LJ Birthday Block - Feb 16

I had a ridiculously, stupidly difficult time with these two blocks for my birthday block group. I feel quite terrible for the recipient because they're over a month late, and I truly hate to do that to people when they're relying on me to live up to a promise.

The block request was for this block (or the paper-pieced one below) with snowflake or penguin fabric, but not Christmas fabrics. I hadn't thought they'd be so difficult to find, but no one had any penguin fabric, except the one I've got here, which is a Christmas print, and the only snowflake fabrics I was able to find were in colours that I didn't like or couldn't match to anything or else were designed to be Christmas-y. So I had planned to exchange some fabric with someone online, but the exchange fell through.

In the end, I had to buy the Christmas penguins and fussy-cut the heck out of the fabric. Out of the original quarter metre that I bought, I think there is only about a usable tenth to eighth left. There were no-Christmas-free sections large enough to use them in the snowball portion of these blocks, so I had to go back to the fabric store and found this not-quite-snowflake (they look like hand-drawn asterisks) print, which doesn't quite match the background of the penguin prints, but which is pretty close. I was fortunate to have enough scraps of the dark blue snowflake print to just squeak by this one block.

Because I didn't have very much of the dark blue, I had to find some alternative blues for my second block for this recipient. I kept the asterisk fabric and picked up a couple (bright!) blues in a medium and dark tone to make this block, which was a bit of a paper-piecing nightmare.

This is a really easy block, to be honest, but when I measured the test square inch on the pattern to make sure the block would come out the right size... it was about 1.3 in square. Sigh.

I spent a stupidly long time figuring out how to shrink the block down to size. (It wasn't a simple shrink job where I went from, say, 7" across to 6.5" because the units weren't squared, but angled on one end and I couldn't figure out what size, exactly, they were meant to be.) Once I finally figured it out, the block whipped up quite easily. I really like the look of this block - I think it's quite striking, even though it's fairly plain.

I really hope the recipient likes these blocks, once they finally arrive. I feel so awful leaving her to wait all this time, so I think I'd feel worse if she only felt sort of meh about them once they got there.

Red Pepper and Chickpea Soup with Potato Latkes

These are another couple recipes from Cat Cora's Cooking from the Hip. It seems like I'm on a bit of a roll with her recipes right now, but I'm running into the point where most of what I still want to make involves fish, so I'll stop making so much of it so quickly - I can never quite talk myself into fish more often than once every week or two. a lot of the other things that I'm interested in are things I don't think I'd go to the trouble of making - sushi, for example - or things I'd like to try but can't get my hands on the ingredients easily or cheaply enough.

In any case, this soup didn't photograph well because my red pepper puree didn't really puree that well. It came out a bit chunky rather than smooth, but I'd used a mini-food chopper rather than a blender or food processor. The flavour was pretty amazing though. It's a very simple soup - onions, garlic, chickpeas, pureed red peppers, vegetable stock, and rosemary - but it tasted more complicated than that. I was really impressed though; I'd definitely make it again.

According to the recipe notes, this soup is called Rivithia in Greece, where it's eaten during the fast before Easter when meat isn't allowed. Most of the recipes I looked at online were basically just chickpea soup - chickpeas and rosemary and a few seasonings - but I think the red peppers really added something special to the soup.

The potato latkes were my first successful attempt at making a vegetable pancake. And they tasted pretty fantastic, if I say so myself. They kind of reminded me of colcannon a bit, though with onion rather than cabbage or kale. The recipe asked for sweet potatoes rather than plain potatoes, but you can only really buy sweet potatoes here (at major grocery chains) around the holidays, so I went the lazy route and bought a bag of pre-shredded potatoes.

All around a pretty good, if somewhat light, vegetarian meal. Though maybe light isn't really the word for it, since the chickpeas (for me) are hearty enough to make up for any lack of meat.

Feta Turkey Burger with Tzatziki

This is kind of sort of not quite another recipe from Cat Cora's Cooking from the Hip. I was going to make a recipe for spicy fish, but I forgot to take fish out of the freezer before work and there was nothing really appealing looking at the store on my way home. So I bought ground turkey instead and decided to make a Greek inspired burger.

There is a recipe in the cookbook for Lamb burgers with black olives, so I used that recipe, but substituted turkey for the lamb and skipped the olive altogether - I've never developed a taste for olives. Too salty. I still had leftover tzatziki from the night before, so I used that in place of her garlic sauce, which is just yogurt with garlic.

This was quite tasty. I think I should have added more onion to the burgers and probably more oregano, but they had a really nice flavour, especially the bits of feta scattered throughout, and of course it was brilliant with the tzatziki. My pitas were a bit dry, so it broke when I tried to fold it closed. Messy eating, but it tasted too good for me to care.

Cat Cora's Pork Skewers with Tzatziki

I don't very much like this photo, but nevertheless. I recently bought a bargain bin copy of Cat Cora's cookbook Cooking from the Hip. The book is broken up into four sections - fast, easy, fun, and phenomenal - which each have recipes for appetizers, main courses, side dishes, and desserts. I'm not quite sure how she decided which recipes went into which section, since I'm pretty sure (without actually looking) this recipe came from the fast section, but while it cooked quickly, I did most of the prep a day in advance and I wouldn't have called that bit of it fast.

The name Cora gave this recipe isn't a very evocative one: pork skewers with (avocado) tzatziki. The pork is marinated in citrus, garlic, chili powder, and red pepper flakes over-night. It was much less spicy than I'd hoped, but it had occasional bursts of heat alongside the much stronger lemony flavour.

The tzatziki recipe included avocado, but I'm not really a big fan of avocado, so I used bits of the avocado tzatziki recipe blended with a second tzatziki recipe from the book, one for Feta-Mint Tzatziki (though I skipped the mint). The tzatziki, which I also made a day ahead to let the flavours blend, was exquisite. I usually buy a pre-made one, but it was better tasting homemade, so I'm glad I went to the trouble. I could have eaten every drop in that glass and then some. I didn't. but I could have. (The garlic is lingering, though. In a big way.)

I made a big mess eating this, since my pita tore when I was opening it and then just kept tearing further as I ate, but drippiness aside, there's really nothing I can complain about. It didn't photograph well, but since I really care more about eating the food than I do about taking pretty pictures, that's pretty irrelevant.

Dr Oetker Pancake Shakers

I've been craving pancakes the last couple days. I don't know that I've ever had a craving for pancakes before, but there it was. I didn't really know what to do about it because I am pancake-making impaired. I've never successfully made pancakes before. They always end up either burned, raw inside, or really thin and hard instead of fluffy and light. It doesn't matter if I try making them from scratch or if I use a box mix.

Dr Oetker recently brought out these shakers, which I think are a pretty ridiculous idea, actually. There are quite a few of them - pancakes, cupcakes, and muffin mixes. Basically you add water to the container, shake it up, then bake or cook it. It reminds me of this pudding shaker my mom had when I was a kid that you could add milk and pudding powder to, shake up and then pour out into dishes to set. (And also, therefore, reminds me of shaking chocolate pudding once and losing the lid mid-shake so that chocolate pudding flew in a graceful arc across the kitchen. Splat.)

I find these a bit ridiculous because of the method, I suppose. It's no different from a box mix really, but I guess I get annoyed by this sort of disposable single use product. I know it's meant to be convenient; they can sell it on the idea of less clean-up and not having a box of pancake mix sitting around in the cupboard for months on end. But it is wasteful. It can be recycled, if you live somewhere forward thinking enough to have plastic-recycling, but I don't. (Yet. It's coming, but not till closer to summer. I still can't believe a city this size doesn't recycle plastic. Honestly.)

In any case, despite my misgivings about the packaging and also the price (six pancakes for about $4 - I should have just taken myself out for breakfast somewhere) I bought one today. I had a dentist appointment and I'm a bit sensitive about chewing right now so I wanted something light and easy to eat and pancakes do fit the bill. (And fill my craving, I hope.)

I didn't quite manage to cook them properly, they were a bit singed (I photographed the best looking ones, on their best side), but they were cooked through AND (relatively) fluffy. I've had better pancakes, but on the whole, not bad. I won't likely by them again, but it'll probably be months and months before I have a pancake craving again anyway.

Pink Spaghetti in Alfredo with Cornflake Chicken Fingers

I thought I should have a fun end to my ridiculous colour-coded food odyssey, so I decided to do something a tiny bit crazy. Pink spaghetti.

I didn't buy it like this, no. I made it myself; it's regular white (high fibre) spaghetti but I stained it with beet juice. What a mess. There were pink dots of beet juice all over the stove and my hands were bright red.

I boiled up a smallish beet, then skinned it and twisted it up in some cheesecloth so that I could squeeze the juice out without dirtying my hands. Alas, I didn't cook it long enough and so to get the juice, I hand to kind of mash it with my hands. It was stupidly hot, so I kept shaking my hands to get the juice off and then it'd spray all across the stove instead of into the pot. And then I had to kind of toss the pasta, a lot, to get it all stained, but even though it was cold on top (it sat while I was trying to figure out how to squeeze out the juice), it was quite hot at the bottom of the pot and so it was this double-whammy of hand-burning, skin-staining frustration. (You might ask why I didn't use something other than my hands to toss it, but that'd be because the spaghetti hook was already in the sink to be washed, along with nearly everything else that'd be touched by the beet juice - I was worried about staining things.)

Actually, the whole thing was an exercise in frustration. I had planned to photograph it, cold, in a clear glass cup with a little sauce at the bottom and a nice spiralled nest of pasta on top. But what I thought was cold pasta (perhaps my singed fingers weren't reading temperature too accurately at that point) was still warm enough to fog up the glass, so I gave up on that.

I don't particularly like the look of this against this green cup - I should have used the blue set instead because it might have looked a little less... gross. Just not a good colour combination.

Anyway, in the midst of all the frustration with the spaghetti, I over-cooked my chicken fingers, so they were a bit dry. Surprisingly tasty for something coated in cornflakes, though a touch bothersome in their sweetness.

Those I made by dredging strips of chicken breast in a mixture of flour, salt and pepper, and garlic powder, then dipping in a mixture of melted butter and mustard, then coating with the slightly crushed cornflakes. I really liked the taste of the mustard beneath the sweet cornflakes, but I think if I were to do this again, I'd skip the cornflakes and use panko instead. They baked up nice and crispy though, which was good since I was a little concerned they'd come out soggy rather than crispy.

Like I said at Flickr, if I were still an 8 year old girl, this would probably be the coolest lunch ever. I served my spaghetti in Alfredo, but your average kid who doesn't like the taste of anything could eat it as easily with a bit of butter and some mild cheese melted on. (And it could be done much more easily with already red pasta or by using canned beets, which would be soft enough to cause less problems. I'm not sure if red pasta has the flavours of the vegetables used to dye it, though, and this I can assure you does not. Tastes just like white pasta.)

Orange Day Curried Carrot Soup

This was luscious and velvety and deliciously good. I've never made or eaten carrot soup before, and was a bit nervous about trying it, but it was quite nice. I found the carrot flavour to be very intense, with a nice hint of curry. It was less difficult to make than I somehow imagined it, though of course I could have done without washing so many dishes (especially the blender).

I don't think a soup like this is designed to be a main course and I was pretty much done with it about half way through the bowl (even though I liked it and would make it again). I didn't like the sound of any of the orange day meat dishes that were included in the colour cookbook, though, so soup it was.

I made a carrot-heavy coleslaw to eat with the soup, which made this a pretty carrot-heavy meal. I like carrots as much as the next guy, but it really was a bit much. I think the soup would be better as a much smaller course in a dinner, though I don't really know what I'd serve it with. (And also I don't have any smaller bowls, hence the large serving anyway - about 1.5 cups I'd guess, though perhaps a little less.)

In any case, that's six days of colour-coded hit-and-miss dinners. White, red, green, purple, yellow and now orange. Although I've enjoyed some of the recipes from the cookbook, Colorfully Slim, in general I've found them to be on the slightly bland side of boring and even taken as individual dishes I'm not really sure that I'd particularly want to make them to serve as parts of properly colour-mixed meals. And so, I think this cookbook might be consigned to the bin. (Or to the Things-to-be-donated pile anyway.)

Yellowish Chicken with Yellow Peppers

Yep, it was yellow day today. Actually, it was orange day, but I didn't feel like making soup, so I bought some chicken breasts and a lemon for yellow day instead. I'll be glad when orange day is done because eating like this, even eating like this sporadically as I have been, is weird.

The thing is that food goes together or doesn't regardless of colour. So just because lemon and mustard are both yellow, doesn't mean they're flavours I want to enjoy at the same time. All three parts of this were tasty, but they didn't belong together.

This day was tough in part because there aren't a lot yellow vegetables and in part because most of them aren't available to me right now. We nearly never get yellow squash in grocery stores around here and even more rarely do we get pattypan squash, so neither of those were an option. And then... what was left? Yellow pepper. I don't know what else. Corn, which I wasn't in the mood for as I'd made creamed corn on Sunday. If I'd had saffron, I could have turned my cauliflower yellow...

In any case, from the left: the cauliflower was marinated for a bit in the juice of a lemon, then steamed quickly in the lemon juice and some water. I added a bit of celery salt and pepper and it was very, very tasty.

But not with the chicken, which was covered with a mixture of Dijon mustard, finely diced shallots, thyme and some salt and pepper. This was very tasty. I added a drop of stupidly hot hot sauce to the mustard so it was pleasantly hot and the mustard was lovely and it was all around very good. Just not with the cauliflower.

The yellow peppers were very nice - roasted until they were soft and sweet and flavourful. They were fine with the lemon cauliflower (delicious, even) and fine with the chicken, alas they could not unify the two.

Review: The Supernaturalist by Eoin Colfer

When I start reading a series I usually feel compelled to finish it, even if I don't like it all that much. Might get better, right? That was the case with Eoin Colfer's Artemis Fowl series. I didn't really like it, but kept on picking up, reading, and being disappointed by the books. (I think I've maybe managed to break the cycle – there are at least two available now that I haven't read.) In any case, you'd think not liking that series would put me off buying more of Colfer's books. You'd be wrong. Thing is, I found The Supernaturalist in a bargain bin at a grocery store for five dollars and I don't really think Artemis Fowl is worth five dollars, but some other Colfer book might be. Right?

Opening paragraph:

SATELLITE CITY: THE CITY OF THE FUTURE, proclaimed the billboards. A metropolis completely controlled by the Myishi 9 Satellite hovering overhead like a floating man-of-war. An entire city custom constructed for the third millennium. Everything the body wanted, and nothing the soul needed. Three hundred square miles of gray steel and automobiles.

The Supernaturalist tells the story of four kids on the fringes of society who are battling a supernatural phenomenon they refer to as parasites. The parasites, invisible to most people, are blue spectral creatures that suck energy out of injured and dying humans. The group is in danger always of being captured at work by the paralegals and lawyers of the corporations that run Satellite City or being injured and sucked dry by the creatures, until one day they're forced to confront a bigger problem: they might just have it all wrong.

On the whole, I enjoyed the book. It was plagued by the same problems that put me off Artemis Fowl - the snotty author's tone that resembles nothing so much as a snarky teenager who think he's vastly more clever, worldly, and funny than he really is, the often transparent plot-lines, the shallowly constructed characters (especially the villains) – but somehow it was easier to take in this story. Maybe it's just that the main character, Cosmo Hill, is a lot easier to swallow than Artemis. Less irritating, less unlikely, less of a Gary Stu*.

I'll probably never read this book again, but I don't mind having spent the time reading it. It could have been worse, and I'm glad it wasn't. (I really need to step away from the Colfer books though. Just Say No and all that.)


*In fanfiction terms, a Gary Stu or Mary Sue is a character who is too perfect to be anything but a stand-in for who the author wishes he or she could be.


Eoin Colfer has written several books, which include 6 in the Artemis Fowl series and several one-shots. You can read more about him and his books at his website.


Colfer, Eoin. The Supernaturalist. New York: Hyperion, 2004.
Finished: 08 March 2009
Rating: 3 of 5 robotix head plates
This was my 1st book in March and my 9th in 2009.



*Psst... my ratings are numbered 1-5, meaning something like 1=sucky, 2=meh, 3=okay, 4=good, 5=great.

2008/09 Block of the Month - The first six

This feels like it will end up as the world's yellowest quilt.

I've talked in passing before about this block of the month group which I'm following on Livejournal and how I'd decided to use up ugly stash fabric on it. (The ugly fabric being the burgundy and the orange which are very greyed colours, not pure colours at all.) It's funny that I'm lightening up on my dislike the more blocks I make. But it's still almost scarily intense in the colours. I'm not really sure what it'll take to mute the brightness, but I've got a few ideas for sashing that I think (hope) will work.

In any case, these are the first six blocks. I noticed that in the past I've only posted individual photos of the first three blocks, so I'm going to add the more recent three in this entry and hopefully will keep up on a monthly basis in the future.

This is the January block. I wish I knew what it was called, but apparently not enough to go looking for a name. In any case, I think this would be a pretty neat block to do as a repeating pattern, without sashing.

February's block was this very simple star. It was nice to have one in February that didn't take too much thought or energy to make. Whips up easy as anything. This block is basically the one that I've used in my Sunlight/Shadows quilt so I've done dozens of it. I could sleepwalk through it by now. It's good to do something so simple in such a dreadful month as February.

And finally, March's Crown of Thorns. An apt name for such a difficult block, too. This was my second attempt at making the block. The first time, everything came out just a touch too small; the second, a touch too big. I prefer too big to too small, though, since I won't be too upset if I nip off the points when I sew the block into the sashing. Can't say I'd like to give that block another try for a good long while.

Aubergine and Kidney Bean Moussaka

This is - finally - another part of the colour-coded food odyssey. I've had the eggplant in the fridge for several days but kept forgetting how early I'd have to start cooking it if I intended to eat any time before I should be going to bed. (Half an hour to salt the eggplant, 30 minutes for making the sauce, baking for 30-45 minutes...)

Purple is a tough colour, food-wise. There aren't really a lot of truly purple foods and most of the suggestions the book makes for getting in more purple weren't really things I'd be all that willing to try. Chicken with Plum Sauce. Cauliflower Beet Casserole. Ugh.

I finally decided to try Moussaka. The Colorfully Slim cookbook has a Soybean Vegetarian Moussaka recipe, but I had another recipe I wanted to try instead. I've got this vegetarian cookbook from Australia which is filled with delicious things that I often want to try but don't because the recipes are so large and awkward to cut down. Their recipe was a fair bit more complicated than the one in Colorfully Slim but sounded like it'd be tastier, so that's what I did instead.

This came out pretty well, anyway, except that it was a bit dry. Even though I cut all the ingredients down by 6, I think I should have left more liquid for the sauce since it wound up much too thick once it had baked, almost like a paste. Still, I could see myself cooking this recipe again sometime in the future. Maybe for more than just one person, though, since that'd be an easier recipe conversion.

Butter Chicken on Basmati Rice

One of the things I most like to eat but hate most to make is butter chicken. I've got this really gorgeous recipe for it - or I think it's gorgeous anyway, but I've had as many different butter chickens as places I've eaten it at, so I suppose it wouldn't work for everyone - but it takes such a long time to make that I haven't done it in longer than I can remember. (Probably it was when I last lived with an old roommate, Faye. And she'd make the chicken while I made yellow rice and aloo gobi.) Typically I use something from a jar or a packet, though I've never found anything I like quite so much as this.

Actually, it's not so much that it takes a long time as that it seems to take a lot of effort, and I seem to be all about low effort cooking. Anyway, here is the recipe:

Butter Chicken Serves: 6

1 onion, peeled and chopped
2 tbsp chopped fresh ginger
1 fresh jalapeno chili, seeded and chopped
1 tbsp oil
2 tsp garam masala
1 can (6 oz) tomato paste
2 cups chicken broth
1/2 cup whipping cream
1 1/2 lb boned skinless chicken breasts, cut into chunks
1/2 tsp freshly ground black pepper
salt
1/4 cup butter or margarine
cilantro, chopped fine (optional garnish)
plain yogurt (optional garnish)

In a 5 to 6 quart pan, combine onion, ginger, chili and oil. Stir often over high heat until onion is slightly browned, 3 to 5 minutes. Stir in garam masala. Scrape mixture into a blender; add tomato paste and chicken broth. Whirl until very smooth.

Pour mixture back into pan, add cream, and bring to a gentle boil over high heat. Reduce heat and simmer, stirring often, until reduced to 3 cups, about 5 minutes. Pour sauce into a bowl. Rinse and dry pan.

Mix chicken with pepper and sprinkle lightly with salt. Set pan over high heat; add 1 tbsp butter and the chicken. Stir until chicken is no longer pink on the surface, 2 to 3 minutes. Add the sauce and simmer over medium heat, stirring often, until chicken is no longer pink on the inside (cut to test), 3 to 4 minutes. Cut remaining butter into chunks and stir until melted.


Probably I found this online some time ago, but I've had the file on my various computers for at least 4 or 5 years, so I'm not really sure where it came from originally. It's really terribly bad for you - so much cream and butter - but so so good.

Green Herb-encrusted Pork with Green Beans

This isn't really quite so true to the colour coded food idea, but I didn't really like any of the options from the book and so I decided to do my own thing following the general idea. So roasted herb-encrusted pork tenderloin with crunchy, spicy green beans and rice.

I've made this pork recipe several times, though I tend to use pork loin chops rather than tenderloin, but I'm glad I tried it this way instead of my usual. I found a method online for cooking tenderloin that I'm a little scared is unsafe but produced the best pork I think I've ever made.

The method, basically, is this: preheat the oven to 500F. Place a 1lb tenderloin (previously marinated or covered with a dry rub) in a roasting pan, then bake at 500F for five and a half minutes. Turn off the oven heat and let the pork sit for 1 hour in the hot oven without opening the door during that time. The meat, at the end of the cooking time looks pretty much like it does in my picture - a touch pink, very juicy, but with an internal temperature of ~160.

So I stuck a thermometer in it before I put it in the oven and it passed 180F within the first 15 minutes (after the initial 5.5 minutes) after which point I turned off the thermometer until just before I took it out of the oven, when it was 165F. When I cut into it, it was juicier than any cooked meat has a right to be and more tender. Honestly, the most flavourful pork I've ever made.

Clearly it hasn't made me sick, but I do still feel nervous about how cooked it was. The temperature was right, but it just seems... odd, I guess, to cook it that way. And I do have a terror of under-cooking meat. I don't want to make myself or anyone else sick. I don't know. Thoughts on the safety of this?

Redwater Rustic Grille - 22 February 2009

So we went to Redwater Rustic Grille for my sister's birthday on Sunday. And this is what we ate. I wish we'd had a better camera with us because the one we had with us does okay but not great. Some of the pictures came out quite grainy. And my sister (who shot three of these pictures) doesn't think to look at what is sitting around in the background or what angle would show things a little better or let everything fit.

This first photo was the appetizer that I ordered - Mini Prime Sirloin Burgers on Toasted Brioche with Quebec Oka and Grainy Mustard. I've ordered these before and they are just phenomenal. So so good.

My sister and brother-in-law each had one of these mini burgers and then also shared Pan Roasted Wild Shrimp in Chili Garlic Butter. I don't eat seafood, but I tried a piece of one of the shrimp even though I was sure I wouldn't like it. I didn't, really, but I just don't like the texture and the slight fishy flavour puts me off.

We didn't get a photo of all three entrées because my brother-in-law was more interested in eating than in photo taking. (Alas.) He ordered 8 oz Alberta Beef Tenderloin with Garlic Poblano Butter on Ponderosa Field Mushrooms with Marjoram and Organic Agria Buttermilk Mashed Potatoes. He found the mushrooms boring, but everything else was great.

My sister was in the mood for shrimp, apparently, because she ordered Wild Shrimp and Scallops with Chili Garlic Butter on Pan Roasted Fingerling Potatoes and Locally Grown Green Beans in Brown Butter. She was surprised (as was I, really - I tasted it on a bit of chicken) to find that the Chili Garlic Butter didn't really have any chili zing to it, though the flavour was really nice.

And I ordered Grain Fed Rotisserie Fired Chicken Breast with Garlic Poblano Butter on Pan Roasted Fingerling Potatoes and Locally Grown Green Beans in Brown Butter. My Garlic Poblano Butter also didn't have any real poblano zing to it, but again... tasted great.

This is what I ate. Or what I ate half of. That's a lot of chicken. The beans were exquisite, the potatoes perfectly cooked and the chicken just a tiny tiny bit dry. (Alas.) Otherwise, perfect.

All in all, a pretty great meal, anyway.

Red Chicken with Red Vegetables

I think my bland beige boring white dinner kind of killed the cooking mood last week because this is the first time I've cooked since. (I did go to a nice restaurant yesterday though, which if I remember to get the pictures from my sister, I'll write a blurb about tomorrow.)

So Day Two of the colour diet is red. A lot of their red recipes were for fish or veal. And if I'd made this last week like I'd intended, I didn't want fish twice in a row, so I decided on Chicken Paprika. This is really just a variation on the theme, since it doesn't have any sour cream and no attempt even at a sauce of any kind, even one less fattening than a sour cream based sauce. Basically, it's really just a chicken breast that's been dipped in a mixture of paprika, basil, oregano, salt and pepper, then baked with sautéed mushrooms and shallots on top. I sprinkled on a good dash of cayenne pepper as well, just for some extra flavour and some heat.

I didn't really like any of the vegetable suggestions from the book - imagine, there weren't any options using red peppers. How could there not be? In any case, I had two red peppers in the fridge for something I'd planned to make last week and didn't, so I roasted one for this dinner, strips of which are on the right of the chicken breast. To the left are baked tomato halves with a sprinkling of herbs and Parmesan cheese.

Like the white dinner, the vegetables were too good so I wound up eating mostly vegetables and only part of the chicken (which was also good but will make a better leftover than cold baked tomatoes would).

Tomorrow will be green day, I think. Though maybe orange. We'll see.

White Fish with White Vegetables

I think I mentioned about a week ago that I've got a lot of unusual cookbooks, including a diet one that suggests eating a different colour of food each day of the week. I definitely agree with the idea that a person should eat as wide a variety of fruits and vegetables as possible in order to get all the nutrients we need from food, but I think eating on a colour-wheel is at best silly.

But silly sort of amuses me, so my next seven meals will be coming from this cookbook, Colorfully Slim.

Day one is white vegetable day.

I'm not really following the plan, but if I were, I'd have eaten nothing but white grapefruit, mushrooms, onions, cabbage, cauliflower, endive, bean sprouts, alfalfa sprouts, pattypan squash and water chestnuts today. (Fruits and vegetable-wise anyway. All the recipes also include protein and so on.) I'm only dedicated enough to eat a white dinner.

So it's not very visible, but under those mushrooms is a fillet of red snapper. I really like red snapper, I think this is the second time I've cooked it and I just really like the flavour. There's something really nice about it. There was nothing particularly special about this preparation and honestly it was a little bit bland. The entire thing, really, is mushrooms, shallots, salt and pepper with some oil and a bit of liquid. It's not enough. I mean, the fish was good, but mushrooms, especially button mushrooms, need some dressing up. They're not exciting and this wasn't an exciting way to eat them.

The cauliflower is really steamed and then tossed with a handful of chopped up cilantro and parsley, which was the only colour the plate, except for the plate. (I did intentionally photograph this on a red plate so there'd be SOMETHING to show all that beige against. Can you imagine so much white/beige on a white plate?) I think if I were to make this again, and probably I will, I'd under-steam the cauliflower a bit and then sauté it in a little oil or butter to add some extra flavour before tossing it with the herbs. Still, it was really tasty even without that. I ate all the cauliflower straight away then picked at the rest of my food because I'd made so much cauliflower I pretty well just filled up on it.

Day two? Red.

Chicken and Sausage Vegetable Soup

So for the first time ever, I decided to make my own chicken stock. Yesterday we made a roast chicken, so I used the stock and some roasted vegetables and... stuff to make it. It's got a much more intense flavour, I found, than the stuff you buy from a grocery store. And it doesn't have that sort of.. faintly metallic taste you sometimes get with the store bought stuff. I don't know if I'll want to do this every time we make a chicken, but it does taste good enough to make it worth the while.

Anyway, I was having a crisis yesterday about what sort of soup to make and looking for recipes but all I kept finding were soups with lemon in them and I just don't like chicken soup with lemon. So Just Jenn suggested a soup she likes to make. I didn't do much more than absorb her suggestions so I really don't know how much like her soup it actually is, but it was really tasty.

Basically what I did was cook shallots, garlic, carrots and some celery until they'd more or less softened, then I threw in some turkey sausage (without the casing) and cooked that through, then I added the chicken stock, and a handful of tiny bowtie pastas. Once the pasta was cooked through, I added a handful of shredded chicken leftover from the night before and some chopped up cilantro and parsley.

In the picture there's a gob of sour cream, which I mixed into the soup and yum. Very tasty soup.

LJ Birthday Block - Feb 10

I signed up this year for another exchange on Livejournal where we make blocks according to requests and then send them out in time for each person's birthday. Because there aren't a lot of us this year, we're making two blocks per person.

For the first birthday, on February 10, the request was for 10 inch blocks made with purples. I feel a bit like I've done nothing but purples the last little while, so I was surprised to find I didn't have nearly as much purple fabric as I thought I did. I didn't use that much for these blocks... I must have put the scraps somewhere I can't find them now. I don't know.

Anyway, I found myself much more constrained by my fabrics than I thought I'd be and it was surprisingly difficult to find fabrics that would work together. I don't think this one is too bad, although I've got a tendency to want a much paler purple in the light areas than I have got.

This second block really didn't work out as well as I'd hoped. I thought the print with the leaves would stand out more than it does, but the background is too close, I guess, to the the lavender. I think the contrast was more obvious when I was looking at larger pieces of fabric but cut into smaller triangles you see far less of the leaves and far more of the background.

Live and learn, I guess.

Roast Chicken with All the Usual Suspects

Here is a sad truth: I've cooked absolutely nothing in six days. What I mean by nothing is that it's possible that I... well, no. I don't even think I microwaved anything (other than pizza pops once). No leftovers. I'm not really sure what I ate. My stomach has been feeling weird and off lately, so I keep eating rice cakes and bland things, but maybe I just needed to eat some actual food? I don't know.

Today, though, we made a proper family dinner -roast chicken, mashed potatoes, stuffing and vegetables. It's pretty much bog standard for us. Nothing different or interesting or strange. (I'd probably do something different or interesting or strange if I were doing it just for myself, but since it's for my sister and her husband also, I have a tendency only to do things I know they'll like.)

I've never done it before, but I'm currently making (or trying to make anyway) chicken stock out of the carcass and leftover vegetables and such. I hope it makes good stock because I think tomorrow I want to try out a chicken soup recipe suggested to me by Just Jenn. Mmm chicken soup...

Review: Divisadero by Michael Ondaatje

Quite a long time ago I had my first experience of reading a book by Michael Ondaatje. It was In the Skin of a Lion and for years I considered it my favourite book. If I don't call it my favourite now, that's probably only because I don't really consider any book my favourite book. (Who can make such a decision? There are so many books.) Whenever I hear there is a new Ondaatje book coming out, I get excited. He is not a fast writer. He's not one of those authors who births a new book every year. There have been at least five years (and as many, I think, as eight) between novels (though those years have been interspersed with books of poetry).

Divisadero, the most recent of Ondaatje's novels, tells the story of a family from California, the way they're torn apart and how they recreate their lives after having something so earth-shattering happen to them. It's mainly about family and the divisions between members of families and also how in spite of distance and such damaging events we can never let go of the people we've lost to them.

Although I've owned the book for several months, this is the first time I've read it. Sometimes, with authors I really love, I put off reading a book because I want so much for it to last forever and I want for it to be perfect and I can't bear the thought of starting it because that will mean finishing it and then I won't have anything to look forward to anymore. Sometimes that works against me, because I'm often disappointed that this book I couldn't bear to open wasn't as perfect as I wanted it to be.

Opening paragraph:

When I come to lie in your arms, you sometimes ask me in which historical moment do I wish to exist. And I will say Paris, the week Colette died….Paris, August 3rd, 1954. In a few days, at her state funeral, a thousand lilies will be placed by her grave, and I want to be there, walking that avenue of wet lime trees until I stand beneath the second-floor apartment that belonged to her in the Palais-Royal. The history of people like her fills my heart. She was a writer who remarked that her only virtue was self-doubt. (A day or two before she died, they say Colette was visited by Jean Genet, who stole nothing. Ah, the grace of the great thief…)

So was Divisadero worth the wait?

A long while ago I said that Ondaatje could write a phone book and make it sound beautiful. This is still true. If you read a dozen reviews of this book, I'm sure you'll see a dozen different ways of calling this book beautiful, and it is. It sounds beautiful and it looks (if you're a visual sort of reader) beautiful. Reading Divisadero is an experience I couldn't hope to explain. There's something very sensual about Ondaatje's words, regardless of the things he is saying or trying to say. I find it hard to describe what this book is about because when I try to think of it, I think of particular scenes, the moment with the fox or when Cooper realizes he's been betrayed or Rafael's horse ride during the eclipse, rather than any A to B to C progression of plot.

And in a way that is the disappointing thing about Ondaatje. He presents moments, more than complete stories. I'd like to know what happens when Claire takes Cooper to the farm. I'd like to know if Anna returns from France. I'd like to know what next. I don't think that's necessarily important to Ondaatje, what next, because I don't know that he really thinks life works like we're taught in grade school to look at books: plot, exposition, rising action, climax, falling action, and resolution. In a way, this book starts with the climax and it's all just life as usual after that, no perfect resolution of conflict wrapped with a bow of forgiveness and familial happiness ever after.

I always want to tell people to read Ondaatje, but I can't ever be sure how anyone will react to his style. It's beautiful, but maybe florid. I can't ever be sure how anyone will react to the stories because they sometimes feel unfinished. I sometimes suspect that Ondaatje appeals most to the angst in me, which in turn makes me suspect he appeals to the teenager in me, and angsty teenagers are the most horrible of people, melodramatic and excessive, which in turn makes me worry that other readers will find Ondaatje melodramatic and excessive. Don't get me wrong though, I wouldn't unread this book (or any of Ondaatje's books) if I could. The most disappointing thing about it, for me, is the ugly cover. (Hearts? Hearts?) (I know, I know, it's meant to reflect a playing card. And yet, ugly.)


Michael Ondaatje is the author of several novels I love including In the Skin of a Lion, The English Patient and Coming Through Slaughter. The English Patient is probably better known for its film version, however. He's also the author of a memoir and several books of poetry, including The Man with Seven Toes (which I wanted desperately to steal from the library at UBC, but didn't), The Cinnamon Peeler, and the entirely amusing Elimination Dance, which you can find online if you search the title with Ondaatje's name.


Ondaatje, Michael. Divisadero. Toronto: Vintage, 2008.
Finished: 11 February 2009
Rating: 5 of 5 painted blue tables
This was my 1st book in February and my 6th in 2009.



*Psst... my ratings are numbered 1-5, meaning something like 1=sucky, 2=meh, 3=okay, 4=good, 5=great.