Sally’s Kitchen & Stuff

We had a gig until 11:45 last night. In Thornbury. In case you have no idea where that is (I had no idea where that was), it’s about 2.5 hours north of Toronto by car, on a good day. We left at 12:30 am, that means that I got home at around 3:10 am, and went to bed by 3:30 am. Then I got up at 8:25 am to catch a ride with my honey so I can get to the Studio by 9:15. In 15 minutes, we’re heading out to Barrie for a waterside festival. *sigh* Then we do it again tomorrow. And the day after.

I’m tired.

I think I’m going to buy some sunglasses, and have junk for lunch. I need…sleep.

I’m totally thinking about moving this whole thing to blogger. I’m a blogger devotee - I have around 3 over there, one for those funny moments with the kids. A couple of other ones to gab, in general. One of the main reasons I want to do this is because of "Hello" support. I use picasa to sort my photos; it’s a very handy program, and it’s FREEWARE.

Since blogger is now part of Google, they have made "blogger pro" completely free - customizable templates, easy uploading, image support, everything, FREE. I can understand why Friendster would need to charge for theirs - hosting, bandwidth, etc, is expensive. I wonder how they’re going to keep this service free for very long, since the server load must’ve increased exponentially in the past 4 months with the recent upgrades. The problem with the net is that what you can offer for a little bit of money, somebody else will do it for free.

This is easy, and kids love it. It’s a very filling breakfast item though, so don’t say I didn’t warn you. It’s a revision of the old french toast - crisper, and you can use fresh bread. I also took out the soaking process.

We visited Port Hope on Saturday, and bought some fresh maple syrup at the farmer’s market, along with strips of smoked backbacon and farm fresh eggs. Mmmm. If you live in the city, chances are, there is a farmer’s market less than 30 minutes’ drive away. In Ontario there’s almost one in every town; even south Etobicoke has a farmer’s market on Saturdays, 8 AM - noon. I wholeheartedly recommend it.

Ingredients - serves 2
4 slices of bread, use whatever you have. Use fresh, not stale bread.
2 eggs
A sticky jam/butter. I used maple butter, but you can use nutella, whipped honey, jam, preserves…
1 pinch cinnamon
1 pinch nutmeg
1 TBSP icing sugar
As much fresh maple syrup as you dare

Instructions
Pre-heat oven (or toaster oven) to 450.

Using a cookie cutter - or a knife, cut a circle about 2.5 inches wide into middle of two slices of bread. Save the circles, and either toast or fry them in a bit of butter.  Glue, with jam, one slice of holed bread onto the slice of whole bread. Pop an egg into each hole, sprikle nutmeg and cinnamon on top. Bake until egg WHITES are set, but not the yokes. Cut off the crust,  cover with the saved tops, sprinkle with icing sugar, and drizzle liberally with maple syrup.

Why eggy surprise? You won’t know there’s an egg in it unti you cut into it.

You can make it right out of the cupboard, with some fresh or frozen chicken. I used frozen chicken breasts from M&M. Anther thing - this works equally well if you have 2 salmon fillets or steaks.

Ingredients - serves 2, feel free to double
2 chicken breast halves
4 TBSP orange marmalade
1/2 cup flour
1 TSP cayenne pepper
1/2 tsp chilli flakes
1/2 cup chicken broth
Splash of Light oil
Sprinkle of salt & pepper
half a lemon

Instructions
Sprinkle salt, pepper and cayenne pepper over chicken. Dip in flour and pat off excess. Preheat pan, add chlli pepper, toast for a couple of tosses, then add the oil. Heat through, and fish out the chilli pepper flakes with a spatula. Brown chicken on both sides.

Microwave marmalade for 30 seconds, stir, and pour over chicken. turn to coat. Add chicken broth to pan, and lower heat. Simmer until chicken is cooked through, about 6 minutes per side.

Serve on a bed of coleslaw and squeeze lemon juice over top. Makes a great midsummer meal. Ever notice that the hotter the climate, the spicier the food? Spicy food actually helps you cool down.

Meet Cammie. Isn’t she lovely? She’s a Canon Powershot A70. Compact, heavy (it’s all those damned 4 AA batteries), kinda flimsy construction, has a major engineering flaw (sand could get into the side lens, causing it not to retract and gives you an error. Thankfully, nothing I can’t fix.), but supposedly the best point and shooter out there. I like it because of the manual options - you can manually focus, change exposure, aperture. Lots of things I can’t do on a traditional cam.

This one’s on auto focus - there’s only one problem. I took it with a mirror, so when the auto-focus beam hit the camera, it’s focusing on the mirror. So anything you take from a mirror is bound to be a bit blurry. Just a tad.

Yes, I name all my electronics. At least, as far as my "follow-me-around" stuff goes. I call my PDA "Palmmie" and my camera "Cammie". Not too creative, but if I call it "snooklebuns" people will think I’m weird.

I’m meeting up some guy who lives in North York today to buy his digicam - a Canon Powershot A70 - gorgeous little thing, 3.2 mp, enhanced jpeg, takes AA batteries, all that. I’ve wanted a digicam forever, so I’m definitely getting this one. All thanks to Craigslist! Yes! Cam, box, case, mem cards, all for $200. It’s still under warranty. Hallelujah.

It’s part of my upcoming web comic project; I’ve got the characters developed already, so all I’ll be needing are backgrounds. I want to make them as realistic as possible, so I’ll need tracing material. You know, I really should’ve stuck with still-life class longer than I had.

So we came up with this idea. We’ll just be us. That’s right. It’d be just the little hilarious things that happen between two people who live together, where the girl is the geek, the guy is the suit, the place is way too small and we share a puter. *grrr* *hiss* *mine!*

Stu: So, do we get to go on adventures and stuff?
Sally: Um. Sure. Let’s go rescue little space puppies from the planet beta centuari in a spaceship made of paper clips, little bits of paper, and mentos.
Stu: Why mentos?
Sally: I don’t like gum.
Stu: …you DON’T need drugs.

I’m looking for a digicam. Saw a good one used actually - canon powershot 3.2 mp, with a 256 mb card, cables, software etc for $200. Not a bad deal considering that it’d cost me $400 in a store by itself.

There’s also the matter of me learning how to use illustrator. I’ve always HATED doing vector graphics, so this will be a…love hate relationship.

I made this last night and Stu absolutely LOVED it. Think Chicken parmasean, without the tomato sauce (I HATE tomato sauce), and very little parmasean.

You will need a roasting pan (with a rack) and a large skillet for this recipe. Foil helps.

Ingredients
12 chicken thighs, bone & skin removed
about a cup of frying oil
2 eggs
1 TBSP water
1 CUP flour
1 CUP breadcrumbs

Seasoning mix
1 TBSP Salt
2 TBSP garlic powder
1 TBSP dried basil
1 TBSP fresh black pepper
1/2 TBSP parprika
1/2 TBSP sage

Topping
1 CUP grated mozarella cheese
1 CUP grated aged cheddar
1/4 CUP parmasean cheese

Instructions
Preheat oven to 450.

Prepare 3 bowls, and a plate. Divide seasoning mix into bowl #1 and #3. In #2, whisk eggs and water together to form egg wash. Heat some oil in the skillet to medium. Mix the flour into #1, and the breadcrumbs into #3. Now, get into rhythm. Dip into #1, pat pat, dip into #2, drip drip, flip a couple of times in #3, then off onto the plate it goes. Once you have four, start frying. You want to get a nice golden color on both sides, don’t worry about cooking it all the way through. Keep working until all of them are nice and crispy on the outside.

A handy tip for a right hander like me is to work from left to right. Left hand goes into the egg-wash, right hand does the flouring and the covering with breadcrumbs. That way you won’t get gobs of batter on your hands.

Line a roasting pan with foil, put a rack on top of the foil, then line a layer of chicken over top. If you have a large roasting pan, you should only have one layer; but I have a small one, so I did two. Cover with cheese, try to concentrate them on the middle of each piece of chicken, and off to the oven they go for 25 minutes until cheese is melted and slightly browned on top.

Serve with mashed potatoes and vegetables - it’s a bit too dry for rice. If you cut leftovers into pieces, this can toss right into tomato sauce and pasta.

Canada Computers just got a graphic update. To all of us geeks in TO, that’s a household name. It’s up there with Sonnam, Jnetronic, and PCUsed. Now the site has thumbnails to all their products. Oooooo. Drool.

There’s a Sandisk Ultra II SD card on sale for $109 - 1 GB! Jeez. Two years ago I had to pay that much for a measly 256. Technology moves much too fast in this world. Not that it’s a bad thing; I just wish the value on "vintage" products go up too. My Little IPAQ 1940, which I love, and adore for its little compact body, is no longer available new from any merchant anywhere. The retail listed price for it was $399 US back in its heyday - haha, two years back, not that I paid that much mind you - and now you can probably find one hocked on Craigslist for under $150 CDN.

First I was going gaga for the Tungster T3. Now I’ve seen the light - I’m more of a PPC person than a Palm person. As in, I’m more of a nerd than I care to admit. I’d rather have a machine I can hack than a machine that has more apps is touted to be much more user-friendly. Now I’m drooling over this little baby / monster of a PPC - the Asus MyPal A730W. That isn’t a PPC! That’s a mini laptop! It has a 1.3 mp cam, microphone & speaker (duplex record/playback), earphones jack, 520 mhz? That’s more power than my computer back in 1997! 640 by 480 display? What will they think of next?

Now somebody give me one of those and that SD card on sale and I’ll be one happy little girl.

That about sums it up, eh? It’s worse than crack. You can play this game for … oh…9 hours straight without batting an eyelash. Currently I’m addicted to build mode - I’m churning out one historic house after another. Call it a revival to Lego(TM).

Stu stayed out all night playing video games, and so I stayed up til 2:30 am on the puter building houses. Geek homes should have more than one puter dammit! We need one more, hook him up to DoD, and that, would be perfect. Sadly, there isn’t more room to put another desk and a puter. We’ll have to wait til our move NEXT year.

He did come home early enough to drive me to work though. Awww.