that canadian girl

Latest adventures…

  • The perfect dinner party

    Since I’ve hopelessly abandoned Sugar & Spice many moons ago, I’ll be posting food-related entries here until S&S rises from its ashes when I revive it. As it’s a long weekend, I really fancied cooking something nice and homemade for friends coming over for dinner Saturday night.

    I decided to go for an Italian theme, and after a bit of brainstorming, came up with this menu…

    • Appetisers of gouda cheese crackers with prosciutto, parmesan, tomato & basil, and goat’s cheese and cherry tomato puff pastries, accompanied by peach Bellinis (peach pieces, peach schnapps topped up with champagne)
    • Starter: Asparagus, rocket and parmesan mixed salad with a balsamic vinegar and garlic olive oil dressing
    • Main course: Homemade spinach, emmental, ricotta and basil ravioli with chargrilled aubergine pesto
    • Dessert: Fruit tart from Sainsbury’s (got lazy by that point!)

    While making the ravioli went well, there’s umm… plenty of room to streamline the pasta mix making (“It says to break the eggs in the well of flour directly on the work surface… but it’s gone above the walls, nooo!!! Eggs everywhere!”) and the rather artisanal shapes of the cut ravioli.

    Everything else was a complete success: the appetisers were so tasty, I’ll have to make them again soon. (Puff pastry is my new best friend!) Peach Bellinis are one of my favourite drinks, no doubt there! And the asparagus salad is a great new find, considering it’s the beginning of asparagus season.

    Now that summer’s starting, dinner parties are going to happen outside and involve a lot more BBQing, but I truly love this kind of dinner parties! Homemade food simply rocks.

  • How embarrassing!

    Isn’t it embarrassing when you forget the birthday of a good friend or a close work colleague? When, on Monday morning, you ask them how their weekend was and they say it was their birthday but they didn’t do much because they “don’t like birthdays” – at which point it hits you that they dropped a couple of obvious hints about going for some drinks at the pub the week before, which no one picked up on. You end up taking them for a belated birthday drink two weeks later at your local, and it ends up being a great time out anyways.

    Well, I feel a bit like that at the moment. I forgot my own blog’s second birthday on April 7th!

    But rather than taking it for a drink at the pub and apologising profusely for my forgetfulness, I thought I’d take it for a full spa and makeover. A rejuvenation cure in the form of a WordPress upgrade, a makeover through a new look (thanks to Andrew for putting my ideas into a functioning design!) and a good Spring cleaning of content and links.

    For once, I’ve remembered to take a few screenshots of the old design before dismantling it, so I won’t forget what it used to look like. I think I may have developed a permanent aversion to the old ash-purple colour, though I’ll always have a soft spot for the grumpy little girl I had in the header.

    So let’s move on to version god-knows-how-many of that canadian girl, the lonely tree. Happy second birthday blog!*

    [* I wonder if this is a good enough excuse to bake another cake? Or maybe I need to bake one to thank Andrew for his hard labour… Oh yes, I think that’s a good idea!]

  • Great iPhoto tool: Keyword Assistant

    I came across the Keyword assistant for iPhoto this afternoon. Far from new, Macworld reviewed it in November 2005 here, but it was news to me.

    As I’ve been immersed in tags of all sorts recently, having developed an addiction to del.icio.us (unusually late adoption for me, but that’s another whole topic) amongst other things, so it seemed to make sense to tag my photos as well.

    A few reasons for this:

    • I rarely name my photos and a long string of digits, while hinting at the date the photo was taken, doesn’t help me find the photo I’m really looking for.
    • My memory is terrible: Even if I named the photo, it’s likely six months down the line, the name won’t be descriptive enough anymore and I still won’t be able to find the photo in question.
    • I like the concept of tagging, it’s an effortless way to name photos without worrying about only capturing the essential of the situation for the sake of the length of the file name.

    So tagging, as I said, is effortless, quick, and great when your memory is like a sieve.

    As iPhoto was lacking in tagging ability (it is possible to tag photos but it’s an annoying process), I thought I’d give Keyword Assistant a try. No learning curve, nothing to figure out – it just works immediately. Import photos, pop open the Keyword assistant and chug through the pictures to name them. As with all other apps that use Spotlight, it then makes narrowing down the search for a specific photo a million times easier! For example, all photos taken with my Nokia N70 phone are tagged “N70” as well as being tagged by topic.

    An ideal plugin for iPhoto if you like your tagging!

  • Mmmm cupcakes!

    cupcakes The baking grump is over – I’ve finally made the (very adapted version of) Daim Bars cake Clotilde I’ve wanted to make for a few days. Granted, not a Daim or Dime bar in sight, but rather some nutty nougat chocolate bars chopped in pieces, but the cupcakes are sooo yummy.

    They’re bound to make a good office bribe tomorrow… 😉

  • How to complain and get a response

    Click on the image to see a bigger picture

    How to complain and get a response

    Ok, now you’ve had your giggles at the smartass who left the pen note. So did I, it was pretty funny…

    But it did make me think that those who offer a service (administrators, delivery services, customer services everywhere) are probably on top of things more than we give them credit for. For example, I knew our sofa was meant to be delivered today but didn’t know what time it would be delivered at. The company delivering could have easily used its order-scanning system to send me an automated SMS letting me know that the driver will be there between noon and 2pm. Can’t give a specific time? They could still notify me that my sofa is on today’s delivery truck as expected. That would have avoided their customer service a nagging mid-day call, checking that the sofa was on the way.

    If the building management in charge of ordering the new parts for the elevator had posted an update with an estimated date and the explanation the smartass prompted, it would have given people around faith that something was being done about it and that, ultimately, it would get fixed. There will always be some smartasses, but remember, if you get one outwardly smartass comment, it’s likely that many more have had the same thought.

    Be your own smartass and think what those who are affected by your non-communication may be asking themselves.

    [via AnnoyMouse]

  • Grumpy me

    Grrr it’s Sunday afternoon, I’m in the mood for baking after reading Clotilde and Jen‘s amazing food blogs, doing part two of our Spring cleaning (of how many parts? I don’t know but it’s looking better every time!) and scheming since Friday to make muffins that resemble Clotilde’s Daim bars cake [Daim bars are like Dime to Brits, or Skor to Canadians, but can also be bought as Daim in IKEA].

    I really fancy baking something sweet, but without eggs or milk (caused by a misunderstanding when dividing the food shopping list with Andrew yesterday…) the odds are against me.

    Muffin issues aside, it’s been a good weekend. Relaxed at home on Friday evening, had a BBQ at some friends’ house yesterday (it really does look like my life revolves around food, doesn’t it?) and spent the best part of today Spring cleaning, including borrowing a Vax carpet cleaner from a friend (Maybe not exciting, but certainly worth doing!). Tonight will involve watching Sky Plus‘ed Doctor Who and eating a cheat’s Thai Green Prawn & Asparagus Curry (Cheat because it’s canned sauce this time. I swear I don’t usually do that!).

    Shame the weather wasn’t clement enough to allow for a good bike ride as that would’ve made it the perfect weekend, but we’re getting to the end of April, so the rain showers should make way for long evenings sitting in the garden with a drink. I hope so anyways!

    I’ll let you know how the muffins turn out when I get around to making them, hopefully tomorrow night! Enjoy your Sunday night, there’s no reason to be grumpy in the end!

  • New service for today's busy spy

    Haven’t got time to scan the secret documents you just stole? ScanR can turn your phone’s camera into a scanner – Take a photo of a document and it’ll return a searchable PDF.

    It’s a free service so I fail to see how they expect to make their money, but TechCrunch has all the details (and some examples of the returned results, not bad!)

    Ok, forget the spy idea. It could come in handy for those meetings where there’s so many whiteboard scribbles, you wouldn’t know where to start to jot those down in sensible notes!

    [Edit: Reason #1 ScanR sucks – It takes ages to send your image back. It’s been +36 hours since I sent mine, not received anything. And no it’s not in my spam folder, I checked.]

  • Automattic/WordPress.com gets funding

    Toni Schneider, the CEO of Automattic (WordPress.com, WordPress.org, etc.), gave more details on the funding that founder Matt Mullenweg wrote about a few days ago on his blog.

    WordPress is, in my eyes, the best blogging software around, and considering the extent of the blogging trend, these guys deserve the boost. Hopefully, it’ll enable them to develop Askimet, WordPress.com, etc even further. Everything points to WordPress.org and Ping-O-Matic remaining independent and managed by the WordPress foundation, which is also good news.

    Matt’s comments also give me confidence that they’re not planning to blow their funding: “Automattic isn’t going to get fancy SoMA offices, throw huge parties at SxSW, or “get big fast.”

    Keep up the good work guys!

    [Found via TechCrunch]

  • Madame ou mademoiselle?

    Saw this article on the Beebs a few days ago, and I think these ladies are getting their knickers in a twist over nothing…

    Feminists in France have petitioned the French government to remove the title Mademoiselle or Miss from official administrative documents. Les Chiennes de Garde (the Guard Dogs), the biggest feminist group in France, say the title “perpetuates the submission to macho values” in France.

    They say it unfairly forces women to divulge their marital status whereas men have only to reveal their gender. Many women dread the day they are seen as too mature for Mademoiselle.

    A polite bonjour to a woman in France is almost always followed by madame or mademoiselle – but the decision as to who is which can be a tricky one.

    I love the word “mademoiselle”. I was never a very girly girl, but secretly, mademoiselle was one of those words I always thought was cute, and felt light-hearted and worry-free. Madame, on the other hand, reminds me of Matronne (yeah, “matron” in English, how did you guess?), a less than flattering title. I mean, who doesn’t want to be a demoiselle every so often?

    If they’re so keen to be unsubmissive and fiesty Guard Dogs, how about a round o’ fistycuffs? Or will it be handbags at dawn?

  • AdSense on London buses

    London buses have joined the trend and solved budgeting issues by using Google AdSense on the ad panels of its fleet of buses.

    London bus AdSense

    Somebody made a funny!