book club 22 - The Windsor Knot by SJ Bennett

 2021-22

 

book club 21 - Audiobook - Mask of Shadows by Linsey Miller

 2021-21

 

sunday dinner - lettuce wraps and noodle salad

 It has continued to be hot here, we've been over 30'c every day but one for over a month, I believe.  It's hot; the smoke from the fires is gross, everything is covered in ash; the Interior is SO dry; I hate cooking.  

We made some lettuce wraps, summer rolls and noodle salad for a recent Sunday dinner, and my favorite part was the crispy rice paper wraps.  I saw these made on Tik Tok last year but was skeptical, but I am here to tell you they are super easy and delicious.

 We had some chicken and salmon for the wraps, as well as a plate with cucumber, carrot, bell pepper, and pea shoots.  Since I bought rice paper wraps to make the crisps, I made a few summer rolls for the kids with their toppings of choice wrapped in softened rice wraps.  I haven't made those for years!  So delicious.

 I found this Saigon sauce at Fresh Street Market; not sure where the peanut coconut sauce was purchased, but they were both AMAZING. 

 I made a noodle salad as well, and instead of buying a head of cabbage to shred to add to the salad with other veg, I bought a bag of coleslaw mix and used that.  A nice time saver.

 The wraps were inspired by this Lettuce wraps with rice crisps recipe from Chrissy Tiegen's Cravings website, should you be interested.

books! of! mystery!

I have become a regular viewer of the ole Tickey-toks, as I like to call them to annoy The Boy, who is barrelling into Tweendom and gets annoyed by his parents no matter what we do.

One of my favorite sorts of videos is what I believe the younguns calls Book-Tok, about what everyone is reading.  A few months ago on there I saw some posts about mystery books from used book shops, in which you don't know what you are buying, only a few clues are given to you on the paper it's wrapped in.  Cute!  Shortly after that I came across a shelf of mystery books in a used book store here in town that I hadn't been to in years and years.

I decided to treat myself to one, and narrowed it down to 2 choices.  Then I noticed that I could sort of the see the title of one of the books, which was one I'd read it before, so that made my choice easy. 

 

 That is also more than I normally like to spend on a used book, but I was caught up in the excitement of it all.

 I have not read it yet, but I will soon.

______________________________________________________

Back in May, the Kamloops Symphony held a book sale, but with a twist, since we were still under strict pandemic rules.  They moved the sale online, and you could order and pay for a bag of books from a variety of genres online, and then go pick it up.  In addition to different genres, they had 2 sizes of bags - 8 books for $10 or 20 books for $20.  I got a back of 20 fiction, and The Mister got a bag of 8 science fiction.

I was a bit disappointed in my bags, to be honest.  Nothing is very recent, despite them advertising they were picking from their "best" books, and a few are from the 70's and 80's.  I took them out of the bags, looked at them, took the photos and....put them back in the bags where they are still sitting in a corner of the basement with some other stuff to be sorted. 

The Mister seemed ok with his bag of science fiction; there was even some excitement over a couple of them, so that's good.  I didn't get a photo of his bag as he put his away promptly, like a normal person.

I will get these on the shelf soon...ish and I will read them, but if I don't like one, I won't force myself to finish it.  I did that with the book I just finished last night, and I stayed up late to hate-finish it.  Not time well spent.

But in the end, the symphony got some money, so that's what really matters.

snapshot - sushi lunch

 Fresh Street Market makes some pretty good sushi.

how to - make a beer can "cake"

 I wanted to do something fun for The Mister's birthday this year.  He loves beer, specifically trying craft beers from different places, and the liquor stores around us have pretty good selections, so I made him a beer can cake.

These are all over Pinterest, should you need more information or inspiration, but because I am not very crafty, I took the basic "stack cans of beer together" and went with it.  I went to the liquor store and bought 10 cans of beer; 6 "tall" and 4 "regular", then hit the dollar store for some ribbon.  They didn't have any nice ribbon so instead I bought a roll of burlap (MANLY!) and purple yarn.  I also found some tiny lights to use in place of candles on the top of the cake.

I used tape to hold the 6 tall cans in place on the board and to each other, then clumsily tied some burlap and yarn around it to make it purdy.

 I realized once I was done that I should have wrapped the cardboard tray in wrapping paper to make it pretty too.  Fortunately my family knows how bad I am at all of this so no one cared or commented.

 My plan had been to make a second layer out of 3 cans and then the top layer with one, but I didn't like the way the 3 cans looked, so I used 4 cans for the second layer and stole one of The Misters beers from the fridge to make a top layer. 

I plopped a ribbon on top and strung the little lights all over my magnificent creation.

And it looked super cute once it was all lit up!

 Everyone was impressed and kindly ignored all the visible tape holding everything together.  These guys are the best.

book club 20 - The Innocents by Michael Crummey

 2021-20

 

book club 19 - The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo by Taylor Jenkins Reid

 2021-19

 

book club 18 - The Best of Me by David Sedaris

 2021-18

 

cheese stuffed little buns, mediterranean chicken, crock pot meatloaf

 I pushed The Mister out of the way and took over the bread baking a few months back, and made these little Cheesy Stuffed Garlic Roll Balls.  They were pretty good, even though the cheese leaked out of some.  Sabotage by The Mister???

 Recipe: cheesy stuffed garlic dough balls 

 

We also made a very good skillet chicken with artichokes that felt very Mediterranean,  and an extremely good crock pot meatloaf.  So delicious.  I only used one box of stuffing mix because that was all I had.  It turned out well, I don't know if I would use 2 when I make it again.

bruschetta pasta salad

 

I mentioned how hot is was the last week of June, with a heat wave pushing us over 40'C every day.  It sucked!  We ate a lot of sandwiches that week.  I wanted to make a cold pasta salad and remembered a very very good pasta I'd made years ago with a no cook make ahead sauce, bruschetta pasta from 2000 and freaking SIX, when I did my ABC's of food posts.  This was from G is for Garlic!  

I thought briefly, a year or so ago, about doing another set of ABC's.....but it seems like a lot of work.  Too much work.  Or maybe not?  Maybe fun?  No.  Too much?  Hmmmmm....

ANYWAY this is a delicious and easy pasta dish, hot or cold.  You could really throw lots of different things in it; we added some chopped cucumber and bell pepper to it the next day when our fridge died and we trying to use up whatever we could before it went bad in the heat.

It's a lovely summer time dish, give it a try.

book club 17 - The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes by Suzanne Collins

 2021-17

 

book club 16 - Journey to Joyful by Dashama

 2021-16

 

book club 15 - The Home Edit Life by Clea Shearer and Joanna Teplin

 2021-15

 

book club 14 - audiobook - Drive Me Crazy by Samantha Chase

 2021-14

 

snapshot - grandma today

 Should I be offended The Mister brought this home for me from Value Village?

stuff and garden update

 Here we are, halfway through 2021, fresh out of the school year and a week long terrible heat wave.  We've jumped right into fire season now; the village of Lytton was destroyed by fire this week and last night there was an evacuation here in town, after a thunderstorm rolled in and started quite a few fires by lightening.

We had a strike somewhere behind our house last night and the noise and vibration through the house was very scary.  The storm kept us up half the night and today I will be making a list of things we should grab if we have to be evacuated this fire season.

I did a quick search and found 3 Go Fund Me pages to help people from Lytton - 

 Love For Lytton

Helping Our Friends In Lytton 

Help For The Victims Of The Lytton Wildfire 

______________________________________________________

I won't judge anyone on how they spent yesterday, but this year we did not celebrate Canada Day.  We did talk about ongoing residential school news with the kids, watched some videos about the schools as well as  some videos of walks and demonstrations that happened yesterday.  I MAY have left a few comments on the social media of some politicians and public figures that decided they wanted to show everyone how ignorant they are, but let's not go down that road right now.

______________________________________________________

In my last post I mentioned an online course on Indigenous Canada from Coursera.  I am in week 8 of the course, and am so glad I'm doing this.  The course is free, should you be interested.

______________________________________________________

 I don't much positive to say, this last while has been rough.  Let's end with a garden update, shall we?

Our raspberry patch is sparser than in prior years.  I think it needs some new soil and fertilizer in there, but for this year we're just letting it do what it wants.

The Mister planted a few peas in these 2 planters next to the tomato plant planter.  They have not enjoyed the up and down temperatures of the year so far.

Our garden this year became mostly potatos and tomatos - we bought some veg plants from a fundraiser and they weren't the best looking plants I've ever seen.  We planted them in the ground the week before the May long weekend, and bam - we got a late frost that killed a bunch of them.  We weren't happy with the amount of money that we'd already spent so we got a bag of seed potatos and more tomatos - The Mister's favorite crop.  We have one lone lettuce and a few cucumber plants that I doubt will do anything.

The Mister bought me a blueberry bush this year, and it's sitting next to a couple of zucchini plants in this section.  The kids discovered the blueberry bush has some blueberries and so now it's a full time job keeping them away from the bush to let the (very small) handful of berries have a chance to ripen.

Rhubarb, oregano, some other herbs.

My mint.

Our garden is absolutely full of butterflies this year!  I haven't seen this many butterflies in years.  They are so beautiful.  The Mister took this lovely photo yesterday.