More Photos

So when we went to eat calcots, on the way home we passed by this lovely little street corner. I don't know if you can tell, but it's where Bastard Passage meets Major Street. The Bastard Passage was enough to be entertaining but when I saw it met up with Major, we couldn't pretend to be mature and pass it by without a photo.

On another note, I've uploaded a few more photos of O here if you're interested.

The Most Ghetto Easter

I tend to be a bit of a stickler about things like celebrating holidays or keeping up traditions. This year Easter kind of snuck up on me and so our celebrations tended towards pitifulness rather than our usual fabulousness. The Saturday before Easter we had to buy a TV and so we spent the afternoon wandering around two different malls comparing prices. I was a bit tired and so my attempts at gathering things for Andrew and O's Easter baskets were pretty sorry. I did manage to look everywhere I could think of for an egg dying kit, but the closest I could come was a spice bottle labeled "food colorant". We picked that up and hoped adding a little hot water and vinegar to it would at least give us one color to use on our eggs.

Usually we dye eggs on Saturday but after buying the TV we got home and realized we had been overcharged by about 90$. The option at that point was to either have the TV sitting around all weekend making us feel a bit resentful and disappointed every time we saw it or Andrew could carry it back through the subway to the mall and sort it out. We opted for the latter option and by the time he got home it was a bit late to try our egg dying experiment.

Sunday morning I managed to stay awake after feeding O and make our usual Easter banitsa and baklava. When Andrew and I were dating I made him banitsa and baklava on Easter and have done it ever since. Lauritz might remember that first batch of baklava. I had put it all together and then we had to leave for church before I could bake it. When we got back I threw it in the oven and figured it was all fine. It looked good and the flavor was fantastic, but sometime while we were at church the phyllo leaves had managed to turn to mush. It ended up basically being a layer of nuts placed between two layers of slime and covered with a really sweet syrup. Yum.

This year the banitsa and baklava worked out. I also managed to get easter baskets hid so Andrew and O had to find their baskets after church. The baskets were pretty lame, but they did at least have our traditional box of cereal and bottel of soda in them. Well, Andrew's did.

After dinner we were tired but decided that we needed to try to dye our eggs. We mixed the food coloring with a bit of vinegar and water and got a nice yellow color which was only slightly darker than our eggs. I forgot to mention that eggs here are all brown, presenting a bit of a dying challenge when the only dye you have is yellow. Undaunted, we put our egg in and let it sit. Success was minimal but we did manage to get some dye on the egg. Of course the minute we touched it, the dye rubbed off.


The food coloring wasn't working and so we thought maybe we could make our own dye. Since we didn't have 15 yellow onions like one recipe called for, we decided that maybe if we just threw everything green we had in the house in a pot and boiled it down we could use the liquid for a dye. So we threw a little moldy spinach in with some spoiled cilantro, added some boiling water and let it cook. Have you ever noticed how most recipes have you add cilantro after the food is cooked? There's a reason. Boiled cilantro smells nasty. Andrew had to really focus to keep himself from gagging and in the end we were left with a pot full of nasty green fiber and a brown liquid that was only slightly different from the eggs' natural color.

I think we tried dying eggs in that liquid but at that point the kitchen smelled too nasty for us to want to continue our fun with dyes. Cooked cilantro is bad enough, but cooked cilantro with vinegar just got vile.

At the store I had picked up a traditional cake that gets decorated with feathers and other miscellaneous crap on Easter. I had some leftover cream cheese frosting that I figured would work and bought some squeezable nutella-ish spread. The cake itself looked like a giant sugar coated donut so I had high hopes for it. Well, I could barely keep myself from peeing my pants as we decorated it because the chocolate stuff just came out of the tube looking vulgar and then when we ate the cake we were forced to remember that it was a european cake and so no matter how moist and delicious it looks, it will end up being stale and dry. On top of that, it was a Spanish cake and so that meant that they threw some anise seeds in it just to up the yum factor. So our Easter cake was a giant stale anise donut with runny cream cheese frosting and chocolate turds on top. Happy Easter.

In an attempt to end the day on a better note, Andrew decided to fill one of his Easter bunnies with some of the leftover frosting. He bit off its ears and poured some in, took a bite, and sprouted at least a few cavities. This is after having a bite of cake and piece or two of baklava. Gag Gag Gag. We had to each eat an egg just to counteract the sugar that was coursing through our veins at that point.

But since we have a baby now and would look like bad parents if we didn't post some pictures of him, here are a few we took on Easter after church. Of course being the bad mother that I am, I forgot about buying him an Easter outfit so there's nothing special about the photos. Oh, and the day after Easter we found a little time to finally rid our freezer of a little Vitamin P. That story isn't really blog appropriate so I'll have to email it to whoever is interested.

Someone has left their twenties behind

As some of you may know, Andrew officially left his twenties a couple weeks ago. In celebration of that fact we decided to partake in a little tradition called "calcots". Calcot season comes once a year and this is the area for it.

Basically calcots are like huge green onions that you throw onto a fire and burn to a nice charred black before eating them. And eating them. And eating them. People here tend to gather a group of friends and family for a calcot meal-- it's not really a two person thing-- so we were grateful when a friend invited us along.

Here's how it goes. The above photo is of the precooked calcots. When we got to the restaurant there was a hefty pile of them, three layers high, just sitting outside the front entrance. When we left these were all that was left.

We started off the meal with pan con tomate, another traditional food here. Basically they serve you some bread, some garlic cloves, and some tomatoes. You get to peel the garlic and then rub a cut clove over your bread before smearing it with a half a tomato and drizzling it with olive oil. It's fantastic.

Next came the actual calcots.. They came in large batches wrapped in foil and just kept coming and coming. It's a bit like all you can eat ribs. I don't know if you can tell but we were given little paper bibs and plastic gloves to make the meal a little cleaner, or at least to keep from getting it all over your shirt and under your nails.

Eating calcots takes a certain skill set, as we soon found out. It took Andrew a little while to master it but by the end of the time the second round of calcots was brought out he was a pro. I was holding O, so Andrew had to do double duty stripping calcots for me and himself.

He could describe his technique a little better than I can, but it involved picking one up and holding it by the uncharred green end and then wrapping your hand around the outer blackened layer and pulling down. That's definitely oversimplifying, but you get the idea. You have to strip off one or two layers before you get to the sweet insides.

It's hard to describe the flavor of the calcots. They taste kind of like a sweet onion, but not really. They taste kind of like what you'd imagine a grilled green onion would taste like, but not really. They really just have their own unique flavor, but that alone is only half the fun. Calcots are not meant to be eaten alone-- oh no they are not. They are meant to be eaten with a glorious little dipping sauce that we were given individual bowls of. I imagine we each got our own bowl in case one were inclined to dip their fingers in their bowl after the calcots were gone. It's a temptation because the sauce is a yummy mixture of I have no idea what, but the truth is that the sauce on it's own loses a bit of its magic. Both a calcot on its own and a bowl of calcot sauce on its own are new and interesting flavors, but put them together and the magic begins.

After a dip in the sauce, you raise the dripping calcot above your mouth and slowly lower it in. Mmm Mmm Mmm. This was one time I was not ashamed to be American because it gave me the perfect excuse for showing no restraint and just gourging myself. Andrew estimates he ate at least thirty of them. They had to change both our plates at least once each because they were piled ridiculously high with the charred outer skins.

The rest of the meal was pretty basic-- sausage, grilled lamb, and the blandest white beans you've ever seen. Dessert, a little birthday cake, and we were blissed out and done. Little O did really well considering we left home around 11am and got back after 7pm. Everyone kept telling us what an angel he was and he really was while they were all around. That night he kind of let us have it for keeping him out that long, but it was worth it.