Not To Be Trusted With Knives

The Internet’s leading authority on radicalized geese

Dec
27

By

The Rest of the New Foods I Made in 2019

Category: food, goals Tags: Leave a Comment

I last blogged about the new foods and beverages that I made this year in July. At that time, I’d made 10 out of the 19 items that I set as my goal for this year. Well, I’m pleased to report that it was merely my insufficient blogging this year, and not my lack of cooking new things that I’d never cooked before, that made it looked like I was failing on this goal. I completed the goal of 19 items on August 11 and ended up crushing my goal with a total of 26 new items made this year. Here are the ones that I did after my first two blog postings on this topic:

Pasta with herbs and parm
Lemon, herb, and parm pasta
  • I made some mint tea with fresh mint leaves from High Garden (also on July 16, 2019). At the end of the growing season, I dried1 all the remaining leaves and now can use them to make mint tea
Mint tea made with fresh mint from my herb garden
Mint tea from fresh mint leaves
  • My friend Kim, her boyfriend Tad, and I made teriyaki salmon at their place. I made the teriyaki sauce and carried stuff between the kitchen and the patio (where the BBQ was) as both Kim and Tad were too injured (ankle and knee, respectively) to do much walking (July 26, 2019)
Dinner at Kim & Tad's place
Teriyaki salmon, potatoes, grilled vegetables, and watermelon salad
sesame chicken, ginger beer glazed carrots, and steamed asparagus
Sesame chicken, ginger beer glazed carrots, steamed asparagus
  • I made my first gluten-free baked good: gluten-free zucchini muffins, because someone at my office doesn’t eat gluten and I wanted to make some regular zucchini muffins (one of my go-to muffin recipes), but I didn’t want her to be left out. (July 28, 2019)
Two types of zucchini muffins (gluten-free and gluten-ful)
Two types of zucchini muffins
  • After a trip to the Okanagan, I made a bunch of stuff with produce we bought there: peach crisp (Aug 9, 2019), roasted pattypan squash with red onion and zucchini (Aug 10, 2019), spicy plum sauce (Aug 11, 2019) and peach-jalapeño preserves (Aug 11, 2019) and chimichurri sauce (Aug 11, 2019), which we had with Linda and Casey would brought over some super delicious steaks!
Patty pan squash
A patty pan squash
Roasted patty pan squash
Roasted patty pan squash, along with some chicken
Making plum sauce
Making spicy plum sauce
Steak with chimichurri sauce
Steak with chimichurri sauce

As I’m sure you can tell, I like making new things that I’ve never made before, so I’m sure this goal will appear again in my list of 2020 goals!

Dec
23

By

On the eleventh day of donating…

Category: food Tags: , Leave a Comment

The Greater Vancouver Food Bank supports 22,000 people per week and share 4.4 million pounds of food per year. Giving them money allows them to get $3 of food for every $1 you donate, because they can buy in bulk – and they can buy the specific things that they need, rather than randomly receiving whatever food you happen to donate.

Their mission is:

Building strong, connected communities through the power of food.

https://foodbank.bc.ca/get-involved/donate-funds/
Donate to GVFB

Jul
22

By

That Time We Totally Made Dinner

Category: food, friends Tags: , , 2 Comments

Hot off the heels of our skydiving adventure, Dr. Dan and I decided that we should tackle another thing that is on our list of very important goals: make a meal that we haven’t made before. I mean, he has a goal for 2019 to cook things he hasn’t cooked before. I have a goal for 2019 to cook things I haven’t cooked before. And he’s visiting this week. And we need to eat dinner. So what could be better than making some delicious dish that is new to both of us?

At least, that was This-Morning-Beth and This-Morning-Dan’s plan. But those guys are always making plans and expecting This-Evening-Beth and This-Evening_Dan to do all the work. Screw those guys.

Instead, we decided to follow the time-tested recipe of (1) order pizza, (2) let someone else deliver said pizza, (3) enjoy!

Untitled

I highly recommend you try this recipe sometime.

Jul
14

By

A bunch of stuff I cooked

Category: food, goals Tags: , 1 Comment

Ever since I posted about my progress on my goals for 2019 (or lack thereof), I’ve been on the look out for new foods to make. Last weekend I made:

German red cabbage:

German cabbage

Roasted cabbage wedges:

Roasted cabbage

And this weekend I decided that I should make something to use up the some of the fresh herbs that are growing my balcony because they are growing like crazy:

High Garden 2019
High Garden 2019 is doing quite well
High Garden 2019
More of High Garden 2019

So I posted on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram, asking my tweeps, FB friends and, (um, what’s the demonym for people on Instagram?) for recipe suggestions. And they did not disappoint!

My friend Karen suggested this recipe: Smashed potatoes with herb vinaigrette. Smashed potatoes are one of my go-to recipes, but I usually put apple cider vinegar with salt and pepper on them. So I was intrigued by this recipe, where you make a vinaigrette with a tonne of fresh, along with olive oil, lemon juice, chili peppers, and Dijon mustard.

Here’s the smashed potatoes, prior to the vinaigrette (basically, boil little potatoes until you can stick a fork in them, put them on a cookie sheet, smash, drizzle with oil, and bake):

Smashed Potatoes

And I found this recipe by the power of Googling: Fresh Herbs With Corn, Asparagus, and Chickpeas Recipe. Though this recipe called for a slightly different mix of herbs than the other recipe, I’m lazy, so I just chopped up a big bowl of thyme, parsley, mint, and oregano1, mix it with olive oil and lemon juice, and then split it in half and used it with both recipes (with the addition of the Dijon and chili peppers for the potatoes).

Bunch of herbs
Big bowl o’herbs

Smashed potatoes with herb vinaigrette:

Smashed Potato Salad with Herb Vinaigrette

Fresh Herbs With Corn, Asparagus, and Chickpeas Recipe:

Fresh Herbs With Corn, Asparagus, and Chickpeas Recipe

And those two dishes comprised my dinner tonight. Super delicious.

Also, while uploading these photos, I discovered a photo of avocado toast that I made on June 25. I’d never made avocado toast before, so that totally counts as a new thing!

Avocado toast:

Avocado toast

So that brings me to a total of 10 new things that I’ve made this year (out of a goal of 19 new things), and since it’s July, that’s about right on track. I’ve also tentatively invited a couple of people over for dinners (for my goal of having people over for dinner 5 times – pending me sorting out my calendar to figure out when such dinners could occur), so that will be an opportunity to make new things too.

Also, I’m going to put the other suggestions I got from people about things I can make with my herbs here, because right now they are scattered between Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram replies and I’m totally going to forget what they all are and they’ll get lost down the memory hole that is social media if I don’t post them here.

From my friend, Linda:

  • a zucchini, lemon and herb pasta to use up random herbs – saute some zucchini with thinly sliced garlic (use olive oil, salt and peper), add in cooked pasta (penne/rotini etc, not long noodles), zest of one lemon, a bunch of random chopped herbs and some parmesan cheese. Dill, chives, parsley and mint would be good choices from your garden. Add lemon juice plus salt and pepper to taste.
  •  freeze your rosemary whole and use it to roast stuff in the future.
  • Make herb butter and freeze it for future use – dill butter is delicious on fish, rosemary and chive would be yummy on potatoes, etc. [This sounds amazing and I’m totally going to do this]
  • salad with parsley and mint (and chickpeas, cucumber, onion, maybe some chives, lemon juice, olive oil, salt and zatar).
  • Make Greek salad with your oregano and thyme. [we do this all the time because I’m slightly obsessed with Greek salads]
  • heat up some sage until it is crispy and top what ever you want, it’s yummy!
  • Make taboouli with your parsley and mint (I usually do it with couscous – much quicker and easier than using bulgar).

From my high school drama teacher (because Facebook):

  • Make herb packets, dry them, grind some bigger leaves and put in small cheesecloth packets. Drop in soups, stews etc and when ready scoop out packets and toss.

From my friend Paul:

  • Makes for great flavour with new potatoes bbqed with butter in tin foil packets. Make sure to boil or steam them first. Cuts down cooking time on the bbq. Me being the neanderthal man that I am I went straight for the fire and had to wait a long time.

From my friend Stephanie:

  • Mix chives, oregano, thyme, parsley with feta or other cheese and use to stuff mini-peppers (cut in half lengthwise). Bake at 375 for 25 minutes until peppers are roasted and cheese melted. This is summer potluck go-to recipe for 2019.

From my friend Cath:

  • I’ve been making tea from my mint, with a little thyme and rosemary thrown in. Excellent hot or cold

From my friend Nancy:

  • I literally just cut mine , put in baggies & freeze them.

So I’ll think I’ll be just fine for using up those herbs!

  1. My savory had weird white spots on it, so I didn’t use it. [↩]

Jun
30

By

Half Way Goals Check-In

Category: books, food, goals, health, home improvement, meta-blogging, organization, rampant narcissism Tags: , , , 3 Comments

So, the year is half over. I know that every year I, like most people, marvel at how fast the year is going by, this year it’s way worse than previous years. Like, the year is half over and I haven’t really done anything… and I haven’t even planned stuff.

Anyhoo, I thought that maybe I’d do a check in on how my goals for 2019 are going since the year is half freaking over, but honestly doing this just made me feel like I really have done nothing with the first half of the year! Correction: this has motivated me to get going on my goals!

Anyhoo again, of my 19 goals, I’ve completed a grand total of 1. So yeah, I’m a wee bit behind. But the one that I did complete was monumental:

I TRAPBAR DEADLIFTED 100 KG!

The goal was actually just to deadlift 90 kg, and I did for 2 reps of a 90 kg trapbar deadlift on Jan 13, and then again for 2 reps on Jan 20, and then I did a single rep of 100 kg. For those of you who prefer to think of weight in pounds, that’s 220.5 lbs. Trapbar deadlift is easier than regular deadlift, but it’s still technically a deadlift!

I came close to one of my other weightlifting goals: I back squatted 85 kg on Jan 24, just 5 kg shy of my goal of 90 kg (i.e., 198 lbs).

I have made some progress on a few other goals. For the goal of making 19 new foods and/or beverages that I’ve never made before, I’ve made 5:

So I’m 26% done that goal – behind schedule, but I can definitely catch up.

For the goal of read 20 books, I’ve read 7 (5 of which I’ve already blogged about), and I’m in the process of reading 5 other books right now. So I feel like I’m on my way with this goal, although I wonder if I should focus my reading to get some of these books done, rather than sporadically reading from all 5 of them, just to make myself feel like I’m accomplishing something! I should also try to pick a few shorter books – most of the books I’m currently reading are quite long, which doesn’t help in the feeling-like-I’ve-accomplished-something department.

A number of my things on my list are home improvement-y/organization-y, so I probably should just make a plan to get some of those done, as some are the type of thing I can get done in a weekend here or there.

I haven’t sewn anything and I have a goal to sew 5 things, so I really should decide what I want to sew and get cracking on it. I have a goal of sleeping an average of 7 hours per night and though my Fitbit tracks my sleep for me, I can figure out how to find out what my average since Jan 1 has been. Looking at the graphs by month, I can see that I haven’t hit the 7 hour mark for any single month, so I know I’m not meeting the goal, but I guess I’ll have to download the data to calculate the yearly average myself. I have a goal to write in my journal once a week and I have written 23 entries, so I’m 44% done that goal. And I have a goal to have people over for dinner 5 times, and I’ve only hosted one dinner, so I should do some planning for that (anyone interested in coming over for dinner? Hit me up!)

As for my blogging goal, which was a *very* modest 78 blog postings, as soon as I hit “publish” on this one, I’ll have published 23 for the year (or 29.5%). Perhaps another thing I can spend a bit of time on!

 

Jun
16

By

Summertime!

Category: awesomeness, events, food, friends, goals, New Westminster, rampant narcissism, sports, Stupid Injuries Tags: , , , , , , , , , Leave a Comment

OK, so it’s not technically summer until Friday, but you’d never know it from the weather we’ve been having. It’s sunny and warm and the sun is up until nearly 9:30 pm.

Things I’m excited about for the summer, in no particular order:

  • The New West Grand Prix – watching professional cyclists ride around and around and around and around my home is actually a lot more exciting than one might expect. Plus my gym will have beer and snacks
  • playing tennis – Scott and I bought some tennis rackets that were on super duper sale at a sports store that was closing down, right before I sprained my MCL. And while the MCL healing has been going slower than I would like, it’s definitely getting better. So much so that I’ve been able to play hockey with a knee brace – so I think I’ll give tennis with a knee brace a try too!
  • the New West Farmers market – while the Farmers Market in New West runs all year, the winter market is uptown on Saturdays and somehow I never manage to get all the way uptown! But the summer market is at City Hall, which is just a short walk (up a very steep hill) from me on Thursday afternoons/evenings. I haven’t gotten out there for the first few weeks, but I’m planning to go soon.
  • canning/jamming more stuff – my friend Patricia has some pear trees near here that have those most amazing tasting pears EVER. I can’t wait until they are ready because I’m going to pick some and can them!
  • tackling stuff from my 2019 goals list – I am VERY behind on my goals for this year (I blame teaching too much in the January semester), but now that that is behind me (along with all my work travel for May), I can actually do some of that stuff
  • Fridays on Front Street and the New West StrEAT Food Truck festival – two New West traditions. I have a couple of friends who are moving/have moved to New West this year, so I’m excited to indoctrinate them into our New West ways
  • hiking – every summer I say I’m going to do more hiking. Hope springs eternal!

I also have a bunch of vacay that I need to book, but I don’t really want to go away when it’s so nice out and there’s so many fun things going on. Perhaps I’ll take some days off to do stuff around here (especially if a certain friend of mine comes to visit and wants to jump out of a plane with me, as we may or may not have previously discussed).

And maybe I’ll look at the fall for a trip somewhere…

Dec
31

By

All the rest of the new foods that I made this year

Category: beverages, family, food, goals Tags: , , 2 Comments

I’m back dating this posting to yesterday because I had it mostly written but didn’t quite get around to finishing it before I had to leave for a New Year’s Eve party last night.

When I last wrote about the new foods I made this year as part of my goal to make 18 food items or beverages that I have never made before, I’d only made 5 foods. Of course, that was back in February, and I’ve made a lot of things since then. Thirteen things, so be specific.

  1. a saison beer
  2. olive tapenade
  3. beer battered fish tacos
  4. salmon cakes
  5. balsamic vinaigrette
  6. peach-bourbon jam – made this from peaches I got in the Okanagan. And it was a huge hit with those who I shared it with1
  7. mint juleps – made these for my friend Kim and her boyfriend when they came over for dinner with mint from my balcony garden
  8. pickling spice – made this so I could make spicy pickled carrots
  9. spicy pickled carrots
  10. cream of asparagus soup – made this with my sister’s Vitamix for my aunt who came over for lunch when I was at my sister’s place over Christmas
  11. Godfather – a delicious beverages that is made from whiskey & amaretto
  12. sugar pie – made this for Christmas dinner
  13. Irish soda bread – got this recipe from a friend of mine who tweeted their grandmother’s recipe. It is so simple to make and very delicious!

So there you have it – the remaining 13 new things I made this year to complete my goal of making 18 new foods and/or beverages this year. 

And I’m already looking forward to making even more new things in 2019. The list of ideas so far include: sourdough bread, plus sauce, ginger beer, pickled asparagus, and, inspired from our trip to Scotland: Scottish tablet and Cullen skink.

Dec
25

By

Merry Atypical Christmas

Category: family, food Tags: , , , Leave a Comment

Typically I spend most of my Christmas break catching up on writing the eleventy thousand blog postings that I was too busy to write during the year, along with reading books for fun and maybe watching some movies, and definitely Christmas baking. But this year has been a bit of an anomaly, mostly because I was asked to teach a couple of new courses next year, so I have spent most of my Christmas break developing course materials rather than doing all of those things. And my family did two different cookie exchanges before I got to Ontario, so my sister’s place was so well stocked with cookies that it was unnecessary to do our usual Christmas baking extravaganza.

In lieu of Christmas baking, I made some chocolate hockey sticks and pucks for friends and colleagues, and today for Christmas dinner dessert I made a sugar pie. Sugar pie is a French Canadian delicacy that I’ve always wanted to try making, so today seemed like a good time to do it.

 
 
 
 
 
View this post on Instagram
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

I made Sugar Pie for Christmas dinner dessert.

A post shared by Beth Snow (@drbethsnow) on

In lieu of reading for fun and blogging, I’ve read 1.5 textbooks!

But don’t feel too bad for me – Christmas was spent with my family, eating delicious Christmas dinner, and giving each other a crazy amount of presents (translation: I was spoiled as usual). 

And now I have 14 more days to get the first new course ready to go! Wish me luck!

Dec
22

By

On the eleventh day of donating…

Category: food Tags: , , , , Leave a Comment

The Greater Vancouver Food Bank provides assistance to nearly 30,000 people every week! That’s a lot of people. And that’s just to support people in Vancouver, Burnaby, New Westminster, and the North Shore (Other food banks serve people in other suburbs around Vancouver). 

And apparently the demand has increased 30% in the last 4 months. So now seems like a good time to donate to them.

22% of the people using the food bank are children. Another 22% are seniors.

Source: https://foodbank.bc.ca/about-us/

And while you can donate food to the food bank, the food bank actually really likes it when you give them money because (a) since they buy in large quantities, they can get deals so that $1 will get them $3 worth of stuff, and (b) they can buy what they need to have a variety of food available to people, rather than ending up with a thousand cans of the same stuff.

In addition to the traditional services that one thinks of when they think about a food bank (i.e., providing food), the GVFB realizes that “emergency food as a stand-alone is not a long-term solution. [Their] goal is to build strong, connected communities through the power of food, and [they] employ the principles of sustainability, education and training, and quality nutrition to achieve this goal.”

Some of their programs include:

  • Project CHEF: Cook Healthy Edible Food: “an experiential, curriculum-based school program aimed at children in kindergarten to grade seven that teaches students about healthy food”
  • Community Kitchens
  • Workshops
  • Rescuing Food from local businesses to distribute to individuals and organization.
Donate to the GVRD

Aug
19

By

The Return of High Garden

Category: food Tags: , , , , , Leave a Comment

One of my favourite things about summer is growing food on my balcony – I like to refer to my little balcony oasis as High Garden (as my condo is on the 10th floor and I’m a Game of Thrones fan.)

And my garden seems to get bigger and better every year. This year we actually are fertilizing on the regular and, who knew?, fertilizing really helps the plants grow1.

This year we decided to plant a few vegetables:

  • tomatoes
  • cucumbers
  • onions
  • potatoes
  • spinach

and some herbs:

  • rosemary
  • chives
  • thyme
  • marjoram
  • savory
  • mint
  • oregano
  • dill
  • parsley

and, of course, the cat garden:

  • cat grass
  • cat mint
  • cat nip

Planted on May 15, 2018:

High Garden - 2018

High Garden - 2018

High Garden - 2018

High Garden - 2018

High Garden - 2018

High Garden - 2018

High Garden - 2018

High Garden - 2018

High Garden - 2018

June 16:

High Garden 2018

High Garden 2018

High Garden 2018

High Garden 2018

June 26:

High Garden 2018

High Garden 2018

Starting to see some flowers on the cucumber plant

High Garden 2018

High Garden 2018

High Garden 2018

High Garden 2018

High Garden 2018

Potato and tomato plants looking quite full of leaves!

June 28:Savory & Oregano

Cucumber flowers

Cucumber flowers

Potato flowers

Flowers on the potato plant

We’ve been eating herbs all throughout the summer – I use them in homemade salad dressing, scrambled eggs, with various meats on the BBQ, etc. We managed to get enough dill to make a delicious dill dip, but then the dill plant died. The savoury plant looked pretty grim from the time we planted it and never really took. The parsley, which I planted from seed (all the rest were seedlings), didn’t grow at all.

The cucumber plant ended up only yielding two cucumbers, but they were big:

Cucumber that grew in High Garden!

The spinach plants yielded enough to make a small spinach salad for each of us (I’m not convinced it was more than the amount of spinach leaves on the seedlings we originally planted!):

Spinach salad - made with spinach from High Garden!

Last week when my friend Kim and her boyfriend Tad came over for dinner, we made mint juleps with mint from High Garden:

Mint juleps
Yes, I realize that those are Moscow mule mugs, not mint julep cups. I don’t have any mint julep cups, so the mule mugs had to suffice! And suffice they did – they were pretty darn tasty – a very refreshing drink on a hot day!

Tonight’s dinner included these three potatoes (which popped up above the surface – there are still more to harvest):

Potatoes

and this onion was sautéed to go with our steaks:

Onion

All in all, I’d say it was a successful growing season for High Garden. I’m kind of sad that summer is coming to an end though (as evidenced by leaves on trees changing colour and Halloween candy appearing in the local grocery stores) – I’ll have to enjoy the last bit of my garden while I can!

  1. The answer is everybody. Everybody knew. [↩]
« Older Posts