DIY

My husband and I have started watching Jamie Oliver's Ministry of Food and one thing I can say about JO is that guy's got passion. Getting people to eat well and cook for themselves is clearly something he cares a lot about and isn't just a put-on for his shows. Every time I watch him (or other people extolling the virtue of organic/100 mile/make-it-all-yourself food ) I get all fired up and want to become some healthy eating superwoman. I want to be a food saint.

But that feeling only ever lasts a day or two. The reality is I'm not perfect. I eat junk, I succumb to the lure of McDonald's now and then (more "now" than "then" lately). I don't buy organic, I use shortcuts in the kitchen (ever since my kid was born we've been buying pre-diced garlic. It's just so much easier!).

Sometimes it gets me down that I don't make more effort to be "perfect" in the kitchen, but I think I'm being too hard on myself. I think I'm a healthy middle ground between Jamie himself and the shlubs he always finds for his shows who eat nothing but takeout every day and whose diet is entirely beige. People who, in their late 50s, admit to never having cooked a thing in their lives. People who can't identify common veggies like broccoli. I may eat McDonald's, but I also make my own marinara sauce from scratch, thank you very much.

Earlier this week we were watching a recent episode where Jamie taught a few soccer hooligans (oups, I mean fans) to cook a chicken dish with asparagus and then had them teach each other. This morning, as we were putting together this week's meal plan, my husband turned to me out of the blue and said "I want to try that Jamie Oliver chicken thing." See - that guy can get anybody fired up!

We swapped out asparagus for green beans because that's what we had on hand and used dried thyme instead of fresh because I forgot to get the fresh. It was very, very tasty.

Jamie Oliver's Parmesan Chicken Breasts with Prosciutto

My version - served with green beans, salad and
store-bought potatoes (shame!) on the side.

Something To Look Forward To

During a recent conversation with family, I complained that there were no good movies coming out this summer. Well, OK, maybe I should say there are few of interest to me. I mean, Star Trek, Transformers, Terminator - can we get any more guy-centric?

Then my mother-in-law reminded me that Julie & Julia is coming out in August. How could I forget? Though I didn't read Julie Powell's blog at the time she wrote it, I did read her book and enjoyed it thoroughly. In case you don't know, Julie Powell hated her dead-end job and challenged herself to cook more than 500 recipes from Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking over the course of one year. Interspersed throughout the book are fictional accounts of Julia Child's life based on family letters and her autobiography. It's a really cute, funny book.

So why am I so looking forward to this movie? Well, not only is it based on a book I enjoyed, and not only does it have a cooking theme I can relate to, but Meryl Streep (LOVE HER!) is playing Julia Child. In the words of Ina Garten, how bad can that be?

Say It With Sugar

Today is Father's Day and like most other gift-giving occasions, we kept things very simple around here. My husband and I often don't get each other gifts for such "holidays" or at best get each other small token gifts. This is largely due to:

1. our lack of needing more things
2. my damned unemployment
3. the now-waiting-in-purgatory plan to save for a house
4. our overall Scrooginess.

My token gifts often take the form of baked goods.

While I like to cook, I'm not a huge baker, so I use holidays and events as excuses to whip up my husband's favourite treats. Past gifts have included Nanaimo bars, Rice Krispie treats and the always popular lemon squares.

I was going to go for the tried and true lemon square again this year, but decided to be brave and try something different. It was time, I felt, to go where I'd never gone before and make my husband's all-time favourite goodie: doughnuts.

I was going to give Jamie Oliver's recipe a try, but it required yeast and hours of rising and kneading and let's just say I'm lazy. So I cracked out the good old Joy of Cooking and found a no-yeast recipe.

A few lessons were learned from my first doughnut making experiment (i.e. the longer you go about frying doughnuts, the hotter the oil gets, which means the last few doughnuts cook much faster than the first few . . . hello black doughnuts!) but all in all I think they turned out pretty good.

The whole batch - about two dozen

The purtiest two . . . mmmmmmm

Nostalgia, Geek Style

Yesterday, while heading into the subway, I passed by two young teen buskers playing classical music - one was playing violin and the other was playing cello. A small crowd of other teens was hovering around them.

I meant to zip right past them, but the piece they were playing sounded strangely familiar so I stopped to listen. It only took me a few seconds to place it . . . it was the theme song from the old Super Mario Brothers game. Very cool.

It's Back

The recent lack of posting or meal plan is thanks to a much needed break from life. Sounds stupid, I know, needing a break when I'm not even working, but job hunting is a soul-crushing, depressing, slow process. A week to someone looking to fill a job is nothing. A week to someone sitting at home by the phone power-eating their way through a bag of chocolate chips is an eternity. So I convinced my husband to take a few days off work (that and his boss said "you need to take some vacation or else!"), grabbed the kid and headed to Ottawa for an extra-long weekend of hanging with the folks.

One good thing that came out of the trip (aside from the rest, relaxation and free babysitting) was that I found the laundry card. That's right, the DAMN, STUPID laundry card! On the drive back to Toronto I was digging through my purse in search of something - what, I can no longer remember, but it was probably a half-used Kleenex to wipe my son's perpetually runny nose - and there in an inside pocket was the laundry card. The DAMN, STUPID laundry card.

Here's one of my favourite parts of being a parent: I'm going to blame the whole thing on my kid. And not just because it's fun to have a scapegoat who can't talk and therefore defend themselves, but because it's the truth! The evidence to support my accusation:

1 - I don't take my purse down to the laundry room - EVER. The only situation where I would is if I was planning on going out right after doing the laundry. But I lost the card on a Saturday morning, when my husband and son were upstairs waiting for me and I most definitely did not go out.

2 - My kid loves pulling things off of the front table where we store a cordless phone, the mail and the DAMN, STUPID laundry card.

3 - My kid loves to put things into other things. My husband is always finding toys, pieces of half-eaten snacks and other miscellaneous household items tucked into his work bag.

I rest my case.

Though we had to pay $10 for the replacement card, at least we now have a spare and we got the money back that was on the original card.

Could this mean more good luck is coming my way? Maybe a call about an interview? The New York Times is suddenly flush with cash and needs a Toronto-based correspondent? Sadly, I doubt it.

Warm Fuzzies

After the recent disappointing news that the California Supreme Court decided to uphold the ban on gay marriage, my heart was warmed yesterday by this news story of a gay penguin adoption.

Awwwww. I'm a sucker for stories involving animals stepping outside of the bounds of what is expected of them, like when a dog adopts an abandoned baby tiger or elephants and dogs become friends.

D'Oh

Could I be a naturally accident-prone person and just never realized it before? Or is my displeasure about being unemployed surfacing in subconscious ways?

Last night, while preparing dinner, I damaged one of my favourite mixing bowls. It was a stupid mistake that reads like a recipe:
1. Place chopped sweet potatoes in bowl, toss with olive oil, salt and pepper.
2. Dump seasoned sweet potatoes onto baking sheet.
3. Place baking sheet into preheated oven and innocently put bowl on stove burner while finish prepping the rest of dinner.
4. Wait 20 minutes.
5. Realize bowl - PLASTIC BOWL - has been placed on the stove's venting burner.

Sigh.

The bowl is just from IKEA and is nothing special, but I liked it because it was the perfect size and had the nice pour spout. I guess the silver lining is that I get a trip to IKEA out of the whole thing, right?

RIP bowl. We had some good times:
pancakes, cookies, popcorn. Oh, the popcorn.


A close up of the damage.

The burner suffered too, of course.
My husband's suggestion to let it cool and peel the plastic off
later was wise. Please ignore the dirtiness underneath.
Cleaning the stove is a project for later this week. No really, honest.

A Note on Meal Planning

You may have noticed I started posting our weekly meal plan. Perhaps to show just how neurotic I can be, perhaps to inspire. Either way . . .

I know it probably seems like a lot of work, but the truth is it actually makes my life so much easier. We started meal planning a few years ago when my husband went back to school to see if it could save us some money. Back then we'd just picked five random recipes and, to be honest, it didn't save us that much because we ended up with lots of ingredients that only worked for one meal and what was leftover was wasted.

Nowadays, meal planning is much more strategic. This week's a good example: Quiche used up the leftover eggs and bacon from last week's "breakfast for dinner" as well as the Asiago cheese from the "make your own pizza night." The cream needed for the quiche also goes in the Vodka Penne (a rose pasta sauce). Whole chickens were on sale and the leftovers can go in BBQ chicken pizza. Bell peppers are used in the fish as well as BBQ chicken pizza.

But, the thing about meal planning is that plans can go awry. Though chickens were on sale, the store sold out on the first day and never restocked. We ended up having takeout (sorry Terry!). Oh well. Otherwise we stayed on mark.

So how does this make my life easier? It eliminates the nightly trivia gamed called "what are we going to have for dinner" and for the most part means only one trip to the grocery store a week.

I also do my best to double one recipe a week and freeze the second portion so that on days when we're busy, dinner is already done. Our freezer is currently stocked with spaghetti sauce, vodka penne and chicken tortilla soup. I started doing this in preparation for being on mat leave and never stopped because it is so awesome.

In fact, the strange side effect is that I now feel uneasy if we don't have anything in the freezer. Yes, I've become a crazy person with a desperate need to stockpile food as if we're on the brink of war or a depression. Oh, wait a second . . .

AAAAaaarrrggg!

In today's very special episode of "Tales From the Laundry Room," our down-on-her-luck heroine continues to lose in the battle against the new laundry machine overlords.

Yes, the saga continues.

I have lost the card needed to use the laundry machines. After helping me tear the apartment apart, my husband said, in his usual casual manner, "Meh, life is too short to worry about a lost laundry card." While I usually appreciate his zen-like attitude, this time I respectfully disagree.

In fact, losing the card is a major pain in the ass for several reasons:

1- We've lost the $30 that was already loaded on the card. I think I've mentioned before that I'm cheap. And unemployed, right? So I'm sure you can imagine how overjoyed I am at needlessly losing money.

2- We can't do laundry without the card.

3- We use cloth diapers for our son. That's right. Now please see #2 again.

Let's just say things might start to get a bit ripe around here if it takes a while to replace this stupid card. If I disappear in a few days it's likely because we did get a replacement card, but when I opened the diaper pail the overwhelming stench caused me to pass out, hit my head on our concrete walls on my way down and die from a serious head injury.

See, a lost laundry card IS something to worry about.