So this past week has been exciting in the sense that I got sick right after Keelan recovered, then when I was kind of recovered, he got food poisoning from some take out, and now we're both in the recovering phase.
To be honest, highly do not recommend.
But I felt well enough to cook two soups this week, as we have some ridiculously warm (for March) days. The header is a winter melon soup, which I made with a winter melon that I grew at the farm! It had pork meat balls, carrots, and vermicelli in it, along with ginger and garlic.
Once again, we went up to the farm for Family Day weekend! We were able to drive up to the house, but there was snow on the ground. It was also cold enough that we did not turn on the water. While we were there, we got more snow! Our neighbour actually came over and pre-emptively plowed a path for us to get back out, which was really nice of him.
Actually it's really interesting looking at my post from last year and all the photos – especially the river. While the river's not frozen solid, or even close to it, for many years, we definitely had more ice this year than last!
This post is overdue by many many months, but a lot of things happened that made me delay writing about... mainly in that I wanted to blog about the convention that my friends and I went to, but then none of us really enjoyed the con so it kind of deflated any enthusiasm I had.
But one good thing we did was go out for an omakase dinner at one of the oldest Japanese restaurants in Toronto – Ginko Japanese Restaurant! It was all of our first omakase experience and it was really wonderful.
Back at the end of October 2023, I had the opportunity to take a 3 day workshop held by my local cooking studio with noted wagashi master, Eijun Mitsubori.
It was a really amazing experience, and I originally wasn't going to do it! I had talked myself out of it when the class was first announced since the price point was a little high. But at the last minute, the studio owner offered me a discount since I'm a regular student at his other classes, and I scrambled to make it happen. I'm just a total sucker for a discount.
But I will say that it was absolutely worth it – I got a great deal but I would've happily paid full price! I'm only now getting to writing the blog post and editing the photos, but I wish I had the time/brainspace earlier since I'm sure I've forgotten a lot.
As usual, I procrastinated editing photos, but at least they are being put up in the same month in which I took them!
We had an unseasonably warm weekend where it was over 25C! That was unexpected… not unpleasant, but I’m not sure I liked it. We had a lot of garden work planned and doing that in summer-like heat was not fun.
Anyway, under the cut are some photos I’d like to highlight, but the full gallery is also available at this link!
I'm also trying to pack lunches for when I go into the office. And what better way to enjoy lunch than making it super cute?!
Above is rice in the shape of an otter. It's in a sea of onion ginger sauce from the shogayaki pork. There's also a hardboiled egg and some yu choy with oyster sauce. This was actually a lunch for the boyfriend but I'm counting it anyway because it's just so cute.
Every year, I try to be more responsible about cooking dinner (as opposed to ordering takeout). So maybe if I post about it on my blog, I'll both keep up with blogging and cooking dinner!
On March 5th, I went to a wagashi making class! It was at a local cooking studio, and I’d been wanting to do it for a while! In fact, I had talked to some of my friends about the wagashi class from this cooking studio back in March 2020, but y’know… some stuff happened in March 2020. But at any rate, it was nice to actually get to attend and learn!
The two wagashi that we learned to make in this 5h class were a nerikiri maple leaf and a kinton Christmas tree. Very seasonally appropriate, haha.
I developed my own sandwich loaf recipe a while ago… now that I have an actual blog set up, I guess I should maybe post it?
Plus I bought these super adorable pans!! Who wouldn’t love bunny and bear head shaped bread?! My recipe conveniently makes one Pullman loaf or two animal head loaves, too.
