Don't Let Your Babies Grow up to be Canada Geese

The picture has absolutely nothing to do with the post but I was looking through some photos and came across a series of these little guys.  No ugly ducklings here.  Too bad they grow up to become pesky Canada Geese.

This weekend I got to my favourite quilt shop - Homestead Stitches in North Bay.  And added to my stash.  I did actually go with a goal in mind.  I'm going to a baby shower for 2 babies in a couple of weeks so, since this is very last minute, am going to make 2 rag quilts with baby fabrics.  I bought a bunch of flannels on Ottawa Street in Hamilton a few weeks ago but when I pulled them out of the bag at home decided that they were too boyish.  One cousin is having a girl and the other doesn't know what she is having.  So I needed to pick up some pink flannels for the girl.  I think the other will get a mostly blue and green quilt with a splash of pink here and there.

So from baby birds to babies, I guess the picture does relate after all.

It's all business in the left hand lane

If only those words were true.  Why do people insist on driving in the left hand lane when there is other traffic moving faster than they are?  Does it make them any less of a person if people pass them?  Do they think they will never get back into the left hand lane and be stuck behind a truck with a trailer containing a refrigerator doing 70km in a 100km zone?  I am convinced, through no scientific evidence, that the people going slowly in the left hand lane are responsible for 75% of the traffic tie-ups.  As I said, absolutely no evidence of this fact, it just feels right.

Muffins

I had another baking extravaganza last weekend, making 2 kinds of cookies and 1 batch of muffins and squeezing them into the freezer.  The cookies were ones I have blogged about before from Regan Daley's In the Sweet Kitchen.  The muffins were from an undiscovered, meaning an issue I had put in my handy magazine holder never to be seen again, issue of Bon Appetit magazine.  They are simply called Oatmeal Muffins which would likely have made me pass by the recipe.  The only reason I paused is because oatmeal was on sale a couple of weeks ago, 2 for some good price, so is contributing to my crowded pantry issues.  I really have to send my husband grocery shopping with a list.  The most he comes back with that isn't on it are apple turnovers.  Anyway, these muffins are a little more than just oatmeal muffins.  They have nuts - I used hazelnuts because I didn't have the called for pecans.  And they have blueberries.  I had some nice wild ones, where else, in the freezer.  And the end result - a very nice muffin.  Highly recommend them.

My Top Ways to Save Money

I've been thinking a lot lately about how to increase my savings rate and am actually succeeding some of the time (when not using the savings to augment my fabric and yarn stash).  Today I picked up a copy of Money Sense magazine because it listed a bunch of ways to save $750 per month.  A lot were common sense, many were good but it got me thinking about some that weren't mentioned.  Here are 8 of my favourites.

1.  Bring your lunch to work - in the food zoos where I work, when I buy lunch, I spend around $8 on average.  Multiply that out and it costs almost $2,000 per year.  Bringing my lunch has some other advantages - it is handy so when I'm crazy busy, I don't have to take time out to find lunch; it is generally lower in calories than food zoo fare and it generally tastes better.  I try to mix things up by bringing sandwiches, salads or leftovers to heat up in the microwave.  And when I do eat out, it is a treat which always makes it better.
2.  Use the library.  I used to buy books a lot.  Depending on how much you read, the costs can really get out of control.  And then there is the storage issue after you have read the book if you want to keep it.  And what if you decide you don't like the book?  You have to keep reading because it cost $10 and only reading 2 chapters is not very cost effective.  If I don't like a library book, I just stop reading and start something else.  Very satisfying.
3.  Magazines that provide lists of ways to save money never suggest not buying magazines.  Again, you can read the list at the library.
4.  Hang clothes out to dry instead of using the dryer.  This is one I'm not particularly good at.  Since we try to do a lot of laundry during the week so we don't have to face it on the weekend, we tend to use the dryer a lot more than we should.  But even a couple of loads a week hung outside reduces the cost of using the dryer and clothes hung outside smell nice.
5.  Use coupons if the product is something you would normally buy.  Lately the paper has had inserts from P&G with coupons for things I often buy.  I also like the web coupon service save.ca.  There isn't a ton of variety so I can't use it all of the time - it has resulted to my overflowing stock of whole wheat pasta!
6.  If you have the space, grow veggies.  We get a lot of produce from our garden.  Last year was a more difficult growing season - heat and drought possibly - but the summer before I rarely bought veggies at the grocery store or farmers' market.  Even if you don't have a lot of space, container vegetable growing is another way to go.  You Grow Girl has a lot of ideas for growing veggies in small spaces.  Veggie seeds are inexpensive compared to buying a plant that has already started and if you store them in a sealed container (I used ziplock bags), the remaining seeds can be used in subsequent years.  My tomato seeds are 3 and more years old and I have seedlings growing happily in my basement again this year.
7.  Where possible, make gifts.  I make a lot of gifts and find baby gifts one of the most fun and inexpensive.  For $30 in yarn, you can make a lovely sweater for a baby.  That same $30 will get you a t-shirt at a baby store.  There is no comparison in quality or beauty.  The sweater is made from the heart and the mother always appreciates that.
8.  Wait for the sales at the yarn and quilt shops - I am not very good at this one myself but most stores have a sale at least once a year so you can feel good about stocking up.

The best thing, none of these tips are painful.  They don't change my life since they don't involve sacrifice, making them easier to stick to.  Well, except for the last one.

Fine Cooking Magazine

The good food weekend continues with a recipe from the April/May issue of Fine Cooking Magazine.  I love Fine Cooking magazine.  I've been subscribing to it for several years now and have rarely had a recipe out of it that I haven't really liked.  There are several recipes that I go to over and over again.

The recipe today was lamb shanks en papillotes with leeks, carrots, rosemary and orange.  Very tasty.  Essentially, the lamb shanks bake for 2 1/2 hours in foil with the veggies and it comes out very delicious.  We had smashed potatoes (mashed potatoes with the skins still on) and cookies that I baked this afternoon for dessert.  Very lovely.

A Good Food Weekend

We haven't eaten out very much for quite a few months, mainly because we've been so busy but also because when you start tracking your expenses, it is easier to say no to eating out.  This, combined with the fact that I love to cook and weekends are the only time I really get to relax in the kitchen, means that eating out has fallen down on my list of priorities.  This weekend however, we have gone out twice.  Since joining Groupon's coupon service, I've purchased a few coupons for restaurants in the area.  Last night's Groupon was for West Plains Bistro in Burlington.  It is a small, cozy restaurant with very good food.  We only had one thing off the menu, Moroccan Shrimp, and they were very tasty.  Our main courses were the night's specials.  I enjoyed mushroom ravioli with a light cream sauce and I could have licked the plate. The other half had a stuffed pork chop that looked really good but I was enjoying my pasta so much that I didn't even taste it.  This is highly unusual.  We'll definitely go back.

Today we were out running errands and looking for a nice birthday present for me and stopped in at Oliver Bonacini in Oakville Place mall.   Continuing my mushroom themed weekend, I had a pizzetta with pancetta and mushrooms and a bitter greens side salad.  Very nice.  And they had a promotion for the 3 Chefs Cookbook - a $20 gift card for brunch with purchase.  Since the book has the really yummy, cream free, mushroom soup that I have enjoyed at Jump a couple of times, I decided that alone was an excellent excuse to buy the book.  Instead of giving me a gift card, the waiter took the $20 off right away.  While not the best use of a promotional opportunity since a gift card would mean that I had to go back, I was quite happy about the immediate discount.  I will go back here but the gift card would have meant that I had to.

Finally, for dinner, I had taken some shrimp out of the freezer in a renewed effort to reduce the amount of food I am stocking in there.  The other half thought that noodles seemed like an excellent idea so I browsed the cookbook collection for something Asian-inspired and found a nice spicy noodle recipe from Thai Cooking Class, a book recommended by Bonnie Stern School of Cooking when I took a Thai class there about 20 years ago - when you still had to go to Chinatown to buy Lemon Grass and curry paste.  It was excellent.  Lots of onions and garlic and just enough spice.  A Riesling from Thirty Bench worked really well alongside.

I only hope tomorrow can live up to the Friday and Saturday culinary goodness.

Baking Frenzy

Despite being pretty much exhausted after being up later than normal the last 2 nights and not really sleeping all that well all week, for some reason I decided that today I was in the mood to bake, bake, bake.  Some of the mood came from a shopping trip to Metro yesterday where everything was on sale.  Butter was something like $3 off.  Flour was on sale.  Eggs were on sale.  The only small issue is that, other than the eggs, I'm pretty well stocked on all of the other ingredients I threw in the cart.  So it was time to find some space in the pantry and refrigerator.

First up on the assembly line were multi-grain buns and, not pictured, bread.  This is a recipe from the Robin Hood Flour website that I found as a suggested use for their newish multigrain flour blend.  I haven't tried them yet but things all went according to instruction so I expect they will be tasty.

Next up, peanut butter, oatmeal chocolate chip cookies.  These are a recipe I've had hanging around, cut out from a Baker's Chocolate advertisement that used to be in a lot of magazines years ago.  I think it is also on the website but it is taking forever to call up the recipe with a similar sounding name so I'm not going to link.  The recipe produces a really tasty, although somewhat flat, cookie.

Then, in the "not such a great success" category are some nutty chocolate dried cherry granola bars.  I picked up this recipe from an Our Complements magazine from Sobey's.  It tastes really good.  Unfortunately, the bars didn't really set well and I think they will have to be eaten with a spoon.  This picture is a pretty good representation of their appearance. I don't think I could have baked them any longer they taste almost past done and got brown on the top.

Next up was a chocolate chip banana bread from the book Bite Me.  It is still in the oven so no picture of that one for now.

And while all this was going on I made jam.  In a case of desperation, I bought strawberries yesterday because I am at rock bottom in the jam department and I would rather make jam from imported strawberries than buy jam from the grocery store.  Yes, I realize that this just proves I'm crazy.

I'm off to try one of the buns with some lovely washed rind cheese from Quebec that I also picked up yesterday.  It might taste pretty good with the jam.

Then I think I need a nap.

Finally!

These socks are called Carved in Wool from the Fall 2010 issue of Interweave Knits magazine.  The good thing about the sock-every-two-months challenge is that I finished these incredibly time-consuming and irritating socks.  This likely would not have happened without that motivation.

I'm not even sure I really like the finished product and they are a little too baggy.  Good for hanging around the house I guess.  I have not a centimetre of yarn left.  In fact, the toes are a tiny bit shorter than I would like because I had to frog a bit of the first one to finish the second.  Good thing I had the ending stitches on holders in anticipation of this eventuality.

At least I decided against the provisional cast on irritation.  I started it for the first one but cast on too many stitches, got most of the way through it and just couldn't face doing it again.  The yarn is too thin to make that a fun experience.  So when I recast on with the correct number of stitches, I just did a regular k1 p1 rib.    By the time I got to the second sock, I was very glad I made that decision.

To put it in perspective, it took more than 2 months of regular knitting to finish these socks.  In 3 days this week, I've already finished 2/3 of the leg of my next pattern, called Spring Forward from Knitty.

The lesson from this project - no more heavily patterned socks and if you aren't liking the project frog before you are too far gone.

I'm going to hit post and walk the pattern over to the recycling box so I don't ever see it again.

Parsnips

I made the halibut I mentioned this morning.  It was very tasty.  But that isn't really part of my afternoon story.

It was another nice spring day and since I have several seeds that say to plant in "early spring" without much further definition, I planted them today after turning over the veggie patch.  I also knew I had intentionally left some parsnips in the ground over the winter because everything I have read says they are so much sweeter and can be dug up over the winter.  Since I don't possess a tool that digs into frozen ground, I did not try to dig them up over the winter but I dug them up today.  And I made a parsnip puree (recipe from Spilled Milk, a very funny podcast).   While I was expecting something more like mashed potatoes, I got soup.  Which was ok but I didn't use my brain and realize it was soup until after I put it on the plates.  Regardless, it was delicious and tasted surprisingly good with the sauce for the halibut.  The parsnips were so sweet.  Very, very good.  I highly recommend planting parsnip seeds and letting them over winter.  I enjoy them in the fall but the difference is incredible.  I still have a couple in the fridge so plan to enjoy them roasted or in a great Fine Cooking risotto recipe that I discovered a couple of years ago.

In other, sadder news, there was a rather large house fire in my neighbourhood this afternoon.  One of the onlookers said that the husband died two weeks ago and he was pretty sure the wife died in the fire.  I hope they are together again.

I always seem to blog about beef

And I don't even enjoy beef that much.  But here we go again.  I guess the reason is that I don't remember to write about food that often and when I have a beef dish that I really like, I tend to remember to blog about it.

Anyway, at curling the other night a couple of people were talking about this great dinner they had made from this great cookbook.  I asked what the cookbook was thinking that there is at least a 75% chance that I have it and ... I do!  And I haven't cooked from it forever, need a bit of a kickstart in the cooking department because lately I've not been that inspired so pulled it off the shelf yesterday morning.  Before I went grocery shopping so could pick up the ingredients.  This may be part of my uninspired problem.  I have been randomly buying things at the grocery store and then trying to figure out what to make.  It's hard to get excited about cooking something when you don't have half of the ingredients.  So lately, I've just been throwing things together.  Still tasty but not inspiring.

The cookbook is A Matter of Taste by Lucy Waverman and James Chatto.  Lucy writes the recipes and James provides drink ideas to go with them.  Unfortunately, I tend to drink something different from what James recommends because I never remember to add his recommendation to the grocery list, get home and find I don't have a California Pinot Noir (in this case) or any other country's Pinot Noir for that matter.  Fortunately it tasted pretty good with a red Zinfandel as recommended by my beverage and food matching encyclopedia.

This book is set up in menus and it is my goal to actually make one of the full menus at some point but I don't think I have yet.  This one is called Japanese Influences and the beef part was Steak with Mushroom Miso Sauce.  Yummy.  The mushroom sauce smelled a lot like Miso soup (surprise) in the pan but when poured on the steak which had been marinated for 1/2 hour in soy sauce and other stuff, the flavours blended very nicely together so that you couldn't pick out any one element of flavour.  As I said earlier, yummy.

I also made the Soba Noodles with Spicy Greens.  This was also very good and contained a lot of veggies.  The spicy came from Wasabi paste, ginger and hot pepper flakes, although again, I didn't really notice the spiciness and thought that the flavours blended together really well.

Tonight it's Roasted Halibut Tagine from A Dinner of Lemons.  Considering that I'm likely only making the Halibut  and possibly the Israeli Couscous, if I have some in the back of my cupboard and it hasn't gone stale, it isn't really going to be a dinner of lemons.  More like lemons and some other stuff.  I'll try to remember to blog about it later.