Extra protein?

Today I made two recipes from the cookbook Chelka sent us for Christmas, The Balanced Plate by Renee Loux. One was seasoned steamed greens and the other was wasabi mashed sweet potatoes. Both were quite tasty and pretty darn easy, although I did put a bit too much wasabi in the potatoes. Matt finished his food, and I had about two bites left when I wondered aloud about the little white oval shaped things in the mashed potatoes and popped one in my mouth to see if the taste would give it away. "Looks like insect eggs," Matt said as I swallowed. I didn't finish my mashed potatoes.

The last two weeks I worked and worked and worked like a crazy person. I racked up 90 hours in ten straight days. The most I worked in a day was 15 hours this past Thursday, although the Monday of that week was a close second, coming in at 12 hours plus an hour of commuting time. It makes me tired just thinking about it.

BUT! Some good came of it all. I produced two games for Telus Mobility: a text messaging game that challenges you to translate textspeak into real English and a picture/video messaging game featuring monkeys.

I also kicked out a holiday card for SHS where you can design your own ugly holiday sweater and view a gallery of sweaters that others have made. I highly recommend this site. I usually get sick of my projects, especially if I have had to produce them quickly as I did this one, but I keep going back to see what new sweaters people have created. I am really impressed with the number of people interacting with the site. As of this moment, there are 346 sweaters in the gallery. With user-generated content sites, the general rule of thumb is that 1% of people who visit the site will actually contribute something. I think this site blows that 1% statistic away!

Change of world view

Tonight I realized that the word camcorder is short for camera recorder, and now it sounds even more stupid to me than it did before.

My baby's a damn good one

Yesterday, Matt spend a good chunk of the day making me a present, which turned out to be a mix CD. When asked why he put each song on the CD, he would answer, "Because it's a good song about love." I love my new CD, but I don't think I expressed my gratitude very well yesterday. So let me take this opportunity to tell everyone that my mix CD is awesome, almost as awesome as the boy who made it for me. He's a good one. Lemme tell ya. The rest of ya'll missed out, cuz he's mine!

Ketchup Ball

My teachers in school sometimes used the term "catch up ball," as in "Don't get behind in your assignments, or you'll have to play catch up ball." While I understood that they were saying "catch up" I always thought it was a funny phrase because it sounds like "ketchup ball." How would you play ketchup ball anyway? Sounds pretty messy to me.

Animal liberation + uncheese

Tonight Matt and I made the worst pizza we've ever made. It was kind of my fault and kind of Matt's fault, but mostly I think it was the fault of Jo Stepaniak, author of The Ultimate Uncheese Cookbook. Yes, we made uncheese pizza.

I should have known better when I saw that the recipe called for 1/2 cup of nutrional yeast, which I find to taste really nasty. I should have stopped when I realized I was missing a key ingredient. And I really should have let the blender run longer so as to avoid chunks of oatmeal in my cheese. Alas, I did none of these things, and now I have about two and a half cups of mushy stuff that looks like hummus but tastes like... well, not cheese.

Matt's part of the story is just another chapter in his endless search to find a pizza crust recipe that tastes really good and not bready and doesn't take upwards of three hours to prepare. This time he went with a recipe involving beer. Was this just so that he could go buy beer? He may deny it, but I think it was. (Incidentally, I was the one who pointed out the fact that cases of Stella Artois were on sale at the IGA and that the purchase of said case intitled one to a free commemorative tote bag. The tote is huge.) Despite several reviews stating the contrary, the pizza crust was really bad. It's what I imagine hard tack or whatever the pioneers ate on the road tasted like. Only fresher, not that that makes it much better.

The pizza sauce I made was tasty. Not my best, but tasty nonetheless. Here is a picture of our pizza. The uncheese is under the sauce since its texture would have made it impossible to spread on top of the sauce. The cheese on top is colby that I wish I had saved for more noble purposes.



One highlight of the evening: an animal liberation protest outside our house! Oh yes! This is the second protest we've witnessed on our street. Both times the cops have shown up before the protesters. This protest lasted much longer than the first, and there were way more cops this time. We even saw a few in riot gear: masks, clubs and all. However, as I'm sure you can imagine, there was no need for riot cops. The vegan protesters were quite peaceful as well as bilingual. The first protest was in French, so I'm not sure what their demands were.

New recipe post: apples

I just posted a new recipe post to my myspace blog.

Thanksgiving #2

On Thursday, we had our second Thanksgiving feast of the year -- this time on American Thanksgiving and in Boston with Kris And Friends. This picture of Kris and Porky Roy sums it all up for me.