Look at these tomatoes I bought yesterday. They're so very, very good I can barely stand to eat them. We never, or just rarely, get interesting tomatoes at the grocery stores around here, but the Co-op I usually shop at has started bringing in these tomatoes from a local farm (they're obviously hot-house - still a mite cold for growing tomatoes outside) and it's really, really nice to see some non-standard varieties.

The big red tomato cost me $2, though, which is a little bit crazy, so I probably won't be buying too many of them. But the taste, oh my god, so good. Better than tomatoes my dad grew at home.

The zebrino tomatoes were only 90c for a little tub (there were a few more than in the picture), which I think must have been an error on the cashier's part, but I'm not completely certain. They're really nice tasting as well, quite sweet, though they've got a slightly thicker skin. I think I'm going to try roasting a couple of those but I think I've packed the cookbook that has the recipe in it that I wanted to use, alas.


This is what I made first, with my tomatoes. It was a nice, huge salad for lunch and if I had tomatoes that good every day, I could probably eat that every day. So so so good.

For one huge dinner salad (or 2-3 side salads):
1 lg tomato (or in this case, 1/4 large tomato and 3-4 cocktail tomatoes)
1/2 English cucumber
1/4 red onion
1.5 oz (~45g) feta

Cut everything to appropriate sizes and crumbling the feta over all. Then, whisk the following ingredients together until it emulsifies.

1.5 tbsp olive oil
1 tbsp lemon juice
a splash of white or red wine vinegar
1 garlic clove, crushed
salt and black pepper, to taste (go easy on the salt if you are using it with feta, since it's so salty on its own)
1/4-1/2 tsp dried oregano (it's nicer fresh, but I always wind up throwing out most of the package, so I don't buy it often)
1/4 tsp dried thyme

It should look almost creamy, with the flavouring bits suspended in the dressing. If you let it sit - which really improves the flavour by making the garlic punch through, but isn't necessary - you'll need to whisk it again before you put it over the salad. Taste to check the proportions before using it - you might like more olive oil than I've used. (I think most recipes use something closer to a 2:1 or 2.5:1 proportion of oil to vinegar and/or lemon juice, but I prefer a really lemony taste.)

This makes, I guess, about 3 tbsp dressing, which is more than enough for one huge dinner sized salad (like the one in my picture). There was about 1 tbsp of dressing leftover on the plate.

I've been pretty sick the last few days (and making myself go to work in spite of it all, because I can't afford to lose time) and all I've wanted to eat is chicken noodle soup.

But I don't really know how to make chicken noodle soup, or not chicken noodle soup the way my mom makes it. So instead... this. Which is very tasty, though it's probably the vegetables in a chicken noodle soup that do a person good, more so than just... chicken and noodles. Anyway, this recipe still needs some work - I've got to get a more flavourful broth, but want to do it without the nasty, nasty smell of simmering fish sauce, which is in the base recipe that this soup came from. (I've made it once before following the directions from the recipe, but this time I mostly did my own thing.) This is a super-easy thing to make if you're feeling like garbage, so I had it two days in a row. (I made double the broth part and double the chicken the first day, and then made fresh noodles and washed/cut fresh vegetables the second.)


So, Chicken Soup for One

1 oz (30 g) cellophane noodles or rice vermicelli
1 cup (250 ml) low-sodium chicken broth
a (small) dash of fish sauce - enough for a bit of taste, but not enough for the smell)
1 or 2 button mushrooms, thinly sliced (about 1/2-1 oz or 15-30 g)
1 or 2 green onions/scallions, both whites and greens, sliced into small rounds
2-3 oz (55-85 g) chicken breast, boneless/skinless, cooked and sliced or shredded into bite sized strips
a small handful of bean sprouts

In a small pot, cook the noodles according to package directions. (Some need only to be rehydrated for a few minutes; the ones I use cook in about three minutes.) Drain and place in a large soup bowl.

Using the same pot, add chicken broth, season with a bit of fish sauce, and add sliced mushrooms. Bring to a boil, then lower to a simmer and cook until the mushrooms are softened. (Or just leave it on the heat until you're ready to use it.)

Meanwhile, slice onions and chicken. Add to bowl on top of noodles. Rinse the bean sprouts and pick through to make sure you've not got any soft or slimy ones.

Pour broth and mushrooms over the noodles/chicken, then top with bean spouts. Eat and enjoy.


As I made it (4 oz/112 g chicken, uncooked weight, it was less than 3oz cooked; 16g mushrooms; 2 small scallions; 1/2 cup bean sprouts):
305 Calories|3g Fat|35g Carbs|34g Protein|1g Fibre

One of the things that frustrates me about IJ is that I want to use this with my flickr account to post pictures of some things and talk about them and whatever whatever... but I can't set up my flickr account to make posts here. (LJ, yes; IJ, no.) Wah.

Of course, I can always do this ("this" being cutting and pasting the code from an entry at LJ or from my food blog):

My parents are up for a few days this week, so since I had today off work, we drove up to Canmore in the afternoon. (Canmore is sort of... on the way to Banff, which more of you are more likely to have heard of.) Canmore is a smallish town surrounded by mountains, (which make me remarkably uneasy - I'm a prairie girl at heart), but the mountains do make for nice postcard images and these particular mountains are favourites for that.

This photo is of the Three Sisters mountains, taken from the side of the highway on the way from Canmore back to Calgary. It was really hazy out to today - it looked like smog was hanging over the mountains instead of over downtown Calgary - so a lot of my pictures came out sort of awful and grey looking. And this is so focused on the trees, rather than the mountains (alas), but there they are. You can see a few more pictures I took if you click on the photo and go back to my flickr account.

I do wish I took better photos than I do, but I just don't have the eye for it (or the knowledge for using the camera to its fullest or the camera to take the best pictures). I do what I can, and I suppose that's more or less enough.

When I first created this IJ, I'd planned to use it for more than just fandom related things. One of the things that I never quite liked about me and LJ was the way that I kept everything segregated (and I do - I have a fandom LJ, a health/weight loss LJ, and a personal LJ where I post everything else). But I never felt comfortable bringing all that together because a lot of the friends on my personal LJ really, really weren't into fanfic (or if they were, it was mostly to mock it) and I'm really close to a lot of the people in my personal LJ, but wasn't comfortable talking with them about my efforts to lose weight. And then from the other side, I didn't feel like my fandom friends list was at all interested in hearing about the REST of my life. (Of course, I update so irregularly at my fandom LJ that nearly no one would have noticed even if I did post the occasional non-fandom thing.) Beyond those three LJs, I also have a blog at blogger which is basically just a photo journal of all the things I cook.

So my thought, here, was to do everything all in one spot. It didn't quite happen, in part because I'm lazy and have been too tired lately to do much of anything (I've mostly only been updating my photo/food blog), but also because I wasn't quite sure anymore how to go about finding myself part of a community of friends the way I did back on LJ five or six years ago when I first started my first LJ there. How insane that I'm too shy to make friends online. (The first time, it was quite by accident, an accident of being more or less booted - as a group - off a different forum and then being tied together by adversity and all of that and suddenly finding that we rather liked one another even without Lord of the Rings fandom tying us together. I'm not quite sure how I wound up with any friends in Harry Potter fandom, though I suppose it was a matter of friending writers whose work I admired and then slowly starting to care about their lives as well as their writing. Even there, though, I've never felt particularly like a part of the greater fandom community.) At any rate, my being here felt overwhelmingly lonely. Like talking to a brick wall and hoping like mad to hear anything back. So I didn't really do anything with it.

And now... now I've started friending people, but it's all fandom people again, and... I don't know that I feel okay posting food posts in here, talking about the calorie counts of home-made mozzarella sticks, bitching about the jackasses who run the place I work at, trying to find a crafting community where I'm not made to feel totally uncool because I don't have ideas that'd end up on craftster, posting pictures of the quilts I make... all those random things I'd like to be able to put together.

Bleh. I don't know.

or those playing along at home (which is... no one) I'm spinningcompass at LJ. It was never my first choice for a name, here there or anywhere, so this time I snapped up the one I'd originally wanted.

Probably I won't update this much, but until things settle down, I feel like I need to keep an eye out wherever I can so that I can follow along with any movements that are made.