Last week's lenten food

Here's a plate of rice, salsa, and baby scallops I made:



The rice I cooked with mushroom soup base and some leftover caramelized onions. The salsa is the same as this one, and the baby scallops I defrosted under running water in a sieve, then dried them off, and fried them quickly with some oil, salt & pepper, not long enough for them to get all rubbery, they were still tender in the middle. It was really yummy.

Here's the vegan mac & cheese, some salad and canned beans:



The pasta was ok, the salad yummy, and the beans I won't buy again:



Here's the dressing I used for the salad:



And here's the amazing vegan chocolate chip cookies I made. I put about a tsp of cinnamon and LOTS of semi-sweet chocolate chips. I'm gonna remake them sometime with pecans too:



Last week on Tuesday I had to go to Sherbrooke St. West for an errand and decided to stop by the Japanese/Korean store and the Indian place too. I bought some miso paste for the first time:



Lots of seaweed (one brand was on sale 2 for 1):



Some seasoned mushrooms:



And of course some more furikake:



I made miso soup with strips of seaweed, some furikake, tofu, and some of the mushrooms. I forgot to put the mushrooms in at first:



Then I put them in and the soup wasn't as pretty any more, but twice as yummy:



This is an dessert I bought at Dad's Bagels, the Indian place. I don't know what it's called, it's fried dough dipped in syrup, and very yummy:



Here's some guacamole I made. I didn't bother looking up a recipe online, but I remembered it's supposed to have garlic, so I mashed up an avocado with a crushed garlic clove, some Vio dressing, smoked salt and white pepper, and it was really yummy, if a bit too rich. Next time I'll put some chopped onions and tomatoes in too:

Snow in Rawdon

Today I brought my cats to my parents place for them to keep them for me because of my chronic cough. I took a few pictures of the freshly-fallen snow at the same time:

002 by ~Maurizio-Fantini on deviantART

Eat fat. Lose weight.

Go read this people! Gone are the days of being afraid of lard! (Except for grocery-store lard, be afraid of that.)

I have to go buy this book too. Yay fat!

Why NOT to park in front of a fire hydrant...lol

see more Epic Fails

Water by =aeon-100 on deviantART

Rosemary Bread

The rosemary bread turned out delicious:



Especially dipped in olive oil & tamari:





This stuff is like crack, I could eat a whole loaf like this!

Snow, cats and construction

On Saturday morning I got up to see a beautiful snowstorm outside the window, and some kids playing outside:



It didn't last long though, the sun came out in the afternoon.

I stayed in and went on the internet for a while, and the cats kept me company and snoozed:





Here's a pic of the construction on the corner of St. Urbain and President Kennedy near my church. I wonder what they're gonna build?

GMH

A few days ago I decided to delete Plime and FML from my favourites list at work that I check every day because I didn't want to continue reading such negative stuff all the time. Then today on The Ancient Way forums someone posted a link to GHM - Gives Me Hope, the opposite of FML. If I wasn't at work I would have gone through several kleenexes already crying! I'm gonna send that website to everyone I know!

Quick bread

Tonight I want to make bread! That recipe is so simple and quick. Or I might go hunting for tamari and nutritional yeast to make a half or quarter batch of vegan mac & cheese instead. Hmmm...I think I'll try for the mac & cheese and do the bread Friday night or on the weekend instead. I should go over to my friend Stephan's place to bake instead of baking alone, it's always more fun with friends around. And I can get him to try some of my vegan mac & cheese too lol. Oh and I can use Jen's blender to make the cheese sauce mix too! :D And maybe I can make that rosemary bread while I'm at it too if I have time. Or not, we'll see.

On repentance

I found a very good blog post written here.

It goes well with this earlier post.

List of vegan recipes I want to make

Ok I decided to google "vegan recipes" after reading the lenten foods thread over at Desertcalling.com and came across Vegweb.com, and clicked on the "most popular recipes" link. I was surprised all the yummy-sounding recipes there were so I decided to make a list here of those I want to make.

Avocado sandwich
Chocolate chip cookies
Mac n'cheese
Cheesy bean enchiladas
Unbeef stew
Uncheese mix
Shepherd's pie
Chickpea salad sandwich
Ranch dressing
Spanakopita
Rosemary bread
Lasagna
Sloppy Steves
Tofu scrambled eggs
Velvet red lentil soup
Lisa's famous shepherd's pie
Spinach/artichoke dip
Eggplant "chips"

Salad and Nanaimo bars

I made a salad last week with some leftover iceberg lettuce I had, and tossed the brown leaves to Licorice. She loves salad:



Here's the salad:



It consists of a quarter head of iceberg, sliced, with a sliced avocado, a handful of grape tomatoes cut in half, a few tablespoons of cold leftover fried onions and mushrooms (that I fried with a bit of spicy mesquite), some homemade vinaigrette, salt & freshly ground white pepper. Delicious! The fried onions really made it yummy.

I ate it with some amazingly good bread I bought that I dipped in some store-bought sundried tomato & oregano vinaigrette. It was actually really yummy!:



And here's a pic of one of the nanaimo bars I made with Stephan last week before I cut it up. I decided to double the layer of chocolate on top cause I love chocolate, but the whole thing ended up being too thick, and too little of the middle layer compared to the top and bottom. Next time I'll do the same, except double the middle layer as well and split the recipe into 2 pans instead of 1 to make it thinner. And I think I'll try rolling out the bottom layer before putting it in the pan to make it a bit more even. It turned out really yummy though, despite being too thick:



I can't wait to re-try this recipe after Lent!

Salted Herring Fillets, at last!

Last week I went back to the european deli near my place in search of the elusive salted herring fillets. It turns out they had changed brands and the new brand used different packaging, so I hadn't recognized it last time I went. So I got some, it's in whole fillets instead of pieces, but just as yummy:





I also bought some good Russian rye bread to eat it on:



And made some delicious Russian-style open faced herring sandwiches:

Weather and Chinese pastries

Here's a pic I took at work last week. We're starting to finally have some more light in the evening!:



The fog and rain we had in January:



Here are some of the pastries I bought last time I went to Chinatown.Here's a salted egg yolk pastry with taro:



A preserved egg pastry:



A fried pastry with red bean paste, very yummy:



Very yummy curried beef pastry:



The one on the left is my favourite, it's like a cinnamon bun except made with dried pork and shallots! So yummy!



BBQ'ed pork pastry, another favourite:

Remi Gaillard

I had seen this drawn in cartoon before but this guy decided to act it out... :P



Here's the video:



Another few of my favourites are Foot 2008, Kangaroo (for the song, not the video, the video I find kind of mean) and Put it Where You Want. Watch them! :P

Yes alcohol was involved in this posting :P lolll

Oh! and Best of Elevator!!!

And the Bat lollllll :P

Frogs and calm

Something my friend Scott said to me the other day made me think. "So you've finally learned to relax?!" I always thought of myself as a fairly laid-back, relaxed person, but maybe I'm not.

A combination of that, this post about singing, this article about nature/silence, and this track that I'm listening to reminded me of how I felt when I was sitting outside in the country listening to those frogs, how I didn't feel like I had to get up and do something, I could just sit there for hours listening to the frogs singing. It gave me great stillness and peace. I long to be able to experience that again sometime this summer while visiting my parents, the sitting outside at dusk listening to the frogs peeping, enjoying the calm. I want to move back to the country so I can relax. There's no frogs to listen to here except for the recordings I buy.

Fish and snow

A few weeks ago I went to the european deli near my place and they didn't have any of the herring fillets I usually buy so I got some salted herring pieces instead, thinking it was the same thing, and some sprats:







The flavor of the herring was delicious, but they were chock full of bones. It took me half an hour to pick all the bones out of these small pieces. There was some roe also, which was yummy if a bit bland:



The sprats were ok, but I won't buy them again. The label said in brine, but they were in oil. Translation mix-up I guess:



I ended up giving the rest to my parents. I wonder if they've liked them any better than me?

And here's some pretty weather we had 2 weeks ago, it was changing from one minute to the next, very windy!: