It's What's For Dinner

So Jess is giving me shit for buying Chris something today (February 14th) when I said that I wouldn't. In my defense, what I bought him is very very not Valentinesy at all and if it were any other day of the year then I would just be noted at being a nice girlfriend. Since he never reads this blog then I can tell all of you what I bought and he'll be none the wiser. I shall allow my readers to tell me if this counts as a Valentine's gift.

Just for the supreme court record, I do not consider this a Valentine's Day gift.

After school today I went to the Superstore and bought him some steaks.

See! It's not a Valentine's Day gift at all! I win!

The poor boy only gets to eat beef whenever he either stops in at McDonalds at 1am with his friends or goes around the corner to the Kozy Korner Cafe for a burger and fries when I'm at work. He barely ever eats beef in my presence out of respect (famed Cowatarian over here) even though it does not bother me at all to see other people eat cow. But it's nice that he respects my choices and doesn't feel the need to eat it when I'm around. I've created a closet burger eater and it's not something I'm hugely proud of. So tonight I shall make him a delicious steak (smothered with fried onions and peppers of course) because he deserves it. It was kind of weird going all the way to the grocery store just to buy steaks. Come to think if it, I've never done it before actually. I've never bought steaks before. Seriously? (I'm racking my brain right now trying to think back throughout my entire grocery store shopping life). Nope, nothing is coming up. Well, I hope he likes his dinner because I feel like a traitor to the bovine community for my purchase today.

PS. Can someone please make or find this dress for me? Not only would I receive an astronomical amount of attention for wearing it but the dirty jokes that I can come up with right now are overwhelming me and I need to be able to share them with someone.

A Year in Review of Mental Health

It's been a year since my last mental breakdown. I laughed out loud when I wrote that opening line just now because it seemed like such a serious announcement to make. Last year when my life was stressing me out beyond what I knew to be even possible, it was not a funny situation to be in that's for sure! I remember it so well too. It was supposed to be a romantic weekend between me and Chris but it ended up being him getting tied up with important business and me crying at every given moment due the intense stress I was dealing with at the time. Third year was the year from hell in terms of school. The courses were tedious and unrelenting. I was busting my butt and barely sleeping due to the tremendous work-load. Work was driving me insane because the boss was giving me full-time hours when I explained time after time that I could only handle about 15 hours a week (I was getting 32-38 a week instead). Plus I was stressing out over trying to find the time and money to fly to BC for a couple days for a job interview. Yep. Life sucked. But, one good mental breakdown later and me quitting my job the next day helped out a little.

It's funny how we are able to pinpoint certain days in our lives such as me being able to remember exactly what happened on this day one year ago. I guess the reason it sticks in my head so well is that I quit my job the day before Valentine's Day, which was nearly the biggest day of the year at my old job and it felt good leaving them in the dust on such a huge selling day for them. Yes, I have issues with my ex-boss and I am more than happy to share them with you.



So today I am in a much better mental state than I was back then. I am in my final year, which is a very very strange situation to be in, and my work load for school has decreased substantially for this last semester. My new job is much easier to deal with since I have great bosses who give me the shifts I ask for and since it's still technically the slow season, business isn't busy enough to give me tons of hours. I am very glad about that. This year however I have a man who lives downstairs who is constantly sounding like he is hacking up a lung. Not that this has too much to do with my mental state but he is hacking right now which is why I bring it up. Lovely eh? I just wanted to share my experiences with everyone else. What can I say, I like to share these kinds of thought provoking moments in my life.

OH! Good news! My parents have officially booked their flights and hotel for their trip over in May! YAY! They are coming on May 5th and staying until I think the 14th or so and I am super excited to be able to show them this side of the country! Notice all of the exclamation marks in this paragraph!?!? I know! All it took was for me to graduate to finally get them over here.

Tip of the Day: Loud music does not fully drown out lung hacking.

Daydreaming the School Work Away

Crunch time is beginning to set in here on campus. The majority of mid-terms and assignments are due next week which means that stress levels are up and enthusiasm is down. I'm lucky that I only have one mid-term and one assignment due next week so my stress load is lower than most of the students in my department. I guess I also have a giant portfolio due for one class which I haven't been thinking enough about. Forgot about that one! For the next week I'm going to just keep my head down, lay low and get as much work done as possible.

Monday is Valentine's Day which means that the radio and stores are bombarding everyone with advertisements about what perfect gift to give that special someone. I made Chris promise that he will not get me anything because I really don't need anything and I don't want him to spend his money on something like a giant stuffed gorilla holding a fluffy red heart. Obviously he would never buy me something like that, but you all get the point. I like to think that we don't need a special day to show each other how we feel because we're pretty good at that anyway, and it's the little things we do on a regular basis that prove this to each other.

But Valentine's Day is about romance and I wanted to list some of my favourite romantic movies but I'm having a heard time thinking of some. Probably my own personal favourite is The Notebook (oh Ryan Gosling how you get me every time), but other than that I'm drawing a blank! This is not good. Here is my goal as of right now. I am going to research some of the most famous romantic movies of all time and watch some of them. I know that I am going to come up with lots of older movies like Gone with the Wind, Casablanca and The Way We Were (embarrassingly enough I have seen none), so I think an old fashioned movie-a-thon is in order. I am likely going to have to wait until the reading break to do this because I won't have much time in the next week, but it will get done!

The only downside to this movie watching idea is that for some time afterward I am probably going to be living in a romance bubble. Every time a chair isn't pulled out for me or someone doesn't start dancing out of pure glee from their over-consuming love might become complete confusion and disappointment for me. This could cause havoc.

Wouldn't life be more fun if we all lived in a pre-planned choreographed world?

Thumbs Down to Glumpy Rice

Today was meal day for Jess and myself. For the past three weeks we have been working very hard to come up with and plan for a meal for our Quantity Foods class and today was our day to make the meal (with the help of our lovely group members of course). Quantity is a class in which everyone goes into pairs (except for poor Kaylynne) and every pair is in charge one week to create a meal to feed 60 people. Each group has a theme to it as well which pertains to our nutrition background (for example, "Heart Healthy" or "Gluten Free"). Ours was a DASH diet meal which means that it had to follow a diet plan which was created for people with high blood pressure to help lower their blood pressure. In other words, we had to try with all of our might to get as much salt out of the meal as humanely possible.

Tip of the Day: Salt causes high blood pressure.
Second Tip of the Day: Everything delicious contains salt.

In the weeks which lead up to today, I've been making the food items at home to ensure that they tasted good and cooked well and learn all the little secrets to make everything taste delicious. My only downfall in all of this is that I fell in love with the Carrot Soup we made and I made it with bouillon cubes (huge no no in the DASH diet) because bouillon is pure salt. The second problem is that Jess also fell in love with this soup so we had a fairly large expectation for it. I then last night made the soup again but with a no sodium bouillon and well...it was rubbish. I was severely disappointed. We also took out all of the bouillon out of the rice which made it bland and pointless (in most people's opinions). When I make rice at home I don't use bouillon so I was used to the simple flavour of it, but this does not mean that everyone else was as well.

Anyway, I am rambling so I will move on. The day began around 8:30am when Jess and I arrived at school. We had a group of 5 other students who help us out with the cooking and serving. We plan the whole day so that we delegate most of the tasks to the group members and we are meant to answer questions, help out when needed and mostly ensure that everything goes smoothly. Our group was great because even though everyone was behind schedule most of the day, they were all cool and calm and got the work done. Their calmness kept me calm which is great for a kitchen staff. As I mentioned before, I was disappointed in how some of the food turned out and we got both good and bad responses from the clientele who come in to have lunch with us. I guess I should explain the menu!

Appetizer - Carrot Soup with a whole wheat herbed biscuit
Entree- Baked cajun cod with melon salsa, brown rice (with onions and garlic) and steamed green beans
Coffee/Tea
Dessert- Baked apples with cinnamon and walnuts with a cranberry maple sauce and vanilla yogurt.

In my opinion, this is how the menu went:
Appetizer- bland flavour but looked beautiful and had lovely texture
Entree- I liked it all except for the glumpy rice. Some people thought the fish was too spicy but I thought it was great.
Dessert - very yummy flavour but apple was slightly overcooked.

It's disappointing when you have such high expectations and the reality doesn't reach as high as you wanted. Making the food at home was far more successful so I had a strong idea in my head of how I wanted everything to be and it was unfortunate that people did not experience was I experienced before making the meal for 60 people. I am also a total control freak (just ask poor Jess) especially when working in kitchens so it was hard for me to sit back and let everyone else do everything. Sure I definitely had to step in and lend a hand many times but we were told to rely on our staff to get it done. Plus the no bouillon thing took me for a major loop but we had to try to stick to the DASH diet. I am proud of us for taking a risk with the menu though. Apparently cooking fish is really touchy in the class because most of the time it just gets negative feedback. Plus we used some bold flavours which could have turned a lot of people off (and did) but we went for it and gave it a try. It would have been easy to play it safe and make things that everyone on PEI seems to love, like chicken and potatoes. Sometimes safe sucks!

I think that working in kitchens for so long has given me tunnel vision of what is important in terms of cooking. I think too much of pleasing the customer, and for this menu it would have meant a whole lotta salt added; however, for this lab the overall objective was to create a meal which followed the DASH diet which people could make at home if they were on the diet for their health. Yes, I think we accomplished that...although I would have the ensure that they followed my recipe exactly for the rice. Say NO to glumpy brown rice!

Third Tip of the Day: I swear to all of you people that brown rice can taste just as good as white rice. Use a bit less water and never, ever stir it. Let the water come to a boil, add the rice, turn down the heat, put on a lid and just leave it alone. After 40 minutes turn off the heat and allow to sit for 10 minutes. I promise it will be perfect.

More Books!

This is the first semester in my entire university career in which I have had the time to read books. And by books I mean a collection of fastened pages written by authors who have no affiliation with my school life. These books are also known as NOT TEXTBOOKS! In fact, this semester has me reading very small amounts of textbooks. This isn't normal and the more I think about, it is quite eerie. Am I missing something here in terms of my reading outlines for school? I certainly hope not.

Anyway, as I was saying, I have had this strange time lately which some may consider to be "spare time" in which I spend about a half hour every night reading a book which isn't a text book. Since the end of December I have finished two books and am now working on my third.

The first one was Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer. I spoke of this book a good while back when I was just starting to get into it. When I got about half way through this book I realized that what I was reading would definitely impact the way I eat from hereon in. On more than one occasion this book brought me to tears as I read about the horrible ways in which the animals we eat are treated from their birth to their slaughter. The fact that there are no strict laws which disable people from treating these poor creatures in ways in which I choose not to repeat at the moment, is beyond me. There is a definite lack of emotion and relationship with the animals we choose to consume and I wonder why this is. Do we need to disassociate our brain from out stomachs by trying to not think where this lovely steak or chicken kiev really came from? I believe that if everyone knew how these animals lived and died then we would dramatically change the way we eat. I strongly encourage everyone to read this disturbing book so that you can have an educated idea of the sacrifices which were made for your nutritional needs. And before you ask, the answer is no. I have not bought any meat from any supermarket since I finished the book a couple weeks ago. I've thought about it and even picked it up once or twice...but I always place it back in the cooler and walk to the soy-foods aisle instead. I just really hope that soy plants are treated well or else I don't know what I'm going to start eating.

Tip of the Day: if you want to stop eating fast food, or more specifically KFC for good, do some research on the cruelty of the chickens that goes on for their establishments.

The second book I read was a book I got for Christmas called Love, Lust and Faking it; The Naked Truth about Sex, Lies and True Romance, written by Jenny McCarthy. What can I say? I enjoy a good trashy novel just as much as the next girl. It felt good to just turn off my brain and read this book. It was an easy read and you could tell that the author was not a professional author. Yes, I know that she has written several books which landed on the Best Sellers list, but that does not mean that she's a talented author. She's famous and hilarious therefore she will consistently land on these kinds of lists as long as she has something to say. Now I love Jenny McCarthy. I think she's super funny and entertaining and I enjoyed reading the book. It made me laugh out loud more than once and she had me sucked into her stories many times. Her story of how she got into posing for Playboy the first time was absolutely hilarious and I applaud her guts to get in there the way she did. I don't think the book was worth the price my mom paid for it to give to me as a gift, but it was a decent read nonetheless.

Now I'm reading The Girl Who Played with Fire which is the second book in the famous trilogy by Swedish author Stieg Larsson. I loved the first one (which I read over Christmas break) so I went out the other day and bought #2. I'm only about 70 or so pages in but I'm thinking it's going to be good like the first one. I very much look forward to reading it.

SERIOUSLY????

So I'm having a bad day. It started off great but has now dwindled down to exhaustion and upset. All I want to do is go crawl into bed and sleep it all away but I can't because Chris is playing at Hunter's in 2 hours and I promised I'd be there. The group of people who were going to come along have all bailed on me which sucks but there's nothing I can do about it this far into the game so I'm going to go solo. Yipee. Plus my computer crashed on me, which is so incredibly inconvenient it's not even funny. We're getting to the point in the semester in which the work is piling up and the assignments are due and it's all on my laptop. I really want to cry right now. So I have to somehow find the time tomorrow to bring it somewhere where it can hopefully get fixed. Where am I going to find this time you ask? I have no idea! Now I sit here using Chris's computer wishing I had my own. Oh, and one of my best friends is angry at me and I'm just sick about it and feel helpless and stupid and assholish. Yes that is a word. Do not try to fight me on it at the moment.

I really didn't want to use this blog to rant tonight but I saw a news story that just sent me over the top so I started ranting about the above problems and I couldn't not talk about the story considering the post I put up yesterday. A man in BC got sentenced 6 months in jail for beating a puppy to death. A 3 month old puppy! He beat it to death and blames it on alcohol and steroids. Yep. Drunken roid-rage is his excuse. What is wrong with people?

But don't worry everyone. It's OK because he's getting 6 months in jail, drug/alcohol treatment and can't own any animals for 10 years. What a relief. The SPCA people were apparently thrilled at the sentence so I guess this is a rather large sentence for this kind of act. I'm incredibly curious to see what that guy at Whistler gets for killing all of those dogs. Only time shall tell I suppose.

I'm sorry for the ranting. I really am. Blogging such an easy way to get it out.

Sad Day for BC

Don't you hate it when something horrible happens close to where you live, or where you are from? There's this sense of shame that your hometown was the setting of a heinous act and that people will associate you with it when they learn where you're from.

I'm from BC which has a fairly large population given the fact that Vancouver and Victoria are large cities, so it's understandable that the chances of bad things happening there are more likely than PEI since the population here is so small. Some prime examples of terrible BC events are the discovery of Robert Pickton, the lovely pig farmer who killed dozens of prostitutes and fed them to his pigs. That story made everyone think twice before eating bacon for a while. Then there's the controversial Creston BC which holds about a thousand people involved in Canada's largest polygamy community. Nothing like giving your 12 year old daughters over to men old enough to be their grandfathers to make BC look good! Honestly though, why does a man feel the need to have 26 wives and 80 children?

The reason I bring up this strange topic is that today while watching the news, I was horrified to see the story about the employee of a dog-sled company in Whistler BC who slaughtered dozens of sled-dogs. So the business was set up to give tourists dog-sled rides during the 2010 Olympics in Vancouver and now, apparently the business isn't doing well so they decided to kill the dogs since they were of no longer of any use to them. The more I think about this the more upset it makes me. There dogs are magnificent creatures and I am quite certain that all they had to do was pack them up in a truck and bring them to shelter or somewhere, anywhere, that would take the dogs and find good homes for them. But instead they decided to have one man slowly kill the dogs, right in front of the entire 100+ tethered pack of dogs, and toss them into a mass grave where they were left to die (if not already dead.) Many of the dogs were already sick and abused due to neglect and lack of resources to properly care for them. Shouldn't this have been a sign to reduce your numbers before it got to this point? Adopt them out to homes who can take them!



I feel sick typing this. If you sit down and read up on the story you'll understand the magnitude of what actually occurred at this place and be just as sickened as I am.

As of right now in Canada, if you commit a serious animal cruelty fine then you can face up to 6 months-5 years in jail and have a lifetime ban of owning any animals. I wonder if this would be 5 years per animal? So many people in the world are not animal people and many think that 5 years for hurting an animal is a bit much. But why is hurting an animal any worse than hurting a young child? Both rely on us for their survival and trust us completely. Am I really talking apples and oranges here people? In my opinion, I don't think so. The thing that sucks about animal cruelty cases is that many of the people are released from jail early, probably because they seem like low-profile cases or something. This saddens me very much.

Our license plates say "Beautiful British Columbia" and it's hard to think of Whistler right now without the vision of the mass murder of these dogs. I know that this kind of thing can happen anywhere in the world, but it's just unforunate that it has to happen in my amazingly gorgeous home province. For a long time now whenever people hear "Whistler BC" they'll be saying, "Oh, isn't that where all of those dogs were killed?" Sucks to be remembered for something like that.