Oh cow feets

I am sitting here eating yogourt with *surprise* gelatin in it for breakfast. I grabbed a perfectly innocent-looking container off the shelf out shopping as we needed it for a recipe. It wasn't until this morning when I opened it for the first time and saw it jiggling away - not in the good, gentle, yogourt-y jiggling way, but liiiiike jello, that I realized it. Yogourt with gelatin is slowly becoming a nemesis of mine - I prefer my yogourt with regular old milk fat, thanks - but like non-fat "yogourt" gelatin as a part of yogourt is becoming pervasive.
And I wonder why I'm thisclose to becoming one of those people who buys organic milk and makes her own yogourt. Why am I not just doing it, really?
The bastardization of what I start to feel like referring to as "food-based products" isn't new, certainly, but it's an eternal thorn in my side. It can make grocery shopping (and yeah, I'm still a big box or big chain shopper, more than I'd like) feel like a reading marathon, where I learn words I'd never care to use, and, more disturbingly, learn there aren't really brands you can trust.

This video is making me tear up...

"Fidelity": Don't Divorce... from Courage Campaign on Vimeo.

And it's not just because of the song - though I am loving the song.

Not quite pudding

One of the major (MAJOR) differences between Emily and me is our patience levels. I need to be changing or disturbing things, coming or going, or messing around with things. Em, on the other hand, is quite happy to just sit with a rice pudding and let it become.

Over the weekend we made rice pudding from a semi-recipe we found at Rosy Little Things ("that's a recipe," said Em, "all of it?". It went smoothly with white rice and cardamom that she ground herself in a tiny mortar and pestle (and the only question would be: why don't *you* own one?), and it was good. And lo, we said, we shall make this again with the remaining half-a-can o'condensed milk. And so the rice was soaked, and the ingredients were joined and ne'er did I poke my head in the kitchen to see what was happening. And maybe an hour of quiet simmering later, we determined that into this short grain white rice recipe, there was long grain brown.

Emily had patiently followed the directions, had sat stirring over a vat of...well, can pudding be crunchy? The rice was not cooked, the pudding did not pud. We tried to eat it, much as we had loved the first batch, but it was not to be. Nevertheless we maintain hope, and plans for more - because you cannot, cannot have too much rice pudding.

The magic of Emily, though, is that I believe she convinced the sugar to caramelize. I kind of want to get more cans of condensed milk and see if she secretly knows how to make dulce de leche - I don't think she'll want to as she sometimes objects to snooty (french-named) foods on principle, but I can always tell her it's for more pudding (and then point out that she's been eating bastard-ish kheer).

It's like Venice...Italy...and California...but not...

We have a new mandate, Emily and I, to seek adventures of a Sunday, rather than, well, not. And so we plugged in Daisy, the trusty if sometimes a little addled GPS, and headed...well...somewhere! In this case, the "somewhere" that I plugged in was New Westminster - Quayside it said. I was thinking I would get to see the lovely public market there, but instead we found, well, we found these:

It's mid-February and little green things are beginning. Ah, yes, *that's* why I'm here. And we found:

We stumbled onto a boardwalk along the Fraser river, and found this weird wannabe Venice, Italy - fountains and reservoirs and even somewhere a classical-type statue (I did not take a picture of the statue because it mostly made me sad). It scared Em, but I rather enjoyed it. But we said goodbye to wannabe Italy and went back to the boardwalk (which wanted to be Venice Beach, CA) and found this:

Train tracks leading to nowhere, or to barges, but we don't think they're working anymore. And then, most wonderful, we found this!:

and Em got to climb. I got to take pictures of Em climbing (because it is a joy to watch). And I found pinecones (the good kind) and brought some home. It was nice to find all this about 20 minutes from home (by car!)

Old friends

I acquired my very first laptop when I started university back in 2000. It was small thick toshiba, with a tiny screen, and it was, to be honest, pretty ugly. It had a cd-READER, no network cards whatsoever, and a 3.5" floppy. In other words, it was a computer that should have been dead long ago. But I loved it, and it's a little Toshiba - built for the long-term as it were. So with the help of one of my best-tech-friends, I got a hold of a very lite-running version of Ubuntu Linux, and installed it, and what do you know? The computer surfs the internet (wirelessly!) We're talking an 8.5 year old laptop that has now regained basic functionality. Does making green get better than that? Well...maybe, but...this is just so fun.

Coffee & Strawberries

It is snowing in B.C. Again, some more, it will not stop snowing in this province. I should be used to it, I should hush up, quiet down and let it lie. The truth is I don't hate snow, I don't hate winter. But this. Is QUITE enough, thankyouverymuch. Despite that, we ventured out into it, seeing as this is my one weekend-day-off this week, and I wanted to make the most of what I had. We drove through the snow with the guidance of Daisy, the kid's lovely new-present GPS.
We actually made our first visit to the SUP bookstore (every time we see it on our way to the Daiso we exclaim " 'sup bookstore?"), and discovered there really are craft books to look at (or books describing the use of a katana if you could care less about the construction of tiny furniture as in Em's case).
Daisy got use there, and she got us safely to the Bubble World that is quickly becoming my favourite for bubble tea - largely because they have a delectably perfect Strawberry Milk w/ Coffee Jelly - which is so much better than it might sound to someone who has never had Strawberry & Coffee together.

We ended our day by skating the parking lot to the T&T for snacks and miniatures. Em tried to lose her phone for the second time in that parking lot, and she's just back from retrieving it - someone called us and said they'd found it and she drove back through the snow that continues to fall to pick it up. We are now safely home, surrounded by the debris of our day, and ready for bed.