Hope that everyone is having a safe, relaxing day filled with fun and family. And food. Lots and lots of food. We had a fantastic breakfast this morning; Mom has made it a tradition for the past few years to make what she calls ’breakfast strudels’. It’s scrambled egg, bacon (turkey bacon for our family though), and I think some green onion and other little tidbits for flavour wrapped up inside a phyllo pastry. Deelish. 

I also helped her put together what we had hoped would be a new Christmas breakfast tradition, Champagne and orange juice parfaits. Next time I think we will have to up the fruit and juice to alcohol ratio – they were a little too strong for most. We were all spooning away at our glasses for most of the morning while we opened gifts and watched the Little Brother rip open his many toys and videogames.

Now I’m starting to get hungry again… I know I am definitely looking forward to dinner (and dessert – need to eat up the rest of those cookies, and I made a carrot cake with tons of icing, yum) tonight! Merry Christmas!

I got to make dinner tonight, and was told to have it ready by 7pm when most people would be home. I’m done around 6:45 and hungry… but I decided to be kind and wait up for my Mom who was running a number of errands after work, but I didn’t realise just how long that would take. I was ravenous, and a little (actually, a lot) on the cranky side when she came home sometime after eight, but she brought back a microwave (yay!) so all was forgiven. I made some ‘curried’ chicken from a recipe I saw in a Chatelaine magazine; it called for bananas, which I thought was a little odd, but I thought what the hey.

And I say “curried” the way I do because it was not very spicy, or curry-like at all. It looked like curry, and smelled a bit like it too, but it had a really mild, sweet flavour thanks to the banana that must have overpowered all the other spices I added. And to top it off, the rice I randomly picked out of the pantry to go with the chicken was basmati rice, a rice which I later discovered has a somewhat sweet taste to it. I just thought it sounded fancy, and more exciting than plain old white rice so I threw it into the pot. Don’t get me wrong, dinner still tasted good, and no one complained (to me anyway). Not even my little brother who usually groans when he finds out that I made dinner. I’m not sure I would make it again though; next time I’ll try “regular” curry sans fruity ingredients.

I am quite proud of myself though, I made that dinner with no supervision whatsoever. You should all be proud.

I  broke the microwave.Don’t ask me how, it just happened. There I was, a bowl of cold oats and milk at the ready, my hand on the microwave door. I put my oatmeal-to-be inside, closed it and pushed the one minute button, and then it makes a sort of cracking noise, then shuts off.

Worst part of it was, no one else was home at the time, so I had to cook that oatmeal ye olde fashioned way: on the stove. In a pot that is now coated with charred oats and burnt milk I can’t seem to scrape off no matter how hard I scrub. How long are you supposed to cook oatmeal on the stove anyway? I think I’m just going to leave that pot in the sink, and then disappear out of the house when the others come home and discover it. After all that, the oatmeal was only so-so and probably not worth the trouble. (Don’t tell anyone).

I bought a box of these cute little things from a little kiosk at my local mall (called Purdy’s Chocolates) as a part of my Mom’s birthday gift. They’re sugar-free, hazelnut truffle-filled hedgehogs. The woman at the shop let me try a small one before I bought it, and it was surprisingly tasty, for being sugar-free. I could have sworn I was eating a regular chocolate. In fact, it tasted almost exactly like those chocolates you buy at the airport – unfortunately the name escapes me right now –  that are packaged to look like gold bars. I know they’re Swiss though. At least I think so anyway. I just hope Mom will like her little sugar-free hedgehogs, or at least appreciate the thought, because I know she’s on a “diet”. And more importantly, they’re tasty.

Happy Birthday Mama!

My friend L came to visit me today, and brought a book with her that she’s been reading lately called The G.I. Diet. It’s based around the glycemic index (hence the “G.I.”) and goes on about how our bodies react to the different amounts of sugars in the foods we eat. It may sound complicated, but it’s basically common sense. The G.I. Diet doesn’t tell you anything new, just the whole don’t eat too much fat, avoid refined carbs and most sugary things. Pretty straight-forward, and it seemed simple enough to follow – no weird foods to make or anything – so I offered to try it with her just to see what it was like.

Andhis is what I’ve had to eat today so far, trying to stick within the G.I. guidlines:

• Breakfast: a bowl of oatmeal mixed with some fat free, sugar-free yogurt and a handful of blueberries. Off to a good start, I think. 
• Snack: glass of skim milk
• For some reason, I neglected to have lunch. Oh right, I was out looking for a birthday present for The Mother (it’s tomorrow, oops).
• My next snack was some cherries, celery sticks and hummus, then a small slice of poundcake. Okay, so maybe that should count as my lunch…
• Dinner: TBE (To Be Eaten).

If it wasn’t for that slice of cake (which wasn’t even all that good… damn pound cake, you looked so yummy just sitting there on the counter), I’ve been doing well. Yet for some reason I’m finding it extremely difficult to not think about food all the time now that I know I’m on a “diet”. It’s crazy! Even now as I’m typing away that pound cake is calling to me… that same, mediocre pound cake. And the crackers and cheese (both on the “red-light”, aka banned foods list) my brother is eating in front of my very eyes. Never have I wanted to eat those plain, cardboard-flavoured crackers as much as I do now that I know I can’t. Or technically, shouldn’t. 

So I say, screw the salads and the stupid diets. Sorry L, Im gonna get me some crackers!

I  really do. If there was only one kind of salad I could ever eat for the rest of my life, it would be greek. I might go so far as to say if there was only one meal I could eat for the rest of my life… but then I would be missing out on some really good baked goods. Like cupcakes, for example.

Last night I ended up going out with a friend of mine to this Greek place (in Burlington) called Sotiris. Never been there before, but said friend has always raved about it. It’s a small, relatively casual restaurant with all the traditional Greek fare: souvlaki, gyros, moussaka and the like. We shared a platter of every kind of meat available, shrimp, potatoes, salad, rice, bread… and there was more. It was HUGE. Everything was monster-sized, although nicely presented. And priced, now that I think about it.  For the two of us it ended up costing less than $40, if you don’t count the wine we drank, and we brought most of it home because we were so stuffed. If you’re ever in the area you should check it out.

Now I’m off to watch The Kill Point finale with The Sis… the show hasn’t been particularly great persay, and I have yet to figure out just what has kept me watching since the pilot episode until now, but I’m off nonetheless.

Rejoice! A Cora’s has finally opened up in my hometown, and it’s basically right down the road. The only other times I’ve been were when I visited The Sis at university in Kingston, or my friend J in Missisauga where we went often enough to get to know the menu (incredibly healthy choices, unless you opt for the things smothered in chocolate sauce like I do), and the people who worked there by name. It’s a good way to get smoothies on the house, but only if our server was the teenage boy that I’m pretty sure had a crush on us. The last time we went, we found out he didn’t work there anymore and we received no complimentary breakfast drinks… boo to that, we said.

The House is planning on going there for brunch in the next couple days. Mmm, I can almost taste those banana-chocolate crepes now…

Today my Dad turns 53. As a gift, my sister and I decided to get him an iPod Nano and a smart looking traveling case to go with it. He’s been starting to get a little more techno-savvy – using Limewire to download Deep Purple and the like - and as he takes the train everyday to work, we figured why not get him something that might make the commute more bearable? Well, we hope it will anyway.

Somehow my Dad has been able to make this commute for over twenty years, and for that I applaud him. I’ve had issues with taking the GO to work just for four months in the summer! Man, on those days I forgot my Nintendo DS at home (or in the car, dang it) I just couldn’t drown out the noise of other passengers talking obnoxiously loud on their cellphones, or typing away on laptops, or the dreaded crying babies and otherwise whiney children. I remember how I would come home and complain to him when I was done with school about how I never wanted to work in Toronto unless I lived there. He would just smile at me with a weird sort of “father knows best” look. Now that I think about it, I believe the man is just impervious to any sort of annoyance. He did put up with my siblings and I for almost as long as he’s been commuting after all. I can only assume that the man is an impenetrable rock of patience and general contentment with life (among many, many other things). Now he can be a rock with music.

So now I’m making a cake for him. The Sister has mysteriously vanished from the house… probably to hide at a friend’s and avoid her share of the work, but that was to be expected. I thought about taking pictures, but the kitchen is a mess. Perhaps when I start work on the icing, maybe after the fact, I’ll pull out the camera. And no, I am not making rock cakes.

And speaking of “snow” – how could I forget(!) - I made Baked Alaska the other day. Or should I say I made a Baked Alaska? Er, with my Mom that is… Okay, okay, so I just helped. Anyway, it’s actually not as complicated as I thought it might be, and the only trouble we had was keeping ourselves from eating all the meringue topping before we spread it on the cake. Yummy.

I stuck on some pecans afterwards because it looked kind of plain — in hindsight I should have realized that it would look like poop on snow! I wish I had put it in a nicer looking dish before I snapped the photo too, but I was afraid I’d break it. It was quite yummy though. Definitely going to have to try making one on my own someday.

This was not the Turkey Sandwich, the Soup in a Box, or even the Mac n’ Cheese I used to make while at university. I was taking baby steps. The first dinner I had made all on my own – I felt so proud, so accomplished then. It was only some chicken, perogies, and a salad (granted, it was of the Salad in a Bag variety, but a salad nonetheless), yet at the time I had felt like I had passed some test, some domestic right of passage. I can see you laughing right now, but for me this was a monumental event. I could cook! Me, for which the kitchen was my least favourite room in the house, me, the girl who always had scrambled eggs because the omlete never turned out right, the girl who was afraid of cooking meat because that meant you had to touch it when it was raw… and probably the most disgusting tactile sensation ever. It took me back to the days of highschool biology when we dissected rats and cow eyeballs and fetal pigs. 

At any rate, I’m sure I am still that girl. In fact, I know I am: I use the rice cooker to make rice. And just the other day I made a bowl of pasta for dinner because it was easy and I wanted to get back to The English Patient that was waiting (dare I say it) patiently for me on my bedside table. It was only two weeks ago when I made my first “meal”, and I haven’t made anything remarkable since then. But one day I will be able to make something spectacular. Next on my agenda is a vegetable stir-fry. Or possibly something with shrimp. Baby steps.