parmesan cheese and pesto

 I bought a little container of parmesan cheese pieces from the store (Fresh Street Market!) for $3, brought it home and whizzed them up in my food processor.  My food processor jumped and clanked and I thought it was going to burst apart, but eventually it whizzed the parmesan into teeny pebbles of cheesy goodness.

I put it on the table next to the tomato basil bread (The Mister's first bake from Grandma Today)

 

Next I used the food processor to make a batch of Winter Pesto from the Urban Vegan cookbook - I was actually a recipe tester for the cookbook; you can see some of my test results here and here .

This pesto is one of my favorite recipes of hers - instead of basil and pine nuts she uses spinach and walnuts!  So delicious.  My garlic was incredibly bitey in the finished dish, so I stirred in a couple of spoons of the parmesan to try to tone it down.  If you were keeping it vegan you could use some nutritional yeast - and it was delicious.  We tossed it with ravioli for a quick dinner.  The next day the garlic had mellowed a bit and it was even better.  I smeared it on some toast and topped it with tomato slices.  Super good.

Recipe: Winter pesto

 

book club 22 - The Windsor Knot by JH 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.

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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.