Things today

- It’s absolutely redundant to say, but it’s of supreme interest to me how one thing, one action, one occurrence, one glance, one joke, you get the idea, loses its importance with the coming of other such items. It’s almost like the theory that a brain is only capable of holding a certain amount of information and with the addition of anything more past its saturation, instead of supersaturation into the fluid of our memories, the old, vestigial memories are displaced like when that last drop makes the meniscus on top of the nearly-too-full cup burst.

I think a lot about age these days, though why, I don’t know. I suppose it’s always been particularly pertinent detail in my relationships with others, as I skipped a grade and still went into advanced classes as a child. Also, not having friends as a kid meant I went to the grown-up table in all possible instances, feeling ill-at-ease around my peers. I always thought that meant that age was of little importance to me, as I felt I could transcend it, but I suppose it could also be seen that it’s always been quite the opposite. In any case, societal pressure dictates me to be at a certain place in my life according to some age-marker, but I don’t feel that for me or my friends, and for that I’m grateful. That being said, lately, I’ve been really aware of age and aging. A friend and I were talking recently about how time passes quickly, and somehow, she had never thought about the fact that proportionally, our days mean less to us than they did when we were children. I mean, think about it: when you’re two, a year is half of your life. Of Course it’s a big deal. When you’re 28, a year is 1/28th of your life and therefore is of less “numerical” importance, and as we get older, each year represents a smaller and smaller percentage of our lifespan.

So is it habit that allows us to get over people easier when we’re older, or is it simply that the time spent with said person is representatively smaller in comparison to those who came before? I’ve been thinking of tattoos that I’ve gotten in the past that meant the world to me because they represented a certain person, and with time and habit, I’ve all but forgotten the tie that person had to that piece of skin. For example, I have a semi-colon behind my ear (I can’t remember which one and am too lazy to get to a mirror to see). When I was dating Will, we initially bonded over semi-colons being our favourite pieces of punctuation. Eventually, I tattooed one on him when we were hanging out with Dan Innes, and henceforth, he is marked by me, and our relationship. I often forget I have that semi-colon, and even though I got it long before I met him, he attached himself to it by getting one as well. The thing is, when I do remember that I have it, I even more often forget that he had anything to do with it. I bet he doesn’t think of me when he sees his either. I don’t think that’s sad, I just think it’s so interesting. At the time, THAT WAS THE COOLEST THING EVER!!!!! We’re a couple with matching tattoos!!!! OOOOH! And now? And what’s more, that was 2006, and my heart was DEMOLISHED by him at the time, and NOTHING could help me and WOE WAS ME, blah blah, etc… and now he’s just a blip. Or even more, the one who came after him, I still speak with regularly enough and I would have died for him if anyone had asked, and though now I still might, because I love him so dearly, it’s just under such different circumstances. For one, I would have to weigh out the pros and cons of making such a choice, whereas before it would have been next to instinctual. It’s so mental to look upon someone for whom your heart beat exclusively and know that they mean something different to you now, and that all of that, while important in your growth at the time, really isn’t eternal. I think that is just beautiful. More into the grey areas, and I truly love and appreciate grey more and more as I age.

- What always appealed to me most about Dungeons and Dragons was that you could draw your character. My brother had books upon books of different story lines and sure they were fun and I always hoped that I would reach the highest levels and get to the orange book with the Phoenix, but ultimately, I wanted just to make up new characters and draw them in that little box in the top left hand corner. I don’t know if everyone had the same character sheets, where you would fill out their stats, dexterity, alignment, race, class, charisma, etc… (also, great words to learn as a child), but ours definitely had a box where you would draw out your character. I wanted nothing more than to be part of that world, to choose what I would look like, to choose whether I would be an elf cleric or a dwarf thief, to not be the kid who couldn’t understand the other kids when they were playing at dress-up. Does anyone use those books anymore? My best memories with my brother involve us sitting around and drawing up characters together in his various rooms from various houses.

- I want to understand the wisdom behind something I read recently: when you’re the loneliest is when you ought to be alone.

Toronto Café reviews

So in my recent decision to appreciate Toronto for all its worth, I have been goin to different cafés to read, write or draw.

Here are my findings:

The Common – 1058 College (at Gladstone)

I ordered a soy latté and it was Awesome. Served in a tall, what might be considered soda glass with thick edges, I was a little put off by its cumber. Once I threw one of those handy little keep-your-hand-from-scalding-itself cardboards wrap-arounds, I was free to enjoy, and boy did I ever. The really babeish girl behind the counter made it extra foamy (how with soy, I do Not know, but kudos) and it lasted me ages. I sat on a pew writing for a few hours while they played horrendous music off of her ipod (the headstones? really?) until an even more babeish dude sauntered in and started working, changing the music immediately. They serve dinner there though I didn’t experience the food, but I did see someone get a sampler dish at the next table, with various cheeses and cured meats and it looked most appetizing. There are something like 6 tables in the entire place, so meals wouldn’t ever get to crowded and at night, it’s by candle-light. There are chairs in front if you feel like chilling outside with your drink, just remember to bring your glass back in when you’re done. This is the sort of place where I’d love to get taken on a date, just sayin…

Also, points to the babeish dude for offering everyone in the café fresh strawberries procured from the local farmers market at Dufferin Park (it was a Thursday).

Lit Espresso Bar – 810 College

I went in here on a rainy day, looking to draw around some human companionship at a distance, and figured this might be a place to do such a thing. Can’t say it was terribly successful, but the coffee was great. I ordered a soy mocha – I guess comfort from the rain? I don’t know – and on top of making it look really pretty with swirlies on the top, it tasted incredible. The espresso was not totally distinguishable, but definitely there enough to make it a supreme mocha. There’s nothing worse than ordering one and having one taste overpowered by the other – it’s a delicate balance, an exceptional mocha. The atmosphere of the café was cold, I guess it’s a matter of taste, but it’s simply that modern decor incorporating exposed brick and polished maple but not appearing any more warm or “authentic” than my knock-off airwalk chucks. The art on the walls right now though is pretty awesome, being photographs of various coffee-related items thrown into illustrator and trace-masked with different colours to give it a totally surreal look. The music was awesome, playing bloc party, vampire weekend, and wilco, which was particularly soothing on such a wet and gloomy day.

Green Beanery – 565 Bloor St W.

I chilled out here reading for a few hours before heading down to Nirvana for lunch with a friend. This café is half coffee product store, half coffee shop. The atmosphere is pretty sterile, corporate. I can’t say I really cared much about it at all, actually. I ordered a soy latté, and it was pretty unexceptional. What was exceptional though is that they carry ice cream there and ALSO have a chocolate chip shortbread cookie. I LOVE SHORTBREAD AND CHOCOLATE CHIP COOKIES. I had to look away cuz I’ve been eating so much ice cream these days, but I know it’s there and I will return one day, to triumphantly chew and swallow said cookie. I can’t remember the music playing, so chances are it wasn’t awesome. Actually, it felt really like a Second Cup, which always feels like a second-rate anything else: it’s never terrible, but always totally unmemorable.

Nova Era – 770 College

Ok, so this place doesn’t really count as a café I guess, but I just have a soft spot for them. Maybe it’s that they’re so unforgivingly Portuguese and despite recent circumstances, I just like that country. The place just teems with cafeteria ambiance, but they have Pastéis de Nata (custard tarts) that normally aren’t the flakiest ever, but TODAY THEY WERE, and so many different baked goods, and breads, and they all speak Portuguese to each other and it’s just really cute. Their coffee is great too. It’s $1.50 for a solid espresso and the same for a Pastel, and I’m sure their sandwiches are equally as awesome and inexpensive. They’re all over Toronto and this one has a sweet patio (covered, which helped in the rain today) with an awesome view of all the randos walking around Little Italy (Always entertaining!).

Strawberry Bloob Crumble

Living in Toronto, I get the wonderful chance to have the cheapest produce ever from our China Town on Spadina. I got yesterday’s bunch for $10, which included 4 boxes of strawberries for $5, and 3 pints of blueberries for $5 – INCREDIBLE. When shopping in China Town though, it is worth it to check out the few different markets, cuz one next to another will have a different deal – the first two places I saw had 3 boxes of strawberries for $5.

So tomorrow’s my old room mate and good friend Tanner’s birthday, and since she’s not the biggest dessert fan, I figured a crumble would be a great idea for her; easy, lots of fruit, and light on the sugar.

So here’s how I made it.

Preheat the oven to 375.

Ingredients:

1 tbsp brown sugar
1 tbsp flour
1 tbsp fresh lemon juice
6 cups whatever fresh or frozen fruit you want (I chose fresh strawberries & blueberries)
2/3 cup brown sugar
2/3 cup flour
2/3 cup oats
4 tbsp butter cut into small bits

Cut up your fruit or if it’s just blueberries, mix it with the first three ingredients and pour into your baking tin, 9×9 or 11×7.
Mix the last four ingredients so that it’s like a chunky mushy mix. I mean, imagine what you think a crumble ought to look like before it’s cooked and that’s to the point you want to mix it. There will be dusty parts, but make sure you’ve got a solid amount of chunks and you’re good. Pour that last bit on top of the fruit evenly.
Bake for 30 minutes, or til it’s golden brown.

I ran out of brown sugar, so I had to substitute with white, which makes it less aesthetically pleasing, and a little less palpable of a taste, but who’s gonna argue with butter and sugar anyway?

The thing is Tanner got sick and can’t eat, so I have to eat this entire crumble mostly to myself! BIG PROBLEM.

Pride in friends

I have friends. I know, weird. KIDDING. They are fantastic people, or I wouldn’t want to spend time with them, now would I?

Something I love about getting older is that my friends keep impressing me with the culmination of all of our years of talking and pondering and mind-changing and you name it, presenting itself as beautiful and creative projects. One such example is Wondrous Machine, a Christian music project by my lovely friends Anne & Joel, who also merged together to make this adorable culmination of ideas and talking and you name it:

Now, I’m not Christian, but they are. And they, being the musically inclined cuties that they are, decided they wanted to make Christian songs that were accessible to children. So they cut up some cardboard and painted it, strapped on those fake guitars and jumped around in front of a camera or two, making this video:

WONDROUS MACHINE ::: a kids music video from darryl augustine on Vimeo.

Being proud of their accomplishment, they’ve decided to take this seriously and pursue it full-time, hunting down producers, and Christian TV people, and distributors for their DVD and I couldn’t be more proud of them. They’re working on some secular songs now, promoting healthy eating and appreciation for your parents for having made said food for you and toothbrushing and I don’t know what else they told me, but I back it.

Anne & Joel, I am proud of you guys for chasing your dream, and frankly, I think it’s a great one. I think this is a good idea on which you’ve fallen, and I am grateful that I have friends who are inspired, and in turn, inspire me.

Over-rated v. under-rated

Over-rated: hope lately. This whole getting kicked in the face while trying to climb out of an ever-deepening hole business is bullshit, so I’m not going to bother worrying about it anymore. That way, when something shitty comes around, I’ll just be like, “oh hey, knew you were coming by, you can’t surprise me anymore. In fact, your presence is tiresome, but pull up a chair cuz you sure seem to be comfortable hanging around me these days.” When I related to the girls the other night the idea from Battlestar Galactica that hope was dangerous (when the lawyer dude threatened to kill Lee over his being the interim president because he would give the people hope and they couldn’t afford to have any at that moment), in reference to break-ups, I knew it directly applied to myself in my current situation, but had no idea it was so broad in its scope for my life, so frak it. Bring it on. I’m not a moron, I know it’ll chill out, and maybe it already is, but until I’m sure, I’m just gonna sit back. So that when it’s done, I can pick up the pieces and move the hell on.

Under-rated: lots. Skylines, especially ones that are super geometric and ascending in height according to their distance from you, though not very well demonstrated by my photo.

Fog:

Roses: “Now wait a second, roses? They’re the most over-rated flower ever, people give them all of the time, they’re not even that pretty and they don’t even smell that good. Also, they hurt when you touch them.”
All valid points, BUT have you ever stopped to think about how hard it must be to get a long-stemmed rose? They’re bushes for christ’s sake! And they Are pretty, and soft, and people put their petals into salads (why, I don’t know – I sincerely doubt they add anything to the taste experience).
They are so in bloom in Toronto and I couldn’t be happier. OH AND ALSO, most of them are that mildly annoying magenta colour, and not red, as one would assume as the most commonplace color. So there. I take a stand. These guys are just beautiful, and special, and I am relieved that I see them everywhere, climbing things, hanging out in their velvety splendor.

These were all taken today within a two block radius. How’s that for beauty?

Toronto ain’t so bad.

Tarte aux tomates, prosciutto et feta

This is the easiest special treat I like to make for friends and family. The recent post on this by David Lebovitz inspired me the other day to make this for my dad and uncle. It looks classy, and tastes like a heaven for which you would pay dearly in a restaurant.

What makes this such a fantastic recipe is that its versatility allows it to be modified for any diet. A tonne of my friends are vegan/vegetarian, so I am perpetually on the hunt for recipes that are easy to make for them at our dinners.

Traditional tomato tarts are made with Swiss-tasting cheeses, such as Edam and Gruyere, as well as with bacon/ham bits. Myself, preferring healthy options, like the choice of goat cheese, feta, maybe even bocconcini. In France, with the fantastic whole wheat & seed flours available at every grocery store, the crusts give a completely different taste than the bland flours stocked here, but we made do with what we have.

One way it’s the easiest thing ever is that you can just go out and buy the pie crust from any frozen section, already in an aluminum baking tin. Since people (LIKE ROBBIE) like to throw out the aluminum tins I like to have around for those moments I like to bake things, sometimes these are useful. I will never advocate using pre-made crusts, but I’m just saying it’s easy if necessary. For a good & easy crust recipe, this one works well, substituting shortening (like, who has that around?) with butter/margarine.

6 tomatoes of your choice
6 slices of prosciutto
1/2 cup of feta cheese
oregano, thyme, black pepper
olive oil

Preheat oven to 425

Put a sweet layer of Dijon mustard on the bottom of the crust, layering the sliced up tomatoes on top. Between the tomato layers, insert the prosciutto, and crumble the feta. In the middle, sprinkle olive oil & herbs over the pie. Repeat until the top of the tomato layers reach the top of the pie crust.

Cook for half an hour, or until the cheese is sufficiently browned.

So that’s how I made it the other day, but I’m excited to use extra firm tofu fried in thin strips in olive oil & spices in place of the prosciutto, or alternately, pan-fried tempeh in place as well. I would be curious to see what nutritional yeast would do as an alternate to the cheeses. It would be awesome to throw in thin strips of red pepper as well, or even thinly sliced bits of asparagus, since it’s so wonderfully in season right now.

It’s Seriously the easiest thing.

The restoration

Working on regaining faith is just as hard as working on regaining trust. Often, the loss of faith is a direct consequence of a breach of trust.

So the heart wants what the heart wants. Though I don’t believe in regret, I have to say that sometimes it’s important to not give yourself and trust away when you have very good reasons not to, despite the heart wanting what it wants.

It’s called logic and it’s worth listening to. It makes no sense to lament anything about the past; all we can do is decide not to accept things we don’t appreciate, henceforth.

In other news, THESE STRAWBERRIES ARE WEARING TUXEDOS!!!!

Courtesy of Jordan, we got to eat these tasty little numbers the other day, and holy shit were they good. It’s pretty logical how to make them, but if you lack deductive reasoning skills, you buy strawberries, dip them in melted white chocolate, then dip the sides in melted dark chocolate, painting the bowtie and buttons on with anything small-tipped you’ve got kicking around.

Little things like this remind me of just how creative one get can with food, and it makes my heart beam.

This year is going to be full of more food, better ideas, and prettier pictures, I promise.

Disappointment

There’s a lot to be said for having faith in people. It’s a driving force for waking up in the morning. It’s a background application in your daily existence. More than that, it’s a startup program that allows proper functioning of your emotional well-being. It’s why it makes you mad when someone allows the door they just opened to slam into you. It’s what allows you to make new friends, trust them, and grant them access into your personal bubble. It is assuming people obey traffic laws, it’s assuming your food isn’t poisoned at the restaurant, it’s being weirded out when a dude’s yelling ‘the end is near’ down the street.

There’s no real reason for us to believe in a god, and people say you just have to have faith. It’s the same with people: there’s no real reason to think anyone will obey social convention, but we assume they will. We have faith that they will.

So what about when you start to lose that faith in people? When you start thinking that maybe, when you’re awesome & think of others, that in fact, others are not mirroring said sentiment. What about when people create their own social convention that involves lying, a lack of consideration for others, general disrespectful behaviour, and they impose it upon the rest of unassuming us still clinging to the vestiges of common courtesy and general well-treatment of others?

I don’t know how to reconcile my life and ideals with what I’m facing every day from my peers. I’m saddened and disgusted by their behaviour. I only realized that it ‘s been evident in my demeanor last night, and I don’t know what to do. I’ve got to say too, that it’s men – men are who are bumming me the fuck out. The women in my life, new and old, have been there through and through, demonstrating an unparalleled level of friendship I never expected. The men, for the most part, have done nothing but disappoint me time after time, on so many different levels. For a girl who has more guy friends than girls, this is a big deal. My friends are those guys who are villains in romantic comedies: they lie, cheat, manipulate, to have sex, get their way, boost their egos. And I am helpless against it except complaining to them, to try to demonstrate how it hurts to have said actions inflicted upon yourself with my own experiences in this realm, and nothing changes. I get scoffed at, eye-rolled at or straight up ignored. I don’t know what more I can do. It seems my choice in men isn’t that much better than the poor girls they put through the ringer, and it just slowly suffocates me. I was always idealistic, or at very least optimistic about the way I thought my friends accosted the world – we’re from the punk scene, we’ve been discarded by the real world so many times, but we don’t care, cuz we’re not like them. We have morals, we believe in ethics, we believe in justice, or so our songs claim. Too bad they can’t live up to that. Too bad I bought into it and am now paying the price for hope.

The last thing I ever wanted to be was jaded. It’s like I feel like the chick in the fifth element. I just need love to give me hope again, but it’s in that that I lost my faith. And it’s that that always gave me faith.

I love my friends, but I feel dissonance about their actions. Do I accept that this is the new way of acting in relationships? Do I settle for being treated like a pretty face that will do when it’s convenient? I can’t accept that, but I fear I’m an obsolete model that can’t (won’t) be updated.

A few things from the creative side

I made maki last night at home with Mickael. We had planned to have a sushi night for months; pity we had to wait until I’m moving to TCB. I am a maki genius:

I also made some dresses out of XL shirts. It’d been so long since I’d sewn that it took way longer than it ought to have, but I’m still pleased with the results:

Best cake I have ever made

I am a culinary genius. I made this cake out of whatever ingredients we had in the kitchen earlier this week, and I still can’t stop thinking about it. Cherries picked fresh from the grove and coconut.

Here’s the (approximate) recipe:

bowl full of pitted fresh cherries

1 cup golden sugar (unprocessed sugar)
1 banana mashed
1/5 cup oil (I use either cold pressed virgin coconut oil or grape seed oil)
2 tsp vanilla
1 egg

2 cups flour
baking powder/soda
salt
3/4 cup coconut

1/2 cup buttermilk (milk with vinegar)

Preheat oven to 350. Grease 9″ round pan.
Cream sugar in banana and oil, add egg and vanilla. Mix flour, salt, baking powder/soda (leavening agent) and coconut.
Add all dry to wet, adding buttermilk in spurts occasionally. Add cherries last.

Pour into pan, cook until crust forms and is golden. 30 minutes or so.

PS: I decide against coming back from the North America trip full stop: I’m moving to Toronto straight up in August. I’ll be able to make it to This is Hardcore and be closer to my friends I love dearly. I can’t wait.