It all began a little over a month ago, when our cousins, aunt and uncle (or CAAU) got us a crepe maker for Christmas.  I had never made crepes, though I am partial to them.  Actually, I suppose I’m partial to anything in the flat-baked-breakfast-batter family, which includes pancakes and waffles.

But back to the crepes.  When we first brought it home and unpacked it, we carefully read the instructions for clues on making the perfect product.  According to the manual, the general technique was to crank the heat to volcanic levels, dump the batter onto the griddle, and then hustle to spread it into a circle before it cooked too solid to do so.  “Okay,” I thought.  “Seems simple enough.  Pour it n’ spread it.”

The challenge was that, with the griddle being so blisteringly hot, we had about 4 seconds to get the batter spread in a uniform thickness to all edges of the pan, which seemed to grow larger with each passing instant.  It got to the point where the crepe making became an increasingly stressful affair.  The air was thick with tension as we prepared to pour the batter.  A deep breath; then one of us would take the plunge,  and the race was on.  Batter splashed onto the griddle, sizzling and popping.  The one wielding the crepe spreader would leap (literally) into action, dancing about the pan and frantically whipping the batter about, trying to make something approximating a circular shape.  The seconds raced past as the liquid cooked and thickened, and the situation became more urgent.  The batter-spreader began hopping from foot to foot, resembling a squirrel with an overabundance of Coke in its system, desperately looking for pools of batter that could be spread out.  And then time was up, the crepe was cooked, and a misshapen, slightly lumpy cake would come off the grill.

It was tasty, but the experience felt slightly lacking.

So last week, on the way home from work, we stopped by the crepe truck that sometimes parks outside our apartment.  This was partly to enjoy a savory crepe for supper, partly because we like the friendly people that run it, and partly so we could spy on their technique.

We learned two valuable things from this stop.  One, we had the heat way too high on our crepe maker.  And two, that the recommended “short, quick strokes” approach to spreading batter was not necessarily the most effective.  So yesterday morning, as we were making sweet crepes for breakfast, Elizabeth employed a new tactic — one that involved low heat and a sweeping circular motion — and produced a perfectly even, perfectly round, perfectly baked crepe.  As we ate our breakfast with strawberries and syrup, she sat there with a big “I’m the best crepe-maker ever” grin on her face, occasionally calling my attention to the beauty and deliciousness of the food she had prepared.

I am going to need to practice, because apparently breakfast has become a competitive sport.

“Perhaps we could take a cooking class,” one of us ventured.

“Maybe we could go to one of the museums,” another of us proposed.  This was instantly shot down in what was, I must state with some indignation, a most abrupt and non-collegial manner.

“Let’s take an art class,” said another of us, in a somewhat huffy tone given how his previous suggestion had been eviscerated before even being given the chance to spread its wings and soar toward the sun.

An art class, we agreed, was a Good Idea, and so we set forth to the Interwebs to find ourselves a class to take.

Nobody, it seems, is very interested in teaching art on Saturdays anymore.  We scoured websites high and low in search of individuals or institutions who would be willing to impart on us a hint of culture.  Initially, I began by searching for someone who would teach us to execute oil painting on canvas, preferably in a ne0-Renaissance manner.  I soon scaled this back to just “oil painting”, then “painting”.  Then we began searching for “art”, and “culture”, and finally in a desperate flurry of keystrokes I found myself looking at the Google results for “makin’ stuff”.

It is a bleak and barren landscape out there for the weekend art class warrior.  The one course we did find that looked interesting was a class on digital photography.  This perked us up for a moment.  Then we realized that: a) the course extended through Saturday and Sunday, and we had already made commitments for Sunday; and b) we would need to get showered, get dressed, purchase a digital camera, learn to use it, and get to the class within the next 55 minutes if we were to make this work.

I was okay with most of those, but just didn’t think I’d be able to get dressed in time.

Instead we made crepes and watched really bad TV.

photo credit: mikebaird

A little while back, Elizabeth and I took a cooking lesson.  During the course of that lesson, which was in our home, the chef asked if we wanted to use our knives or his knives.

“Either one is fine with me,” I said.  “Our knives are right here on the counter; why don’t we just use those?”

Chef Glenn took one look at our motley assortment of blades and politely suggested we use his cutting implements.  He intimated that a good knife makes food preparation dramatically easier and more enjoyable.

He was right.

Shortly thereafter, Elizabeth and I trotted over to Macy’s and bought ourselves a proper set.  At least, a more proper set than the set we had.  The new knives will actually cut things, and you don’t even have to get a good downswing to chop potatoes.

Some of the things we were told to look for in a good chef’s knife were the bolster, the handle, and the edge.

The bolster is the piece of steel where the handle blends into the blade.  A thick, heavy bolster indicates a more durable knife.

You also want a handle where the steel runs from the blade all the way to the back of the handle, and the handle itself is riveted on.  I’ve heard that three rivets are preferable to two, since this generally indicates better construction quality.

Finally, for a chef’s knife you want a straight edge — not serrated.  Serrated edges will give the knife the illusion of being sharp longer, but they aren’t good for slicing things like meat and vegetables, since they tear rather than cutting.  A straight edge and a good knife sharpener will put you much farther ahead.

And for the curious among you, here’s what our full knife set looks like.

Not intentionally, unfortunately.  Elizabeth was whipping cream to grace the strawberries we spent last Saturday picking, and I popped into the kitchen to check on things.

“How’s the whipped cream look?” Elizabeth asked me.  I peered into the mixer bowl and deemed the cream still unwhipped.  “Needs a few more minutes,” I replied, and cranked the mixer to its highest setting and sent it on its merry way.

Turns out there’s a very fine line there between whipped cream and whipped butter.  We crossed that line, and not in a timid or exploratory way.  No, we launched across it, riding on rocket-powered dune buggies with air raid sirens strapped to their roll cages.  When I came back into the kitchen, we had a gooey glob of butter thrashing about in a sickly looking bath of buttermilk.

All’s well that ends well, I suppose.  I bolted out to grab another carton of whipped cream while Elizabeth pressed the butter, and for breakfast the next morning we had buttermilk pancakes with strawberries, whipped cream, and homemade butter.

I figure that fact that it was homemade counteracts all the usual health issues generally associated with butter — or whipped cream, for that matter.

photo credit: Robert S. Donovan

“I saw this guy speak today,” she said.  “They made a movie, and posted a big section of it on the website.  We should watch it.”

Innocently, I complied.

Now, when a movie advertises itself as being about the zombie apocalypse, or a witch hanging out in the woods, or a guy with an overdeveloped interest in chain saws, I expect to associate a certain level of fear with the film.  I can brace myself accordingly or (more likely) just avoid it altogether.

I had not expected a movie about economics to be pants-crappingly horrifying.  The image of the swelling US national debt, along with projections of where it’s heading, is frightening enough.   But when you couple that with the realization that debt payments have partially been funded by drawing on surplus Social Security, and that the aforementioned surplus is going to disappear pretty quickly as a whole lotta people get set to retire…

I spent much of last night trapped in fitful nightmares of a post-meltdown world that was curiously reminiscent of Fallout 3.

photo credit: i eated a cookie

There’s an advantage to this; with all three of us participating, it creates a circle of shame.  If one of us so much as mentions going to the gym, the other two assume that person actually intends to go, and are thus guilted into tagging along.  So now, rather than individually going when the mood strikes us, we end up going when the thought even crosses the mind of anyone else in the house.

Given that exercise leaves me in considerable discomfort afterwards, the gym tends to be on my mind quite a bit these days — usually preceded by an unflattering adjective or two — and so we end up talking about said gym and, by extension, returning more and more frequently.  I expect us to hit critical mass soon, where we will simply drag sleeping bags and the microwave down to this gaping maw of fitness and spend our every waking and sleeping moment there.

At the very least, our foray into exercise has proven to be more enduring than our detox attempt.

photo credit: adria.richards

My mind folded in on itself trying to draw the chain of connections that had led us to this point and, failing to do so, crawled into a corner and whimpered quietly whilst trying to untangle its pretzeled self.  This was pretty much out of the blue, as far as I can tell, and was also a pretty great idea.

We packed a picnic lunch, complete with a really great couscous salad Elizabeth made, and headed down to New Brunswick (the one in Jersey, not in Canada) in search of canoes to rent and paddle.  The one we ended up renting, contrary to the title, was not birch and was not little.  It was a big aluminum behemoth, the sort that people use when they’re traversing the wilderness with three month’s worth of food, or perhaps a yearling calf, aboard.

We ran into three distinct challenges on this adventure.

First, I have not paddled a canoe in close to a decade.  Perhaps canoeing is like riding a bike, but if it is then my bike had two flat tires and a missing gear, and the steering column was about 30 degrees off center.  As we struggled our way down the canal, leaving a tortured, erratic “s”-shaped wake behind us, we kept asking each other, “How do you go straight?”  I’m not sure why we kept asking, because I think it became pretty apparent pretty quickly that neither of us really had the answer to that question.  Fortunately, apart from a few near collisions and the fact that our zig-zagging caused us to travel twice the distance we would have had to cover if we’d gone in a straight line, our navigational challenges never led us to bodily harm.

The second challenge was the picnic.  We had a 50-pound pack of food in the bottom of the canoe, and had just assumed that, somewhere along the canal, we would find a gently sloping grassy bank where we could drag the canoe up and have our lunch.  I’m not sure if this is an issue with canals generally, or just this one in particular, but all the banks were perfectly vertical and about a foot above water level, and lined right to the edge with trees.  It made for serene and beautiful canoeing, but did not really lend itself to coming ashore for picnic-type events.

We tried eating in the canoe, which started awkwardly and nearly ended very, very badly.

The third challenge was that canoeing is really a form of exercise.  You may recall that Exercise and I have agreed to disagree.  We respect each other’s place on this planet, but that doesn’t mean we get along.  After an hour and a half in the canoe, I began to realize that I was getting quite tired, and a little sore — both in my shoulders, and where my ass was trying vainly to find a comfortable spot on a flat aluminum seat.  In case you were wondering, my ass never did find that spot.

We ultimately ended up driving to a nearby park after we had docked the canoe, and had our picnic lunch-cum-supper on a blanket there.  It was less precarious and a good deal more comfortable than in the canoe, and I got to shovel food into my non-canoeing face, so that counts as a win in my books.

photo credit: aussiegall

I’ll leave you to process the nuances of that statement, but those are the facts and we must live with them.  A notice was slipped in our door last Friday night, alerting us to the fact that, at some point this week, dudes with hoses would be blasting our houses with a high-pressure stream of water, and could we please take anything breakable off our patios so it didn’t end up lodged in our neighbour’s wall.  For us, this meant hauling our potted plants and patio furniture into the living room, where they sat gazing out through the sliding doors and waiting for the crews to arrive and finish their work.

Around 10 o’clock yesterday morning, I sat at my desk in my office upstairs.  I had the blinds half-drawn, as the sun was making it a little hard to see my monitor, and so I didn’t really have a good view of what was going on outside.  The house was quiet, the street was quiet, and then an enormous jet of violently angry water suddenly pounded the window inches from my face.  A window, when hit with a stream of liquid like that, behaves much like a drum, and my entire office was its acoustic chamber.  I almost crapped my pants.

The crews quickly finished our house and moved on to the next, but by then the irrevocable damage to my psyche was done.  I now sit fretfully at my desk, peering nervously out to the street and starting in alarm whenever someone in the house turns on a tap.

photo credit: Pembroke Dave

In an effort to similarly simply things when talking about “my sister” and “my brother-in-law”, I will henceforth simply call them Lynnita and Brad.

“My brother-in-law” is what tore it.  It takes me about ten minutes to type that out, what with the hyphens and all, and if I refer to him twice in one paragraph I pretty much need to book a vacation day when I’m done.