Merry Christmas from the slightly darker than usual Tdot.

A very Merry Christmas and I wish you power and heat for the new year.

Not that snowy by much of the rest of the country's standards, but pretty snowy for Tdot in comparison to the last 4 to 5 years

It's the official Toronto holiday greeting now. Things are a bit nuts here with the snow storm from two weekends ago and the ice storm of this past weekend. Power was knocked out on Saturday night for large portions of the city, and many people still don't have power or heat on Christmas day. Many Toronto Hydro workers gave up their own Christmas to try and get more of the city back up in time for Christmas. Happy thoughts everyone, and hug your local Hydro worker.

The Dinosaurs weren't too happy about the current weather either.

All of my family got very, very lucky and never really lost power. I had some flickers on the Saturday night, but woke up to a working alarm clock. Both of my work places still had power this week as well, which was a mixed blessing. I spent most of the early week entertaining friends to keep them warm. Today was the quiet family Christmas, and I was so happy to have a quiet, sleep-in, stuff your face day. It started with a great, quick recipe I found recently on Freutcake for eggnog french toast. I love eggnog and french toast, so this was going to go well regardless.

5 ingredient Eggnog French Toast
Stolen from Freutcake
Serves 4-6

1 1/2 cups of eggnog
5 large eggs
2 tbls of sugar
6-8 slices of brioche or challah bread, 1/2 inch thick. I used challah bread, and the inherent sweetness of it totally works.
8 tbls of unsalted butter, ish.

-Whisk the eggnog, eggs and sugar thoroughly in a bowl. I'd recommend whisking the eggs and sugar together first and then whisking in the eggnog. And whisk those suckers in a bowl, then pour them into a shallow baking dish.

 Noggey eggs.

-Soak bread slices for about 10 minutes or until completely saturated. The slices are super heavy when they're a soaked, so be careful when pulling them out to go into the frying pan that they don't pull apart.
(If doing all the slices in one go, preheat your oven to 200C and have a wire rack on top of a baking tray in there. After you fry up the slices, plonk them in the oven to keep warm while you're doing the rest of them.)
-Using about a tbls of butter per slice of bread, melt the butter in a medium heat pan. Fry each side until golden, about 2 to 3 minutes.

Fry it up.

 Melted butter works for a topping too.

 I'm sure this would have tasted even more amazing had I remembered to get some maple syrup prior to today, eg when all the shops were closed, but whatevs. Pretty awesome breakfast.

Merry Christmas y'all!

Things I've been doing instead of working on my thesis

1. EVERYTHING to do with the Francis Bedford exhibition my classmates and I have been working on for the past three months.  There's a fair amount of blood, sweat, tears and choice swearwords in this making of this exhibition, but I couldn't be prouder of the finished product.

 

2. Attempting to eat real food again, or at least waaaaaaay less take out and pre-made stuff.

One of the best breakfasts I've had in weeks.

3. Dyeing Easter eggs. Yep.

It's amazing what you can do with a pile of Tumeric and some time on your hands.

Back to regular posting soon, I promise.

Weekend Breakfast

A lazy weekend was had by all. Sleeping in, reading/finishing a book I've been reading, and wandering by the grocery store. It was started with this scrambled eggs and avocado recipe I found on the Toronto Star website. Since I didn't have any crème fraîche, I just put some table creme in with the eggs.

Avocado Scramble on Toast (Makes 1 serving.)

Ingredients

1/2 avocado, sliced

Juice of 1/2 lime

2 eggs

1 tbsp (15 mL) crème fraîche

1 slice bread, toasted

Freshly ground black pepper

What to do

In small bowl, mash avocado slices and lime juice with fork.

In another bowl, whisk eggs and crème fraiche.

Heat small, non-stick skillet over medium. Add eggs. Cook, stirring in figure eight pattern with wooden spoon, until just scrambled and still moist.

Spread avocado on toast. Top with eggs. Season with pepper.

More eggs. And paneer.

I had some leftover paneer, half an onion and some potatoes lying around. Time for a fry up!

Boil the potatoes in small chunks until soft, drain.
Slice onions into thin slices, throw into frying pan on medium heat with some veggie oil. Stir.
Add potatoes. Stir.
Add 1/2 teaspoons of coriander seed, cumin and turmeric. Stir.
When onions are almost cooked, throw in cubed paneer and stir until either warmed through or slightly brown and crisp on the outside.
Remove potato mixture, crack on egg into the pan and attempt to do an over-easy egg. This doesn't always work well for me, so I'll take what I can get.

So glad that last essay is over. So glad, in fact, that I'm using some of the notes to protect my keyboard from splatter while eating at the computer. I'm not a *huge slob, but stuff falls off of forks occasionally. It's interesting that everything that was white when the cooking started, ended up being yellow, predominately due to the turmeric. Eggs just do that on their own.
It's also interesting to note that most of my posts are well after the midnight mark. Might have to do something about that along the way.

Runny Eggs

As I sit here at my computer, writing this blog to put off doing more research about 20th century cameras used by professional photographers, I look at my lunch and realize that I really need to work on how to cook eggs.

I love diner style breakfasts with runny, sunny-side up eggs, loads of hash browns and ham slices. I try to redeem the lack of nutrients and vitamins by having Oj or extra fruit with it. Either way, I love cheap, greasy diner breakfasts.

Sadly, I have a hard time cooking them myself. I guess not having the flat, griddle surface that diners have might be my first problem, but I suck at cooking eggs in general. I can hard boil them, and that's about it. My scrambled eggs are a little weird and I can't do sunny-side up eggs without them exposing at one point or another. None the less, I will still try, I hope it's down to practice and a decent frying pan. Today's attempt was going fairly well until the last flip where the yolk started to rip, and moving it to the plate was the breaking point, as can be seem. Tasted really good though, and I was really happy with my potatoes and onions.

In other news, CONSERVATION ROAD TRIP!! Eight of us from my Master's program are going to the 10th Biannual Winter Meeting of the American Institute for Conservation of Historic and Artistic Works next weekend! Not only have we lucked out that the conference is focusing on photography this year, it's happening in Ottawa and not in the States like previous years. We've all scrapped together our pennies for the conference fees, hotel and the rental cars, and we're hitting the road on Thursday night for the drive to Ottawa.

Professionals from all over North America are giving lectures and workshops about preservation issues in photography, and it's being hosted by the National Gallery of Canada, Library and Archives Canada and the Canadian Conservation Institute.

I am ready to thoroughly geek out for two days.

Also, thank you to our Chemistry professor, Chris for not being understanding about us missing class on Thursday to go to the conference, but for actually encouraging us to go since it's a great opportunity. Thank you Chris, you're amazing.