Okay - time to come clean. I didn’t make the crêpes pictured in the photo. Noooo, my crêpes were consummed far too fast to be photographed. But they looked JUST as fabulous! (hee hee).
What I did make is this:
Meine Schwester hat mir diese Wolle für mein Geburtstag letztes Jahre gegeben. (That was just for you Miss Eve….just because I’m feeling all saucy and germanic today. Plus Mitzi has requested that I speak more of her mother tongue. Totally off the top of my head so I know the grammar is a mess.)
Anyway, enough of my silly before you all think I’ve lost my mind. The wool is “Austermann Step” (mit Aloe Vera und Jojoba Öl) the only colour I can get from it is #03. My sister bought the wool for me a year ago for my birthday and it feels amazing!
With the ‘Mastering the Art of French Cooking’ in hand and the spirit of Julia behind me encouring me to give the pan a good and hearty toss…I NOW know how. And I even got one perfect flawless flip!
The filling was strawberries and icing sugar, rolled up and topped with a drizzle of pure Maine maple syrup.
I spent a good portion of this morning trying to remember the French Canadian woman who was my mom’s culinary heroine. Thanks to Margaret, I got Madam BenoÎt! Yessss.
Unfortunately I couldn’t find any youtubes of M. Benoît, but here is a CBC archived clip that I urge you to watch. Oh lord, back bacon covered in mustard and brown sugar…oh god, yes!!!
Now, M. Benoît suggest that your guests (20 ‘ungry men) should take the hot food from the buffet first and then come back for the cold items. She adds, ‘And if you think they are not going to do that, just stand at the table and GET them to do it.’
Well, no wonder she’s was my mom’s goddess. That’s exactly the kind of control my mother craved!
I do remember my mom telling me why she was such a fan. Apparantly, one day on the show M. Benoît was making a casserole or some such. So after she had assembled the food she gave the instruction to place it in the oven at 425 for 30 minutes. As she went to place the casserole dish in the oven when it slipped from her hand and fell on the floor. Without missing a beat she said, ‘Or you can juust take out the one you’ve already prepared from the ‘udder hoven’.’ and with that she opened the second oven where that premade one layed in wait.
You know, I just had a brilliant idea. I’m going to get her books from the library because as she specialized in Canadian food and traditional Canadian food…I’m thinking that her recipes would probably work very well with this 120km diet we’re all supposed to be eating. At least food that’s indigenous to Canada.
A while back, I was looking for books on French cooking at the library. There’s a very, very cool librarian over at College and Spadina who will not only help you find what you’re looking for, but also make recommendations.
She suggested that I read ‘Julie and Julia’ - which is one woman’s attempt to cook every recipe in Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking. Trust me, I was hesitant to read this because I just had a vision of the author Julia Powell being one of the A-type personality women in my neighbourhood. Women who actually don’t enjoy food, but would do it just to be smug and smarmy about it.
WRONG, Julie is truly MY KIND OF GAL. During one bad episode during her project she praises her friend Gwen.
“Sally encourages me to find my inner greatness, to love myself and treat my body like a temple. She wishes I’d quit drinking so much and wants me to go to therapy. I probably should spend more time with her. But especially during the tough times, the days of aspic and freezing rain, I found myself not so much craving betterment and an exercise partner so much as a fresh bottle of booze, a pack of Marlboros, and someone content to eat butter sauce and watch reruns on TV with me. It’s lucky for me, though perhaps bad for Gwen, that I’m just a solitary outer-borough secretary with a taste for vodka and cigarettes, rather than, I don’t know, a bi-curious stripper with a small coke habit - I get the feeling that with such a wealth of potential disaster to work with, Gwen would truly come into her gift as some sort of Shakespearean corrupter of innocence.’
I love this woman. She drinks, she eats, she smokes, she swears. Oh, and she blogged this all, waaaaay before any of us had heard of blogging.
I guess also the main reason that I find Julie so cool is because she finds JULIA so cool. I’ve always maintained the coolness of Julia - beyond her cooking finesse and the fact that she got a gagillion women to a least examine their inner gourmet.
Julia Child’s coolness maybe have been her sheer physicalness to begin with. She was 6′2″, and not a willowy 6′2″, with a voice of frankly, a bad drag queen. Now, for any of us gals over 6′ she might as well be our queen. Because a good majority of us aren’t 6′ in that willowy whispy willow whisp way - most of us have the bodies that will actually support that height. But do you know what that means? It means that if you share a house with 5 other women of average height, you become the default ‘man’ of the group and are responsible for bug killing, power outages and dealing with the landlord…with NONE of the sexual perks!
So to have one of ‘us’ become a culinary doyen and worshipped by astronauts wives…well HELL! Do you think they’d ever put someone as wonderful as that on TV now?
Don’t believe me on her coolness? Check this shit out.
I especially like how the chocolate is saved for the cook for later.
A final quote. ” Julia leaned gamely onto her knuckles like some otherworldly primate god of kitchens and good humour…’
And that’s all you need to know.
In Other Culinary News
My sister came over a few days ago and I made chicken drumsticks for the three of us. Seeing as we all have different tastes when it comes to marinades I made three each, Piri Piri chicken for Mr., Jerk chicken for myself and some lemon turkey rub chicken for the sister.
Feeling a bit saucy, at one point I exclaimed in a Jamaican accent* that, ‘I love me jerk chicken, maaahn.’ And just in case my little joke was lost on anyone I followed up with my regular canuck accent, ‘You see, see what I did there, I went all Jamaican on you.’
My sister, like Mama from the old Eunice skits, replied, ‘That isn’t Jamaican. That’s just drunk white woman at Caribana.’
* Glacia, Woman of a Thousand Accents is available for birthdays, anniversaries, Bar Mitzvahs, Christmas and Kwanzaa parties. Glacia, Drunk White Chick is also available and probably with less notice.
I got the pet photos back. I don’t love the backdrop so much (calling Sears Portrait Studios) - but the pics of the guys was great.
If you’re wondering why there’s only one of Wrex…well, he’s a cat. 30 minutes of HELL to get one shot that he didn’t look completely pissed off in and even that dude had to photo shop my arm out.
On a seperate note, why am I feeling all schadenfreude over the arrest of Steve Page? Is it because I secretely knew that all NDPers are cokeheads?
Seriously, I don’t even know the guy enough to form an opinion other than he the Ketchup guy and the poster boy for Canadian ‘nice guyness’. Maybe that’s it. When I read the headlines this morning, I sooooooooooooooooooooo wished I had a martini in one hand and a cigerette in the other just so I could bark out, ‘HA!’ at the appropriate moment.
Oh, I downloaded the ‘This American Life’ podcast where the topic was, ‘Who is Canadian?’. I’m still offended - mainly by some stupid girls on the show who I quite honestly found really condescending. (To those girls who are upset that William Shatner and Neil Young (but his songs are so American!) are Canadian, I have one word. Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr.) But Ian Brown and Ira Glass made up for it.
On a seperate not. Lorne Greene was Jewish? I did NOT know that.
I watched ‘Paris, Je T’aime’ a few nights ago and when I watched the last story I was brought to tears. (And not just because I was thankful that there was someone with a worse accent than me.).
So then I watched it again yesterday. And I cried, but harder.
And last night Mr. G asked me what it was about that story that got to me and why I tried to repeat the last two lines I had to run to the bathroom.
You know, there’s something about Alexander Payne that does it to me. He has this way of showing you who shitty life can be but just before you get depressed he like YANKS you back with something hopeful and beautiful.
I got a package in the mail yesterday from Shoppers’ Drug Mart, with coupons and samples of things that are ‘Everything you need for a girls night.’.
Items included:
Jergens Natural Glow Moisturizer
Veet Wax Strips
Campino Yogurt Fruit Candy
Biore Strips
One Brand Condoms
Condoms? What kind of Girls night is this? Who are you planning to invite?
Weird #2
I had heard that there was a lending library at the community centre across the street from me. So today I went over there and this (swear to God) is the converstion I ahd with the receptionist.
Moi: Hi, you have a library here?
R: No, all we have is the reading nook with some books.
Moi: Oh.
R: You can go over there and look at the book. (She waves her hand in the direction of a set of shelves with books on them.).
Moi: Oh I see.
R: Then if you see one you like, just write your name on this form here with the book you want and then bring it back in three weeks.
SERIOUSLY, I SWEAR - TO - GOD that is what she said to me. I soooooooooo wanted to press the issue and find out what her definition of a library is.
Lastly
I watched Juno last night and I can’t get this song out of my head.
So my brilliant idea was, screw the decoration on top, just make some cupcakes white and some red. Unfortunately, I grabbed the wrong food colouring package (This ‘Neon’ colour one my sister got for me a year ago) and got confused which was the ‘red’ colouring. When I realized my mistake, I searched for the real red I usually use.
This is the result:
Pink.
Trust me, I really tried to add enough red to change it, but at some point the icing started smelling like a Barbie doll factory, so I decided to stop.
Meanwhile, we’ll just have to have a Canada Day that’s gayer than Christmas!
A couple of weeks ago I got rid of my newspaper delivery. I was really actually frightened to do so, but now I’m pretty g.d. happy. It’s so totally freeing. And instead of spending $321 a year on the paper, I can spend $95 on the New Yorker and have something that I can pass on to someone else instead of toss away AND I’ll actually read it.
Let’s face it, I can get my news off the internets anyway, the exact same news.
So, this is all part of my de-cluttering scheme and once I get my scanner I’m going to scan all these stupid pieces of paper I hang on to for a million years and put them in digital diaries, scrapbooks or recipe books. It’s all going digital baby!
The other thing I’m going to do is to never ever buy anything ever again. Seriously, I just don’t think I need any more non-comsumables. I work from home so my wardrobe is minimal, I’ve got enough crafts and books to last me at least 10 years and other than appliances I can’t think of what else I need.
