What’s under your stove?
Since we have been packing up and cleaning the condo in order to move, there have been a lot of interesting discoveries made Several of those discoveries were when moving the stove out to clean behind it. The checklist is as follows, or at least as far as I can tell:
- duct tape
- asparagus
- cheerio
- philips head screw
- unpopped popcorn kernel
- popped popcorn
- penne
- mushroom
- stella artois beer cap
- piece of tin foil wrapper
There was a lot more, but not everything was as easy to identify. At least things are a lot cleaner than they were.
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I want one of these
I know this video has probably been plastered all over the place by now, but what kind of blogger would I be if I didn’t do my part to ensure a viral video spread like a virus? I can’t help but laughing every time I watch this entire video, but my favourite part by far is the line “Mother fucking time vampire”. I’m going to make a conscious effort to assimilate that term into my mainstream conversation whenever applicable.
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Oscar winners
Although I typically have very little interest in actually watching the Oscars, I’ll admit that I usually am interested in finding out who/what won the top awards. I usually only care about who one best actor/actress, best supporting actor/actress and best picture. I just took a peek and wasn’t really surprised. For anyone that is interested here is the list of winners:
Motion Picture: “Slumdog Millionaire.”
Actor: Sean Penn, “Milk.”
Actress: Kate Winslet, “The Reader.”
Supporting Actor: Heath Ledger, “The Dark Knight.”
Supporting Actress: Penelope Cruz, “Vicky Cristina Barcelona.”
Director: Danny Boyle, “Slumdog Millionaire.”
Foreign Film: “Departures,” Japan.
Adapted Screenplay: Simon Beaufoy, “Slumdog Millionaire.”
Original Screenplay: Dustin Lance Black, “Milk.”
Animated Feature Film: “WALL-E.”
Art Direction: “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.”
Cinematography: “Slumdog Millionaire.”
Sound Mixing: “Slumdog Millionaire.”
Sound Editing: “The Dark Knight.”
Original Score: “Slumdog Millionaire,” A.R. Rahman.
Original Song: “Jai Ho” from “Slumdog Millionaire,” A.R. Rahman and Gulzar.
Costume: “The Duchess.”
Documentary Feature: “Man on Wire.”
Documentary (short subject): “Smile Pinki.”
Film Editing: “Slumdog Millionaire.”
Makeup: “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.”
Animated Short Film: “La Maison en Petits Cubes.”
Live Action Short Film: “Spielzeugland (Toyland).”
Visual Effects: “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.”
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Bacon Cheese Pizza Burger
This looks so good and so disgusting all at the same time. No matter how disgusting you think it is though, I would like to see somebody turn down at least a taste of this creation. You know curiosity would get the best of you, and you would have to try it if it were in front of you. I grabbed this pic from a pretty cool site thisiswhyyourefat.com and the description for this amazing culinary marvel is: “Giant burger between two large meat pizzas, eggs, bacon, colby and pepper jack cheese.”
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The Trilogy Meter
I figured I would share this. This is a fairly accurate rating of several different movie trilogies, in my opinion.
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Why I hate Windows updates
Let me start off by saying, I’m glad the process is automated for people that would otherwise never patch their machines and have them sit directly connected to the Internet. But, it really becomes a pain in the ass when you are dealing with a laptop for work. I use a laptop connected to a dock during the day and typically bring it home at night.
The first warning I usually get of a Windows update requiring a reboot is when I first boot up in the morning, since they are typically released at night while my laptop is happily sleeping away in my bag. Now, I’ll be the first to admit I am far from being a morning person and don’t usually arrive first thing in the morning, so I find it a little more important to hit the ground running when I arrive to work. It is at this point where I have zero interest in waiting for 4 windows updates to apply and reboot my laptop, I have stuff to do. So I opted out of the reboot this morning and have constantly been dodging the pop-up window and clicking on “Reboot Later”. The only problem with this is, by the time I am done for the day and am willing to shut everything down I normally want to LEAVE, not stay and wait for updates to install and reboot. I know, I could have done it at lunch, but if you knew what my taskbar looked like you would know that I typically have 14-20 active windows/apps open at any given time, including notepads with various notes and configuration.
I guess what it all comes down to is that I’m lazy, and I really can’t think of a better way to do Windows updates without causing myself any inconvenience. Maybe I should have made this blog entry on my phone while my laptop was rebooting!
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Butter Chicken in a box = fail
While shopping on the weekend, we came across the Gourmantra brand Butter Chicken meal kit. I love Indian food and butter chicken especially, so I was intrigued. My first instinct should have been to put it down and run away, but I decided I would give it a try. If any kind of intelligence had kicked it, I would have deduced that the only meal kit that is actually worth eating is tacos. Sadly, that was not the case.
The kit comes with basmati rice, a garlic/ginger puree, a tomato puree and a packet of “butter chicken spice blend”. I started out heating butter and the garlic/ginger puree, and I also added some chopped green chili’s to spice it up a bit. After that was all mixed together I added some cubes of chicken breast, it started to soak up the butter and puree and was starting to smell nice. After the chicken had cooked and was no longer pink the tomato puree and water was added to the mix to cook for another few minutes. This was really starting to smell more like an Italian dish than an Indian one, with the garlic and tomato being the predominant aromas. Now it was time to add the “butter chicken spice blend”, and this is when things took a bit of a turn. I’ve had my share of butter chicken, and this really didn’t smell like anything I had ever experienced. It wasn’t bad, but it just didn’t match my memory of what the dish should smell like. Having not mixed it in yet, I decided to give it the benefit of the doubt. Unfortunately, the smell didn’t really change much. The entire mixture took the aroma of this spice blend. It had a pungent and sweet aroma, that just wasn’t right. To be completely honest, it wasn’t bad, it just didn’t seem to fit. After the final mixture including some half and half cream cooked for a bit longer, I plated a bed of basmati rice and got ready to add the butter chicken on top. I thought the cream and dry spices would have thickened the sauce up a bit, but it really didn’t. I ended up having to drain the liquid as I was scooping out the chicken or I would have drowned the rice.
The final plate looked alright, but still had the same smell as that dry spice blend. I ended up eating it, and it was filling but not terribly tasty. The basmati rice was probably the highlight of the dish, and that is pretty hard to screw up. I guess next time I should actually try a real recipe and do the spices from scratch. Or, leave my consumption of Indian cuisine to the hands of a capable, authentic Indian restaurant.
The rest of the pics of the meal in progress are here
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Sunday Dinner
To borrow a page from dahil.ca, I have my own Sunday Dinner post. You can read his post (which arguably has more pictures and might have been tastier than mine) here.
It started last weekend, when I decided to renew my Costco membersheip and revisit all they had to offer. We weren’t really in the mood to cook a massive meal that night so we just picked up a few things including some chicken and salmon. All week we were salivating over some of the steaks we had seen, and decided to BBQ up some sides of beef this weekend.
So we made another trip out to Costco and wandered around for a bit. I had to exercise some serious self control in almost every department I was in, especially the electronics section. I was a bit disappointed in the selection of free samples this weekend though. Last weekend I was able to fill myself with a lunches worth of free samples, today I only had 3 samples and one of them was a piece of gum. Anyway, we found our perfect rib-eye steaks, picked up a few other things and left the store. I also grabbed a $1.99 hot dog on the way out.. This place is just rolling with deals, like this 20L tub of mayo. These can’t be for home consumption, can they? Maybe in Quebec?
Once the steaks were home, they were prepared in my special marinade. (Sorry not giving that one away) Which they soaked in all afternoon. Here is a pic I took of them soaking up the marinade:
Sadly, I didn’t get a pic of them when they were done but they looked great. The steak had homemade Italian sausage, caesar salad, rapini as sidekicks. I’m so full, I can barely type anymore. So I won’t. Next time I will get a few more pics, but I was so hungry by the time everything came off the BBQ, I couldn’t wait.
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