Dinner at Rocco’s with my parents. A neighbourhood joint since 1951! Incredible food and an incredibly nice family! Saluti!
Month: April 2016 (page 1 of 2)
Sharing a box of cookies with my Mom at Macri’s Italian Bakery. Happiness is…
{Pinned HERE}
Mr. Michie went back to work on Tuesday and I got to work too! I pulled out my Feast cookbook by Nigella Lawson and made a batch of dinner rolls. I made them slightly larger than her suggestion and after bathing them in an egg wash and sprinkling them with sesame seeds they were ready for the oven.
We used these as the base to build cheeseburger sliders! Perfection!
This morning brought our glorious Easter break to a close. It was back to school for Mr. Michie. I don’t think I was ready for that. We’ve had a wonderful “staycation” just the two of us. Getting things done around the house, cooking together, watching movies, listening to music and doing some school work here and there. It has been so nice to just move to our own beat.
But this morning the alarm went off at five and just like that, the carriage turned back to a pumpkin. It’s cool this morning and damp. I tended our little garden while Mr. Michie made coffee. Among a few things we had gotten at the nursery was a mixed pack of ranunculus, so other than a red and a pink that were already starting to bloom, I didn’t know what we would get. The buds are beginning to fill out on the other plants and it looks like we have a few white and yellow flowers in there. So the garden is starting to feel very “Spring” like and very colourful.
After kissing Mr. Michie goodbye this morning, I sat down for five minutes with my cup of coffee to read the news and plan my day. I decided to live on the wild side and hit the shuffle button on my music. Neil Young’s “Down By The River”, was the first thing to come on and considering this is one of my favourite Neil Young songs, I’m gonna take this as a sign, that it’s gonna be a good day!
I just know this woman is welcoming us into her home. Don’t you just love this woman’s outfit and the wallpaper. What a photo!
This weekend is the beginning of the end of my time off with Mr. Michie. I treasure this time. We’ve spent the morning doing odd jobs. We’ve ordered a few bins to finish off organising the closets and then that job is officially ticked off the list. We’re catching up on podcasts and we’re listening to a lot of music. We seemed to have moved back into a Jazz and 70’s phase. So lots of Dexter Gordon, Miles Davis and ELO are being played in the house at present.
We made BBQ this week and are turning the leftovers into tacos for dinner tonight, we just need to plan a menu for the next few days. The first week back to school is always a killer, so if we can be organised about it, it makes everything run much smoother on the home front.
This weekend also heralds in The Masters, so I think some fried chicken and pimento cheese sandwiches just might be in order along with some sweet tea, of course! I have my favourite and I’m pulling for him, just like I was last year.
I’m looking forward to a weekend filled with walks, coffee, candle light, good music, great food and even better company! Here’s to the weekend, long may it last!
Today we attacked our bedroom closets and I am now sitting amongst a scattering of bags filled with items to donate to the charity shop. The house smells amazing because we are slow roasting a pork shoulder to make BBQ for dinner tonight. So dinner and another area decluttered are two things I can tick off of my list today.
To fortify us for an afternoon spent gutting closets, we made bruschetta for lunch. I marinated the tomatoes over the morning so they were extra flavourful before spooning them over a loaf of ciabatta that I had drizzled with oil and rubbed with garlic before toasting. Fresh mozzarella sat on top while the tomatoes were delicately nestled all around.
A few sprigs of torn basil and a splash of balsamic vinegar and lunch was complete!
I was looking for a new cinnamon roll recipe for Easter. One that wouldn’t make a gazillion, as this year I wasn’t cooking for a crowd and one that wouldn’t take too much effort as I had a lot of other baking, cooking and prep work to get done the day before.
I came across a cake mix cinnamon roll recipe on the Betty Crocker website and I decided to try that, with a few exceptions. I can’t easily get yellow cake mix here, so I used a white one instead and I decided to splash some vanilla extract into the dough mixture, you can’t go wrong with vanilla!
I also made my own cream cheese frosting, laced with vanilla and a hint of clementine zest. The end results were wonderful. I made the rolls the day before and went through every step, right up until baking them. Instead, I covered them and let them stay in the fridge over night. We were up early Easter morning, so while Mr. Michie made coffee, I put the rolls out on the counter for about thirty minutes and then baked them. They rose beautifully and the house smelled divine!
I sat down yesterday afternoon to catch up on a bit of blog reading that I had saved and I watched this. I was mesmerised. Created by Thomas Blanchard, using a mixture of paint, milk, oil and liquid soap. I was completely entranced. I felt that I was watching a cosmic explosion, a carnival of candy colours, a film showing biological matter in all it’s minutea. It is a metamorphosis of colours and shapes. I found it to be almost meditative. Enjoy!
Memories of Paintings from Thomas Blanchard on Vimeo.
{Found via: This is Colossal}