I Dream of Gnocchi

SO, I have a food post for y'all. I didn't really take too many pictures because I was busy thinking that this was going to turn into a complete disaster or be mediocre or at least be one of THOSE dishes. Disappointing or unimpressive:

We're our own worst critics, at least until Kuzco gets involved. What can I say? Despite the odds, the dish turned out awesome. When I make more friends dans Montréal, in my magical dream scenario, I would cook this and bring it to a pot luck.

It was an experiment, after I saw a recipe for a Vegan pasta sauce that was similar to an alfredo, but made with acorn squash. What did I happen to have after my adventure in impulsively grabbing produce at our local fruiterie this week? You guessed it, acorn squash.

I'm an addict for creamy pasta sauces and I was craving comfort food after a tired Monday in classes. It's a little work intensive, not because any of the steps are TOUGH, just because there several of them to be taken in the process.
So if you make this at all (DO IT), set aside time and DON'T BE STARVING when you start. Also, don't be Vegan. Also, don't be scared. Cooking without a recipe from your brain is an art.

Now's let's make some delicious art, baby.

Riley's Experiment Turned Totally Awesome Squash Gnocchi

Ingredients
• 1/2 baked acorn squash, peeled (Slice squash in half. Gut it. Put the halves face down on a baking tray or casserole dish with a half inch of water in the bottom. Bake at 350 for 45-60 minutes, until the flesh is tender and the skin peels off easily. If you're cooking for a crowd, use the whole squash and 2 packs of gnocchi, maybe?)
• Cream cheese
• Milk
• 2 cloves garlic, minced (depending on how much you like garlic, add more or add less)
• Cooking oil of some kind
• Salt & Pepper (freshly ground if you have it)
• 1 package potato gnocchi
• basil, fresh or dry
• some type of hard Italian cheese associated with pasta on the regular. Serious, Parm, Parm Reggiano, whatever you've got on hand. 

 #1. In a bowl, mash together the squash, cream cheese and splashes of milk. Stir until it has a thick, creamy texture. (This is totally up to you, how much you add of everything. Thinner sauce? More milk. Flavour? More cream cheese.)

#2. Brown garlic in a saucepan with a splash of oil, not too much, (this is all going into the sauce) but enough so the pieces don't stick to the bottom of the pan. When it's a toasty golden colour, pour the contents of the saucepan in with the squash mixture.

#3. If you don't mind bits of garlic, you can totally throw this back on the burner now (put it all back in the saucepan from the bowl first) on low heat, stirring so it doesn't burn. I was looking for a really smooth texture so I spooned the sauce into my blender and let it rip until I felt it had been sufficiently whipped into silky goodness.  At the same time, get a pot of salted water on the boil for the gnocchi.

#4. Rip up a few fresh basil leaves and add them, plus a small amount (at most 1/3 of a cup) of my good friend Parm Reggie, grated, and stirred until it combined and melted. Salt and pepper the sauce to your taste.

#5. Cook the gnocchi in the boiling water, according to the package. (Note: When they float to the surface, they're done. GET THEM OUTTA THERE, into the nearest colander like a bad-pasta-ass action film.) 

A neat trick I like to use to thin out my sauce is to ladle pasta water into it a bit at a time. The starch from the noodles gives the sauce body, or something. I'm making that up, but it makes sense to me, OKAY?

#5. When the gnocchi are all cooked, add them into the sauce pot and stir until they're evenly coated. Then, MANGE. Slightly sweet, garlicky, creamy sauce enrobing pillowy soft gnocchi. Not bad for a shot in the dark dinner experiment! Next time, I might add more veg, like onions or wilt some baby spinach into it...

Do not even lie, you want this in your face.

Reboots

Bek and I wanna get the fashion blog up and running again because we...like fashion. Montreal, and the Plateau where we live in particular is chock full of kitschy and trendy stylish people all over the place. It's inspiring to see so many modes of aesthetic. Personally, I feel inclined to start dressing with personal flair, or at least begin blogging about it again. Hopefully, we'll see more activity in that direction in a little while.

(Maybe not this weekend. We have the Pop Montreal festival to attend. And I have homework. And writings. AND. AND AND AND AND--)

The important part is that we make it more manageable. One of the hardest things about running V is for Velvet before was that it was so time consuming to make outfits in photo shop, hunt down trends and samples, code the HTML for EVERY item we had to link, that sort of thing. It's important that we be consistent, but it's also important for us to have a LIFE... Which is why we moved here in the first place. A changing of the pace so to speak.

Here's a little sample... I can't get the button to work, but if you happen to have a Lookbook account, you can click the pic and be transported. (Ooooooh.)

Also, I got my first piece of Montreal mail yesterday! A little card from my mom, testing the system so to speak. It was written dans tout le Francais, which was some adorably awful French. I later found out Google was responsible for poor translation, so let this be a lesson to you, kids. DIY.

A Little Less Conversation, A Little More Muffin

In case you couldn't tell (or you don't like reading-- GIRL, GO HOME) I'm back in school and the student life. The sore shoulders from backpacks, the early morning class & coffee combo, the rambling sentences about creating a general atmosphere of my current life experience. In one of my lectures (British Literature to 1660) as her introduction, the professor told us a little bit about herself. She said that when she was working on her Ph.D her escape from the mountains of pressure was sewing.

Well I might not be after a Ph.D, but this is my first time in university and I'm already apprehensive about what's expected of me. I'm no slouch when it comes to school. I slack like the Dickens, but when push comes to procrastination, I get it all done in the end. What I'm leery of is whether or not I'll be able to get a grip on all the higher thinking. University is filled with big concepts and it's built to open up your mind and teach you things to change the way you see the world. I just want to understand it. And survive. And not ruin my future. No worries, right? 

I might not be much of a seamstress, but apart from blogging and running, one of my best escapes from the pressures of life is baking and cooking. Paper panic? Cookies. Bad day? Squash Risotto. Another part of being a student is counting every penny and putting it to good use. Use meaning, when life gives you browning bananas, you make good on your money and bake muffins.

Moist, delicious, wholesome banana muffins from the recipe your mama swears by. So, last night, I threw on some tunes, my apron and brewed some coffee in my favourite mug. (Great Gays, ASSEMBLE!)

Monsieur Smith's Mix & Match Muffins

 CAST:
1 cup oats
2 cups all purpose flour
1 cup brown sugar
1 tbsp baking powder
1 tsp each cinnamon & nutmeg
1 tsp baking soda 
1/2 tsp salt 

2 eggs (room temp)
1 1/2 cups yogurt (I used greek, vanilla)
1/2 cup oil 
Dash of vanilla
1 cup fruit of your choice (MASHED BANANAS!)

1. Get two mixing bowls, one bigger than the other. The big one is for dry ingredients, the smaller one, wet ingredients. Sift all the siftables into the bigger bowl. Then added the brown sugar, oats, and salt. Mix it!

2. Combine the wet ingredients in the smaller of the two mixing bowls. Eggs, yogurt, oil, vanilla. Blee bloo blee blah.

3. Mash up! You don't have to mash the fruit if you use other kinds, but bananas work better in muffins mashed. So I got to work, like a boss. Fork. Measuring cup. Badassery.

 

When you've adequately expressed all your angst and rage and panic, add your bananas to the rest of the wet ingredients and stir.

4. This is where the magic happens. You see, when two mixing bowls love each other very very much....

They add the wet ingredients to the dry ingredients to make muffin batter. Stir just enough to incorporate the two together, no more and no less! Overmixing makes for tough muffins.

5.  Heat your oven to 350 degrees. Grease 1 1/2 muffin tins. (My mama said this batter makes 12 muffins. I want to live in her world of titanic muffin tins and humongous carbs. For the rest of us, two muffin tins are probably a good idea.)

Basically, use as many tins are you need. These babies rise, but not by much. I got 18 muffins from this recipe...
6. Bake 20-25 minutes, until a knife comes out clean.

7. Bask in your glorious, oaty children.

8. Now eat them. Bek put butter on one half of hers, and peanut butter on the other. I tried mine with pumpkin seed butter. Both were amazing.

The muffins are dense, moist, not too sweet but tasty. There's nothing quite like fresh baked goods... The best thing about baking is that it also ensures you have food ready to eat when you need a quick snack or a study break.

Uhh. I got muffin else to say here...

BYE!

Well, there's always next weekend.

Stuff I Did This Weekend: 

vendredi
• Went to a "meet & greet" with staff of Concordia's independent student newspaper, "The Link" (and signed up to be a contributor to several categories.)
• Hit up a local microbrew with The Link staff, sampled both raspberry and honeybrown beers.  (Notes: both, good.) Also, listened to Bekah debate the merits of different Bowie albums with an Irishman. Met a journalist grad who majored in Russian studies, spoke fluent Russian and gave us three reasons why his apartment was haunted.
• Walked home in the rain, threw on the new Darkness CD and fell asleep even though I was SO SURE I WASN'T TIRED.

samedi
• Slept in. (durr.)
• Trekked out to Value Village to find some back to school garb, and ended up with three pieces and 5 books-- more than I meant to buy. (Oops.)
• Went for a solid 5K run. Upon which I threw down Hans Zimmer's The Dark Knight Rises soundtrack and ran like I WAS the Batman. (Cape not included.)
• Read T.S. Eliot and Allen Ginsberg aloud, lying on my yoga mat, in the kitchen, to Rebekah.
• Split for the evening to the Village, danced like a FREAK, and then split early. Last trains are the despair of my dancing shoes.
• We made the mutual decision that 1AM was a premature turn in on a Saturday night and thus, headed out to the legendary La Banquise, a 24-hour poutine joint. ATE EVERYTHING. Seriously. (Bek: La Elvis. Me: La Matty.)

La Elvis

 

I realize this looks like the most disgusting thing ever (all poutine does), but there is steak and green peppers and gravy and that's all you need to know.

 

• Walked home. C'est froid.

dimanche
• grocery shopped
• tidied my room
• made epically good vegetarian chili
• put up the rest of my picture frames
• #occupied Second Cup to steal their internet. (The money I'm going to save when I don't have to buy tea to use their internet connection is going to be awesome. Like. Seriously, 4 bucks a week.)

Stuff I Didn't Do this Weekend:
• laundry
• cocaine

The French Revolution: Welcoming Party

I keep having these moments where everything seems to fall into perfect, clean lines. Seconds of belonging, kind of what I've been looking for as I get my footing in this brave new place. Some solace or reassurance, that I wasn't alone, that I have a chance to make it out of here alive. (Maybe even better off?)

#1. Bek and I went out to look for a bar. It was our first Saturday in the city (well, the first where we weren't covered in moving dirt, sweat and exhausted) and it was not to be wasted. After spending the afternoon making our little flat into a little home (pictures hung, vinyls spinning, stocking the fridge with fresh veggies from our nearby fruiterie) we were too tired to go dancing, but not too tired to go out and sit on our butts with a cold drink. So we got dressed and wandered out into the night to find a scene.

The nightlife in Montreal is the stuff of legends (says the tour book that Jill got me for my birthday). The night was cold with the first mumble of autumn making us wish we had brought scarves. Each bar or pub or bistro we passed promised something different. One, a young scene, loud and boisterous. The next, sophisticated, wine swilling patrons with square plates and assembled, precarious appetizers. People wandered this way and that through the streets. No one clear direction was marked as the path to the par-tay.

We decided on Chez Baptiste, not sure why, but with our eyes on it, we both decided it would be a good place to check out. Mutual, mind connection decision made. Inside, the bar was dark and the Black Keys blared over the speakers. People wore berets and thick rimmed glasses without a sense of any irony whatsoever. Our waitress asked us where we were from and we explained we have moved, and it was our first week dans la ville. A few minutes later she came back with a tray, and on it, three shots. "Welcome to Montreal!" And I can't be sure whether the warmth from this welcome was me being genuinely moved, or from hard alcohol. Either way, we left a few hours later in high spirits and thanked the waitress again on our way out the door.

#2. Today at school, I discovered they serve a free vegan lunch from Monday to Friday. I gawked at the wealth of the young and the hip and the smart and the beautiful. I felt, like this was a place where my passions, my interests and my morals were aligning. I learned about poets and my prof talked about epiphanies and Oscar Wilde and poetry. Hipster Mecca. Who knows, sooner or later I might even get to call it my home, instead of that place where I just happen to have landed at the moment.

#3. I even wandered into a pet store, and bought a scratching post for the cat using my lame French skills. Bravo, moi. Bravo! The house is more or less emptied of cardboard boxes, too. I made a vegetable stock out of the bits and pieces of cut up vegetables Bek and I haven't made use of. The weather is getting colder and stuff is starting to come together.

Keep calm, and carry on, y'all.

The French Revolution: Transition

I called home last night for the first time since the move on Saturday, to hear mama's voice. I rambled on to her about my profs, people who express with passion the romanticism of grammar, and swoon over the 100+ word sentences of Charles Dickens. (I'm not kidding.) Then she asked me about the commute, the cat, and how everything was going. How was I feeling?

It was then, I had a moment of pristine verbal clarity, something that does not happen to me very often. "Mom," I said, "No one daydreams about the transition period."
No thirteen year old on the cusp of puberty lays down in the evening, starry eyed about growing pains and acne. They wax hopeful about new heights, about breasts and curves, about muscles and low voices. The end result.


I never sat with my psychologist, pouring my heart out about the excitement of struggling with my social anxiety. I looked forward to a time when heading into work wouldn't be the cause of tears and panic, when I didn't care so much about what people had to think of me. When I could feel 'normal.'

So, I guess what it boils down to at this moment in time is: Am I 100% happy?

No. Of course not, I'm in transition. I've been in the city not but a week, without a full week of classes under my belt. I've not yet stretched my legs out and headed to the higher ground. I haven't had much opportunity to make new friends, or build a new life here, or get into a routine. Those things take patience and time. When people spew entire whip-lash paragraphs of Quebecois French at me, my brain still shuts off, like it's white noise. Je ne comprends pas. This English-outcast mentality has put my confidence offside. Where once I felt strong and confident, I now feel.... paled in comparison. Reverse ugly duckling syndrome.

I knew this wasn't going to be easy, and I'm not miserable, I'm just incomplete.  I have to make what I want for myself. "Putting yourself out there," is nowhere near as simple as it seems.

I had a similar discussion with my friend JG, who lives in Liverpool at the moment, but is planning on making the move to Edinburgh. I lectured him that moving to Scotland wouldn't be a cure all for any discontent he had with his life. I said he would have to take pains and put in effort to get what he wanted. Well, it seems as though I may as well have been talking about this to myself. Advice that I ought to take straight into my heart, until I find my niche, where I belong, and this new brave world of happiness. I guess we'll see. It's a little premature to be developing anything, and little early to be despairing too.

Awkwardness. And they say you only go through puberty once?

The French Revolution: Moving Day

[NOTE: I WILL UPDATE THIS POST WITH PHOTOS WHEN I CAN GET AT 'EM. UNTIL THEN, YOU JUST HAVE TO READ STUFF. READ IT WELL.]

I've done it. Move complete. I'm typing this away in a Second Cup in Montreal.

The night before the big move, I could only lay awake in bed and think one thing: "This is the craziest thing I've ever done." And it is. I've never lived so far from home, in a place where I don't fluently speak the preferred language. I'm pouring literally thousands of dollars into a degree and this living arrangement for the next three years. They say the big risks = the biggest payoffs.

Fingers crossed on that.

The move itself went something like this: we got up with the sunrise to jam poor Telly into his cat carrier, then schlepped him into the back of Bek's car. Bek and I took that car, and our parents each went in their own respective vehicles. We had a gaddamn convoy. Before we left, we geared up on coffee and breakfast sandwiches, then took off down the highway. And we drove over 500KM, over 6 hours, until we made it all the way to la belle province (Québec) and la ville (Montreal...duh). The drive itself didn' feel long at the finish, but by the end I was talking to the cat, he was talking back, and no one was in the mood for the next step of the journey.

I had been dreading this for weeks. Steady goodbyes, one by one to the people I love as well as the slow disappearance of my worldly belongings into bags and cardboard boxes were pretty much symptoms of the looming apocalypse. Friends and family with their eyes alight would ask me if I was excited and I would just shake my head.

"No. I'm too stressed out by the move."

The idea of moving is simple by definition, and most people only hate it because of the hard work it signifies. You take your stuff from the home at point A, move it to point B. Well, it so happens that Point B, my new home, is an apartment graced with ample stair-age. No elevator.
My parents are both over 50 years old, not spring chickens and the very IDEA of sending them (cruel taskmaster styles, yo) up not one, but two narrow, somewhat steep flights of stairs carrying heavy/fragile/featherlight/nothing was giving me massive anxiety. If someone broke something, I was going to have THAT on my conscience for the next...oh...forever.
Every family dinner or special occasion, someone would say, "Hey, do you remember the time you got the idiot idea to move to the only French speaking province in our country and mom was carrying that big box up the Aztec pyramid that you call your stairs using only her love for you and she slipped and got a hangnail?" Dare I say, the story of the agony would echo through the ages as first fact, and then legend.

Yes. This is the MO I was working with. Dreading. When we GOT there, the former tenants of our place were still moving out. They were pretty well all francophones, which one of the fellows seemed to find important as he made a big show out of asking us all if we were from Ontario and then bidding us goodbye as "anglophones." Merci, bro. Nothing makes me feel at home like having it pointed out explicitly why I don't fit in. Seriously!

As we hauled box after box up the stairs, my dad stood on the balcony and pulled things up by a rope. My parents in the end, actually did very little stair climbing, for which I am very grateful. We got all the stuff up, threw it into the rooms, shutting Telly in the bathroom, to adjust to part of his new home. He curled up in the window, petrified. I could sympathize.

My parents headed to Ikea to bed hunt (which is like head hunting but sleepier in the back to school season) and Bek's parents went to scope out their hotel. What did we do in that moment? Did we jump up and down with excitement? Did we high five? No. We threw my comforter on the floor and laid on it without moving. Then we made coffee and laid still some more. The start of our glamorous French-Canadian Metropolitan lives began with no sugar, no milk dark roast and paralysis courtesy of fatigue.





We went out for dinner with Bek's parents, tried to order in French, and came home to find the cat missing. POOF. Gone. We searched the apartment top to bottom. We checked every room, every pile of miscellaneous stuff, every box, twice. Somewhere in the back of my mind, I feared that in some WEIRD anglo-hate fueled terrorist act, someone had had broken in to let the cat out. We literally could not find him. ANYWHERE. So I did what my mama taught him to do best: come to the sound of a treat container being shaken. Following the sound of the bell on his collar, Bek found him in my closet. Which we thought was regular size, but ACTUALLY goes all the way back to Narnia, while still providing room for several fugitives and/or in denial people of the gay persuasion.

We have no beds, so we slept on the floor. C'est la vie.

None of this even feels real yet. Like by next week, I'll be back home, in my Waterloo life with my family and everything will be on hold again. Not this time, mes amis. This time, we're playing for keeps. 

À Suivre...