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I don’t know what’s going on, but I’ve been wide awake since 4 this morning. I gave up on sleeping an hour ago and snapped my headphones on. Thought I’d share one band in particular with you: The Rural Alberta Advantage.
This one’s called Frank, AB:
And this one’s called Edmonton:
Leave it to a bunch of Albertans living in Toronto to make me wax post-nostalgic for our time in Montreal from where Hanne and I would think about all the good bits of our hometown. And sure, now we’re back and there are… good bits. North America’s northern-most city will have an unseasonable high of plus-11 C today. The past few days have been/will be a brief respite from the cold — these few days count as a good bit of a long brutal Edmonton winter. A spring-tease before we’re plunged back far under zero until April. Or will it be May? Winter here seems both colder and longer than I remembered…
New and old, here’s what SiS listened to in 2008. List will be updated until… I lose interest.
WSiSL2in2008 playlist will show up on your right side after the jump.
And whatever you’re listening to tonight, your playlist ought to end here:
…because I’m supposed to post at least once a week to help keep SiS’s NaBloPoMo (post a day month) run going and because I only feel like playing video games and drinking beer today.
Counts. Totally counts.
Remix No. 1:
The Original:
Cut Copy – Lights and Music (from In Ghost Colours)
The Remix:
Boyz Noize – Happy Birthday Remix (from Lights and Music Single)
Remix No. 2:
The Original:
Does It Offend You, Yeah? – Epic Last Song (from You Have No Idea What You Are Getting Yourself Into)
The Remix:
Lifelike – Epic Last Song (from Epic Last Song Single)
Remix No. 3:
The Original:
Kraft – Kraft Dinner
- KD is okay, but it could be better. I’m right, right? Hanne and I got home late one night and I wanted junk food. KD sounded about right, but it’s boring and one-dimensional. So…
The Remix:
Supper in Stereo – BKD
- Fry four or five strips of bacon. Instead of using butter or milk as per regular KD instructions, use some (or all!) of the bacon grease. Chop bacon into chunks and mix it into finished KD. Peas would be good, too, I think. I’m going to try that.
AHA! I figured out a way to get music on our blog. Here’s what Hanne and I have been listening to in the kitchen.
Bon Iver: Flume / Skinny Love from For Emma, Forever Ago
Ingredients:
- 1 part Wolf Parade vocals/lyrics
- 1 part TV on the Radio vocals/plaintive shouting
- Dash of Califone pacing, folktronics
- Splash of Iron and Wine
- Pinch of Band of Horses
Passion Pit: I’ve Got Your Number / Sleepyhead from Chunk of Change
Ingredients:
- Drop of smoking Hot Chip beats and breakdowns
- Grating of Gibbard vocals dissolved in giddy-kid Go Team choruses
- Simmering zimming Unicorn(s) midi-synths
- 1 chunk of Styrofoam, broken into squeaky bits and blips
- Animal Collective / Daniel Johnston manic silliness, to taste
High time for the SiS team to learn its chops! Hanne and I recently attended NAIT Culinary School’s Art of Garde Manger & Knife Skills course. We spent three four-hour sessions in these kitchens:
There’s Hanne in the back of the room interviewing Chef Roote. Hanne was working double duty as she was on assignment for Vue Weekly. If you’re interested in all the nitty gritty, jump over here.
I tagged along because I’ve always wanted to work in a professional kitchen. I’ve read books and articles on chefs and their kitchens. I simultaneously romanticize and pragmatize this life when cooking. I want to work dans le merde, even though I know that means in the shit. I want to work in a lively, chaotic environment, but don’t want to get pushed around or yelled at (you reading this, Hanne?). I often tell Hanne, while doing the prep work for dinner, that if someone would pay me well to chop and slice food all day, that would be exactly what I’d do. But not only do I not chop and slice well enough, a chef’s work is meant for people with figuratively and literally thicker skin than me.
I was excited to take this course because I could pretend. I did the pretending in my head, so not to embarrass Hanne. Like calling the chef, “chef” or my prepared ingredients my mise or asking if I could wear a toque. I didn’t actually yell at people to get out of my way, but thought of cantakerous ways I would have while waiting impatiently for them to get THE HELL out of my way. I didn’t actually scold a guy for putting a knife in the sink… no wait. I actually did. It is a sure-fire way to dull a knife, after all. Man, I’m an asshole.
The fun wasn’t all in fantasizing. I learnt a lot. I have decent knife skills, but the chefs gave me a gamut of tips to sort out a few bad habits. The best tip was to simply move my cutting board to the edge of the counter so that my fist (the one holding the knife) wouldn’t get in the way when side-slicing an onion. Painfully obvious. “Thanks for the tip,” I said, and at the end of the sentence I swallowed the word chef and washed it down with my pride.
Chef also told me to take my time. I learnt the bear claw/knuckles knife technique around the same time we launched SiS and have spent the last year and a half NOT cutting myself with the chef’s knife. I got so good at not cutting myself that I invested all excess energy into doing it fast. But while quickly pounding a carrot into a haphazard rumble strip is fast, it ain’t good. I was told to take my time and be more precise, which you may have read about in Hanne’s chowder post. What I learnt in this course paid off on the chowder as all the veg. cooked through evenly (perfectly!) and, although you couldn’t see it in the post’s picture, the symmetry of the cubes looked great on the spoon and felt great to chew.
Precision was also called upon in class when making canapes and sandwich displays. I’m now convinced that paying attention to presentation is important. Seeing all the food laid out pretty in class made me even hungrier and although the moment was fleeting, I did at first eat with my eyes.
The course was a lot of fun and I encourage you to read Hanne’s article. She spent way more time working on it than I did on this post, so if you’ve read this far, you owe her a read. Also, if you’re a foodie in Edmonton, check out NAIT’s list of part time culinary courses.
Hanne’s written 1-2-3-4 great booze articles for Vue Weekly, all odes to classic cocktails and/or rare spirits. In October, our columnist turned her job into a losing venture by purchasing 1-2-3-4 bottles of rum, three of which are pictured above (Havana Club Anejo Blanco-Appleton Estate V/X-Gosling’s Black Seal) and won’t be subsidized by the weekly. The problem is, I can’t object because she has 1-2-3 more jobs than I do right now. Also, the cocktail recipes Hanne dug up and created in her latest feat of investigative journalism are some of my favourites.
One of these is the Harpo’s Special, which may (or may not) have been invented by (or for) Harpo (probably not Karl) Marx. I like flavours that attack in different ways with different trajectories. The Harpo’s Special has a sour hook of lime, a jab of boozy acid, a slap of bitters and a soft sweet finish. Go to Hanne’s latest Vue article to make this and other rum-based cocktails.
SiS’s Ginger Beat Cocktail
This drink will work you over. It’s a SiS original made by Hanne, a take-off on Gosling’s Dark and Stormy. I’ll call it–and I get to because I’m, like, married to the creator–the Ginger Beat. Think your various tastebuds cymbals, toms, high hats, bass drums and imagine benched behind them the best drummer you can name, say Stewart Copeland or Dave Grohl.
Gulp, sip or do whatever you do. The lime shimmers sour over your tongue and rumbles in your cheeks. The ginger snaps up your palate and burns down your throat. The dark rum breaks in, flattening the flavour with bitter caramel while beating licorice, anise and earthy (peat moss?) notes. Sugar settles the flavour’s throb to a steady beat and is nearly a nod to silly-girly-drink but comes off more sophisticated-lady-or-mister-drink, grounding the bite of the alcohol and ginger and making the drink less brash than composed.
That may seem a bit exuberant, but I’ve just had 1-2-3 drinks while writing this post. Make it like this:
- A third of an old fashioned glass of crushed or cracked ice
- 2 oz Gosling’s Black Seal or other dark rum
- 1 Tbsp ginger syrup (recipe below)
- Top glass up with ginger ale
For ginger simple syrup:
Ingredients:
- 1 inch cube of fresh ginger, sliced thin
- 1 cup water
- 1 cup sugar
Method:
- Put above in pot, bring to boil, simmer until golden
- Refrigerate leftovers for seconds
- Thirds
Let’s just say it’s probably good that Hanne doesn’t let me post what I want, whenever I want. Luckily, for me, Halloween is a great excuse to take SiS in a decidedly different (read lowbrow) direction. Here’s the world’s “blacker than the blackest black… times infinity” death metal band grocery shopping (*Hanne’s note–This is NSFW, and pretty vulgar):
The show is Metalocalypse. Ignore the video captions. Happy Halloween!
For the past two years, good mornings in the SiS household have hinged on two drinks. One is coffee. The other is Hanne’s genius invention: The Peanut Butter Banana Smoothie. Yeah, you’ve seen it around, but Hanne came up with it first. It might be SiS’s most unoriginal original recipe, but the other PBBS recipes you’ve seen online are all gross.
SiS’s PBBS is more milkshake than globby smoothie. Don’t worry, it’s all illusion. Frozen bananas only seem to turn into ice cream when blended with milk. It’s a healthy drink. Protein from the peanuts and milk. Calcium… Bananas… they’re good, right? One morning I put leftover whipped cream on top, which was awesome. But I digress…
So first, you’ve got your frozen bananas. Buy lots. Peel them, split them in half and freeze. Second, you’d better use real peanut butter. Don’t make this with the sugary pretend stuff. You need to use the creamy, chunky, pain-in-the-ass natural peanut butter that takes some stirring before use. Sucks, but it’s worth it.
TIP: get as big of a jar of real peanut butter as you can so that you don’t have to do this too often. Spatula the PB out into the bowl of a stand mixer. Use the dough mixing attachment (the curly spike). Once the machine’s done the work for you, spatula the PB back into its jug. Refrigerate it or it’ll separate and you’ll have to mix it again.
So how to? Combine two banana halves, a cup or so of milk, a generous spoonful of peanut butter, a dash of vanilla and blend. Don’t overcomplicate your morning by measuring. If you must, the recipe’s below. Experiment with proportions until you get the taste and consistency you like. The only way to mess this up is to use bad milk (guilty) or accidentally blend a loose blender seal into the drink (again, guilty). Otherwise, this drink is idiot proof.
SiS’s Peanut Butter Banana Smoothie
Serves 1.
Ingredients:
1 frozen ripe banana, halved
1 cup milk
3 tablespoons REAL peanut butter
1-2 teaspoons vanilla
Method:
1. Put stuff in blender and blend.
AND, if you have a blender that blends in the same cup you drink out of, then there’s hardly any mess. Unfortunately, the only product I know that does this is the Magic Bullet. It’s cheap and also built cheap. We’re on our second machine in two years. I had to plug my ears while running the last one, which is why it didn’t make the cut when we moved from Montreal. I hope another company that makes good blenders copies Magic Bullet’s single cup style and I hope that happens before the Tasmanian devil busts out of our appliance. Man dies from Magic Bullet shrapnel?
photo by Tony Lynch
Hanne and I having built up our reputations as cooks sometimes pays off! Or we’ve at least convinced some people that we know enough about food that they humour us by asking us to make stuff for them. And sometimes they pay for the expensive ingredients, which is, in case you were wondering, the payoff.
My brother purchased himself a tin of matcha for 30 bucks. 30 bucks! His request was green tea ice cream. We used David Lebovitz’s recipe, word for word. It worked perfectly and you can find it HERE. If you are one of the people out there that we’ve convinced to buy an ice cream machine and it’s since been relegated to your never-used single-use appliance cupboard, then buy this book and get your freezer bowl back in the freezer.
photo by Tony Lynch
This turned out to be the best green tea ice cream I’ve ever had. Or made. Or Hanne made. Or whatever. My brother, when my Mom asked him if it was the best green tea ice cream he’s had said, “yeah, it’s good.” Maybe it was the victim of extortion talking (30 bucks!!?!). Let it be known that when he tried making green tea ice cream himself, he used brewed green tea. Brewed tea! So the lesson here is not to damn cooks with blogs with faint praise or their small world of readers will find out that you suck and that when you worked in a kitchen and dropped a knife you tried catching it by the blade. Anyway, thanks for the photos, little brother!
Also, to the chocolate bacon sorbet skeptics: Lebovitz has a candied bacon ice cream, so we’re either not the only ones who know what we’re talking about or who are disgusting.
