December 2007

Trifle

Posted on by Patrick

My first stop-motion video:

Mmmm, tri­fle…

Update!

Because Doug demand­ed it, here’s the recipe.

You’ll want to do this in a tri­fle bowl, a tall, wide, cylin­dri­cal bowl, usu­al­ly on a stand. I found mine at Wal-Mart for about $8.

Bot­tom lay­er: Take an angel food cake and tear it into bits. Put it into the tri­fle bowl. Cov­er with about one or two cans’ worth of man­darin seg­ments. Mix up some red Jell‑O (I use straw­ber­ry) and pour slow­ly over all. You don’t want every­thing to float to the top, which is what I find hap­pens if you pour too quick­ly. Put in the fridge till the Jell‑O sets.

Mid­dle lay­er: Mix up some Bird’s cus­tard accord­ing to the pack­age direc­tions for cus­tard dessert (not cus­tard sauce). Let it cool to about room temp (you’ll want to put plas­tic wrap on it so it does­n’t form a skin). Pour onto the Jell‑O lay­er. Refrig­er­ate till the cus­tard is cool.

Top lay­er: Whipped cream. Gar­nish with fruit (I used left-over man­darin seg­ments; my grand­ma always uses Maraschi­no cher­ries; sliced straw­ber­ries would prob­a­bly be good too).

Enjoy!

Winter Wonders

Posted on by Patrick

Hoarfrost

Sure, it looks pretty.

Frosted tree

You’ll get no argu­ment from me.

Winter Wonderland

But the night before, dri­ving down the Trans-Cana­da High­way in fog dense enough that I could­n’t see the lights of Bran­don from one kilo­me­ter away, I was­n’t think­ing of the beau­ty of hoar­frost. I was think­ing, pray­ing real­ly, “Just let us get home.”

Jewish Pastry

Also: The rugelach (or Jew­ish Pas­try) turned out just fine.

Christmas baking

Posted on by Patrick

Every year at Christ­mas, one of the fam­i­ly treats is a sweet li’l treat that we’ve always known sim­ply as “Jew­ish pas­try”. This year I decid­ed I’d like to take a crack at mak­ing it, and faced my first obsta­cle: How do you google a treat that you know by such a gener­ic (and cer­tain­ly incor­rect) name?

So I punched “jew­ish pas­try” into Google’s help­ful lit­tle box, and got how­ev­er many thou­sands of returns. Can­ny crit­ter that I am, I had a look at the image search results. Turns out the prop­er name for “Jew­ish pas­try” is rugelach.

Armed with that knowl­edge, I tried hunt­ing for rugelach in Google. And dis­cov­ered that there are as many recipes for rugelach as there are Jew­ish grand­moth­ers. Hmmm.

So I emailed my mom, and got our iter­a­tion of the recipe from her. It came from my great-aunt Olga, who is on the Ukrain­ian side of the family.

Right now the dough’s chill­ing in the fridge. Soon I’ll be dab­bing straw­ber­ry jam onto tri­an­gles of dough and rolling them up and bak­ing them. Hope­ful­ly it turns out.

Wish me luck!

New ficlet — “Jenny, who is a dog”

Posted on by Patrick

So I cre­at­ed a new ficlet this morn­ing, called “Jen­ny, who is a dog”. For those of you that haven’t run across Ficlets, here’s the idea: You go to the Ficlets web­site, sign up or sign in, and then you can cre­ate a “ficlet”. A ficlet is a short-short sto­ry, or more accu­rate­ly a part of a sto­ry. You have an upper bound of 1024 char­ac­ters* to tell your sto­ry. Any­one can add onto it by cre­at­ing sequels or pre­quels. Every sto­ry on the site is licensed using a Cre­ative Com­mons Attri­bu­tion-Share­alike license.

So here’s my lat­est snip­pet of fiction:

Jen­ny, who is a dog, came into the liv­ing room, sat down on the floor, and spoke. “What sup­per?” she said, tail thump­ing on the hardwood.

I stared at her. “Beg par­don?” I was shocked enough that I actu­al­ly respond­ed. To a dog. You see the state of mind I was in?

“Sup­per. Food. What?”

“Uh–” I’d been mak­ing my own dog food, these days. Jen­ny was old, and store-brand food was­n’t doing her any favours. “Liv­er and rice, for you,” I said. “I think piz­za for me.”

“Good. Liv­er good,” she said, and trot­ted off to the din­ing room.

I went into the kitchen and got a beer out of the fridge. As I twist­ed the cap off, my phone rang.

“Y’el­lo?”

“Doug?” It was Lisa, my girl­friend. “Uh, Doug, I did­n’t know who to call–”

“Calm down,” I said. “Deep breaths. What’s up?”

“Mr. Kit,” she said. “He’s–” She could­n’t go on.

“He’s talk­ing?” I said, and there was silence on the line. I knew I was right. Mr. Kit, who is a cat, was talk­ing too.

Jen­ny came into the kitchen and sat on the floor. “Jen­ny good dog,” she said.

And all day it kind of fes­tered in my head. I kept think­ing, what’s next? Where do we go from talk­ing pets?

So I’ve decid­ed to expand it into a short sto­ry (some­thing more like 2,000 or 3,000 words, I’m think­ing). Inter­est­ed? Let me know in the com­ments, and when it’s com­plete, I’ll email you a link to read the whole thing.

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* Which works out to about 200 words.