Seizure Salad

For once, the urge to write a blog post actually struck at a time when I can sit down and do it.

I live in a great apartment in a great building in a great neighbourhood. There is a shared courtyard between my building and a row of townhouses that face the street - basically my building's patios and the townhouses' backyards overlook each other in very, very tight quarters. So far so good - you can hear everyone's business all of the time, but people are generally very respectful.

Tonight though, someone is having a party that started this afternoon and is still going strong at midnight. I'm just getting a little weary of hearing people getting progressively drunker and louder right outside my window after 6 hours or so. Ah, wait - I think they've trundled off to the bar now.

I am in the middle of watching the excellent and beautiful movie Once, please run out and rent it right away if you haven't seen it. It is so good I'm crazily trying to savour it by stopping it every 15 minutes or so to procrastinate....I don't want it to end.

What a disjointed post...mainly I wanted to post the 'recipe' (and I use that term loosely) that I made for dinner tonight, to share and so I can keep track of it later. As usual I don't measure to take these as loose guidelines.

I've been making this peanut sauce for going on a decade, and I swear whenever I order something with satay or peanut dipping sauce in a restaurant, I always think that mine is better. This keeps in the fridge for 2 weeks or so, and is incredibly good to dip cold cooked chicken in. This recipe is equally good with cubes of fried tofu - actually even better than the chicken.

Thai-ish Peanut Noodles with Chicken and Broccoli

2 cups cooked rice or Vietnamese style vermicelli (follow package directions)
1 large cooked sliced boneless chicken breast
1 large handful broccoli, steamed until bright green and just tender

Toss the above with Peanut sauce:

about 1/2 cup natural peanut butter if you have it - the regular kind is OK too, but the natural is best for this recipe

about an equal amount of coconut milk

1/4 cup good tamari soy sauce

1 clove minced garlic

juice of one lime

dribble of toasted sesame oil

1 tbsp brown sugar

hot chilli sauce to taste (I use sriracha "rooster brand", about a tablespoonful)

Blend everything in a blender, keep tasting and adjusting until it tastes good and bob's your uncle.

... and garnish the whole thing with chopped cilantro, chopped peanuts if you have them, sliced green onions and a squeeze of lime.

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Damn, I haven't made this in a while and I forgot how good it is. Once you make the peanut sauce this is very fast to make too, the vermicelli is just prepared by soaking the noodles in water boiled off the kettle for 5 minutes or so. Nom nom.

Updates

I've been sorely neglecting the blog lately, life has been pretty busy. A big, big event at work that I was organizing just happened last week, and I breathe a pretty massive sigh of relief that it's over, and nothing exploded.

Although, I did have one really good embarrassing moment. We had our event in the roof salon of a very swank hotel. The room has an outdoor patio adjacent. Some guests were outside when I got word that the coat check was closing up shop, so I opened the door and stuck my head out to let them know. Unbeknownst to me, a thread from my dress (OF COURSE, exactly at the epicentre of my boob) got caught on the door frame, and when I tried to back into the room I was suddenly blocking the doorway with a 2 foot long thread connecting the door frame to my left boob. I had to un-hook myself from the door to let them back in. Fuck! Dress somewhat ruined - big run now across one half of the chest.

Oh boobs, sometimes you are just a pain in the ass. Sometimes.

The great communal yesteryear

Not much time to post lately, I've been blog delinquent. Work and life are conspiring to rob me of the rumination time needed to make the bloggy machine work.

I don't know why, but I've been thinking lately about a certain time in my life, about 15 years ago, when I experienced communal housing situations for a good 5-6 years. There was a period of time between about 1991 and 1996 when I lived in a series of big old Victorian houses with lots of roommates. Since then I've endeavoured, even conspired to try my best to live alone. Even in times of real financial difficulty, post-1996 I've made my way in little teeny bachelor apartments.

The roomates I had during that time were wonderful people - most of whom I'm good lifelong friends with, still. But the daily annoyances and demands and mess and politics sucked so much energy from me ... that time is when I learned for better or worse that I need a good portion of my time to be spent alone. Not just alone in my room, but alone in the house. Alone, like - naked singing Billy Joel songs at the top of your lungs alone.

It's such a mixed bag, the communal living thing. I do know that the most creatively ferment-y time in my life was during that period. It was a time where I discovered my art, my creativity, my great loves (it was a time of lovers, too). I met new people constantly - there was always something or someone brilliant and interesting just around the next corner. But I feel in hindsight that I was constantly trying to get away from the feeling that all of the strong personalities in these dwellings were tracing themselves over top of my personality. I felt, feel - like too much constant time living with other people diminishes me.

I do feel (almost abnormally) that I need really great quantities of alone time in order to face the world properly, with grace and openness. But I miss the creative ferment and excitement and thrill of that time, when you never knew who was about to walk through the door. A lot of really, really great people walked through the door. My ideal really, would be a semi-communal living arrangement with private quarters/bedroom  mixed with a communal kitchen and shared living area. Why the hell don't we develop more spaces like this? I've done some reading in the past few years about community living arrangements like this, where there is a mix of shared and private space.

By my reckoning, between 1991 and 1996 I lived with between 12-17 different people.  I remember all of them fondly and vividly and each one left something with me that is a permanent part of me - thank you all!

I still love you, pork

I'm sick of the swine flu, and I don't even have it.

I'm not on Twitter, but apparently Tweets about swine flu have reached something like 10,000 per hour. Crazy. Remember how SARS-hysteria shut Toronto down completely, and just about single-handedly ruined our tourist industry? The film production sector has still not recovered.

Joke: Will there be an outbreak of mutated swine/avian flu?  When pigs fly.

Ah ha hah...but seriously folks, who the fuck knows.  It's either the major worldwide pandemic we've been waiting for, or more premature hysteria, tomato tomahto. I'm feeling sorry for the pig farmers who are apparently the victims of the worst assumption of all, that you can get swine flu from eating pork.

Cuz you can only play your own damn band so many times

I like Max Webster as much as the next hoser, but the band's repeat appearances on their former frontman Kim Mitchell's Q107 radio show is making me feel a little stabby.

He even intro'd them this afternoon with a little rock trivia about the drummer (Gary McCracken) having sung A Million Vacations ... as if he was intro'ing any other band, *and not his band, the one he was ensuring royalty payments for by playing them on his own radio show*.

Not classy, and actually a conflict of interest. Bah humbug.

Down in the valley

It's been an interesting and odd few weeks. My mind has been on music, mostly the playing of it. I've been thinking about the time before I lived in Toronto when I was first playing music, hanging around clubs listening to what was going on in my city, trying to break through/in/  somehow - not just to play and gain an audience, but to fit into some kind of community of musicians. I always felt "at odds", less so now but there is still a big element of my personality which is "at odds" with the music community. Yeah, maybe at odds with communities in general. In moments of feminist analysis I put it down to not having a membership card to the boys club... maybe this isn't really it.

Recently I've really been clicking with my band, we're sounding good and tight and songs are flowing, and just the other night at a show I was thinking how it's coming a little more effortlessly now, and the foundation of the whole thing - the rhythm section - is this kind of subtle but powerful engine in just the way that it should be. But our bass player just let us know he is off to greener pastures, for good and decent reasons of future prospects and taking care of his family.  Tricky thing, life - just when you start to get comfortable, whammo!

Saw a very very good musician from my hometown here in Toronto the other night. It was a great show. Some of the 'entourage' knew me but not as a musician, that was kind of strange. One fellow kept circling back to the guy in my group "so, are you in a band? Are you a musician?"  This is the assumption - identify a group of people and pick out the one you think is going to be the musician. They probably won't look like me.

I've been having excellent, epic dreams lately. Last nights' was so lovely but I don't think I can do it justice by describing in words, it was almost entirely pictoral. Just a slow series of stills, like a storyboard.  I had bought a house at the top of a hill, overlooking a valley. From this old, charming house you could look down across a valley and the landscape looked like farmland does from a plane - little squares of different colours of green. As I was unpacking in my new house, a neighbour came over to introduce himself. He told me that there was a farmer in the valley who kept a flock of sheep - I was very intrigued and hoped that I would meet this person. After a while I headed off down into this valley, which just looked from my house like one gently sloping plain. As I walked along I realized that it actually wasn't one unbroken stretch of valley, there were mini-valleys that were quite steeply sloped that were hidden from view as you gazed out over the whole expanse, you only found them once you actually crossed the terrain.

As I entered the first of these steep valleys I discovered that the whole area was a giant open air farmer's market. Every kind of wonderful, ripe fruit and vegetables and other food was there for sale. I grabbed a basket and just kept putting more and more wonderful stuff into it, more than I could carry. I saw the sheep my neighbour was talking about wandering around, grazing in and out of the area along with the people, and I knew that I was going to learn how to take care of them, shear them etc. from the farmer. All of the people there were contented and happy, walking around this market in the bright sunshine. When I woke up I almost cried - I didn't want to leave this place.

Please god/universe/multiverse, when I die can I go there? I promise I'll be good.

Ten random things we didn't have in the old timey times when I was a little kid

1.    computers
2.    internet porn
3.    liquid laundry detergent
4.    hummus
5.    ADD
6.    Miley Cyrus, Brittney Spears, NSync, Backstreet Boys or Spice Girls
7.    Coloured eyeliner
8.    tooth whitening strips
9.    charcuterie
10. cellphones for kids

But we did have...

1.    typewriters
2.    Harold Robbins
3.    powdered laundry detergent
4.    french onion chip dip
5.    a smack in the head for not paying attention
6.    The Bay City Rollers
7.    Black, brown and 'blonde' eyeliner
8.    Pearl Drops Tooth Polish
9.    Head Cheese
10. Come home when the streetlights come on

* e.t.a: I just thought of another good one.  We didn't have voice mail, but we did large devices about the size of a small laptop called "answering machines" which took two full-sized cassettes. Originally, you had to leave an outgoing message that was 30 seconds long. My dad, who had a home-based business, bought a very early model and a sales person had to come to the house to show us how to use it. :)

Wish List

Perhaps I'm feeling the bite of the economic downturn, but I found myself daydreaming about stuff I'd like to have recently. I'm pretty low-maintenance when it comes to discretionary spending - when I am flush (not very fucking lately) I spend disposable income on getting fancier than average groceries, spinning fibre and yarn, take out food. That's really about it.

But I daydream of these things:

1.    This awesome, amazing, wonderful crocheted vinyl album pillow from Toggle on Etsy.

2.    A Lampe Berger. Damn, I've wanted one of these for years, specifically this one.

3.    A set of really, really good cookware. Really good. Like, think of really good cookware (Calphalon, Paderno etc) and then imagine cookware designed by rocket scientists that makes that stuff look like disposable aluminum pie plates. Maybe this.

4.    Same goes for knives. I have fantasies about this bread slicer.

5.    A ridiculously expensive but so worth it smelly candle from Diptypque.

6.    A vintage Gretsch drum kit.

7.    A $50 steak at House of Chan.

8.    A vacation on Tiree or in Tuscany or Tanzania or Tampere.

9.    My favorite perfume from Frederic Malle which in maddeningly, inaccessably expensive.

Top of my wish list is something which is inaccessible not because it's too expensive, but because the service (and related services) are not in Canada yet due to factors like the Canadian market being too small for these companies to see the worth in negotiating a bunch of licensing agreements outside of the U.S.

10.    The new way the world is going to listen to music on the go.

Jinxed

I am totally jinxed today, at least where cooking is concerned. I went for a walk with the dog and forgot that I had chicken breasts poaching on a skillet on the stove. Got back to the smoke detector blaring and the pan boiled dry. Not to mention rubbery, overcooked chicken breasts.

Tried to salvage chicken breasts by making a chicken, broccoli and rice casserole (a back of soup-can label special) and after cooking for twice as long as the recipe indicated, had crunchy uncooked rice and dried-out top.

Made bread (corn bread from Jeffrey Hamelman's Bread) on my new pizza stone...only to discover that you need a peel to get free-formed round loaves from your counter to the pizza stone. Had flat, deflated doorstops.

During all of this, dropped and spilled many many things on the floor.

Since I am grumpy and have ruined the casserole I've decided to make brownies from a bagged mix for dinner in protest. I am pretty sure I can't possibly fuck this up. Although I did add extra cocoa and instant coffee powder - I take that back, it is entirely possible I could fuck it up.

It's nice though that it is just now getting dark at 7:28 pm - yay for daylight savings time!

E.T.A April 13 - just now re-reading this post, and thought I should update the "how can you possibly fuck up bagged brownie mix" comment. Well, you can't - but you *can* unwisely leave them out on the counter for the dog to consume, thereby ensuring a very expensive trip to the emergency vet late at night.

A little promise to myself

I'm writing a little promise here to myself, to help me actually follow through on it. For anyone in the same circumstance in April who can do it, why not join me?

April is a 3-pay period month for me. I am going to use the "extra" pay period to pay off my credit card debt.

I'm lucky - my credit card balance is relatively small (but ask me about my student loans - ha!). I'd like to pay my balance down to zero and I think I can do it within 2 months with that extra April paycheque.

There is a very large part of my brain that wants to take my extra April paycheque and go to Spain, or Cuba, or just about anywhere other than here. I am telling it to be patient.