…8 more days to pile the mountains around Vancouver with snow…
…8 more days until I spend Friday night glued to the TV watching PVR’d daytime programming…
…8 more days to clean out a certain clothing section at the Bay…
Yep, 8 more days till the Winter Olympics in my hometown, Vancouver! I’m so stoked that I just bought the “I believe” theme song soundtrack on iTunes – English, French, instrumental. Yay!
I’ve always liked Winter Olympics better than the Summer games, because the sports in winter are much more, for lack of a better word, exotic. I mean, watching four people shoot down a giant ice slide for hours is just much cooler than watching a sport I actually understand, like basketball.
This time around, not only is it better than it’s taking place in a city I love, but I’m also going to be at one the games! We’ve had the tickets since round-one bidding, but recently just finalized…We totally lucked out (completely, utterly, one of the luckiest things ever to happen to me) and got tickets to the MEN’S GOLD MEDAL HOCKEY GAME!!!! Okay, everybody now, HAPPY THOUGHTS towards seeing the Canadian boys win on “home” ice!!!!!!!!
We’ll be making a whirlwind trip (this is what I get for traveling with people whose work revolves around “Q1″…bah). We’re flying in on Friday and leaving on Monday for the weekend, and I hope to leave in a state of exhaustion from celebrating all day on Sunday :-)
Anyone else excited about the Winter Olympics? Just slightly? ;-)
Tagged as:
Olympics,
Vancouver
First of all – if you’re in a position to help out, please give generously to those in Haiti who need all of our happy thoughts.
My charity of choice was the Canadian Red Cross, and it made me happy when the server crashed when I tried to donate – thanks, other donors who crashed the system with me!
Alright, Christmas is over, but somehow I’m still sitting next to my Christmas tree. This clearly shows that 2010 hasn’t officially started for me. The first couple of weeks have been busy catching up and finishing up some loose ends from 2009, so hopefully this weekend we’ll get around to taking down the tree, distributing the last of our presents, and on with 2010.
Lots of trips coming up, so I’ll be updating on those as I go! I’m heading down to NYC again in a week for a long weekend, and then to Vancouver for a, um, low-key hockey game during the Olympics. I’ll be back for a couple of months before heading up to Vancouver again for my bff’s wedding on May 1, and then who knows, I might actually squeeze in a REAL vacation not long after that.
I swear I won’t turn this blog into a starry-eyed, all-about-weddings discussion because that’s just so rude to those expecting me to continue to gush about food. However, because everyone’s been asking me casually (or seriously, haha) when we’re thinking of getting married, I’ll just say this – WOW weddings are expensive! Therefore, I have no conclusive plans/ideas, because first, I have to get over the big hurdle of setting a budget that we can actually live with. If I won’t spend $1,500 on a pair of awesome Louboutins that’ll last me at least a couple of years, why would I spend double that amount on a person who’s supposed to take photos of me for a couple of hours?? I’m not even photogenic!!
Alright, enough with the ranting, and on with 2010! Happy new year/happy 15th day of the year!
Tagged as:
wedding
Fill out memes.
And watch Gus sleep.
• If I were a month, I’d be September
• If I were a day of the week, I’d be Saturday
• If I were a time of day, I’d be 7:30 A.M.
• If I were a planet, I’d be Earth (because The World Is Just AwesomeTM)
• If I were a sea animal, I’d be an otter!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
• If I were a direction, I’d be South
• If I were a piece of furniture, I’d be a large rustic dining table.
• If I were a historical figure, I’d be Coco Chanel
• If I were a liquid, I’d be water
• If I were a gemstone, I’d be a giant chunk of unpolished emerald
• If I were a tree, I’d be a Rainier cherry tree
• If I were a tool, I’d be an Allen key. Go IKEA!
• If I were a flower, I’d be lavender
• If I were a kind of weather, I’d be sunny
• If I were a musical instrument, I’d be a harp
• If I were a color, I’d be vintage pink
• If I were an emotion, I’d be giggly
• If I were a fruit, I’d be a mango from Taiwan
• If I were a sound, I’d be the orchestra tuning – bunch of A’s
• If I were an element, I’d be Gold
• If I were a car, I’d be the Batmobile
• If I were a food, I’d be a sweet potato
• If I were a place, I’d be a cozy backyard with twinkly lights
• If I were a material, I’d be yards and yards of organza
• If I were a taste, I’d be sweet and tart, like Sweetarts
• If I were a scent, I’d be mainly fruity, slightly floral, and a dash of baby powder
• If I were an object, I’d be an ice cream scoop
• If I were a body part, I’d be a shoulder
• If I were a facial expression, I’d be a toss-your-head-back kind of laugh.
• If I were a song, I’d be any Christmas song
• If I were a pair of shoes, I’d be mary janes
Tagged as:
family,
me
Just like chocolate, English toffee was another delicacy that my mom rationed in small quantities to me when I was little. She had her reasons, and now I have my reasons for why I pick up a box of Almond Roca once in a while.
It’s never Christmas without my candy thermometer, and this year I decided to put the little thing to the ultimate test – candy making. After a quick search, I realized that toffee is actually pretty easy to make, so after a Christmas party where I had already drank a few glasses of wine, I began heating up butter and sugar in my kitchen at 10:30pm on a Sunday night. Surely enough, even with alcohol in me, this recipe was hard to mess up – now it’ll be a staple for Christmas time next year!
English Toffee with Chocolate & Hazelnuts
Ingredients
- 1 cup butter
- 1 cup granulated sugar
- 1/2 tsp sea salt
- 1/2 tsp pure vanilla extract
- 1/2 cup of chocolate chips if you’re going for easy, or 1/2 cup chocolate to be tempered
- 1/2 cup hazelnuts, toasted, slightly peeled where you can, and chopped roughly
- In a heavy-bottomed pot, melt butter, sugar, salt, and vanilla at medium heat. Stir constantly, using a heat-proof spatula if you have one. Keep the candy thermometer clipped to one side of the pot.
- Once mixture reaches threading temperature, just over 100 degrees Celsius, reduce the cooking temperature so that it is not a hard rolling boil, but still boiling nonetheless. At this point, you don’t have to stir as much – just temper the mixture once in a while.
- While this is cooking, line a 9×9 square dish with parchment paper, making sure to cover all sides.
- When the thermometer registers at about 140 degrees Celsius – pay close attention! This is all going to happen very fast – it’ll reach the 300 degree Fahrenheit or about 150 Celsius hard crack stage very quickly, and as soon as it does, remove, stir mixture and pour into the square dish lined with parchment paper.
- If you’re going for an easy toffee recipe, wait about 2 minutes for the mixture to start setting, and throw the chocolate chips on top. The heat will melt the chips, so smooth out the chocolate evenly, and then sprinkle the hazelnuts.
- If you’re going for tempered chocolate goodness, let the pan cool and stick in the fridge if you can, while you temper the chocolate. Just before throwing the chocolate onto the toffee, dab it first with some paper towel to get rid of excess oil. This will help the chocolate stick better. Sprinkle on hazelnuts.
- Let chill in the fridge overnight or at least a few hours, then break apart and enjoy!
Tagged as:
candy,
Christmas
When Starbucks first came out with these, Alex would always pick one up whenever we stopped in. Slowly, from having lukewarm feelings towards them, I became a fan of the spicy and sweet flavour. I’ve always wanted to find a recipe that mimics just this cookie, and so entered Barefoot Contessa at Home.
Since Barefoot Contessa has baking mixes as well, I actually first tried this cookie via her box mix, and loved it so much that I searched for it in my Barefoot Contessa cookbooks. Surely enough, there was the recipe in Barefoot Contessa at Home, and I made it immediately.
The recipe sucks.
After having seen how runny/sticky the batter from the mix turned out, I was dismayed to find actual decent-solid-like cookie dough in my mixing bowl. From there, it was a downhill experiment where I forgot to add baking soda to the second batch, and the third batch’s consistency was even further from my expectations that I couldn’t even muster up the energy to roll the cookies in sugar before baking.
That was all last year. This year, I decided that the problem must lie within the proportion of the ingredients in the recipe – and I boiled it down to the fact that everything was in cup measures. Out of curiosity, I weighed my cup of flour and discovered that today, a cup weighed 6 oz. in my apartment! (On a dry summer’s day, it’s about 4.5 oz. using the exact same cup.) So after some fine-tuning (hello, first-batch ginger rocks in garbage can), here’s the recipe:
Ginger Molasses Cookies – adapted from Barefoot Contessa at Home by Ina Garten
Ingredients
- 8 oz. dark brown sugar
- 2.5 oz. canola oil
- 3.5 oz. molasses
- 1 large egg
- 2 tsp. ground cinnamon
- 1 tsp. ground cloves
- 1 tsp. ground nutmeg
- 1/2 tsp. ground ginger
- 1/4 tsp. sea salt
- 10 oz. all-purpose flour
- 1 tsp. baking soda
- roughly 1/2 cup chopped crystallized ginger
- granulated sugar, for rolling cookies in
- Preheat oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit
- In a stand mixer, mix together on medium speed, the sugar, oil, molasses, spices, and salt for about 5 minutes. You shouldn’t have to scrape the bowl too much, but do as necessary.
- Add in egg and mix on medium speed for another 2 minutes.
- Add in flour and baking soda, and mix on medium speed to incorporate all the flour. Add the chopped ginger and mix until combined.
- Roll the dough into about 1″ balls, and drop into sugar. Flatten on the cookie sheet.
- Put into preheated oven for 10 minutes. Depending on oven temperature etc., it should be ready at about the 13 minute mark. In my convection oven I left them for only 10.5 minutes and they turned out perfectly.
- Cool on the cookie sheet for 3 minutes before removing to rack to cool completely. Makes 32 regular-sized cookies, or 16 jumbo Starbucks-sized ones.
Notes:
- The dough dries out and “seals” itself easily, so my second batch, which was rolled and then sat on the counter for 10 minutes waiting for the first batch to bake, didn’t crack as much. Pictures here are of the first batch.
- When you remove the cookies from the oven, they should still be puffed up. That’s fine, during the three-minute cooling period, they’ll flatten and start to look like what you want them to look like.
Now go and make them! They taste just like the wonderful things from Starbucks!
Tagged as:
baking,
Christmas,
cookie of the fortnight