Going Domestic

mealtime *should* be an adventure, right?

Chris flew home from Edmonton yesterday, and we brought with him a thawing bag of Lemongrass-Relajo Pork from a new eatery there called Wild Tangerine. It's been sitting in our fridge ever since, and I am kind of intrigued about it. I guess the idea is that I stick the entire shiny bag in boiling water to cook it. That's a new one for me. (I wonder if the bag is heat-safe plastic? Hmm ...)

I also tried googling the word "relajo" to find out what it is, but I didn't get any English-language results that looked promising. Whatever it is, I hope that it's tasty ...

This will be my last post for SaBloBoMo, I'm sure. I thought that I'd write more about a book that I mentioned briefly back in the fall, Peter Mayle's French Lessons: Adventures with Knife, Fork, and Corkscrew. It's my favourite book about food ever.

Why did I like it so much? Because Mayle's genial and descriptive narration made me hungry enough to want to eat frog's legs. In fact, I'd love to go to the frog leg festival that he wrote about. And truffles. And escargot. This book made me want to travel to France so that I can eat escargot off of a sheet of aluminum foil with a tooth pick, at a side-of-the-road makeshift restaurant. The entire book goes on like this - it's a tour of various food-oriented celebrations across the French countryside. The idea of enjoying eating while on the road as much as sight-seeing isn't a new concept for Chris or I (case in point: our multiple daily trips to Gelatissimo in Sydney). One of these days we'll go back to France and have that Bresse chicken that we've been imagining - I know it!

if you give laura a cooking lesson ...

I'm not certain if I've posted about this before, but I have zero talent when it comes to cooking things in the pancake-or-similar department. I am not totally sure why. After burning my first batch of sweet potato rosti yesterday, I thought that maybe I had my pan too hot. I used a much cooler pan for my second batch, and they never did brown properly, until I transfered them to a hotter pan. Bah.

It's a good thing that they're yummy little things, or else I would never cook them again.

Sweet Potato Rosti (from Today's Parent, Jan 2007)

• grate two small sweet potatos and half a small onion onto a clean dish towel
• squeeze dish towel to remove excess moisture
• in a medium bowl, beat two eggs, then add the grated mixture. Add 1/2 teaspoon each of salt and nutmeg. Add ground black pepper to taste.
• heat up a large non-stick pan with 2 tablespoons of olive oil, then drop spoonfuls of batter into the pan (aim for six patties), and flatten. Cook each side 5-6 minutes until golden.

The "cook each side 5-6 minutes" part is where I went wrong. It was more like 2-3 minutes ...

Anyway, this brings me back to SaBloBoMo and one of my favourite books to read my daughter: If You Give a Pig a Pancake by Laura Joffe Numeroff. 

I have a feeling that this book isn't as popular as it's cookie-lovin'-mouse cousin, but I think it deserves to be. The illustrations are delightful; this pig has a sweet expression and is light on her totters (especially when she's wearing tap shoes). She can arrange furniture, wear a tool belt, and is a respectable interior designer. And she's there for her pals. Some very positive traits, I think. It takes about three minutes to read through this book, which is a nice length for a toddler Madeline's age. She has some books that are wordier, and it's rare that I get to finish all of the text on each page before a small set of fingers set about turning to the next one!

We have a few other books in this series at home, and this one is similar in that an animal makes increasingly outrageous requests of his or her child host.  If there is something that I don't like about this book, it's that events don't build on each other quite as naturally as they do in If You Give a Mouse a Cookie. Sometimes it's a pretty big stretch with this one.

self-indulgent me-related post

There is no better month than SaBloBoMo January for my Blurb book to have arrived. I can't remember if I've posted about it, but awhile back Blurb ran an offer for Typepad subscribers to make a book out of their blogs for free, aside from shipping. I signed up, spent far too many hours formatting the thing, and a mere two weeks later, this is what arrived:

Obviously, I picked my other blog ... no offense, okay?

The basic idea is that a person downloads a blog-slurping/formatting software program from Blurb, imports blog entries and photographs, and then assigns the content to various pre-defined layouts (all text, text with photos, or all-photos). Then you proof-read the final product, and upload it back to Blurb, where you can order both soft- and hard-cover copies.

What I liked about my Blurb book:

• the quality of the final product is very nice. I'd say that the dust jacket, binding, and weight of the paper is indeed book-quality. The photos are clear, though I wish the photographer was a little more talented :)
• the book-making software was very easy to use. The blog entries were assigned to pages, photos were placed via drop-and-drag, and the page layout could be changed merely by clicking a new design from a menu.
• the ability to play with the photos added to a layout. I could move the photo around within it's frame to change the focus, add borders, and change the size.

What I didn't like about making the Blurb book:

• the book-making software automatically assigns one post to a page. Well, this was a total waste of space and trees, as I rarely had a post that filled even a third of a page. I ended up copy-and-pasting until I had full or near-full pages. As a result, I have a few double posts. Oh well. Oddly, the line spacing changed for the entries that I pasted. A feature to tweak line-spacing would be nice addition to future versions of the book-making software.
• some of the layout options didn't make sense to me. Why was there an option to have two photos in landscape-orientation at the very top of the page, but not one for the very bottom of the page, for example?
• the software would freeze every time I tried to access Page 19. It was bizarre ...

pickier reader than eater

I have always loved a good book, but more often than not, my definition of a good book doesn't include anything in the science fiction or fantasy genre. I tried to love The Hobbit, but I kept losing track of who all the characters were and where they were going. I tried to get into Wicked, but I found myself skipping every single paragraph about munchkin politics, which was a fair amount of the novel. About ten years ago, though, I went through a phase where I was obsessed with Arthurian legend. Of course, I read The Mists of Avalon by Marion Zimmer Bradley.

I hated it. I hated that it drifted from the Arthurian geneology that most Arthurian researchers believed to be true (which I accepted as proper, as well). This bugged me to no end! The book is more about early Christianity and established paganism running into each other than the exploits of the Round Table companions, and I felt that many of the characters deserved more development than they got in this novel. I know that I'm probably in the minority and most people rave about this book, but it just wasn't interesting to me. I think that my favourite pieces of Arthurian fiction are The Wicked Day (the geneology of this one still is irritating, but it's an interesting study of the character Mordred) and a trilogy by Persia Woolley (Child of the Northern Spring, Queen of the Summer Stars, and Guinevere: The Legend in Autumn), which I suspect may be out of print.  I don't know if I still have my copies of the Woolley books; I might have to borrow them from the library the next time I want to read them.

I have food related tie-in to King Arthur: the King Cake (galette des rois) tradition is alive and well in Newfoundland, or at least the part that I live in (though the Wikipedia entry only discusses the tradition from the context of New Orleans and mardi gras).  We didn't bake our own; Chris picked one up at Auntie Crae's after reading about them. Ours had a teeny tiny ceramic cow in it.

hazards in the home

The other day, one of my friends asked me if I had an opinion on what kind of flooring works well on stairs, and today, I can answer with 100% certainty that ice is not the way to go. Last night I stepped outside to fetch Madeline's backpack from the truck, and proceeded to slip down the concrete steps without even realizing what happened until I had whacked both my lower back and my head. A nice layer of new ice must have formed on the steps as the afternoon cooled off. While it is an inexpensive and natural material to work with, I don't recommend using ice on stairs of any variety. Bruises aren't really ever in vogue, nor are concussions.

There are no such injuries in today's book, Plan B by Emily Barr, though her main character tackles a much larger renovation than a mere staircase in the novel. I'm sure this qualifies as chick lit, but it's the first book that I bought to read after we moved to St. John's, so I have a soft spot for it. It's a tale about what happens to a particular family after they move from England to France, into an old house (manor house? farm house? can't remember!). In the course of the novel, the house gets updated, the main characters' relationship gets updated (in a very twisty way), and I learned that there are places to surf in France.  Why did I like this book? Well, the story was more interesting than another certain "move to someplace in Europe and re-do an old home" book I've read, largely because I found the narration more engaging. And someday, I'd like to move to France and live in really old house, too. That's what Chris and I refer to as our "retirement plan".

canadian content

It's Day 8 of SaBloBoMo, but I am forging ahead with my second book post of the month. Again, it's the last book that I held in my hands: Secrets from the Vinyl Cafe, by Stuart McLean. He's one of my favourite CBC Radio personalities, and it's because of his weekly radio show that I also was introduced to his writing.

Well, that's not true, actually. It was Chris who got me started on my collection of Stuart McLean books - he has tradition of buying me a book from a Canadian writer every year. My favourite book, by far, is Welcome Home, but I quite happily have been plugging through Secrets.

What do I like about it? The style. McLean's prose has an easy to read flow, and his words work very well at drawing the reader into the story. I honestly do care about Dave, Morley, Sam, and Stephanie. I feel like we've been friends from years, silly as it sounds. I don't normally enjoy third-person narration, but when McLean does it, it's not flat. As with the rest of the Vinyl Cafe books that I've read, this is a collection of short stories. Some of them require the reader to briefly suspend reality, as McLean's fictional family is often plagued by more bad luck than what I consider normal, but more often or not, the stories are good for a laugh.

Side note: a couple of years ago, Chris and I found ourselves a few tarps down from Stuart McLean at the Edmonton Folk Music Festival. We thought that he was there with his daughter, until we noticed that he and his friend were a tad bit too touchy-feely for that sort of relationship. It was kind of weird. But he does have great taste in music :)

click

I've decided to sort-of participate in Sassy Student's January challenge - a post a day about a book (good, bad, or otherwise). Never have participated in a thing like this before, but I read about it on Mary P.'s blog, and it sounded like something fun. Of course, I'm already behind and there is no way that I will be able to post every single day - I have to pack and be a parent and stuff! But all of my future posts this month we be about books, okay?

I'm going to start off with the last book I held in my hands: The Photoshop Elements 3 Book for Digital Photographers, by Scott Kelby. You see, I'm a little interested in digital photo editing. Not interested enough to invest in Photoshop outright, and not interested enough to take a bunch of classes. We bought PSE 2.0 years ago, and I've been dabbling in that. I wasn't very good at figuring out what all it could do, however, not having any sort of background in digital graphic arts. So, I read some great reviews of this book in the photography forum at Two Peas about eighteen months ago, and I received a copy of it for Christmas 2005. It's really a handy book - explains what to do about improper exposure, colour correction, conversions, and some neat digital effects. Step by step instructions with accompanying photos. The problem I ran into was that it's written for PSE 3.0 and we had 2.0. Many of the menus aren't the same. About three months ago, I got the idea to see if I could find a copy of PSE 3.0 on eBay, and I ended up scoring a legimate copy for about $20. Whee! Since it arrived, I've been trying out many more features, and I've become one of this book's biggest fan!

sock monkey love

Sock Monkey Love Pt 1
Originally uploaded by goingdomestic.

This little fellow is what I decided, in the end, to whip up for the gift exchange Madeline and I participated in. I use the term "whip up" loosely, because it turned out to be many hours of work for me. I sewed him entirely by hand, and more than once ripped out what I'd sewn to do it all over again in a tidier fashion! I found this tutorial from web-goddess Kris really helpful because of the wonderful photos for each step in the construction. I

I have to make another one of this little guys as Madeline grew rather attached to the monkey. I have a grey-and-pink argyle sock waiting, but I need to practice my embroidery stitches a bit first!

a lobster mystery

I was chatting with my mom yesterday, and she mentioned that she and my dad had enjoyed lobster tails for their NYE dinner the other night. Chris and I kept with our tradition of staying in on NYE in the company of whole boiled lobsters and nice wine.

My parents didn't buy whole lobsters and chuck out everything except for the tails. They bought them that way. I've seen lonely lobster tails for sale in grocery stores before, but never unattached claws. What happens to the claws belonging to the lobsters that the tails belong to?  Are they thrown out? Mixed into the seafood salad at the deli? I really want to know ...

Nice to meet you, 2007!

I'm happy to be spending the first day of the new year at our temporary home here in St. John's. The three of us got to experience the ups of last-minute holiday travel (seeing everyone) as we took a last-minute trip back to Edmonton over Christmas. We also experienced the downside, namely that our bill for airfare, car rental, and crib rental was roughly the cost of our trip to Australia a couple of years ago. We didn't win the lottery this past Saturday, but there is always next Saturday to hope for ...

I knit a lot while we were out of town, and once we were back home I went out to purchase two more balls of each of the yarns for my scarf, which I decided needed to be longer. I am a little surprised at how much yarn costs (and thus, how much my scarf cost to make). I guess that's the price of being able to choose my fibres and colours.

I've spent the last two evenings fervently putting together a blog book via Blurb - they had a promotion for Typepad users awhile back, and Dec 31st was the last day to use my coupon.  I'm kind of grumpy because the book-assembling software kept crashing when I tried to access Page 18 of my blog book, and then when I tried to place my order, it told me that my coupon has already expired. Argh! I sent a note promptly to technical support, so hopefully this story will have a positive ending instead of leading to a rant.