Category Archives: Food

A Promise To Myself

For a long time I thought I had my shit together. But it turns out I’m still carrying all sorts of baggage around, and I hadn’t yet taken the time to sort my shit out, if you’ll pardon my French. Instead, I was avoiding. I was keeping myself busy. I was pretending. It’s time for change. That change starts today.

That’s not to say I’m unhappy. Far from it! But I’ve taken a step back from a lot of things in order for me to be able to concentrate on making myself whole again. I’ve got a lot of work to do. I’ve narrowed down my goals into three tangible, attainable targets. I intend to improve:

  • My career prospects
  • My relationship with my daughter
  • My health
To that end, I’m working to eliminate distractions and stressful, unhappy situations from my life so that I can concentrate on the three targets above. And I’m making lists. Have I ever mentioned how much I love making lists?
So, here are my lists. By sharing them with you, I hold myself more accountable. I’ll touch base and update on progress, and you can ask how I’m doing, too!

Career Prospects/Work and Community Involvement
  • March with my brothers and sisters in the Evict Rob Ford rally tomorrow. 
  • Attend NDP Leader’s Levee Saturday night in a pretty black dress. Hand out business cards. Make contacts. Look for opportunities. Enjoy spending time with like-minded folk who have like-minded goals. 
  • Run for the position of Secretary on the executive of my union’s area council.
  • Find someone to nominate me as a delegate to our regional Labour Council.
  • Bug my manager to (finally!) implement the career development portion of my most recent performance evaluation.
  • Join some committees and working groups. It’ll look good on my resume.
  • Volunteer at a soup kitchen. It’ll feel good in my heart.
Relationship with Gwen Junior
  • Start a Saturday afternoon hot yoga routine at Moksha Yoga Uptown (only seven dollars!).
  • Hire a math tutor – sit with them and help.
  • Write a weekly letter to her, and encourage her to do the same.
  • Try to weasel my way back onto her Facebook hahaha
  • Teach her to cook.
My Health
  • Aforementioned weekly hot yoga.
  • Buy a pair of ice skates – skate for free Friday nights.
  • Check out the lane swimming up the street once a week.
  • Stop eating such bullshit! Like, seriously!
  • My friend Mitchell (you like what I did there, M?) just sent me this brown rice detox thing – maybe I’ll try that.
  • Get a solid eight hours sleep.
  • Drink more water!

“Natural” Soda Pop? What the Zevia?!

Today I enjoyed an impromptu food court lunch with a good friend: intrepid gossip blogger and general internet shockster, SoJu.

Drunk karaoke - circa January 2011

Okay well “enjoyed” might be misleading – actually it was the crappiest shawarma I’ve had in months. What’s up, Anoush? You did not bring your A-game today! The company was lovely, though.

After walking with Soju to the scene of her meeting in Yorkville, I decided to have a wander through Pusateri’s on my way back to the office. For those of you who don’t know – Pusateri’s is a chi chi frou frou gourmet food store where lunch costs 85$ and they offer valet parking and pet minding for your diamond-collar-studded yapper named Pookums.

So I poked around for a while, but eventually I got tired of being shoved and jostled by wealthy matriarchs and sunglass-wearing socialites who could obviously smell the middle class on me and did not spare the snake eyes. So I grabbed the cheapest drink in the cooler and got the hell out of Dodge. Read more »

Adventures in Breakfast

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I hope entries written with my iPhone app don’t suck. You’ll have to let me know I guess.

So hi! I’m on holidays this week. This morning, I rolled out of bed after nine o’clock, made myself a cup of Dutch chocolate flavoured coffee (which, guys, really sucks – I’m out of coffee and this crap’s my backup) and thought, “geez it sure would be good to have eggs Benedict this morning!”

Except I don’t have English muffins or back bacon, and can I be honest and say the thought of poaching eggs and making a freaking hollandaise sauce kinda intimidated me? So I did what any culinary fraidy cat in my position would do: I turned to allrecipes.com for recipes and YouTube for how-to videos :) I’d link you some of the better ones I found, but again, iPhone n00b here. Is n00b even still a cool thing to say? Is cool? Oh man, I’m glad my kid doesn’t read this. Read more »

Not Everything I Do Turns Out Awesome

AND IT WAS TURRIBLE, TURRY!

Well, I talk a good game about liking to bullshit my way through recipes, dancing to the beat of my own drum, et cetera. Usually it works out very well. Other times I create serious culinary disasters. This is one of those times.

I stumbled across an entry recently on a really super blog – whatsonmyplate.net. This is quickly becoming my favourite foodie blog. The author, Tonya, is a fantastic photographer (I love love love photos of food!) and I love her ideas and recipes. One in particular piqued my interest – homemade mustard! It seemed ridiculously easy. Soak mustard seeds in vinegar, then plunk ‘em in the food processor with some salt and some sugar. Next thing you know I’m as sexy as the Barefoot Contessa and I’ve got my own show on the Slice Network. Right? No, Jennie, that’s bullshit. But anyway, I decided to give it a go. Read more »