La Ferme

The Big Yam's first time at the farm was a raging success, if you measure success by the happiness of a baby going to town on a T-bone steak:

The kid loves his red meat. Apparently T-bones make great teethers. By the end of that whole ordeal he was so covered in an insulating coating of beef tallow that water was beading up on his skin. I love R & R Acres - it's so relaxing - sleeping in the bunkie, taking naps, tooting around antiquing little wee towns, eating copious amounts of red meat, visiting with our hosts:

Shooting guns:

That's me with a .22 calibre rifle. I also shot a .22 handgun, a .45 rifle and a shotgun. I know guns are bad, blah blah blah...but I really do love shooting. I love the accuracy involved in it, I love the little adrenaline rush of feeling like you're doing something bad, and I love steeling myself for the kick. Pumping a shotgun makes you feel badass. I know there's something intrinsically wrong in our culture that it romanticizes the authoritative click of a pumped shotgun, but I can't help it - it makes you feel like you could actually take on an army of zombies and win. I'd like to get my gun license and then my hunting license in the next little while so that I can join in on the duck hunt. I feel like duck are a good hunting starting point - it'd be hard for me to look a deer in the eye after I shot it - as much as I love venison, it wouldn't be easy.

Over the years they've kind of wound down the number of livestock on the farm - the upkeep is just too much. Right now they have sheep, some turkeys, chickens, and some Muscovy ducks. I thought that this male turkey looked a lot like Little Big Cuz:

Here's a photo of nephew M for reference:

Am I crazy? Something about the big, gentle, wiser-than-their-years expression in their eyes and their little barrel chests.

Our goody bag from the Farm included a bag of frozen venison hearts, tongues, and assorted duck and Canada goose offal (gizzards, more hearts and the like). I'm excited to see what I can do with it. I love eating tongue - it's so tender and flavourful, although my tongue experiences thus far have been limited to ox tongue and duck tongues. Luckily, I have my 1962 edition of the Joy of Cooking to help me through it. Gotta love the Joy of Cooking - they'll probably advocate that I nap the tongue in some weird, retro-French master sauce, but at least it'll give me some tips on how best to prep the organs. We also got some pepperettes and a summer sausage made from random meat from R's hunting spoils - the summer sausage has beef, duck, Canada goose, venison and other random goodies in it and it's DELICIOUS.

Some food roundup -

Dinner with P before we left for the farm - corn sauté, pan-seared cured pork chops, green salad

Dessert for P - peach-blueberry crisp with whipped cream

Farm food: T-bone steaks (local, Walkerton meat), green salad, broccoli slaw

Farm breakfast: bacon, eggs, homefries

Blueberry sour cream pie

Today is a laundry, back-to-reality day as we ready ourselves for the arrival of Miss Ramona, who will be spending 3 days with us at Camp Leslieville. My mum is also having us take care of my Poh Poh all day tomorrow - which should be interesting - it kind of limits what we can do but I figure we'll stick around the neighbourhood and go for bike rides or swimming or something. Additionally, Dr. Rei is coming over this afternoon for some fun time.

Here is a bonus video of the Dotytron's turkey intimidation tactics. I find this HILARIOUS - there was one female turkey in particular who was quite bold and kept freaking out Ehmdo by chasing us and the Dotytron would do his weird technique and had me howling:

Fin.

The bitter sting of discrimination

I spent all yesterday in Elmira with Lolly et al. doing some wedding dress shopping at this bridal boutique in the middle of farm country. It was a fun outing, but I was also the recipient of a VERY frosty reception from some old skool Mennonites at the quilting store in town (and by "town," I mean the one commercial strip for miles.) The women in the store were kind of gawking and shying away from me and SMckay and the proprietor lady was quite curt and dour and refused all my effusive compliments on her store. I was like, WTF ladies - DON'T BE SO UNCHRISTIAN! So SMckay may or may not have nearly knocked over a display of religious greeting cards - no need to be such dicks about it. So I might have not been dressed appropriately for my age in a too-short H&M babydoll and a fierce side French braid that snaked around my head - them Mennonite b***hes shouldn't be so jelly of my acres of tanned, brown, not-so-toned skin. It's just flesh! Relax gurlz!

Tuesday night's outing with Dr. Rei and Montréal I and the roomie was fun - we had dinner at Gourmet Burger Co. and then went to our movie. I also picked up some new pants for work - high waisted trouser cut jeans (sshhhh...don't tell HR!) in an intense blue-black:

I really want to sharpen up my work wardrobe. I've been coasting since graduating from school and I want to get serious about my work style - since that's where I spend the majority of my time anyway. For the fall, I'm thinking sweater dresses with boots and a crisp white dress shirt underneath. Sleeveless, 60s looking dresses in black and grey with a brightly coloured turtleneck, tights, and open toed sandals with a chunky heel. Trouser cut pants with a tucked in shirt, a colourful cardigan and a contrasting skinny belt. Some new flats and a new purse that says grown-up.

Crazy, Stupid, Love was aight. I don't think it's deserving of the critical praise being heaped on it. It's being touted as a mature love story but it's not that mature. The story centres around Cal Weaver, who is 20-odd-years into a marriage with Julianne Moore's character and has gotten depressingly complacent - to the point where his wife has an affair and wants a divorce. Broken and lost, he ends up frequenting a bar where a slick lothario in the extremely-easy-on-the-eyes form of Ryan Gosling takes him under his wing for lessons in how to mack the ladies and get his groove back. There's also Emma Stone as Hannah - a lawyer who is awkward in all things relationship and who catches the eye of Ryan Gosling. An unnecessary subplot involves Cal's babysitter's immature lust for Cal and Cal's son's unrequited love for the babysitter. The interwoven plot reaches at times with the tidiness of the interrelationships and some stories are more compelling than others. The tone breaks between farce and more tender, realistic moments and I found the shifts for cheap laughs jarring. Overall, it was okay, but definitely felt over-long at certain moments and didn't deliver on the laughs.

We saw the movie in the Varsity VIP room which costs more (the timing was better for our respective schedules) and which has stupid benefits like: bigger seats, seats set up in pairs with crappy cheap plastic side tables separating the groups, and someone taking your order and delivering your snacks to you. For like, $20 a ticket on a regular night. LAME! They also only show 2 movie previews which is the

Tonight I'm going with Dr. Rei to the premiere of One Day which is based on a fairly meh novel by David Nicholls featuring 2 intensely irritating and unlikable protagonists that got an undeserved amount of good reviews/press and which my academic Book Club has chosen as their next title, alongside John Updike's Couples (the theme is monogamous pairings, apparently) which I haven't picked up from the bibliotheque yet but which I anticipate will be mad borzorz. We shall see what the night brings. This is after my friend P who is in town from Egypt comes over for the earliest dinner of all time, which makes him extremely accommodating considering I had originally totally bumped him to go to this movie with Dr. Rei until I realized that I COULD HAVE IT ALL by eating dinner at 4pm. Yay!

Tomorrow we're headed off for our last road trip of the summer - to R & R Acres. Big Yam at the Farm (the other farm - like, the real working farm, and not Lolls' farm)! Ehmdo is coming too! Fun!

In the meantime, imma leave you with this video of the Big Yam eating a piece of corn on the cob which is kind of hilarious, mostly because he does this awesome thing where he holds it in his mouth and then blows around it (the sound of him blowing is most obvious at the 1:18 mark):

Doubtful I'll have time to post before I head out - but when I come back, regular posting will resumeth!

Fin.

Unexplained phenomena

There was a photo from before I left for my vacation at the bottom of a post that I didn't describe and some of you astute readers might have finished reading that particularly scintillating (it wasn't) entry and gotten to the end and been like, "WTF?" This is the photo in question:

This was a gift to the Big Yam from his Great Nany. It's an obviously handmade, quite tall figure made out of the itchiest, most unsoft, most toxic-seeming foam this side of a Chinese infant formula manufacturing facility. She said she saw it in a store and wanted to get it for the Big Yam. We suspect it was an item used for display purposes, as it's not even finished. The top of his head is open so that you can see into it and there's a cheap ribbon looped through to hang him from something. It is simultaneously creepy, unsafe, and odd and we don't know what the crap to do with it in our house. I don't really want the Big Yam playing with it - it's really shoddily put together with like, wood glue. When I called Great Nany about another unrelated matter, she wondered if it was "Bud Lightyear" - oy. Right now he's been relegated to a dark corner of the basement. Any ideas?

Real life has been pretty good to us so far. I've been taking over mornings so that the Dotytron can do lesson planning and all the other borz0rz stuff that teachers have to do during their time off so that their lives aren't hell. LAME!

But we've been having fun hanging with the roomie and Montréal I, going to parks and for walks and just chilling.

Yesterday I attempted to get our lives back on track and made us whole wheat blueberry pancakes for breakfast. The key to a good pancake (IMO) is making sure you have enough fat in the pan so that you get that crispy ring around the outside (see above). That crispy ring MAKES a pancake, IMO.

Last night Montréal I made us a fish soup for dinner. I was admittedly skeptical. When we lived with her in university I wasn't prepared for her Russian peasant eating habits and would look askance at her dinners of smoked oysters on buttered crackers. Really, it was I who had the growing up to do, as I'm now the person happily scarfing pickled herring on buttered rye bread like I grew up on a gulag in the the Siberian Steppes. The fish soup was very simple - water, carrots, celery, potatoes, dill, salmon, and scallops, shrimp, and squid poached in a lemony marinade tossed in at the last second. I made us a salad of broiled figs stuffed with gorgonzola and wrapped in pancetta on arugala dressed with olive oil and balsamic.

I also made us Mona's Mother's Mother's favorite cookie recipe, which got bumped to the top of the baking queue when our friend N won a family oatmeal cookie baking contest with the recipe. As you well know, I loooooooove winning cooking/baking contests!

Finally, here is a photo of a giant slug that appeared on our back deck, with the Dotytron's hand for reference. HOW CRAZY IS THAT?!??? Giant slugs are GIANT!!! We saw oodles of nature while at the cottage(s) which I get big thrills from. We saw: a muskrat, baby loons, regular sized loons, a doe, a buck (I've never seen a male deer in the wild and this one was super up close), and wild turkeys. That's a pretty impressive tally.

Tonight I'm being reunited with my dove, Dr. Rei and we're going to dinner and seeing Crazy, Stupid, Love with Montréal I and the roomie.

Fin.

Back to life

...back to reality. Taking a look at this year's blogging tally, I noticed that we're three quarters of the way through the year and I've only logged around 80-some-odd posts! What the hell? Who knew that caring for a squalling babe-now-almost-toddler would occupado so much of my writing time? (Answer: everyone.)

We got back from 2 weeks of cottaging bliss on Saturday. The idea of resuming real life was filling me with dread. I could get used to a life of rich, egg-heavy breakfasts, watching the Big Yam splash around in lake water, al fresco dinners, long nap-laden afternoons, and board games. These past 2 weeks were made all the more dear because of my acute awareness that our idyllic, carefree summer of fun has a half life. Several portentous end dates are looming - the end of the Dotytron's summer vacation, the end date on my maternity leave, the time until the Big Yam turns one (which is happy and sad in the most clichéd, time-worn manner imaginable.) I have to keep reminding myself to be conscious of how lucky I am and not to waste away the remaining days by being morose. I made the Dotytron promise in the car ride home on Saturday that when we got home, we'd unpack first (I'm not so crazy about prolonging vacation time that my OCD impulses to unpack and have the house in order don't win out), but that we wouldn't turn on any computers or check into the information superhighway. It made it easier, somehow.

We came home on a hot, sunny, brassy day that highlighted the garden overgrown with weeds, the stuffiness of a house left vacant a little too long, and the drudgery of unpacking a car full of inflatable water toys and pool noodles. By refusing to check into Facebook-land and just being together as a family and easing gently and tentatively into our neighbourhood and the summer edition of our routine, it made the slow shift from vacation mode into summer-quasi-real-life mode not as shocking. Prevented us from getting the post-vacation bends.

It would be impossible to sum up the past few weeks - I took about 400 photos (albeit most of them the blurriest), but here are some of my favorites:

Bruce Wayne actually cooked something!

Little Big Cuz has the cutest, knowing little smile. I love that guy's face.

The last photo is of a 2000 piece puzzle depicting a work by the artist Britto (whom I've never heard of prior to embarking on Puzzlegate 2011.) We bought this puzzle because JSculls was hankering for a challenge. I believe we bought it 4 days into our 7 day stay. It was epic-times at frustration high, resulting in 4 of us staying up until almost 2am on Friday night/Saturday morning, trying to get this b***h done. It was insane. And at the end of it, you're left with this ugly piece of crap! Puzzlegate was an emotional roller coaster of the highest order - the lows were crushing, the highs not very high at all, when it comes down to it.

I thought family cottage time was good - but there were some simmering family dramas that marred things a bit. I don't know if it's just a byproduct of the fact that my bros tend to get along a little better with each other or that my sister and I are closer, but I thought Bruce Wayne and CHova were acting up a bit. The timbre of the board games times can get a little mean spirited and nasty and I'm not a fan of that - especially when I'm on vacation. That being said, I still didn't want that time to end.

Kdubsguelph cottage was fantastic - absolutely no complaints there. It's so nice to be with a big crew of people I love. It's a rarer experience for me to have a crew. I didn't keep many friends from high school or university (where most crews are born and fostered) and so the experience of having a big group of the same people always is the best. It's so comforting. I have smaller, more atomized crews that come together when I host big dinners, but the level of intimacy of kdubsguelph times is hard to replicate. Although I doubt my experience is that singular - I think the the older you get, the more your crews get dispersed and the harder it is to have that strong group bond.

I had a lot of opportunity to play and practice on the ukulele. The Dotytron taught me a blues form and then had me learn to improvise. The next day, after doing some noodling, I turned to the Dotytron while brushing our teeth and asked, "Is my blues playing derivative?" At which point, he practically did a spit-take of toothpaste and put me in my place (the general gist being that having JUST LEARNED to play, I'm not at the point where I could even be derivative.) LOL! This also resulted in me saying that "Look, B.B. King wasn't born in a day" - I'm not even sure where I was going with that.

Certain things contributed to making real life better. I'm going to itemize them:

1) I love my neighbourhood. We had takeout dinner from Amaya on Saturday night and then burritos from Chino Loco's last night and we went on long walks both days and I realized that I love my home.

2) A house at the bottom of the street is listed at $749,000

3) Our friend from Montréal is visiting! Her other visits didn't mesh well with our schedules so this is her first time meeting the Big Yam. We went to visit her in Montréal pre-pregnancy, when we were contemplating pulling the goalie, and then this is the first time since then. So even as I say that I don't have much crew, the roomie and Montréal I are totally crew. A small crew, but the kind of crew where we pick up after a year and a half with no awkward chit-chat, no catching up, instantly into the easy, effortless rapport and deep conversations that make you feel like you're home. Like people know you and accept you and you can just be.

We're spending the day with Montréal I and the roomie and L'armi again today and probably tomorrow.

Fin.

Outtakes

Here are some photos from recent travels and sojourns. This is the Dotytron and T as another public pool/wading pool in our 'hood:

Some photos from our exciting adventure in stinky tofu land, aka "T & T Nightmarket":

My people love them some giant toast (see the "giant toast" dessert at Phoenix for reference.) This stand was selling toast fingers with all kinds of crazy flavorings - we got the coffee caramel one:

This place was selling store bought ice cream with some fairly pedestrian toppings. I think they were getting mad traffic because they hopped on the bacon bandwagon AND because of the cutesy graphics and names for items (my people have no resistance to the cutesy! None!):

We got a "ninja panda" - which is black sesame ice cream with condensed milk and sugared crushed peanuts. I got her to add some coconut - but this was pretty ho-hum all things considered:

Tuesday night's dinner was tuna macaroni salad with a raw beet, apple, and horseradish salad alongside some blanched beans in a sharp mustard vinaigrette:

This is a photo of the Big Yam rocking the very Frrraaanche swimsuit JSculls bought for him - he modeled it for the first time at our pool hang yesterday - looking pretty cute!

We had the outlaw parents babysit so that the Dotytron could take me out for an early birthday dinner. We went against our gut instinct (our gut instinct is to ALWAYS go to Guu or Guu Sakabar) and tried a new place in the neighbourhood, Le Canard Mort, which is owned by the same people who own Le Rossignol, also in the neighbourhood. It was so-so. The service was a little scattered and inexperienced. One of the servers was too busy chatting up a regular about inane things to notice that we were ready for drink refills and that we wanted our check. I also took the liberty of ordering a cocktail for the Dotytron and inadvertently emasculated him by getting something that didn't come in a lowball glass. I thought a gimlet was a classic, manly drink! How am I supposed to know?!?

This is the girl who didn't understand my neighbour's specification that she was bringing "punch for the adults" to the street party and started took three big gulps of what I thought was juice punch, only to INSTANTLY start to feel a little light headed. BECAUSE IT WAS ABOUT HALF VODKA. I haven't had vodka since an ill-advised trip down puking-vodka-cooler-on-my-friend's-driveway's-lane in grade 11. So of course I got all red-faced and my heart was pounding and I realized I very much DISLIKE the sensation of tipsiness and I yammed a million carbs to soak up the light mist of booze in my belly and went up to our bathroom to splash cold water on my face and drank a million glasses of water to flush out my system. The Dotyron insists that the paranoia of being the slightest bit drunk has a greater affect on me than the actual effects of the alcohol itself. It was precautionary - nothing is more unseemly than a drunk parent at the block party, am I right?

Le Canard Mort was so-so. Kind of ho-hum. We got the sweetbreads appetizer, which is served buffalo chicken style - breaded and deep fried and doused in a buttery-hot sauce. Pros: big chunks of sweetbreads. Cons: the sauce made everything a little to soft undermined the breading. This would have been spectacular if it was crispy.

We also split an order of the potted prawns, which featured chopped prawns swimming in a buttery, rich, cheesy sauce with toast for dipping. This was quite tasty, but you just read the description, so it's a bit of a no brainer. It's like the Obvious Mayor of Obvious Culinary Combinations-ville:

I ordered the duck breast, which, as you can tell from the photo, was delivered well over the medium-rare I was informed (rather smugly I might add) it would be served. I hate that. I hate when the server says to you, "Just to warn you, we serve our duck [lamb, salmon, pork, etc.] medium rare...are you okay with that?" and then they inevitably go over. Actually, it's incredible how that invariably happens - the restaurants where servers tell you that they serve their meat "medium rare" are the ones who have no idea what medium rare is or how to get a protein to that point. The "raspberry sauce" was terrible - literally a glop of barely cooked raspberries that had been mixed with the pan sauces and then pureed - like a glob of unnuanced jam on the poor, unsuspecting duck breast.

The Dotytron ordered the chicken cordon bleu - which he said looked like a melting owl:

True! This was okay. Again it was overcooked (you can see how the breading has separated from the meat because the meat has shrunk from loss of moisture) and under seasoned. The vegetables accompanying our meal though, were perfectly crisp-tender. The desserts were underwhelming to say the least: an earl-grey lavendar creme brulee, lemon shortbread with chantilly cream, and some chocolate banana cake. I am definitely in NO hurry to go back and we decided we should have gone with our guts - our guts filled with Guu. We ended up getting a key lime pie and a coconut cream pie from the Great Canadian Pie Company and scarfed it at home watching Friday Night Lights, which is still a damned perfect evening.

It was nice dining a deux though. I like that guy.

Today we're going to see the Dotytron's culminating concert and then doing some more cottage prep.

Fin.

Lit review

Marcelo in the Real World is high-calibre, genre-transcending YA fiction in the vein of John Green's best work. Marcelo has an Aspberger's-like condition that makes it difficult for him to interpret the nuances of conversational speech and also manifests in the ability to hear music that no one else can hear. Marcelo's dad, who has never believed that Marcelo has a condition, makes a deal with him that if Marcelo spends the summer working in his dad's law firm, he'll be able to finish out his high school career at the special-needs school he has been attending. When Marcelo enters the "real world" he comes up against the sad, complicated, morally ambiguous choices that come along with it, and has to navigate his way through the "real world" while maintaining his sense of self. The book is fantastic mainly because it represents the unique voice of Marcelo without speaking down to the reader or demeaning the character - and Marcelo is a great character. Funny, smart, empathetic. For any English teachers - this would be a great addition to the curriculum and I think there's a lot that you could pull from the book to make it work for a few grade levels.

Anthony Bourdain's Medium Raw is a collection of essays of food and the world of cooks. The Bourdain of 2010 is a lot more traveled, less bitter, and more moneyed than the Bourdain of Kitchen Confidential fame. With the fame, he's toned down the roiling machismo and hyperbole (some) of Kitchen Confidential and I devoured this collection of essays gluttonously - because few people write for cooks. This book is for cooks. The essay on David Chang, Bourdain's "Heroes and Villains" chapter, it's all for those who have known the sweet kiss of the salamander's heat and who have donned the checkered pants. The collection can be a little insider-y and name-checky, but that's just how he rolls now, and he makes a point of acknowledging his luck. His writing is on point, better now that there's less vitriol and his position is gentler and less about the adversarial dick-measuring contest.

Matched is being touted as the next Hunger Games - because everyone (read: publishers) are all desperate for the next Hunger Games. I liked it, but didn't love it. The novel takes place in a near-future America where all your agency, including who you will marry, your job, and how and when you die, are controlled by "officials." The protagonist, who is somewhat passive and lack's Katniss Everdeen's grit, finds herself matched to her lifelong best friend, until a blip in the system matches her accidentally with this strange boy, setting off a series of events that results in her growing realization that having EVERY ASPECT OF YOUR LIFE CONTROLLED IS KINDA FUXZ0RED. Like I said, the main character is kind of passive and annoying and her brain-fuxz0redness is kind of annoying, but it was still pretty good reading and I'm intrigued enough to want to know where it's going (it's going to be a 3-part series).

Jennifer Egan's A Visit from the Goon Squad won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize. This "novel," made up of individual chapters following a different character in a loosely connected web of relationships, is a deeply affecting work that exhibits both Egan's considerable writing chops and works as an elegiac, wistful, incisive snapshot of our times. It's difficult to describe - it reminds me of some of the best television writing around now - similar to Treme where you're dropped into a moment in a person's life that is about them navigating that moment but also stands in for where they've been and where they're going. It's not surprising that HBO picked it up to turn into a series - it's perfect for that treatment. The book follows people navigating the music industry in the late 70s into the next millenium - it's about being young, messed up, and growing into an older, differently messed up iteration of your younger self, with new responsibilities and decisions and regrets and small triumphs. I really loved this book and can't recommend it enough.

Getting ready for the cottage is nearly breaking me - but tomorrow SMckay is coming over to go swimming and brunching with me and the Big Yam so I'm super-pumped to go on cottage prep hiatus for that.

Fin.