Larocque and Roll

Randomosity!

1. On Friday, I came home from work early in the day with what would become a two-day migraine, which are as rare as hen’s teeth for me. Usually, the last a few hours, and then they go away. This one knocked me on my ass and then jumped up and down on my head and stomach. Sweet.

2. While I was home, I took the opportunity to watch a couple of movies on TV that I hadn’t seen (or hadn’t seen all of ) before. The first was 17 Again, which was surprisingly good. There were some genuinely funny moments, especially between Mike’s nerdy best friend and the principal. And while I know I may not be alone in acknowledging that Zac Efron is a pretty, pretty guy, he’s actually not that bad of an actor. The second was It’s a Boy Girl Thing, which is a mostly Canadian production, about two teenagers who swap bodies ¹ I’d seen parts of it before, liked it, but never actually got to see the whole thing. It also is surprisingly good – I thought that both of the actors who were playing the teenagers did a good job of mimicking the body language of each other when they were supposed to be in the opposite bodies. Certainly worth checking out.

3. A few weeks ago, when I posted about this year’s theme, I mentioned wanting to have more meatless weeks. There are many reasons for it, both personal and environmental, in addition to examining how often I fall back on eating meat or meat products. It’s worth noting that I am still drinking milk and eating eggs, as they are important sources of calcium and protein; while I do enjoy soy milk and have used egg substitute successfully on a number of occasions, this whole thing is about awareness, not making radical changes. ² That day marked the first day in what was going to be my first meatless week of the year – I had a menu all planned out, including lunches that didn’t include lunchmeat, and was pretty gung-ho about it.

Except, here I am, three Sundays later, and I am still meatless ³ I haven’t run out of meal ideas, and have often surprised myself with my inventiveness, especially when it comes to lunches. Yesterday I was craving one of my favourite comfort foods, chicken and dumplings, because I still wasn’t feeling great; however, this morning I looked at the chicken in the freezer ⁴ and then looked at the corn I froze this past summer, and decided that corn chowder is just as comforting, especially with biscuits. As well, most of my meals this week don’t involve meat, such as the veggie fajitas I’m going to have for lunch this week, the roasted tomatoes with pasta, and the curried tofu possibly Friday or Saturday. It’s become less about “I am only going to do this for one week” and more about “let’s see how long I can keep this up.” ⁵

4. There will be a full post about this later, but I managed to fit in some reading this month. I was reading five books in total which leads to all kinds of distractions, and only managed to finish two of them.

For my first trick…

Not long after I came up with my list of cookery-type things I wanted to make this year, I decided that I would start with the item that triggered the whole list: raspberry white chocolate scones.

Oddly, it wasn’t easy to find a recipe, and I wasn’t confident enough to wing it. Eventually, I found a recipe here and was very please to discover that I had all the ingredients on hand. Well, all of them except for the yogurt – all I had was the Liberté Méditerranée, which has a glorious 8.5% milk fat content ¹. OH WELL. They were delicious!

Some thoughts:

• The recipe calls for frozen raspberries, but it doesn’t indicate whether or not you should thaw them or not before adding them. I think if they had been thawed, they would have lost their shape and not been as good. I did, however, rinse them in a strainer because they had frost on them, and I didn’t want there to be too much extra liquid in the dough.
• The frozen raspberries made the dough very cold. Duh.
• Once I had everything mixed, it didn’t look like it was going to turn out very well. The dough was wet and sticky, and I threw my hands up and thought, “Well, I tried.” The scones look huge in that picture (and they were) because I didn’t want to bother making nice, neat, smallish ones if they were only going to come out half baked on one side and burned on the other ² Despite that, they came out baked just right on all sides, so I guess the joke was on me.

If you are going to make these scones ³ I would suggest on reducing the amount of white chocolate chips you use. There isn’t really all that much in the scones, but it was still a little overpowering. When I was telling this to someone at work, they made the suggestion that the chips you don’t use in the scones can be melted down and drizzled over top of them once they are baked, and it’s a suggestion I fully endorse.

Finally: how do YOU pronounce “scone”? When I was younger, I used to pronounce it sc-AWN because that’s how my mother and grandmother pronounced it. Once I got to grad school, my roommates pronounced it sc-OWN, and try as I might to resist it, I eventually started pronouncing it that way, too. ⁴

A year of eating interestingly

I’m not that bad at making resolutions and keeping them for a few months, but I’m really bad at keeping them for a whole year. And I’m getting to be Of An Age where self-improvement should be ongoing, not just something I resolve to do once a year. So rather than set a whole lot of arbitrary goals to try and stick to, I decided to pick a theme to guide me through the year. And the theme I picked? The Year of Culinary Experimentation!

The idea came to me while I was on my way home after Christmas. I was in a Second Cup in Toronto and saw that they had raspberry white chocolate scones, which I hadn’t had for a number of years ¹ and was inspired. I loved those damn things, and while I wouldn’t want to eat them more than once in a while ² they would be something I could add to my playlist.

That got me thinking of other things I want to bake or cook, the tools I had, and what skills I want to learn. Once I got home, I made a list of things I’d thought about, and decided that over the coming year, I want to try and make them. Some of them are simple, some… not so much, but all are things I know I and my family/friends would enjoy.

• White chocolate raspberry scones – I made these a few weeks ago, and I have pictures and a recipe to share.
• Bread – growing up, my mom always made bread. It makes the house smell good, and I can’t think of a better reason to try making it.
• Samosas – love these! And, from what I understand, they’re not all that hard to make.
• Pumpkin ravioli – I have a pasta maker, and I have a ravioli form. I tried making ravioli a few years ago, and it was a disaster. However, I learned my lessons, and I think I can make them without messing up too badly.
• Lasagna – see above about the pasta maker. Plus, it’s something that would be great to stick in the freezer for those times when I can’t be bothered cooking supper.
• Quiche/Bad Baby Pie ³ – this is something I would definitely share, since it’s too rich to eat by myself.
• Cheese fondue – it’s better that you just accept this and move on to the next item.
• Flourless chocolate cake – guess what I’m making for my birthday cake?
• Spring rolls – these are just about my favourite thing at Thai and Vietnamese restaurants.
• Cinnamon rolls – not like sweet bread-type rolls, but like the ones at the market in Halifax. This is going to be a challenge because I’m not really sure what the base is. Some kind of pastry or biscuit, I think.
• Manicotti – another good frozen food.
• Apricot red lentil soup – one of my favourite local restaurants ⁴ often has this as their Soup of the Day. It’s sweet and hearty, and it makes me deliriously happy when I eat it.

On top of that, I have a few other goals:

• Host at least four dinner parties, one for each season. The guest list shouldn’t be the same every time, but the same person can attend more than once.
• Clean out my freezer, and keep it stocked with only the necessities. The freezer on my fridge is narrow and doesn’t have a lot of room, and while a chest freezer, even a small one, would be an asset for preserving food, I also think it would be too easy to fill it and forget it. As of now, I only buy things to freeze if I know I’m going to use it in the coming week, or if it’s something like frozen fruit or vegetables that I might need. I’d like to have a few frozen meals, preferably that I’ve made myself, on hand in case I don’t feel like cooking dinner.
• Plant more vegetables and herbs in my (admittedly small) garden. I tried planting tomatoes and squash last year, and it was not a success. Granted, that may have had more to do with the lousy weather than my ability to grow things. As for herbs, I had some cute little pots that I got last year which will be perfect for some fancier things like cilantro and cinnamon basil, while the more standard fare like rosemary and parsley can go in the garden.
• Have more meatless weeks. I’ve tried in the past to set aside at least one week a month to go without eating meat, although I may have cheated when it came to lunches. I have a really great vegetarian cookbook, not to mention the several at the library, from which I can find tasty things to make, like the Curried Chickpeas I had on the weekend. I’m also aiming to make my lunches meat-free, and to go for longer than a week at a time.

And, as I’m trying to get back into the habit of blogging more often, I’m going to endeavor to post about all of these attempts.

Ritual

This weekend, I was all set to write a post about what this year’s theme was going to be, as opposed to making resolutions. Sadly, on Thursday (or thereabouts), I was struck down with Braindeaditis. My ability to focus on important tasks was nil ¹, and making any sort of decision required at least fifteen minutes of navel gazing. Things that were at the top of my “To Do – NOW!!!!” list just kind of… sat there. Episodes of Braindeaditis always seem to hit when I have important deadlines to meet, and I can’t afford to sit around admiring the dust patterns on the stacks of things on my desk.

This is the conversation I had with myself earlier today:

Me: Um, Brain? Could you please pull it together? I have to finish a Very Important Presentation Including Handouts, plus write an update on the status of a Very Important Report That I Have To Redo. And let’s not forget the schedules that need to be examined.
Brain: Leprechaun giraffe sidesaddle!
Me: What does that even mean?!

So, making sense of anything is damn near impossible right now. In lieu of anything meaningful, I’m going to tell you about my new bedtime ritual. It’s all well and good to say that I go to bed shortly after 11pm, but all that means is that I make my way upstairs at that time; there’s still getting my pj’s on, brushing my teeth, remembering to go back downstairs to make sure the cat has water, going back upstairs because the cat is in the tub crying because he wants water from the tap, trying to remember where I left my book ² and so forth. By the time I’m in bed and am ready to read a few pages, it’s well after 11:30 and it’s time to shut off the lights (and yet I read until midnight anyway.)

To cut down on the amount of puttering I do when getting ready for bed, I start much earlier. Around 10:30ish, no matter what I’m doing, I go upstairs and do the following:

1. Put my pajamas on.
2. Brush my teeth ³
3. Turn on the heating pad on my bed so it’s toasty warm when I get in.
4. Fill the humidifier and turn it on low.
5. Make sure the cat has food and water.

This way, when I meander up shortly after 11pm, all I have to do is hang up my housecoat and crawl into bed, making my reading time that much longer!

The New Year’s Post

Okay, it looks like I wasn’t on the ball about getting this up sooner, but the honest truth is that I was trying to avoid the crush of New Year’s posts from all the other blogs you read ¹. This way, you’re still in the New Year frame of mind, but aren’t sick to death of everyone and their maiden aunt blogging about how this year, they’re really going to use the treadmill this year. Or go out and start that fantasy roll-playing league they’ve been talking about doing for years. Or traveling to exotic locations like Sarnia or Markstay-Warren. ²

I had started a post on the weekend about how I spent the last ten years, following the keen examples of both Dr. Beth and Sarah. However, in retrospect, I’ve had a mostly dull past ten years, with the exception of 2000 and 2009.

2000: I was a semester into grad school, and loving it. Not so much with the stomach cramps and weird bouts of internal pain, which would eventually be diagnosed as gall stones, necessitating the removal of my gall bladder in May. I spent my summer working in the Department of Medical Informatics at Dalhousie ³ I traveled to Edmonton and Jasper, and got to see the tall ships in Halifax. I attended an epic Halloween party and a truly epic St. Patrick’s Day party. I was the person in charge of the Orientation Week activities, and managed to pull off a 99% on an assignment. ⁴ Unfortunately, I got bronchitis in October, which lasted until the end of December.

2009: I was one of the planners for my section at a major conference in Toronto. I traveled to exotic Washington, DC for another one. I bought a new car, and realized that the cracking paint in my office? Was actually evidence that my roof was leaking and would need to be redone. I picked up yet another hobby, complete with expensive toys: spinning (as in “wheel” and turning straw into gold.) ⁵ My adorable niece was born, bring the total niece/nephew count to 2. I started an exercise habit and actually stuck with it.

This year, I haven’t really made any resolutions, except maybe to stick with the ones I made last year. Maybe actually finish a few of them. ⁶ I do have a few ideas for things to do this year, and once I get them fleshed out, I’ll pass them along.