OK! I have about a million things I want to blog about in the next week and a half covering my travels over the last… 4 or 5 months.

First, CAKE! Gluten free cake made out of coconut flour. I downloaded the recipe in a pdf from Picadilly books, but I can’t find it anywhere on their website or on Amazon right now. I have every intention of buying the book though, because every recipe in it has been a total taste success… something that’s hard to say after tasting some random gluten free baked goods out there. Coconut flour, in my opinion, is the way to go. I think I could make some good change opening a #gf bakery in Calgary using coconut flour. The only issue might be the amount of eggs needed. Wheat intolerance folk will be fiiiiiiiiiiiiine. True celiacs may have problems if they have egg allergies. Which would suck, obviously.

In case Picadilly puts a link up to the innards of the book, this their site. Or maybe you want to read the lonely Amazon review? You’re welcome.

The cake:

Basically, I beat the hell out of the batter in my fancy new 90th Anniversary KitchenAid, divided into two round cakepans lined with parchment paper AND THEN I stuck the two cooked cakes together with (UTTERLY FABULOUS) whipped coconut milk.

Did you know you could even do that? You take a can of coconut milk, throw in some vanilla and (I used) icing sugar and you whip it, whip it good. It doesn’t really take on a whipped creamy consistency until you chill it. I poured what was left of mine after the cake was assembled back into the can and stuck it in the frigo. Because I am brilliant.

There were some slidey issues, but before it went into the fridge things were straightened out. Is that toasted coconut on the top? Oh, why YES! it is.

This cake tastes soooo much better the next day after it has been refridgerated. I’m not sure why. The coconut flour is moist and firm (probably because this cake has oooh, 9 eggs in it). I went with a coconut theme just because I wasn’t sure how much coconut would come through the chocolate in the cake. I really had nothing to worry about.

I used a dirty plate. And put the picture on the internet. To show you the magical dollop of coconut whipped cream. It was divine. Really. Also, the flash was a necessity in the first two pictures. Which is worse than the faint natural light coming from the one window in my subterranean kitchen. But not a lot.

FIN.

Next time, maybe a Hawaii round up or a cookie revelation. Or a post only about my newly acquired love for borscht.

I just finished clicking in my grocery order. For the second week in a row. The hermit wins out on this one. Who likes going to the supermarket anyway? I mean, the real supermarkets, I’m ok with. The big-box-factory-made-crap-markets, I can do without. Anyway, it’s a pretty sweet deal, the online grocery delivery service. You place your order, and a random hippy (that if you’re cool like me, you actually know) delivers it to your door a few days later. Repeat weekly. Sign me up.

Grocery delivery seems like a yuppy fantasy come true, and I guess in a way it is. The thing that validates the extra cost for me: I don’t think I’ve eaten better than I have this week in a long time. When you actually have groceries in  your house, you don’t eat out. When you have fresh organic groceries in your house, you’ve probably paid an exorbitant cost for them, and you probably want to use them before they go bad. So  you do. The next thing you know, you’re having a salad for lunch. It works for me, anyway.

The pizza we ordered Friday night was an accident.

This weekend was pretty business-as-usual. Yesterday we did some Costco-ing for bulk shampoo and a desk chair for me. I am an office-chair-stealer. If we are both in the office at the same time I am forced (I force myself due to imagined obligations) to sit on the dreaded card table chair. While also from Costco,  the card table chair is significantly less comfortable. It is the suck, actually. As an aside, I hate Costco. Why do people pay for the privilege of being tortured by harsh lighting, long line ups, AND everything costing $9.97? Why? That’s not even mentioning the torture of being harassed to pay more and join the super-bonus-ultra-shinier-metal-club each and every time at the check out.

When we got home from our commercial expedition, we made dinner and settled in for an evening of typical hermit activities. UNTIL duh duh duh…. I got a text message from a co-worker asking if I wanted to go to the Feist concert. The message came at 7:00 and the show started at 7:30. I’m not sure why she offered them to me, but I’m pretty grateful that she did. For the $5.00 it cost us to park, we saw a really good show. Hayden opened for Feist, which is funny, because earlier in the day we were talking in the car about how I’d never missed a Hayden concert until this one. I did miss a few minutes of his set, but I think it counts as perfect attendance regardless.

There’s a review for the Feist show here. I really enjoyed the shadow show. Listening to Feist was fun and even though I’ve never been what I’d call a fan, I still recognized a number of her songs. The only thing that really sucked was the audience. They didn’t stfu the entire time. It was constant drunken chatter, as if they were at a hockey game.

One more thing. Not that I’m trying to be proprietary in any way, but Feist isn’t from Calgary, Calgary. She’s from Nova Scotia. I guess maybe that’s why you were so chattery, drunk, and disrespectful. I’m not really sure why you were eating gigantic containers of popcorn either, but that could explain why you look so gross.

How My Heart Behaves is a pretty cool song, but enjoying it makes me worry that I’m on a slippery slope towards enjoying Barbara Streisand.

Today I went to the museum to learn the art of book binding. It was pretty fun. There have been a lot of exhibit changes since the last time I was there, including a lot more interactive-type stuff. For example, I blew up an oil well, AND walked through Sir William van Horne’s supposedly moving train car. I love the shaky floor feeling in a museum. Like an amusement park ride but educational. The books my friend and I made are pretty awesome too. I also managed to capture some pretty fantastic pictures on the blackberry.

All of these pictures were taken in the Maverick section. LOOK OUT John McCain.

The only thing I really wanted to do this weekend that I didn’t is see Religculous. Religulous, whether it turns out to be good or bad, is TOTALLY my kind of movie. It will no doubt be one of the more enjoyable evenings I spend this fall. Whenever it happens.

Cono Sur’s cabernet is back, locally, which means Christmas is right around the corner. What to do, what to do? The only clear answer about what to do for the Christmas holidays is to drink wine. That’s what I have come to understand over the last few fall seasons. The other good thing about Cono Sur is that it looks cool, with its trendy bicycle label, it’s somewhat crappy cork that falls apart, and it’s organicness. Behold the organic wine schmoozing with the organic pears. Cono Sur is a player.

Sometimes life requires you to do certain things. Sometimes those things feel like acts of charity. You make the choice to do them, but did you REALLY have a  choice?

Sometimes, afterward, you realize you did exactly what you were meant to do, and guess what? It was actually FUN!

Friday, my office closed early for the long weekend. I went to the farmers market and the supermarket and bought a free range, organic turkey, some root vegetables, and a sweet pumpkin - to make a

pie. Then I spent the rest of Friday scouring google, trying to figure out what the heck to do with my ingredients.

I baked a pumpkin pie for scratch, brined a turkey for roasting, and packed the rest of my ingredients into a reusable shopping bag.

We hopped in the car on Saturday, I bought a new camera lense, and we headed for the hills to have Turkey Day Dinner with boybot’s dad. Despite almost constant conversation about the “economic crises”, it was a really, really fun day. The meal I made was edible, the scenery outside was beautiful, and the company was fun. I would do it again tomorrow, and hopefully we’ll start making a bit of a habit of it.

It’s hard losing a wife, a best friend, and living in the middle of nowhere. Even if “nowhere” is the most beautiful place I can think of. It’s sad to see someone who has wanted to desperately to be alone all his life, finally alone, and lonely. A man with two real friends in the world, who would help him unconditionally, one of them his son.

This winter I’m going to be making it a tradition to go out there at least every other Sunday and cook a decent meal. There’s no warmer feeling than cooking a meal for someone, and making them smile - when there really aren’t a lot of things going on in their life to smile about.

I can hear the boys talking about the turkey and the meal on the phone now. So cute, they make ME smile.