50s Housewife Fails

I’m not a fancy cook. I typically rotate through a few fixed dinners – pasta with smoked salmon and tomato sauce, 3-egg omelette, salad with All The Vegetables + chickpeas – and wait for monthly infusions of Mummy Food, delivered whenever the Boy visits. But sometimes I’m called to channel my inner 50s Housewife and create glorious desserts. Sometimes this goes wonderfully! Behold the cheesecake I made from my great-aunt’s signature recipe:

But I’ve recently been called to conjure up confections for a bake sale, and that, I’m afraid, has not gone so well. I was all set to bake Strawberry Blondies with walnuts, adapted from this recipe, but they turned out fifty shades of unappealing. Don’t get me wrong, they taste delish, but look a little like road-kill. Or oven-kill. Or at least like nothing you’d want to spend money on:

The middle hadn’t set even after an extra twenty minutes in the oven, so I brilliantly turned up the dial to broil, and three minutes later was attempting to cut away the charred edges. I ended up mangling it, and then jammed them all in a single Tupperware so I could forget their existence in the fridge. The next morning, my slices of mutilated monkey meat cake had congealed together and it took great effort to pry them apart, further disfiguring them. And so what could be done but eat them myself? For the bake sale, of course, it only made sense to whip up a batch of brownies-from-the-box, and sprinkle them with cocoa powder and icing sugar to make them look more appetizing.

I’m an Artsy, Potentially Unemployed

“[English majors] are highly sophisticated makers of symbolic material.” – Professor Heise, McGill

Fun fact: if my brother (who is studying Physics) and I both end up getting doctorates, we will both be Doctors of Philosophy. We likely won’t understand the other’s thesis if we exchange them, and we will learn vastly different skills in our pursuits of graduate degrees–nevertheless, we will end up being the exact same thing.

Now, guess which one of us is questioned at length about the usefulness of her degree, the difficulty of the work involved, the potential for longterm employment, and the importance of her field in the grand scheme of the world. Big hint: I used the feminine pronoun. Big reveal: it’s me, the English major.

Artsy fartsy stuff in disarray, as befitting an artsy.

When I talk to my brother about his work and his studies, I see so many parallels between our fields. We’re both communicators. He works to understand the universe. He explains it largely using the language of mathematics, although his near-constant assignments require English language skills as well. I work to understand our conception of the universe. I explain it in metaphors and in interpretations of the human experience. Our potential degrees are well-named: we’re really both working to become philosophers.

Maybe one day he will work at a space agency, or a lab, or a university, and he will discover great things and explain their workings and win a Nobel Prize. Hopefully, he’ll do all of the above. He’s really that brilliant. Maybe I’ll work at a university and write some books. For the sake of argument, to even out our potentials, maybe I will be the modern, Canadian equivalent of William Shakespeare.

Maybe we’ll both end up working at Tim Horton’s and my point is entirely moot* (unlikely for him–physicists are a hot commodity in the job market).

Will his contributions be more important to the world than mine?

To different people, maybe. Some people might even see the both of us as useless, overeducated academics of little use to the real world. Maybe he would be better off becoming a doctor and helping people in a directly tangible way. Maybe I would be better off becoming a farmer, and contributing tangibly to my community. Problems: he nearly faints at any talk of veins and blood, and I am a plant killer of the first degree. Our skills and talents are better suited to the career paths that we have chosen. Even so, maybe we should just suck it up and work at real jobs anyway, for the betterment of society. Isn’t that what I keep going on about, the betterment of society?

What I see my English degree doing is helping to change global attitudes and societal values. Science, without its balance in the Arts, does little to fully explain the world. True, it explains the Hows and Whys, but it doesn’t touch the “The Way in Which We Go About Doing Things” and the “How do We Feel About It?”. I am entirely preoccupied with these last two. But these alone are useless, if not complemented by the Hows and Whys. Science and Arts work together. We’re both important. And because we attempt to understand and explain the universe, and try to extend that understanding so that future generations will understand us (and hopefully understand themselves), we’re important to everyone else, even if what we do doesn’t seem as difficult or useful as a ‘real job’ out in the ‘real world’ beyond the university boundaries.

I’m privileged to be working towards my dream job: a career in academia. I mean this both in the sense that I’m really, really lucky that I have the support of my family and the financial means of pursuing my goals, and in the sense that I have found something (that I believe has great value to society) that I am certain I will be happy doing for the rest of my life. My work is hard, rewarding, and (by accident), really fun for me. I feel the same way about all jobs; when the individual is happy and successful in doing them, then he or she contributes to society in a wonderful way. This is not a competition to see who is more important, with all the losers declared incompetent and useless.

I am an artsy, and I will be employed, and I will do something for society. I will be judged by my own merits, and not in comparison to anyone else.

* I learned the word ‘moot’ from Rick Springfield’s “Jessie’s Girl”, and I love it very much.

Grocery Shopping Like an Adult

1999 was a big year for me. I was seven, and thought I was incredibly grown up, mostly because that was the year I learned how to tie my own ponytail and how to make a cup of tea. We’re not talking about Grandmama-approved Earl Grey served in your best bone china, but boiling water poured over Tetley’s and gulped down before it had a chance to steep. Still, I was a proud little second-grader, convinced I could conquer the world before starting high school. (Not even kidding — when a popular boy didn’t invite me to a party in grade six, I was determined to publish a volume of poetry within the next two years to make him regret not socializing with a published author when he had the chance. Needless to say, that has not happened.)

These days, I can braid my own hair (nothing like Baboushka, though. Girl, you gotta show the interwebz your mad hair skills soon!) and I’ve even upgraded to loose-leaf tea, but I haven’t thought of myself as an adult in years. I’m not financially independent, my mother quizzes me before exams, and my father and I discuss most of my papers before I’ve written a word. But I’m working on the whole growing up thing. And in some respects — namely grocery shopping — I might even be there.

Well, okay, we drink bagged tea too.

So, how to grocery shop lyk a bawss like a responsible adult:

1. This seems obvious, but know what you and the people you’re shopping for can and cannot eat. As you likely surmised from Baboushka’s apple crisp recipe, she’s gluten intolerant. While I can mainline pasta and bread, my Ashkenazi-Asian genes have doomed me to lactose intolerance, and I stopped eating (land) meat when I was a wee three year old. And so shopping for roomie dinner parties requires mad planning.

Almond milk for lactards!

2. Make a list! But not any old list. A super-responsible-adult list divided into food groups! I’m not going all Canada Food Guide on you; one of my food groups is “Noms.” That’s where fizzy drinks and chips and candied ginger go. But because we’re Super Responsible Adults, most of the list is spread between Proteins (smoked salmon is amazing if you’re too lazy to actually cook fish), Carbs (quinoa doesn’t stick as much as rice; sweet potato fries are the best) and Produce (my new goal is to have as colourful a fruit basket as possible). It’s way less tempting to buy ALL THE FOOD when you’re starting at a well-thought-out shopping list. Well, except when all-dressed chips are on sale. I may have an addiction.

3. Go shopping!

It’s probably easiest to buy everything in one fell swoop at a big-box supermarket (guilty), but you’re probably spending more money for food of a lower quality. Now, if you live in the McGill Ghetto, that problem is easily remedied. There are no fewer than four grocery stores on Parc between Sherbrooke and Pins. For delish produce, hit up Eden in Galeries du Parc. Their avocados are always ripe. For super cheap anything, Marché Lobo is the place to be. Seriously, you can get two dozen Medjool dates for a dollar. And Provigo and Metro are always there for when you want the brands you grew up with (&/or cheap wine).

Gluten-Free Apple Crisp That You Can’t Screw Up (Unlike that Midterm)

I forgot to take a picture of the finished crisp; I ate it too fast.

This is what the last corner looked like, before I made Sarastotle finish it off.

The recipe is my sort of my own, adapted from my memories of how my mother has always made hers. In my family, we never put oats on the top: such a thing is never done! It is entirely gluten-free, but contains butter, so it’s not vegan or dairy-free. Easily adaptable though!

I bake a little like my great aunt; after a while, measurements become meaningless and I just start throwing in ingredients by the handful, rather than by the exact tablespoonful. For breads, this is a really, really bad idea. You’ll end up with rocks for scones. For apple crisp, it’s safe to guesstimate.

You will need:

• a big bowl
• a fork or spoon
• a small dishie to melt the butter in
• a casserole dish (preferably a big flat one; I only had three apples, so I used a loaf pan, and I had to jig the temperatures accordingly)

Ingredients:

• 6 apples (I used Cortland)
• brown sugar
• rice flour
• cinnamon
• 1/4 cup butter (melted)

1. Slice apples. Put in bottom of casserole dish and sprinkle lemon juice over them, to keep them from browning.

2. Look at your apples, now back at your bowl. Now back to the apples. Guesstimate the amount of sugar needed to cover all of the apples, and fill all the nooks and crannies, and put that into the bowl. Throw in a handful of flour and mix together. If there are pebbles of sugar, leave them; they’ll be nice and crunchy when you bake them! Shake some cinnamon in and mix well.

3. Melt your butter and mix this in, stirring it well. Crumble this mixture over the apples.

4. Pop it into an oven preheated to 375 degrees Fahrenhe

it. Wait 25-30 minutes.

Serve warm, with ice cream. Or eat it straight out of the casserole dish with a spoon if you’re an uncouth cur like me.

Next time, Sarastotle will teach you how to make an omelette.

Signs, Signs, Everywhere a Sign

My frozen pipes bring all the city of Montréal workers to the yard.

After seeing one handyman, one handier handyman, one plumber, one city of Montréal engineer, and a pile of city of Montréal workers, our pipes are thawed. Sarastotle had gone to shower at a friend’s house, and when she returned, right as the door was opening, all the taps burst forth with glorious torrents of water. It was a beautiful sight to behold. Hot water returned almost immediately. We then ran the dishwasher for three loads–it’s incredible, how many forks a small household uses every day.

Our apartment is now de-grimed, and we have a tidy stack of the water bottles the city gave us. We are thinking about donating them eventually; we’ll hold on to them until it’s clear we won’t have any other plumping problems. Our

other roomie, S., was pleased that we would survive a zombie apocalypse, if we were to be confronted with one.

One of the workers instructed us to keep a tap drizzling at all times until the end of the winter weather, to keep water flowing through the system. Sarastotle made a beautiful sign for the tap, and S. made sure we all had an incentive to follow the instructions.

We decorated the kitchen sign for good measure, with various hunks we found in old issues of Cosmo.

We’re 0 for H2O

We have no water. No, it’s not the Mayan apocalypse come late, just a potentially frozen pipe, and we’re not dying of thirst, just wallowing in filth.

Yesterday at lunchtime, water pressure went way down and now we’re lucky if we can get a few droplets out. So that means we get to trek to the nearby mall to use their bathrooms, and shower at the gym. (Full discloser: so far, I’m just not showering, and can attest that cornstarch really does help fake clean hair!)

Our landlords are wintering in Florida so it’s up to us to beg/charm/bribe handymen/plumbers/city officials to work their magic. We had one guy in until midnight last night, he returned several times this morning with a plumber in tow, but although they cut several holes in our kitchen walls and blasted hot air at pipes, we’re still waterless. Apparently the frozen pipes are in municipal jurisdiction. And so the city of Montreal just dropped off a gallon of water to tide us over until they can muster a crew to fix whatever needs fixing. Rationing, yay!

We’ve also filled up a few buckets with snow. Once it melts, we’ll be able to flush toilets again! Ingenious!

Alas, the city had to remind us that snow melts into water. And that’s why we go to McGill!

The Move to WordPress

We started blogging on Tumblr, but decided to move to WordPress in order to offer a comments section. We’re trying to repost old posts onto the WordPress blog, but if you want to check out past posts, we’re at:

http://playersofprincearthur.tumblr.com/

Good Gravy, Marie: We’re Gonna Kick the Bucket!

Sarastotle was cruising through her procrastination stations recently and happened upon an article outlining 10 things roommates should do to bond. Turns out, we’d done most of them already because we’re naturally awesome. We were only missing one main one: The Roomie Bucket List. Instead of doing the numerous assignments piled upon us this week, we sat around our kitchen table (oh, the sweet joy of having a table after a year of perpetually picnicking around a coffee table) and composed a list of our goals for the year.

*** FOUR MONTHS LATER***

Back in action, to tell you about all the groovy things we did, because I couldn’t be bothered to write about each thing as it happened.

Here, for posterity, is The List:

1. Zumba Sundays

2. Thai food

3.  Westmount Adventure

4. Movie at Cinema du Parc

5. Dessert at Juliette et Chocolat

6. Roomie Brunch!

7. Swimming laps

8. Paint our nails

9. Cosmo bulletin board

10. Crafternoon tea

11. Tend n’ Mend (sewing)

12. Torrid love affair (Baboushka)

13. 1950s LARPing

14. Downton Party with hats

15. Wine and Cheese Crashing with Katy Kat

16. Religious excursions

17. Ottawa trip

18. Afternoon tea (different than Crafternoon Tea)

19. Baking apples

20. Make dresses/tutus

21. Acquire ettiquette book and learn to be ladies

22. Soundcloud debut!

23. Make a trebuchet!

24. Movie night

25. Karaoke

26. Dictionary of Sarastotles-Baboushkisms

27. Teavening

28. Lemon poppy seed cake

29. Write to favourite Mormon mommy blogger

30. McGill biddies do the Hammer! (Hamilton trip)

31. Exercise routine (stretching)

32. Chips in a bowl

33. Write Christmas letters to troops

34. Airporter Party (Toronto trip)

35. JavaU Fries

We must have been hungry when we composed The List: everything is about food.