They killed Osama

TPat arrived and so I've been playing good host and took a long hiatus from the blog. Is anyone still out there - there - there?

Look at these two, thick as thieves:

I don't know how to subdivide this post - there's been a lot of cooking, a lot of eating out, a lot of Hot Docsing, and a lot of celebrating and fêting of Dr. Rei, esquire.

Hrm...well, since the food seems to link everything together, let's start with that. I made a seared albacore tuna tataki rice bowl for TPat. Seared albacore from Hooked seafood in Leslieville (sustainable, ethically caught!) dressed with a sesame-soy vinaigrette and served on top of steamed brown rice tossed with rice vinegar and sugar, chili mayo, avocado, cucumber, nori, and scallions. So good:

I also made us eggplant parm on another night, because TPat loves eggplant and her partner doesn't:

We had a breakfast of those spinach-cheddar waffles with poached eggs one morning:

On Friday, TPat and I saw our first Hot Docs, The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975. The film is pieced together from Swedish documentary footage that was shot in America during that time span, I guess when Sweden was feeling particularly engaged with the civil rights movement and Americana? This documentary was incredible. It featured a soundtrack by ?uestlove and commentary by noted black intellectuals, Talib Kweli, Angela Davis, etc. Danny Glover is one of the producers. This film is everything you want a documentary (hot or otherwise), to be. It was educational, inspiring, enriching, and got you all fired up inside. It exposed me to a black intellectual, Stokely Carmichael, that I had never heard of before, who was considered one of the forefathers of the Black Power movement in that he spoke out against the passive resistance and non-violent methods espoused by Martin Luther King, Jr. He was intensely charismatic, well spoken, funny, and immensely enthralling to watch in action - I'm definitely going to look up more Stokely Carmichael speeches. I'm pretty sure this film is going to get wide release - I highly recommend you see it when it comes out in theatres. So freakin' good.

After the documentary, we met up with Dr. Rei, Hanbo, and Dr. Rei's broski for dinner at El Jacal, a Mexican restaurant at Bloor and Dufferin. We ended up staying there for almost 3 hours, talking and eating and laughing and discussing politics (on the last weekend before voting day of this Canadian federal election). The food was really quite good - I'd definitely go back. The Dotytron and I shared a chicken tinga tostada (shredded chicken with cojita cheese, queso fresco, lettuce, on a fried tortilla) which was so tasty. Tostadas are such a tasty, messy delight to eat:

We also split an order of choriqueso, which is a queso fundido (like a Mexican fondue) with crumbled chorizo, served with warm corn tortillas. If I have to sell this dish for you in any way, you're an idiot:

The we split a mixed platter of tacos. We got the cerdo adobo (marinated pork), the carnitas (slow fried pork) and the cochinita pibil (marinated pork in an annato sauce with pickled red onion)...these were SO JUICY! I can definitely say that the pork tacos here are the juiciest and most generously filled of all the Mexican restaurants I've been to in the Toronto area:

Saturday was the nicest day we've had in Toronto all spring, and definitely since TPat came to visit, so we packed up and headed to Kensington. Originally, I had said to the Dotytron, "so, when you come back on Saturday, can you watch the Big Yam while me and TPat head to Kensington?" and he gave me a kind of forlornly quizzical look and asked, "uhhh...how come I can't come?" LOL! So it was a VERY rare occasion indeed where the Dotytron and I were downtown walking around together. This probably hasn't happened in like, 2 years, if not more. We were hankering after some lunchy type snacks so I stopped in at Agave Y Aguacate which was recently awarded an astounding 5 "N"s in Now magazine. It was crawling with people and I had to wait about 15 minutes to get my two tostadas (the people working the little booth work painstakingly slow.) I got the green tostada, which consists of queso fresco, tomato, guacamole, and guajillo & tomatillo salsa as well as the tenga tostada (chicken, beans, avocado, crema), both on top of a puffy, shatteringly crisp fried flour tortilla. These were both delicious snacks, but not necessarily worth lining up forevers for - especially in Kensington, which has no dearth of tasty Latin treats (for instance, I followed this up with a dulce de leche stuffed freshly fried churro):

I happened to be standing in front of Corey Mintz, who is the food writer for the Toronto Star and whom I've had beef with before, when he Tweeted this incredibly poncey, pretentious statement about how standing in line for Guu makes Torontonians so gauche. I don't know who decided he was the arbiter of taste in Toronto, but I hate his guts - also, he looks like this:

BTW, that image was taken from someone's blog with the accompanying caption "Corey Mintz is everything I hate about everyone" and "you are the definition of a wiener" - LOL! So, he's waiting for this really young, Aritzia-staffer looking girl who is standing behind me in line, waiting for her order. The line for Agave Y Aguacate is the longest in the little mini-food court in this store in Kensington and it snakes in front of this other stand of a dude selling arepas. Corey's companion says, "I feel sorry that this guy's stand is being blocked" and Corey says, in this most miserable, pinched, affected, drawl, "DON'T. His product is terrible, he makes horrible food." RIGHT IN FRONT OF THE GUY'S STAND! So freakin' rude!!! First of all: WHO THE F**K IS COREY MINTZ!??!@ Second of all: calling food "product" is insufferable. Third of all: YOU ARE THE WIENERIEST WIENER IN ALL OF WIENERDOM. Ugh. I hate how he thinks he's an arbiter of taste. In the zero sum battle of who's face I hate the most, I think Corey Mintz might now have eclipsed Chuck Klosterman for me.

For dinner that night we picked up takeout from British Style Fish'n'Chips - which is close by and now my second favorite fish'n'chips in the city after Harbord Fish'n'Chips. The batter is crisp and light and the fish portions are generous (haddock for the win! Spending the extra $2 for halibut is a sucker's bet, IMO) and the fries are rendered down to softly yielding hunks of potato limpness. Also: IT'S GRAB YOUR OWN TARTAR SAUCE (!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!) THAT MEANS YOU CAN TAKE AS MUCH AS YOU WANT. Say it with me now: QUE?!??!! LOL!!! The best!

That night, we stayed in and watched Exit Through the Gift Shop, the documentary directed by the street artist Banksy. It is a stunning documentary that is an instant conversation-starter, if you are a sentient being. The meta-narrative of the film offers multiple opportunities to meditate on the nature of art, the commodification of art, street art, public art, class, politics, art systems, and authorship. It is a staggeringly good piece of filmmaking that stands distinct from the tertiary nature of the attendant discussions of whether Banksy exists at all, whether he actually directed the film, whether the entire documentary is a hoax.

Sunday morning we had breakfast burritos with black beans, spinach, and cheddar scrambled eggs, sided with guacamole, salsa and sour cream:

Then we went to Hamilton where Dr. Rei's parents and Hanbo were hosting a surprise party for her birthday which was a blast. We then had to skeedaddle back to Toronto for supper club, which was held in the private dining room in the wine cellar of Enoteca Sociale - a beautifully intimate room that has a window looking into the cheese cave. Knowing that we were about to eat an Italian meal at one of Toronto Life's "Top 10 New Restaurants of 2011" certainly didn't stop me from loading up a plate of DELICIOUS Persian home-cooking courtesy of Dr. Rei's mum. So good! At one point, after I had muscled my way to the front of the buffet line with unseemly haste, I looked up to see the Dotytron giving me a look of pure incredulousness after espying my heaping plate of food. I couldn't help it! I never get to eat Persian cooking and I love it so.

Enoteca Sociale was alright. The company was amazing and the room was beautiful but the food was okay, not great, and not worth the hype by any means. The Dotytron and I shared everything. I ordered the baccala fritters served in a tripe sauce. I love me some trippa and I love baccala but this dish was long on fried and short on flavour.

The same could be said for the octopus and potato salad. The octopus was served correctly - very tender without any chew or tough resistance, but the flavours did not meld in this salad at all - everything just tasted like what it was and the ingredients didn't transcend the sum of their parts at all.

For our mains, we got the braised oxtail on a bed of polenta, which was tasty - but I felt like I could have cooked this (and have) just as well.

The "house made" pappardelle with a goat ragu was a smallish bowl of wide noodles (could have been a bit more al dente) with a bland, insipid tomato sauce strewn haphazardly with chunks of goat meat. Again, the dishes never transcended the sum of their ingredients and left a rather lacklustre impression overall.

To finish we ordered 3 cheeses - seeing as how they had a cheese cave, it seemed a waste not to. Their Italian cheese list was quite pedestrian (taleggio, reggiano) so we went with a Canadian selection, from left to right: Blackburn, Comtomme, Grey Owl. I really liked the candied pecans on the plate, but the other accoutrements were merely meh. I REALLY disliked the toasts they served with the cheese plate because they had been aggressively salted which totally fought with the flavours and salt of the cheeses. FAIL!

As I climbed into bed last night, very very late for a new mum, after another Hot Docs with TPat (which I will review tomorrow), the Dotytron stirred and I turned to him and said, "I love you" and in his barely conscious haze, he mumbled back, "I love you too," at which point I leaned over and whispered into his ear, "They killed Osama bin Laden."

LOL!

Fin.

The resurrection of Christos Maximos

is a joyful time, befitting tranquil reflection on the power of miracles and all the goodness that is the Lord.

...OR it's a time to dress up your kid in a Michael Jordan onesie with matching skull cap, courtesy of Mhui:

BEST. OUTFIT. EVER.

This weekend was cray-cray. My bro, Bruce Wayne had all these health problems that resulted in him spending a chunk of the weekend in emergency and then having his gall bladder removed. We had the Easter Egg hunt, which went well - but will require minor tinkering for next year (I will be more strict about the shotgun start and I will fill my eggs with stickers so that the little ones aren't super-hyped up on chocolate). Then we had Dr. Rei over for a hilarious brunch of spinach & cheddar waffles topped with poached eggs & hollandaise and served with maple cranberry breakfast sausages from the Mennonites:

Saturday morning we took Poh Poh and my mom out to lunch at Phoenix - I couldn't possibly love that restaurant MORE. It's insane how much I love that place. Then headed back downtown and did a top-to-bottom house clean in preparation for TPat's arrival from Vancouver. Sunday was a brunch of Spanish torta (sliced potato omelet) that I gussied up with red pepper & crumbled Bob Evans sausage and topped with salsa verde:

Then homework for the Dotytron and myself and Easter dinner with Momma D's side of the family (I baked a carrot cake with cream cheese frosting but did not take a photo.) Monday was the final round of housecleaning, homework, and the Big Yam's first time on a swing:

His little feet kicking up slay me. For dinner last night I made us a warm chickpea salad with spinach, topped with seared flat iron steak with salsa verde:

I also resurrected my starter after a YEAR in cryo and made 2 rosemary olive olive oil boules which turned out to be my most successful breads to date. The olive oil results in a slightly tighter mie for the bread and a tender crust. I also adjusted for the fact that our house is cold with longer resting times than the recipe (courtesy of my bread-baking idol, Nancy Silverton's Breads from La Brea Bakery) called for - with amazing results. I'm so proud!

Finally, we finished off our Easter weekend with a couple Thomas Keller oreo cookies. I fell in love with the TKO from Bouchon when I was last in NYC - it's a superlative rendition of the Mr. Christie classic. The recipe yields a HEAVENLY salty chocolate sablé cookie that crumbles just so around a (too sweet - will adjust the amount of white chocolate) whipped white chocolate cream. I don't normally spend time fussing with sandwich cookies - I generally hate the low yield and the multiple steps (rolling & cutting & piping filling?!?) but these I will definitely make again. I love the hit of salt and the deep, rich chocolate flavour - which was obtained with bulk store cocoa powder, despite the exhortations from the ENTIRE WORLD to use "the best quality" cocoa powder one could find:

TPat comes this afternoon! Yay!!! So excited for her visit - although I am bummed that she will be spending a week in Toronto that's supposed to be full of thundershowers.

Tonight for dinner I'm making us roasted asparagus tartines (French open faced "sandwiches" of toasted bread and toppings) with poached eggs and parmesan cream with a mixed green salad of roasted beet, horseradish cheddar, and maple vinaigrette.

Fin.

Book review omnibus

Book club had me reading The Bone Cage by Angie Abdou for the March meet-up. It was picked for CBC's Canada Reads but let me divest you of any ideas you might have about it's literary rewards based on that introduction. The book was apparently kicked off pretty early (I don't know - I don't listen to the CBC) and as my friend JJ said, "this is the first book we've read where I thought 'I could have written that'" - which pretty much says it all. It's about two athletes, one a swimmer, one a wrestler, training to compete in the 1996 Olympics or some shiz. I didn't pay attention, because if there's one thing I hate more than nationalism, it's when nationalism overlaps with sports. That there is a venn diagram illustrating how to make Lagerfeld annoyed beyond measure. Anyway, the book was the WORST. All about trying to make amateur athletes all noble and shiz (hey, newsflash: no one ASKED you to do this!) and building a flimsy narrative around epic descriptions of swim practices. BORING!

I also read Emma Donoghue's Room, which recently won the Man Booker prize. The narrator is a 5 year old named Jack, who has spent his entire life living in an 11x11 foot room with his mother, who was kidnapped 6 or 7 years prior to the events of the story. It was floated as a possible book club title, but in the end, the other women in the club (who are all moms save 1) found the subject matter a little discomforting for their liking. Note: once you have a kid - stories of kidnapping and kids dying will affect you A LOT more than you would have thought possible. I didn't think this would be true, but it totally is the case. The fact that the story is told through Jack's perspective actually mitigates the inherent grossness of the premise - Jack's mom has taken pains to shield him from the reality of his situation and you don't get the sense that he's some feral child or that he's aware of what he's missing beyond the four walls that make up his world. Room is touted as being one of the most "beautiful, radiant, and expressive renditions of maternal love" ever (I pulled that from the publisher's website) but I personally found it a little irritating. I know, I'm a monster. Conceptually the book is interesting - but I thought that was all there was to it - it was just the concept. I also found Jack as a character pretty annoying. I didn't find him cute or precocious or endearing (I tend not to like children characters because they're always getting themselves into situations that adults have to compromise their own interests to rescue them from) (I know, I'm a monster). Once I got beyond the narrative conceit of imagining what your perspective would be if you'd been kept from the world at large and had only your mother as your social outlet the interest in the book ran out for me. But I suspect that I'm in the minority on this one, so by all means, go and read it and tell me what you think.

Finally, our next book club pick is Amy Chua's Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother which has generated a minor furor in almost every major publication of the intelligentsia (Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Time, the New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly) and become a cultural phenomenon. You'd have to be living under a rock to miss the whole debate that's STILL GOING. As a by-product of a weirdly bastardized version of Chinese parenting and as a feminist and cultural studies scholar with strong opinions on child-rearing and the ills of modern society, I was intensely interested in reading this. It at once disappointed and exceeded my expectations. First of all, it's imperative to know going in that the majority of people commenting on the phenomena haven't read the book, but are basing their opinions on the cleverly marketed and out-of-context excerpts posted in the original Wall Street Journal piece. Chua is actually much more tongue-in-cheek, self-deprecating, and self-aware than the reductive dichotomizing between "Western/Chinese" parenting styles would have you believe. It's a slim little memoir and you can read it in a couple of hours. The Dotytron devoured it while waiting for our car's oil change and tire switch.

I think that what's so great about this book is the fact that it's become such a lightning rod amongst a certain segment of society - as JJ said, "who knew motherhood was such a hot button topic?" It's been fascinating discussing it with the Dotytron, who came from a fairly "Western" style upbringing, is a music scholar, is now a pedagogue, and is someone who has come into contact with Chinese culture on a more intimate level than some. He actually wants to crash book club but the idea was kiboshed by some of the other ladies.

Ultimately, I thought the discourse on the issue was misdirected. Chua isn't "mean" or "cruel" and she's not living through her children. If anything, it's just a different outlet for the general anxieties that most privileged, educated, liberal parents put on their kids - instead of sports and helicopter parenting and testing kids of ADD or ADHD or fretting about "self esteem," Chua's approach funnels all that money, energy, and parenting work into making her kids master extremely difficult instruments. To be the best that they can possibly be. To instill a sense that excellence and mastery does not come easily or without hours and hours of sweat equity. Chua isn't off the hook - her practice notes for her daughters are as inspiring as they are frightening in their intensity and commitment to detail. Maybe my admiration for her approach is self-serving, as I'm in possession of precisely the same kind of borderline OCD-nitpicky taskmaster personality traits (for example, today I threw myself on the bed while the Dotytron was getting to work and started fretting about the work we have to do to get the house ready for Tpat's visit. I told the Dotytron, "I expect you to clean the basement thoroughly!" and when he replied with mild outrage that he ALWAYS cleans the basement thoroughly, I replied, "That's not true. I know for a FACT there's a pile of cat vomit down there that I've been sitting on." At which point he said, "first of all, if there IS a pile of Smudge vomit still there, it's because I didn't see it'; second of all, WHAT KIND OF A PERSON 'SITS ON' VOMIT?!??!! You're insane." *insert lots of incredulous eyes and lots of dramatic finger quotes around "sits on")

I will say, that when people wonder at my cooking abilities - these are skills that could ONLY have been gleaned through the trial by fire that is 5 years spent working in professional kitchens. The rote, mindless, drudgery of endless repetition is the only way to master a craft and give you the mental agility and muscle memory to do something well.

It cannot be denied that there is a fountain of love there (in Battle Hymn) and a belief that your kids deserve the best, even if it means driving 9 hours and spending mountains of money to get them a shot at learning with one of the best piano teachers in the country. The book details parental and child sacrifices, which is what got lost in a lot of the talk on the topic - which is very telling, I think, of the state of Western parenting, when there is only one way to show love for your child, and that is the super-soft, namby-pamby, coddling, self-esteem boosting kind that actually in the ends sets the bar so low, that it does the exact opposite and robs kids of their opportunity to build real self esteem.

I'm interested in hearing what other people who've read the book think.

Tonight is our first Wednesday night dodgeball game of the season - woot!

For dinner I made us chorizo and potato stuffed cubanelle peppers with aged cheddar cheese melted on top. Served with "Mexican-style" black beans and rice.

Fin.

Rapido!

Shiz be all mad hectic all up in this mother - so this is a mostly picture post. The Dotytron's "girl talk" class in his after school program (who he's been teaching for the past 3 years and who ADORE him) have been clamoring to meet the Big Yam so I'm taking the car this afternoon to meet him and crash the lesson.

These are my dulce de leche sandwich cookies. They turned out GINORMOUS and look like little bums with a skid mark. I accidentally added too much flour to the batter through the classic n00b mistake of measuring incorrectly (dip and scoop rather than the more correct, spoon and level.)

The chocolate flan - which was a big hit! I love flan and I should really make it more. So nice and chilled and refreshing:

Last night's dinner was whole wheat spaghetti in a rose sauce with Italian sausage from Rowe farms and parsley:

This is the blurriest picture of all time, but it's strictly for the benefit of SMckay, who spoiled the Big Yam with the cutest set of stuffies ever. They're called the Food Chain Friends (tagline: "they're friends, they eat each other...it's a complicated relationship") which are a set of cute and ugly vaguely prehistoric looking stuffed toys that all fit inside each other's mouths like Paleozoic

Matryoshka dolls. This is the Big Yam having his head eaten by one:

Solids foods + itch to craft + blogging inspiration + need to procrastinate = HOMEMADE GIANT PLACEMATS/SPLAT MATS! I bought the laminated cotton fabrics from Etsy and all I had to do was cut them to size, round the corners, make bias tape (I am now a bias tape PRO) in a contrasting/complementary shade and sew the bias tape on. I'm pretty pleased with how they turned out. Right now we have one of the table and one folded up underneath the high chair:

Don't embiggen the photos lest you see my crooked seams (I rushed through the job while watching Top Chef Canada and being distracted by how PATHETIC the cooking pool is in our home and native land.)

Fin.

Working on dem teef!

So I just checked out some vacation photos on FB of some peeps who have an almost 2 year old little girl and I guess they were in the Dominican or something. The little girl was wearing a series of bikinis and I was totally grossed out by it. Is that weird? I just don't get what areas you're trying to define when you put a toddler in a bikini. I mean, I didn't wear a two piece bathing suit until I was around 23 or 24. Which might be a little extreme, but still - I find it really creepy when I see young girls in 2 piece bathing suits. I'm in favour of the surfer look for kids. In fact, the other day at Kol Kid on Queen Street I almost bought the Big Yam a blue and white striped one piece that looked like the French "bathing costumes" people used to wear, back when people had some modesty:

I also think that look is hilarious.

We won our dodgeball game on Friday! Wahoo! Which actually meant we finished the season in third place (after only winning 2 games all season long). LOL! Amazing! We start up again on Wednesdays - which means a pretty insane schedule. The Dotytron is working late Mondays, Tuesdays I have class starting in May, Wednesday night we have dodgeball, Thursday night the Dotytron works late again, Friday we have softball starting up. Gulp. No wonder I get yelled at for over scheduling us.

On top of that - I might have volunteered to organize a street Easter Egg hunt for the kids. *weak laughter* I can't help it! Then, when I was trying to figure out the logistics and typing up my super cute invitation (see below), I asked the Dotytron what he thought about some minor detail, and he got all, "I don't know, whatever, I'm too busy to think about that right now" and then I (of course) BLEW UP AT HIM and went on this giant diatribe about "community!" and "Jane Jacobs!" and "selfishness!" and "civic mindedness!" and all sorts of Sesame-Street type malarkey about how everyone is busy and how you have to make time for these kinds of things and otherwise you're contributing to the downfall and anomie of modern life, blah blah blah. It was pretty classic/epic. At the end of the day, it's not *that* much work and I kind of had the best time ever making the invites, so once I calmed down, the Dotytron was able to talk some sense into me and make me see that I was being insane and high-strung.

Saturday we had dim sum with my Poh Poh and my mum and my mum's exotic lesbian cross-dressing friend and her partner. The Big Yam woke up twice throughout Friday evening and we went to bed late so we woke up feeling like hell and the weather was pants, which all meant that my planned movie date with Dr. Rei to see Jane Eyre was cancelled in the end. I love my best friend though. I really really do. So much of my time is spent chuckling over something funny one or the other of us said in recent memory. Like how last week when we were hanging out she was trying to remember the name of this Indian restaurant in our hood and kept telling me to search for "Arupi" or "Arupa" and even though I REPEATEDLY asked if she meant "Udupi Palace" she insisted that it started with an "A" - only to figure out like, 2 days later that it WAS Udupi Palace. Stuff like that.

Friday night pre-dodgeball I made us mussels steamed with chorizo and Fin du Monde beer with toasted buttered whole wheat baguette and a salad:

Last night we had McDonald's. Whee! This morning we had Momma and Poppa D over for a belated birthday brunch for Momma D. I made spinach and cheddar waffles topped with a slice of ham and a poached egg with a mixed greens salad with sesame-soy dressing:

I also made a banana cake with cream cheese frosting.

Tonight we're going over to J & S's house for a Mexican fiesta. I think they made carnitas - but my contribution is a chocolate flan and some dulce de leche snowball cookies.

Fin.

In case of the apocalypse

The Boobla has been inconsolable from teeth pain as of late (seriously - how crazy is it that our teeth CUT THROUGH OUR GUMS to emerge?!) so we ran out and bought this hastily researched homeopathic product, camilia, which purports to soothe irritability, restlessness and painful gums. It looks like this:

Of course our family doctor gave us all skeptical/wary face when we told him about it and was all like, "wellllllll...it's homeopathic so it hasn't been tested - I'd recommend Tylenol" as if he wasn't reassured by the smiling visage of Koala, M.D. on the packaging! It knocks the little guy out COLD - last night we gave him some and he slept almost 12 full hours. We're not sure if he just needed the sleep or if we basically drugged him to sleep so that we could gorge on Popeye's in peace. We'd feel pretty guilty if it was the latter.

Last night was so fun! PBR and fried chicken are a match made in heaven - or so my alcoholically inclined guests seemed to indicate. The dinner convo was amazing and spanned many topics - the apocalypse, where we decided that if it was truly nuclear armageddon (and not just like, Biblical apocalypse with the locusts and the sea boiling and the raining frogs - which we all agreed would be pretty cool to witness), we'd want to meet our maker with a nice, healthy heroin drip, or failing that, weapon's grade camilia. LOL!

I also tried to make a case for hell not being that bad and that I would want to be one of Satan's minions, but the Dotytron curtailed THAT dream by saying, "Dude. It's HELL. There is no way that it could be anything but the worst. They would know you'd want to be a minion and would just never pick you, but keep stringing you along every day - that would be your hell." Hahahaha! The thought of me languishing in the fiery bowels of the Dante's Inferno, constantly thinking that today might just be THE day that I'm finally allowed to be one of Satan's minions and only to have my hopes crushed day after day, is actually pretty funny.

But enough about that. Today marked my first run in a little under a year - it was hell. Apparently after you have a baby, when you run, you pee a little. FANTASTICO!

For dinner I made us perogies (frozen) baked in the oven with caramelized onion and fennel with sautéed rapini (that I blanched first to take away some of the bitterness - I'm also continuing my mean mum routine and pureeing rapini for the Big Yam and making him eat fennel.) For dessert we had leftovers of the cake I made yesterday for our dinner - a delicious, light, springy orange cake (made tender with sour cream) with a milk chocolate buttercream.

Okay, here are some book reviews, coming at you fast and furious.

I read Elizabeth Gilbert's Commited waaaaaaaaaaay back in January for my book club. I had studiously avoided her Eat, Pray, Love based on my assumption (founded on nothing but a gut feeling) that it was honky grandma be trippin' wah wahing catnip and that I would find her intensely self-absorbed, boring, and would want her to call me when she had REAL problems (it turns out that I was right. Not that I've read Eat, Pray, Love to determine that, but this is one of those instances when I'm SO right about a cultural product that my rightness transcends things like actually having to consume the cultural product in question - it's the same way I feel about like, LCD Soundsystem or something.) ANYWAY, this book was the same - it details her attempts to reconcile the legal requirement that she marry her Brazilian beau, Felipe (the "love" of the previous book) who was played by Javier Bardem in the movie but in real life looks like this:

They were obviously separated at birth [/deadpan]. I will concede that there's a certain self-deprecating witty humour that's kind of par for the course for any memoir-ish book and that makes it readable enough - I just couldn't be BOTHERED with all the navel-gazing and faux-anguish. YOU EITHER GET MARRIED OR YOU DON'T. CALL ME WHEN YOU HAVE REAL PROBLEMS. YOU HONKY GRANDMA.

As a companion fiction piece, the book club also read Brady Udall's The Lonely Polygamist. This is a sprawling work of fiction (not like, Jonathan Frantzen sprawling, but featuring a cast of many) about a fundamentalist polygamist named Golden who has four wives, an armada of children and finds himself experiencing a mid-life crisis - detached and apathetic. The author's use of a polygamous family is really just a way of taking the ordinary family struggles that people experience and using the multiple wives aspect to exaggerate them - from a male perspective. The writing was pretty engaging as were the characters, but in the end, I found Golden's lack of engagement and general bewilderment with his life and lot too hard to stomach (seriously? You made these choices!) and didn't finish the book - I read ahead and found out what happened, but skipped some of the last third. It's a good read - I mean, I WAS slogging through this with a 1 month old baby, so that might have affected my desire to persevere.

I blew through the latest and last installment of E. Lockhart's Ruby Oliver series, Real Live Boyfriends in about 30 minutes. It wasn't as satisfying as the other three in the series - Ruby is at her best when she's got real drama to contend with and the last book is really about wrapping things up and leaving Ruby in a fairly stable place in her life - the discord with her boyfriend Noel felt really contrived and false and didn't have the emotional resonance of the other books. Supporting characters also didn't really shine and Roo's parents (one of the highlights in the series) were also made to be an afterthought. The book felt rushed - although I might be dealing with some angsty grief because the series is over? Could it have ended in a way that I would have loved? Who knows?

I have a few more, but it's the end of the day and I'm exhausted...I'll wrap up tomorrow.

I will end by saying (again) that I do love my street more than anything. All the neighbours were outside today after work and we were all watching the kids zooming around on their bicycles, tricycles, scooters and whatnot and it was really sweet. We have a neighbour going through some health issues right now and it's really warming to see how our street is coming together as a community - we really really really lucked out - it's unbelievable. I feel so fortunate that we live alongside such warm, welcoming people with so much care and consideration for each other - our kids are going to be going to the same schools, separated by only a few years (or in the same year, as is the case with the Big Yam and our neighbours' daughter) - I freakin' love it.

Fin.