Bibliomama

I was prepared to rough it in the bush food-wise - Collette told me "just forget trying to eat healthy - it's easiest if you just buy crap." I went to Loblaws and crowded my cart with club pack boxes of every processed snack available, and filled in the spaces with chips and cookies. I only bought meat that had enough nitrates in it to last three weeks without refrigeration. I bought CHEEZ FREAKING WHIZ. I had not reckoned on my husband, "Hibachi Man". We had a Coleman stove, but I don't think he used it at all. He used a little Hibachi and the grate over the campfire. He also brought actual meat. He made hamburgers. He made steak and potatoes. And lit candles.  He made french toast and bacon.  He warmed up cinnamon buns in a cast iron pan over the fire.  Then there was the parade of giant hunks of meat, courtesy of Mark and Dan and Auspit . This is pork. This is beef.  ...wrapped in bacon.  It was fou

Cooking for another gourmet dinner party.  I got the recipe from an LCBO Food & Drink Magazine It was called a terrine. A more accurate description would be "meat, mixed with other meat..." "....layered with other meat..." "...wrapped in bacon." I had to call my husband in for an engineering consult. We swaddled it and bathed it as tenderly as we would an infant. A meat infant, that we were going to roast and eat. Okay, bad simile. We stuck it in the fridge and weighed it down with cans to squish down all the layers (NEVER NEVER do this with a baby). Look, there are pistachios and dried cherries in it - it's practically trail mix! Okay, admittedly, I picked this terrine recipe because it was less jellified than all the others, and there was STILL a higher degree of slipperiness than I'm generally comfortable with (sorry if I just made you gag, Nicole ). But it was actually insanely delic

This is what I did this afternoon: The ones on the right (toffee shortbread or shortbread meltaways - my recipe is on a pink page from a flour recipe book, and I've miraculously managed not to lose it - this is almost exactly the same) has become my go-to Christmas cookie over the past few years, and one of the only cookies I can actually "whip up", which to me means very little recipe consultation - since my memory's gotten so bad and I'm a bit obsessive, following a recipe usually means frequent and repeated looking back at the recipe between adding and stirring things. The kids love them, they freeze like a dream and....um... well, shortbread, and Skor bits, so duh. In the middle is salted chocolate toffee pretzel bark , which I found last year, I think by Googling pretzel toffee bark (okay, not the most gripping story - the recipe makes up for it). Every time someone tastes it, their first question is whether you need a candy thermometer to make

Because when I finally decided at the last minute that I was making this for the dinner party, I should have assembled my fancy ingredients all at once to take a picture, but I didn't. Instead, I tried this, but Rose was sleeping on Eve and I was distracted and didn't manage to get a decent shot. Then I realized that it probably would have been a better, more balanced shot if I had put the pecans, the ginger and the maple sugar all together, but by that time I had already chopped up the ginger and baked it in the cake. Also, you can't see the pedestal from this angle so it just looks like a tippy plate. Then I was hemmed in at the table by other people who were drunk and pitiless and didn't care that my camera was unreachable in my purse and I have to post EVERY SINGLE DAY in November, so I didn't even get BAD pictures of Collette's amazing peanut soup with smoked chicken or Janet's fabulous Boston lettuce and feta and pomegranate salad with Cajun

With Salted Maple Caramel Sauce and Maple-Coated Pecans. Pictures to follow. (I know. Totally phoning it in. Sorry).

First of all, running drop-tackle hugs to Maggie - FUCK the leaves, Maggie, FUCK them - and Jenny - make the boys iron, Jenny! Just kidding, that's a terrible idea if your boys are anything like mine - and everyone else who is making me feel like forcing out a blog post every day in this miserable month is a wholly worthwhile endeavour. Also, the Denver Hayes never iron shirt ? Is a filthy lie perpetrated on the iron-hating public. ALSO also, Angus and the team wore shirts and ties over to St. Joseph's high school for an exhibition game, changed into their jerseys and promptly stuffed their neatly pressed shirts and pants into their drawstring bags - so yeah, still love the coach, but shaking my head a little. Because tomorrow (today) is Thursday and I will be (am) driving to Barrie to spend the week-end with Zarah, I have decided to review tonight's (last night's) dinner for this post. We had the last of the carrots from my dad's garden - those were fantastic,

The other day I was on Twitter and someone was talking about how her daughter was eating broccoli and she was extremely pleased. The hashtag was #babyledsolids. And I thought, WTF? Baby-led solids? How does the baby lead with the solids? Do you make the baby mix up its own cereal? Do you carry the baby around the kitchen while it points out the ingredients for pheasant under glass? The baby doesn't lead! WE lead! Isn't our function as far as babies and solids to sort of lead the babies up to the kinds of solid foods that won't, you know, cause them to die? Babies aren't that bright, folks. A baby will try to eat a TV remote. They don't know that they can't eat celery and pretzels and marbles or hot dogs that we haven't cut in half because our mothers have informed us forty thousand goddamned times that a hot dog is the exact size of a baby's windpipe - it's up to US to provide the leadership in that regard.  And I stormed around muttering about rid

I'm cranky. No-good-reason, hair-trigger, don't-fuck-with-me cranky. Is it just me, or are some times just more difficult to fix in the mind than others? Eve has singing lessons at 6:30 on Wednesday evenings, but for some reason I always think it's six. I have dinner ready and remind her to brush her teeth, and we're ready to leave, and then I realize it's not until six-thirty, and we live about four seconds away from her teacher, so we're way too early. Except tonight the teacher wanted to do it at six, and all day I've been confused because I'm actually right, but then I'm not usually right, so am I really right? Then Eve came home with a sore throat and a fever and it didn't matter anyway, so FUCK. Also, fuck the fucking people with their insisting on being served a fucking meal every fucking night. I'm sick of cooking the same four things over and over, and when I try something different why on earth is it a meatloaf with oats and milk

These are the elements for my appetizer for our couples dinner party tonight. And yes, I do realize all of my posts have been exceptionally frivolous and self-absorbed lately, and yes I realize there are things going on in the world that could be addressed. But right now I need to go shower and get dressed and it's NaBloPoMo,  and I made a donation to the Red Cross, so cut me some frickin' slack, okay? As many of you know, I'm a little off my game at the moment, and I may have been a little overly adventurous with my attempt at the chicken recipe. I wanted to try to make something that would use a sauce that resembled the spicy hot chocolate I had in Montreal at juliette et chocolat . I found a chocolate curry recipe, with cut-up chunks of chicken, but I wanted something a little more elegant, so I altered the sauce recipe slightly, then found a recipe for cocoa-chili rubbed chicken breasts , which I plan to slice up and drizzle the chocolate-curry sauce on. The chicken b

I always know intellectually that intense experiences are followed by inevitable let-down, and yet I'm always unprepared for the reality. I loved being in New York and I was also happy that it was at the end of our crazy busy travelling/houseguests/nonstop plans stretch and once I got home the rest of August was a wide-open expanse of Summer Fun. So naturally I've been a mopey whiny mess all week. Every morning I would spread out my suitcase and the laundry baskets on the bed and fold a few things and lay out a few things, and then leave it all there until Matt wanted to go to bed, whereupon he would pile it all on the floor at the foot of the bed again, and the next morning I would start all over again. I bought groceries I've mostly been too tired and headachey to cook. I've given up on trying to pull back on my antidepressant until September. The days I don't take it are so unutterably wretched I can hardly stand it, and it's not fair to the kids. I'l

Yes. I have named this post George because this post has proven otherwise unnameable. I considered 'Spinning my Wheels' or "Blurry and lacking in focus" and "little nuggets of pure crazy" and nothing worked. I will call it George. So apparently I should put a honking big slash between the Biblio and the Mama because (and I really should have known this), I can only do ONE THING at a time. I can blog regularly, or I can do book reviews. So not surprising. Whenever people talk about working out at lunch hour or stopping at the gym on the way home from work I try not to stare at them with my mouth gaping unattractively, but I'm always thinking "huh. So not everyone has Exercise Day, where they exercise first thing in the morning and then spend the rest of the day recovering from said exercise?" I've been on this baking-for-the-lunch-boxes kick because it's the beginning of the year and I'm still optimistic and energetic (well a

We have a dinner party with four other couples every couple of months, where everybody makes something fancy-ish, and we rotate who does the soup, salad, appetizers, main course and dessert. It's been a big success; I really enjoy the fact that everyone only does one course -- usually I wouldn't spend all day making a salad, but when I actually have the chance to it's quite satisfying. Over the past year we've had Julia Child's boeuf bourguignon, veal osso bucco, spit-roasted lamb and satsivi (a Georgian dish consisting of chicken bathed in walnut sauce); pear parsnip soup, smoked salmon chowder and lobster bisque; butternut squash ravioli, cauliflower fritters, seared duck and scallops on pesto. And that's just what I can remember. People have cured their own pork belly, aged their own steak and beheaded chickens in the back yard (I might be exaggerating on that last one). For this party I was making grilled strawberry and fig salad . I'd actually ne

For those of you who enjoyed my hapless attempt to recreate citrus almonds , here's another one.  1) go to Allium in Ottawa with three friends (great restaurant, stupid name -- whose chef was actually trained by my husband's cousin's French-chef husband -- true story -- well obviously, why on earth would I make something like that up? I met him at my brother-in-law's wedding. Where there was a vegetarian buffet. He was fairly gracious in the absence of foie gras). Fail to order the Carrot and Brie soup on the grounds that you have never really loved carrot soup, which usually tastes like watery cooked carrots, while I prefer them raw. Taste the Carrot and Brie Soup of a friend and then wait for her to go to the washroom so you can eat most of it and refill her bowl with wine and hope she won't notice.  2) go home and mount a pitched battle with said friend to see who can re-create the recipe best. Swear at her when her first attempt is much better than yours,

So my friend Collette is notoriously cheap -- really, she likes being called cheap, if we try to tone it down to 'frugal' or 'sensible with money' she gets offended. At one Christmas craft show we went to, they had citrus almonds for sale, which we sampled. They were delicious, but she refused to pay five dollars for a tiny little bag of them (even though it was fetchingly wrapped in sparkly gold snowflake-printed cellophane and tied with an adorable ribbon). I, of course, bought the five-dollar bag of almonds, brought it home and stuck it in the cupboard waiting for an occasion auspicious enough to warrant hideously expensive almonds, until they went stale and I had to throw them out. I'm not sure what the word for me is, but it's even less complimentary than 'cheap'. Can you believe that there is no recipe for citrus almonds online? Well, okay, I'm by far no computer whiz, but I've googled dozens, nay, hundreds of recipes from 'chocolate

I guess the list of things that drive me to the depths of despair is not that short. Watching the news. Bathing suit shopping. Trying to explain to my husband why my hair sucks. Never being able to remember which guy was prime minister when. Trying to help my son with his math homework. But cleaning out my cupboards? That's a whole new definition of despair. It's like dragging out hundreds of brightly labelled examples of how disorganized, slovenly, careless and unwholesome I am. I'm a freaking stay-at-home Mom -- shouldn't my cupboards be meticulously-planned, graphed-out marvels of neatness and order? Cans of tomato paste and bags of rice should leap into my waiting hands, ready for inclusion in my nightly menu meal. How the hell do I end up with six cans of black beans and no tomato soup on a regular basis? How many times can I get hit on the head with the same goddamned package of whole wheat pasta? And I swear to God, you know that disease where people are born and

We had our third potluck dinner party with four other couples last night. It was our turn to host, which is fine, because when you host you don't do the main course. This means you don't always get to cook with your own stuff in your own kitchen, but it also means (at least in my case) that you don't have to bust your ass cleaning and hiding piles of crap one floor up or down AND cook a main course at the same time. I think it was my friend Janet's idea, and it was a really good one. The idea is to cook something fairly sophisticated that you've never cooked before, and we all take turns doing each course. It's a fun cooking experience, and a great night with friends, and since it's November and the last few weeks have been travel-intensive for Matt and single-parenting intensive for me I was really really looking forward to it. Not to mention this is the cleanest and clearest my counters have been in months, if not years. In all the pictures of people in