Category Archives: Food

Brief Weekend Roundup

I am effectively dead. I am calling in Not Living today, because that’s about as useful as I can manage to be. Work will happen tomorrow.

Friday: Excellent day running around with the boy. Dinner with Tal and Kris, which consisted of much laughter, wine, delicious food, and OMG Battenberg cake, which I have not in forever, or at least since Marks and Sparks abandoned the colonials closed their Canadian shops. Awful night of not-exactly-sleep where I am very, very ill for some reason.

Saturday: Resting in bed with tea until I decide I am able to get up and drive safely. Excellent cello lesson. Visit to the mall to pet the Easter farm animals. Scored a secondhand copy of Lego Star Wars for the Xbox, and a secondhand controller which is red so I will play better. Lunch out consisting of hot dogs and fries, as I had promised the boy. After nap, we all head out to the south shore so I can drop by the luthier and renew the rental of the 7/8 cello for two more months. Then all three of us play our new video game, and the boy is quite good at figuring out what’s what. We end the day by watching the Deserts episode of Planet Earth.

Sunday: Summer tires put on the car. I make my first homemade tourtière. After nap we head out to have a home-hosted sugaring off meal with excellent friends and many children. Everyone eats too much breakfast-style food drenched in maple syrup. I think the tourtière is too dry and kind of wishy-washy on the seasoning, but everyone else claims it’s awesome. (Next time I’m doubling the sage and cloves, not boiling off as much of the broth, and using a different pastry recipe.) After the boy’s in bed HRH and I head out for our once-monthly steampunkian-horror game, which was most excellent. I got nine more rows of the lap blanket done. (It’s the only knitting I’m getting done at all, and only during this game.)

Which brings us to today, where I feel lethargic and achy. The damp weather doesn’t help.

My mother has informed me that the FedEx shipment I missed is not in fact my cello goody bag, but a box of photo/scrapbook albums she and my dad shipped to me from my grandmother’s apartment in Vancouver when they went out to visit her last week. I’m looking forward to seeing them.

In Which She Makes A Regretful Revelation

I’m working on the taxes today. I hate it. I hate sorting receipts and adding things up and inputting them into appropriate columns. Bah.

So I’m taking a break to share something very sad with you. I figure this is timely, what with Easter coming up.

Over the past two months, I have developed a sensitivity to chocolate. The darker the chocolate is, the worse my reaction.

Yes, you read that right. I can no longer eat dark chocolate.

No, this is not an April Fool’s joke.

You have no idea how much this has upset me. Chocolate is my reward to myself for finishing a task, my encouragement for making it through part of the day or a project. Instead of being able to enjoy it, my tongue and hard palate burn. It’s no fun at all, I assure you. This has really depressed me, and it’s been one of the things I’ve been struggling with behind the scenes.

It’s not just one brand, either. I’ve experimented with various kinds from my stash. Same result every time. The higher the cocoa content, the worse it is. Chocolate chips in cookies, chocolatines, chocolate-covered butter cookies; they’re all culprits. Those double-the-cocoa cupcakes I made last week? Bad. But the regular chocolate cake I made earlier in the month was fine. Go figure.

The reaction I get from milk chocolate is almost non-existent, so I’ve nibbled what little I had of that with caution. So far, so good.

Then this morning I made myself a peanut butter sandwich, and fifteen minutes after I finished it my tongue and throat were prickling. It’s not an additives thing, either; we use natural peanut butter (as in, the ingredient list reads: “Peanuts, The End”). I suspect my body, slyly encouraged by spring and the general sap/growth thing that used to turn me into a mess as a child and teen, is now manifesting allergies to things it hasn’t previously needed to in a new and exciting way thanks to a ramped-up sensitivity level. Ten years ago the new symptom was random skin itch and contact dermatitis with pretty much everything, so I wouldn’t put it past my body to have developed a new symptom. I haven’t yet experimented with diphenhydramine hydrochloride (like Bendryl, one of the common food-sensitivity-friendly antihistamines) to see if it’s my body releasing histamine in an attempt to fight off what it perceives as an invading chemical of some kind. (Dear body, you know I love you, but really, dark chocolate? Is this some kind of amped-up immune system thing connected to the fibro? Do we need to talk about ongoing medication again?)

Sigh.

You know what this means, of course. It means I have to go shopping to replace all my dark chocolate with creamy good-quality milk chocolate. In small amounts, of course, in case I develop a more intense sensitivity to that as well. And yes, it also means I’ll be careful, and will speak to my doctor about it at my upcoming appointment.

More Joy!

The day just keeps getting better! I just had a call from Bodhifox, cheerily inviting me to go out for tea. Of course, he’s in Ohio and I’m in Montreal, but it was such a wonderful thing to ask. To unexpectedly touch base with someone I love like that was fantastic.

Fox says there’s one more good thing to come, as surprises come in threes.

I feel like spinning around in the sun for a while. I wish there were daffodils to pick. I’ll have to make do with looking at the sun and pretending it’s warm. Also, there are cupcakes to make.

Weekend Roundup

Busy, busy, busy.

Friday morning was sunny but cold for our outing to the Biodome with Curtana and Arthur. The fun began before we got there, because we took the Metro. The boy has no memory of being on the subway, which isn’t surprising because he was very tiny and in a stroller the last time we rode it with him. He was very excited, because hey, it’s a train! Naturally there was a unexplained slowdown, turning a half-hour trip into a forty-five minute trip. He entertained himself by identifying the letters in the graffiti on the windows. The Biodome was a very exciting destination because there is a rainforest pavilion, and the boy’s Nana has recently come back from Costa Rica where she visited the rainforest herself. Also, the boy was hoping there would be jaguars, even though I told him there were none. Hope springs eternal when you are a very earnest almost-four.

We met Curtana and Arthur at the station at the other end and there was a joyful shout from the boy and a running forward from Arthur, and it looked all the world like a slow-motion reunion on a film screen, missing only a swelling of music to cap it all off. And the running didn’t really stop: they were so excited about the Biodome that they ran through it once, then ran through it again. We saw crocodiles (caimans, actually), lots of tropical birds, very big fish, tiny monkeys, bats, otters, beavers, ducks and waterfowl of all kinds, puffins, and penguins. I don’t know what they enjoyed most, but the kid slide next to the otter slide was certainly up there, as was the big screen before the penguin exhibit upon which was projected Arctic footage. They were particularly tickled by the fact that the penguins on the screen were as tall as they were, and cavorted around with them.

We had a snack, and visited the boutique (where we bought some tiny toy turtles, to go with the larger turtles the boy plays with in his bath, and a lovely bone china mug with barn owls on it for me), and spent some time in the hands-on educational room before we all took the Metro back to our respective stops. And we made a date for Arthur to come play on Sunday morning. Lunch and nap were very late after so much excitement but he did finally take an hour and a bit of sleep.

Saturday was our all-day spiritual workshop retreat day, missing some people but still fabulous! It was a really great day with wonderful food, interesting workshops and discussions, fun activities and insightful ritual. I’m so glad we’ve decided to do this twice a year. It gets us together and talking about great topics, doing more ritual, and having fun. Carving out time here and there for these things is difficult; setting one whole day to focus on this kind of thing is easier and very rewarding. (Not that we don’t do it at other times, too! The two workshop days don’t replace the regular ongoing work, but supplement it.)

Sunday morning Arthur and his dad Forthright came over for a couple of hours of train and Lego play. I made some quite nice scones (adding extra brown sugar and underbaking them just a tad to produce a very sweet and moist result, nom nom nom) which both boys wolfed down (Liam was actually keeping track of how many he ate and proudly held up five fingers when I asked him what number he was on near the end of the playdate). There were tears at the end when the boys had to part, but reassurances that lunch was coming for one and that they’d see one another again for the other seemed to soothe them. After a lunch of pancakes and a nap, we were off to Ceri and Scott’s house for a movie and dinner, a treat rescheduled from last week when the boy had been very, very ill in the car. I got another three rows knitted on the damn ribbing of the mitts I’m working on thanks to Ceri’s presence, and the boys played downstairs. And I got a belated Yuletide gift from Ceri, a lovely set of fingerless gloves crocheted in the Phoenix Gloves pattern by Julia Vaconsin in a beautiful Lorna’s Laces colourway with soft greens and reds and pinks (Gold Hill, perhaps?). They’re exquisite and I adore them. I wanted to wear them for the rest of the day but I couldn’t handle the DPNs I was knitting with properly, as they kept catching in the gloves, and I didn’t want them to get spattered with tomato sauce from dinner, so off they came when they finally had to.

And to my surprise there was decent sleep each night as well. Wonders will never cease.

Now it’s headfirst into the anthology. Today and the rest of this week will see me tidying up last-minute loose ends or edits from the final contributors, scanning the original material for final comments and errors, and then playing with the order of the essays. It all takes a lot of brain power, more than it seems that it ought to.

In Which She Drags Herself To The Computer

Not dead. I wish I was (or rather, I have wished I was for a variety of reasons over the past five days but not at this precise moment), but no, I am not actually dead. I’m in a lot of pain, which is annoying and has been wearing down my patience and ability to deal with basic everyday things; I haven’t been sleeping; and the boy and I have had gastro. But today is a new day and we sent him off to preschool, and our fingers are crossed that everything goes well. Yesterday was an excellent day in which there were no bodily upsets and he ate and slept well, but you never know. And I only found out this morning when I called to let the director know he was on his way that there’s a kid waiting for surgery who can’t come into contact with any possible illness or the surgery has to be rescheduled. That would have been a good thing to know before we sent him in; I might have kept him home an extra day just to be positive. Except not knowing this plus my climbing the walls and increasing pile of backed-up work meant I really needed him to go in today.

Bah.

Today is St Patrick’s Day, and the boy is dressed in a new green t-shirt we picked up for him on Saturday and he looks great. They will be talking about Ireland at school today, and the boy has been reminded that he can tell them about the goddess Brigid, whom he learned all about at the little witchling circle (as one of the leaders calls it), as they probably don’t know about her. He was reviewing what he knew while he got ready to go: “She lives in water ( “And fire,” I interjected) and we throw pennies to her (they’d been told throwing pennies into water and making a wish was a form of communicating with the goddess, so now he tosses pennies into the mall fountains and shouts, “Thank you Brigid!”), and she has white skin and red hair, and she takes care of us when we’re sick and helps us get better.” I can only imagine how garbled that will come out at the other end, and how politely confused the teachers will be.

What lovely sun out there.

Evidently even when I am ill I can still make a kick-ass onion soup and chicken pot pie. The secret? Christmas dinner, and the absolutely fabulous turkey soup it made. I used a small container of the frozen turkey-heavy soup as the base for the cream sauce over the chopped chicken, and wow, it was spectacular. I’m still very confused as to why I wanted to make them when the idea of food had been turning my stomach all day, but they were delicious even in the tiny quantity I ate.

You know, the front staircase is like the bathroom: It doesn’t matter how often I sweep it, it’s dirty again immediately afterwards. On the bright side, the snow’s almost all gone in the front yard, and there’s only a thin layer left in the back. No snow and less mud can only make things better.

I read the entire stack of library books I brought home last Thursday by Sunday night. I resorted to rereading Anne of Avonlea yesterday while the boy napped.

Today: Yoga, then reviewing the final submissions for the anthology (yay!), reviewing edits/rewrites of the first round of essays, sending contracts for the ones that are done, and then I get to start playing with a new order of the fifty stories. And work some more on a scintillating, insightful, poignant introduction. I would love to hand this in early.

So Far…

– Loaf of bread: check

– Batch of most excellent six-grain sweet rolls wrapped around dark organic chocolate, which has melted and gone all smooshy and delicious inside: check

– Successful cast-on of the beginning of those wrist warmers: FINALLY (with a bonus 1/3 first row of ribbing)

– Tomato-bean-beef stew in the slow cooker: check

I’m being so efficient that I’m kind of annoying myself.

Valentines

I gave the boy a little box of chocolate hearts with Lightning McQueen on the lid, and I am the best mom ever.

    A: Here you are! Happy Valentine’s Day, sweetie.

    BOY: Oh, wow — what is it?

    A: It’s chocolates. Happy Valentine’s Day.

    BOY: Can I have one?

    A: Yes, you may have chocolate at nine in the morning, because it is Valentine’s Day.

    BOY: Gee, thanks! [opens box, takes a foil-wrapped chocolate out, unwraps it strip by strip, and nibbles the treat] It’s hard!

    A: Yes, and it’s got Rice Krispies inside, too.

    BOY: Thanks, Mama!

    [A turns to leave]

    BOY: [calls after her] That was very kind of you, Mama. Thank you!

Then we had to negotiate when he would be allowed to eat another one, so I brought the clock over and said that when the little hand was pointing at the ten and the big hand was pointing at the twelve, he could have a second one. He decided to hold the clock in one hand and the box of chocolates in the other, just so he wouldn’t miss the precise moment when he’d be allowed to unwrap another chocolate.

Have a terrific day, everyone! Hug a cat or a tree or a friend.