I was going to write about wine today, but today’s dessert was too tasty not to feature.

Blueberry grunt is a Nova Scotian recipe that none of my friends have ever heard of. Mum used to make it on rare occasions, and it’s completely delicious in every way. It tastes sort of like blueberry pie with ice cream but is a thousand times easier to make because there’s no real pastry involved, just fluffy heavenly biscuits to soak up all the melty ice cream and syrupy blueberry goo.

I couldn’t resist a giant container of blueberries at the store the other day, so I decided to give it a go for the first time. I think it turned out quite well – the sauce is possibly reduced a little too much, but it still tastes fantastic.

It’s really easy to make – just mix a quart of blueberries and a cup of sugar in an oven-safe pan and simmer for a while, and in the meantime throw together some biscuit dough and drop into the hot sauce, then bake for ~20 minutes. Serve while hot, scooped over vanilla ice cream.

Mine was a little on the sloppy side because the ice cream was melting while I was trying to get a picture I liked, but when you eat it right away the hot/cold contrast is awesome.

This didn’t really make as big a dent in the blueberry bin as I’d hoped, so I guess I’ll just have to keep making it…

Allan and I just got back from a week-long road trip down to Oliver, BC and back. My sister Mary and her family live in Oliver and it’s always a great time visiting them, especially because the destination itself is so beautiful and fun.

As I’m sure I’ve mentioned before, I generally try to make an effort to eat local, which means something very different in Edmonton and Oliver. In Edmonton it’s easy to find meat, grains, most vegetables. But fruit is much trickier; it can, and does, grow here, but not well enough for anyone to do a whole lot of it. Not being one to deny myself things that are delicious, I usually seek out BC fruit and wine when I can’t easily get my hands on something local. But even that isn’t easy if I’m just at the grocery store. Even smaller local grocers stock almost entirely USA grown produce. I won’t get into the economic, environmental, and culinary reasons why this is so infuriating right now, but suffice to say it means enough to me that I spend most of my trip to the store scouring little stickers looking for something from western Canada instead of California.

Anyway, what I’m trying to say is, my primary goal of this trip, other than some bonding with Mary, Greg, Layla, Baron and their gigantic dog Chester, was to a) try a lot of Okanagan wine (an upcoming blog entry unto itself) and b) eat a lot of Okanagan fruit.

To my delight, the drive into Oliver and then further to Osoyoos was a steady stream of fruit stands, vineyards, and U-Picks. On our first day we stopped at a fruit stand and grabbed some treats for me and Layla to make a pie with.

Are those not the most beautiful apricots and blueberries you’ve ever laid eyes on? I was just giddy with the huge arrays of gorgeous fresh fruit laid out in generous boxes at prices better than their significantly less awe-inspiring Californian counterparts at Safeway.

A few days into our stay, Allan and I hiked the Golden Mile Trail, a 10 km stretch starting at the Tinhorn Creek vineyard, through a stretch of hot flat desert where the trail seemed to dance under our feet with all the strange and exotic-looking species of grasshopper that were out exploring with us, and ending at a little road that wound through a variety of orchards. I was drained and losing enthusiasm after the first two-thirds of our hike through the hot sun, but walking past the rows of tantalizing fruit was my reward. Tart, crisp little green apples ripening on trees, golden peaches and apricots just taking on a rosy blush, bright red cherries bunched together on a branch, contrasting sharply with the deep green foliage; more ripe, plump deep burgundy cherries ready to fall right off the tree. Everything looked so beautiful, so alive, so delicious. I bored Allan once again with my musings on food; how fruit is the only thing in nature designed to inspire lust in us, that we’re biologically programmed to find deep pleasure in, not just something that our pliable omnivorous palletes have taught us to accept as food. It exists to charm and please us, to taste sweet and perfect. By the time we left the orchards, I never wanted to eat anything but fruit ever again.

Since I was 12 or so, I’ve been dying my hair a LOT. I started with blond my very first time, with the help of my sisters (a strange choice, since I was blonde as a younger child and had actually been looking forward to my hair darkening as I grew up). And then I was hooked, constantly changing my hair colour dramatically with no real reason at all. I can’t even count the number of times I’ve been asked “so what IS your natural hair colour?”, as even those who’ve known me for several years haven’t really seen it. Here’s a brief and hilarious history of some of my past dye jobs:

So anyway.

Not really because of all the dying (I rarely lighten, which is the only thing that really damages my hair), but really because of general neglect and a natural predisposition for dry crappiness, my hair often becomes rather matted and damaged. When I got engaged in December 2007, it was absolutely horrible, as it usually is around Christmas time when I hardly have time to sleep and use the bathroom, much less brush my hair. So for the next eight months I went cold turkey on my hair dye addiction, and then sprung for the rare and unbelievably expensive professional dye job (generally avoided as I get smacked with both extra length AND extra thickness charges):

It faded quickly, and to get myself out of an oh-I’m-so-ugly slump, I dyed it red, my trusty old standby. I come back to red a lot, because it’s sort of different but it looks passably natural on me with my pasty skin and green eyes. I’ve been referred to as a redhead many times even when I had what I thought was an obviously fake dye job. One ex-boyfriend’s mother even exclaimed upon seeing me that she couldn’t believe her son was actually dating a redhead. Weird.

So now, in a rare case of colour loyalty, I’ve had red hair since late October 2008. It’s required a dye job about every 3 weeks, but I just can’t seem to bear to let it fade away. My current coworkers have never seen me any other way, and one girl at work even told me this week that she’d actually believed I WASN’T faking it.

So basically, redheads of the world, I implore you: let me join your ranks?

There’s some things I need to get off my chest.

I generally have pretty good taste, I think. Which means I tend to associate with other people who share my good taste, which means, well, it can get a little snooty up in here. And when things get snooty, the phrase “guilty pleasure” seems to get thrown a lot. Some of these things are genuinely guilt-ridden – a cupcake for a diabetic, a cheeseburger for a dieter, a steak for a vegetarian, a tendency to rape/maim/murder people. But most are really just shameful pleasures; for me, anyway, I often will hide or deny my genuine enjoyment of something because I’m afraid of what my friends would think.

So I figure this will be at once my most embarrassing and liberating blog post ever.

THINGS THAT ARE HORRIBLY AWESOME:

Kraft Dinner: I have no justification for this other than it tastes great. Most things involving processed cheese powders do. That’s just the way it is.

Artificial Grape Flavouring: Aside from the Frankensteinien monstrosity that is the Grāpple, artificial grape flavour has never done me wrong. Kool-aid, popsicles, those weird flavoured waters, grape pop – bring it on.

Caramilk bars: I appreciate fine chocolate, I really do, and I’ve got a decent palate for it. But goshdarnit if I don’t just want to scarf a wad of cheap milk chocolate and caramel goo every now and then.

Doritos: Oooooh powdered cheese, I love you so much. Doritos are like crack to me. When I was in Germany on a student exchange I was begging for someone back home to ship me a bag, and during my 10-month stint as a vegetarian, I was always hiding empty Zesty Cheese bags under my bed so that my vegetarian boyfriend wouldn’t know I was still eating them (the powdered cheese is not vegetarian). Oddly, I seem to have kicked my addiction these days, without even really trying.

Diet Coke: Okay, this one I do genuinely feel guilty about, which is why I’ve quit it. But I still crave the ice cold fizzy refreshing goodness of it all the time.

My Chemical Romance: So fun to sing along to in the car. This is all the justification I need. Ditto Fall Out Boy. Although I do fully realize that these bands are very, very lame, they’re also very listenable.

Cocaine: Just kidding. Maybe.

Kentucky Fried Chicken: How can it be wrong when it feels so, so right

Alright, that’s enough, but you catch my drift. Please tell me some of yours to take some of the shame off of me!

Lately I’ve been incurably restless. My mum I’m sure is familiar with these little phases of mine – I spent a good deal of my teenage years wandering around the house, occasionally stopping by her room to announce my boredom and then shrugging off any of the activities (mostly chores) she suggested I take on to keep myself busy. This is how it’s going for me now: little sleep, no real enjoyment in anything, no ability to sit still and get something done. So yesterday, fed up with sitting at my computer begging it to adequately entertain me, I stood up and announced to Allan that I was going to go buy some plants.

I know nothing about gardening and every plant I have ever owned has had a short, anguished life of neglect. Still, this year I have been determined to start a garden, primarily for culinary purposes (buying bunches of fresh herbs and letting most of them go bad is getting to be an annoying ritual, and tomatoes and onions from my backyard is the most tantalizing thing I can think of, yard-wise). But weekend after weekend has passed without anyone else in the house initiating the garden project, and with it getting late in the season, I figure there’s no time like the present. So I bought a bunch of plants, not seeds as I had originally intended because I figured there was no time, and because that seemed more likely to fail regardless.

The trip to the store was lovely and easy – spending money is one of my strong suits. Coming home to plant them was another story.

This was what I decided would be my garden:

Yes, a patch in the middle of my mature lawn. There was digging to be done. Unfortunately I couldn’t for the life of me find a spade to do said digging with. So I grabbed an ice scraper and started lawn-gouging.

However hard you think this was, it was in fact a thousand times harder. After a couple hours and far more spider-related incidents than I care to mention, I had this beautiful chunk of bare soil

You’ll notice it isn’t quite square-shaped…I ran out of steam. Shortly after this was taken Laurie came home and found the spade, and also showed me a large piece of ground that seemed to have been recently sodded and where the grass came up with minimal coaxing (great, a little late, agh). The spade and I made short work of the rest of the square

At this point it was 11:00 pm and I was covered in dirt and sweat, so I abandoned the plants and went inside to shower and sleep.

Coming home from work today, all my digging muscles still aching badly, the last thing I wanted to do was spend the evening in the yard again, but goshdarnit if I wasn’t going to get those plants in the ground.

I am so freaking proud of myself you have no idea. I don’t know if any of these will work out – there’s a mix here of vegetables, flowers, and herbs, crammed into a relatively small area – but for now it looks awesome enough for me to sit and gaze at it with pride. Please come visit and gaze with me before all the plants die.

I’m going to go lie in bed and try to sleep away the too-out-of-shape for digging pains now, wish me luck!

So, when I made baked beans for Easter dinner on Sunday, I could’ve sworn the recipe called for an entire pound of bacon. I busted out a pack of bacon and chopped it all up, only to realize at the last minute that it only called for half a pound of bacon, leaving me with an extra half-pound of chopped up fatty mess. When Allan was bugging me for a late night snack last night, I figured I’d put it to use and make the most horrifically fatty mess of a sandwich the world has ever known.

Started by frying up the chopped bacon…

found a couple of eggs to throw in the mix…

Scrambled for a minute, and voila, gloriously awful sandwich filling

Add toast, and you’ve got a high-fat, high-carb, 1/4 pounder of bacon for me and my sweety at 11:00 at night. This sandwich must never, ever be repeated:

I’ve been putting off posting pictures of our new place because it’s been taking us forever to get all the crap between the three of us (me, Allan, and my sister-in-law Laurie) settled in here and looking presentable. But I figure it’s close enough now to bust out the camera.

This is the front entryway/sun room, which is filled with our shoes and Laurie’s plants. I love plants but tend to kill them, so it’s nice to have a green thumb around…can’t wait until we can start a garden!

This is the living room, which is the last major room that’s not really set up yet. But it’s at least tidy enough to sit and watch tv or play some Wii.

Behind that giant shelf is a cozy little reading nook…

…and the dining room. We do have more chairs than are currently shown here, so please do come visit us for dinner!

That leads into our very crowded kitchen, where we’ve pulled out every organizational trick we could imagine to fit all our things in and still have some working space…and we still ended up with a fair amount of small appliances, tupperware and nonperishables pushed down to the basement

And here’s the kitchen.

I know we’re on the north end, but please come visit us! I promise I’ll make you a meal worth the trip

Yesterday was the last day of my chocolate making course at NAIT. It’s the first of several baking and pastry night classes I’m planning to take throughout spring, and it was definitely an interesting experience. It’s been a long time since I’ve been in a classroom, had to learn difficult new skills, and befriend strangers (never my strong suit). I was definitely out of my comfort zone, but now I feel like I can take on the rest of the classes, and hopefully I won’t freak out when I start full time school in the fall.

Here’s what I brought home from class yesterday:

We had to make our boxes out of chocolate, which was a major pain in the butt and mine had a lot of weird problems, but whatever…it’s chocolate. I unintentionally took the picture from the perfect angle to hide the big crazy crack in the lid that I had to pipe over

Closeup of the rose I made out of modelling chocolate (chocolate that is weirdly flexible at room temperature until it dries out and becomes even less appetizing than in its initial state). I wasn’t very happy with my rose, so my instructor encouraged me to try again, and once I did I said “I think this one is way worse” to which he replied “I agree!” so I smooshed it and tried to make a dinosaur instead, which was as disastrous as you’d expect, and at that point I decided that modelling chocolate sucked anyway.

The massive heap of truffles in the box. They were all delicious, including the intimidating “truffle truffles” which were made with black truffle oil and had a very strong, interesting flavour.

Adorable tuxedo strawberries…so good.

After sampling all this, Allan is extremely supportive of any chocolate making endeavours, so I guess I’ll have to buy a bit of equipment and keep playing around with it. He even forced me to apply at a chocolate making place, but as I suspected they weren’t hiring (and my instructor works there, so I’m sure he would pipe up and mention the many ridiculous mistakes I seemed to be making every time he looked over). A fun hobby, anyway!

The longer I go without updating this, the harder it is to do so -  I feel like “oh, I can’t post about this until I post about this and this and this that already happened…” and it just gets worse and worse. So here’s me trying to catch up on the past 4 months that I’ve been slacking, so everybody can get off my back

My last post was October 27th so I guess the next big thing after that was Halloween. I celebrated it by working the Costume Cuties event at the store for a few days and then dressing up as a “candy corn witch” and hanging out with my friends.

Me with Million Dollar Baby Emma and Pirate Jill. All eyes were of course on Deanna, who always outdoes herself with Halloween costumes (and costumes for any other occasion she can think of). This year she was a lion, and brought a couple furry friends out:

Then there were 6 weeks of horror as PGW hit full Christmas load, and I was thrown out of my quiet office to go work production for the majority of the season, except for when I was fielding payroll complaints from a hundred angry immigrant workers who had recorded their hours improperly, or submitted their corrections to stressed out managers who didn’t have a hope in hell of remembering to hand them over to me. Somewhere in there Allan and I still managed to put up a tree and pretend like we were celebrating the season

After Christmas we had a really great New Year’s party…but I think I may have deleted the photos unless they’re on my work computer. I hope they are.

Then in January we went and stayed at the house in Phoenix with Mum, Dad, Sara and her kids. It was awesome.

Me and Mum on the golf course

Me and Allan by the pool

We loved the beautiful scenery hiking through the desert

Relaxing in Arizona gave me and Allan a good chance to unwind and talk about how we wanted our year to go. I decided it was time I started working seriously towards my goals instead of continuing on the path I’ve been on for a long time, so when I got home I signed up for part time baking/pastry courses at NAIT and applied for culinary arts full time in the fall. I found I was losing enthusiasm for work and not doing a great job anymore, so I recently quit to find a job that’ll be more suited to the culinary field (which I’m still working on, but I have a couple promising opportunities and one sure thing available). Starting in a new field means a pay cut, which means selling my car, which means moving closer to NAIT since I’m already taking classes there regularly, so Allan and I are moving into a great little house with his sister Laurie this month. This month is absolutely crazy for me, and I feel my life is being flipped upside-down, but I think that’s what I need to get out of my current funk. So here’s our new house:

I really dig the kitchen.

So, that’s what’s up with me lately. I’ll try to keep more on top of this, I promise!

Not him, me.

When I was younger I had bigtime issues with being alone and afraid. Even when my whole family was home, if they went to sleep and I was still awake I’d quickly become completely terrified of whatever I thought might be lurking anywhere that I wasn’t looking. At some point, I guess around the time I moved to Scotland, which is really just the time that I left home and started living like an adult, I grew out of it. I even lived in Sara’s windowless basement for a few months, sleeping alone in complete, can’t-see-your-hand-in-front-of-your-face darkness without really worrying what was lurking in the corners.

But sometimes I just turn into a giant sissy again.

Right now it’s dark, and quiet, and Allan’s at Jeremey’s place watching the hockey game. I usually don’t mind having an evening to myself to quietly go about my business. But while I was sitting going through all websites and blogs I like to read, I stumbled across an entry where people started posting ghost stories in the comments thread. This one in particular pretty much ruined my evening:

A man went to a hotel and walked up to the front desk to check in. The woman at the desk gave him his key and told him that on the way to his room, there was a door with no number that was locked and no one was allowed in there. Especially no one should look inside the room, under any circumstances. So he followed the instructions of the woman at the front desk, going straight to his room, and going to bed. The next night his curiosity would not leave him alone about the room with no number on the door. He walked down the hall to the door and tried the handle. Sure enough it was locked. He bent down and looked through the wide keyhole. Cold air passed through it, chilling his eye. What he saw was a hotel bedroom, like his, and in the corner was a woman whose skin was completely white. She was leaning her head against the wall, facing away from the door. He stared in confusion for a while. He almost knocked on the door, out of curiosity, but decided not to. This disinclination saved his life. He crept away from the door and walked back to his room. The next day, he returned to the door and looked through the wide keyhole. This time, all he saw was redness. He couldn’t make anything out besides a distinct red color, unmoving. Perhaps the inhabitants of the room knew he was spying the night before, and had blocked the keyhole with something red.

At this point he decided to consult the woman at the front desk for more information. She sighed and said, “Did you look through the keyhole?” The man told her that he had and she said, “Well, I might as well tell you the story. A long time ago, a man murdered his wife in that room, and her ghost haunts it. But these people were not ordinary. They were white all over, except for their eyes, which were red.”

I can’t even explain why, but that story made me sick to my stomach with fear. So now I’m home, alone, at night, with my friggin’ pets making all kinds of horror movie noises to keep me on my toes. Hero keeps finding little things – screws, bottlecaps – to chase around on the hard laminate floor to make scratching, rattling noises. Lady scratches at the bottom of her cage trying to burrow, and once in a while thumps loudly just to be a jerk. These animals are killing me.

Honey, please come home!