Camping - Food Edition (after which I will stop milking one measly camping trip for blog posts)

I was prepared to rough it in the bush food-wise - Collette told me "just forget trying to eat healthy - it's easiest if you just buy crap." I went to Loblaws and crowded my cart with club pack boxes of every processed snack available, and filled in the spaces with chips and cookies. I only bought meat that had enough nitrates in it to last three weeks without refrigeration. I bought CHEEZ FREAKING WHIZ.

I had not reckoned on my husband, "Hibachi Man". We had a Coleman stove, but I don't think he used it at all. He used a little Hibachi and the grate over the campfire. He also brought actual meat. He made hamburgers.

He made steak and potatoes. And lit candles. 

He made french toast and bacon. 

He warmed up cinnamon buns in a cast iron pan over the fire. 

Then there was the parade of giant hunks of meat, courtesy of Mark and Dan and Auspit.

This is pork.

This is beef. 

...wrapped in bacon. 

It was four days of torture and deprivation, obviously.

Since my husband spent much of his youth practically camping professionally, I left the set-up and procedures pretty much entirely to him - I just put stuff where he told me to. I probably should have paid some attention to the fact that he hasn't actually camped for twenty years or so, and double-checked with him that ALL of the food had been put in the van before we bedded down on the first night.

Instead, I woke up to strange sounds outside the tent. Since I have marked tendencies to over-imaginative hysteria and I DON'T CAMP, I naturally thought "AXE MURDERER", not "FORAGING WILDLIFE", and whacked Matt frantically so he could.... I dunno, get out of the tent and distract the psychopath while Eve and I ran away? Since he was in his compact sleeping bag and he's a little less, um, compact than in the past, he kind of flopped off his air mattress still IN the sleeping bag, opened the tent flap, yelled something, then wriggled out of the sleeping bag and got out of the tent. After a moment, I realized two things: 1) I didn't hear anything that sounded like an axe thunking into a person, and 2) I had to pee. I crawled out of the tent to see Matt standing a little ways away, trying to figure out how to wrestle our cooler lid out of the grip of two raccoons, who didn't look in the least inclined to give way. I looked down and said "did they take my shoe too?" and he said "no, I threw it at them". The raccoons eventually wandered away, Matt gave me my shoe back, and I went to the outhouse while he put ALL the food in the van.

A couple of nights later while we were at the drive-in, another family had their kitchen tent ransacked and plundered for a number of bread products, which made Matt feel better. After we got back from the movie, he lit a small fire for us after the kids went to bed. We were sitting there talking, and then he got up to adjust the firewood, so I clicked on the flashlight for him. Then I heard a rustling sound off to the left, in the wooded lot behind out campsite. I turned the flashlight beam to the left, and - okay, I didn't get a picture, so you have to imagine this one dark, and just the heads, stacked one on top of the other.

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"Do you have any Grey Poupon?"
Photo by Auberon_

They stared at me for a second, then very subtly pulled their heads back behind the tree trunk. You could almost hear them whispering "I don't think she saw us."

We came home with part of the beef roast (score!), forty-two granola bars and a couple of good stories.

What I've Been Doing While I'm Not Blogging

Cooking for another gourmet dinner party. 

I got the recipe from an LCBO Food & Drink Magazine

It was called a terrine. A more accurate description would be "meat, mixed with other meat..."

"....layered with other meat..."

"...wrapped in bacon."

I had to call my husband in for an engineering consult. We swaddled it and bathed it as tenderly as we would an infant. A meat infant, that we were going to roast and eat. Okay, bad simile.

We stuck it in the fridge and weighed it down with cans to squish down all the layers (NEVER NEVER do this with a baby).

Look, there are pistachios and dried cherries in it - it's practically trail mix!

Okay, admittedly, I picked this terrine recipe because it was less jellified than all the others, and there was STILL a higher degree of slipperiness than I'm generally comfortable with (sorry if I just made you gag, Nicole). But it was actually insanely delicious.

My Bark is Better than My Bite

This is what I did this afternoon:

The ones on the right (toffee shortbread or shortbread meltaways - my recipe is on a pink page from a flour recipe book, and I've miraculously managed not to lose it - this is almost exactly the same) has become my go-to Christmas cookie over the past few years, and one of the only cookies I can actually "whip up", which to me means very little recipe consultation - since my memory's gotten so bad and I'm a bit obsessive, following a recipe usually means frequent and repeated looking back at the recipe between adding and stirring things. The kids love them, they freeze like a dream and....um... well, shortbread, and Skor bits, so duh.

In the middle is salted chocolate toffee pretzel bark, which I found last year, I think by Googling pretzel toffee bark (okay, not the most gripping story - the recipe makes up for it). Every time someone tastes it, their first question is whether you need a candy thermometer to make it, and once they know there's no hard-crack or soft-ball stuff involved (hey, candy-making terms all sound dirty, I never noticed that before) then they ask for the recipe. My husband told me I have to take the rest of it out of the house.

On the left are these that I found on the Yummy Mummy Club website. I made them for the first time today. For how pretty they look, they're not that much work, but I'm not sure they're delicious enough to make a whole bunch. I'd like to find a way to get a bit more stuff on them to balance out the chocolate a little. I'm also not sure why they're called mendiants, which I believe means homeless people in French and I find that a tad disturbing (resolutely not Googling something again on the grounds that it might torpedo my ridiculous argument). They do look pretty cool, though. I added some red walnuts that I got to make shortbread since the dried cranberries weren't bright red enough, and I used pumpkin seeds instead of sunflower for greenness.

I have dough chilling in the fridge for smoked sea salt maple sugar shortbread and blue cheese warming for blue cheese walnut shortbread for my dad. But I'm not sure what else to make. I just typed five different versions of 'leave your favourite Christmas cookie in your comment!' and they all sound douchey. If you want to, though, go ahead. 

Why I'm Not a Food Blogger

Because when I finally decided at the last minute that I was making this for the dinner party, I should have assembled my fancy ingredients all at once to take a picture, but I didn't. Instead, I tried this, but Rose was sleeping on Eve and I was distracted and didn't manage to get a decent shot.

Then I realized that it probably would have been a better, more balanced shot if I had put the pecans, the ginger and the maple sugar all together, but by that time I had already chopped up the ginger and baked it in the cake. Also, you can't see the pedestal from this angle so it just looks like a tippy plate.

Then I was hemmed in at the table by other people who were drunk and pitiless and didn't care that my camera was unreachable in my purse and I have to post EVERY SINGLE DAY in November, so I didn't even get BAD pictures of Collette's amazing peanut soup with smoked chicken or Janet's fabulous Boston lettuce and feta and pomegranate salad with Cajun shrimp and Margot's marvellous Moroccan Salmon Cakes and Susanne's truly incomparable Beef Wellington which turned out perfectly even after Collette walked in and said "What are you making? Beef Wellington? That's REALLY HARD to make. It never goes well on that Gordon Ramsay show. I do NOT have a good feeling about this."

Anyway, here's the goddamned cake.

I also didn't get a shot of the maple sugar candies that Matt made because I was (incredibly stupidly) worried that after we cut the cake into ten pieces they would be too small for everyone, so he made them as garnishes for a (totally unnecessary) scoop of ice cream. I stuck one on top of the cake.

I'm a barely decent baker. I'm a truly horrible food blogger. I am unsurpassed as an eater. It's good to know your strengths, I always say.

Maple Gingerbread Layer Cake

With Salted Maple Caramel Sauce and Maple-Coated Pecans.

Pictures to follow.

(I know. Totally phoning it in. Sorry).

Wrinkles of various types

First of all, running drop-tackle hugs to Maggie - FUCK the leaves, Maggie, FUCK them - and Jenny - make the boys iron, Jenny! Just kidding, that's a terrible idea if your boys are anything like mine - and everyone else who is making me feel like forcing out a blog post every day in this miserable month is a wholly worthwhile endeavour. Also, the Denver Hayes never iron shirt? Is a filthy lie perpetrated on the iron-hating public. ALSO also, Angus and the team wore shirts and ties over to St. Joseph's high school for an exhibition game, changed into their jerseys and promptly stuffed their neatly pressed shirts and pants into their drawstring bags - so yeah, still love the coach, but shaking my head a little.

Because tomorrow (today) is Thursday and I will be (am) driving to Barrie to spend the week-end with Zarah, I have decided to review tonight's (last night's) dinner for this post.

We had the last of the carrots from my dad's garden - those were fantastic, obviously. We had some berries from Farm Boy, which were pretty good, although obviously it's not the best season for them. I also cooked a box of President's Choice Coconut Chicken Lollipops and a box of President's Choice Moroccan Cigars, both of which I picked up on a whim at the grocery store yesterday because I thought a finger foods night before I leave might be fun.

Both were really good - good quality chicken and beef, the coconut coating was nice, and the Moroccan cigars had an authentically Moroccan flavour (based on my expert opinion, which I base on having spent two whole weeks in Morocco once). Both my husband and I were impressed.

Eve's review of her toasted kaiser bun with melted cheese on it and Angus's review of the box of timbits he filled up on after volleyball which meant that he wasn't hungry - also thumbs up.

My review of my kids? They SUCK.

(This is not a sponsored post, in case that wasn't clear. It probably was).

On How I Like to Think I'm Open-Minded, but I'm Really Not At All

The other day I was on Twitter and someone was talking about how her daughter was eating broccoli and she was extremely pleased. The hashtag was #babyledsolids.

And I thought, WTF? Baby-led solids? How does the baby lead with the solids? Do you make the baby mix up its own cereal? Do you carry the baby around the kitchen while it points out the ingredients for pheasant under glass? The baby doesn't lead! WE lead! Isn't our function as far as babies and solids to sort of lead the babies up to the kinds of solid foods that won't, you know, cause them to die? Babies aren't that bright, folks. A baby will try to eat a TV remote. They don't know that they can't eat celery and pretzels and marbles or hot dogs that we haven't cut in half because our mothers have informed us forty thousand goddamned times that a hot dog is the exact size of a baby's windpipe - it's up to US to provide the leadership in that regard.  And I stormed around muttering about ridiculous hippy-dippy airy-fairy notions of parenting. Baby-led solids! Jesus Christ!

Then today I was driving home from a restorative day of tulip-looking and jerk-chicken eating with Pam and I heard Kathleen Petty on CBC interviewing Kathy Buckworth, the author of I Am So the Boss of You: An 8-Step Guide to Giving Your Family the Business. I haven't read the book and didn't even listen to all of the interview (just to be clear about the fact that I'm not bothering to make sure this is based on complete information or anything), but the part I heard was Kathy Buckworth saying parents have to be in charge and make the rules and you are allowed to say "because I said so". And then she said she was making baked bean casserole, "which is as nasty as it sounds", and her friend said she wished her kids would eat that, and Kathy Buckworth said "well, make them" and the friend said she couldn't, and Kathy Buckworth said something like "listen, my goal isn't that they like it - my goal is that I have them fed something nutritious, on time, under budget, so that I can feel successful".

And I thought, WTF? First of all, TOTALLY goes back to that thing where if you say you wouldn't tolerate a picky eater you just didn't have one. Second of all, fine, someone has to be nominally in charge, but I do actually subscribe to the "I didn't ask to be born" theory of parenting - you made the children, so I don't really see how them asking to be fed something they don't find revolting is all that importunate. Third of all, of all the reasons (and there are some good ones) for making a kid TRY something, let alone eat all of it, "so I can feel successful" is pretty far down the list in my books (well, okay, maybe not THAT far down the list in MY books, but I kind of think it should be in your book, if you actually write one). So then I stormed around putting away my groceries and muttering about people who think they can run a family like a business and how going back to the fifties and "children should be seen and not heard" is not so much a new idea as, well, like I just said, a REALLY OLD ONE!

So yes, one might quite rightfully inquire when my book on parenting and nutrition is coming out. The one where I hold forth on letting my son play soccer with a chicken ball before eating it, and feeding Eve coconut yogurt and broccoli five nights running.

Parenting is hard. Judging is fun and easy.

Surly Thursdays or whatever shut up I've been posting for twenty-one days straight

I'm cranky. No-good-reason, hair-trigger, don't-fuck-with-me cranky. Is it just me, or are some times just more difficult to fix in the mind than others? Eve has singing lessons at 6:30 on Wednesday evenings, but for some reason I always think it's six. I have dinner ready and remind her to brush her teeth, and we're ready to leave, and then I realize it's not until six-thirty, and we live about four seconds away from her teacher, so we're way too early. Except tonight the teacher wanted to do it at six, and all day I've been confused because I'm actually right, but then I'm not usually right, so am I really right? Then Eve came home with a sore throat and a fever and it didn't matter anyway, so FUCK.

Also, fuck the fucking people with their insisting on being served a fucking meal every fucking night. I'm sick of cooking the same four things over and over, and when I try something different why on earth is it a meatloaf with oats and milk in it? And why did I buy not enough ground beef and forget to reduce the other ingredients accordingly so it turns out a barely loaf-shaped mushy oat-y mess? Actually everyone else ate it quite happily (once I buried it under a blanket of melted cheese), but I thought it was icky. My husband was a fan of the idea of meat loaf, and suggested that next time I just try adding a little more... meat. So fine, but FUCK.

You know what would be really different? If someone on a TV show went through something traumatic and then said "Wow. You know, that car accident/ watching my partner get murdered/ war really messed me up. I probably shouldn't be trying to perform any complicated or stressful tasks right now, and I think it would be really good for me to talk to some kind of professional". Because it's really not original anymore, the whole "I'm fine! I'm fine! I'm totally good being a policeman or doctor or whatever and then AFTER I do something unbelievably reckless and disastrous consequences occur, won't it be a heartwarming dénouement when I finally walk into that psychiatrist's office?" It's old. It's tired. It's annoying.

To cap it all off, I left a comment today in which I used 'they're' instead of 'their'. FUCK.

I'm going to bed. Or out for a cheeseburger. I might bitch-slap someone denying their PTSD on the way.

Fiddling While Rome Burns

These are the elements for my appetizer for our couples dinner party tonight. And yes, I do realize all of my posts have been exceptionally frivolous and self-absorbed lately, and yes I realize there are things going on in the world that could be addressed. But right now I need to go shower and get dressed and it's NaBloPoMo,  and I made a donation to the Red Cross, so cut me some frickin' slack, okay?

As many of you know, I'm a little off my game at the moment, and I may have been a little overly adventurous with my attempt at the chicken recipe. I wanted to try to make something that would use a sauce that resembled the spicy hot chocolate I had in Montreal at juliette et chocolat. I found a chocolate curry recipe, with cut-up chunks of chicken, but I wanted something a little more elegant, so I altered the sauce recipe slightly, then found a recipe for cocoa-chili rubbed chicken breasts, which I plan to slice up and drizzle the chocolate-curry sauce on. The chicken breasts turned out okay - not fantastic, but okay - but the chocolate sauce with the chicken was just not quite right. I tried the chicken with the sauce drizzled over it with a sprinkling of demerara sugar and cinnamon, and that was better. And I'm out of time, so it's what we're going with.

I also made coconut orange cashew rice. I mixed in some Thai purple rice with white basmati, thinking it would be a nice contrast. Then I realized that I was pouring liquid in with it, and thinking the white rice would stay white was purest idiocy. Oh well - Eve has already had a bowl of the purple rice, which she thinks is fantastic.

Happy Saturday, everyone.

You Call That A $@%# Pancake?

I always know intellectually that intense experiences are followed by inevitable let-down, and yet I'm always unprepared for the reality. I loved being in New York and I was also happy that it was at the end of our crazy busy travelling/houseguests/nonstop plans stretch and once I got home the rest of August was a wide-open expanse of Summer Fun.

So naturally I've been a mopey whiny mess all week. Every morning I would spread out my suitcase and the laundry baskets on the bed and fold a few things and lay out a few things, and then leave it all there until Matt wanted to go to bed, whereupon he would pile it all on the floor at the foot of the bed again, and the next morning I would start all over again. I bought groceries I've mostly been too tired and headachey to cook.

I've given up on trying to pull back on my antidepressant until September. The days I don't take it are so unutterably wretched I can hardly stand it, and it's not fair to the kids. I'll wait until they're back in school and then throw myself on my doctor's mercy.

Yesterday after I dropped Eve off at her friend's house, Angus spontaneously decided that he and I should make pancakes. I was delighted. I found the recipe and gave him the ingredients and measuring utensils and let him go to it.

I never make the pancakes. Mixing the batter was fine, but the actual cooking of the pancakes went horribly wrong. We waited to long to flip them, then we flipped them too tentatively, so they were burned on one side, then batter splattered out from the underside so they were all lumpy and malformed. We accidentally made one that looked like Mickey Mouse, and a few misshapen blobs, then he wanted to make a giant one so we poured the rest of the batter in the middle of the pan, but then when he flipped it half of it fell on the edge of the pan. We laughed our asses off and drowned the weird-ass pancakes in syrup and ate them. We texted Matt that we would not be usurping his pancake-making duties, and he expressed his relief. Angus was enamoured of the word 'spatula' and said it over and over again until I threatened him with bodily harm.

Speaking of meals that WOULDN'T make Gordon Ramsay curse a blue streak, lunch at Maze with Marilyn was amazing. I usually assume that acclaimed restaurants are overly hyped, because... I don't really know why, actually. Because no matter how you whip, chop and julienne, it's all just food. It's not like they're serving unicorn burps or anything. But then I remember that when you eat a really great meal in a restaurant, it's like everything you eat is the perfect example of itself. The salad I had was the perfect salad, and I felt like every salad I ate for the rest of my life should have butter lettuce and grilled corn and roasted peppers, and I had no idea what was in the dressing but it was PERFECT. The chicken was perfectly cooked and convinced me that chicken should never be without fried yucca and fig reduction. The only thing I didn't adore was the stout ice cream. I thought, like I usually think about wacky ice cream flavours, 'well that can't possibly taste like what I imagine it will taste like', but it did. Turns out I don't like Guinness in a glass or in a scoop. However, they brought us one of each dessert instead of the same one, as we had both ordered, so they gave us the other one anyway, and we discovered that the creme fraiche from the other dessert went really well with our chocolate pudding, so it all turned out fine. Also, it was Restaurant Week in New York so our meal was actually quite reasonably priced. We celebrated this by having hideously expensive cocktails.

George.

Yes. I have named this post George because this post has proven otherwise unnameable. I considered 'Spinning my Wheels' or "Blurry and lacking in focus" and "little nuggets of pure crazy" and nothing worked. I will call it George.

So apparently I should put a honking big slash between the Biblio and the Mama because (and I really should have known this), I can only do ONE THING at a time. I can blog regularly, or I can do book reviews. So not surprising. Whenever people talk about working out at lunch hour or stopping at the gym on the way home from work I try not to stare at them with my mouth gaping unattractively, but I'm always thinking "huh. So not everyone has Exercise Day, where they exercise first thing in the morning and then spend the rest of the day recovering from said exercise?"

I've been on this baking-for-the-lunch-boxes kick because it's the beginning of the year and I'm still optimistic and energetic (well anyway, I'm marginally less beaten down and demoralized than I will be come February). The kids love those chocolate-covered-coconut bars, so I've turned out batch after batch of chocolate-dipped coconut macaroons, because they're fresh and homemade! and I know all the ingredients! Of course, the fact that those ingredients include sweetened condensed milk and chocolate detracts from the virtuousness somewhat, but still.... Tonight I realized two things. 1. I don't have to look at the recipe any more. 2. We're all so sick of chocolate-covered coconut things we never want to see another one. Naturally I have NO IDEA where to go from here.

I couldn't sleep last night. Then the back of my head got itchy and I scratched it and then spent the next two hours obsessing over the weirdness of back of my skull. Does everyone have this odd shelf of bone halfway up, or have I been walking around with a permanent depressed skull fracture? God help me if I ever go bald.

Remember when I took the kids to Laflèche and we did the kids' obstacle course? My friend Collette has decided that the adults of our four families need to do the adult course. The three-and-a-half-hour really-high-up I'll-make-a-man-out-of-you adult course. Except Matt's going to be away. I said I couldn't go without someone to encourage and support me and tolerate being cursed at without holding a grudge and everyone else said I could use their husbands for that. So I'm going. Even though I'm afraid of heights and those harnesses are really unflattering. What does it say about me that I'm slightly more afraid of humiliation than I am of death?

Wow. This post may have reached a new pinnacle of frivolous lunacy (lunatic frivolity?) Of course, I went to the gym this morning, so really, what did you expect?

Dinner Party of Awesome

We have a dinner party with four other couples every couple of months, where everybody makes something fancy-ish, and we rotate who does the soup, salad, appetizers, main course and dessert. It's been a big success; I really enjoy the fact that everyone only does one course -- usually I wouldn't spend all day making a salad, but when I actually have the chance to it's quite satisfying. Over the past year we've had Julia Child's boeuf bourguignon, veal osso bucco, spit-roasted lamb and satsivi (a Georgian dish consisting of chicken bathed in walnut sauce); pear parsnip soup, smoked salmon chowder and lobster bisque; butternut squash ravioli, cauliflower fritters, seared duck and scallops on pesto. And that's just what I can remember. People have cured their own pork belly, aged their own steak and beheaded chickens in the back yard (I might be exaggerating on that last one).

For this party I was making grilled strawberry and fig salad.



I'd actually never eaten a fresh fig before -- I had to call one of my friends to ask if I was supposed to peel them. I bought an extra one to try eating and it took me a few minutes to bite into it, it looked so strange, but it was delicious - Eve liked it too.



I couldn't find pomegranate molasses, so I made some, which was easy. I used snow pea shoots instead of sunflower, and I have no idea what Hooks blue cheese is and no memory of what kind I used.

We grilled the fruit and got all the ingredients ready here, then assembled at the host's house.





Just as I was sprinkling the last spoonful of walnuts on the last plate, I remembered that Susanne's boyfriend Paul is allergic to shellfish and....OH FUCK. Considering I was the one who made the chicken in walnut sauce and that I made a separate chicken breast with a balsamic reduction for him, you'd think I might have remembered. In my defense, he is very quiet - in our blind guess-the-food game, he ate nectarine and it was Susanne who spoke up and said he was allergic to nectarine peel. I cleaned off the plate and made a new salad without walnuts and apologized to Susanne for trying to kill the father of her unborn child. Margot quietly occupied herself with removing the walnuts from the green beans for the main course plate. Later on someone asked Paul how he found out he was allergic to walnuts and he said 'eating walnuts'. See? He's gotta get more obnoxious, or he's not going to survive this group.

The salad was great, although the tradition is for everyone to praise everyone else's dish and denigrate their own, so I probably said I should have used arugula instead of swiss chard or something, for form's sake. Curiously, a good part of the conversation tonight revolved around things happening to people's fingers (if you recall, the conversation was toe-centered at my book club meeting). Also, the drunk woman beside my husband kept threatening alternately to stab him or perform oral sex on him (apparently she'd lost the distinction between fellate and fillet several drinks earlier). Somewhat inexplicably, a good part of the night was devoted to a discussion about Rick Springfield and Simon in the Land of Chalk Drawings. However, no boyfriends were harmed (or molested) in the course of this dinner.

For those who asked, here is my book club list for next year:

The Book of Negroes, Lawrence Hill

You Could Live a Long Time: Are You Ready?, Lyndsay Green

Come Thou Tortoise, Jessica Grant

Super Sad True Love Story, Gary Shteyngart

The Best Laid Plans, Terry Fallis

Vernon God Little, DBC Pierre

The Death of Grass, John Christopher

The other two months are a short story night and a manuscript by one of our members.

Flying by Seat of Pants Recipes: Carrot Brie Soup

For those of you who enjoyed my hapless attempt to recreate citrus almonds, here's another one.

 1) go to Allium in Ottawa with three friends (great restaurant, stupid name -- whose chef was actually trained by my husband's cousin's French-chef husband -- true story -- well obviously, why on earth would I make something like that up? I met him at my brother-in-law's wedding. Where there was a vegetarian buffet. He was fairly gracious in the absence of foie gras). Fail to order the Carrot and Brie soup on the grounds that you have never really loved carrot soup, which usually tastes like watery cooked carrots, while I prefer them raw. Taste the Carrot and Brie Soup of a friend and then wait for her to go to the washroom so you can eat most of it and refill her bowl with wine and hope she won't notice.

 2) go home and mount a pitched battle with said friend to see who can re-create the recipe best. Swear at her when her first attempt is much better than yours, which prompted your mother-in-law to counsel dumping most of a litre of cream into the pot, which actually does improve it immeasurably.

 3) make a second attempt which goes much better. 

 4) make a pot for book club which garners rave reviews and may even edge out my almost-famous near-sublime butternut squash soup. 

 5) go to Zarah's and decide to make a pot for lunch with good friend and his wife who I am meeting for the first time. 

 6) dispatch Zarah to the market for ingredients, including carrots and brie. Admire big beautiful local award-winning carrots with which she returns, and look somewhat suspicious at the cheese, which has a thin layer of ash running through it, but succumb to Zarah's blithe assurances that it will work fine (and it does taste really good).

 7) roast the carrots lovingly on a cookie sheet, drizzled with olive oil at 400 degrees until soft

 8) sauté sliced onions and one or two sliced potatoes slowly in butter and olive oil over medium-low heat until soft.

 9) place carrots, onions and potatoes in soup pot. Season with sea salt, pepper, lemon thyme, oregano, whatever. 

 10) add homemade chicken stock just to cover (I over chicken-stocked and under-potatoed the first time).

 11) simmer for a while. 

 12) add wine. simmer for another while. 

 13) add cheese. Stir. Observe cheese melting nicely. Observe strange substance that resembles blobs of gray chewed gum floating around. 

 14) Freak out and deride Zarah's ridiculous yuppie ash-bedecked cheese. 

 15) Calm down and scoop out blobs with a slotted spoon. Empty out soup into bowl and scrape remainder of blobby gray crap off of bottom of pan (or make Zarah do it. She switched the cheese, after all).

 16) Return soup to pot and simmer. Add cream. Consider contacting the Evanturel people to advise adding a big red warning DO NOT USE IN SOUP label so no one else has to endure a similarly harrowing experience. 

 17) Serve soup to appreciative guests and swear each other to secrecy. Until you're in dire need of a blog post.

Flying by the Seat of Pants Recipes: Citrus Almonds

So my friend Collette is notoriously cheap -- really, she likes being called cheap, if we try to tone it down to 'frugal' or 'sensible with money' she gets offended. At one Christmas craft show we went to, they had citrus almonds for sale, which we sampled. They were delicious, but she refused to pay five dollars for a tiny little bag of them (even though it was fetchingly wrapped in sparkly gold snowflake-printed cellophane and tied with an adorable ribbon). I, of course, bought the five-dollar bag of almonds, brought it home and stuck it in the cupboard waiting for an occasion auspicious enough to warrant hideously expensive almonds, until they went stale and I had to throw them out. I'm not sure what the word for me is, but it's even less complimentary than 'cheap'.

Can you believe that there is no recipe for citrus almonds online? Well, okay, I'm by far no computer whiz, but I've googled dozens, nay, hundreds of recipes from 'chocolate caramel coconut pecan shortbread' to 'yak in blueberry brain sauce' and always been able to find something at least approximating what I'm looking for. But I googled 'citrus almonds' and nothing. Nada. Niente. I got citrus cake with almonds, almond cake with blood orange sauce and Miley Cyrus sits naked in a tub full of almonds and orange juice (okay, I made that one up). But Collette winged it and made some that turned out quite well. So today she came over and attempted to walk me through the same thing.

I'm not what you'd call an organized cook. I don't line up my measuring implements, chop things into perfect matchsticks or follow recipes to the letter. When my sister asks me for a recipe she says "and don't do that thing where you say 'add a bit of this and then smell it' -- I need exact quantities!". This took even my style to an extreme. So without exact quantities, or pictures (because I just didn't think of it), for fun and profit, here you go:

CITRUS ALMONDS
Beat two egg whites with mixer until stiff peaks (hee hee) form. In large bowl, mix together zest of one lemon and one orange, then squeeze the juice out of the suckers into the bowl. Add honey -- lots. Like, squeeze the bear until your wrist hurts and then squeeze a little more. Add a pinch of nutmeg, or maybe cinnamon, perhaps pumpkin pie spice or just something that hasn't been off the spice rack in a while. Throw in some orange oil, or blood orange flavoured olive oil that you bought because that's what you thought Collette meant when she said orange oil, because really, how the hell do you get oil from an orange? Blood from a stone no, but oil from an orange yes? I'm still skeptical.

Then move towards the almonds, remember the stiffly peaked (hee hee) egg whites, dump the egg whites into the bowl. I bought one tin of Planter's almonds and one container of Farm Boy Natural Almonds. It was like the townies meeting the rough-hewn farm folk, or private school vs. public school -- those puny little canister almonds looked scared shitless. Toss until coated. Oh, before all this you should have preheated the oven to 350, or maybe 300. Place them on a cookie sheet and stick them in the oven. In a few minutes, your house will be filled with an aroma so foul your children will cover their faces and beg to be sold to the first available passing stranger. The good news is they won't ask to watch TV in the family room which is attached to the kitchen. The bad news is you start to suspect something crawled into your oven and died before you put the almonds in. Be strong -- all will yet be well. Toss the almonds every ten minutes until they look on the verge of burning. Take them out and let them cool. Resist the urge to toss them down the garbage disposal or send them to Afghanistan as a lethal terrorists-fighting weapon. Toss them in a buttload of icing sugar (yes, that is the metric term). Wonder briefly why you didn't just spend the goddamned five dollars at the craft show. Ransack house in vain search for sparkly snowflake-printed cellophane and ribbon. Stick almonds in crappy tupperware container. Tell kids it's safe to come out.

Enjoy.

Right there, next to the three-year-old kumquats

I guess the list of things that drive me to the depths of despair is not that short. Watching the news. Bathing suit shopping. Trying to explain to my husband why my hair sucks. Never being able to remember which guy was prime minister when. Trying to help my son with his math homework. But cleaning out my cupboards? That's a whole new definition of despair. It's like dragging out hundreds of brightly labelled examples of how disorganized, slovenly, careless and unwholesome I am. I'm a freaking stay-at-home Mom -- shouldn't my cupboards be meticulously-planned, graphed-out marvels of neatness and order? Cans of tomato paste and bags of rice should leap into my waiting hands, ready for inclusion in my nightly menu meal. How the hell do I end up with six cans of black beans and no tomato soup on a regular basis? How many times can I get hit on the head with the same goddamned package of whole wheat pasta? And I swear to God, you know that disease where people are born and age like sixty years in five? Every can I buy has that disease. Seriously -- I clean out the cupboards at least every six months, and every time I find cans of beef broth or bottles of salad dressing that are older than this house.

I cleaned out the baking cupboard to get ready for Christmas baking. Turns out I have a five years' supply of peanut butter chips, flaked coconut and raisins, so I'll be looking up recipes accordingly. I also had an appalling amount of stale high-quality chocolate, which I can never bring myself to just throw out without trying, so I spent yesterday afternoon spitting out a lot of stale chocolate -- good times.

There is also drastic need for what my husband calls 'the sauce purge'. When we have a fridge and cupboards full of food but nothing to eat, it's generally because of a serious sauce surplus, without corresponding stuff in or on which to put said sauce. I think it's sort of like the shampoo-buying syndrome (this will make me pretty! This will make me a wonderful cook, perfect mother and a better lover!) If I went grocery shopping this week and bought a package of fifty chicken breasts, I'd have an outside chance of making a dent in the sauce.

So tomorrow for supper? Everybody gets one box of crackers. Of dubious freshness. With sauce. Then they can try some chocolate for dessert and see whether or not they actually feel like swallowing it (suspense! fun!). Then I will find some kind of twelve-step program (1. no matter how good the sale price is, nobody needs an eight-pack of condensed milk. 2. we already have applesauce. we already have applesauce. we already have applesauce. 3. when you think 'maybe we could try this', what you really mean is 'I want to pull this out of the cupboard five years from now and wonder what the hell I was thinking'. etc.) And we'll start clean.

Food and Wine and Cheating at Pictionary -- What's not to like?

We had our third potluck dinner party with four other couples last night. It was our turn to host, which is fine, because when you host you don't do the main course. This means you don't always get to cook with your own stuff in your own kitchen, but it also means (at least in my case) that you don't have to bust your ass cleaning and hiding piles of crap one floor up or down AND cook a main course at the same time.

I think it was my friend Janet's idea, and it was a really good one. The idea is to cook something fairly sophisticated that you've never cooked before, and we all take turns doing each course. It's a fun cooking experience, and a great night with friends, and since it's November and the last few weeks have been travel-intensive for Matt and single-parenting intensive for me I was really really looking forward to it. Not to mention this is the cleanest and clearest my counters have been in months, if not years. In all the pictures of people in the kitchen I just keep looking adoringly at my counters.

Within the first ten minutes, I learned that this was not the greatest group to use the word "fallacious" with.
This was our table. These are our friends. I took out the faces because I wasn't sure if they'd want to be on my blog, although some of them will have to if they're in pictures with me and I look good. My principles only extend so far.


This is Collette's fabulous duck prosciutto and avocado salad. She drove to Plantaganet to get the duck. While we were eating she said to her husband "oh, by the way, there are duck breasts in the freezer that you are not allowed to touch." He said "you know, if you hadn't told me, it wouldn't have been a problem." We all figure that some night there's going to be a showdown where Mark comes in late, wakes Collette up and gives her a choice between which breasts she'd prefer to remain untouched.

This is me with Collette, she of the fabulous duck salad and the upcoming Sophie's Choice.

This is Margot's absolutely amazing seared scallops on cauliflower puree and parsley pesto (it's almost as much fun to say as to eat). While she was getting this ready the political discussion got a little heated. We ended up having to look up 'socialism' and 'democracy' in the dictionary. Then I made Collette look up 'fallacious', hoping that would stop all the bad blow-job jokes. No such luck. I tried to lower the tension with a rousing game of cheese or font, which is much harder than it seems like it should be.

These are the people that had to arm-wrestle to decide who would have to go home and change. Either that or have a cheese or font-off.

This is Susanne with her boeuf bourguignon a la Julia Child, which was every bit as awesome as Meryl Streep was in Julie and Julia. (Susanne, I can put your face in if you want-- let me know).

After this we played Pictionary before dessert. Also, Michael showed me this article about the guy who wrote the book I reviewed a few days ago. This article kicks my book review's ass, which is okay because I don't think anybody read it (except maybe Susanne, which I wouldn't know, because she never comments, which is fine, it's a personal choice, it's not like I live or die by comments, well it sort of is because I'm a stay at home Mom but my kids are gone most of the day although not long enough that I could get an actual nine to five JOB or anything, so I'm alone a lot and it's always nice to feel like someone's listening, but you know, whatever). It also does a great job of describing an issue that spikes my blood pressure on a regular basis. I mean I haven't read it again while sober yet, but I'm pretty sure it totally rocks.

This is my boobs and my Chocolate Macadamia Cream Satin, which I have to say turned out marvellously despite my overbeating technical difficulties (the cake. Not my breasts).

It was a great night, slightly rancorous political discussions and repeated fellatio allusions and all. I plan to make a donation to the Ottawa Food Bank in reparation and gratitude, for my friends and nights like this.

(Also, Zarah, Alison, Amber, Susanne -- did you see the links? Do the links work? Are you proud of me for learning how to do the links? I'm beyond excited about the links. Who says you can't teach an old, tired, overly anxious, slightly needy, approval-seeking dog new tricks?)