2nd post of 2014...

There have been several times in the last few months where I have looked the shortcut to this blog on my dash and thought, "yes, I will write something." That's about as far I get with that.

I've been following a lot of blogs lately, many of which have recently revamped themselves and changed the look of their blogs. Almost every time, I love the change and think "I should go back to mine and do something about it." I then look at my dash shortcut again, and leave it at that.

I've finally started to get back into a groove of cooking and I get a third of the way into a recipe before I think "I should probably get my camera, I can fudge the starter photos..." and then never go back to my desk to get the camera.

It is what it is.

This post took the better part of an entire episode of Project Runway and America's Next Top Model to write. Sorry I'm not sorry.

Life is slowly going into what could actually be described as a normal schedule. I'm now working full time at one job, I got some travel in just as the summer ended and I'm slowly gathering materials for Halloween. I can't complain too much.

I will leave this image from the cottage, and hope to move forward.

In another part of the galaxy...

My goodness it's been a while.

A variety of things have pulled me away from this blog, proper home cooking and making. I don't like to make excuses, but it is what it is. I believe the proper term is that I've been "busy as fuck" lately, physically and mentally. I have desperately been trying to crowbar a life into the little time I have outside my professional working and volunteering life, I guess to a point of being partially uninspired and frustrated at the lack of time. Procrastination and no time are not good bedfellows.

As I sit here over some surprisingly awesome homemade pizza (I need to steal the homemade pesto recipe that my roommate made for our St. Patrick's Day dinner party, it's really awesome. Yep, something else that was not chronicled), I'm slowly coming back to the life I want, and why I bothered with a blog in the first place. Now, I just have keep that momentum going and actually cook, make and document those previous two things.

There is hope yet.


Despite the busy, I did get a few pictures from my week off in between contracts. By a few, I mean the same shot out of our hotel window the night we arrived and the next morning. I spent most of the weekend at Blue Mountain sitting in a hot tub and the pool at our hotel while my friends narrowly missed trees. I was thoroughly relaxed by the time we left on Sunday.

 Hey guys!

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!

Celebrating the end of Halloween with snow in November.

Yep, I can post regularly to this blog. Totally.

Despite my insane new schedule (Huzzah for employment!), Halloween was a success! I finished the costume in time and managed to wear it out tot 2 parties! I'm so glad there was a second Halloween party I could go to, I spent to much damn time building that costume.

Everybody remember the stupid, sexy Little Red Riding Hood costume and the awesome T-shirt design from Threadless of "Little Red?" It all culminated in one bad Little Red, who didn't need no Lumberjack to kill that wolf.

Hello ROM camel.

He was warm at least, in death.

I'm quite pleased with how ex-Fluffy came out, even with all the issues he has. I was sewing up his butt by hand about 2 hours before we left for the ROM's Friday Night Live Halloween party, and thankfully I owned everything else already for the costume. I also learned some entertaining things about using fun fur, including that I really should have done some basting stitches along my fur and lining. There was a point around one of the paws where the lining had ridden up do far along the fun fur that I was short by about 6 inches. Also, despite being really careful and using the proper technique for cutting fun fur, there is STILL fun fur all over my apartment. 

1. Ex-Fluffy was made from scratch. I used a few weeks worth of grocery flyers to draft a pattern for all of his pieces. I also spent a fair bit of time looking at wolf stats on wikipedia and pictures of real wolf hides to work out the dimensions and basic shape. Loosely speaking, ex-Fluffy is about the same size as an adult grey wolf. Anatomically wonky, but more or less correct length wise.

Bits and pieces in No Frills' flyers.

2. Cutting the pieces out resulted in some solid blisters along my thumb from the slow, careful cutting that the fun fur required. And my knees were mildly ruined by the amount of floor action I had from tracing this pattern out. Worth it though.

 Trace, cut, repeat.

3. As I mentioned before, sewing ex-Fluffy together was a learning experience. Generally speaking it went very, very well, especially considering I haven't used a machine in a long, long time. It helps that my machine is really awesome.

The tail and ears were hand sewn into the body and head. While annoying, it did create nice seams that needed minimal combing to make then invisible.

4. This awkward bathroom selfie was done about a week after Halloween, when I had time and energy. When posed, this is was the hood looked like with it's slightly uneven ears.

However, when left to it's own devices, the hood proved to be a little too big..

All in all, I am super thrilled with this costume. Ex-Fluffy turned out great, and provided an extra source of warmth on the windy walk home, the dress and petticoat worked out really well to round out the costume, and I received several compliments from people at both parties. Now we just have to find a use for him... other than a wolf skin rug over the foozeball table.

Hallow-EEK!

It sounds better than "Hallow-month."

The roommate and I have been pondering over Halloween ideas for this year. It's on a stupid day of the week (Thursday), her family is in town visiting for a week and I'm going out of town the weekend after to Montreal. So, for a while we thought our options were limited. We've just discovered that, not only are there a few decent options for the weekend prior to Halloween, we're probably (still need to buy tickets) going on a GHOST WALK around the Tdot. We found a Groupon for Tour Guys a company I've been known to promote and love in a previous life as a Hostel front desker, and I'm pretty excited, especially with a promise of "No gimmicks, no capes and lanterns, no b.s." and a tour name of "I ain't afraid of no ghost!"

On to the important stuff about Halloween, costumes! My roommate has been collecting bits for what we all think is a hilarious and awesome costume, a killer bee. Not just a bee costume, but a bee with weapons like knives, bullet belts, throwing stars and guns. Yep. Pretty awesome. For a little while I thought about doing Lady Gaga in the new Applause video, specifically the colour blur/explosion thing she has going on, but I wasn't sure how I was going to dress up the rest of me. After some perusing on the internet I saw this, amongst the other piles of sexy costumes.

I'm not crediting this image since the store sucks ass. Look back through some of my posts to work out which one, if you're that desperately in need of knowing.

At first I thought "meh, standard sexy Red Riding Hood," but it then reminded me of a shirt from Threadless that I own, and the ideas started to form.

"Red" by Anton Chigurh, which can be found on Threadless.

I need to have a wander over to some of the fabric stores and do some swatch shopping for the wolf. He's probably going to be a pain to make, but I've got the other two thirds of what I'd want this costume to be, so there's hope yet.

We shall see....

As a semi-related note, here's "Little Blue Riding Hood"by Grant Stephen Shepley, also on Threadless. You're welcome.

Summer is over in the Tdot.

Summer is not my favorite season for personal comfort, I'm the first to admit it. I hate the high heat and humidity we've been getting for the last few summers. I hate sunscreen but I have to wear it, or lots of clothing that make the previous issue a bigger problem. I hate sweating constantly from the heat, and I feel like I can't go out and about nearly as much outside since it's fucking hot all the time. I love some things about summer, cottaging, camping, swimming, and BBQing.

 A slightly bad cellphone picture of the BBQs in the pool area of our apartment.

And an even worse, fuzzier cellphone picture of some dead fish and a side of potatoes and red onion, mushrooms skewers.

BBQing was never strictly a summer activity in my family, we do it all year long. Our New Year's tradition is doing homemade burgers on the BBQ and getting Swiss Chalet fries. However, since I've moved into an apartment, I only have access to the BBQs in our pool area for a limited time during the year, roughly 5 months spread over summer.

 The results from the previous picture.

 That time, when we fished for our own fish in a Toronto swimming pool, caught a few of them and made them for dinner.

This is the last thing I'll probably BBQ this season, a fantastic recipe for Paneer and Red Pepper Skewers. It was a nice send off to the BBQing year. The recipe needs some tweaking, admittedly, chiefly I should have cut the paneer bigger and I think the addition of tomatoes may help retain some moisture. And this did not keep well in the fridge, that's for sure. The paneer was rock solid the next day. I salvaged it by reheating it in a small saucepan with some olive oil.

I love fall. The cooler air, less death-causing sun, and the ability to wear pants and not sweat to death make me a happy dude. But as the air cools and the sun goes down earlier, I will have a moment of reflection for the end of BBQ season.