oh, you delicate heart.

wondering where the lions are says: (4:44:03 PM)
i think it's hilarious. especially since the 'search for people' option is down so i'm just twittering to myself.
heather says: (4:44:59 PM)
BAHAHAHAHHAA

Give me a break, I gotta do SOMETHING with my afternoon besides switching back & forth between The American President & The First Wives Club.

every day i'm-a tumblin'.

I always say I'm not an internet creep, and then today I caught myself reading the Tumblrs of complete strangers. Currently, I am obsessed with the Tumblr of a guy who created a Tumblr just to make snarky comments about the posts of his girlfriend who obsessively Tumbls. What a handful.

Her:
theruth:

"My boyfriend started a tumblr for the sole purpose of snarking my tumblr.
It is one of the funniest things I’ve read in a while.

this is definitely for real. my bf had been giving me shit for being a tumbltard for awhile and decided this was the best way to combat my obsessiveness. we were both kind of drunk when he started it and he had me in tears i was laughing so hard. i should also note that we normally have a loving and healthy relationship. we just both have a good sense of humor."

Him:
Fun fact of the day about Ruth:

Immediately after telling me she loved me for the first time she decided to pass out inside a wooden crate on the streets of Barcelona. You stay classy, TheRuth.

Not all of his comments are as hilarious as this one, but even I can't be witty all the time. I only wish her name wasn't.. You know.

I got Twitter today & I've already updated it twice this hour. I was going to hold off on getting one, but Loverboy challenged me to, and I love a good challenge.

Hotmail, Facebook, Livejournal, Myspace, Blogspot, Twitter... Where does the madness end? True, I don't update Livejournal or Myspace anymore, but I do still check my inbox occasionally still for messages from a certain rapper of Black Moon/Boot Camp Clik fame.

For now, though, I gotta turn off the computer & start the preparations for the Portuguese Sausage & Kale soup I plan to make for dinner. But first I gotta twitter about it.

the chicken dance.

Tonight for dinner I am making thyme-buttermilk fried chicken on a bed of sweet potato puree with crispy pan-fried shallots, homemade buttermilk onion rings & a celeraic and cabbage apple cider vinegar slaw.



The fried chicken is done in peanut oil, the only way to do fried chicken other than your own lard from scratch. The oil will be infused with fresh herbs (sage, thyme, rosemary) as well as a head of garlic, bay leaves, and my own touch: a bruleed sweet vidalia onion. Recipe courtesy of Tyler Florence of "Tyler's Ultimate".



The sweet potato puree recipe is my own, and easy peasy. The onion rings will be sweet vidalias as well, coated and "marinated" in buttermilk, fresh thyme & marjoram, and good ol' s+p, then also deep fried. The celeraic-cabbage apple cider slaw looks delicious in the cookbook and uses apple cider vineger, good quality grainy mustard, and some of my favourite dried herbs. Recipes courtesy of Anthony Sedlak of "The Main". I just love mixing recipes from my favourite babes of Food Network Canada; or, you know, the only two men under 35 with their own cooking shows.




This is what the end result is supposed to look like. For now, I gotta go spread the legs of my bird & de-bone that baby & brine it all day in sea salt & water & fresh herbs. I'm so excited. Last night I facebook-chatted with a classmate from my program at George Brown for an hour about the pros/cons of deep-frying in lard vs. vegetable oil, duck confit & the differant ways to prepare it, and our favourite reducing, basting, marinating and de-glazing methods. She was almost as excited as I was for me to debone my first (raw) organic, free-run chicken all on my own. Just me & my boning knife.

For all you vegetarians & meat-haters out there, sorry dudes, I just couldn't resist posting pictures. I fucking love this shit.

so [sick] of love songs

Skipping math, again, and drinking with a select (preferred) few of my new friends & classmates seemed like a good idea at the time. Unfortunately, after one (two, three..) too many Molson Canadians at a sports bar 'cross from school led me to be hugging my toilet shortly after 5pm. I haven't been feeling normal since. Drinking at noon always seems like the best idea.

All I thought I wanted tonight was a pair of wool socks, about eight blankets, ginger ale and someone to spoon feed it to me through a straw. I got 3 out of 4, and that ain't bad. Besides, with no hunk here to drink ginger ale with and nurse my nausea, I can wear a one-piece long john suit with my wool socks and take pictures of myself on my living room couch without much embarassment at all. I meant well when I told myself I'd do my dishes, debone & brine the chicken I'l be frying for dinner for company tomorrow night, and you know, do the vaccuuming. Instead, I did some catch-up on a near-week's worth of Law & Order: SVU, meanwhile catchin' up with my favourite Winnipeg ex-boyfriend.



For now, I feel about as crazy as my curls, but I'm sure I have high hopes that I'll be feeling just fine, albeit a little frustrated, by midnight.

if you can't stand the heat, get out of the kitchen.

There are few things I detest more than when a perfectly good food blogg(er) goes to waste, has a baby, and replaces their recipes for galettes, terrines, and their famous featherdrop biscuits with babies, babies, babies. Now, I can perfectly appreciate that you are overjoyed by your little bundle of joy (Hell, I hope to have a couple of them myself one day!) but I wish you'd appreciate that, for now, I don't care to watch videos of your newborn shoveling yoghurt down it's throat when all I'm looking for is a good recipe for homemade hot & sour soup. Food blogs, fashion blogs, Lindsay Lohan's Myspace blog... A quick google let me be aware that there are, yes, over five MILLION blogs for proud mamas such as yourself.

If Cory can have both a food blog & a politics blog, then you can two too. And somehow, the genuis behind The Garden Apartment finds a way to involve children into her blog without bothering me, or my gag reflex.

For a girl that's more about Top Chef than Top Model, I understand that not everyone gets as excited about a good meal as I do. I've had a couple great ones since I moved here; the lamb stew at Oddfellow's, the yukon gold frites with lemon mayonnaise at Jamie Kennedy's Wine Bar, and the thin crust at Terroni... A good meal, or even one good dish, really fills my (artichoke) heart. Thanks to my all-of-a-sudden-unavailability to work as much as I'd like to at my friendly chi-chi neighborhood kitchenware shoppe, I have been forced to cook more out of my own home & I couldn't be more happy about it. As well as being good practice for my up and coming culinary career (in one way or another), I'm sure my friends couldn't be more happy about it either. Last week, I made an assortment of panini for dinner with a friend. French brie & bartlett pear on a buttery baguette for him, balsamic marinated & roasted plum tomatoes and red peppers with pesto & herbed goat cheese on Italian sourdough for me. I served them with oven fries I made; yukon golds I tossed & baked with garlic, cayenne, grated parmesan and sunflower oil and served them with $16 Roasted Garlic Aoili from Williams-Sonoma (minus my discount).

It was delicious.

This weekend, I'm making a thyme & buttermilk brined fried chicken dinner and I couldn't be more excited, and not only because I don't have to supply the wine.

In a big city with a little kitchen, it turns my stomach to see such a good food blog go to waste. Almost as much as it turned my stomach to see your youngest with creamy white yoghurt dripping all over it's chin.

the thoughts of mary jane.

(Dis)Courtesy of the Toronto Star, my horoscope today is as follows:



"When a struggle has been won, you soon become bored. But when faced with a difficult new task or challenge, the thrill of the chase motivates you. Something is now being offered to you on a plate."


I'm a pretty typical Aries when it comes down to it. Enthusiastic, confident, quick-witted and with an often overwhelming sexual energy, I still don't know why I check my horoscope because it never makes me feel better about myself or my at-the-moment-current situation. Although Aries' are characterized to be all of the perfectly acceptable aforementioned things, they also happen to be irritable, quick-tempered, sensitive and prone to nervous breakdowns.

Oh, the audacity.

kissing girls (you shouldn't kiss).

I didn't think I missed Winnipeg all that much before I went home for four days between Christmas & New Year's Eve. So much Winnipeg has been sleeping on my couch that I felt like I was getting alot of the good and none of the bad- all I needed was a king can and a parka, and nothing really would've changed. In Toronto, I still go to potlucks, I still drink more hard liquor than a girl of any stature should be drinking (especially on weeknights), and I was still being mostly innapropriate but in different ways than before. Several friends were shocked when they'd heard that I was being mostly monogamous. I never thought I was thaaat bad, but I guess I was.

I was wrong when I thought I didn't miss Winnipeg. As soon as my size six feet stepped foot on what I believe's gotta be the only place with permafrost South of the soil of the North West Territories, I knew I was in for a real treat. I knew that it was going to be a welcomed vacation from.. well, a two month vacation.



It was. Shown here, Maddy (and I) were Queens for a Day when a dinner was thrown in our honor at the Hector home of six (soon to be seven) of Winnipeg's kindest boys. Not one of our most planned out potlucks, this thrown-together fete was celebrating great cause for celebration- the return of two pretty great girls from their new pretty great lives now elsewhere. Also, Tom's hair is looking great these days, and that's definitely another cause for celebration.



Stefan, beauty shown above, was a daily thing for me in Winnipeg. Mostly by accident, seeing Stefan always reminds me of summer. Camping? Probably. I don't know when the last time he had a shower was (I'm guessing it was before Burning Man 2008), but I think that's fabulous.. You know, for him.

There are a couple things I really missed about Toronto, though, that really made it worth coming back home. It didn't hurt that I brought a little Winnipeg back with me in the form of Kate Kidder & Jane Harrington. But I did miss a couple things liiiiiiiiiiike....



Coffee the morning-after-the-night-before at Ella's Uncle down the street (and breakfast at various hip-hot-spots across the way).



Spending the night before with new friends. I spent New Year's at a gallery space by the guy who's famous for throwing up on famous paintings with Laura-Louise & Alicia. I spent Christmas Day doing some throwing up of my own after a party thrown by the aforementioned. I've seen Russ Martin a couple times too, who (and whose hair) just gets better every time we see eachother.

Oh yeah...



Him too.

Seperated for seven days felt more like seventeen after spending much of the month of December with my new photog friend. Distance is good, though, I've since decided. He's good from both near and far, and the free camera lessons don't hurt either.

Kidding, sort of...