Going Domestic

let bylaws be bylaws

Please allow me to introduce our new garbage container, Oscar:

Oscar joined our household yesterday, making us compliant with a new municipal bylaw that comes into effect in a couple of days that require all outside garbage to be contained in animal-proof containers or nets.  It will be really nice not to have to keep our garbage in the basement any more. 

Please wish Oscar a long and healthy life. Oscar had a predecessor, but Mr. Trashy sustained an injury back in March when his lid blew away in 80 km/hour winds, never to be seen again. I don't want to have to replace yet another garbage container, so I think I'll figure out a way to tie the lid to the body of the container before winter returns.

five alarm frustration

I haven't made a meatloaf in a long, long time. The meatloaf from Saveur that emerged uncooked from my oven for the second time kind of put me off meatloaf for awhile, but I relented and picked up the ingredients to try one again when I was at the store the other day (this one is not from Saveur, obviously).

Meatloaf 3.0 cooked up lovely - 50 minutes at 375 worked really well. The hitch (yes, there is a hitch, of course. I'm talking about meatloaf, after all) was that when I opened the oven to peek at the meatloaf, a little bit of smoke escaped from the oven and set off the smoke alarm! Madeline was napping, so I quickly shut the oven, turned it off, threw the back door open and fanned the area beneath the smoke alarm. The shrieking subsided. But what do I do about getting the meatloaf out of the oven?

I didn't want the smoke alarm to go off again. I thought I had a brilliant idea - I'd disconnect it, take the meatloaf out of the oven (the amount of fat that cooks out of extra lean ground beef is icky - I don't want to know what regular ground beef would be like!), let the house air out, and then pop the battery back in. Easy peasy. So I pulled a chair up and untwisted the smoke alarm. But where was the battery? What was up with that electrical wire? Argh. Just my luck - the detector is hardwired intead of being battery operated.

I ended up leaving the meatloaf in the oven until it had cooled down enough that the grease wasn't smoking. I don't know if I will be trying Meatloaf 4.0 out anytime soon. I think I'm cursed.

accidental tourists and the big May Two-Four

The three of us set out this past Saturday to try to take a peek at an iceberg that was spotted near the town of Twillingate, NL. It's about a six hour journey from St. John's, so we decided to stop in Gander, and then make Twillingate a day-trip on Sunday, and then we'd come home on Monday. Monday was a holiday - Victoria Day.

We drove to Twillingate, but the iceberg had moved on. We tried to find somewhere to have lunch in town, but the all of the cafes were closed for the season still. We thought that it was really odd that they wouldn't have opened up for the long weekend! The only place that was open for lunch in Twillingate was Mary Brown's (which is less greasy than KFC, in case anyone has ever wondered).  Thankfully, Madeline liked the chicken fingers. On Monday, we wandered off our course home to step into Trinity. Our guide book described it as being a town that has transformed itself back to what it looked like in the 1800's, and it was supposed to have an interesting train. But when we arrived in Trinity, nothing was going on there either. Not even a place to have lunch! (It was pretty, though).

The May long weekend is traditionally the start of vacation season after a long winter. I couldn't fathom that nothing was open on our trip westward across Newfoundland.  A waitress at the restaurant we went to in Gander enlightened us. Tourist season in Newfoundland, she explained, begins the weekend after May Two-Four because everyone goes away for the long weekend. Well, they certainly aren't looking to have lunch anywhere ...

Sidenote: I stepped into the Shoppers in Gander, but they didn't have any Method cleaning products.

curry chicken

Yesterday evening, I shamelessly grabbed a can of vegetable curry out of the pantry for dinner. I added some roasted chicken and cooked some basmati rice to go with it, but the curry came out of a can. I don't know why I don't make curries from scratch - an understocked spice rack, perhaps? Ugh. Maybe I just need an easy recipe and then I'll actually get around to putting the ingredients on my grocery list.

I'm (and I think Chris is, too) wishing that we'd bought another bag of those chili lime peanuts when we were at Trader Joe's. I wonder if making them is as simple as adding crushed chilies and dried kafir leaves to a quantity of peanuts ...

the real disparity ...

Listening the news lately, a person would get the impression that the people of Newfoundland are hard done by fishing conglomerates, airlines, and oil companies. Really, they should forget all of that and complain that they can't buy the Method brand cleaning products while other people, shopping in Shoppers Drug Marts across the country, can.  I've been slowly visiting all of the Shoppers locations in St. John's, and it looks like I'm stuck using carcinogen-laden Fantastik to clean our home here. Bah!  I'm also sad that I haven't been able to find Cheddar Bunnies here - none of the grocery stores appear to carry the Annie's Homegrown brand.  It's funny, because in Calgary even regular grocery stores carried Madeline's favourite little orange bunnies, not just the organic markets (which St. John's could use one of).  It's funny how these little things mean so much to me ...

colour therapy

I've blogged before about how I'd love to try out an AGA Cooker. Part of that obsession might be mere curiosity about what it's like to cook on a high-end appliance, but a large part of my interest would indeed be because the Cookers come in so many fun colours. Pistachio and Claret are calling out to me at this moment ...

I love colourful appliances. I'm actually kind of bummed that my Kitchen-Aid stand mixer is boring white, although Chris very rightly pointed out that it never will clash, sitting out on the counter of any kitchen. A few years ago I saw the stand mixers in a lovely tangerine colour ...

My quest for a colourful appliance continues, and I've set my sights on vacuum cleaners (even if we do have hardwood on our main floor at home). I use a cheap navy Hoover at home and never realized that vacuum cleaners were anything but boring!  But there are Dysons that are purple! Or red and purple!  I found a turquoise Hoover. And a series of vacuums by Miele that feature graphic images on them!