Archive for Food

Regional Food

July 8, 2008 at 4:23 pm · Filed under Food, My obsessions

So, inevitably, when we talk about moving back to NS, hubby and I always talk about the food.  Mmmmm, food.

There is the normal seafood that I look forward to.  Lobster, crab, scallops, haddock, all that good stuff.  What makes it even better, is that my Step-dad does work for a local dock, and they often give him the fresh stuff right off the boat!  With hubby working away, I’ll make those girls seafood lovers in no time.  The seafood however you can get just about anywhere.  Through the magic of hi-speed shipping, you can get fresh seafood here in Edmonton!  Although, when I became an adult and saw that people ate lobsters in restaurants, and fancy ones at that, I was shocked.  My family, no word of a lie, turns into a bunch of ravenous animals when they have a feed of lobster.  First is the layer of garbage bags on the table, then comes a layer of newspaper to soak up all the juices.  Then, usually one of my aunts will also fashion a bib of sorts from the garbage bags.  Then the hammers and pliers come out and get sterilized.  Then the frenzy begins.  No buns, coleslaw, or potatoes as sides for my family!  It’s strictly the lobster and butter.  Every bit of the lobster gets eaten.  Every single bit, even the green stuff.  My brother and I would dip the little legs in butter and suck the juice out.  Seriously, could you imagine my family at a fancy restaurant eating lobster???  Neither could I!

Nope, the food that we really crave is the fast food, if you want to call it that.  Donairs, donair pizza, pizza flips, pizza in general!  Homemade bread from a hole-in-the-wall bakery, Tatamagouche butter, BBQs at my aunts’ house, I could go on and on!  We’re going to have to do a lot of swimming to work all those calories off!!  I can’t wait!  :)

Leave a Comment

Birthday Party

May 30, 2008 at 4:07 pm · Filed under Food, kids

So, life must go on, and my princess Katie turned 4 this week.  On Sunday we’re having a few friends and their kids over, along with my MIL and maybe a family friend-it’s kind of early in the day for him though, especially on a Sunday!  We’re just going to have munchies and a small BBQ, and I am going to make another ice cream cake!  This afternoon I made the cookies, but I tossed in a half cup of peanut butter to the batter.  I just found a recipe on Martha’s website for Peanut Sauce, so I think I’m going to have both chocolate fudge and peanut sauces with maybe just a good vanilla icecream-no need to overload things.  Plus if I fiddle with things too much I won’t know where I went wrong!

I’m half tempted to start making and selling them-they are pretty easy and are really good!  I’d just have to work out the cost analysis of the whole thing.

Leave a Comment

Recipe Links

May 11, 2008 at 1:04 am · Filed under Food

For Jane…..:)

Ice Cream Cake: http://www.foodtv.ca/recipes/recipedetails.aspx?dishid=5505 

Chocolate fudge for the ice cream cake came from here: http://www.foodtv.ca/recipes/recipedetails.aspx?dishid=6770

Country Spice Loaf:  http://www.foodtv.ca/recipes/recipedetails.aspx?dishid=6747

There you go!  Happy Baking!

Leave a Comment

Jane,

May 8, 2008 at 8:18 am · Filed under Food, My obsessions

You make it sound like work when you call my gardening plan ‘Organic farming’ and ’sustainable’!  Just kidding, I will still blog when we move-there may be an interuption for a while, but I’ll keep up with it-hubby can only talk so much about gardening and vegetables before he gets bored!

I remember being kids and going into my grandfather’s garden and just picking things and eating them right on the spot.  I remember going into the rhubarb patch with my brother and a couple of little cups of sugar and eating the rhubarb right out of the garden (the sugar was to dip the rhubarb in!).  I want the girls to experience that.  My grandmother canned and froze everything-I remember afternoons of mom and nanny making cabbage rolls by the dozens to freeze for the year, and she made the best green tomato chow I have ever eaten!  Not to mention the rhubarb pie-one of my favorite deserts!

I find it so ironic that I spent most of my teen years dreaming of living in the big city, and now I can’t wait to leave.  We’ll be close to the city of Halifax though, I want the kids to be able to experience city life as well as the country life-and I need to be close to scrapbooking stores, there’s none on the island of Cape Breton, it’s going to be hard for me to live there for a year!.  I’m a country girl with a big-city shopping habit!  Not to mention I love to eat in restaurants of all kinds, so I can’t go too far from that experience either.

Comments (2)

Check out this ice cream cake!

May 6, 2008 at 10:16 pm · Filed under Food

Hubby’s birthday is tomorrow, and he put in a request for an ice-cream cake.  Instead of just getting one from DQ like usual, I decided to make one.  It’s 2 giant chocolate chip cookies, fudge sauce, and ice cream in the middle.  I hope it tastes as good as it looks.  Recipes are courtesy of Anna Olsen again-she’s great!  I’m worried about the ice cream though.  I bought some instead of making it (need an ice-cream maker attachment for my mixer!) and when I started using it, I noticed on the label it said something like ‘frozen treat’ instead of ice cream.  I hope that it didn’t crystallize when I softened it a bit then re-froze it.  Oh well, all the rest of it looks yummy, we can get over crystaly ice-cream!  I’ll post another pic when we take it out of the springform pan.

Comments (1)

Did you ever….

May 4, 2008 at 1:37 pm · Filed under Books, Food, Health, Scared

Want to write about something-a subject matter, an issue-only you can’t find the right words?  Nothing looks right to you?

I’ve got some family illness going on-an aunt of mine has been diagnosed with breast cancer-but no matter what I write, it all looks wrong.  I think about her a lot, I worry about her and my uncle, and their children.  I think about the fact that my mom is around the same age and doesn’t keep up with her regular checkups.  I think about the fact that my aunt went in complaining of stomach pains of all things, and because of her age they decided to do a mammogram.  I have my own ultrasound to check out possible ovarian cysts this week, I know it will go well, but every once in a while I wonder ‘What if?’

I’ve been thinking a lot about food lately-and not just because I’m dieting again!-I’ve been reading books and watching documentaries about food production and costs and the industrialization of food processing.  Michael Pollan ( in the book In Defense of Food) has a good idea about getting back to the roots of your food.  When you pick up a carton of milk, think about where that milk came from-think about the farmer that owns the cows, think about how far that milk traveled to get to the grocery store-this is not a new idea at all, I see the theme recurring in documentaries and other writings about the topic.  I think that my hubby is getting worried that I will totally hippie-out on him, but I really feel passionately about this.  I tell him my plans for when we move to NS and buy our own place.  I want an acerage outside of the city so that I have lots of room to garden, I want a root cellar, and I want to spend weekends in the summer freezing and canning my yield.  I want to buy local the items that we don’t raise ourselves, and that includes meat products.  I want to stray away from processed food that doesn’t resemble the original product at all.  First step, we’ve gotten rid of margarine!  Yay!

Hubby was raised on margarine, I was raised on it too, but my grandparent’s used butter, and it was a treat and something I often over-indulged on.  I have managed to cut back on the amounts I use, and I have convinced hubby that margarine is a totally manufactured, horribly processed product that doesn’t resemble it’s original state, or even food.  Small steps, small steps.

I really hope that when I get my degree in Human Nutrition I can use my passion and my education on this topic.

Comments (3)

Yummy

April 25, 2008 at 10:14 am · Filed under Food, Uncategorized

I can’t wait for another half hour or so! I am making Spiced Country Loaf, and it smelled so good when I mixed the batter up-my house is going to smell so yummy when I take it out! I love smells like that, gingerbready, comforting smell……If it turns out I will post a picture-I finally figured out how to post pics and download pics from my new digital camera-if you couldn’t already tell.

The recipe is Anna Olsen’s, and can be found here: http://www.foodtv.ca/recipes/recipedetails.aspx?dishid=6747

ETA: It was OK, made my house smell soooo good! I was expecting more of a spice kick from it, but it was pretty mild. I will make it again, but only after I get slipat to put in the bread pan-it stuck to the bottom!

Comments (3)

In Defense of Food

April 16, 2008 at 8:24 am · Filed under Books, Food

In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto http://www.michaelpollan.com/indefense.php

I just finished it last night, and it was great!  A little dry at times, but overall a very good read, especially if you are interested in nutrition, ecology, or just being plain old responsible for what you put in your body.  I really recommend this book, and I am eagerly awaiting his other book ‘An Omnivore’s Dilemma’ from the local library.

Leave a Comment

Great Weekend….

April 15, 2008 at 9:33 am · Filed under Food

…just what I needed to lift up my spirits! Friday night wasn’t much, hubby went out with some friends, I wrote some posts, did some reading, that sort of thing.

Saturday was a beautiful day! We did some running around, then just hung around and vegged out. I went out with some girlfriend’s on Saturday night. Just did drinks and a potluck, but it was nice and full of laughs! I had made some Long Island Iced Tea mix that turned out really yummy, it’s my new favourite drink! Potent though, it’s got rum, vodka, gin, tequila, triple sec in it! You’d think that combo would taste horrible, but mix it with Rose’s Lime Cordial and some coke, and it’s great. I made some hot and sour meatballs to bring-they turned out so good! You just mix an equal amount of jalapeno jelly and cocktail sauce, then add cooked meatballs to it and cook it on the stovetop or in the oven til the sauce is nice and thick. It’s a make-again for sure!

Sunday I worked for a few hours…morale is still pretty low and there’s still a lot of gossip going around. The weekend staff haven’t had their meetings yet though, so I’m hoping that will change. I went in determined to stand up to them, to say ‘That person isn’t here to defend themselves, so I’d rather not hear you talk about them’. But it’s so hard! Especially since I really like all the people I work with on the weekends….I’ll try it out on someone I don’t like first! LOL!!!

When I got home I was happy to see that hubby had cleaned and finished the laundry for me, so we cleaned up the yard and bbq and went shopping for bbq food! Hubby and the girls had steaks, I had grilled salmon-and we all had baby potatoes and steamed green beans. It was so good! I love to BBQ, the most simple basic things can just taste so much better from the grill. I especially love farmer’s market season for BBQing. The potatoes and veggies just taste so good! Hmm, I am making homemade pizza for supper tonight-maybe I’ll make it on the bbq!

Yesterday hubby had the day booked off, so we did some shopping and went out for dinner. We went to East Side Mario’s, and while the food was good, the service was not-as per usual for most restaurants in Edmonton lately. The wonderful thing was that our server did not charge us for the kids meals (actually, maybe Monday is the day kids eat for free-I’ll have to check that!) or our drinks-I gave him a nice tip for that. I am pretty patient with most servers that are over-worked, and under-paid. As long as they make an effort, I am OK. It’s the ones that don’t even try at customer service that really get to me!

ETA:  The joke’s on me!  Monday is the day that kids eat free at my local East Side Mario’s!  So, we got our pop for free.

Leave a Comment

Cookies

March 28, 2008 at 8:32 pm · Filed under Books, Food

So, I picked up Martha Stewart’s latest cookbook, all about cookies.   Looks so good-thanks Jane!!!  The kids were climbing all over me tonight….’Oh, what’s that cookie called?  What’s in it?  Can you make it tomorrow?’  LOL!!!   There’s lots of good looking recipes in there-I think that I will have to try some this week!

Leave a Comment

Older Posts »