Happy Easter!

Wishing everyone a blessed Easter!

Our Easter brunch, made up of the contents of our basket.  We've got:

Bread - shaped by weaving 5 strips of dough, it made for easy tearing apart.
Ham and sausage
Pink pickled quail eggs
Olives - three types; salmon, blue cheese and garlic stuffed
Brie
Marzipan lamb and rose
Eggs - kraszanki, tea dyed and the ones we roasted in the oven, then dyed with shaving cream.
Salt - red wine and black ash
Butter - garlic and herb
Goat cheese medallions - the oil was drained and reserved to use in cooking.
Mustard with horseradish
Beet with horseradish
Rosemary infused olive oil
Fig infused vinegar

What a delicious way to start the day!  The preserved goat cheese medallions turned out fantastic, as was the bread dipped in the oil and fig vinegar.  The vinegar had a very nice sweet and tart flavour that really woke up the taste buds.  Just a tiny sprinkling of salt on an egg was all that was needed - the black salt in particular tasted much more "salty" than regular salt, which is an odd sort of thing!  Both the mustard and beet horseradish had a kick to it, so a little went a long way, and the brie was in the perfect stage of oozing softness.

Glorious!

Something new

Trying something new for our Easter basket.

More photos here!

Merry Christmas

Wishing everyone a very Merry Christmas and a joyous and prosperous New Year!

From my family to yours.

Happy Canadian Thanksgiving!

Happy Thanksgiving to all our Canadian viewers!

While a lot of people have had their big dinners on Sunday, we're waiting until Monday.  We're not going to be doing a turkey or ham this year - the girls asked for bacon wrapped chicken thighs.  I tend to buy bulk at Costco, so I got a 4 pack, leaving us with plenty of extra bacon for other things.

I used 1 1/2 of those for our Sunday supper and made my own version of the Bacon Explosion, using what I had available.  I had some ground beef, which I mixed up with seasonings the way I would normally do for a meatloaf, rather then the sausage they used.  I didn't have the seasoning mix they put on the woven mat of bacon at all.  I also used a mix of shredded marble cheese and dry feta where the Bacon Explosion uses cooked bacon pieces.

 That made for a rather large roll!  After wrapping it in aluminum foil, I baked it for about 2 hours, opening the foil for the last half hour or so to brown the bacon. 

When it was done, my daughter helped me take it out of the foil and transfer it to a dry pan, upside down.  Since the underside had been sitting in rendered fat and was looking pretty pale, we popped it back into the oven under the broiler for more browning.

It was incredibly delicious!  Surprisingly quick and easy to make, too.  I think this is something we'll be adding to our list of recipes for special dinners!

Happy Easter!

Our Easter brunch, using the contents of our basket.

For the Devilled Eggs, the prosciutto rosettes were chopped fine.  They were then mixed with some shredded cheese, egg yolks and mayonnaise for the filling.  Once filled, the eggs were topped with a sprinkling of grated horseradish root and a bit more shredded cheese.

Wishing you a joyous Easter!

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

Wishing you all a joyous Christmas, and may 2011 be a year of peace, happiness and prosperity for you and your loved ones.

See you next year!

Day two, part one

Head over to my craft blog to see today's photos.

Rather than repeat myself...

... you can check out today's photos on my Get Crafting blog.

Happy Canada Day!

Anna:  Yes, I know - technically, Canada Day has been over for more than an hour.  I just got these uploaded not long ago, though.  For more photos, visit my flickr set.

I took more than 200 photos of the fireworks tonight, and most of them actually turned out!  I've only uploaded 2 of them so far - I might add more later, but definitely not tonight!



Both photos were taken near the end of the show, when the smoke was pretty thick and drifting down the river.  The combination of the smoke and the light from the fireworks gives the bridge a surreal look.





This one, I just really liked. :-D


Happy Canada Day to my fellow Canadians!

Happy Easter!

Wishing everyone a glorious and joyful Easter!

Merry Christmas!

Wishing everyone a safe and happy Christmas celebration, and a year of health and happiness in 2010!

In the Christmas spirit

Anna: I recently joined a local crafters group's email list. It's a very friendly and active group that gets together IRL (In Real Life) regularly. For Christmas, a bunch of us signed up for an Advent gift exchange. How it works is, the organizer partners up the participants, and we all had to get 24 small gifts (maximum $5 each) and one large gift (maximum $25) to exchange with our partner. I thought it was a really fun idea. Keeping in budget was an interesting challenge. On the one hand, it's really hard to find nice gifts for under $5. On the other, it's amazing what nice gifts you can find for under $5! Of course, being a crafter's group, we were free to make the gifts, too. :-D

Today's gift was a set of giant jingle bell ornaments for the tree. I happened to be sitting with my daughter's cat on my lap, and she thought they were quite interesting. LOL

The blanket under cat and bells is a crochet blanket my younger daughter is making. It's not done yet, but it is more than big enough to sling over my lap. She could have finished it off already, but decided to add another bulk ball of yarn's worth to the border. This cat LOVES the blanket, and immediately climbed onto my lap when I was done covering my legs. I got my older daughter to get this picture for me.

Preparing

Preparing
Originally uploaded by amkb

Anna:

Lately, we just haven't been taking a lot of pictures, and the ones I've been taking have been for my crafting blog. I figured it was about time. ;-)

We're slowly getting prepared for Christmas, including making tourtierre, the traditional French Canadian meat pie. Normally I use the blend of meats my MIL taught me, but not all of them were available, so this year is going to be different. Which is fine with me. I like experimenting.

I'd ordered 24 pounds of ground meats for 2 dozen pies. We ended up with a bit more than that, as the game meats come pre-packaged and frozen to the butcher, and they don't have control over the weights. I also bought a new pot, just for cooking the meats, as there is no way we could do it using the roaster like last year. We did only 12 pounds and it barely fit - stirring as it cooked was very messy. The roaster doesn't exactly fit on the element, either, and isn't long enough to fit over two. So I got this 16 quart capacity stock pot. It'll fit on one element, hold all the ingredients, and still have room for mixing.

I hope.

Tomorrow, the frozen meats should be thawed out enough for us to start cooking in the evening. Sunday, we make the dough and set up the assembly line. I've done very little baking in this oven since we've moved, but I know that one side of the element doesn't heat up properly. We'll have to make sure to work around that.

I'm really looking forward to making our pies!

Celebrations

partrioticplanters
Originally uploaded by amkb

Anna: Yesterday we had a full day of celebrations. I've uploaded photos in a Canada Day flickr set, some of which are also in my updated The Works Festival set - that festival ended on Canada Day.

Canada Day

We left too late, couldn't find a parking spot, and so got a really, really bad view of the fireworks..


Test shot to make sure the focus and shutter are right; if you notice the river boat, *that*'s about where we should have been :P

k.. the last picture refuses to actually *go* below the others, so it's staying here.

(Anna: fixed it...)

309:365 Happy Easter!

Anna and Philippe: Sending our wishes to everyone for a happy, blessed Easter!

Making the Easter basket is one of our favourite traditions. Philippe got photos of this year's basket.



The completed basket is always covered with a special cloth. This year, we used an antique linen cloth, worked with linen thread in cutwork and drawn thread embroidery. It's one of the finest pieces of embroidery I own. From the age I was told when I bought it, it's now almost 90 years old.



The traditional contents include bread, ham, kielbasa, salt, cheese (a wheel of brie this year), butter, horseradish (usually a root, but I could only find the jarred kind this time), and lots of eggs.

There's even some chocolate in there. :-D