Isn't It a Shame?

Note to Self: Card Games are a good, wholesome, fun way to spend time with friends. Harmless competitiveness only adds to the good times!

Tip: Euchre is a fantastic game for four, fondly enjoyed by many. Very few other games can 'trump' the entertainment value of Euchre!

Thus far we've received responses from Karen, Sara and Murtle. These are the ladies I expected to nail this stuff on the head, but so far they've each only landed 3 or 4 of the 7 correct. I suppose ultimately that's really not bad performance whatsoever. Good work girls!

Also, Karen had her big gala dinner last night which was scrumptious. As always, very much enjoyed by all, even though we spent 1/2 the night talking about Facebook!

Cross country skiing yesterday was fabulous - having Gatineau Park right there really is single handedly enough to make me want to live in Ottawa. I think Canmore is a close second on my list of candidate cities, with Waterloo/Guelph and Viç†oria  bringing up the tail.

The moment you've all been waiting for...

Charity Wishlist '06!!
Just a friendly reminder about how the game works. It's basically connect the dots - below is a list of charities, and people. Your job is the match the charity to the person, and the more correct guesses, the better off your charity of choice will be!

2/3 correct: $5 bonus
4/5 correct: $10 bonus
6 correct: $15 bonus
7 correct: $25 bonus

Charities

The Bruce Trail Association
Santrolpol Roulant - these guys do worm composting!!!
Opportunity House
Child Soldiers
The Mission(Ottawa)
Rideau Lakes Environmental Foundation
David Suzuki Foundation

People

Karen
Richard
Muriel
Caroline
Sara
Alison
Simon

So get out there - take a look at each of these organizations, and get your guesses together! Send me an email at magboy 69 on the ol' hotmail by December 29th, and I'll post the results here!

Merry Christmas and happy holidays!

Played road hockey with the boys today - Simon, Richard, Arlen, Frank, Vik and Dirty D. Actually put together a solid game, and caught a faint glimmer of our old touch and finesse.

Honestly, those Friday afternoons at blake's house were some of the best days of my life.

I'm flying Porter Airlines to Ottawa tonight - only $85 all in (vs $75 for the train) - plus, it'll only take one hour! The flight is from the toronto island airport, which will be a new experience for me.

Should be fun.

Can't wait to get home and see everyone!!

Since coming back from New York, I've been quite a busy man in the kitchen!

This week's experimental delights included:

French Onion Soup: Laura has 2 french onion soup bowls, so I figured it was due time. Caramelize some onions(butter, sugar, onion in frying pan for 10 mins). Add a touch of flour to absorb the extra juices/butter. Buy/make chicken or beef broth. Add broth to onions, simmer. Pour into soup bowl, add a layer of baguette. Add a layer of cheese. Cook in over until cheese is melted.

Bundt Cake!: Laura's Nana gave us a bundt cake pan as a house warming gift. Frankly, I don't really see the advantage of a bundt cake over another other form of cake...except it has BY FAR the coolest name. All of the recipes I found were not from scratch, but rather all started with "1 package of chocolate cake mix", to which we added 1 package of jello chocolate pudding mix, 4 eggs, some oil, some milk, sour cream, chocolate chips and pecans. I tried my hands at making a glaze( icing sugar + water ), but it was a disaster...I added too much water, and it was really runny(note for people like Simon - we're talking like I had a ratio of icing sugar to water of atleast 5:1 and it was still too watery).

I'm making butter chicken this afternoon, but using my fallback PC Financial sauce...hmmmmMmMmMM!

Most of you will remember the tragic tale of the first great spider purge. Hours of effort were undone by a small amount of carelessness - we didn't wash the worms themselves, and in the tiny spoonful of dirt that was carried over from the first compost to the second were a handful of the spider we were trying to hard to eliminate.

Well, that handful of spiders must have been mating like bunny rabbits - by this week, the problem was back to being as bad as it was to start with; literally hundreds of these friggin tinsy tiny spiders.

Once again, I sat down with the daunting job of sorting through the compost to find and keep all the worms, but throw everything else out. With some experience under my belt, I was able to rip through things much more quickly.

For those of you that don't know this(and *I* didn't know this until yesterday), worms lay eggs/caccoons. These things are friggin small - about the size of the head of a pin. Like a tiny little bead. Each little caccoon turns into between 2 and 20 worms.

So as I'm sorting, I start to notice all this little beads....which I obviously couldn't throw out!! So needless to say, this added a whole extra level of complexity and effort to things! But I managed to save around 30 little beads, which could turn into as many as 600 worms!!

Lately I have been trying to get back into the swing of things with cooking - some of the classics like chile, risotto and lasagna...

But I've also been trying to branch out a little bit and take on one or more new exciting items per week.

My biggest success has come in the liquid form of soup. Yummy, warm and delicious.

Soup #1: Butternut squash / apple.
- start with some chicken broth. Add diced butternut squash. Also add 1-2 carrots cut up, some onion, ginger, 2 or so apples worth of apple, some pepper and some curry powder. Simma' down. Blend, while adding a little cream.

Soup #2: Potatoe leek soup. Equally as easy - cut up some leeks, saute in a frying pan. Cut and skin some potatoes, and boil those guys in a big pot. Add some garlic and green onions to the leeks. Drain the potatoes, add some chicken broth, add the leeks, add some milk, blend and spice appropriately.

Next on my soup list - split pea.

I also made a fantastic stuffed port tenderloin for the first time ever the other day. Cut the tenderloin so it is 1 large flat "sheet". Line with ricotta cheese & spiced bradcrumbs. In a bowl mix baby spinach, parmesan cheese, toasted and cut pine nuts, spices and more breadcrumbs. Lay over the ricotta cheese on the meat. Roll, holding together with toothpicks/skewers. Grill. Oh so yummy.

I've also been making a number of muffin recipes from scratch that have turned out quite well.

Any ideas or suggestions for what I should take on next??(I'm looking at you Karen)

For the past 3 weeks my life has been spent tending for worms. Yes, like the little red wriggly kind.

For one rason or another I got it in my head that worm composting would be a jolly good time. Good for the environment, and fun for me.

I eventually was able to find someone in Toronto to buy worms from - a much more involved task than I'd originally thought, and also much more expensive - $27 for 1/2 pound of red wrigglers.

Anyways, for a while, all was good in worm land. I bought a big rubbermaid big to store my compost in, which fit nicely under the kitchen sink. Within a week I'd amassed quite a collection of banana peels, orange rinds, apple cores, egg shells and what have you. Was quite surprising really how much organic material one throws out. The worms were churning away and everything seemed good.

Then two things happened to forever change the path of worm composting here in this little apartment.

i) I decided to bring some leaves in from outside to add to the compost. Well, I must have pick a bad leaf - as within days these intsy bitsy spiders had taken over the compost. They were everywhere. At first I thought I might stand a chance at killing them off individually. Boy was I wrong.

ii) My online research indicated that worms like bread. So an old stale bagel was dutifully cut up and added to the heap. was THAT ever a mistake! This big puffy white mould started growing . And I mean this mould was GROWING. Like, there'd be nothing in the morning when i went to work, and I'd come back at night and there'd be an inch thick of mould everywhere. Gross++.

These two unfortunate events led to me basically disassembling the compost item by item, so I could start from scratch, keeping just the worms. This process took almost 4 hours, as the worms are quite hard to find/catch. Eventually, I had a little container full of worms, and everything else was clean and mould/spider free.

I rebuilt my composter(you need clean dirt, newspaper, foodscraps, etc) and went to add my container of worms. Almost like it was happening in slow motion, I dumped the worms over onto the new compost...and realized "oh shizzat, I didn't clean the worms...". Out of the corner of my eye, in the tablespoon or so of dirt that was bundled over with the worms, I see 2 little spiders, scurry off into the new compost.

So, potentially all that work for naught. Right now we're waiting, and holding out hope.

# posted by Greg @ 5:15 AM 3 comments