Last night, as I was reading the cooking blog that I became a member of, M. saw the picture on the screen and said "ohhhh I looove creme caramel/flan (insert your word of choice here)" and asked me if I was going to make it. I've never been a big fan of creme caramel, for me it's always been a strange kind of dessert, somewhere between the consistency of jello and pudding with a weird eggy aftertaste. But since he said he loved it, I couldn't resist. Also, I'd never cooked anything in a Bain-Marie (waterbath) before, and the whole waterbath concept seemed like an interesting thing to try-- very microbiology laboratory-like where you try to keep the agar warm and in liquid form until you're ready to pour it out into a petri dish..Then you pour it out and swirl the plate around and ohh the pleasure of seeing a perfectly even agar surface that's so smooth and shiny and ready to be streaked...but I digress...So, yeah, I decided to give it a try...The flan I mean, not the microbiology stuff. Given that this was my first try, it came out pretty good. The recipe called for a single medium-sized oven-safe bowl, but I didn't have that, so I improvised (old lab habits die hard you know) and used single-serving size ceramic mugs. This decision was made on a gut-feeling that told me the mugs would be safe since they were, as it read at the bottom, "high fired stoneware"...So basically they'd been in an oven before, and I was going to put them in a waterbath anyway, so I decided to give it a go (please do not take my advice on this for your own mugs, I can't guarantee yours won't crack).


Reversing them was so much fun and M really liked the taste (in his words "I can't believe you made this from scratch"), so I am happy (and they're so easy to make, too!). It came out with the holes on it even though I took care not to let the water boil...Maybe I let it stay in the oven a little too long, but the taste was OK so now I can be worried about the cosmetics next time. But I realized last night as I was making this that for me, trying all these new things in the kitchen has nothing to do with the anticipation of eating them later (because I wasn't dying to eat this), it's more like a curiosity, kind of like "I wonder how they make that and if I can make that at home"...That's the fun part...It's all the more rewarding if you've got someone anxiously waiting to eat it (assuming it is edible) of course.

On a slightly different note, tomorrow night I'll go to McDonald's to have a BigMac before we go to catch a movie. I think this will be the third time in the last 13 months that I've gone to a McD's, I know it's unhealthy blah blah, but give me a break, once every 4 months is as good as it gets, I really am looking forward to it!

Alice Somewhere...Not Quite Wonderland...

I was disappointed that after all the advertising, excitement, and anticipation, Tim Burton's version of Alice in Wonderland failed to deliver on so many grounds...I don't even know what the purpose of releasing an IMAX 3-D version was, since there was nothing that impressive about the graphics. The Hatter and the Red Queen (who actually was more like the Queen of Hearts) were of course wonderful, and the Cheshire Cat might be the only cool "graphical wonder" in the whole thing, but it felt like a mediocre children's movie, rather than a fantasy masterpiece coming alive under the direction of someone from whom we have come to expect so much.

So they mixed and matched the two books, which is OK...But something was not there...I understand they wanted to do something different and not stay ultimately true to the original versions, but a grown up Alice just didn't cut it for me. There was not much of that "wonderment" and confusion one would expect from Alice. She's in "Wonderland" (or Underland) for crying out loud, couldn't she at least show some kind of emotion? She talked like she was made of stone...And where the hell did the riddles and rhymes and philosophical ponderings that make Alice, Alice, go? I think half the problem was that the running time was too short to get too deep on the theme. But then the whole thing lost its essence. This was Alice in Wonderland minus the soul. And don't even get me started on the "scenery"...I expected something much more...It wasn't as "quirky" and dark as one would expect from Tim Burton.

For me, this is certainly not the best adaptation of Alice and definitely not the best one of Burton's brilliantly dark and fascinating movies. But then again maybe I should be glad I saw it at the movie theater because I doubt I would have watched it to the end at home...

It's been some time...

From time to time, I just drift off into another world and start neglecting my poor blog. I've been doing a lot of "free writing" and reading lately about possible research interests that don't require a laboratory...Which is all good for me, but that takes all my writing energy and time, and leaves me not wanting to write anything here on the blog. I have a lot of pictures to share from way back when but I need to re-size them and upload them, and that requires some amount of effort. Posting pictures on a public blog is not something to be taken lightly, so I have to sort through them to find ones that are not too revealing, re-size them, re-save them as something else, and then try to find them again and upload them. It's OK if it's just one or two pictures, but you really got to want to share the pics to go through with all that for anything more than two. To top it all, I was pretty sick for a while last week that I just didn't have the brain juice to come up with anything all that interesting. "I've been coughing like crazy and have green snot coming out of all orifices" is hardly anything worth writing about. So that's why things have been quiet here in blogland, but I thought I'd check in today and start writing with the hope that inspiration hits me at some point during the mindless typing. Unfortunately, so far, it's not working. For me to come up with something that I feel comfortable posting for the whole world to read, I need to feel good about what I've written. What I'm looking for, of course, is not the kind of good feeling I'd get if I'd created a masterpiece (having produced no real masterpieces in my life, I wouldn't know what that feels like, but I can guess it doesn't feel the same as finishing a half-assed blog post), but I aim for at least a decent attempt at proper spelling, and some amount of coherence rather than just blabbering. And as I am writing right now and waiting for that inspiration that is nowhere to be seen, I realize I AM blabbering...So, without further senseless rubbish, I am going to post some pictures while I have the time and shut up. These pictures are all from February, when we had the "High Lights Festival", Nuit Blanche (an all-night arts/fun festival), and M's birthday. When I took them, I had stories for all of them in my head, and each was going to be a separate post, but of course now that all of that seems to have disappeared in the vacuum that my brain creates every now and then, it's just a bunch of pictures...Blabbering in picture format if you will...

Blabber # 1: During the festival period, we had some cute bus stops and ad posts that were wearing hats...Here's the bus stop down the road from our place wearing a cute pink cap...


And here's an ad post in Old Montreal:

Blabber #2: There were also these around:



In case you haven't guessed, those are for cooking marshmallows and hot dogs (and also keeping warm I think)! Here's us roasting marshmallows (and someone a hot dog) on Nuit Blanche/M's birthday:


Blabber #3: One of the things I really like about Montreal is the fact that there's always something fun to do, and the city is very colorful and lively, even when it's freezing cold outside. There seems to be some kind of festival going on all the time.

Here's a picture I took at the "Place des Festivals" which lucky for us in only 2 blocks down the road from where we live...They were projecting the pictures of people who came here for the Jazz Festival on the windows of the building, which I thought was pretty neat.

Blabber #4: Finally, during my absence from the blog, I got to taste some cupcakes, although not at the place I was talking about before. The chocolate one on the left was pretty tasty, almost to the point that I changed my mind about frosting, but the carrot one on the right was too sweet and spicy for my taste...M really liked it though...

Blabber #5: It's quite possible to wonder if you've suddenly been transported back in time when you're walking around in Old Town one night and come across a shop window that looks like this...

You can also see here that not only have I not been inspired to write lately, but also my photographing skills haven't improved and are still as crappy as they've always been. For further justification, see pictures in Blabber #6...

Blabber #6: We finally went inside the Notre-Dame Basilica, watched the light show and got some pictures...Apparently, the basilica has a special place in the history of Montreal. From what I understood, the reason France sent the missionaries to Montreal when it was established as a city in the first place was to convert the natives as well as serve the community.

It is an impressive basilica, especially by "New World" standards...


OK, I think I will stop here for now and save some blabber material for later. I've also been realizing lately that I have some things that I'd like to write about but dare not, because "they" might be watching...Nothing too serious, or out there, just regular rant stuff, like me not being able to understand why people are so against the health care reform in the U.S., and why I can't see anything that groundbreaking about the health bill anyway, how much I dislike the idea of having to go through a full body scan at an airport (and not because I don't want people to see my body), etc. etc...But I find myself changing my mind and opting against writing all these things, because that's what it's come to, that we're not really that free to say what we think, and we're never as anonymous as we think we are. So, I write about things that are "safer", like my own life, no mundane how that might be for others. I feel comfortable critiquing things that are under my immediate control...That's all...

March 8th

Today is International Women's Day...Something that M said this morning made me think...He said: "If we declare today a day for women, does that mean the rest of the year is for men? Isn't that saying/acknowledging women get only one day a year as opposed to every day as equals?"


Happy Women's Day to all my sisters around the world.