Yearly Archives: 2010

More cocktails

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1 part Cranberry liqueur
4 parts ginger ale
1 part Cuban rum
Shake with ice in a water bottle.

This one was pretty good but not great. I think the rum taste was distracting. Maybe I need to get some vodka, if I am looking to beef-up some flavoured-alcohol drinks. It doesn’t have a name yet.

1 part Bailey’s Irish cream
1 part Voyant chai cream liqueur
1 part Kahlua
0.5 part Grand Marnier

Since everything was in the fridge I couldn’t be bothered with the shaker, I just stirred it and licked off the spoon. This was very good. It’s like the ingredients of the layered shooter B-52, with the chai liqueur added, so I decided it should be named after a bomber airplane of the Indian Air Force and went looking for one. Hence, Shamsher.

A better cocktail recipe

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As served at deVine’s (I don’t know if this one was presented by Penny Irving or by Bryn Batton Wall)

Nutty Angel

  • 1 oz vodka
  • 1 oz Frangelico
  • 1 oz Baileys
  • 0.5 oz dark creme de cacao

Shake in a cocktail shaker with ice, dust with nutmeg.

As served chez moi

  • 1 part Cuban rum
  • 1 part Frangelico
  • 1 part Baileys
  • 0.5 part Kahlua (turns out dark creme de cacao is not as ubiquitous as the guy at deVine’s assured me)

Shake up with ice in a wide-mouthed Nalgene bottle, put some nutmeg on top in a glass.

This is almost as good as the one at the tasting. Since Kahlua and the rum come from Spanish-speaking countries, I will call it Ángel Loco.

Food and drink that doesn’t go together

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When I was a teenager, I noticed that ground beef tasted great in lots of one-pot combination dishes. We ate a LOT of ground beef as a family of several picky eaters, one heart patient, and mostly one busy cook. I also discovered that eggs tasted pretty good with stuff mixed in, starting with a can of Campbell’s cream soup, but then extending that to various other things in scrambled eggs such as cheese, mushrooms, or celery. So one summer when I was keeping house for myself I thought to extend these observations to cooking eggs and ground beef together in a frying pan along with a can of soup. It didn’t taste good at all.

On Thursday night I went to a cocktail tasting at deVine Wines. Our party gathered in honour of a birthday celebrant.  It was a lot of fun – we tasted seven cocktails, and brought home recipes, a silly souvenir drinking vessel, and whatever ingredients we bought. I feel like making cocktails at home now, except that I don’t have a shaker, and I’ve just gotten around to putting an ice cube tray in the freezer, and I don’t have a complete set of ingredients for any of the things we tried. But one or both of the drink-mixers for the event was really encouraging people to try out combinations on their own and make up names for them.

Here are my conclusions so far:
1. Cranberry liqueur from Okanagan Spirits is really good on its own. It would probably also be very good with orange juice, with ginger ale or soda, with cranberry-cocktail juice, or with champagne, but I don’t have any of those things here yet.
2. Frangelico, the hazelnut liqueur dressed up with a monk’s knotted belt around the bottle, is a bit too sweet to drink warm on its own, and it smells oddly like an old library.
3. Diet root beer and 6yo Cuban rum, while each is something I would gladly drink on its own, when mixed together have a terrible overtone or texture or something, together, like outgassing plastic. Fortunately I didn’t mix very much of it. I had thought it could be called an R&R, but now I don’t want to waste a name.
4. Adding a dribble of Frangelico to the above makes most of the weird chemical thing disappear. It actually just makes it taste like cheap pop, which may be a fake-flavour taste or may be an artificial-sweetener taste.

Conclusion: I need to buy more compatible drinks.

What foods or drinks have you discovered just don’t go together?

Heritage Festival

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Yet more evidence that Edmonton deserves being called the Festival City. Now I have been to the Heritage Festival (previously Heritage Days, I think) as well as the Fringe theatre festival and the Folk Music Festival, and they’ve all been excellent, urban events with attention to the transportation, hygiene, and shade needs of summertime crowds. And there are lots of other events that I haven’t been to yet but maybe I will sometime: Capital Ex, Taste of Edmonton, the Grey Cup, Silly Summer Parade, Old Strathcona Music thing whatever it is called, Film festival, Blues, Jazz, dragon boats, and more.

The Heritage Festival http://www.heritage-festival.com/ is held in a park on the riverfront, just past the university. I should have anticipated that getting there by bicycle was probably going to mean going down a hill on the way there and up one on the way back – there may be a flatter route or one with less traffic so that I could have ridden up instead of walking in a crowd of pedestrians, but that was okay. Admission is free, although they take food bank donations. Each of the 65+ cultural pavilions (marquee tents) in the park had some or all of the following: food for sale (you bought tickets at a central kiosk and bought the food for tickets), folk-dancing children, arts and crafts for sale, and displays about the history and culture of the ethnic group(s) in the homeland and in Canada. I did not find any Irish-speakers at the Irish pavilion, only a vague encouragement to call the president of the Sport and Social Club. I wandered about in a not very systematic way eating various foods: satay from Borneo, pierohy from Ukraine, barm brack from Ireland and bara brith from Wales (similar fruit breads), bannock with jam from the Aboriginal pavilion, a chocolate crepe from the French one, and then my stomach got full before I ran out of tickets or suggestions.

Even when I’m travelling, lately, I work at not trying to do things in a perfect, once-in-a-lifetime way but to pace myself and enjoy what I can manage easily. So while it would have been nice to take photos with my good camera, I chose not to carry it around, and instead experimented with the camera on my new phone. I’ve learned that although the zoom seems tempting, it’s generally not worth it for me, because I don’t get clear enough pictures. Also, it doesn’t do a great job of high-contrast bright sunlight – this may improve if I learn more about how to do it.

Indian dancers Korean performance (drums and dance) Romanian dancers Congo-Kinshasa dancers unknown

Two more libraries

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5. Capilano Branch. To get to this library, I took the #4 bus that I always take home from work, and continued to the east end of the line. The Capilano Mall looks promising from the outside, I’d always thought when riding by it in a car, but I probably wouldn’t go there again, with Bonnie Doon closer and Southgate now on the LRT. The library is on the small second floor of the mall, across from the elevator. I didn’t see an escalator or a staircase.

The returns are in a slot outside. A library staff member sits at a desk facing the door welcoming people. The branch is quite small, and it’s in a space without inherent charm. It’s telling that the webpage on this branch doesn’t mention the collection size, but does mention that the armchairs are full by mid-morning. I’d call this my least favourite of the Edmonton libraries, so far.

6. Whitemud Crossing. This is a big and very busy branch library, one of the ones that’s open on Sundays in winter. It’s in a new-looking block of shops just south of Whitemud Drive, and is easy to get to by car and to park. They have a good-sized section for science fiction and fantasy, automated return checkin machines, and a lot of magazines arranged by theme. (Curve and Ebony don’t count as “Women’s” magazines, but decorating-lifestyle magazines do.) With high ceilings and windows on two sides, the facility was surprisingly noisy, but since I was just browsing that didn’t bother me. I’d definitely go back if I had a car and wanted a change of scene.

Libraries

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The Edmonton Public Library has 17 locations. (It hasn’t had bookmobiles since 1995, though).

Before this week I had been to two, Strathcona and the downtown one. Now I have been to four.

eplGO is a one-room public library inside the engineering library on campus. It was added at the end of the recent renovations. It seems to contain mostly new paperback fiction attractively displayed, with a small section on stuff related to careers and job-searching. When I was there, there was one employee re-shelving, an automatic checkout machine, and a box to drop off returns. And my returns got recorded into the system that same day, which makes it very handy – and it will be even handier when I’m biking. It’s also possible to have public library holds delivered there, so I might try that next winter. (Not embarrassing ones!)

Idylwylde is a branch library in the north end of the Bonnie Doon mall parking lot, in the same building as a Health Unit. While it was being renovated last year the library was somewhere in the mall, but I never got around to visiting it then. From the outside, I noticed a wall of big windows that had the word for Library written across them in many languages, and I could vaguely see books through the windows. It turned out that there were shelves of manga and other graphic novels attached across the inside of the glass – an appealing presentation. There was a gas fireplace and armchairs, computer carrels, a bigger teen section than small-children’s section, a staff-picks display and a 1-week-borrowing display but no other theme displays or new-books section that I could see. I took a picture but my home internet is misbehaving and the tethering connection is insufficient.

The Kingston Frontenac Public Libraries also has 17 branches, because it doesn’t just cover the small city but the whole county, some of which is quite rural or on islands. Some of the branches are tiny and open as little as four hours a week. The last year I lived there, I started a project to visit all the branches, but I only got to four or five. So I think I will do it here instead.

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Today I took a day off, without doing anything for work or for home. It was great, and looking forward to it was great too.  I enjoyed a whole day of solitude without taking notes or checking my messages.

I headed out around mid-day. It was just above freezing, and I was comfortable in the stripey knitted jacket. I took buses to downtown, where I headed to Zinc and the Art Gallery of Alberta. When I was cutting across Churchill Square by City Hall, the empty square and the colour of the sky and the lack of greenery or Christmas lights to soften the concrete floor and towers reminded me weirdly of Revolution Square in Havana. I don’t know why a lot of school buses were lined up on a street, and I don’t know why a lot of (US?) military vehicles were lined up on an avenue. But while I was taking pictures, a woman came up behind me and said “Are you posting those on Flickr?” I said, um, not this minute (I had actually contemplated whether to get out the big camera to take the pictures home, or use the phone to post immediately on Facebook, so I was a little confused.) “But you’re going to, right? How are you going to tag them besides ‘edmonton’? ” Caught off guard, I said oh, Churchill Square, I guess, and the woman said “Great! Because I forgot my camera!” and walked away.

The Art Gallery has just re-opened in a dramatic new building. In the lobby is the restaurant Zinc, which I’d read about when it opened. It is extremely stylish, with the menus mounted on zinc plates and the place setting knives balanced on edge. Plating was more conventional, my server was competent without being intimidating, obsequious, or over-friendly, and my lunch was good. I had a glass of some Malbec, a couple of tiny buns with flavoured butter (fennel, shallot, and orange), and what they called the Un-burger with a side of gallery salad. The burger meat was elk and caribou, garnished with mushrooms and caramelised onions. It was really good. The salad was straightforward, greens with blackberry vinaigrette. Cost $29 something before tip. Some people were eating alone at the bar and reading. I think all the clients were better dressed than I, but it says something good about my confidence that I only noticed this at the end when I was looking around to describe the atmosphere.

The gallery exhibits included one of Yousef Karsh portraits, a couple of sound installations, Goya prints, and Degas sculptures and drawings of bodies in motion. They didn’t seem to have static exhibits of the permanent collection. The gift shop’s best feature was some really neat stuff for kids. Most of which I resisted buying. Next I walked to the Alberta Craft Council gallery/store, which was neat but I didn’t like it as well as the one in Newfoundland.

The rest of my planned shopping errands were in the 124-Street area of interesting shops. One thing that I wanted to buy was not quite available, so they will call me, and in the intervening time I will think/feel more about whether I want one, and I’ll tell you about it later. I still haven’t found a crochet hook that will pass through the little beads I bought to put in a lace shawl, so I don’t know if I need bigger beads or an even tinier hook or another method. But I got a long-cable needle for the yoke of a sweater I’m working on, and I patted some yarn and didn’t buy any. Then I spent a long time in MEC, figuring out which tent I would buy when I buy my next tent and which sleeping bag I would buy when I buy my next sleeping bag, but deciding I wasn’t ready to buy either. So I spent my Christmas gift certificate from Mum on a shirt, a replacement buckle for my backpack, and some Lindt milk chocolate. It felt like I should use this last gift on something more lasting, but I’ll have opportunities for that with the inheritance.

And then I came home. While I was waiting at the Telus-plaza bus stop, I took time to read the maps and confirm that besides the 7 and 57, I can also take the 70 down 99th. And unless I am waiting with people from OffWhyte and want company, it’s probably just as fast to take the 8 to Bonnie Doon and catch a 4 back from there.

zinc1 zinc3 churchill square 1