Seared Scallops and Guacamole with Lays, and a gazillion msn popups

This was dinner. It was very good:





The guacamole I made with my usual mix. And ate with my favourite chips ever. The baby scallops were very quick and simple to make. I simply dumped a handful or two of frozen baby scallops into a nonstick pan with a tablespoon or so of canola oil, a few grinds of white pepper, and a pinch of smoked salt. I turned the pan on high, when they start sizzling I stir them around a bit every so often, and when all the juice has almost evaporated I lower the heat to med-high and let them sit just enough to get golden and stir them a bit, and then dump them in a plate. The whole thing takes less than 5 minutes, which is what I love about it lol.

And wow what on earth is this about? lolll



Ok apparently it was just people replying to posts I had replied to.

Never mind flavor, we want calories!

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This article is about how our bodies are wired to derive pleasure from the caloric content of food, not just it's flavor. Really interesting!
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classic by ~hayriyepinar on deviantART

And I present to you...

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...the wonderfully maniacal

ALLIE!!!!!!!1111111ONE1!11

Disclaimer: you might have to read a few pages before you get it, but wait till you get to the bricks post and procrastinator post and you'll love it!!

Reading that definitely cheered me up. I was starting to wonder if I was pmsing or something because I was so annoyed and fed up and cranky but I guess all the rainbows and unicorns got to me. And I've had an idea too. I want to make an Allie-style post once a week, just for the fun of it :D I can't wait to get my Paint all fired up!

P.S.

This is the BEST POST i'VE READ YET!! yeah I hadn't finished reading it when I mentioned it the first time. It's SO TRUE for me!!!!

Click twice to fullview! - "Tag The Pig"

I can just hear Piglet... awww, I miss Winnie The Pooh now lolll.


Oh ddddDear by *kizer180 on deviantART

I heart Sky Full of Bacon

I finally got around to checking out Sky Full of Bacon and so far I've loved the first two episodes. So interesting to find out how peking duck is made! I can't wait to go eat some after Lent is over now :) And I love this:

"Unlike so much food TV, I won’t cut what they say down to brief soundbites and move at a frantic, please-don’t-switch-the-channel! pace. The goal is a format which allows for thoughtful conversation but also offers the sensory satisfactions of great-looking food."

Some of my favourite pretty chickens

A beautiful golden sebright, a beautiful silver sebright, Black n' white fluffball, I think these are my blue chickens!, a white fluffball, a grey fluffball, golden fluffball, some frizzles (yes they're really called that!), big hair, a lacy one, one with a thousand flowers, a striped Plymouth, a very pretty colombian, a red and grey beauty, and this guy must have been stretching because I've never seen a rooster with his chest out so far! I mean, his head is *almost* behind his legs! lol.

Chickens!

I want one to raise some bantams someday!!! They're so pretty, my favourites are the Silkie and the Sebright. I still haven't found pictures of the blue, feather-footed breed I saw a picture of once...

Oh and there are more here. I especially love this one!

Aspen Alley 2 by *Nestor2k on deviantART

Some food ideas for next month and bacon dreams

Wow. I'm totally blown away by this guy's dedication to pizza. If ever I go to SF I have to try his pizza!

In that article there's a link to an article titled "Pizza Cognition Theory" which basically states that whatever pizza a kid has as his first pizza ever, will thereafter define pizza for him. I think that's totally true, not just for pizza but for anything else. That's one thing that if ever I have kids I'll make sure to raise them on as good quality and as wide a variety of foods as possible. Ok we might have days of eating spaghetti with store-bought sauce if we're short on time or money but there will also be homemade Pasta alla Puttanesca, sauce Bolognese, etc. And you can bet the store-bought won't be the first pasta they would try!

Speaking of which, I've never had anything other than your run-of-the-mill restaurant pizza, I've never had pizza with mozzarella di buffala and fresh basil and good stuff like that on it, baked in a real wood-fired brick oven. I have to ask my fellow Chowhounders here in Montreal where I can find some. Hopefully the question is where and not if.

And of course I'd like to try making my own pizza some day, and eventually building my own outdoor pizza oven. I love any outdoor cooking projects, whether it be making pizza, smoking my own bacon, bbq'ing, or cooking over a campfire. I have yet to try the first two though. Hopefully my bacon dreams will come true this summer if I'm not so lazy and stop procrastinating! lol.

Romesco potatoes and chickpeas with spinach

Wow I really want to make this and this sometime soon.

Pond Of The Past by =Alexandru1988 on deviantART

Prague's time by *Gutkin on deviantART

Guacamole & ritz

Pretty boring, but here's what I've been eating a lot of in the past 24 hours:



Along with hummus, salad, cereal bars, stovetop stuffing, water, and vanilla soy milk. And a multivitamin.

Am tired, went to bed late, will be going to bed early tonight. After spending some more time on Restaurant City on Facebook.

Oh, and the guacamole was made with this.

A mural and salad with baby scallops & sweet potatoes

Here's a mural on the side of a grocery store beside the Montreal-West train station:



Last night for dinner I had salad with baby scallops & sweet potatoes and toast:



The scallops I thawed, then dried with paper towels, then fried quickly with some oil, smoked salt and freshly ground white pepper. And of course I used Vio dressing, I swear that stuff is like crack, I've gone through half a bottle already because it's all I put on my salads ever since I bought it lol. I also added more white pepper & smoked salt to the salad.



I found this bread at the Maxi near my place, it's not much more expensive than cheap white bread and it tastes soooo much better. The thin parts get shatteringly crisp when you toast it and it's absolutely delicious. I haven't bought regular white bread in a while now.



The sweet potato. First I started out wanting to slice some with the mandolin and make sweet potato chips, and then I had an idea. I remembered one of the jobs I worked in a cafeteria they would put taro root though a machine so it came out in long really thin laces and then deep fry it till it was crisp and serve it as a topping on salad, and I was addicted to it. So I thought maybe I can grate sweet potato and do the same thing.



For my first try I just dumped a handful into the frying pan and it instantly spread out over the surface of the oil and foamed and looked really pretty, so I ran to get my camera but by the time I came back it had all retreated to the sides of the pan:



And then it was really annoying to fish them all out with a spoon so on my second try I put a handful into my sieve and tilted the pan with the oil a bit to be able to put the sieve lower because I didn't have enough oil in the pan:



Then dumped it out when it was brown and crispy, and salted it:



It was delicious!

And after that I made some sweet potato chips, which were delicious too:





And now I'm off to make more delicious guacamole and other stuff and watch anime with Stephan.

Guacamole, Indian snacks, and other goodies

This week I went to the grocery store and looked at the salsa section for the first time. They had a bunch of things I'd never tried before, so I got some smoky chipotle salsa, some regular mexican salsa, and some guacamole seasoning. I had never heard of guacamole seasoning but I figured I'd try it, it seemed simple enough as the label read "Just add avocados!".



It turned out to be absolutely delicious! It was sooo much better than the two times I had tried guacamole in the past. The creamy avocado was perfecly balanced with bits of bright flavorful tomatoes and onions. I'm gonna buy more avocados tomorrow to make some for my friend Stephan, who's never tried guacamole. I hope he likes it! It's a pity I didn't take a pic of the one I made yesterday but I ate it too fast lol.

In the same aisle where I bought that there was also asian, indian, and other mexican food lol. There was some asian pork and beef jerky that I'm definitely gonna have to try when lent is over, and I bought some indian munchies, which turned out really yummy, if a bit spicy:



In the candy aisle I found this:



I finished the whole bag in two days lol. I shouldn't have eaten it before going to bed last night though, it kept me awake for a while. But they were yummy, I snacked on them all afternoon at work today too.

Going to the grocery store really is like a field trip for me lol. It's so much fun to wander around and find all the yummy stuff you've never tried before!

Another incredibly delicious discovery I made this week is cheesy rice - without the cheese. One evening I decided to put a heaping tablespoonful of miso and a cube of mushroom broth along with the 3/4 cup of round-grain italian rice and 1 1/2 cup of water I was cooking. When the water was all evaporated I tasted it and found it to be very salty so I kept adding water bit by bit and figured I'd let it get creamy like a risotto. When it was nice and thick and creamy I tasted it again and it was less salty, so I had some for dinner and stuck the rest in the fridge. A day or two later I took some out, and reheated it with a tsp of margarine, and a few grinds of white pepper. I couldn't believe my tastebuds! It tasted cheesy!! I kid you not! Ok maybe it was the association of white pepper to cheese that my tongue has from eating noodles and cheese with white pepper, but the texture was perfectly cheesy too! lol. Wow, I can't believe I stumbled upon that :D And it's light-years beyond the un-cheese sauce I tried making a few weeks ago. I wasn't even able to eat that. I didn't think to take any pictures, but it's not much to see anyways, just creamy rice-pudding-looking.

I'm also 90% decided that I'll move in with my friends Stephan and Christelle this summer, partly because it was announced at my job that they're doing a pilot project of having people work from home. So I told them I was interested and I'm praying I get chosen! They're only going to start with 4 people. They asked us to let them know if we were interested before the 6th of April, so I'm guessing I won't find out if I was chosen or not until at least mid-April if not later. The hours would be reduced, 10am-4pm instead of what I'm doing now, 9am-6pm, but when I move in with Steph & Cri my rent will almost be cut in half so that will help a lot.

Ok it's getting late so I'll post about tonight's dinner tomorrow. Oyasumi-nasai! (good night in Japanese)

Swedish food

After reading this post I really want to buy this book now!

I'm gonna eventually have to start cooking Swedish food like I said I would once Lent is over!

Canadian wireless electric bike

Toronto -- Ms.Yeg Baiocchi, Daymak Inc’s CEO, is pleased to announce the launch of Daymak’s new electric bike, “The Shadow”, the first wireless eBike. The Shadow is powered by the proprietary, patent pending Daymak Drive, developed in Canada by Daymak Inc.

Read the rest here.

Sechuan food

Now I don't like spicy food. But I've been reading more and more about sechuan peppers and how the numb your mouth, not burn it. This article makes me want to go try some now.

How to make head cheese

In my daily rounds of the internet today I came across a great funny blog post about how to make head cheese. I'll have to add this to my list of cooking projects. I should really consider actually starting to make things from that list once Lent is over, I think I've had it for a year now and haven't made anything from it yet.

I have a dilemma that has arisen lately, I have to decide whether or not I want to move in with 2 of my friends since the 3rd is moving out and they've asked me if I'd like to take her room and help keep the rent down. Now I'm thinking I'd like living with friends, but I'm not sure how I'd deal with noise at night since they're both night owls and I've become very noise-sensitive when I sleep in the past couple of years. And I usually try to get to bed by 9:30pm on weeknights. I'm also wondering since both of them are gamers if the constant noise of things being killed will bug me as much as it did when Mat lived with me. It won't be any closer or farther from where I work so that doesn't affect my decision. At least I have till the end of May to decide, my lease ends 30th of June so I have to let them know a month in advance. Well at least if I end up not being able to live there any more I won't have a lease so I can leave when I want. Hmmmmm....

You might be a foodie if...

Go read "You might be a foodie if..."

I'm not as bad as some of those people, slowly getting there though :P

The windows at work haven't been this clean in months. We finally had some rain yesterday after two weeks of dry sunny weather, the windows were positively filthy. Today I got to work and just gaped at the beautiful gleaming view in front of me. It's so nice!

Last night I talked with Mat till 2am or so. I was finally able to put into words what I hadn't been able to tell him for a while now, for various reasons. It was great to get stuff off my chest. Nice warm fuzzy feeling. But nothing has changed still really, except we understand eachother a bit better now.

Every time I look out the window I'm surprised at how clean they are lol.

I went for a walk on my lunch hour again today. Now that the weather is nicer I've started going for 20-30 minute walks every day at work. I want to have some sort of physical activity since I'm not the type to play sports and I have a desk job. Mat was telling me how he started doing push-ups to get a head start for when he starts in the army and we both did some as well as sit-ups and I had him beat for the situps with 25-19 and he had me beat with the pushups at 19-1 lol. My arms are miserably weak apparently lol. Maybe I should start doing some pushups too :P

Silent Regrets by =Alexandru1988 on deviantART


Little Glass Worlds by =BrokenTrinket on deviantART

Two dinners & other stuff

On Tuesday night I made this:



The salad is curly green salad with fried sliced eggplant, avocado, and Vio dressing, the stuffing is Stove Top brand, and the baby scallops I quickly fried over high heat with a bit of freshly ground white pepper and smoked salt. It was really yummy. Especially the eggplant in the salad! I had gone on an eggplant craze a while back then got fed up of it and stopped eating it altogether for a few months, but decided to try it again. This is the first time I've tried it in salad, and the charred smoky sweet flavour is amazing when covered in vinaigrette on salad.

Tonight I made more salad with eggplant:



This time I used quartered mushrooms that had been marinated in sundried tomato & oregano vinaigrette overnight in it as well as the avocado, Vio and eggplant, and I put about twice as much eggplant in it this time too. Absolutely amazing.

Here's some gum I bought in Chinatown with an Engrish name lol:





And here's my sister and her boyfriend looking all cute snuggled up on my couch:



And here they are at the St. Joseph's Oratory:



And sometime soon I'm gonna have to make this recipe.

Off to bed I go!

St. Joseph's Oratory March 2010

My sister and her boyfriend came over Thursday night to spend the weekend. On Friday they went to the Eaton Center and then we went to watch Cop Out, Saturday we went to the St. Joseph's Oratory, the Atwater Market, and then my friend Stephan's place to watch Ghost In The Shell, and on Sunday I brought them a bunch of goodies from the bakery in Chinatown after church. Here are the pics I took at the Oratory:

Here is a playlist of the videos I took:

More Michael Pollan

Out of the kitchen, onto the couch.

Go read this people!!

Ouch!!

Set me free... by =Sugarock99 on deviantART

Caffeine makes me write

Nothing like a dose of caffeine to give me a boost of optimism. I've noticed that as well as waking me up, it makes me more cheerful and optimistic (and makes me write here lol). I've been feeling blah lately with my cold, food poisoning and a divorce looming over my head. Sunday night I slept really badly and was feeling very tired and crappy on Monday, not wanting to drink any coffee cause I was still sick. Then Monday night I went to bed at 9pm and managed to sleep well and woke up on my own at 6:30am (15 minutes before my alarm was set to go off) yesterday and felt so much better than on Monday.

Last night I was in bed by 9:30pm, went to sleep at around 10pm, then was woken by the phone an hour later. The problem was it took me till 1am to get back to sleep. I usually need at least 9 hours of sleep to function properly, so I was lying there totally discouraged thinking to myself "Oh please God not another day like Monday, please let me SLEEP!!" This morning I dragged myself out of bed feeling discouraged and dead tired, but once I drank a large tea I felt much better, not just woken up but more optimistic, the day ahead of me actually seemed manageable. I'm just hoping that it won't prevent me from sleeping tonight.

I'm also hoping that I won't feel as mind-numbingly tired this afternoon, the afternoon between 2-4pm is always the worst for me. I fall asleep after lunchtime even on a normal day, so with only 5 or so hours of sleep I'm praying I can make it through. I've tried napping on my lunch hour but I don't always manage to fall asleep. I don't dare to have any more caffeine either for fear of it preventing me sleeping again tonight and turning this into a cycle. Plus I hate feeling jittery.

But at least it's sunny!



Forgive the crappy cellphone pic, I didn't want to have to wait to upload the picture from my camera tonight. Whey are they gonna start making cameras with an email/im function? And the windows at work are filthy, it's driving me crazy wanting to clean them! Yet another reason I want to move back to the country... good air quality!

One of my favourite songs was playing on the radio this morning, don't know the title but the chorus goes "tonight's gonna be a good night" by Black Eyed Peas I think. It always makes me happy.

The tea at the newly-renovated convenience store in the Charlevoix metro is so much better than the stuff you get at Angrignon metro. They have a cool little coffee and tea brewing machine, instead of tea bags they have a selection of teas in little plastic containers with a foil lid, similar to coffee creamers, but a bit larger. You take one of the containers and open the lid of the machine, put it in, and then close the lid, which pierces the container. Then you select the size drink you want (the largest otherwise you'll have too strong tea by selecting the espresso or coffee size) and it pours the hot water through the container of tea into your cup.

It's surprising that the tea is so dark after simply being strained through quickly like that, so I think it might be a more finely ground powder of tea leaves instead of flakes that's inside the containers. Then just open the machine to remove the container & throw it away. Voila! Good tea! At the store at Angrignon, they pour hot water from a coffee pot into a cup, dunk in a tea bag, put the sugar and milk if you ask for it, swish the tea bag around for about 5 seconds, remove it, put a lid, and then give it to you. Now imagine what it looks like after the bag's been only swished around for 5 seconds and then removed. It's ever-so-mildly tea-flavored water with a bit of milk & sugar. Yuck. After the first time they did that I always asked for them to leave the bag in the cup please!! I like tea that actually tastes something thank you.

Oh, and at Charlevoix they actually have a selection of different teas, so you're not stuck with whatever cheapest brand of regular breakfast tea that they decide to use. I love earl grey, but they had run out this time so I had regular english breakfast, which was good too.

Here's something I saw when I went to the grocery store last night lol:



I wonder how long it took before someone said something about it to them?

There was also a poor bird stuck inside the grocery store, flying around in the rafters. This isn't the first time I've seen this happen, I've seen them inside the metro and the mall too. I always feel so sorry for them as I imagine they've been stuck there for a while, starving and frantic. I worry that none of the staff will notice and they'll drop dead from starvation. I usually make sure that someone knows about it. I wonder how on earth they catch them? Or do they even catch them? Maybe they just put out some poisoned bird food at night.

Argh I'm so sick of this cough! I must be driving my coworkers crazy. I have an appointment at the end of the month with a specialist. I can't wait. At least I have an air purifier now and no more cats either *sniff*.

My sister is coming over tomorrow night for the weekend, I took Friday off so we could have some more time to do stuff. She's bringing her new boyfriend for the first time, and usually when she comes over Friday night that only gives us a bit of time on Friday, the whole day on Saturday, and they half the day on Sunday to do stuff. We usually end up not doing anything special on Sunday because we get up too late to have time to go somewhere and be back at my place in time for her to pack and leave by 3pm. She has make it to the bus terminal early for the last bus back to Rawdon at 5:15pm.

I don't think I'll be able to do much running around with them this weekend though as I'm still recuperating and haven't had the time or the energy to do any housework yet. My place is a mess, I'm hoping I can at least tidy a bit before they come over.

Argh I hate clients who talk WAY too loud and blast your ear off when you answer the phone!! I feel like telling them "Move the mouthpiece AWAY from your mouth and stop talking as if I was at the other end of a warehouse!" Ouch. My ear. Thank goodness there's a volume button and I can turn it down but I can't tell which ones are quiet and which ones are loud when I answer so I have the volume set in the middle and then either get my ear blasted off or have to ask them to repeat themselves.

I think I'll end this here for now and go eat lunch. Yay for chickpea curry!!! OM NOM NOM NOM

Cellphone pic to follow.

Oh and here's a nice picture my sister took of the snow last weekend:


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