The last two weeks, I’ve been feeling off my game. Mostly, I’m tired and unfocused and I just can’t seem to accomplish anything useful at all. It’s taken what feels like a massive effort to haul myself out of bed and get to work, where I get nothing accomplished. And then I have dance class or go to the gym or work and don’t make it home until after 7, at which point I’m too tired to make good food choices ². Finally, on Sunday I’d had enough and started thinking about how to snap myself out of it. While sitting at the kitchen table drinking my coffee and trying to make a list, I saw a bunch of very ripe bananas, and a light bulb went off. Baking!

Baking has many elements that I could use to yank myself out of the slump. There is a very precise list of materials that need to be assembled; there are specific pieces of equipment that must be used; there is a list of instructions that need to be followed; there is a time limit in which the task must be accomplished; and there is a reward upon completion of the task. A delicious, delicious reward (that I mostly give away).

Sunday afternoon, I whipped up a batch of classic scones and some banana bread (with the ripe bananas). Tonight I made dairy-free zucchini bread (because a co-worker is very allergic to dairy)³ It’s still a little too soon to tell if it’s working, but I have started to make a mental list of some small jobs that I can do tomorrow. Best to start small.

And have a slice of zucchini bread.

1. There was one memorable week where I baked three loaves of zucchini bread, two loaves of carrot bread, a chocolate zucchini cake, oatmeal cookies and chocolate chip banana muffins.
2. I realize this is probably part of the problem – and I’m working on it.
3. It’s the recipe in The Joy of Cooking, and it happens to not call for milk or butter.

Last weekend, blueberries were on sale at the grocery store, three packages for $4. They’re not the tiny, wild blueberries of my youth that we picked in the wilds of New Brunswick while visiting my dad’s family, but they were pretty good nonetheless. I spent most of the week eating one package just as-is, in yogurt or in salads. Yesterday morning, I made the second package into blueberry muffins – they’re pretty good, and I’m going to throw a bunch in the freezer for later. And right now I’ve got a peach blueberry crisp in the oven for later tonight. Sadly, they weren’t on sale this week, and I’m thinking I should have got more last weekend (and froze what I didn’t use).

Today I made bread. It’s a recipe from the cookbook More Food That Really Schmecks [1. I don't know what "schmecks" means, although I suspect that given its placement in the sentence, it's either a verb or an adjective. ] I made the same recipe a few weeks ago and tweeted about it, prompting Dr. Beth to ask for the recipe. It’s a good basic bread recipe, and if you can get your hands on a copy of the cookbook I would strongly recommend it[2. It's a cookbook made of awesome, so it's worth it in general. ]. Today I decided to mix things up a little – I added 2 tablespoons of flax seed, 4 tablespoons of wheat germ[3. I'm going to have to hoard what I have left of my wheat germ - I haven't been able to find any at the grocery store for a long while. Probably they've moved it YET AGAIN. ] and about half a cup of sunflower seeds. Instead of using all unbleached flour, I used about half unbleached, half whole wheat. Granted, there’s no one else here to confirm this, but it smells and looks pretty good.

And now I’m off to peel some sweet potatoes for supper. I’m throwing them on the BBQ with tandori chicken that’s been marinating since last night.

As well, yesterday I had quite a time editing and uploading some pictures to Ravelry – I’d taken them, I’d edited them, and they only needed uploading. But for some reason the file format wasn’t being recognized, which meant re-editing all 40 or so photos. What was supposed to be a relaxing evening updating my stash turned into a hair-pulling exercise and several rants about Gimp.

To make having to work on a Saturday more palatable, and to do some activity that might bring me some contentment, I declared that I would bring in cupcakes the next day. Because who doesn’t love them some cupcakes? Stephen Harper supporters, that’s who! [2. Also, probably Stephen Harper. ]

So, with purpose and determination, I came home, had supper and got to work. The first thing I saw when I got in was some week old bananas that needed to be turned into something delicious. Chocolate chip banana muffins – perfect! [3. It's a recipe from a hippie-earth-crunchy muffin cookbook my mom has. Originally, it calls for some kind of nuts in the muffin and somewhere along the way the nuts turned into chocolate chips. I don't recall who's to blame for this delicious substitution. ] Now what? Carrots! I got some carrots at the farmer’s market last weekend, let’s make carrot cake cupcakes with cream cheese icing! And what else? What about chocolate cupcakes with caramel icing? Only CHILDREN who support Stephen Harper don’t like chocolate cupcakes!

Then I looked around, specifically at my sugar. And flour. And eggs. How is it possible that I’m low or almost out of ALL of them AT THE SAME TIME, when I most definitely need them? And what’s worse is that I only had enough paper liners for the muffins. GAH!

I hope the staff like their stupid chocolate chip banana muffins and their stupid carrot cake IN A PAN with stupid cream cheese icing. I’m going to be over here sulking while I lick the bowls.

Sometimes with butter, mostly with pepper, never with salt. I deplore those powdered toppings you can get that make it taste like sour cream and onion or barbecue because they are partly salt and mostly gross. Any popcorn that’s covered in caramel and nuts is my biggest weakness and I can’t eat just a little at a time, which is why I buy it, at most, once a year.

The pot I make my popcorn in used to belong to my grandfather, who gave it to me when I lived in Halifax. It’s green and the paint is chipping, the lid doesn’t fit properly and it’s stained by the thousands of things that have been cooked in it. It’s also the pot my sister and I used to blow bubbles in when we were little and stayed over at my grandparents, so it’s of huge sentimental value and I won’t be getting rid of it anytime soon. It’s the perfect size and depth for making popcorn, which is the real reason I haven’t/can’t get rid of it.

It’s a great snack if you’re looking for something crunchy but not fattening, and if it’s late and you shouldn’t be eating before bed, a little bit of popcorn won’t hurt you.

I got the recipe for this from Allrecipes.com; since the link has gone AWOL from my bookmarks I can’t send you there. However, I did print it out:

3 tbsp olive oil
1 onion, chopped
2 cloves garlic
1/3 c dried apricots, cut up
1 1/2 c red lentils
5 c chicken stock
3 roma tomatoes (I used half of a can of tomatoes)
1/2 tsp cumin
1/2 tsp thyme

First, you saute the onion, garlic and apricots in olive oil, and then you add the lentils and stock, bring to a boil and simmer for 30 minutes. Then add the tomatoes, the spices, and simmer for another 10 minutes. The next step says to put half the soup into a blender and puree, but I have a fancy schmancy handheld immersion blender (also called a “wand”) so I used that to puree the soup instead. [2. I do have a blender - it's my grandmother's very old blender, and it weighs a ton. Back in the day, everything was made of steel and iron and toughness, and they never broke down. That blender is older than I am, and it's going to outlast your kids. ] Easiest. Soup. Ever!

The problem with soup for me is this: I am a single lady, and a pot of soup is all well and good, except that it lasts forever. On day one of soup, it’s all “YAY! SOUP! YUMMY!” and day two goes something like “SOUP! Still awesome!” By day three, the blush is definitely off the rose and by day four I’m cursing the fact that I made the stuff in the first place. “Well, why don’t you freeze it?” you are saying. I could, but there’s the problem of the itty bitty freezer, and the fact that when I cleaned out my freezer last week, I pulled out about a dozen containers of unlabeled soup-like product that had been there for an indefinite amount of time. There’s also the problem that some soups don’t freeze well – potatoes fall apart, mushrooms get rubbery, and let’s not talk about the disgusting mess that zucchini and other squash becomes when it thaws.

The solution for me, then, is to either label and date any containers of soup I put in the freezer and not put any more in until I’ve used up what’s in there, and/or make a smaller batch each time.

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. It seems that I had a theme going on, what with two movies about body swapping. ] 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. It's also worth noting that the milk and eggs that I do consume come from organic sources in the province. ] 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. Except for a cheat when I made soup one day - I didn't have any vegetable stock and had to use chicken stock. ] 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. I also vowed to clean out my freezer, so that chicken is going to get eaten at some point. ] 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. Sort of like when I was still running on the treadmill - one day, instead of alternating between walking and running, I just ran to see how long I could go without stopping. In the end, I managed about 15 minutes - go me! ]

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.

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. Normal scone recipes call for heavy or whipping cream. I guess this one calls for low-fat vanilla yogurt to cut down on the fat content, since you're already adding delicious, fat-laden white chocolate chips. ]. 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. Ah, the quirks of my oven. ] 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. And I highly recommend you do - they're actually quite easy! ] 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. However, they were unsuccessful in getting me to pronounce basil BAH-sil. It's BAY-sil, and always will be. ]

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. Probably since the Second Cup in Barrie, the one just off the 400, closed. It was the closest one to where I currently live. As a further aside, it's since been replaced by a Starbucks, which... if I need to stop for a latte on my way home, I can. But it's not a Canadian company, and the Second Cup there would ship beans to anywhere in Northern Ontario where there wasn't a Second Cup, free of charge. ] and was inspired. I loved those damn things, and while I wouldn’t want to eat them more than once in a while [2. Because otherwise they wouldn't be as special. ] 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. From the movie Waitress; she makes a quiche-like pie that involves brie at one point. I'd also like to try the pie she made with raspberries, blackberries and dark chocolate. ] – 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. The Urban Cafe. ] 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.

Fast forward a few years. Every time I went to Ottawa or otherwise met up with Julie, she was always suggesting that we should go for sushi. Being somewhat reticent, I always declined. So this past weekend, on my way home from the Knitter’s Frolic with Fineskylark and her fiancee, when they suggested we stop at a sushi place in Barrie, it seemed like a perfect time to get the hell over my squeamishness about sushi. They offered to order some things we could share, and then I could decide if I wanted to order some pieces for myself. Fair enough.

The verdict? FAIL! I was okay with the first two or three pieces (a Bonsai roll, a Cowboy Roll, and a California Roll), but something… felt off. The Shrimp Tempura roll stuck in my throat, and the last one (I’ve forgotten what it was) did not go down easily. It wasn’t so much the taste – they all tasted fine – but there’s something about the texture of the rice and the seaweed that made me very uncomfortable. Maybe it’s just a psychological thing, like tofu (which I’ve overcome and now like) and driving over the Burlington Skyway (which I can just about do without my knuckles turning white), but even the second piece of the California roll I had later didn’t sit well in my mouth.

It’s so pretty though, so I will continue to look at it and be awed.

[1] Granted, I don’t think it was the sushi that made me sick, but more likely the chicken teriyaki I also had.

I have another pot luck party coming up on Monday, so I thought I’d have a go at making them last night. I followed the recipe exactly as it said, despite some misgivings, and then put it in the oven. Before I did, I put a cookie sheet under the pan just in case.

A little while later, I checked to see how it was doing. It’s a good thing I put it on that cookie sheet because it had completely bubbled over. Not only that, it had seeped behind the parchment paper I’d lined the pan with, meaning removing it would be a challenge. Once it comes out of the oven, it’s supposed to cool off for a few hours – thank the deity of your choice for Canadian winters!

Once it came back in and thawed some, it was as difficult as I though to get it out. When you do, it’s oh so worth it.

Yeah, it’s a bitch to get out of the pan, but it’s sticky and sweet and delicious. If you’re inclined to try making it, here are my thoughts:

1. Only use half a cup of butter in the crust. You just want the crumbs to stick together, no be batter-like (which they were last night.)

2. I used graham cracker crumbs instead of vanilla wafers. Hey, if I can find shortcuts, I’m going to take them.

3. Use the salted peanuts! The little bit of salty in the sweet is a lovely contrast.

4. If one can of condensed milk covers the top, then don’t add the second can. I think that’s why it bubbled over last night. That, plus the overabundance of butter in the crust turned it into a soupy concoction which re-hardened after the cooling period.

I thought about drizzling chocolate over it once I got it out of the pan, but that would just be gilding the lily.