Crappy Customer Service

Addendum

Thinking further about the food question...I did become addicted to bubble tea this year, after hating it with a passion.  It was early days in the trend, about 10 years ago, when I first tried it and found it disgusting.

I guess the process has improved, or been brought over from Taiwan in a more authentic way, because now I can't get enough.  I go to Tea Fusion in Edmonton City Centre for my junk.  I've been uncertain about trying it elsewhere because I'm afraid they will use flavour syrups or powdered tapioca and it won't be as fresh and delicious.

May As Well Finish It

December 26 – Soul Food What did you eat this year that you will never forget? What went into your mouth & touched your soul?

I don't have the type of relationship with food that causes it to touch my soul.  It's food!

I can't remember any truly ass-over-teakettle food moments this year.  I did make sex in a pan for Christmas dessert, which was pretty nice.  It's unfortunate that that particular recipe is so dated.

December 27 – Ordinary Joy Our most profound joy is often experienced during ordinary moments. What was one of your most joyful ordinary moments this year?

Sitting with my husband on our new deck on one Sunday morning, before the asshats get out of bed and start their leaf-blowers and muscle cars.  I don't even know how we wound up out there together, since he isn't the type to hang around outside.  We were just listening to the breeze and the birds in our PJs.

December 28 – Achieve What’s the thing you most want to achieve next year? How do you imagine you’ll feel when you get it? Free? Happy? Complete? Blissful? Write that feeling down.

Putting another drop in the educational ocean.  I will feel glad not to have to do that part again, and that's about all.  There isn't any bliss involved in that.

Again, Really?

December 9 – Party. What social gathering rocked your socks off in 2010? Describe the people, music, food, drink, clothes, shenanigans.

2010 will be remembered as a time when I attended some dull-ass parties.  Everyone in my social circle is a certain age, the same certain age as myself.  We don't have many children among us, since I have a lot of gay friends.  So we are creeping towards senescence at an alarming speed.  I wanted to have a good time and live it up, but everyone I know is so boring.  No shenanigans were included. 

And I'm not referring to drinking or drugging, because that also bores me.  I'm talking about fun!  They all yawn and head for home at 10pm.  No one wants to play Rock Band with me or dance or jump around.  They all want to stand around tasting wine and talking about nothing.

The work parties I attended were better - especially the year-end pot luck with 40 people.  That is a lot of food and we have some damn fine cooks at work.

Schlep, Schlep Out The Barrel

Mr. W and I bartended my cousin's wedding last Saturday.  Here are the highlights:

• I discovered that my husband may be a closet chef/mathematician, but he really wants to be a bartender when he grows up.  I have never seen my darling backward mild-Asperger's only-child husband be so gregarious.  He claims that it's because people will eventually walk away from the bar.
• When you buy 20 drink tickets, and drink them yourself, and stay upright, you will impress me.  Not in a good way.
• Bartending in heels hurts.  The soles of my feet stung.
• My cousin and his new bride are both happy hugging drunks.  I hugged more that night than I have in a year.
• The under-30 set likes Sailor Jerry, the over-30 set likes Captain Morgan Spiced Rum, and never the twain shall meet.
• The bar star pours, but the second in command gets the truly glamorous job of ice management.

Let's Talk About Something Else

Here's the part where I mention that I have a real shot at that job.  And I'm still waiting to hear and it's making me crazy and I lay awake at night worrying about things that haven't happened yet.  I am on a very short list.

But I'm not going to talk about that anymore.  I'm going to mention a couple of good food experiences I've had in the last couple of weeks. 

Food is my comfort and salvation.  I was raised by the daughter of a caterer and prize-winning chef, who could have had her own restaurant.  I married someone who can cook.  I know it is all kinds of wrong but I just love food.  You can't make me hate it, even if it's making me fat. 

My first experience was the Italian Centre Shop on the Via Italia in downtown Edmonton.  Everyone had been there except me!  At least, everyone who is related to someone Italian in Edmonton.  But the purchase I enjoyed most was not Italian - they have a whole freakin' aisle of German, Belgian and Czech chocolate bars.  I had a blueberry flavoured chocolate bar, which was damn good.  Plus a truly epic, fatal deli.  You will die with a smile.

The second was Paradiso Pastries.  This bakery is associated with a halal butcher in my neighbourhood, and their specialty is baklava in every possible nut flavour.  They had a foot-high mound of jalebis, the crunchy sweet my husband is addicted to.   Rum baba, too.  I could live in there.

Getting Around To Things

My principal source of recipes is Cooking Light magazine.  (Not because I am particularly interested in diet food, and neither are they.)  When I was a magazine account rep I had a lot of opportunity to read the whole category of food magazines over many years and Cooking Light is the best, followed closely by Fine Cooking.  I don't like Bon Appetit, Cook's Illustrated or the other highfalutin' types because I'm looking for recipes for every day, not just special occasions.

Until now I have been tearing out the recipes I like, gluing them to pages and putting the whole shebang in a binder.  It's a real time-sink though, and over the years it's gotten harder to find what we're looking for because we had no real categorization scheme.  Plus stuff gets splashed up and dirty because we are still kitchen barbarians.

Today I took the binder and fed all the recipes from Cooking Light into Myrecipes.com, the parent site of Cooking Light's publisher, which includes recipes from many other food magazines.  I now have all my recipes categorized and sorted, available on the kitchen computer whenever we need them.  You can make changes, add notes, do whatever you like to the recipes.  This is going to make menu planning way easier, now that we don't have to flip through the flipping binder all the time.

The other site I use is Allrecipes.com.  Cooking Light doesn't have the baking coverage that this site has.  It's been around practically since the Internet was born.  I have a recipe box there too.  Now if I could just manage to digitize my recipe books, that would free up some space in my tiny kitchen.

That, And The Terribly Hard Seats.

Big Fat Deal asks us to read Roger Ebert's column Nil By Mouth.  He has similar things to say as did Jon Reiner in his article The Man Who Couldn't Eat.  While I cannot imagine food and drink leaving my life forever, as it has Ebert's, I was intrigued by how their sense of smell dominated their thoughts and dreams.

Reading these articles, I thought about my experience in going back to school this past Thursday.  I have started another course on my long & expensive journey to a Supply Management diploma.  This time my course is on the U of A's main campus.  I attended the U of A for a year when I was 17 - it was a decision on my parents' part to keep me in school for another year so I could be 18 when I started at NAIT.

I hated university and I felt it was a waste of time to be there.  It's hard when you're under the drinking age, which is strictly enforced.  It was a large stumbling block to my social development.  I didn't like the learning environment either.  I knew I wasn't staying so I made almost no effort to learn anything for the first time in my life.  I was absolutely miserable because I wasn't making any friends, my 23-year-old roommate was never around and vastly uninterested in me.  My high school friends had all moved on to their own post-secondary paths - and they were all 18, of course.

Toward the end of the year I ran into some long-lost friends from my hometown and had a better time.  But the U of A has always been associated in my mind with that feeling of being set adrift on the sea of adulthood too early.  Those feelings rushed back to this 36-year-old overgrown girl when I set foot in one of the buildings where I had a class.  It was the smell - that institutional, cement-based waft with overtones of chemistry.

Pity, Part II

Know what's funny?  I found myself outside earlier this week with Mr. W.  I was wearing a neck-to-ankle wool felt coat, mittens and winter boots; Mr. W was dressed similarly.  We were eating ice cream.

I saw a guy on the coldest day of the year exiting a 7-11, Slurpee in hand.  It was colder outside the Slurpee than in by a large margin.  Perhaps he was drinking it to warm himself.

No wonder people think Canadians are mildly insane.

Your Cuisine Rocks, Sir.

A product rep once compared by job to that movie Boiler Room.  You sit at a desk, typing as fast as you can, the in and out boxes on your desk foaming with activity as you cradle the phone to your ear and negotiate another sale.  And yes, it is like that right now in our busy season.  It will be like this until Christmas.  Sitting at the computer all day makes it hard for me to come home and relax at my computer.

In the meantime, let's not talk about work anymore.  I find myself saying that more & more.

I'm not much of a savory baker but I do love pretzels.  They disappear quickly in this house because Mr. W has a huge salt tooth.  I will die of diabetes and he will die of a heart attack.  And yes, you have to boil them because they taste better.  If I could find some malt powder I could make them even better.

This book is my latest obsession.  You see all those papers sticking out?  I've barely scratched the surface of this book and there are already 100 curries I want to eat RIGHT NOW.  I bought a spice grinder today because I'm enjoying working with vast quantities of spices (I never had a coffee grinder before, we don't drink it).  Fortunately Mr. W loves Indian food as much as I do.

Earlier this week Mr. W and I made our first pilgrimage to an Asian-Caribbean grocery store.  We are fortunate in that Edmonton has a large population of Near Eastern-type folks so every unusual ingredient is within my reach.  We were directed to these stores by several of our Asian friends.  We recently met some Punjabi foodies who insisted that we go to "The Brown Store" as they call it.

Even if you don't do a lot of Indian cooking I recommend these stores to you.  I bought a full grocery bag of spices and legumes for $30.  This same bag in a regular grocery store, even if I was only buying what I could get, would've probably been $100 or more.  They stock the same spices you buy at any store as well as the exotic stuff.

I did have to laugh at one point.  We were the only um, European types in the store, and a very tall Caribbean man came out of the stock room to look at us while we were shopping.  At first I thought he was watching us for theft but now I realize he was watching us buy ingredients.

Making Off With The Goods

I just got back from visiting my parents at the farm in the bustling nowhere of Tangleflags, SK.  I've been thinking about my mom's cooking non-stop for a week now.  My mother grows more famous in the area as the best cook around as the years go by.  People eat at her house like it's their last supper.  There were three pies - a horrible pumpkin for the suckers who eat that sort of thing, saskatoon (similar to blueberry) and chocolate.

My parents live next to my aunt & uncle, who own the farm my great-grandfather claimed and settled.  Aunt & Uncle are known for taking in stray humans, dusting them off, setting them on their feet and getting them going again.  They have no children of their own but many adoptive/casual foster types that fall from their family trees.  Currently living with them is a young man of 22 who got a blow-n-go lock on his car after his first DUI.  He is lucky to be living with my uncle, who pays him to help with farm maintenance while he attends Lakeland College.  He is even more lucky to be living next to my mother; my aunt isn't much of a cook.  My dad tells me that when he gets desperate enough he hangs around until mealtime - and he'll probably have to get in line.  My mother told me she helped out with a local funeral and a man she hadn't met before asked everyone in the crowd about her and how he could get her to give up her egg salad recipe.  (Just so you know, dude, there IS no recipe.  She just does whatever and it turns out amazing.)

My dad likes to tease people who show up with the intent of sticking around for eats by pretending to be upset at second helpings.  "It's easy for you," said one of the strays.  "You live in The Cookie Factory!"  And I agree, he's had the benefit of her combination of skill and natural talent for nearly 47 years, so he can just relax when I go into their cool room and start rummaging for canned pears and relishes.