Good lord.  I was going to write you a nice post today about my upcoming practicum but HELL FROZE OVER and I had THREE phone calls today.  I was on the phone for over TWO HOURS.  Holy catfish, I haven’t even got time to pick my nose!

And, my little brother moves away to university tomorrow so I’ll be away for two days helping him move.  Busy times, busy times.  So instead of a fabulous post, I will leave you with this picture of my lunch, vegan pho, which I am about to devour:

Present but hard to detect: hot chili sauce, hoisin sauce, and slices of green onion to accompany the more visible lime and sprouts and basil.

Notice the piece of paper over my laptop keyboard, which will protect it from slurpy splashes.

It got cold today, so I turned on the fireplace.  Which made things nice and cosy… until I noticed there was a very cold draft moving through my living room.  I am quite clever, and was able to trace the draft to two sources: the open kitchen window, and the open sliding glass door in the bedroom.

Apparently, I am not clever enough to avoid heating the entire out doors.

This is not my recipe.  It is from one of the best cook books ever, Splendid Soups by James Peterson.  Splendid indeed!  You should rush out and buy this book if you like soup.  (It’s not vegetarian, in case you wondered.)  Anyway, this soup is so easy to make and the results are almost shockingly good.  Seriously.  I would not lie to you.  I took a lot of pictures but honestly, the whole works comes together in under forty minutes start to finish, and that includes time where you’re just twiddling your thumbs and watching TV while something simmers.  Not bad for a home made soup.

First, may I introduce the fennel, of which one bulb is required:

He has a slightly licoricey taste.  Here’s how you deal with him.  First chop off his leafy stems.  And cut him into quarters, cutting top to bottom.  Here he is, just before the final quartering cut:

Notice the wedge shaped parts of his stem there at the bottom.  That part isn’t nice to eat so we’re going to chop it off, as well as taking a shallow slice directly off the bottom.  This destems him.  The picture shows me making a very tricky and technically demanding angled slice to get the core/stem out:

Now he needs to be diced.  Don’t fuss too much with this.  The goal is to make little pieces that are soup-sized.  I cut each quarter into thirds, vertically, and then cut across these for the dice:

Now you toss all those pieces into your pot.  Next we will finely dice one medium sized white onion:

And that goes in the pot too.  Next add a bouquet garni - basically just a bundle of herbs tied together with twine that will simmer in the pot and be removed before serving.  You can use any herbs you like, though traditionally thyme, parsley, and a bay leaf are involved.  Marjoram is the herb recommended by the author, and I used marjoram, bay, thyme, sage, rosemary, and parsley.  Bundle them all up and tie it with some butcher’s twine, then toss it in the pot too.

Next we need to add 18 whole, peeled cloves of garlic.  Seriously!  When boiled without first being sauteed, garlic becomes very soft and mild.  The soup will taste of garlic but it won’t be overwhelming.  Trust me.  Go for it.  I used two whole cloves.

So now here is what your pot looks like:

It has a certain elegance, no?

Put the pot on the stove and add two litres of chicken stock, or in my case, faux chicken stock which involves no actual chickens.

Bring it to a boil and let it simmer for fifteen minutes covered.  While that’s happening, chop up about four very red and ripe tomatoes, about two cups worth.  I ended up with closer to three cups because I had a rogue tomato that needed chopping before it got too soft for any other use.  The recipe says to peel and deseed them, but I gotta tell you, that just seems like a waste to me.  You end up throwing out about a third of the volume of the tomato and I personally like the feel of the little seeds.  So I left everything in.  Which might also explain why I ended up with too much tomato:

And once the soup has simmered for fifteen minutes, you toss in the tomatoes and let it go for another ten minutes covered.

While that is cooking, strip some of the fuzzy bits off the fennel stalks and chop them up.  Try for a tablespoon or so.

And while you’re at it, chop up about a quarter cup of parsley, very fine.  I used flat leaf parsley which I prefer to the curly - the curly stuff feels yucky to me.  And reminds me of bad diners.

It’s also time to prepare the beans.  The recipe calls for properly cooking white beans from dry, but I can’t be bothered so I just use a can of precooked white kidney beans.  The recipe calls for just one cup, but I also hate to waste half a can of beans since they come packaged in more than a cup, so I just use them all.  When using canned beans, make sure to rinse them first.  They come out of the can in a sort of sludgy broth that I have never tasted but looks gross. Here are the beans next to the tomatoes.  Don’t worry about the continuity error.

Okay, so while you chopped fennel and parsley and rinsed beans, the tomatoes had their ten minutes to simmer in the soup.  Now fish out the bouquet garni, which has outlived its usefulness and needs to go in the trash. Shake off any clinging onions or other bits.

Now add the beans:

And the parsley and fennel fuzz:

And some salt and pepper to taste.  Stir.  Behold!

Behold also the mess on my stove.  Heh.  Okay, now you just let the beans heat through for maybe five minutes, and serve with crusty bread and perhaps a nice salad.  Hearty and delicious.  Seriously delicious.

I love having plants in the house.  Recently I killed a cactus by overwatering (but seriously, it looked to dessicated and dry, surely it needed more water!), so today I went out to replace it.  And came home with three new plants.  One is a succulent, which is basically a type of cactus I figure, because it’s supposed to be let to dry and dies with overwatering.  It’s the little fingery plant on the windowsill.  The jade plant, on the table, has been around for a while.  The other two plants, on the box and floor, are the other two new ones and much more my type of plant: green and leafy, easy to care for, hard to either over or underwater.  In any case they form a very nice leafy composition by my fireplace and I am very pleased by them.

When I was young, I would occasionally find myself home alone for the weekend with my mom.  My dad was an avid golfer and skiier who took many weekend trips to indulge in these hobbies; sometimes I would elect to stay home rather than join him, and it was these times when he was away that I had my best experiences of domesticity.

My mother would first clean the house - Dad being something of a tornado of debris, she generally allowed things to be messy when he was home, a decision based I believe on an acknowledgment of reality.  But with him gone, everything could be put to order and expected to stay that way.  With the house clean, she moved on to puttering: baking, sewing, and painting being her chief occupations when the house was to herself. I was mainly an observer here; my mother and I were not friends while I was growing up, and though we didn’t argue, we simply had very little to do with one another.  Yet I loved these times when it was just the two of us at home.  We didn’t talk much, and I didn’t share in performing her hobbies with her, but somehow there was a feeling of relaxation and contentment and coziness that could only occur under these particular circumstances.  I loved it.

Now I see much of her in me.  When Husband leaves home for a few days, I too make a thorough cleaning my first order of business.  Then I sew or cook or read - putter, in other words.  And I get that feeling of contentment, though when I am home alone I sometimes wish to have someone to share it with.

This weekend, Husband had four days off work.  We stuck close to home, other than two day trip drives.  I did my cleaning and ordering and cooking and reading and sewing - and it was perfect.  We achieved just the right balance of independence and interdependence, socializing and staying in, relaxing and doing things.  We had some serious talks but also laughed a great deal.  And I have realized that this is the best feeling I know: contentment, in my home, with my beloved husband, as we carry out daily occupations at a leisurely pace.

And that is what motivates me to be a home maker, insofar as I perform those tasks.  It’s not that I like cleaning the bathroom, or even necessarily that I love the cleanness of the result (though that is very good) - it’s an emotional experience of peace and warmth that requires order and recreational industry to manifest.

Yesterday was one of those complicated, sad, difficult days that I can’t talk about here.  The only thing good that came of it was the feeling of connection to Husband, who as it turns out can crack me up even when I’m in distress and getting sick *and* hungry all at the same time.  I can’t say enough about how much my quality of life and happiness are increased by his presence.

Side note: we tried to go out for dinner last night, and had our first total veg flop.  We went to Nick’s Spaghetti House, which I fond memories of, but it turns out there is not a single vegeterian option on the menu!  All the pastas are meat sauced.  It was very hard to leave the delicious smelling restaurant in search of something else.  Of course the dinner we ended up having was a disappointment.

Today I might post a recipe since I’m going to be making one of my favourite soups of all time (fennel and white bean), but first I have to whip myself into a cooking frenzy because I am actually sick and my energy is poo poo.  If I end up reading on the couch all day, I guess I could post pictures of that instead.

“Vegans can eat chickens, right?  I mean, I know they’re not plants - but they’re just so boring!”

Husband spotted this when he went for his morning shower today:

Can you see the weiner?  Complete with its, shall we say, two friends?  Here’s a close up:

Naturally I rushed to take a photo.  Maybe I need a new category?  Accidental weiners!

Husband and I like to take drives, so yesterday that’s just what we did.  We started at home (Vancouver), and then took a drive through West Vancouver, which was my first time going there.  Husband was nearly incapacitated by my comment, made innocently and without a trace of irony, that I thought it would be perfectly acceptable for us to buy a place in West Van some day (humour explained for non-natives: this is the rich part of the city, peopled by uber snobs who drive Maseratis and stare down their noses disapprovingly at mere plebes like me).  It would be like saying, Gee dear, I guess I could see my way to living in Trump Palace, if I had to.

Okay.  Anyway.  We made a brief detour to check out lighthouse park, which is where well scrubbed and clean looking West Vancouver dogs go to run around with their equally clean owners:

I took a picture of this plaque not because I’m particularly interested in Captain Vancouver, but because of the special attention paid to the birth of the first white child born here.  West Vancouver’s snobbiness has a pedigree reaching back to the first whiteys I guess (fourth paragraph):

Then we went to Whistler, future home of the winter Olympics and also a haven of snobbiness.  By the time we got there it was three in the afternoon and I hadn’t had any lunch yet, so I was beastly.  And so was this nifty scultpure of skulls!  (Sorry for the bad segue.):

Whistler is actually quite nice, and thus ends the nice portion of our driving day, because we just kept heading north and let me tell you, there is nothing up there but little butt towns full of houses with cars in the yards and not much else.  We drove up to Lilloett, then on to Lytton, Boston Bar, and then looped back through Hope to Chilliwack and finally home.

The towns are ghastly but the landscape is spectacular, but alas I only got bad pictures of it because, as I say, no one lives up  there and clearly highway maintenance is neither prioritized nor, perhaps, possible.  Long chunks of the road are right up against obvious avalanche and slide prone banks.  You can tell because a) there are signs saying so and b) there are rocks littering the road that plainly came from the slide bank on the left.  On the right is a steep cliff down the mountains into nothing.  So there’s nowhere to stop and even if there were, you don’t want to loiter where avalanches happen!  This is a long way of saying this is the best picture I got.  Sorry.

This was one of the very few areas where they put up a barrier between the highway and the cliff.  The river was beautiful and so are the mountains - but holy shit the highway is scary.  In places it’s one lane for both direction (as in, you have to share the lane with people coming the other way!) - but because it’s the fucking BC mountains the road is twisted like a corkscrew and you can see about four metres in front of the car.  If someone was actually coming the other way, the Sprite Car (and us) would be paste.  Why was it only one lane, you ask?  Because the other lanes were all covered in rock slide material!  Ha!  Ha!  Nervous laugh!

They may be living in poverty ridden and ugly little butt towns, but the people of non-population-corridor BC are fucking hardcore.  And seriously, it is so beautiful up there it takes your breath away.  Canada is in general very sparsely populated once you get about two hundred kilometres from the USA border, and it has a vast and rugged beauty that is startling when you’re used to the ugliness of the city.

Anyway, from rich West Van to poor Boston Bar and points in between, we had about a ten hour drive through some fantastic terrain.  And despite driving all day we stayed in a rather small little corner of the province, which I must say is really enormous.

Okay.  There’s more driving on the schedule today so I need to jet.  I mean drive.  See ya!

So the other night Husband and I were walking down to Gastown to meet some friends for drinks when we saw a poster that caught our eye.  In huge, bold letters it said “STOLEN” on top.  Then there was a picture of a Boston Terrier.  Then a description: “Stolen dog.  Last seen wearing a pink Louis Vuitton collar, in the neighbourhood of X and Y streets.  Has a tattoo on her belly that spells out ‘thug life.’  Reward: $5000.  No questions asked.”

So what kind of person is the owner of this dog?  This owner, who puts a vanity tattoo on their dog proclaiming their anti-society association with criminal lifestyles?  Who wants someone to come forward but makes it clear that he believes the dog is STOLEN?  Who puts expensive gear on a ridiculous looking dog?  Is this owner, likely a person who uses their dog as a narcissistic extension of themselves and who is clearly hostile, the sort of person who actually will ask no questions?  If they can afford such a huge reward, are they in fact an actual thug?

Husband and I cracked up over this sign.  It’s quite interesting, the things people reveal (or portray) about themselves.