i'd just like to wish you all a very happy holiday, and so would these lovely ladies:

i've decided that i could pretty much live on nothing but gulab jamuns.

if you haven't had the pleasure of having gulab jamuns, allow me to explain: imagine the most amazing timbit possible (basically a deep-fried ball of milk-enriched dough) that is then soaked in a mind-blowing cardamom-scented syrup. the description does not do it justice. it is beyond orgasmic. ohhhhhhhh baby.

i may not be ready for proper holiday cheer, but i'll take any excuse to bake, really. but in the spirit of not wanting to gain ridiculous amounts of weight again this winter, i've tweaked a recipe for gingerbread to make it about a million times more delicious and just a smidge less bad for you. whole-wheat flour adds fibre and texture, and i've replaced the traditional molasses with honey. australian manuka honey has a caramelesque depth which complements the three kinds of ginger perfectly, but of course, feel free to experiment with different varieties.

gingerbread pear muffins
makes a dozen, give or take

2/3 cup all-purpose flour
2/3 cup whole-wheat flour
1 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp cinnamon
1/4 tsp ground ginger
1/4 tsp salt
1/2 cup oil
1/4 cup water
1/2 cup granulated sugar
1/2 cup honey
3 large eggs
1 thumb-sized piece of fresh ginger, peeled and grated
4-6 chunks crystallized ginger, chopped into small bits
1 medium-sized pear, such as bosc

preheat oven to 350°f. combine flours, baking soda, cinnamon, ground ginger, and salt in a large bowl, and set aside. in a separate bowl, stir together sugar and honey until well combined. add eggs one at a time, and beat well. add this mixture to the flour mixture and stir until just combined. add oil, water, and grated ginger, beating until smooth. peel pear and chop into small pieces. gently fold pear and crystallized ginger into batter. pour into well-oiled muffin tins and bake until a knife inserted into the centre of a muffin comes out clean, about 20-25 minutes, watching carefully. remove muffins from muffin tin and place on wire racks to cool.

enjoy with a nice cup of tea and a comfy chair.

sometimes, when i'm truly down, the only thing that properly cheers me up is the schubert:



don't know why. one of those giant dark chocolate bars with fleur de sel doesn't hurt either, come to think of it.

oh, and i made quince preserves. have a picture:

so today i was at the starbucks in uptown waterloo, around the noonhour lunch rush of crazy. the place was full of people in outfits that looked more expensive than mine (i pay a surprising amount of money for outfits that don't look like you'd pay a surprising amount of money for them, i'll have you know) and after i got my latte i decided it would be a good idea to pay a trip to the restroom. i tried the door of the ladies' room - locked. i could have waited, i suppose, but i had a bus to catch and decided to try the men's room. unoccupied - score! so i went in, did my business, and left. as i exited, i held the door for a gentleman on his way in. he said thanks. then, i noticed a pair of yuppies, staring at me, with their jaws firmly planted on the floor.

what the fuck, people? is it really so shocking that somebody with lady parts should use the men's room? it's not like it was the kind of men's room with mutliple cubicles and urinals and stuff: in fact, it looked identical to the ladies' room, same toilet, same sink, same soap. the only difference is the stick figure on the door. in fact, the starbucks just up the road at wlu has the same two washrooms, but they're simply labeled "washroom," not men's or womens. i don't see what the big deal is, but people definitely looked at me with, well, horror.

i think they maybe need to get out more.

i started watching the first few seasons of curb your enthusiasm again this weekend. it brightens my spirits a little to watch it:



because larry david is brilliant.

kitchener's one redeeming quality is that its sketchy downtown shopping centre has a black-and-white photobooth, so when i feel like taking silly impromptu portraits of what i look like at the university, and i haven't been carrying a heavy camera with me, i can:

i've been stuffing eggplant like this as a nice special-occasion thing for a couple years now. here's my recipe's most recent incarnation, which i like to serve simply with a bit of rice and beans:

stuffed eggplant of AWESOME

serves 4

1 medium eggplant, halved lengthwise
1/4 red bell pepper, chopped
1/4 green bell pepper, chopped
1/2 small onion, chopped
4 mushrooms, chopped
1/2 of a 150 ml jar artichoke hearts, drained and chopped
1/2 small zucchini, chopped
1 small wedge of brie, cubed
2-3 tablespoons crushed tomato
1 small handful fresh basil, sliced into thin ribbons (or chiffonade, if you prefer)
1 small serrano or other small chile, chopped (optional)
salt and pepper, to taste
a few glugs of good olive oil

preheat oven to 400 degrees. place eggplant, cut sides down, in a glass baking dish and fill about halfway with water. cover with tinfoil and place in preheated oven for about twenty minutes, until eggplants are soft. meanwhile, prepare the other vegetables and things for stuffing. combine bell peppers, onion, mushrooms, artichoke hearts, chile, zucchini, and basil, and set aside. when eggplants are soft, remove from oven, drain, and carefully turn over onto a clean work surface. scoop out most of the seedy portion of the insides, leaving a nice trough for filling with stuffing ingredients. place eggplant halves back in baking dish, and divide stuffing mixture between them. sprinkle the bits of brie overtop and cover with crushed tomato, a good crackling of freshly ground pepper, and a sprinkling of salt. add a few good glugs of olive oil to the dish, cover again with tinfoil, and return to the hot oven. bake another 20-30 minutes, or until cheese is melty and the vegetables are soft. serve with rice and beans, or whatever.

addendum: it's nine below zero!

it's been years since i've listened to nick drake.

he's still really good.

if you don't listen to nick drake, you really, really should.

i don't really have much to announce before i head off to edmonton for the week, except TRAFIKMAGASINET:



because i love everything about it.

see y'all on the flipside!

big thankies and respeck to my beautiful sister-in-law nicole for getting me hooked on the making of preserves. she recently gifted us a KILLER peach raspberry champagne jam, that's absolutely stunning on toast. ohh baby.

when i was last in upstate new york, i was fortunate enough to find a stand at the ithaca farmer's market selling prunus cerasifera, or cherry plums. these plums are, not surprisingly, about the size of a cherry and have an intense, sweet-tart flavour. what's really special about them, though, is their incredibly high pectin content, making them a natural choice for preserves. it's quite a laborious process separating all the plums from their tiny stones, but the sparkling, jewel-like tart red jelly you're left with is well worth the effort.



thus:

plum jelly

1 pint cherry plums, washed and pitted
6 tablespoons sugar

combine plums and sugar over medium heat, stirring to disolve sugar. simmer, stirring occasionally, until plums have cooked down to a uniform shade of bright red and a thick, jelled consistency. as jam is approaching readiness, prepare three 60 ml jars by sterilizing under hot water. spoon jam into prepared jars with a small funnel, seal jars and place in a heavy stock pot such that they are covered by at least one inch with water. boil for ten minutes, then remove jars carefully with tongs and place on paper towels. if jars have properly sealed, you will hear a "pop" sound shortly after they are removed from the water, and the top of the jar will not move when pressed. since this produces rather a small batch, you may skip the jar-boiling canning steps if you wish, and simply eat the jelly within 2-3 weeks. (chances are that it won't last that long regardless; i for one have been quite greedily having second helpings of toast every morning since our sudden influx of homemade preserves.)

*also: for an extra-special and very comforting autumnal treat, try adding just a teensy hint of cinnamon while the jelly is cooking.

moving on from last entry's self-pitying emofest, i now have an even more urgent, even more pressing matter to attend to.

and that's my pants.

namely: coloured jeans. gosh, i love them. basic blue's all well and fabulous, i guess, but i confess to owning about 1548797898346 pairs of black skinnies, each slightly different from one another and each designed to suit a specific sartorial situation. i've also strayed slightly from the ubergothness (and yes they ARE goth, seeing as i remember all this flouncy black stuff when it was cool the first time, thankyouverymuch. emo? i'd rather have the bubonic plague. but i digress.) of the black skinnies and gone so far as to purchase pairs in a subdued mustard yellow and white. (i've also since managed to stain them both.)

my point is, i'm having trouble deciding what other colours to introduce into my wardrobe of pants of craziness. turquoise? bubblegum? eggplant? seafoam green, perhaps? i saw a pair of red jeans that looked pretty fantabulous


(kind of like this)


but i also clearly recall owning red jeans when i was in about third grade and thinking back then that they were the most wicked awesome things ever. :|

when i was a youngster, i recall that all my wacky trousers all came with hideously outlandish and over-embellished faux-leather belts. i never wore them. i don't know why they insisted on including them with every pair of pants. they gathered dust until one day in probably sixth grade, i decided to try and sell them off to some of the neighbourhood folks in a garage sale.

all i earned that day was a sunburn.

i'm sure many of you often ask yourselves, "gee, how can i be as cool as sami?"

thankfully, i have the answer. and it's easier than you might think!



it's a mother flipping fanny pack.



very good

you buy

ladies and gentlemen,

everything ok!
everything ok!
everything ok!
everything ok!
everything ok!
everything ok!

HOLY CRAP.

i am the summertime queen. what makes me say this, you ask? i just invented something better than ice cream. the other day i decided that one of my mangoes was getting a little too overripe, and since i wasn't ready to eat it just then, i decided to hack it to bits and freeze it. when i came to thaw out the results this evening, it had of course become a giant orange frozen block. i supposed therefore that the only reasonable way to try to eat this was in the form of a mango smoothie, and this is what happened. it's got the creamy, buttery sweetness of ice cream, except that it's vegan, the fat content is next to nothing and, because of the mango's high water content, it's way lighter on calories and sugars as well, yet somehow so very VERY satisfying. ohh, baby.

i recommend, also, that you try and use a variety of mango that's not too stringy, as the fibrous stringy bits are a real pain to blenderize.

mango ice cream

1 mango, cut into chunks and frozen until a nice firm block
1/2 cup plain soymilk
sweetner, if you must (but you really don't need it!)

first, unless you have a very powerful blender, you might want to get a good sharp knife and try to hack that frozen mango block into somewhat smaller frozen chunks. place these chunks into a blender (or hand-blender friendly dish if you, like me, have a hand-blender) and pour in soymilk. whizz until smooth and thick. spoon into a big bowl and tuck in!

because some people want to hear me make an ass of myself on talk radio:

ontario today

scroll down to wednesday's barbecue segment, about 15 minutes in. there's some interesting chitchat and talking with other folks, and then there's me.

and then there's maude.



(am i the only person who, upon hearing the words "and then there's" always mentally fills in with "maude"?)

RADIO ONE
RADIO ONE

since our television died, i've kind of got into the routine of listening to radio one during the day while i cook and sew, instead of watching star trek. (i still watch star trek on the computer, in the evenings, mind you. heaven forbid i let two days go by without watching star trek!)

anywho, i've officially transitioned from being somebody who listens to radio one, to someone who telephones radio one. so if you happened to hear some spazz on ontario today talking about cajun blackened tofu this afternoon, that was me.

(and it IS delicious.)

so last night i dreamt that i was at my dayjob, doing dayjobby things, but then david schwimmer (that's ross from friends!) was my boyfriend, and then i was being hassled by some apparent library executives who were evaluating my work skills, because david schwimmer kept being all cuddly on me while i was supposed to be working.

then some crackheads stole david schwimmer's van. if i remember correctly, it was a wood-paneled van. it was pretty much awesome, and we were pretty pissed off when some crackheads stole it.

then i woke up. i have no idea what david schwimmer had to do with anything, given that i haven't so much as thought about him in a couple of years, and never particularly gave him much thought in the gee-i-wish-he-was-my-boyfriend department.

i blame vicarious drug smokage. i guess i also blame vicarious drug smokage for the fact that i ate ice cream for the first time since forever, and even the cardboard-wafer cone it came in tasted pretty fucking wizard.

curse youuuuuuuuuuuuuu, internets! i shouldn't be buying things. i know very well that i should not be buying things. i am being dispatched on an academic cross-country adventure OF AWESOME, and, while this will bode well for my CV (in desperate need of some more padding) it doesn't bode so fabulously for my pocketbook.

therefore, internet, i must protest. please to be stopping making me look at things like this:




since it is obvious to resist their lovely plaid charms OF AWESOME.

sigh.

this is my favourite recipe for potato salad. i loosely adapted this recipe (with a good many tweaks, of course) from a wonderful french cookbook some time ago, the result being a strange french-swedish-hungarian hybrid that i can hoover a six-serving bowlful in the space of time it takes to watch an episode of star trek: voyager. i like to use new potatoes when they're in season in ontario and have that wonderful creepy-looking skin that falls off with a good scrub. failing that, i'm also quite fond of the creamy texture of red potatoes, but whatever your favourite potato is will do. a mix of white and blue potatoes makes for a really visually interesting salad, too.

thus:

pommes de terre en salade

serves six (or less, depending on just how voracious you are)

1 1/2 - 2 pounds potatoes (unpeeled if new and tender-skinned, peeled if older)
2 tbsp white wine vinegar (or just plain old white vinegar, if that's what you've got handy)
3 tbsp extra virgin olive oil
1 handful each fresh chives, parsley and dill, chopped
salt and freshly ground pepper, to taste

boil the potatoes in lightly salted water until soft but not mushy. drain and transfer to a bowl. while the potatoes are still warm, toss with vinegar, and leave to cool a little. once the potatoes are approaching room temperature, add the olive oil, chives, parsley and dill, tossing to combine. season to taste with salt and pepper. et voilà!

*and another thing: if you prefer your potato salad dressing to be a little bit creamy, feel free to add a tablespoon or two of sour cream or plain yogurt to the dressing. it's pretty flipping awesome too.

woohooooooooo

so i decided to see what would happen if i held a fisheye lens



up to the lens of my colorsplash



and it actually came out pretty awesome.

PICTURE POST!

here are some things that happened in the past few months

JINKIES! some trekkie put together a complete list of everything kes wears on star trek: voyager.

which is kind of awesome because i was watching voyager with my mother the other night, and we simultaneously commented "i LOVE what kes is wearing."

hands up who thinks i could pull off this outfit without looking like an elf?

this is a FLIPPING AWESOME bit of animation.

it's kinda cute how angry they get about beer ads, though.

*cough*

this is officially one of my favourite dishes ever, just something i threw together last night. i'm calling it a ragù for lack of a better word, though it's not technically because i use fish and not red meat, so if anyone has a better word for this, do tell. also, feel free to try different kinds of fish or pasta or grains with this recipe. i used linguine, but i suspect it'd be wicked with something like couscous or quinoa as well.

linguine with pseudo-italian (kinda) fish ragù

2-3 glugs olive oil
1 small onion, roughly chopped
2 cloves garlic, roughly chopped
1 green bell pepper, roughly chopped
1/2 to 2/3 cup crushed tomato, give or take
a small handful of fresh basil leaves, ripped or chopped into small bits
1 dried thai chile or other small chile, crumbled
juice of 1/2 lemon
3 tilapia filets, or other similar white fish, defrosted if frozen and cut into smallish pieces
generous pinch of salt
3 good handfuls linguine, broken

in a large saucepan, heat the olive oil over low-medium heat. add the onion and garlic and cook until the onions are translucent, stirring occasionally. add the pepper and continue cooking for a few minutes, until peppers begin to soften. meanwhile, cook the pasta in boiling salted water until al dente, and drain. set aside. add the crushed tomato and fish and cover, cooking for another few minutes. add the basil and chile and continue cooking, stirring occasionally, until fish becomes opaque, breaking up a few bits of fish as you go. you want there to be some chunks remaining, but much of it should fall apart, almost melting into the sauce. at this point you might want to check and see if the sauce is sufficiently thickened. squeeze the lemon over the sauce and stir, and cover again for a few minutes. add the salt, stir, check seasoning and adjust if necessary. serve the ragù over a small portion of linguine. and you're done. brilliant. give yourself a pat on the back for a job well done, and have a nice glass of red wine.

serves 4

Copyright deal could toughen rules governing info on iPods, computers

uhh, and this is enforceable how? i mean, i know that the whole "downloading" thing is perceived as a terrible threat to the music industry (and i won't get into my rant about that now or we'll be here until we're all flying hovercars and wearing matching silver v-stripe jumpsuits) but really, is there even a way to tell that i bought the music on my ipod? i mean, what if the songs come from a cd that *gasp* i borrowed from a friend and then transferred to my ipod? or one from the library? there is also the school of crazy governmentman thought that argues that copies made of purchased music, even if only for personal use, are illegal, in which case anything on your ipod would be considered as such, but i mean come on, that's ludicrous. i'm surprised i'm not hearing more from apple and their mp3-player colleagues raising more of a stink over this kind of crap.

i guess, however, if they raised too much of a stink, they could be seen as condoning the illegal download of music and film, despite their lucrative itunes store and other such paid-download developments on sites like amazon.

damned if you do, damned if you don't.

it's stupid.

i'd like to offer a little sartorial advice to some of my fellow old goths.

(and i say this out of the kindness of my heart) if you're over 40, i don't care how much of an affinity for the darkness you have, you should really give up the goth makeup. i've seen many an otherwise good looking middle-aged person RUIN EVERYTHING by thinking they can still pull off the eyeliner and crap. you can't.

this doesn't mean you can't still be all about the darkness and stuff, it just means finding new ways to be all about the darkness. leave the crazy makeup for the kids these days, unless you really want to look like robert smith, who has gone from avant-garde hotness:



to slightly mental:



simply by insisting upon rocking the same look for 25 years.

you what i want?

i want that rogers wireless should stop calling me on my mobile phone, while i'm at the office, with exciting new offers about my phone. especially not from weird-ass long distance numbers that i'm pretty sure cost me money. what the fuck is that shit? and while i'm at it, since nobody ever wants to hear about exciting new offers about shit over the phone, why do they bother? do they just hope that some people will take them up on their offers just to get rid of them or something?

also, i want that companies and charities and all that stop trying to give me free previews of shit. because when the first two weeks of some exciting new program are free, or i don't have to decide whether to donate now, the people talking to me are SO INCREDULOUS that i don't even want to try their new thing ABSOLUTELY FREE! for the first whatever. you know why it's free of course: they assume that by the time they start billing you, it's too much of a hassle for you to cancel and you'll just keep paying for it. or, in the case of charities, that you'll find it in your heart to donate that cup of coffee's worth of money per day to little so-and-so in an impoverished nation. i'm a member of greenpeace and i invest in small businesses worldwide through kiva.org. i make like $20,000 a year. don't make me feel shitty about not feeding and clothing all the orphans of the world. i do what i can, but i just don't have the budget for widespread philanthropy. not to mention the fact that i don't trust that these organizations don't have a religious agenda, and i'm certainly not interested in funding missionaries.

it's strangely often that i get the song "i feel pretty" stuck in my head. and it's usually when i'm at my most unsexy, feeling all gross and sluggish and barfy. and it's always stuck in my head sung by none other than miss piggy:



which is awesome, because miss piggy is pretty much my hero.

when does something become everybody's business?

i just wonder this because i've been hearing a lot of rights and freedoms talk lately about how whatever a person does is nobody else's business, and to be honest i find that knee-jerk freedom view very narrow-minded and poorly thought-out. indeed, perhaps it's less a cornerstone of my particular ideology, but the way i see it, it's easy enough to say that my actions are nobody else's business, but this is only true if they truly affect no one but me. arguing, therefore, that i live in a free country and therefore it's nobody's business whether i choose to recycle or not is erroneous, and this is an argument i've heard from numerous individuals whose judgement i had always otherwise considered to be sound. however, if we consider that not recycling has a negative impact on the environment, and that no one person and their material consumption habits exist in a microcosm, but rather as part of a planet with loads of other people and things living on it, can we really still say that the decision not to recycle affects no-one? if it affects everyone, can we really still say that such a decision is nobody's business?

i constantly see and hear so many people defending their rights to do horribly thoughtless and irresponsible things, because they consider it their "right" to do so. but if, say, driving a fuel-inefficient vehicle and creating an excessive amount of waste and, heck, leaving the faucet running while brushing one's teeth actually cause strain on the earth's environment (you know, the place where we all live that kind of sustains us) shouldn't the rest of the world have a say? it's like turning up your stereo so loud that it disturbs the neighbours: is it all right to continue to do so because it's a free country? don't your neighbours have the right not to be disturbed? don't the planet's resources have the right not to be overexploited? doesn't everybody else in the world, not to mention generations to come, have the right to a planet still capable of supporting human life?

seriously people, get past the knee-jerk "freedom" crap and THINK.

my personal relationship to food is extremely wonky and tumultuous at best, i admit.

i know this article is from a little while ago, but it's still i think one of the best ones i've read on how we view what we eat:

read me, i love you!

personally, i find that while i also take great joy in the act of both cooking and eating, and exploring tastes and smells and textures of foods, i also find myself often preoccupied with thoughts of how much of this or that i'm getting in my diet. have i had too many calories? enough fiber? and so forth. so much so is this a concern that i'll find myself making numerous obsessive calculations throughout the day, theorizing that if i eat this and this, and then have that for dinner, i'll have had such-and-such calories and such-and-such protein, and so forth, instead of simply allowing myself to eat and enjoy an abundance of simple, fresh food every day without worrying that it doesn't adhere to a ludicrous and arbitrary number i have for some reason determined is how much i need in a day. i think in part it gives me something to focus on, so i don't have a chance to worry about how my courses are going, or whether i'll get the living room tidied in time for my dinner party, or whether i'll ever manage to get a PhD and a decent teaching job, and whether i'm wholly repellant to other people and that's why they always seem to get sick or busy after one or two dates.

cruciferous veg and their starchy buddies, OH

i mean, if you're going to do cauliflower, and it's pretty much one of my favourite vegetables ever (and i like many, and many of them are fellow crucifers, like cabbage) and you should really do cauliflower all the time when it's in season and all gorgeous, it just seems a horrid shame to steam or mash the crap out of it and then just drown it in cheese, or worse yet, force it down plain like that, when it's utterly, utterly UTTERLY orgasm-inducing roasted. i'm amazed that nobody i know seems to know about roasting cauliflower. heck, when i do aloo gobi soup, i actually like to let the cauliflower and potato get a bit brown before adding stock and everything to the soup; even though i whizz it all into a puree anyway, roasting the cauliflower brings out a bit of sweetness in it which is really magnificent. so here's what i do, and it's so stupidly basic that i'm pretty sure i can't even call it a "recipe":

preheat oven to 350 degrees. peel and cut two potatoes into chunks, then boil on the stove in salted water until just a little softer than raw. meanwhile, cut cauliflower into florets roughly the same size as the potato bits, and wash thoroughly. drain potatoes and chuck them into a roasting pan along with the cauliflower. drizzle over a few good glugs of extra-virgin olive oil, sprinkle over a generous pinch of salt and just a teensy weensy bit of freshly ground pepper. chuck it in the oven, checking occasionally to flip over vegetables and make sure nothing gets too stuck, until everything's nice and brown and crispy and FREAKING AWESOME.

shh... don't tell her, but i'm getting these for my mum for mother's day:



petal pearl earrings by elizabeth scott

it's hard buying jewelry for my mum, because our tastes don't always overlap in these kinds of things, but somehow i think these are simple and pretty enough that she'll like them as much as i do.

and and and i've just bought a whole bunch more mustard and black shirts (organic, of course) to make more bumbly bee shirts:



IT'S A PLAGUE OF BUMBLY BEES OH NO

and i have a massive, MASSIVE organic mango that i bought on the weekend, and i think it's ripe enough to tuck into today. life is good. but how the heck are you?

sometimes this blog just needs to stop being about a) my own neuroses and mental shortcomings, and/or b) all the neato stuff in my shop, and needs instead to rave about the awesomeness of other people's work.

kelly newcomer creates some of the flipping awesomest art i've ever seen anywhere. it's just so joyful and harmonious and the absolute best kind of whimsical. this is "flowers and machines":



which is pretty much THE absolute best piece of art that i own, so much so that i pretty much intend to decorate at least one room of my next apartment around it.

this is one of her otherworldly and impossibly adorable robot sculptures:



this is lovable machine, and indeed one does kind of feel the uncontrollable urge to hug it:



and this is helicopter baby:



and now that you've seen how thoroughly awesome all of this stuff is, go check out the rest of her stuff, too.

well, sweeny todd was FUCKING AWESOME. blood and stuff, and lots of people in fingerless mittens (as a purveyor of the aforementioned woolen goods, i approve) and alan rickman and johnny depp (THANK GOODNESS) not being a pirate and i believe i even briefly spied none other than anthony head as some guy with one line.

and i want everything helena bonham carter was wearing.

AND THE GORE! i'm a happy camper.

also, impending tooth doom (read: wisdom tooth extraction - all five of them!) approaches, and i can't help but wonder if i'll be fully sedated or awake to hear all the bone-crunching. AND THE GORE. i may be the only person in the world who takes a perverse delight in anticipation of toothy doom.

also,