i gotta stop doing this...

and by "this" i mean, "overextending myself on the weekends." we're entertaining TWICE today. twice! that's ludicrous! we're having the dotytron's family over for brunch and then having our friends A and S and the dotytron's old thornhill friends D and her kids, and J over for an early bbq dinner. phew.

last night me, dr. rei and the dotytron went to the dodgeball party. we weren't planning on staying very long because they're all pretty much very much younger than us and i have a feeling we have a different sense of what it means to party...like, when i say "party" i mean "talk s**t and laugh all night" whereas i suspect that their definition of party encompasses mine, but also includes "watergun fights with red wine in the hallway" which gives me mild seizures just thinking about it. at any rate, i wanted to go to c64's thing, but in the end, we got called away cuz the roomie got sick and was sent home by the midwives who wanted to make sure that someone was home with her. the roomie is NEVER sick so we went home right away. it turns out she just had a migraine, but she'd never had one before, and was so disoriented when it first came on that she forgot our home phone number, which is what made the midwives reluctant to send her home without someone there. she's lucky. she has a great work support systems and we have a great home support system.

the party was aight. we went AFTER hoovering down 4 slices of pizza each in the space of about 5 minutes, and chasing it with the cheesecake brownies i made (pictured above). yesterday was pure bliss. i got rid of all the stuff i had to do by 1:30pm and was going to meet dr. rei and her parents downtown but bailed on that to lie at home on the couch, marathoning "gossip girl" and knitting. so happy. i effin love that show. it's a delectable treat. and a million times better than "the hills" which is way too vapid. "gossip girl" by comparison is a delicious, well-crafted little morsel...it's like a french macaroon and "the hills" is a cookie from a 7/11.

so the party last night was hosted by this girl on my team who's in canada for a bit on her 'round the world tour...she's from australia. the house she lives in is shared with 6 other people, one of whom is a japanese guy, who obviously doesn't speak much english. he introduced himself to me and i THOUGHT i heard the name "tucker." so i kept calling him by name, which is a trick i employ to make people feel included. "tucker! thanks for the snacks!" "it was nice meeting you tucker!" as we left, dr. rei burst into laughter, because she's pretty sure his name ISN'T tucker, and is in fact, taka or something. so i embarrassed myself hugely by calling this poor dude by the wrong name...and at that, the most IMPLAUSIBLE name imaginable (as the dotytron said, "you don't meet CAUCASIAN people named TUCKER!"). pretty brutes. tucker/taka was so cute though! he meekly brought over an array of bowls filled with sunchips, regular chips, and roasted peanuts and put them on the coffee table. so cute!!!!!!!! i was so full but i made me and dr. rei eat some. adorable. i really empathize with new immigrants like crazy. i'm the champion of the underdog.

this was brunch this morning. i quite like brunch entertaining. you get a solid visit in, but then you still have the rest of the day to do stuff. if only i could get more people on board! we had: bob evans sausage, swedish pancakes, blueberry whole wheat muffins, bourbon peach compote, juice, whipped cream, maple syrup, and momma d brought over a big platter of fruit and some brie with mushrooms. yum!

for the bbq tonight i'm making my famous burgers, with either cheddar cheese or the brie with mushrooms melted on top, and our friend J is bringing a salad, and i think i'm going to make a sauteed corn and scallion salad with lime. for dessert i made blueberry sour cream pie with almond streusel, which i'm going to serve with vanilla ice cream.

fin.

abbatoir cat

last night we had dinner with our friends, B & G. we originally wanted to go to foxley...but it was packed full of the members of broken social scene and their loser, plaid-shirted, trust fund skeevy hangers-on. it was an hour long wait. i refuse to wait an hour for tapas. especially on ossington. then we wandered over to pizza libretto. but it was packed full of the readership of toronto life who had left their babies and bugaboo strollers at home. it was an hour long wait. i refuse to wait an hour for pizza. especially on ossington.

i had a feeling this was going to happen. i'm starting to hate ossington as a street. i had compiled a list of backup options during the day because of the aforementioned feeling. we consulted the list and ended up at the niagara street cafe. the website has annoying flash and a ghey song. fast-forward that shiz. i would describe the menu as "new american" or "urban farmstead." i didn't make up those terms. the food world did. the space is nice, with a big patio...we opted to sit outside because the weather was sultry.

we started off with sliced and warmed fred's potato sourdough bread with a caramelized onion and arbequina olive oil jam. this was tasty (but i was also very, very hungry).
we shared a bunch of appetizers.

we had poached ontario artichokes with lemon vinaigrette and bacon mayo. this was tasty...they had cleaned the artichokes until you were at the mostly tender leaves near the heart...you had to pull the leaves off, dip them in the bacon mayo and then scrape them against your bottom teeth. my general preference is an entirely cleaned artichoke that you can just go to town on, but this was nice.

then we had their heirloom tomato and goat cheese tartelette with zucchini blossoms and greens. i didn't see any zucchini blossoms, but this was also yummy...the tomato was really ripe and the goat cheese had been whipped and was quite mild. the stack sat on top of a flaky pastry square.

rabbit rillettes with bacon jam, grainy mustard, and house preserve. i didn't taste any of the accoutrements but the rabbit rillettes was tender, delicate, fine textured, with a faint lemon flavour. delicious.


raspberry point oysters with cucumber mint salad, sugar-chili vinaigrette, and raspberry szechuan pepper granita. i tasted the first two accompaniments, but not the raspberry granita thing (probably superfluous anyway). the oysters were cold and the other elements paired with the brininess well...a good amount of heat offset by the crisp texture of the crunchy cucumber.

i went halfsies with the dotytron. i ordered the braised pig's cheek and confit of tongue with sprouts and lentil salad. i really loved the tenderness of the tongue and the braised pig's cheek had been crisped up and was super-tasty. the meat portion was quite small and i definitely did NOT like the taste of the raw, grassy sprouts with the lentils. it made everything taste really alfalfa-y and the greenness wasn't what the otherwise warm, round, plate needed.

the dotytron ordered the slow cooked cumbrae's brisket with asian greens, baby shitakes, and panko egg yolk. this i dug. the brisket was moist, fatty, rich, and beefy. the panko egg yolk was flash-fried and broke open over the whole dish (and we all know how much i loves raw egg yolk). i personally could have done with more conventional greens instead of the asian greens. i thought the baby shanghai choi was again, a little too "green" tasting and chewy for the dish. i think baby snap peas and baby carrots would have been a better match, but overall, i thought it was well cooked. i would order this again over my dish.
for dessert i ordered the almond milk panna cotta with macerated cherries and biscotti. i love almond milk, ESPECIALLY in a panna cotta. this flavour was quite subdued...i've had punchier, stronger almond milk panna cottas before, but it was a nice finish to a meal. the panna cotta was lighter than i personally prefer and the cherries were a bit of an afterthought. i think i also would have enjoyed the dessert if it had been served a little cooler. the biscotti was crisp and crumbly...i really liked the texture and flavour of it (faintly lemon).

the dotytron got the soma chocolate tart with salted caramel sauce and cardamom chantilly (whipped cream to you and i). the tart was rich and bitter with an acceptably flaky crust. the salted caramel sauce was barely present on the plate and the cardamom whipped cream was a nice gesture, but unnecessary.

overall, i'd go there again, EXCEPT for the fact that near the end of the meal, the nearby abbatoir must have received a shipment, because the air was suddenly suffused with a distinctly barnyard funk that tempered the experience slightly. if you sit inside, you're fine. we went on a hunt for the abbatoir and saw the back end of it, complete with a mangy, feral, abbatoir cat. i think the other thing about niagara cafe is that the menu is tiny, so if they don't change it up enough, then it wasn't so extraordinary that i'd rush back as there weren't that many things on the menu that i was interested in revisiting. the apps were stronger than the mains, i thought. it was quite affordable though. for 4 people, 2 bottles of wine, 3 courses each we paid $315 including tax and tip. i thought that was pretty decent.

today is a day of errand-doing. i've made a pie and blueberry muffins and done two loads of laundry and laboriously punched out 4 packs of stencil letters and alphabetized them to make the t-shirt making a little easier tonight. tonight is my dodgeball t-shirt making party. i'm not planning on staying too long...i'm also thinking of hitting up the why? festival...which is a party that my buddy c64 is throwing featuring bogdan raczynski from rephlex (aphex twin's label) records. i'm on the fence because i ALSO want to come home and sit on the couch and watch gossip girl and knit with the dotytron. it's a tough call.

i was going to go and check out grocery-store clothes at joe fresh...but the roomie wants to come too so i've put that on hold. i'm running on money fumes right now. september and august have both been uncharacteristically expensive months so i'm running on a deficit. luckily, october is a 3 paycheck month...the sucky thing is that the deficit i'm running cuts into my plans to dump my 3rd paycheck into my savings account which i'm trying to bulk up in case my contract doesn't get renewed. it's a tough life. the other sucky thing is...i do need to continue shoring up my work wardrobe with more professional fall/winter work clothes. i can't keep falling on the "casual" side of office casual.

fin.

roget's v. the world

i know K is waiting for my "scathing" (her words) review of "blind loves"...but i'm afraid she'll have to wait a day or two longer (but isn't the above review enough?)

in light of the fact that yesterday heralded the firing up of the large hadron collider (LHC) by the european organization for nuclear research (CERN) - thereby kick-starting not only the very real possibility that we'll be able to replicate the events milliseconds after the big bang, discover new particles, AND perhaps create a black hole and get sucked into an infinite singularity, but also adding yet ANOTHER cause for concern in my growing list of things to fret and worry over (currently taking pride of place on that list: diabetes, cancer, aneurysms, and dementia) - i'm going to review cormac mccarthy's "the road": a pulitzer prize winning novel that was ALSO given the benediction of no less an authority than the mighty and unimpeachable oprah herself.

"the road" is a post-apocalyptic tale to end all post-apocalyptic tales (quite fitting, for the genre). it follows the story of a man and his child (whose age i peg at around 8 or 9) as they spend endless days walking through a charred, benighted, sepulchral america after a nameless catastrophe (the implication is war, perhaps of the nuclear variety). the landscape is grey, the sun can't penetrate the ash-sodden atmosphere, twisted, blackened trees claw at an unyielding and remote sky. everything is burned and there is no animal, bird, or vegetable life...no anything but this man and this boy, bound by their blood and their faith and their dumb humanity to continue to exist. what people there are who haven't succumbed to starvation and the worst of humanity in crisis have turned to cannibalism. it's a gross, haunting, bleak existence (if you can call it that), made all the more potent by mccarthy's sparse, staccato prose, stripped of the adornment of unnecessary punctuation (commas and periods). people speak in clipped statements that at the same time intimate at the immeasurably vast richness of what was lost...the spaces between the words and what isn't said becomes its own character and landscape in the novel.

i couldn't put it down, even as it ate away at me. it's a terse, powerful, novel that uses silence and negative space to create a chiaroscuro portrait of what we can be, at our very best and worst. it's at once hopeless and hopeful.

regular readers know that i have a somewhat unhealthy preoccupation with the apocalypse...i've read a bunch of the hallmarks of that genre, i appreciate the thought experiments at work and the reflection of our current situation that the totality of the end highlights so concisely. i like the idea of starting over, off the grid, re-making the world from scratch. mccarthy takes these idyllic pastoral fantasies and smashes them against immutable, total, bleakness. this book beat the apocalypse out of me. it made me deeply afraid and unsettled. it was a difficult read and it was also insidious in its' ability to linger in my thoughts even as i went about my day-to-day business of affirming my existence.

the big bedroom reorganization of aught 8 was preceded by a systematic culling of our bookcase by yours truly. i had a pile of fiction and non-fiction that i was ready to donate to the library. shortly after i finished reading "the road," we were packing up titles to drop off. as i piled books into milk crates, i hesitated over my copy of roget's thesaurus. very rarely do i flip open a print dictionary or thesaurus anymore - it's much easier and intuitive to turn to dictionary.com, or merriam-webster online. the darkness of "the road" stayed with me though...enough so that i spared my thesaurus its' charitable fate. i couldn't help but think of a world in which our ivory towers have burned down to twisted skeletal spires and when our memories of what we could be have been swept away by the grim spectre of survival. so i slipped it back on the shelf. an insurance policy against regression.

*that's not the same cover as the book that i read, but it's the creepiest and most fitting of all the ones i've seen online
-----------------------------

in a bid for seasonality last night i nixed the asparagus and lemon in the spaghetti and threw myself into fall with a shitake, button, and oyster mushroom pasta with thyme, onions, and pecorino.

D made a green bean salad with feta and pecans, vinaigrette and dice onion.

dorie greenspan plum cake made a repeat appearance on the table and was better after a day or two...the flavours had deepened and mellowed and turned a little richer. it also suited the creamy sweetness of ice cream better than whipped cream. so, maybe it'll get filed away for a future revisit after all.

tonight i continued the late summer/early fall assault with mennonite garlic farmer's sausage braised in caramelized onions and leffe beer. sided with a summer succotash of green beans and corn kernals sauteed in crisp pancetta (an amazing combo), and D's leftover bean salad tossed on baby spinach leaves with some balsamic vinaigrette - the result of fridge-cleaning.

fin.

gossip girl = unicorn

ummm...so gossip girl is kind of AMAZING. i loves it. it's good, solid, fashion-y, trashy fun. completely over-the-top, but what do you expect from an expose of the lives of rich "teenagers" on the upper east side? the actors all have weird, magical, mythical creature names like: blake lively! leighton meester! penn badgley! chase crawford! sophie lancelot! (okay, i made the last one up). they look 27!!! it's steamy and racy and features awesome nyc locales and outfits. also...BEST SOUNDTRACK EVER! and by best soundtrack ever, read: they played "the way i r" AND akon's "don't matter" in the same episode. BEST BEST BEST!

for some reason, i find it way more believable than the o.c., which was overwrought but also kind of not? i dunno...could never get into the o.c...didn't buy the whole kid-who-looks-like-a-lion-cub-from-the-wrong-side-of-the-tracks-who-spends-the-whole-series-brawling angle. i liked seth and summer, but the tone was weird and the conversations seemed all tv/real world talky (like, gilmore girls or even dawson's creek...where the characters speak in this hyper-literate way that's supposedto be realistic...as opposed to when characters speak in a hyper-literate obviously contrived way that makes perfect sense in tv-land [ie. frasier???? for lack of a better example]). plus, i kind of hate mischa barton.

the point is, the o.c. always looked hella low budg but gossip girl doesn't. and i think i have a crush on penn badgley. i mean, as much as i loved logan echolls (played by the normal-named jason dohring) on v-mars, i have to admit it was the bruised, snarky character i loved, not so much the packaging. penn badgley, however, is a cool drink of water on a hot summer's day. he is foine. ed westwick's ("chuck") sleepy bedroom eyes do kind of gross me out. it doesn't help that they outfit him as the serpentine, sleazy-brit (even though he plays an american) second coming of oscar wilde. it's gross! the actual "gossip girl" part of it (voiced by veronica mars! convergence) is kinda ghey but she just pops in briefly. the other annoying thing is that two sole minority characters have nothing to do but stand there and be mostly mute, affirmative-action, place fillers.

wow. this breathless paean to all things gossip girl might very well give you the impression that all i fill my head with are pop culture puff pieces. not true! tonight i'm going to see "blind loves" at the toronto international film festival. it's been getting rave reviews. a tip of the hat to K for doing the legwork. TIFF is way too unwieldy a festival for me. most of the stuff i want to see comes out anyway. that's why it's a boon when you have a friend like K who is willing to scour the massive tomb of a schedule/film list and present you with a neat and tidy short list of potentials replete with screening times and locations. amazing! she should be a film festival gun-for-hire. my friend D is also coming.

D's coming over for dinner. she's making a salad. i'm making spaghetti with asparagus, shitakes, and lemon. leftover plum cake with vanilla ice cream for dessert.

fin.

back to school = meltdown?

or maybe it's just me. suffice it to say that i had a grade A wig-out at the dotytron this morning as i was leaving the house because he wouldn't master the dodgeball mix i had assembled for the monday night iteration of my team, "the west coast rap ball-stars." more correctly, saint that he is, he agreed to master it (it's an old school/new school hip hop mix and the levels are all over the place) but didn't want to chop it up into discrete tracks again. his reasoning was that he didn't have the time. which (of course) resulted in me having a rage blackout and flouncing out of the house and threatening to cancel all our social engagements if he "doesn't have time."

of course, by the time i went to the bank to get my ttc money, the dotytron and i converged on the corner on our way into the subway station and calmer heads had prevailed and i realized that i was being a bumblehead. ah, life. heehee. what can i say...things get all jumbled up in the rolling, cavernous recesses of my brains sometimes. i'm a jumble brain. and seriously...this is NOTHING compared to the flash-fire apocalyptica that i used to be a victim of, back when i was pumping myself full of artificial hormones. and the dotytron freaks out too! i just never tell you about them! he almost had a few mental breakdowns when we did the big studio/bedroom retrofit a few weekends ago. put him within a five millimetre radius of ikea furniture and an allan key and it's OVER. we had to get a new linen storage thing because our old ikea one became his mortal nemesis over the course of a few minutes...i think he ended up punching it into submission (in his defense, the thing would topple over if you looked at it funny and it was so ungainly and awkward it was like trying to get a comatose andre the giant into a pair of pantyhose while hauling him up a spiral staircase).

i've got a lot to keep track of! back to school has dire implications on the meal planning. meals with portable leftovers have to be strategically situated within the week so that the roomie and the dotytron have stuff to pack for lunches. portable, quasi-healthy, mid-day snacks have to be made (right now we've got granola bars with pumpkin seeds, almonds, sunflower seeds, coconut, raisins), grocery shopping AND cooking are now all me, and i've got all my extracurricular activities to slot in.

today after work i'm meeting up with dr. rei and H and baby D and we're going to get supplies for my dodgeball team to make our t-shirts for the monday nights (oh yes, i'm playing TWO nights of dodgeball this fall...yes!). my brother's team is ALSO playing on sundays and mondays. dun dun duuuuuuuuun. my sunday night team is called the ballbarians and my t-shirt name is "big beef and cheddar." for monday nights, we had to pick a rap alter ego. i'm torn between "tony! toni! tone! (all 3 of them)" or dr. rei's pick: "buckshot shorty." they're both pretty apt.

then i'm going home to make dinner and park my butt in front of the tv and wax my upper lip and knit. i rented season 1, disc 1 of "gossip girl." i'm going to try it on for size. we'll see if it fits. i don't like my teen stuff too adult and too whatup bring the drama. i like there to be some substance to it (come back to me, veronica mars and buffy!). not much on my tv radar for the fall season outside of joss whedon's new offering, "dollhouse." other than that...i've got gossip girl, season 4 of battlestar, generation kill, season 4 of entourage, and season 5 of the wire on backlog to keep me occupied. i'll wait til the dust settles on the fall season and pick through the survivors. i'm thinking of picking up "mad men," but other than the period-correctness of it, i gotta say, it looks kind of boring.

-------------------------------------

for dinner tonight i made a salad of baby spinach and baby arugala, roasted figs (sprinkled figs with sugar and pan roasted with oil, salt, and pepper), oven crisped pancetta, and breaded, fried, buffalo mozzarella with some crusty toast spread with roasted garlic butter.

fin.

i've said it before...

and i'll say it again...itunes and apple are a bunch of no-good, sneaky, a** bandits. i had really high hopes for winamp with their large bento skin...but alas, it wasn't to be. constant, unremitting crashing has forced me to go slinking back to itunes with my tail between my legs, to the accompaniment of the dotytron, pantomiming bloat along with dry-heaving, bubbly sound effects.

boooooooo...i hate being forced to do anything.

in other news...i tried taking a stand against the ongoing intellectual entropy that's a hallmark of modern western culture today - i failed miserably. i don't want to get into details...suffice to say that the concept of comparable, authoritative information is an elusive chimera.

i'm clearly cranky right now. i just spent about 2 hours bundling cables that run betwixt and between my computer/printer/speakers/monitor/external hard drive/usb hub, etc. it was maddening, dusty work and then i had to contend with a recalcitrant ipod and stupid, fascist itunes on top of it. and now it's 10:00pm and i'm going to bed in a hour. yay.

this is a picture of the dimply plum cake i made last night for dessert. it's a dorie greenspan recipe. dorie greenspan is lionized in the food blog world and her recipes are the inspiration for a monthly series called "daring bakers" where food bloggers the world over all tackle one of her recipes a month and then breathlessly recount every detail of its' execution.

well, i gotta say...i've yet to be impressed by a dorie greenspan recipe. this plum cake looked really pretty but the taste fell flat. it just tasted like nothing much at all...like a non-cake; this after i took the liberties of upping the amount of cinnamon called for in the cake and adding some ground caradmom. the cake baked up with a nice crusty top, but the sides were sawdusty and bready and flavourless. this cake just needed more. more tenderness, more crumble, more sweetness, more of a distinctive flavour. i'll probably tool around with it because i do like the look of it...and there's something so homespun and charming about a plum cake served with a drift of whipped cream.


this is what i made for dinner tonight. i took two thin slices of eggplant and sandwiched them around a filling of goat's cheese run through in a food processor with some basil, salt, and pepper. then i took the eggplant sandwiches and breaded them and fried them. delicious! few things benefit more from a coating of flour, egg, and breadcrumb/panko than eggplant. the result was a crisp coating surrounding a barely solid mess of basil-flavoured eggplant custard. sooo good. i ate 5 of 'em.

alongside i made a quick chickpea salad. warm chickpeas with diced red onion, garlic, T's chilies, lemon juice, parsley, salt and pepper.

fin.

so much for one world, one dream

the dotytron is really messed up about everything that went down with his school placement...and now that i've heard the whole story, it seems like it's pretty blatant and obvious discrimination and it's got me and my family hoppin' mad. my mum and sister and outlaw bro (the lawyerly types) are all up in arms and getting riled and my mum is firing on all pistons.

--------------------

in other news...the concert was amazing. heart was THE BEST. they played most of the hits, but for some reason opted to play a who cover song and a led zeppelin cover...which doesn't make that much sense but whatever. nancy and ann are effin' incredible. best women rockers of all time...seriously...who can test? i know there are some people out there who would claim that the breeders, or l7 or some of those other washington/grunge-era women rockers were the shiznit...but seriously? seriously? in terms of longevity of the career and pure songwriting and execution, heart slaughters them all.

and little arnel pineda killed it. so cute! jumping around the stage. he's basically the reincarnation of steve perry before steve perry is even dead.

yesterday we hung around the house and went for dim sum and then my brother bought a wii so that's what we did all night. we're going for lunch today and then heading back home.

tonight we're having bwong over for dinner and then chilling and maybe going to see the roomie's friend from b.c.'s band playing at sneaky dee's.

fin.

it's pineda-time!

yessssssssssss! the long awaited 80s hair-rock-schlock fest has arrived! tonight i'll be staying dry (hopefully) and winding and dancing and singing along to the soaring vocal acrobatics of ann wilson (heart) and arnel pineda (journey). i'm so pumped! my sis and outlaw bro are picking me up from work and then we're going to pick up some grub and then head to the amphitheatre where we're meeting up with the dotytron and S. i'm calling it as coug-fest 08 for sheezy.

yesterday i went to get my security pass renewed and when i mentioned my weekend plans to the woman who processes them she flipped out! she's going to see if she can get tickets...lol! it was so cute...she was so pumped. apparently she saw styx a couple of years ago and got invited to after-party with the band. amaze.

then S is coming back with us for a sleepover and haircut if there's time (i have mad dead-ends, yo!) and then we're spending all saturday up in markham eating our faces off. sunday we'll have an early lunch and then head back downtown, where we're having dinner with bwong and then maybe hitting the roomie's friend from b.c.'s band's show at sneaky dee's. holy eff. just another ram-jammed weekend at the lagerfelds. phew!

the dotytron is un petit peu bummed because he's getting switched out of his current placement which he's already fallen in love with. apparently the fact that the teachers-in-training placed at the catholic school weren't catholic caused a problem with the v.p. the good news is the dotytron's new placement is literally a 5 minute walk from our house.

the bad news is...he really loved his original placement, which was in the scarbs (he reps the scarbs so hard now and it makes me love him even more). he got along really super well with his mentor teacher and felt he could learn a lot from her. the class was huge (35 kids) and was SO diverse with a lot of people from mixed economic backgrounds and levels of english proficiency, and a huge contingent of new immigrants.

key characters who i was eagerly anticipating hearing stories about included:

- a kid who was legally blind 

- a kid who is the classic trouble maker, attention hog (ie. while sitting in the corner after getting in trouble, will ask the dotytron, "hey man...can you beatbox?") and drops lines like tracy jordan (both in delivery and content). for example, this kid is friends with a much smaller ) kid who is really well adjusted and is apparently really good with video games. kid B was telling the dotytron, "yeah, the first time i picked up a video game, i was just really good at it, i was a natural," at which point, kid A interjects with, "the first time i picked up a video game, I ATE THE CD! i did! swear on my life!" lol! kid A is also obsessed with this other kid in the class who's straight out of jamaica and talks with the thickest patois. kid A apparently can't get enough of the way jamaican kid talks.

- there's also a crew of slick little tykes straight out of columbia with crazy faux-hawk pompadour hairstyles who wear the best, hippest clothes and look like little men. the columbian kids also DESTROY the other kids at soccer. the dotytron says it's ridiculous...they're like little (apparently they're all really short) ballerinas. haha! so this one kid was complaining about not wanting to play soccer because all the columbian kids are so good at it and the teacher was saying that that's not true, it's a stereotype, etc. the kid waits for the teacher to leave, turns to the dotytron and says, "they're all good at soccer, aren't they!" to which the dotytron tried to explain that columbia was a big country, it's a stereotype, etc. so the dotytron asks complaining kid what his ethnic background is, to try to draw a parallel with stereotyping. the kid is iraqi so the dotytron was stuck, trying to think of a common misconception about iraqis that was suitable for that context. lol! according to the complainer kid, iraqis are known for being good at soccer...so there you have it...make sense of that how you will.

booooooooooooooooooooooo...i think the dotytron is so good with kids and ESPECIALLY amazing with kids who are all slick and street and from different backgrounds that he'd do really well in the scarbs...cuz the scarbs needs the love of a good dotytron. we checked out the school he's going to...it looks pretty slick and homogenous. and i'm hoping it's not all riverdale-privileged. i also hope he gets along as well with his mentor as he did with his current one...it sucks going from a situation that you know is amazing and a good fit to one that might be an entirely different story.

fin.

swedish for

...drives my dotytron crazy. yes indeedy. tonight after work and after a trip to our trusted menswear retailer around the corner from us and after picking up some pakistani take out for dinner, we're making a trip to the wilds of north york for ikea goods.

i know. i know. it sucks that EVERYONE in a certain age group and bracket has an apartment with the same cooly modern looking doo-dads and gee-gaws and furnishings and accessories. but what is a cash-strapped apartment dweller/home owner to do? really? i've reconciled myself to the fact that i'm a not-so-special star in a universe of not-so-special, not-so-unique stars. for people with limited wherewithal and limited time and home decor vision, than ikea is IT. what would you have me do? spend precious minutes away from my billions of other interests to go traipsing around toronto for the latest new, mid-century modern thing? eff that! and i EFFING LOVE mid-century modern furniture! do you know how much it pains me to see privileged urbanite jerkwads the world over crawling over sectional sofas and turquoise and chocolate brown colour schemes and sagey greens and neutral taupes and teak everything that i know i'll never be able to afford or justify in my ever-practical soul, in which children and their inevitable trail of destruction loom in the not-so-distant future?

whatever...ikea (swedish for "path of least resistance" and "reasonably well made and durable") it is. the dotytron loathes ikea like you wouldn't believe. he hates how you have to walk through the ENTIRE store to pick up the stuff you need at the very end in the big warehouse space that's inaccessible by any other means. he thinks he's being fiendishly clever by suggesting we somehow finangle our way directly into the warehouse area, pull a blitzkreig, and run. unfortunately, the stuff we're after today (lamps, curtain stuff, small storage) isn't IN the big warehouse part (which is mostly for big furniture)...it's in the regular store part (i'm almost 100% certain of this) so we're screwed. i'm hoping a fattened belly and a more considerate than usual me will allow us to navigate this trying situation with grace, aplomb, and a minimum of screaming meltdowns.

once we're done though...we'll be done with house stuff for a while. i mean, aside from needing a bed frame, new boxspring and mattress (or a tempurepedic one!), new couch, side tables, toaster, etc. you know.

i have to say though, a trip to the municipal dump while at the cottage had a sobering impact on my consumerist ways. it was DISGUSTING and i think should be required field trip material for every grade school kid at some point in their lives. piles upon piles of crap lying in a fetid, stinking, rotting depression in the ground, sunlight reflecting off the mountains of plastic bottles and blinding you even while your nose is being assaulted with that wet-garbage/hot day smell and you're being accosted by screaming gulls. it was like a scene out of mad max, replete with a smoldering tire fire blazing in the distance. ughhhh...if i was a rabid garbage sorter and recycler and reducer before, i'm tenfold that now.

i'm excited for makkah for dinner. we haven't had it in ages.

--------------

*edit*

makkah was the lick. we also stopped off at our favorite tailor/menswear retailers on the danny and picked up some sweet work clothes for the dotytron. ikea mission was a semi-success...we spent a lot on some increased lighting for the downstairs but they only had ONE (!) of the little converter thingies that turn the boxes of our record holding shelf/room divider into either drawers or a cupboard. boooooo...that means we have to go BACK. the best part was we ran into our buddy rumbleton and his brother, C. yay! i love that guy. seriously...he's a real mensch.

fin.

restaurant reviews

on friday night i went to dinner with my mum, my mum's friends visiting from HK, their son (who is starting at ryerson this year) and my bro. we went to table 17 in leslieville. i had heard mixed reviews about their service but overall good reviews about their food, so i figured we'd give it a go.

the room is actually two, bifurcated by a wall with a spacious doorway opening between them. the first room holds only a small handful of tables and contains the bar and the second room has more tables and a big, rugged, rough-hewn wooden table that serves as an open bussers-station, where they can slice bread for tables, etc.

nice dim lighting, comfortable bench seating (almost too comfortable...the pillows on the seat are so plush it leads to some awkward maneuvering on the way out), doesn't get too noisy. the service was a little on the under-attentive side but the food is quite good and the prices are solid.

we ordered a few apps to share to start.


we got 2 orders of the diver scallops, which were seared and served with a thick spear of guanciale, thick bearnaise, and sweet peas. this dish was pretty damn delicious... the elements are all a no-brainer. it could have gone out to the table a little hotter and the bearnaise could have been a touch looser (probably seized up a bit as it cooled down).


the charcuterie platter was fairly generous though slightly uneventful and boring. the best thing on the board was the head cheese...otherwise the other elements were a little standard, though still tasty. it came with some sliced bread that was a little too thick to match the ultra-thin slices and a little too soft. i prefer toasted bread or something sturdier with my charcuterie plates.


then we got 2 each of their "hot balls" appetizer. there are three different kinds: aranicini with gorgonzola and a marinara dipping sauce, goat cheese croquettes with honey, and bachalau balls with potato and a basil dipping sauce. the goat cheese was probably my favorite...the bachalau was heavy on the potato, light on the salt cod, the arancini were serviceable.


we also shared the signature chili beef ribs, which the owners carried onto the menu (apparently by popular demand) from their previous venture, izakaya. they're not worth writing home about...i mean, **i** wouldn't have kept them on the menu. especially when they come to the table slightly dried out around the edges and barely lukewarm, with nary a chili flavour to be found in the sweet sauce coating the meat-thin beef ribs. there's some spice in the loose kimchi accompaniment but overall the dish was ho-hum.


for my main i got a braised rabbit with house made pappardelle (not pictured) olives and lemons. the rabbit leg was pretty tender, a touch dry, and overly salty but the pasta had a nice chew. tone down the heavy handed with the brine/salt elements and you'd have a comforting dish.


my bro had the steak frites...the frites there are just the way i like them...slender and crisp. my mom had the black cod which had a crispy skin and was sitting in a light broth with some shitake mushrooms and green stuff. she said she liked it (i didn't try it).


we shared three desserts. we got the chai spiced pudding. the texture of the pudding was nice, thick and creamy with only faint chai flavours (more ginger and spices and less tea). it was covered with a some kind of indeterminate cookie dust which added an unpleasant pastiness and was unnecessary, especially considering it had no discernible flavour. we all would have liked the pudding sans dust.


the chocolate veloute (pudding again, to you or i) was thick and bittersweet but again marred by an incongruous topping of conventional blueberries.


the lemon tart was meh. the crust was thick and a little leaden...lemon curd was standard but couldn't hold its' own against the crust.

overall, it's a decent neighbourhood joint with very gentle prices (5 apps, 6 mains, 3 desserts, flat and sparkling water, no booze = $260 pre tip) and worth a revisit. it still needs to iron out some kinks in the kitchen, but the steady stream of slavering leslievillians i watched in and out the door seems to suggest that the audience is there even if they don't tighten up the screws.

on sunday, we had dinner with the same crew at via allegro, which gets consistently high marks for italian food in the city from word-on-the-street AND published sources. it was pretty meh. definitely NOT worth the drive to the farthest reaches of etobicoke, NOT worth the exorbitant prices, NOT worth the half-assed service, and NOT worth the laughable, disney-fied decor.

i mean, i guess this is "italian" food in the late 80s, southern california sense, but nothing anywhere near like my understanding of italian food. huge chops, giant plates, creme brulee desserts...it's stuck in a bad hotel time warp. the prices are redonkulous and the food is only decent.


we shared a fried calamari appetizer that was pretty good.


we got the "three kings" platter. you pay a set price for person. the "three kings" are supposed to represent the three signposts of italian (tuscan?) cuisine. so for the princely sum of almost $30/person, you get 2 paper-thin slices of proscuitto each, a pillow of arugala, a couple of fat shards of parmesan, and a drizzle of balsamic, with a puck of pear puree. the pear was probably the best part of it. the rest of the components were okay, but certainly did not live up to the hype.


another app that was a huge disappointment was the pizza from the wood-burning oven. how a wood-burning oven managed to produce such an anemic, flabby, insipid excuse for a pizza is beyond me. it's appalling.


then we got a foie appetizer which was ho-hum. seared foie, brioche, a sweet element...came to the table cool and was therefore pretty unappetizing.


for my main, i got the duet of lamb. a crusted lamb rack with a pot pie of shank with some broccoli rabe scattered with goat's cheese. again, decently prepared, but done to death.


the dotytron got one of their signature meat cuts, a 16oz veal chop. it wasn't as tender as veal chops should be and was sided with a tired galette and some kind of spinach flan with a requisite pool of hotel-issue demi.

one of our table mates ordered the "award winning" risotto with duck confit, foie, and 25 year old balsamic (this dish cost $50!!!!). the risotto was cooked correctly but the flavour of the dish was a hot mess. sweet, cloying...it tasted like a mound of runny unagi rice (that's how saccharine it was!).

we finished the meal with ho-hum, exorbitantly priced and unimaginative desserts (creme brule, tiramisu, etc). i mean, i like that stuff as much as the next person...but i don't go about creating a temple of italian cuisine that looks like it was ripped out of "the bonfire of the vanities"-era cooking.

i was kind of embarrassed. my mum's friends had requested italian and i had gone with what people had said about the place and what toronto life had given as a review. I HATE YOU, JAMES CHATTO. i should have just stuck with my guns and picked l'unita or lil' baci. it was really pricey too and so not worth it. the closest example i can come up with is that it's like a yorkville style italian place. you know what i mean.

ugh.

---------------------


tonight for dinner i grilled some steaks and finished them with a gloss of roasted garlic butter. crisped up some diced pancetta and sauteed sweet corn kernals in the pork fat and served sauteed peppers and onions on the side.

fin.

movie roundup

whew...what a crazy busy weekend. because i'm entirely too susceptible to suggestion (especially when said suggestion is imparted from a source i trust), i spent a good chunk of labour day monday, one of the hottest, most sweltering days we've had in what has otherwise been an abysmal, rainy, cool, and uncharacteristic toronto summer, up to my neck in wet wool sweaters, winter weight pants, and the like.

yes indeed. i fell prey to the fear mongering and type A tendencies of my old supervisor T, who informed me on friday that she was going to be switching her summer and winter clothes this past weekend. of course i uttered the natural response, "so soon?" to which she replied to the effect that one never knows and winter in toronto can drop on a dime and then i'll be left scrambling. T shares with me an industrious, cub scouts-motto, type A personality and so i set about washing and drying all my winter wear, only to be faced with a scorching, searing weather prediction for a proper indian summer in the weeks to come with my arms full of heavy, pelt-like clothing.

ah well. at least it's all clean now and ready to go, for when the weather really, truly, does drop on a dime.

i was kind of thinking that once september came around, life would settle into the hibernatory rhythms of winter. boy was i wrong. i've got something going on almost every weekend and i'm valiantly trying to fit everyone/thing into my increasingly packed google calendar.
no time like the present to do a movie rundown...

we rented the movie "21" ages ago (near mid july i think). it's terrible...not really worth mentioning. contrived, boring, and just plain silly. apparently it comes on the heels of the exact same movie having been made by canadian hands, which the dotytron has seen and seems to prefer. it tells the tale of a bunch of MIT math impressarios who pick up a system of counting cards and take it to vegas and fleece the casinos. in the glossy, hollywood version, the real-life nebbishy asians are replaced by slick, baby-faced kate bosworth and the two real asian actors are relegated to side roles. i can't really reiterate what a redonkulous movie this is, except to say that it sacrifices plot and plausibility in favour of slow-mo, hyper-close-up shotos of stacks of casino chips tumbling and cards skittering across the green felt of the table (accompanied, of course, by thx-amped versions of the sound effects of such occurences...from an ant's perspective - all giant BOOMS! and such).

well...i'm as vociferous and ardent a fan of "parenthood" that walks this earth, so not much needs to be said here. if you've never seen it or it have relegated it to the dusty recesses of your memory, indistinguishable from other films that share ensemble casts and 80s aesthetics and are helmed by ron howard, i heartily endorse a revisit. it's great. i effin' love it. it's heartfelt and warm and funny and bittersweet in a way that just doesn't fly nowadays with our preternatural, canny, media-saturated ennui. it was a simpler time.


okay...now onto the new stuff. "pineapple express" is aight. the trailers have definitely done the stupid-trailer thing of showing you too much/all the funny parts (why do they SHOW YOU THE WHOLE MOVIE?!?) so there's not a lot left...it's pretty low-concept as far as flicks go. seth rogan isn't nearly as charming a schlub as his box office drawing power would have you believe...he's a little too precocious of a schlub (unlike say, fred flinstone or john goodman), a little too self-aware that he's going to get hot babes with his flabby, geek-bespectacled look. james franco, on the other hands, saves the movie, as sweet, simple, impressively articulate saul. the movie tries to blend stoner humour with pulp-fiction type violence and the two don't make a happy fit...overall it's jarring and the movie is kind of one-note and that note is pretty boring once you get it. i will say that franco has a great line about his favorite civil engineers which got the longest and most sustained laughs from karl lagerfeld.

"tropic thunder" kills "pineapple express" in the funny department. maybe it's more my kind of humour...it's a really ruthless, satire of hollywood politics and movie studios and actors. it keeps a hairsbreadth on the side of good taste, but could easily be misinterpreted if you're overly sensitive to imagined political incorrectness and lack an understanding of irony, sarcasm, and nuance. i found it consistently guffaw-inducing and i highly recommend you check it, if only for the faux movie trailers that preface the film alone. i love regular movie trailers so much that FAUX movie trailers triple make my day. there's some fantastic cameos and bit parts and robert downey jr. is incredible. go check it out!

tonight i'm going to a crafting ladies night hosted by my friend L. H and baby D are coming and M might show up too. should be fun. i'm working on another lace project...i effin' love knitting lace. it's like magic! i'm on a deadline with this one...i gotta crank it out. i made a banana cake with cream cheese frosting as my contribution to the informal potluck.

fin.

grief...

we went to our friend's mum's funeral service yesterday. it was sad and strange...so many people we should be seeing more of and it sucks that it always happens at occasions like this (but also, on the brighter side, at weddings and baby-type stuff...big life stuff). i had never been to a jewish service before. the rabbi's cell phone went off! he was pretty embarrassed about it. it was actually really shocking...you could hear the ripples of displeasure murmuring up around the synagogue.

the actual service is quite short, but there was a few speeches from family and close friends. the service is really beautiful, bookended by a gentleman singing in hebrew. the melody sounds very, very old (to my neophyte ears) and it rises and falls in ancient cadences that reverberate with generations of belief. i like the traditions...although sitting shivah for the whole seven days seems epic. on the one hand, having an allocated, commonly accepted space of time in which you don't work and can focus on your grief and people can visit you seems like a good thing. on the other hand, according to our jewish friends, by the seventh day you're going a little stir-crazy.

it was a very, very sad day...made all the stranger because we didn't know the customs. death always makes a farce out of life and you're always grasping at the phantoms of social convention, as if knowing them and facility in them will somehow tether you to something solid. "what do i do?" "what do i say?" "is this appropriate to wear?" i don't know what it means when we turn to the banal as guideposts through life-changing events.

fin.

making hay

well...technically, i shouldn't be anywhere near a computer right now, if things had gone according to plan. i should be rousing myself from the kind of deep sleep you only get at the cottage, assessing the lake for how glass and canoe-friendly it is, and thinking warm thoughts about the pancakes and bacon i'm about to consume and the long day of idle swimming, sunning, and reading that stretches ahead.

unfortunately, life had other plans in mind. we found out on friday afternoon that our friend's mum had passed away. she had been sick for a while and while receiving treatment contracted another illness that her weakened immune system couldn't tackle. they're a jewish family and as i've recently learned, jewish funeral services happen as quickly as possible after the death (preferably within 24 hours). because yesterday was the shabbat, the service is today.

so the cottage trip was scrapped so that we might attend the service and support the dotytron's friend through a terrible, terrible time. i can't even imagine what that must be like and i don't want to ever know. there are people who say that you must experience ALL that life has to offer...that without death the joy of birth is dulled, the sadness heightens and highlights the happiness that will (hopefully) follow. i'm not sure i'm one of those people. i don't want to know. when events like these make bring the contingency of our existences to the fore, i really think that i could lead a happy and fulfilled life without this constant. it would certainly lead to less anxiety, fear, caution, hesitance, desperation.

in spite of this, or perhaps because of it, the dotytron and i have thrown ourselves into action. we're fighting back against the random capriciousness of human mortality in the only sad, futile, way that humans know how. we seized what slim control we had and tore apart our bedroom. the dotytron completely revamped his studio and got me my new sewing machine and i got a new crafting area out of the ashes of his old computer desk. this is what it looks like:





i love it. i can knit in the rocking chair and quilt and silkscreen and do all my other stuff at the table. the spacing worked out perfectly and our room is much airier and feels even larger than it already is (and our room is HUGE...bigger than some people's entire condos in toronto). i mean, it's not as nice as some of the other studios established craft bloggers have...like these ones:



for some reason, that teal blue colour is really popular in the craft-blogger's world of crafting studios. EVERYONE has their studio painted that colour.

so we've taken comfort in order and family (house and blood). i had dinner with my mum and my bro s-dawg and her friends who are visiting from hong kong on friday and we're having dinner with them again tonight. so i have lots of restaurant reviewing to do (replete with pictures, natch). the house family have been together when we could, despite it being a bumper weekend for babies being borned for the roomie. last night, she bought us jean's vegetarian thai for dinner and we ate and watched the bbc's "blue planet." i still have movie reviews to do, too. and i finished reading "the road." so we have a considerable backlog of entries.

we've been noshing on the best. chocolate. chip. cookies. ever. a few months back, the new york times' dining section went on a hunt for the definitive chocolate chip cookie. they surveyed numerous pastry chefs and did a variety of comparisons, breaking down what is probably the most emblematic of all cookies into its' composite parts and analyzing their virtues. the resulting recipe swept the food blog world by storm, to put it mildly. my feeds were choked up with page after page of chocolate chip cookie execution. really, who can blame them? isn't the ultimate chocolate chip cookie a worthy life's goal? and isn't the new york times a reputable source to whom you would trust such a herculean task to be executed with attention to detail and tenacious commitment to veracity? some of the things they uncovered are a no-brainer. warm cookies, under-baking, a touch of salt, etc. the big revelation was letting the dough rest, which was then corroborated by no less a food-science pedagogue than harold mcgee.

well, we made the dough on wednesday evening and let it rest for the requisite 24-36 hours. the resulting cookies were simply beyond. i'm throwing out every other cookie recipe. there is no better. a sprinkling of sea salt adds the finishing crunchy crown of flavour-deepening bite, enriching the sweetness while providing a saline counterpoint. bittersweet chocolate is a must. the resulting cookie is chewy and moist (definitely not cakey, if your tastes run to that, although i turn my nose up at you), with a crisp edge and exploding with bitter, deep chocolate flavour. i highly recommend you all try it.

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July 9, 2008

Recipe

Chocolate Chip Cookies

Adapted from Jacques Torres

Time: 45 minutes (for 1 6-cookie batch), plus at least 24 hours’ chilling

2 cups minus 2 tablespoons

(8 1/2 ounces) cake flour

1 2/3 cups (8 1/2 ounces) bread flour

1 1/4 teaspoons baking soda

1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder

1 1/2 teaspoons coarse salt

2 1/2 sticks (1 1/4 cups) unsalted butter

1 1/4 cups (10 ounces) light brown sugar

1 cup plus 2 tablespoons (8 ounces) granulated sugar

2 large eggs

2 teaspoons natural vanilla extract

1 1/4 pounds bittersweet chocolate disks or fèves, at least 60 percent cacao content (see note)

Sea salt.

1. Sift flours, baking soda, baking powder and salt into a bowl. Set aside.

2. Using a mixer fitted with paddle attachment, cream butter and sugars together until very light, about 5 minutes. Add eggs, one at a time, mixing well after each addition. Stir in the vanilla. Reduce speed to low, add dry ingredients and mix until just combined, 5 to 10 seconds. Drop chocolate pieces in and incorporate them without breaking them. Press plastic wrap against dough and refrigerate for 24 to 36 hours. Dough may be used in batches, and can be refrigerated for up to 72 hours.

3. When ready to bake, preheat oven to 350 degrees. Line a baking sheet with parchment paper or a nonstick baking mat. Set aside.

4. Scoop 6 3 1/2-ounce mounds of dough (the size of generous golf balls) onto baking sheet, making sure to turn horizontally any chocolate pieces that are poking up; it will make for a more attractive cookie. Sprinkle lightly with sea salt and bake until golden brown but still soft, 18 to 20 minutes. Transfer sheet to a wire rack for 10 minutes, then slip cookies onto another rack to cool a bit more. Repeat with remaining dough, or reserve dough, refrigerated, for baking remaining batches the next day. Eat warm, with a big napkin.

Yield: 1 1/2 dozen 5-inch cookies.

Note: Disks are sold at Jacques Torres Chocolate; Valrhona fèves, oval-shaped chocolate pieces, are at Whole Foods.

so. full. of. beans.

so chipotle as a concept is pretty ace. there's four options: burrito, fajita, tacos (hard or soft), and taco salad. you pick your format from the options above and then proceed down the assembly line. your meat options are vegetarian, chicken, beef, barbacoa (simmered beef), and carnitas (simmered pork). all the meat is naturally raised and they make a conscious effort to reduce their footprint (paper bags, reusing stuff, etc.).


me and the dotytron got the carnitas burrito and the steak burrito and split them (they were out of barbacoa). you get a base of cilantro lime rice, then a choice of black or pinto beans, then your meat, then a choice of condiments: salsas (chunky mild, medium red, corn, hot...you can also get them all), then sour cream (if you want), and guacamole (extra money). they wrap it up and send you on your way. we also got an order of chips and salsa and guac and salsa.


our meal came to $25 without drinks. the burritos are HUGE. they weigh about 30% more than a burrito boyz burrito. and the ingredients all taste really fresh and not mass-produced. the corn salsa was a great addition - crunchy and sweet. the acidity in the lime cilantro rice makes everything taste bright. the carnitas were juicy and flavourful and the steak was tender and meaty. all in all, i would totally recommend it for a quick and cheap meal. my only complaint is that the chips were over-salted...but that's something that's easily fixed.

this is last night's dinner.

i'm not going to lie, the mixing today was a little rough. i think i did okay but it wasn't like i could seamlessly beatmatch after a 2+ year hiatus (longer, really). also, i suffered from not really knowing my own chunes anymore. but i'm not going to give up! somewhere, deep inside me, is an oldskool mix that will tear the place down. i just have to work hard to find it. and if there's one thing from which i do not shy away, it's hard work.

tomorrow is an early day on account of the long weekend. i'm going to finish some baking i'm undertaking for our weekend at the dotytron's family's cottage (we're leaving saturday morning) and then meet my mum and bro and her friends for dinner. we're going to table 17 in leslieville. i'll post a full review on saturday morning if i get up early enough.

fin.

the wheel in the sky keeps on turning...

^^^ that's me readying myself for journey next friday.

did some reading at the cottage...here are my thoughts on what passed before my eyes.

my sis got me sarah dessen's latest, "lock and key" for my birthday. it's the story of a girl named ruby, who gets abandoned by her ne'er-do-well mother and is forced to move in with her sister, estranged after 10 years, who lives in a mansion on the other side of town. it's about how she's wrenched from the life she knew and all that was familiar (which is not to say that she particularly enjoyed it) and uprooted to a new place and has to start anew and in the process, becomes a different version of herself and reconfigures her notions of family and friends.

it's not a big stretch to say that i'm a sarah dessen fan. i devoured this book. her narratives always unfold at a steady clip and the characters and voices ring true in the sense that they're the conversations you wish you had in a dramatized version of your high school life (upon reflection, many years later). i didn't love this one as much as "just listen" and "this lullaby," but i think that's kind of splitting hairs. it's right up there with my favorites and i would definitely recommend it to anyone looking for some breezy, beachy, reading, of the young adult persuasion or otherwise.

david sedaris' latest, "when you are engulfed in flames," is a big letdown. i found myself forcing myself to doggedly get through to the end of each story, most of which felt interminably long and needlessly drawn out. at his best, sedaris draws from the wells of the near-tasteless and near-tragic to find the clear, cold, refreshing humour and truths that can sometimes be found therein. in this case, he attempts to negotiate that line and for the most part, fails. what results is a frequently tasteless journey that consistently flirts with shocking-for-the-sake-of-being-shocking and leaves you with a poor taste in your mouth. sample passages such as this, on the virtues of having a ready narrative parry to jump-start any potential conversation, "six months earlier, my icebreaker concerned a stripper who became a quadriplegic and eventually had her vagina eaten away by bedsores, not the easiest thing to wrangle into a conversation," are laboured and contrived. sedaris' attempts to throw his lot in with the rejects of the world, cloying and palpable in naked attempts such as the one above ring less and less true when he starts talking about his life in normandy, his apartment in paris, and his home in new york.

let's face it: sedaris runs with the intelligentsia, and while they may very well have their eccentricities, he's a long, far way away from the crass, near autistic boor he would have us believe he is.

the best story is one on the nature of his relationship with hugh and monogamy and their partnership, which is gentle and thematically concise even in its' meandering circumlocutions to the reiteration of his thesis. even this essay though, uses gratuitous imagery and examples to push the point.

if you've liked other sedaris work, this one doesn't live up to the promise of "me talk pretty one day" or "dress your family in corduroy and denim."

tonight we had dr. rei over for dinner. i made that lentil and pancetta, baby spinach salad thing, this time subbing in poached eggs for the breaded, fried goat's cheese and adding in some pancetta-wrapped, blue cheese stuffed roasted figs to use up refrigerator contents before we decamp to the muskokas. i'll post a picture tomorrow.

tomorrow i'm going to C & C's place to record a mix (hopefully). i've been playing around with my old skool jungle lately and lamenting the dotytron's (fiscally sound) decision to go down to one turntable. it'll be nice to see if i can still beat-match and program a set. i'm going to buy C dinner at chipotle's to thank him for caring for our cats while we were gone.

i've seen a tonne of movies lately. "tropic thunder," "pineapple express," "21," and "parenthood," so i'll try to do some film reviews a demain.

fin.