to room temperature for 20 minutes, unmold onto a platter, slice and serve

lazy summer evenings

are spent playing in a badminton tourney with the neighbourhood kids and adults and having over-the-fence conversations about gentrification anxieties like good schools versus bad schools and building permits and demo permits and pre-schools and all day kindergarten.

that's what we did last night after a dinner of muttar paneer with minted yoghurt and a squirt of lime on a bed of brown rice:



the questions never stop when you're incubating a parasite. first people want to know how you're feeling. then if you're going to find out the sex. then people want to know the name situation. we've had a shortlist of boy and girl names for a while with some obvious front runners that are a leetle controversial. i think we'll wait until the fatburger makes an appearance before making the final, final decision, in case our favorite doesn't fit. plus, i didn't know this, but people can be JERKS about the names. for the record, my mum is rooting for elvis. she wanted to name c-hova that when he was born over 2 decades ago. either elvis or thor. lol!

so. literature.

i finished "asterios polyp" AGES ago. it's a graphic novel about an architect who tends to see things in binary terms. following an "act of god" (lighting) which burns down his home, he goes on a journey and lives in a small town and the comic tracks the evolution in his worldview, as the present-day events are interspersed with scenes of asterios' failed marriage, his career and life. there are also portions of the story that are narrated by his twin brother, who died at birth. this comic won a billion eisner awards when it came out - it was quite good, although the goodness is more in the reading than in my re-telling. it was kind of like a less depressing, more urban alice munro story.

speaking of which...alice munro's "too much happiness" should have been called "ANYTHING BUT too much happiness" it was so depressing! depressing stories of downtrodden white people in small town ontario going about their pathetic lives with wistful, hazy internal monologues i didn't really give a flying crap about. i found it incredibly boring. it was my first alice munro and definitely my last. i just didn't CARE. the writing was never all that engaging the stories never all that enticing - just a bunch of faux-literary vignettes where you're supposed to "read between the lines" to tease out what the author is REALLY getting at. i don't care to work that hard for short stories! especially short stories about stupid problems. i give it a resounding MEH.

"when you reach me" is a FANTASTIC, newberry award-winning YA novel in the same vein as madeleine l'engle's work - that is, it is set in the real world but features dalliances with science fictiony-y elements that are nonetheless firmly rooted in realism. told from the point of a view of a 12 year old (ish, it's been a while) girl, in the summer of the late 1970s in new york city, it features a bit of a mystery and slowly unravels an enthralling, sad, bildungsroman-ish story by employing an epistolary format. there's nothing genre-y about this. no romance, no flighty typical girly girl stuff - just solid, accessible storytelling.

lawrence hill's "the book of negroes" was my academic book club's previous selection before i made them read "twilight." the book club found it divisive and we weren't unanimously in favour of it. i didn't really like it. it tells the story of aminata, a young girl who is taken from her tribe in western africa by slave traders and makes the journey across the atlantic to the rice plantations of the carolinas, up to new york, then eastern canada's black communities, and then back to africa and finally england. it tracks the story of aminata's life and weaves in historical tidbits at the same time. the author is a historian by nature and i thought one of the major faults of the novel was that. it read more like a laundry list of events than anything else. it didn't really make the history "come alive" so to speak and it certainly didn't delve into the character or motivations of aminata at all. she's a bit of a blank slate, really. and in so far as one can say this, she was also one of the luckiest slaves ever. rarely beaten, always fortuitously saved from the rigors of physical labour through the intervention or discovery of one of her myriad skills (she has midwifery training, can read, and speak many languages), she never really has to make hard moral choices, which makes the story much less interesting and captivating as fiction. the ending is a little trite and pat and that didn't help.

so that's what i've been reading, and now we're all caught up.

last night the neighbours across the street ordered KFC, which got me all hot and bothered to eat KFC again. the dotytron does not share my enthusiasm. i know that realistically, i'm going to eat it and it's not going to be as good as i remember, but i've got a KFC itch that needs scratching...and i don't know why! they followed up their meal with two-bite brownies which had me hankering for some brownies as well. since i can replicate brownies a lot easier than i can replicate KFC, i'll post the recipe i used.

tonight we're having perogies with bacon, onions, garlic, sour cream and scallions. with leftovers of that crunchy salad from monday night. this is shaping up to be a weekend of heavy eating so the KFC fix will have to come another night.

fin.

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katharine hepburn's brownie recipe
only very small adaptations made to a recipe pulled from my gourmet cookbook

1 stick (1/2 c.) unsalted butter
2 oz unsweetened chocolate (i used semi-sweet cuz that's what i had on hand)
2 eggs
1 c. sugar
1/2 t. salt
1/3 c. of flour
1 t. of vanilla
1 c. of chopped nuts (optional - original recipe recommends walnuts but i find them
- grease and flour and 8" square pan and pre-heat your oven to 325F
- melt the butter and chocolate together in a saucepan over medium-low heat until melted and smooth.
- take the pot off the heat and stir in the eggs, the sugar, the flour, and the vanilla, and the nuts, if you're adding it.
- scrape into the prepared pan and bake for about 40 minutes until a toothpick comes out clean and the top is glossy.
- this makes about 16 2" brownie squares.

*note: i added the scrapings from an almost empty jar of nutella to the brownie mixture - about 1/4 c. and it was DELICIOUS but it did make the brownies a little too sweet. you can follow my example but i would reduce the sugar by 1/3 or even 1/2 a cup.