Three things have prompted me to give readers a bit of an update on the banoffee pie saga I wrote about here a little more than a month ago. First, I’ve noticed that about thirty percent of the traffic that came to this site since I’ve posted that ‘informative’ anecdote has been as a result of people searching for “banoffee pie” in Google. Second, I made a very successful banoffee pie over the holidays — on the 24th of December to be precise — and the family enjoyed it that evening, and; Third, I’ve finally (as in just this past weekend) posted the pictures from the holiday season and thus now have a photograph of the aforementioned banoffee pie for everyone to see (and presumably [...]

December 9 Have you ever tried it? I’d give it about a one in twenty chance that you have. I have. And I want another taste. Way back in 2007 or so, my Brilliant Wife — no, really, she is — who otherwise proudly sports her relatively poor knowledge of popular culture with a disturbing pride, managed to scrape together a hankering to try this very-Londoner dessert. She decided this based on a very obscure and minor movie reference from about 2004. As such, when we visited London a couple years back she (in fact) sourced us a small bit to taste and (maybe only due to the whole wanting-the-unobtainable thing) I’ve been craving banoffee pie ever since. It is difficult to find in Canada. [...]

December 17 I realized this morning as I was taking some time to plan out the week’s recipes in the mealplanit (and yes, two years later we still use that thing!) that while I mentioned cooking on my “planning for two weeks off” post, I didn’t really elaborate on the extent of that. Day 17: …but she still can’t reach the pedal! The benefits of using a meal planning system are that you can prepare quite elaborate meals because, quite frankly, you’ve got the recipes in the computer and generating detailed shopping lists for a week’s worth of elaborate meals is one of the more daunting tasks of cooking. At least I think so. Once you have the ingredients sitting in your kitchen, hey, how [...]

Harvest in July? As the evening pressed on — and looking for something a little less boring than rice to eat with that fresh sockeye we picked up at the grocery store — I chanced to stick my little shovel into one of the potato hills. I fully expected to find some nugget-sized taters, but instead revealed a collection of baseball-sized yukons. We boiled these suckers and served them up with some butter and fresh — also from the garden — chives. Yes, that’s right: the first of the garden feasts was a success! Looks like we’ll be eating well for the next little while: can anyone say fresh potatos! (Note to self: update meal planning software with plenty’o potato recipes!) Next time: ravishing radishes, [...]

IANACS* but I do have the tinkering gene. Roughly defined a Tinkerer is one who makes unskilled or experimental efforts at repair; one who fiddles. Long ago, tinkerers built things like clocks, wind-up gadgets, or animated brass models of the solar system. You know: stuff with vaguely meandering or, at best, decorative function. Today, we tinkerers have computers. And what does it mean to be a tinkerer when it comes to software development? Well, simply, it means that one takes code and experimentally “fiddles” with it until it does something — something interesting or something decorative — sometimes even something useful. This is of course leading up to a real life example. Case-in-point: last night. Last night I was tinkerering with my meal planning software [...]

I realized (after the fact) that this was a recovery weekend. No travel. No visitors. No expectations. We spent some quality time with Sparkle. A few hours (and dollars) were spent at West Edmonton Mall where the hoards had reduced to a tolerable level post-holidays. We took the tree down, sad as it was, tossing it (literally) to the curb, and putting the vacuum to good work. And watched a couple odd movies, neither of which were bad, but not worth deeper analysis either. Geeks as we are, Karin and I implemented the “alpha test” of our new meal planning software this weekend. We decided, for both convenience and monetary reasons, that we needed to spend more time planning meals in advance. A scheme to [...]