domicile

Off We Go

This is something of a first for Martin and I. We're taking a holiday. Together. That does not involve house renovations. At all. Our wee domicile will be housesat by our visiting friend Lindsay who is here on extended leave from Bolivia, and while she and Pluto the Wonderkitty will no doubt get up to adventures and domestic musings a-plenty she'll not be narrating them here. And in the meantime, we'll be taking a break by a canal in Amsterdam, or maybe one in Copenhagen. Much in the way of textiles will be admired, lovingly caressed and likely brought back home. There will be mornings filled with art, and afternoons filled with beer. And I am likely to eat far more cheese in the next two weeks than my body will know what to do with. And, if all goes well, it will be simply fabulous.

So I hope you all have an equally delightful end of September and we'll be sure to post stories, photos and snapshots of dreamy danish fabrics when we return.

Real Life meets Online

  ric rac! 
  Originally uploaded by emira.

I've often admired Beata's gorgeous quilts and bags at our local Farmer's Market, but it has always been her fanciful ruffled skirts and dresses for little girls that has honestly kept me at a distance. Made from a mixture of vintage fabrics and top notch modern quilting cottons -- think Amy Butler -- they hit right in the centre of my deepest aesthetic desires, those being: girly, vintage, handmade, fabric delights! And I knew full well that if I ever did let myself approach the table to take a good long look that I would not  leave without at least one of those ruffled beauties. Well, today was the day and I did indeed buy a wonderful dress for the just turned 2 year old Djuna, and will be posting it in the mail to Montreal this afternoon. I can't wait to see her wearing it, particularly with her rubber boots.

So while my consumption expectations were met, I hadn't really expected to enjoy meeting Beata quite so much. It's not a surprise I suppose given that we obviously share some passions, but after a quick moment of shared fabric appreciation our conversation took a turn to shared blog admiration. All the usuals were up there -- Wee Wonderfuls, Heather's site, Print and Pattern, Posie, and such -- but what was new for me was to meet someone outside of my usual web community, in real life and to share a common love of the same sources of online inspiration. Earlier this week I found myself thinking that I needed to get some good design mags for the plane this weekend, but I quickly found myself wishing I could just print out the last two months of (or bring along a wifi connection for the plane) some of my favorite craft/design blogs that I never have time to linger over. Alas, I'll just have to catch up when I get back I guess.

If you'd like to see some more photos of the dress I bought check out these ones I've put on Flickr, or read more about Beata and her crafts check in on her Rose Hip Blog.

This is my greatest wish for you

  smiling girls 
  Originally uploaded by emira.

Today is my gorgeous, delightfully impish goddaughter's second birthday. She lives in Montreal and so I sadly do not see her nearly often enough, and while I often think of her, it's at times like this when I know there will be celebrations in her honour and that she will in turn squeal with glee, that I feel most sad that she and her parents live across this vast country from me.

Her mother, Kate, is one of my dearest friends in the world and someone who has known me even longer than even my own sister. She and I met when she was two in fact, and I was just weeks into being three. And throughout most of our childhood -- until late teenhood tooks us on divergent paths for a while -- she and I were really quite inseperable. It is quite impossible for me to imagine my life had we not moved in down the street from the person who would become my best friend, and not just in a "maybe I would never have been such a rabid My Little Pony fan had it not been for Kate" kind of way. My sense of creative play, the things I value, how I confide in my beloved friends as an adult and generally how I make sense of the world around me is intricately tied to the experiences she and I shared and the rich world we created together from age 2/3 up. We were blessed to have a particularly kindred friendship and lives that were full of love, support and wonderful experiences encouraged by our parents. So many of my most poignant memories of childhood involve her, especially the ones I think of as moments of real fun.

And so it is little Miss Djuna, as you enter into your second year with the vastness of the world ahead of you, that I find myself hoping for you that you too will find yourself someone like your mom and I did. Someone to share the adventures of life and the deepest secrets of your heart with, and who will remind you who you really are at times when you get a bit confused. Someone you will cherise and adore, play with, fight with, get into secret trouble with and share the adventures of life with (just no going out to play My Little Ponies on the roof of a three storey house ok? that was a dumb idea). This, my dearest Djuna, is my greatest wish for you on your birthday. Though, of course, I'm also sending you a box of adorable treats to tide you over.

The Great Pillowcase Conspiracy

  The Great Pillowcase Conspiracy 
  Originally uploaded by emira.

Ever notice when you're buying sheets that pillowcases are always a total racket? By which I mean that while your typical 100% cotton queen fitted sheet may cost say $50,two standard pillowcases will come in at $39? Which may seem all well and fine except that there is *way* less fabric in two standard pillowcases than there is in one queen fitted sheet, and any arguments that making the pillowcases (officially the world's easiest thing to sew I believe) is more tricky or time consuming than putting in those elasticized corners on a fitted sheet are total hooey. It gets even more insulting when you check out the cost of a twin flat sheet, which for the record will give you anywhere from four to six standard sized pillowcases depending on how you layout your fabric and just exactly what size you need your cases to be. Typically flat twin sheets will run you anywhere from $19 to $25 in a line priced along the lines above. So where's the economy in that huh? I'm quite sure that the sewers in Pakistan/Bangladesh/Insert Country of Exploitation here are not making overtime just for the pillowcases.

And so it is, that I strongly urge you all to never buy pillowcases again. Not when you can buy one twin sheet, cut it into rectangles using an existing pillowcase as a template and sew it up. Depending on how you do this you may be required to only sew two straight lines down the sides, folding over the one end, and then if you want to get fancy you can hem the outer ends where the case goes in. If you want to get really high class you can even make those envelope-y type cases which overlap on the back but then you'll likely only get four per twin sheet, so there's a trade-off. You will likely not be surprised to know that I did this on the weekend, as Martin and I used a discount at The Bay to pick up some rather fetching hot pink new sheets and we both balked at the cases price. From cutting out to completion time I believe it took me less than 20 minutes to make two cases (I'll do the others later that was all we needed to make the bed), and that included hunting for the big ruler.

In other news, we found ourselves very smitten with these new Jonathan Adler sheets and duvet cover while we were there, but sadly did not equally adore the price tag and so it remains at the Bay waiting for one of those infamous clearance days, at which point it will probably be sold out. Le sigh.

(BTW: this rule generally holds for duvet covers. It is almost always way cheaper to buy two flat sheets and make your own, than buy the one they "pre-made" for you. And a duvet cover, my friends, is really just one really big pillowcase.)

Things to do

  still on the vine 
  Originally uploaded by emira.

We leave on a two week trip to Amsteram and Copenhagen on Sunday and there is much to do. Of course.

Ignoring for a brief moment the mammoth list of work things to do, around the house there are chores to be ticked off the list prior to lift off. Why? Because I just won't enjoy sipping coffee/beer/wine with the view of a picturesque canal before me if the spare room ceiling hasn't been painted. Ya know?

Even more pressing than the list of random things I *want* done is the need to can some tomatoes. A lot of tomatoes. Now I'm sure the internet at large could turn up some recipes for decent tomato canning, but why go the impersonal route when I know that plenty of y'all are canning pros. So, anyone have a favorite tomato canning recipe they'd like to share? I've got plenty of the traditional red slicing tomatoes and a boat load of yellow cherries to contend with. And, more than those, I have no shortage of green tomatoes if someone has a tasty green tomato preserving recipe. Feel free to post your/your grandma's winning tomato preserving recipes in the comments or email us at ourdomicile at gmail.com.

Cheers!

Vegetarian Bounty

  Fresh cherry tomato/kale sauce and pasta
  Originally uploaded by emira.

I've got a very ranty post about the sore lack of good veggie fare at most of the current hip restaurants in this town just a'brewing, but for now some more positive veggie thoughts to share:

With the garden in full producing bounty right now -- a bounty comprised largely of different types of tomatoes, greens, herbs, cukes and beans at this point -- we've been eating out of the yard a lot lately. This eating from the yard business was exactly what I wanted to get out of my veggie garden so I'm pretty darned pleased. And given that we didn't plant a full stock of variety, we've also been supplementing every other week or so with goodies from the Farmer's Market where corn, eggplants, peppers, potatoes, pears and apples are currently in glorious abundance and making their way to features on our plates.

This weekend, inspired by some awesome new veggie/vegan recipe finds online I spent a lot of time cooking up some yummy soups and meals for immediate eating, this week's lunches, and for freezing so that we can enjoy some of this fresh summer bounty come the impending rainy drizzle. Rather than belabour you with a long list of the things currently making their way to either my freezer or my digestive track, I thought I'd just share some of the awesome veggie recipe sites I've been eating up lately (pardon the pun) in case you feel likewise inspired. Enjoy!

• Of course there is Orangette, whose nummy Zucchini Flower pasta I made a few weeks ago (though a modified version), this week I'm determined to find time to make the tomato tart (which I think I'll make with a basic vegan olive oil crust).


• A new one to me, is Bunnyfoot, who seems to favour straightforward mostly vegan recipes that are also dee-licious, which pretty much sums up my favorite kind of recipes. I made the vegan version of the Deborah Madison Quinoa Corn Chowder for this week's lunches, switching out the spinach for chard from the backyard. I had my first bowl at lunch today and it was awesome. Quite subtle flavours certainly, but the fresh corn is wonderful at this time of year and it made for an awesome tasty summer soup. As an added bonus, Bunnyfoot uses very  handy categories to organize her recipes.


• Through Bunnyfoot I found myself at Vanesscipes which is another fantastic resource for similarly simple, tasty and vegetarian recipes and food ideas. On the quinoa theme I'm kind of interested in the quinoa balls she's put in a puttanesca sauce, though I don't think the purest in me could handle them in puttanesca, but a basic fresh tomato sauce (which we have ingredients for in spades right now) might be ok. She also gets big points for awesome handy categorization.


• Finally Jennifer, of Vegan LunchBox, has put together the freakin' awesome "Magical Loaf Studio" which may sound like the world's most unappealing culinary aid, but I think it is the bomb. She's used a basic Seventh Day Adventist (who are veggie folk) recipe to put together a little web app that will help you take your basic ingredients (nuts & seeds, beans & legumes, veggies, binder, etc) and design your own veggie loaf recipe with proportions etc. Rad! I already have a few favorite nut loaf recipes, all of which are heavy on the  nuts and savory spices, but this little tool could make fast work of those nights you want/need to cook up something hearty from your pantry (assuming you, like me, have a well stocked pantry of dry goods) and the bottom of your crisper and turn it into a healthy dinner. Mommy's little veggie loaf helper indeed!

I've probably lost you to all the yummy veggie recipe surfing now. Just remember to invite me over for dinner k?

Dirty, dirty marmoleum

I'll admit that I have a little smidge of idealism in my renovating. While the experienced project manager in me is always cautious with over-ambitious timelines and I'm often one to try to lower, not pump up expectations with any project we take on, I do still have dreams of blissful perfection that I harbour deep in my core as we tackle any household project. Afterall, without that childlike hope what would be the fun right? Drywall dust with no utopian fantasy is afterall just really messy.

And so it was that I got rather caught up in just how our bathroom flooring choice was going to alter my world. For the better of course. And so I combed through design magazines, the isles of hardware stores and high end flooring boutiques. My first choice cork was just too cost prohibitive as well as raising some concerns for installation as we planned to do the install ourselves. The cork we were looking at came in tiles you see, and Martin wasn't convinced he could get them snug enough to form a waterproof barrier in our bathroom. Really, I think he just wasn't as cork crazy as I was, but whatever. Eventually, as dedicated historical readers will know, we settled on Marmoleum. Marmoleum promises to be the flooring choice of the green conscious consumer. Made with age-old linoleum procedures and chockfull of natural pigments, cedar resin, flax, jute and all kind of other things that you can imagine actually growing somewhere not being made in a big chemical factory, marmoleum promised to be easy to install, was a very green choice, durable and came in oh so many colours.

And, so far it has held up its end of the bargain. It was fairly easy to install apparently (I wasn't home), though we did end up with one small crack in it where Martin shifted his weight wrong while working in the room to install it, but I can embrace imperfection. It doesn't get too cold (so far anyway) and feels quite temperature neutral on your feet when you first get up in the morning (this was a virtue loudly extolled by many marmoleum lovers), and it is very easy to clean. Which is good, because it is always freakin' dirty! Or at least, it always looks that way. In the end, this has less to do with marmoleum itself and absolutely everything to do with the colour compromise we made. You see marmoleum does indeed come in a veritable rainbow of colours, and as is very normal in a renovating relationship, we had some differences of colour opinion. Martin favoured a pattern of vibrant colours all mixed up that the lovely Miss P and I referred to as "blended up smurf guts/smurf puke." I was more into the neutrals that looked something like my lusted after cork options. In the end, we agreed that neither of us was that fond of the faux-marble type finishes which just seemed like Debbie Travis painting techniques gone wrong. Besides, everyone uses those marble-y finishes when they buy marmoleum and we are different! We are bold! And young! And DIY. So we chose a very natural, warm matte solid green. Kind of, I hesitate to say, the colour of an avocado. But not the same colour as those 70s appliances. It is very nice. Warm, neutral, but definitely a colour. We both felt we could live with it.

And live with it we have for almost two months now, and while it is very, very nice to have a redone bathroom and a smooth bathroom floor surface that is easy to clean (our old one was all crumbly and rotty) it is a floor that constantly needs to be cleaned. Or looks like it. Between my long hair, Miss P's curly long hair, Martin's hair, the hair that Martin tracks home from work, the cat and well just dirt in general the one solid lovely matte colour of our flooring shows everything. And that isn't nice. And so, I sweep the floor about three times a week now, if not more, and mop it twice. This is roughly three times and double as often (respectively) as I used to. And while I am satisfied that our floor is really very clean most of the time, and tell myself that if we had one of those more common patterned flooring surfaces we just wouldn't see the dirt, but it would still be there, it is a bit of a royal pain in the butt.

And so, all of your renegade renovators out there, when considering what do with your floor, learn from us: those kind of cheesy faux-finish patterns are there for a reason. Embrace them. You may find that in the end you're happier with the blended smurf look over the constant cleaning...

Non-Smoking Vegetarian seeks Same

  Originally uploaded by emira.

Three years ago today Martin and I had our first date. We had sushi at a place that happened to be down the block from each of our houses in those days. I had just come out of a fairly messy debacle in which I fell victim to someone else's "issues" and apparently freaked Martin out a bit in my setting of overall dating Emira ground rules most of which came back to: "for the love of god please just don't f&ck with me." We traded demographics over dinner: "I'm a vegetarian" was met with an "oh that's cool, umm well my daughter has been thinking of becoming a vegetarian" which lead to "oh, you have a daughter, where's her mom?" etc. Our conversation was easy and we managed to do that thing that happens when either of you live in one town for long enough, where we connected a dozen mutual friends, acquaintances and shared experiences. We didn't linger long over dinner, Martin was tired from work and I had to be up early and on a plane to Cortes Island for a conference the next day. As we stood outside a bit of a drizzle started to fall and he turned to me and asked "do you smoke?" with the look of a smoker who is just around now imagining how great his after dinner puff is going to be, and I replied with a resolute "absolutely not." That night he told me he was planning on quiting anyway, and that he wasn't really that much of a smoker which is I guess a testament to how interested he was, as he's still yet to completely ditch the habit. 

It's been three years of negotiating difference -- we have a meat side of the BBQ and a veggie one -- getting to know each other, and of course also his daughter the lovely Miss P better, and embarking on this house project together. And while it sounds painfully tired, all the crappy stuff that has happened, as it is inclined to do, over these three years hasn't seemed so bad with him along for the ride. So there you have it my darling, and who knows I just might make a vegetarian non-smoker out of you yet.

Pink Apple Pie

  pink apple pie 
  Originally uploaded by emira.

For her birthday, the lovely Miss P requested a homemade apple pie. Always one to jump on a chance to make a pie for a crowd, I was only too happy to oblige. Her birthday was Sunday, and we would be taking the pie out to her mom's place, so Saturday morning at the Farmer's Market I decided to go on a hunt for some good pie apples.

We're officially into apple season now round these parts, which afforded me several choices, including one stall devoted to apples alone. I figured I'd just start by asking the guy at my favorite garlic/onions place either of the varieties I could see he had out this week would make good pie apples. He started off by telling me that both types he had that week would make great pie apples -- firm, tart, and just picked -- but when I went on to explain that it was for a 10 year old girl's birthday pie he practically started to jump up and down with glee. "Pink apples! Pink apples! You should definitely get the pink ones then!"

Being apparently a bit of an apple novice, I assumed he meant apples that were you know: pink. On the outside, which you typically peel off, something like a Pink Lady, an apple I'll admit I'm very fond of. Still, I kind of wondered what the fuss was about. He quickly reached over to the barrel of "pink apples," which looked frankly kind of yellow and sliced one open with a jack knife to reveal bright pink apple flesh. Now I understood. I asked if, like purple potatoes or purple beans they lost their colour when baked and he assured me that if anything they would get a bit more vibrant. Sold.

And so I woke up early Sunday morning to roll out the crust I had made the night before, hoping to capitalize on a cool kitchen before the summer heat warmed up, and I chopped up my bowl of pink apples. I made a lattice topped pie with little pastry hearts to capitalize on the pink hue, and while I'm not typically one to brag about the products of my kitchen I have to say it was a darned fine pie. Flakey. Sweet with a bit of tart apple bite and just enough cinnamon. And he was right, there was really no better apple option for such an occasion.

{If you're interested, I found some more info on pink apples here. The ones I used may in fact have been "Surprise" apples, making them also highly suited to a birthday pie.}

Blokus!

For her birthday, I gave the lovely Miss P a board game. As previously mentioned, she broke her arm earlier this summer which cut short the usual family weekend activities of summertime like bike riding, swimming at the community outdoor pool, rollercoaster riding, and such in favour of a heck of a lot of sitting around. While she could, if left to her own devices, watch hours upon hours of Sponge Bob or Buffy episodes, it seems a shame to spend our entire visit with her with eyes glued to the set. And, I'll admit, I do have some uptighted-ness when it comes to kids watching too many hours of non-stop tv. But, with a broken arm one can't really blame her for gravitating towards low impact activities. And so it was that we found ourselves playing an awful lot of The Sponge Bob Square Pants Game of Life (TM). Which, while relatively fast and with a low mental commitment, gets tired fairly fast. And yet, playing fairly straightforward, quick boardgames is something that we seem to enjoy as a threesome -- Martin, her and I -- so I decided to try to pick up a new one for her birthday.

While I was visiting in Victoria with Kate, she and I went to the most excellent games store on Fort Street to see if we could find something suitable. My requirements were the following:

• Fairly quick games, anywhere from 20 - 45 minutes. We have Monopoly, but rarely do we have the time to crack out a game.
• Challenging for adults but straightforward enough that a 10 year old will both enjoy it and be just as likely to win.
• Easily played by 2 to 4 players.

I presented these requirements to the very helpful guy at the shop and the first thing he suggested was Blokus. Kate in turn lit up with excitement and proceeded to send forth many accolades of the joys of Blokus. Not able to resist the urgings of a trusted friend and a game expert it ended up as the birthday winner.

Now, it was certianly not received with anywhere near the same number of squeals as the digital camera Martin got her (and can you blame her?), but as soon as breakfast was finished the next morning we cracked out the game for a first try. And she beat us. We then called up a friend for her and took Blokus to the beach for the day. She and her friend then beat Martin and I in a two way tie. Over the course of the day the victors rotated amongst us all, but I can definitely agree that while is certainly a game requiring a fair degree of abstract thought and strategy a 10 year old has just as good a chance at winning as an adult. And while it may seem silly to focus on that, if you want a game to be a hit with kids they need to have a chance to win. Each game lasts anywhere from about 20 minutes to half an hour, which is just perfect.

It's really a pretty fun game, and sadly fairly addictive. Sadly only because she took it back to her moms with her now and we here at the domicile are left in Blokus withdrawl for at least a week until she brings it back. We may have to go buy our own set, maybe travel Blokus for the plane?