Category Archives: Food

Garden!

I have just returned from eating dinner on the back deck, cooked on the new barbecue. (Thank you, whoever left the brochettes in the fridge; they were delightful.)

HRH spent the early part of the afternoon overhauling the gardens, because it was such a beautiful day. The mass of hostas that were growing along the side fence have been transplanted to various spots around the house. We took a trip out to price lumber and lattice to build the new side fence, and then to the nursery to buy our first set of plants. I now have rosebushes, lavender, and other herbs in the back corner. The huge creeping vine is gone from the back porch as well, as the trunk was beginning to split the floorboards. I think we’ll plant a clematis or two down below to replace it, to wind up the deck and along the side fence.

It’s beginning to feel somewhat like summer. It will feel more like summer once we’ve put in flats and flats of flowers, but we’re not going to do that until we’re certain the overnight temperature won’t dip close to the zero mark. I’m not tempting Nature like that, not when it’s done it twice in the past five years before Victoria Day.

Sunday

We spent a fabulous afternoon with the ADZO family yesterday. They fed us, which was unexpected but not unwelcome because they always create wonderful food, and Liam got to play with TAZ and her toys, and in general we all got to relax and share good company. It was remarkable to see Liam interacting with someone who is seven months older than he is; we can see how advanced he is in some respects, and the areas in which he’s definitely an eleven-month-old. He had an excellent nap in the morning and one in the early afternoon, and those allowed him to be sociable all afternoon and let us stay till past six o’clock. When we got home, he had some milk and passed out for twelve hours, with no wakings.

(Yes, we’re rather happy about it as well. Plus he went down for all naps and bedtime without a fuss. Two days of stress seem to have smoothed things over. Cross your fingers.)

We got to share in a first at the park: TAZ climbed the stairs to the slide, sat down at the top, then pushed off and slid down all by herself for the very first time. Liam’s first was much less impressive, but something to celebrate nonetheless: he climbed up the single stair from the sunken playroom into the dining room all by himself. And it looked at one point like he was playing peek-a-boo with TAZ across the wooden chest, because he was trying to mirror her actions of bending down behind it to hide and standing up to reveal herself.

Liam also consumed the most Cheerios I’ve ever seen him stuff into his mouth over dinner. Of course, a lot of them ended up in the seat of the high chair, but he ate tons of them despite that.

Once Liam’s morning and afternoon naps are solid (and they seem to be settling in well) I’ll be able to count on two blocks of an hour to an hour and a half of work per day. Oh: and Mousme is writing a swan story based on the Bonny Swans folk ballad too! I am very amused, and also very excited. I opened my Swan Sister file the other day, but not a single word was added because of the Invisible mp3s on the playlist. It was all good, though, because I played the cello instead, and Liam woke up fifteen minutes later, so I would have just been settling into the writing flow when I’d have had to stop.

I’ve been invited to a local BNI meeting in a couple of weeks, so I have to overhaul my business cards and recreate my handout literature. It’s interesting that this invitation came from someone whom I’ve never met (HRH has spoken to her on the phone once), who thought of me off the top of her head, and at a time when I’m ready to start taking a couple of freelance jobs on again. I’m looking forward to it.

‘Not What We Give, But What We Share’

Thank you, thank you, thank you everyone who came out to the potluck BBQ t!-and-ai731-are-getting-married party last night. Tal, HRH and I truly appreciate your time and energy. The food was wonderful, and the company most excellent. I’m only sorry that I missed a lot of the party due to sitting in the baby’s room trying to get him to/back to sleep, or sitting in my bedroom next to the monitor so that I could hear him if he woke up yet again. I appreciate the thoughtfulness of the guests who wandered in over the course of the evening to hang out with me and bring me drinks and lemon buns. (At one point the entire membership of Invisible was in my bedroom with me, save for the bassist. Of course, the bassist has been in other bedrooms of mine plenty of times, and besides, it was his own getting-married-party going on in the other rooms.)

Ironically enough, Liam woke up at eleven once everyone was gone. Go figure. Maybe it was the cessation of white noise. But apart from the initial rocky two hours of very-hard-to-get-him-to-sleep, he only woke up at eleven and again at five-thirty, each time for about fifteen minutes for soothing, then another five or ten minutes of grumpy complaining alone before falling asleep. That’s an improvement already.

We now have a plethora of hot dog buns in the fridge. No hot dogs, but plenty of buns.

HRH picked up a new barbecue yesterday morning in honour of the event, as we realised that there were between twenty and thirty RSVPs and there was no way that our mini camp BBQ was going to handle that kind of dinner traffic. We’ve been wanting a full-size one for some time, of course, and we found a really great one on sale for just under one hundred dollars, down from its usual price of one-forty-ish. Hurrah!

We also had a wedding rehearsal yesterday, and it’s going to be wonderful. t! poked gentle fun at me for getting choked up when I read one of my lines, but I think I have every right to get teary because it’s one of the lines he read at my own wedding six and a half years ago. The circle is now complete. Or something like that.

Band practice Saturday morning confirmed that the wedding gig will be more of the non-stress event we want it to be. We’ve temporarily removed two of our songs from the set in order to rework and polish them some more before reintroducing them in the fall.

Today: a lovely social afternoon with the ADZO family (once we ascertain the time)!

Weekend Catch-Up

Happy Beltane!

Not turning on my computer for four days running is a very good method of dealing with stress. I like it. It does, however, mean that I have a bunch of stuff to catch up on when I get back to it. The good thing is that it was over the weekend, when there’s generally less stuff to handle anyway.

Let’s see. My parents were in town for a conference, so they came over Friday night and I cooked a belated birthday dinner for my Dad. Roast breast of duck glazed in ginger marmalade and soy sauce, wild rice with oyster mushrooms and toasted almonds, organic spring greens salad with homemade vinaigrette, followed by a dessert of chocolate sponge sandwiched together with strawberry coulis folded into whipped cream, then topped with fresh strawberries and chocolate ganache. And my parents brought an excellent Australian shiraz called [yellowtail] and it was the perfect accompaniment. It was so incredibly perfect. I’m not sure what happened, but it all worked. I’m always surprised when special dinners work.

Band practice was very okay. We miss our drummer something fierce when she’s not there. We talked about what to drop for the upcoming private gig (we’re playing a wedding! okay, it’s the guitarist’s wedding, but still!) and ran through stuff. I think most of us feel better about the gig in general after a week of distance.

Liam’s naps and sleeping-through-the-night went out the window again. Saturday was very, very bad. Last night he only woke up once around midnight, and today when he woke up after a scant twenty minutes of nap he was soothed back to sleep, so I am cautiously optimistic. We thought a tooth had made its appearance Saturday morning, but it’s still covered by a thin bit of skin, damn it. Like the other three, now.

We had coven yesterday and wove a beautiful Maypole. We slipped the weave off and tied it into sections and everyone took a bit home. Our feast was really good, too.

I’ve been going to bed very early to cope with the sleep fragmentation I’ve been suffering courtesy of the waking baby. It seems to be helping a bit.

Reading an excess of Connie Willis (not that there really is such a thing) makes me want to write desperately again.

Okay, baby’s awake! That makes for a total of over an hour of nap this morning. Hurrah!

Hi Cat

We tried Liam on yoghurt again today. This time it was a success, which is a relief because this container won’t get thrown out like the last one did. Of course, I used a half cup of it making scones this afternoon. And I could make lots and lots of my special pancake batter, because there’s no way I’d eat it; I hate the stuff. But still. And he may have liked it this time because I swirled some fruit into it. Whatever.

Jan was in exactly the same sort of mood I was today, which is a good thing. There were books, and tea, and cats indeed. Liam was by turns charming and cranky. He said “Hi cat” a lot. And I got him to sleep at naptime with only a cry or two, in about twenty minutes, and he slept for forty. Not as long as he used to, but better than the twenty or thirty he’s been taking lately. Damn teeth.

Once he’s in bed and I’ve eaten, I too am bound for bed. Maybe this way if he wakes up in the middle of the night, I’ll have had enough sleep to be functional.

I’ve stopped being less happy with the gig because Jan pointed out to me today that it was only the third time the band had played live, which means it was only the second time for me. I keep forgetting that. I’m really tired of not enjoying myself because I’m not being as good as I know I can be. Part of me just wants to give it up because I’ll never be satisfied, and I don’t mean in a striving-for-excellence way. I’m just too damn hard on myself, and I know I resolved to be less hard on myself, but it’s hard. You know? So now I’m not unhappy, I’m just neutral about it.

Tired And Cranky

Well, the crock pot directions weren’t kidding when they say “trim the fat from the meat”. Normally when you trim fat, you trim excess fat because most meats benefit from a bit of fat marbled throughout to help keep it from drying out during the cooking process. Next time I’ll trim all the fat, because what little fat was left ended up melting over everything. Greasy carrots and potatoes are not what I had in mind when I made this pot roast. Lesson learned. Apart from that it was delicious, and I’m looking forward to experimenting with other things. And possibly the best part of dinner was that I could feed the roast and vegetables to Liam, so he ate exactly what we ate last night. And wow, did he ever eat a lot of it.

The further away the gig gets, the less happy I am with it. I’m certainly not looking forward to the recording. Most of me just wants to forget it and remember Invisible’s portion of the evening. Goodness knows my body remembers it; I haven’t danced in, well, possibly over a decade (save for the dancing to Sheena Is A Punk Rocker during Invisible’s sound check last October) and things started to be rather ow last night. And I have a bruise across the top of the palm of my bow hand, and my little finger on the same hand was swollen when I got home on Saturday night, but those are from the hand locking during the second song of the set and forcing me to switch my bow hold. It gave me a lot of trouble, which I’d expected, but I didn’t anticipate having to deal with it so early on.

I finished Bellwether the morning after I’d started to reread it. Now I’m rereading Lincoln’s Dreams, and I’m almost finished that too. I’ll have to reread Connie Willis’ short fiction next, because I recently reread Passage and Doomsday Book not long before that. I seem to have lent my copy of Remake to someone, because it’s not on the shelf.

Everyone’s tired and cranky here. Liam keeps waking up in the middle of the night, and I know it’s because of his teeth, but there’s not much more we can do than give him Tylenol and cuddle him while he screams. And once he’s up and finished his bout of hard crying, he’s really awake so he wants to eat a full meal of milk and play for a bit before going back to sleep. And then it’s only nap-length sleep, so he’s up bright and early to begin his day. Do these teeth need a formal invitation or something? They’re taking their damn time.

I’m currently fighting the need to crawl into bed with a pile of books, a cat, and a pot of tea to ignore baby and husband today. (Apart from the obvious reasons why this won’t work, ai731 is coming over today.)

Gig Minus Five Hours And Counting

We had a good, solid dress rehearsal this morning where we got some blank-memory moments out of our systems, committed music (there were goosebumps!), and were in general pleased with how things happened. I am personally satisfied with my bits in the IBFKATCS. I’m looking forward to the gig tonight.

I had my first soft-serve ice cream cone of the year yesterday. Chocolate and vanilla swirl, dipped in hard chocolate coating. Delicious.

And happy Earth Day to all!