The finer things

I just took a break from doing homework to have an amazing dinner - almost all of which came from vendors at my local farmer's market.

Mixed greens (purchased earlier this week from a local butcher shop/small grocer) with some red bell pepper, mushrooms, cherry tomatoes, dilled goat cheese and grilled salmon, all topped with fresh strawberries and a splash of raspberry balsamic vinegar (the only thing that came from a supermarket). To drink, organic 1% milk from an Ontario dairy.

I am blessed to have the wherewithal to feed myself this well.

So blessed.

Calefaction

There is something about baking that does good things for me.

I am not a good enough baker that I can bake without following a recipe. I enjoy the process of looking through my books, or searching for a recipe online. I choose cookies, or muffins or a cake, based mostly on how good the picture looks, and what I already have in my pantry. I will substitute if I don't like or have one of the ingredients. You will never find a raisin, current or any candied fruit in anything I bake, and I am against maraschino cherries on principle. Next I assemble all the ingredients and tools that I will need. It took me years to remember to turn on the oven at this point - baking has finally taught me to think ahead a bit. I enjoy the measuring, the stirring, the kneading. I love the chemistry that makes three separate things (butter, sugar and flour) in to one (cookies). The part I enjoy the least is the cleaning up, but my husband has taught me to do that as I go, which really does make the whole process much simpler. Finally, I love the anticipation of the final product. The smell as it bakes, getting to poke it with a stick to find out if it's done, trusting that even if it looks a little funky, it will taste good anyway.

I like food.

This really shouldn't come as a surprise, or as news.

I usually prefer healthy food: fresh veggies, lean meats, whole grain breads. I take pleasure in the taste and texture, and I love to spend a day in the kitchen making soups and breads and pies.

I prefer that food be food. Organic and local, if possible. Not from a box, or having ingredients that I have to sound out by syllable. No sugar in things that don't need sugar, and if it does have sugar added, I like real sugar, not HFCS or something similar.

But...

There are some "foods" that call to me, that fall completely outside of what I consider to be food (hence the quotation marks back there). Kraft Dinner, Cool Ranch Doritos and street meat are the top three offenders. You're all likely familiar with the first two, but the latter needs some explanation.

In Toronto (and I expect, in other large cities as well, but Toronto is where my experience lies) there are vendors who dot the downtown street throughout the Spring, Summer and Autumn. They sell hot dogs, freshly barbequed, right there in front of you. They have all beef, all chicken, sausages and veggie dogs. They crisp the buns on the grill. They offer a wide range of condiments from ketchup to sauerkraut. The scent of grilling meat wafts up the street, and it was a weekly treat to get a hot dog for all of $2. Who knows what's actually in the hot dogs, or how often they change the mayonnaise? When was the last time that guy behind the grill washed his hands? It's a gamble, a crapshoot, totally against the way I try to eat.

And yet...

Yesterday, while walking back to my desk from a meeting, I smelled something familiar. I looked around, and there on the side of the road, was a street meat cart. It's been over a year since I stopped working in Toronto, and therefore have had the chance to partake. Yesterday I had my usual lunch: healthy sammich, homemade soup, veggies, organic yoghurt, an apple. Today, I left out the sammich while packing my lunch. I have my $4 (just in case it costs more in Waterloo than in Toronto). I am about to go for a walk across the road. Wish me luck with the mayonnaise.

Personal Vending Machine

One of the perqs at work is that we have subsidized vending machines (yes, this is actually listed as a perq in our benifits rundown). This means that instead of paying $1.10 for a bag of chips or a chocolate bar that takes me 1.5 seconds to inhale, we only have to pay fifty cents. Which is great...except that I have been spending up to $1.50 a day on junk, resulting in me feeling bad about myself (food issues, yay!), and also throwing away my spending money.

My friend suggested I set up a personal vending machine instead. I have stocked my desk with some small cans of tuna, 100 calorie granola bars and chippy things, weight watchers cakes, and some cheese and crackers thingers. I also brought in a coffee can, and put a photo of the Slayer Scythe on it. Every time I want a snack, I pay myself the fifty cents, and hopefully by next year I will have collected enough to buy the replica to hang on my wall.

Lunch!

Today's lunch is a variation of my perennial favourite.

Sammich:
Oatmeal bread from a local bakery, with cheese and ham and some green tomato pickle and a bit of mayo

Salad:
Two kinds of lettuce, green pepper, snap peas (that I picked myself), tomato, a bit of herbed goat cheese and Apple Mustard Delight dressing, all from a local farm.

I really, really love summer time.

Weekend Update

My weekend started (sort-of) 12:15 am Friday morning, when the husband and I went to see The Dark Knight. Woo! Definitely worth the lack of sleep! I napped before and after the movie, and then went into work on Friday, where I mainlined coffee all day. The movie was dark and wonderful and creepy and exciting, and I'm so glad I went.

Saturday we went into the Big City to visit friends and eat sushi (yum!) then we got together back at home with friends to watch UFC. How I went from someone who hated sushi and wresting, to someone who will drive 1.5 hours to eat sushi and will spend 4 hours watching men pummel each other until they bleed/pass out is beyond me.

The very most exciting part of the weekend was yesterday when I spent the afternoon making cheese with my friend semicrunchymom.

We started with milk (and a couple of other things from the cheesemaking kit she bought):



And ended up with mozzarella:



Then we started out with milk again (see previous picture; it looked exactly the same), and ended up with ricotta:



It was very exciting to see the change from milk to curds and whey. It was one of those things that happens in moment, much like the moment when whipping cream turns into butter and butter milk. It was a lovely afternoon, and a fantastic reminder that cooking is really just math and chemistry.

Father's Day Lunch

For a number of different reasons, I have been spending more time experimenting with food the past few months. Yesterday, I decided to take ideas from Angry Chicken, my Weight Watchers meeting and Noirbettie and throw them together in one meal. I was so excited by it that it wasn't until half way through lunch that I remembered to take a picture for the Today's Homemaker Flickr pool!

I roasted beets and russet potatoes in some olive oil with some garlic (this is the part from Angry Chicken). While that was going, I bbq'd some bacon wrapped steaks, and made a viniagrette out of 1/8 of a cup each of maple syrup (the real stuff), apple cider vinegar and olive oil, about 5 strawberries and a couple of slices of red onion (blended using a hand blender so that it was all frothy and pink). I tossed the viniagrette and roasted potatos and beets with more sliced strawberries, spinach and boston lettuce, then sliced the steaks and put them on top of the salad, and sprinked the whole thing with some sunflower seeds.

The bun on the side of my bowl came from the same local farm the lettuce, spinach and straberries came from, and the butter is the stuff I made using Noirbettie's post about making butter.

Yum!

Lunch love

Today for lunch I have:
- tomato soup
- carrots
- yoghurt (raspberry-cranberry)
- a piece of Babybel light cheese
- a royal gala apple
- a red pepper and chipotle wrap that has light mayo, light marble cheese, Branston Pickle, romaine lettuce and low fat smoked ham in it

Yum! I am so happy it's lunch time.

Yum!

I am having organic goat yoghurt with organic rasperry jam in it. It's so much better than regular fruity yooghurt!

Whee!

Yeah, that's about all I've got. Anything else I have to say would be all complain-y, so I'm just going to stop there.

Yum!

A weekend in the country

Ok, so, really only a morning in the country, but I couldn't pass up the chance to hum a little Sondheim.

Anyway!

Tomorrow morning I am accompanying my mother, some of her guild members and some of the London Handweavers and Spinners guild to a goat farm! Wellington Fibres is about a 30 minute drive from home. They raise angora sheep, which produce mohair. Mmmm...mohair. I'm taking a camera with me. And some cash. But the debit card stays at home.

While I am out playing with goats, Fred will be at home baking this cake. We're going to a pot-luck Hallowe'en dinner party tomorrow night, and he decided while flipping through my Martha Stewart catalogue, that this would be our contribution, and that he would be making it.

I should be home from the goat farm by about two, just in case.

The Return of Sammich

Aka - I Have an Awesome Boyfriend.

Fred and I are on opposite work shifts. I have a nine to five office job, and he works as a shipper from 3:30 to midnight so we rarely see each other during the week. Fred also suffers from insomnia, which is very crappy.

Right now he's in the grips of an insomnia attack, so he was still awake when I got up at 5:15 this morning to go to work. While I took a shower and got dressed, he cooked me eggs for breakfast (he hates eggs, even the smell of them, so this is a pretty big deal), made me coffee, made me another one of those wonderful sammiches with the cheese and ham and green tomato pickle, and took out the garbage. It made my morning so much nicer to have that stuff done for me, and to have a chance to spend a half an hour with him today.

He's gone to bed now, and I hope that he's sleeping. My wonderful man.

Sammich

I am eating a sammich. It's on flax seed bread. It's made up of butter, mayo, romaine lettuce, marble cheese, green tomato pickle (like home made Branston Pickle for anyone that knows it) and Vermont-style ham (smoked with maple syrup).

It is sooooo yummy.

I very much wish that I had more than one to eat today.