Going Domestic

It's a good thing we married each other ...

Don't laugh, but for that Hallmarkiest of occasions, Valentine's Day, Chris gave me something similar to this and I gave him one of these (only it cost much more here). No, we're not the least obsessed with wine and food :)

Actually, Chris's wishlist really included a corkscrew with a wood handle, but the ones that I've seen at the wine shops all resemble antique pocket knives, which skeeved me out a bit. I figured that an all-metal one in a brushed finish would look much smarter, anyway. The jury is still out on his opinion, though ...

I inaugerated the silicone muffin pan with a batch of low-fat banana bran chocolate chip muffins, and I'm thrilled with the way they all could be gently nudged out of the compartments. One thing that I worry about with this new pan is forgetting to set it on top of a regular baking sheet before I fill the cups up with batter. I think if I tried to transport the muffins to the oven without something supportive underneath, I'd be wiping batter off of the kitchen floor! My muffin pan didn't come with any cleaning instructions, so I hope that soap and water is alright …

Revenge of the Back Alley

Chris and I listen to to CBC Radio in the mornings as we're going to work, and their local morning program is holding a "find the biggest pothole in Calgary" competition right now. *sigh* If it was only a "find the deepest hole in an ice-covered transportation route" contest, because gosh, we might have found that last night in the laneway behind our garage!

We were coming home after work, and just as we were turning into our garage, we got stuck in a hole where the ice had melted away that was at least five inches deep. With one of the front tires of my car stuck in this cavern surrounded by ice, and the other front tire on the ice, my car wasn't going anywhere. We eventually decided to call the AMA to tow us out (blocking off traffic isn't really our cup of tea), but after half an hour Chris managed to extract the car from the hole, tucked it into the garage, and I think it will stay there until the ice either melts or it snows again and that hole is filled in.

Victory at Last!

We've finally conquered our power bill! Back in November, I wrote about how we received a bill from our electricity retailer for three times our typical monthly electricity consumption. Very strange because we're usually good about conservation and had thus far been below-average consumers. We initially blamed the increase in usesage on our experiment of running the furnace fan 24/7 since the winter weather arrived, but promptly relieved the fan of continuous duty after receiving that bill. The next billing cycle, we were rewarded with 400 kWh reduction. Over the holidays, Chris and I mentioned our electricity woes to my dad, and he asked if we were using the electricified eavestrough feature that our garage was equipped with (previous homeowners installed it as the pitch of the roof makes it prone to ice dams). Of course - we flipped that switch on at the first snowfall and hadn't looked back! Anyway, my dad suggested that the roof may be our biggest power hog of all, so when we returned to Calgary we started only using it after a snowfall when we were in a "melt during the day/freeze during the night" situation. And yesterday, for our first billing cycle sans furnace fan and electrified eavestroughs, we were rewarded with a power bill for our usual 400-odd kWh again! *happy dance*

It's a sin to grow one year older without cake!

I've posted many times about my favourite bakery here in Calgary, the Brulee Patisserie. It's where Chris and I ordered our little wedding cake from, where I took a class and learned make unbelieveable bread puddings, and where my favourite cake of all time, the Diablo Cake, was created. Chris stopped by the bakery on Saturday to order a small Diablo Cake for my birthday in couple of weeks, and the person at the counter told him that they no longer took orders for custom baking - they were only taking orders for the wholesale market. The basically means that all the Patisserie has to offer off-the-street customers like us is what's in their display case on Saturday mornings (because they're only open on Saturdays, now). Who knows what will be in the case when we get to the bakery on the Saturday nearest my birthday …

Maybe it's sad to be obsessed with a cake, but I haven't managed to find a similar one elsewhere … It's made of thin layers of a flourless chocolate souffle cake, with black-peppery choclate mousse spread in-between, then drizzled with Callebaut chocolate ganache. I have the Brulee recipe for the chocolate souffle component, but I'm stuck on the recipe for the filling …

Anyway, I'm keeping my fingers crossed that the Patisserie will eventually return to it's former business model - I'm going to miss our little visits!

Trying to be patient ...

Ugh! Somehow spending my free time studying just ends up heightening my urge to do crafty things, and as far as those diversions go, I'm on a restricted diet. I'm allowing myself to paint the hallway and the middle bedroom in our house, but other than that, it's economics, statistics, corporate finance, and accounting for me ... But there's lots of temptation!

I'm still keen on learning to knit, and have found more adorable baby hats to make here. I think they might be crocheted, though, and I don't know how to do that either.

I would love to make a copy of an Ella bag - I've carried around a black canvas carry-all from MEC almost exclusively, since 1998. How boring am I?

I joined the Craftster community a few months ago, but haven't participated yet. I love lurking amongst the cool textile projects and seeing how making marble magnets has become an official craze ...

My exam is on June 5 and that day can't come fast enough!

OMG! An Alberta Advantage!

Yesterday, my husband Chris passed along this link to a rebate program the Alberta gov't is offering. If you replace an old forced-air furnace with an Energy Star-compliant high efficiency one before March 31, 2004, homeowners are eligible for a $400 rebate towards their new purchase.

A new furnace is near the top of my home improvement list for the year, but we weren't planning on buying until the summer at the earliest *fingers crossed that the 35 year-old furnace in the house keeps running*. We've heard that the price of furnaces increases when the thermometer drops here in Alberta, so we're going to wait out the winter.

Forget about the slow cooking movement ...

I know that it isn't the Aga Cooker that I'm dreaming of, but I'm a teensy bit envious of the new range that my parents bought! It has one of those flat ceramic cooking surfaces that I imagine make clean-up as close to a dream as possible, as far as dirty stoves go, and get this - a convection oven! I've been intrigued with convection ovens ever since the one at the cooking school completely cooked two pork tenderloins in forty minutes. I've heard that modern convection ovens have a nifty temperature/time conversion feature so that, for example, I would still set the oven to bake banana bread for fifty-three minutes at 350 degrees, and the internal computer would convert that to twenty minutes at 225 or some such combination. Exciting stuff!!!

Speaking of cooking classes, I haven't taken any yet this winter, and neither has Chris. I'm studying for the CFA exam again, Chris is taking a Spanish class, and there's other big stuff happening in life. I think that there are a few good classes coming up in March, though - a technical one the "chemistry" of cooking and another on the food and wine of Provence.

Magic on a dinner plate!

Perhaps I should dub February to be the Official Month of Unusual Vegetables (or is it a fruit?), because last night I prepared a spaghetti squash to go with the yummy farm chicken that Chris was roasting in the oven. I'd never made one before, but the method was pretty easy. I poked the raw squash all over with a fork and then set it in the oven (in a casserole dish) beside the chicken. Baked it for about an hour or so, cut it in half, and scooped out the seeds. I began to scoop out the flesh with a fork and it was just the neatest thing to watch it come out in little spaghetti-like strands!!! I seasoned with butter and pepper (Martha recipe), and was really pleased to discover that it didn't taste too sweet! We bought another one at the Co-op last night :)

I stand corrected.

A few posts ago I mentioned that the recipe that Chris used to make eggplant parmigiana instructed to rub salt into the slices of eggplant, which I thought somehow extracted the moisture out of the eggplant so that the finished product was less soggy. I was flipping through a different cookbook last night, and found the same instruction, but this one elaborated on the why. Salting eggplant also extracts solanine, a chemical that apparently makes the eggplant taste bitter. The cookbook also said that the same less bitter/less moisture result can be obtained by freezing the slices for three or four hours, and then squeezing them. Who knew?

Politics of Snow

I've never heard of this anywhere before! Some homeowners in Toronto apparently have their snow-covered sidewalks cleared by the municipal gov't for free! Well, aside from having to pay property taxes, I guess. This is a completely new concept to me. Is this a normal practice across North America and just another way that Calgary is behind the times? We don't even get our back lane plowed so that the garbage collection trucks don't get stuck after a storm ...