Archive for March, 2009

• An Itch I Can’t Quite Scratch

  Date: 2009.03.28 | Category: Uncategorized | Response: 2

  Sometimes reading books or blogs can be a dangerous activity. They give me ideas. Grand ideas even. The ideas range from the very doable (a homemade pizza craving), to the maybe doable (cheesemaking?) to the not doable at all (a large garden, completely with greenhouse like my grandparents used to have and my uncle still does).

  Yep, I’m rereading Kingsolver’s Animal, Vegetable, Mineral. How’d you guess?

  I have no desire to live completely off the grid or exclusively on local food. (A life without Thai food? Not interested.) I do like to eat lots of local foods when I can. This morning the sun is shining, it’s just warm enough to have a front window open and the sunroom is open for the cat. (It is “Piper’s Room” after all, though she does have limited access.)

  And it’s time for me to start thinking about container gardening, again. I wouldn’t call last year’s attempts a dismal failure but they certainly weren’t a success either. The pepper plant was put out of commission by aphids (I still can’t figure out where the aphids came from) as was one tomato plant. The remaining two tomato plants grew way larger than they were supposed to (not quite the patio variety they were supposed to be) and though they yielded flowers the flowers promptly dried up and fell off. I did keep the plants alive all summer though, which is progress for me.

  Meanwhile I didn’t keep the cilantro properly trimmed and it flowered. The basil got attacked by *something*. The lavender turned brown. All this while “indoors” in my sunroom. Go figure.

  My lone summer survivor was the rosemary, which while it did not grow large it did manage to hold off  until October. Go Team Rosemary! I have a vague hope that it may come back…but I’m not counting on it.

  I ordered seed catalogues and all but drooled over the bounty that I could have…if I had a garden. Patio varieties seem to be few and far between. I contemplated ordering specialty seeds from the US but then decided that I really had no appropriate place to start them.

  So once again I’ll be at the mercy of local nurseries and big box stores, looking between all the lovely things one could plant if one had a proper garden to find things I can harvest in my little sunroom. I’m hunting down books on container gardens, which sadly seem to be the domain of all things floral, with a few herbs throw in for good measure.

  I’m hoping that maybe this summer I’ll have a single homegrown tomato. Or maybe enough basil to make pesto. Or I’ll keep the cilantro alive until tomatoes and tomatillos come into season. Maybe I’ll even do a single container of mint – it’s hearty enough to survive my black thumb. I hope.

• You know you probably really need that coffee

  Date: 2009.03.25 | Category: Uncategorized | Response: 2

  When you are standing in line at Starbucks and you hear the barista talking to someone and you swear you heard him say loudly “My chlamydia blah blah blah” rather than what he really said which is “My commitments blah blah blah.”

• I’m seeing a pattern here

  Date: 2009.03.16 | Category: sometimes I ramble | Response: 1

  A few months ago I stared to ween myself off the internet a bit. (Don’t worry internet, I’m not quitting you.) Back when I was working for That Place That I Used To Work That Shall Not Be Named On This Blog my work/life balance was whacked. In a nutshell there was no life, there was just work and sleep and if I was having a really good week, grocery shopping. Then that went away  (yayyyyyyyy) and I went in the other direction where I really wasn’t working much and I was getting used to this new life of mine in Ottawa. Somewhere along the line I realized that I was probably spending a wee bit too much time online.

  My solution to this was “Internet-Lite” days. Originally they were going to be “Internet-Free” but I realized I’d fail at that very quickly. Every time I tried I’d realize that what I was planning to cook for dinner was somehow connected to the interent. Internet-Lite it was. Internet-Lite is working for me. I can still pop on and check my email, monitor blog comments, look up a recipe, go to IMDB to figure out who that person in the movie is, etc. The point is that I don’t linger. Twitter & Chatter are generally avoided.

  However I am noticing a pattern. You see I find myself with the need to do something with those hours. Just knowing how many hours I have ahead of me makes me feel antsy. Like I should be doing Something, since I have All This Time. Sure, I could do normal things like laundry and dusting and sweeping but why on earth would I want to do that? Often I find I’m too restless to sit still long enough for a movie or to read a book (yes, I said I’m too antsy to read). So I find myself informing Lee we are going to *insert random household project here*.

  It’s how we ended up clearing out the pantry and organizing the spice cabinet one Sunday. It’s how we ended up arranging our books by colour another Sunday. And this weekend it’s how we spent about 6 hours doing a deep clean and reorganization of our office. The storage closet in there was cleaned out. We threw out bags of trash that we had once upon a time convinced ourselves were Importan Items and Memories. Ok, most of it was Lee’s. I’ve moved too much in the past 5 years to have accumulated quite that much. Lee is a packrat. He got rid of a lot of stuff this weekend that he’d been holding onto for a long time (and I didn’t push…ok, only a little bit). Furniture was rearranged. An entire army of dust bunnies were extinguished. Goodwill got a small load of donations and while we were out we treated ourselves to Dairy Queen sundaes.

  Sunday evening I could not sit still and if you walked into our apartment you would have found me sitting on the floor killing more dust bunnies that were inhabiting our baseboards. (I do think that part of that was induced by my wrist flaring up again and I still can’t bake or knit and it hurts to hold a book for too long. Ditto yoga. Cooking with a brace on is a pain in the butt. It is very, very frustrating.)

  All this is fantastic but this is the thing – sooner or later I’m going to run out of rooms to clean top to bottom and crap to throw out. Sooner or later dust bunnies will be extinct. Sooner or later I’m going to have to figure out something else to do with all. that. time.

  If I’m initiating cleaning (I *hate* cleaning) now what am I going to do it when it runs out?  (Don’t bother suggesting I clean your place – the compulsion doesn’t work that way.) I’ll have to get creative. And that is a scary, scary thought.

• What’s For Dinner Wednesday v. 3

  Date: 2009.03.04 | Category: What's for Dinner? | Response: 2

  Hey look, I’m actually doing What’s For Dinner Wednesday on a Wednesday. Shocking.

  This is the pantry edition. In order to this I must tell you a story. Ok, so I don’t have to but I will anyway.

  Last April Lee and I were apartment searching. It was suprisingly difficult to find the kind of apartment we wanted. We ideally did not want to live in a large apartment building. I was living in a fabulous one in Montreal with doormen and a fabulous super and building admin (but slightly crazy neighbours) and I loved my apartment (I miss my green bathroom, sigh). I loved the neighbourhood. And even though I liked to bitch about the walking up the hill it was quite good exercise. But there’s a difference between living in a big ole building in downtown Montreal and living in a big ole building in not downtown Ottawa.

  After looking at a place with the narrowest and steepest stairs I’ve ever seen (I don’t think my bed would have make it into the place, or our sofa) we were driving down the street and saw a sign on the lawn at the place we now live. We fell in love with the place. The guy gave us the keys the next day even though we weren’t moving in for 6 weeks.

  Sitting in one corner of our kitchen was a dishwasher. It was one of those portable types on wheels. Me? I love dishwashers. Lee? Hates them. So we got rid of the dishwasher on the condition that he did all the dishes. And so it is. In that location we put in a pantry. Lately every time we try to take something out of that pantry we usually end up dropping something on our toes.

  Thus began the clear out the pantry/fridge/freezer challenge.

  For the last week we’ve been trying to clear out as much as possible. Some things, as always are easier than others. As far as I’m concerned our pasta reserves are dangerously low, but then I’m generally not happy unless I have close to an entire shelf of pasta at the ready. (Mmmm carbs)

  We made pasta with artichoke hearts and white beans (not a success). I made bolognese sauce which got rid of a few cans of tomatoes (success). Last night it was chicken and veg with a peanut sauce on top of rotini.

  That was almost a complete disaster. The first peanut sauce I made? It was the most vile smelling thing ever. I have no idea how those ingredients combined together created such a vile smell. It made us gag. Thankfully I had made the sauce before I started the rest of the meal and was able to whip up more a tried and true recipe that’s more of a satay sauce than what I wanted but hey it worked. (Lee got the honours of disposing of the vile stuff…I could smell from the next room. Yuck x infinity.)

  If anyone has a really good peanut sauce recipe now is the time to speak up.

  We still have more to get through. Like 5 tetrapacks of chicken stock (it was on sale I have no idea what to do with it all since I’m not really making a lot of soup). A roast of some sort, which I kind of meant to take out of of the freezer yesterday and forgot). Another can of artichokes (I’m thinking dip). More condiments than you can shake a stick at. (In terms of mustard alone we have regular French’s and then dijon, honey dijon, grainy and maple.)

  Anyone have any good pantry clearing ideas?