POST-BIRTHDAY POST!

It was my birthday--yay! But wow, was I ever in a birthday funk. The 25th wasn't actually so bad. My co-workers wished me a happy birthday and my best friend since grade nine, sent flowers to my workplace! (One of my co-workers chided me for having flowers brought to a lab work environment but I didn't know they weren't allowed--a spores issue--and my supervisor never said anything. In fact, my supervisor was happy but also a little bit jealous since none of his friends have ever sent him flowers on his birthday, hee hee. The flowers are gorgeous. They're little lillies in the most amazing colours. Ah, colours. I'm a whore for colours. I haven't been able to get any good photos in the evening so I'll have to get myself up early in the morning when the sun's out to get some sunny shots of the flowers and post them here.

I totally forgot to photograph today's food so far. I was eating on the go, having lunch in the car and eating an a Royal Gala apple while doing some shopping in Walmart (no joke). At one point I was running through the aisles with a bucket in one hand and the half-eaten apple in the other. Quite a sight to behold if you were one of the many other shoppers in the store.

Right now I'm drinking this:I'm going to drink half of it and then have my roast parsnip fries for dinner along with a slice of cake. It's better a rather off day for food. I just haven't really been in the mood to eat. Let's just recap previous days' food instead, shall we?

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23rd...Tuesday
Breakfast was a piece of French baguette with cream cheese on one side and Crofter's Asia spread on the other:I miss real bread. Of course it doesn't keep me very full for long but knowing that I was going to be having second breakfast in less than 90 minutes, this was a great way to start the day.

Lunch was the following:A free-range chicken drumstick that I coated with honey dijon mustard and seasoned breadcrumbs (thyme, salt and pepper). Along with the chicken, I've got a bunch of roast veggies (potatoes, mushrooms, red and orange peppers).

Snack of the day was grapes and dates:Dinner was unmemorable and unphotographed! The end for the 23rd!

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24th...Wednesday
Sadly I woke up on Wednesday and my tongue was swollen like crazy. My throat was also hurting--despite being on antibiotics. I was not in the mood to go to work but the doctor is not in on Wednesday and I was also not in the mood to wait at the walk-in clinic so I went to work anyway. I also couldn't afford to take another day off work.

First breakfast for Wednesday was a ripe banana with organic, all-natural PB and Crofter's Asia spread:
Second breakfast was oatmeal with the following mix-ins but my fat tongue was still giving me a hard time. Eating was just not on the list of things to be done for today so I only ate 1/4-1/3 of my oatmeal. My oatmeal toppings/mix-ins included sweetened shredded coconut, roast almonds and dried cherries:Note to self: almonds are a stupid idea for an oatmeal topping when your throat is hurting. Never again.

I also spent my very last day being 25, not only with a fat tongue and super sore throat, but by having the exact same lunch as the day before. I'll spare you from another photo but it was the same free-range chicken drumstick with roast veggies. I ate my lunch slowly but quickly as I only have 30 minutes to eat and managed to finish most of it. I ate all the protein and left a few veggies pieces behind. Fat Tongue wasn't allowing me to chew and swallow my food properly.

I got home after work feeling pretty miserable. I just wanted some soup. My dad ended up going out and picking up some beef bones for me to make some beef broth with rice noodles but Sean called in the meanwhile and asked if I wanted to hang out. I said I'd only hang out with him if I could make soup at his house and he agreed! So he picked me up and we headed back to his place and I made soup while we watched the Olympics with his parents. I can't remember what we were watching but afterwards Sean and I watched an episode of Lost (the second-last episode of season four).

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25th...Thursday (MY BIRTHDAY!)
The food wasn't that interesting. My tongue was still swollen so I decided to make an appointment with the doctor during my break at work (usually second breakfast). First breakfast was the following:
I was determined to eat that Royal Gala apple and two scrambled eggs. Sorry for the crappy pic...it's from my iPhone. Second breakfast was a no-go because of my doctor's appointment so of course, by the time lunch rolled around four hours later, I was positively starving but the leftover rice noodle soup that I had made at Sean's just didn't cut it. It wasn't flavourful enough and honestly, the Chinese veggies that I had added in at the last minute had disintegrated because Sean and I were too busy watching womens' bobsleigh. Hey, at least we won a gold and silver!

Dinner was at my family's usual Chinese restaurant, King of Kings in Markham. We go there so often that the waitresses pretty much know what we want and how we like our food (no MSG and less salt). Awesome. We didn't order as much food this time and I also ate less than usual because I was saving myself for the awesome chocolate banana cake from Dufflet that was awaiting me at home.

This cake is redonkulously good. It's layers of banana and chocolate cake with a whipped chocolate frosting. The best thing about Dufflet is that they use all natural ingredients--yay for me! Here's a photo of my birthday cake:
And here's a photo of my slice:===

26th...Friday
Friday was full of really bad foods. It started off pretty well with first breakfast:A piece of French baguette with cream cheese and two scrambled eggs. I find that the small portion of protein is just what I need to get working in the morning.

Lunch was leftovers from my birthday dinner. No photo as I was more interested in eating than photographing. I had chow mein noodles with mushrooms, Chinese veggies and a piece of fish in fake crab sauce. Mmm...delicious. I then followed that up with a piece of chocolate banana cake--mmm, even more delicious!

Dinner was yet another stunner: a Quarter Pounder meal from McDonalds. And I opted out of the two slices of processed cheese not to save calories, but because two slices of cheese is too much for this pseudo-Asian. Alas, my idea was not a good one because a Quarter Pounder with no cheese is just a glorified hamburger--and that's not a good thing. I didn't finish all my French fries though--they were a little too salty and a tad on the crappy side, if you know what I mean. I thought McDonalds was supposed to be fool-proof?? And of course, I had a slice of chocolate banana cake--all of this in Sean's car, no less. We were on our way to the Fucked Up concert in Toronto, which proved to be highly entertaining for two reasons: Fucked Up and the D'Urbervilles. Yes, leave it to Damon what's-his-face to book an opening I really like when I decide that there's no way in hell I'd like any of the opening bands and leave my money in the trunk and then find out that while there are $10 D'Urberville CDs for sale, I can't get any because there are no "in-outs" for the night. Boo!

But anyway, that was Friday.

GIVE ME MEMORY!

My laptop is slowing me down. It's kind of my fault considering that my free space consists of almost 2GB. Yep, that's right...my laptop is running on only 2GB of memory. Sad, isn't it? But I'm about 96% away from burning some photos to DVD and thereby freeing up about 4GB of space. I really need an external hard drive right about now. I also need a new laptop battery but that's another story.

In other news, F man, just F. It's snowing outside and while I would normally be happy, I'm not. It's probably snowing because my birthday is later this week and the world is probably sending me snow for my birthday which I would normally be over-the-moon about, but today I feel so-so about it.

I'm in a bit of a birthday funk. I usually love my birthday. It's the one day that revolves around ME! The day that everyone says nice things to me; that everyone does nice things for me; the day that I don't have to work. This year however, this year things are different. For one thing, I have to work. I can't take the day off. I probably could have asked for it off had I not been sick for two days last week but I can't afford to take any more days off work--not anymore. Not when I'm going to need to take at least an afternoon off to get my bloody G1 all over again (that's another story entirely). I haven't worked on my birthday in oh, five years! Secondly, I'm sick--still! I don't think these meds are actually working. My throat still feels rather sore though not as sore as before though my glands are definitely hurting. It makes me really unsocial at work because I just don't want to talk to anyone.

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Food as of late hasn't been entirely interesting. I haven't really wanted to eat and on days when I have wanted to, I've been stuck with things like three-day old mushy rice noodle soup or really bland chicken broth because I think my tastebuds have malfunctioned. Here's a half-decent recap because being sick hasn't really made me want to take pics.

18th...no photos :(
I think my camera ate my photos.

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19th...Friday
Finally on day two of some antibiotics (argh, as I wanted to avoid them), I was tired of having mushy stuff to eat and decided to go all out with a bowl of Frosted Flakes and organic milk for breakfast:Not exactly the smartest idea with a throat infection but hey, I'm a rebel! I also refused to have anymore soup for lunch so instead I made myself some roast veggies and scrambled eggs:
Veggies included a couple potatoes, a sweet potato, broccoli and mushrooms. A couple hours later I was hungry again and decided to have another helping of roast veggies with an orange for some vitamin C.I can't remember what I had for dinner that night and clearly I forgot to take a pic of it but dessert was a bowl of frozen strawberries that I nuked in the micro for 45 seconds with freshly whipped cream and a couple of crushed vanilla bean meringue cookies.Yum!! This was a little bit too much dessert though so I only about 3/4 of it.

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20th...Saturday
Vacay from blogging--not really. I only had two photos: dinner and a bowl of grapes. Not very exciting so I thought I'd skip it. Plus, I spent the day just watching the Olympics so it wasn't very noteworthy.

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21st...Sunday
Breakfasts are Sunday are always kind of iffy. I either eat them or I don't. I usually attend church with my family and by the time I get myself settled it's around 11 and knowing that lunch will be in an hour, I tend to skip breakfast. Today one of those days. I just went straight to lunch:Egg noodles with slices of pork and veggies.

Dinner was steamed free-range chicken, Chinese vegetables and white basmati rice:Obviously other food was consumed throughout the day...I just neglected to take photos of it. Sometimes my mouth wants to eat more than I want to take photos.

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22nd...Monday:
I don't have a photo of first breakfast but instead will present you with a photo of second breakfast, my oatmeal. Here it is in all its glory:Instant organic oats with chia seeds, ground flaxseed, dried mulberries, cherries, coconut and walnuts. The latter was a really crappy decision on my part considering that my throat still hurt. I couldn't finish this. It was a really dumb idea since lunch wasn't until almost 5 hours later! But that's usually what my oatmeal at work looks like.

Lunch was supposed to be this:But as soon as I opened the container to snap the pic this morning, I saw all the mold. Here's a close-up if you need one:Not cool! Luckily I had a back-up for lunch:More leftovers from Mevame, which yes...are almost a week old--yikes! But no mold was present so I decided to go for it. The rest of my snacks included grapes and some dried dates:
Dinner was kind of sad because my stomach wasn't feeling well and my throat was still hurting. I just had an avocado with salt and pepper plus an apple:A little bit later I had a piece of French baguette with cream cheese and I am currently roasting some veggies for my lunch tomorrow. Stay tuned!

BAKING UPDATES!

I've done a lot of baking in the past month but haven't had a chance to post about it yet. There's been much Olympic-watching going on and a lot of sickness, plus I decided to take Wednesday off blogging (not one food photo!). Here's a recap of recent baking:

BAKERELLA CAKE POPS:
I made these for a work bake sale last Thursday with the proceeds benefiting the Hospital for Sick Kids. I followed Bakerella's recipe but halved everything as I was feeling under the weather and wasn't really in the mood to be baking. I honestly wouldn't have followed through with this recipe had I not already signed myself up for the bake sale early last week. Because I just really wanted to go to bed rather than create these things, I only made a dozen. Here's the process and the reveal at the end. There's so many final end product photos because it took so long because I was sick.

So first thing's first...you have to bake an entire sheet cake and crumble it. Again, I halved the recipe and since I wanted to keep the rest of the cake as cupcakes, I used a cupcake box mix and made 24 cupcakes. Thank goodness Sean's food processor started working again that night because there's no way I would have gotten this fine crumb without the use of a food processor:

After that I added in the cream cheese and then mixed it all together until it stuck together and was sweet enough. I ended up using about half a can of cream cheese frosting:

After that was complete I rolled the mixture into 15gram balls. Yes, I actually weighed each ball. I think I ended up with around 30-something...I think 34 or 36 to be exact. Then I started dunking and decorating.

Here are my final dozen:I completely forgot to pick up a big block of styrofoam so I made do with some styrofoam I found in the basement, cut it to size and then wrapped it up in some festive tissue paper. It did the trick. It was now nearing 1am so I just wanted these cake pops to be over with. Here's a few more pics:
I like the way the sprinkles come together in a circle in the white one above. It was completely unintentional as I was dipping the pops in a bowl of heart-shaped quins. It kind of reminds me of a Valentine's Day baseball.

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MERINGUE COOKIES:

I went a little bit nuts making meringue cookies last week. I made two batches on the 12th and then another batch the next day. The first batch I made I split into two and flavoured as follows:

Above are chocolate with chocolate chips and I also made a batch of chocolate with dried cherries:

My second batch made the next day were vanilla meringue cookies with dried cherries. As I was packing the cookies into an air-tight container, I had to flip a few upside-down in order to make them all fit. That's when I stumbled upon this one and decided to keep it for Sean:

Cute huh? I think he liked it. He's Sean so he probably thought it was corny and cheesy and silly but I liked it. I mean, how the heck do hearts just appear on the bottom of meringue cookies? It did all the work for me.

My second batch of meringue cookies were vanilla with dried cherries but I forgot to take photos of them. They were incredibly sweet though. I followed the recipe to a T but found them to be ridiculously sweet (hence the use of fruit sherbet served to Sean and his parents but the sherbet was ridiculously sweet anyway). By the way, you can find the recipe here but if you do plan on using the recipe, I'd cut the sugar down by at least 1/4. I also piped my cookies with a pastry bag instead of spooning them onto a cookie sheet. It saved time and effort. Oh and cream of tartar is key to keeping your meringue stable...very key!

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STRAWBERRY COCONUT CUPCAKES WITH VANILLA BEAN AND MALIBU COCO FROSTING:
I wanted to make cupcakes for dessert for dinner at Sean's. I wanted these to have a Valentine's Day theme and was going to make red velvet cupcakes with cream cheese frosting but wanted to include coconut since I love coconut. I couldn't find a coconut cupcake recipe that I was happy with so I decided to stick with a favourite but had to include some kind of fruit puree. I decided to go with strawberry for a strawberry coconut cupcake--yum! After piping with vanilla bean and Malibu Coco-flavoured frosting and decorating half with toasted coconut and the other half with heart-shaped quins, this is what I've got:

Here's a couple close-ups of each. First up the toasted coconut (my fave):

And the heart-shaped quins:

And that's all the baking I've been up to lately. I have wanted to bake some more but there aren't enough taste-testers in my household--boo!

DOM + THROAT INFECTION = HOME SICK

It's day two of my homestay. Thursday morning I woke up and my throat was still hurting and my larynx (?) was closing up on me--or that "hole" at the back of your throat--so I figure that was good enough reason to call and sick and head to the doctor. She told me I had a throat infection (and kind of chastised me for not coming in sooner, doh!) and told me to stay home for the next two days. So I've been home, catching up on the Olympics; last night taking in the men's long program and am really happy for American Evan Lysacek taking home the gold medal. Evgeny Plushenko--even though I was a fan of his when I was younger--is now just a really huge douchebag. Who the hell gets up on the gold medal platform when you've not earned it--even if you are just being funny? This ain't the Ice-capades or Stars On Ice, you idiot! Plus on top of that, his comment regarding the quad and men's skating not being men's skating without the quad--ugh! I'm just about done with Plushenko. I'm glad that Evan Lysacek was able to take home the gold medal with a solid performance that did not include a quad jump--hopefully proving to Plushenko that a quad doesn't necessary guarantee you a gold medal.

Anyhoo, back to the food, here's a quick recap:
Feb. 16...Tuesday.
First breakfast was half a whole wheat bagel with PB and Crofter's Asia spread with a banana:Second breakfast was instant organic oatmeal with ground flaxseed, chia seeds, frozen peaches and strawberries that defrosted by the time I got to work. This is what my frozen fruit looks like:I usually use half for my oatmeal and then keep the rest for my lunch "dessert." Speaking of lunch, for lunch I had a mish mash of stuff:Leftover lamb chop, 6 butternut squash ravioli, 2 small pieces of boiled potato and 3 sweet potato balls. Totally random stuff that was leftover in my fridge but it tasted really, really good. I also packed myself some vanilla bean and dried cherry meringue cookies but only ate a couple before I had to get back to work:
Dinner was at Mevame restaurant for my parents' 37th wedding anniversary. We were celebrating a day early because their actual anniversary falls on Ash Wednesday. I've previously reviewed Mevame so I won't go into too much detail this time but I don't know whether it was because of my sore throat but everything was just a tad underwhelming. My family skipped out on appetizers this time (last time we got two and it was way too much food) and started off with our entrees which came with salads:Mine was drenched in salad dressing (which you can't really see here) but I couldn't finish it. It's a shame since I love this salad which features mesclun mix, spiralized beets and carrots, red onions, cucumbers and tomato wedges. My oldest brother and I ordered the same entree, the lamb chops:He got his with a side of fries while I got mine with a side of rice:My mom ordered the dark meat chicken skewers with fries:While my dad and other brother ordered the rainbow trout:One with vegetable and the other with mashed potatoes.

So this time around the lamb chops didn't seem as flavourful as the ones we had upon our first visit to Mevame. Maybe it's just because I had had lamb chops the day before and those were plenty flavourful or maybe my tastebuds were getting tired of lamb chops (I had had them for every meal prior excluding first and second breakfast), but these just didn't seem as tasty. The fries were spot-on and my mom's chicken looked delicious. I wish I could have tried a piece.

I was stuffed after 1/3 of my salad, one pita bread, two lamb chops, 1/4 of my rice and a good helping of my mom's fries so we all skipped out on dessert. Plus, the restaurant's dessert menu isn't terribly interesting knowing that I can make my own creme brulee at home in no time and at 1/3 of the cost. One thing that really irks me about Mevame is that they never refill your water; you always have to ask for it. Personally, I find refilling a person's water glass the easiest thing you can do to guarantee a good tip. If you refill my water glass without having to be asked to do so, it shows that you're being attentive. It guarantees a good tip from me. We had to ask our waitress for water twice. Not really cool considering that we showed up at 7:50 on a Tuesday night and by the time we were halfway through our meals the restaurant was hardly half full. There was clearly no excuse for her not to refill our glasses. That's just my one waiter/waitress pet peeve.

Anyway, my oldest bro and I split the bill so Happy Anniversary mom and dad!

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Feb. 17th...Wednesday. Because I was feeling sick and because most of my food was almost an exact repeat of the day before, I decided to take the day off from food-photographing.

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Feb. 18th...Thursday.
Home sick! Since my throat was hurting, I didn't really feel like eating anything. Before heading out to the doctor, my stomach wanted to eat a bowl of oatmeal but my throat didn't feel like it. I was the mediator and had a banana instead. Then upon arriving back at home after visiting the pharmacy, my dad helped me make some free-range chicken broth to which I added some rice noodles to fill me up:But even after a couple of bowls of that, just an hour later I was still hungry and dying for some real flavour, so I had a bowl of Frosted Flakes with organic 2% milk:Along with that I decided to try out my new tea: chamomile with lavender:Quatchi decided to chill out with me on the couch while we caught up on the Olympics and later on, I fell asleep:Here we are on the couch pre-nap time:The rest of the evening was spent watching the Olympics and eating the exact same thing for dinner that I had had for lunch with the added bonus of beef broth from some bones I found in the freezer. I also added some napa cabbage.