Going Domestic

2003, it's been swell ...

So, how do two young urban professionals spend New Years Eve in happening Calgary? Do we don our ballgowns and tuxedos and fork over a minimum of $200/couple for an evening of dinner and dancing? Ha - we're too cheap! The first NYE that we were in Calgary, Chris and I went out for tapas and paella, but last year, it was so expensive to go out for dinner because everywhere that we were interested in had fixed-priced menus and live music. We ended up ordering a pair of lobsters, and we cooked up a nice dinner at home and watched some DVDs. This year we're scheduled for a repeat. Maybe we'll add some French onion soup for a first course. I really enjoyed our lobster dinner last year, but I wouldn't want to do it regularly (did I say that?). It's a rather messy meal ...

New juice in my life ...

I think that I've developed a crush on lingonberry juice. I tried a glass of it in the Ikea cafeteria on Sunday, and it was wonderfully sweet and tart! I didn't know much about lingonberries, except for guessing that they're common in Swedish cuisine, so I started perusing some gardening websites like this one to find out a little more about lingonberries (like they are also known as European cranberries - I love cranberry juice, too! - and grow like blueberries). One thing that I haven't tried is the pomegranite juice called POM. I'd noticed the distinctive bottle in a few specialty grocery stores here in Calgary, but I didn't realize what it was until I read about it via ljc and not martha.

I'm kind of sad, also. I've come to the realization that one of the blogs that I've followed for over a year has probably been decommissioned. Eat Drink & be Married was fun site and it had a lot of recipes on it that sounded wonderful (not to mention fabulous artwork by Claire)! I haven't been able to access it for about four months now, so it's probably about time that I get off of the optimism wagon.

Playing House

Yesterday I amazed Chris with my innate talent for Ikea furniture assembly. We had gone out earlier in the day to pick up a few items with the money that we received back from our realtor last week for our legal fees. I put together a BILLY bookcase in record time - we bought it for the kitchen to hold our cookbooks, and it looks much better than the cardboard box they were previously housed in. My other task was assembling a new coffee table while Chris finished the tv hutch a few hours later. The tv hutch is a nice upgrade from the purple bedside table and little red and green stools that our tv and speakers were previously sitting on. The only flaw is that we don't subscribe to a cable tv package, and it's hard to work the tv antenna when they're inside of the hutch! Can't seem to pick up Global anymore … Anyway, we've worked hard on living room thus far, and it's really nice to see the room start to look more like it belongs to a pair of employed adults :)

Oh, and I did do a lot of work on the Roman shade, but I still have to attach it to the mounting board and do up the rigging for it to be complete. But wasn't purposely slacking in the sewing department - I did whip up three Christmas stockings on the 23rd and 24th - love my mom's serger!

Vision of Sugarplums ...

Is anyone surprised that I'm trying to get in a bit of holiday baking? Tonight I'm working on these cookies with holiday-coloured M&M candies. Chris and I received them in a "cookie mix in a jar" kit as a house-warming gift from my friend Ada last month, and I figured that they'd match the colour-scheme of the season perfectly! I think that I'll bake oatmeal-raisin cookies tomorrow ...

Believe it or not ...

Chris and I are heading up to Edmonton for the holidays in a few days, and before we hit the road I have to get the Roman shade for the dining room completed. We've had nothing covering that window for months, and somehow the idea that someone can peek into our home is a little more disconcerting when we're not going to be home. Not that there's anything visible worth stealing ... unless there's a hot market for twelve year-old 20" television sets :) Anyway, I went to Fabricland today and picked up some dark blue cotton twill to use for the lining of the shade - a steal at $3/metre!

Christmas Stalkings?

I've posted about our next-door neighbour M. once before in November, and I'm going to write again. I have no idea how many people live in her house! When she introduced herself on the day we moved in, she seemed to indicate that she lived alone, but there's a regular stream of people coming and going (as detected by our motion detector light after dark). There's usually two cars parked out front, and she also has a double garage. For at least the past week, I've noticed a big white van parked outside in the front in the front last night. I was standing in the our front window last night watching a newly-white bunny hop down the street, when I noticed that there were people sitting in the white van! OMG! How creepy! When I looked again about half an hour later, they were gone, but the van was still there. This morning when I when into the living room to uncover Edward's birdcage, I saw the people sitting in the van again! Am I crazy to be little suspicious of this?

This Little Piggie

Last night we welcomed a new kitchen gadget into our household - our first instant-read meat thermometer. We’re intending to make roast beef for dinner tomorrow night, and discovered a few weeks ago that the manual thermometer that we used in the apartment is missing. Wonder where on earth we packed that …

I like roast beef dinners because I get to make yorkshire puddings and peppercorn gravy. I used to use the yorkshire pudding recipe in my Better Homes & Gardens cookbook, but I like this one from Epicurious a little better - I think that the final product is closer to my mom's yorkshire puddings. I use olive oil for the fat, room temperature eggs, and heat the olive oil in my pan at a high temperature before putting in the batter. They still don't turn out perfect, always, but the puddings still taste the same :)

The last roast beef that we made was a little on the far side of well-done, but without a meat thermometer it's harder to judge things like that. I find this website kind of handy because it discusses approximate cooking times and internal temperatures for different cuts of beef, and different preparation methods.

Organic Matter

My last post was one of my more popular ones - who knew that garbage disposals and waste removal were such fascinating topics? After a couple treatments with lemon and ice, and a vow (from me, at least) to minimize the amount of stuff I stick down the garbage disposal, my sink is much pleasanter to hang out by. I was cheered yesterday when I read in the local paper that the City of Calgary is finally going to trial a Blue Box/Bag recycling program like Edmonton's. The article also mentioned a composting program, jogged my memory a little. When I spent a summer working at Environment Canada, I learned about worm composting. All waste from employee lunches was collected every few days and added to the worm composting bins, and then employees were free to take bags of the resulting soil home for their gardening exploits. At the time, I was glad that it wasn't my job to feed the worms, but I've been kind of keen on the idea since we now have a home of our own. And if I remember correctly, the list of things that are safe to put down the garbage disposal is nearly the same as the one of the worm's favourite snacks ...

So nice to come home to?

I've been avoiding spending time at our kitchen sink lately, no matter how much it bugs me to leave dirty dishes sitting out. There's an icky smell coming out of our garbage disposal and it's a pretty good dishwashing repellant. I'm a bit confused about the source of this smell - we don't leave food in the disposal. In fact, we can't because the previous owners seem to have poured so much greasy stuff down the drain that it clogs pretty easily. We run the disposal quite a bit out of necessity. Two nights ago, I poured a bunch of baking soda into the disposal, but it's magical smell-removing powers let me down. A search of the internet yielded a discussion thread on curing a smelly garbage disposal, so maybe we'll give a few of those tips a try. But none of them give any clues about why our garbage disposal is so funky. My best lead is this Mr. Fix-It link on odors - maybe there's years of icky food crap trapped underneath the garbage disposal flap! Yuck!

One of these days ...

Knitting is something that I've never been able to learn to do properly. I usually blame it on being left-handed and thus harder for a rightie to teach, but with each new issue of Knitty I become a little more inspired to give the needles a try. Way back in the spring I blogged about a bunch of cute wonton-shaped cat toy patterns I saw in Knitty, and in this new issue, the felted bag, the Baby Tart hat, and the cozy-looking shrug all caught my eye. Last time that I fell in love with a pattern I ended up asking my mom to knit it up for me, but I'd feel rather bad doing it again!