Category: Personal Reminiscences

Musings on Pizza No. 2

Cooking / Daily life / Eating / Food & Drink / PizzaLeave a comment

Loading

Pizza was one of those things I thought about when my hot flashes from my ongoing hormone treatment awoke me in the middle of the night this past week. Several times, in fact. As I tossed and turned I thought about my pizza-making process as I recently described here and wondered. I had received some comments about it, too, which prompted my continued meditations on pizza. I’ve been making pizza that way for years with only minor changes or alterations in the steps, but I first asked myself, “Can I simplify it?” Then came other questions: Can I change the ……… click below for more ↓

The Cancer Diaries, Part 26

Cancer / Daily life / Personal Reminiscences / TVLeave a comment

Loading

Cancer changes everything — and nothing at all. Rabbi Skillman That’s a profound comment, coming from a TV character. The “rabbi” in question is a fictional patient in hospital, played by George Wyner in the TV series, New Amsterdam (Season 1 Episode 8). He is talking to the hospital’s medical director, Dr. Max Goodwin (played by Ryan Eggold).  Cancer — its diagnosis, treatment, and impact on people — plays a pivotal role in the series, and offers some food for thought for viewers. This episode stayed with me for quite some time. Skillman suffers from terminal pancreatic cancer. It’s a ……… click below for more ↓

Musings on Making Pasta, No. 5

Cooking / Daily life / Food & Drink / Pasta / Personal Reminiscences3 Comments

Loading

I was back at making pasta this week, trying a slightly different recipe, and working on honing my skills with the pasta machine. As well, I  was hoping to get my recently-acquired mafaldine cutter attachment operating correctly (you might recall reading about the problems I had with it clogging in the previous post on pasta making). My usual mix for pasta dough is a ratio of about two-to-one tipo 00 flour to semolina. Thinking about that, I wondered if the gluten in the lower-protein tipo 00 flour was not working very well with the different, tougher, and less elastic gluten ……… click below for more ↓

More Musings on Tea

Daily life / Food & Drink / Personal Reminiscences / Tea & coffee / What I'm Reading NowLeave a comment

Loading

Back in 1946, while England was still recovering from the deprivations of WWII and under rationing, the prolific George Orwell wrote his essay “A Nice Cup of Tea” with his eleven-step instructions for making what he considered the perfect cuppa.* But do they still stand today? Certainly, his notion of what makes a “strong” tea would be considered very strong by standards today. As the BBC noted in an article that debunked many of Orwell’s notions about making tea almost 60 years later, “The great critic of Hitler and Stalin, was not above a bit of teatime Totalitarianism himself, it ……… click below for more ↓

Musings on Making Bread and Chili, No. 1

Bread & Baking / Cooking / Daily life / Food & Drink / Pasta / Personal ReminiscencesLeave a comment

Loading

Longtime readers here know that before my surgery last summer, along with my pasta making I was an avid, if not always entirely competent, baker. I mostly made bread from “scratch” but sometimes for convenience used an electric bread maker. I made all sorts of bread in previous years, including soda (“quick”) breads, as well as the occasional scone, tea biscuit, and muffin. I’ve always looked upon my baking (and cooking in general) as a sort of living chemistry experiment. I play with recipes, tweak them, explore different ingredients and processes. I have produced some spectacular loaves, a lot of ……… click below for more ↓

Musings on Making Pasta, No. 4

Cooking / Daily life / Food & Drink / Pasta / Personal Reminiscences2 Comments

Loading

I made another batch of pasta this weekend to test my new mafaldine cutter, but it proved problematic . The dough jammed in it against the blades, so I had to switch to my lasagne ricce cutter, which worked perfectly. Because it got so deeply stuck, I had to remove the blade piece on the new cutter and spend some time fishing tiny bits of dough from the teeth. I will have to contact the seller and manufacturer to see if there is something I can do to prevent this in the future. I plan to do a test in ……… click below for more ↓

The Godzilla Soundtracks

Books & Reviews / Culture / Daily life / Film & Reviews / Godzilla / Music & Reviews / Personal Reminiscences3 Comments

Loading

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PDeU42u2s2Y Akira Ifukube. If you’re not an aficionado of Japanese film or a follower of Japanese symphonic music, his name won’t be familiar. But for millions of kaiju fans around the world, he is a legend. He composed the music and soundtracks for many of the Godzilla films, as well as many scifi and other films produced by the Toho film corporation. He has been ranked among the world’s great film composers along with people like John Williams, Ennio Morricone, and Nino Rota.* I spent some time reading about the classically-trained Ifukube this past week after I received two CDs ……… click below for more ↓

The Cancer Diaries, Part 25

Cancer / Daily life / Personal ReminiscencesLeave a comment

Loading

It was with a strong sense of trepidation that I went to my latest meeting with the urologist, earlier this month. Although it was still rather too early to make a fulsome diagnosis, I was anxious about what my latest blood test might show. My biggest worry was that I would need further treatment, including chemotherapy. I have to admit that on the drive to Barrie, I was frankly asking myself if it would be worth it to do more. Although I was a couple of weeks past my last radiation treatment, I was still having side effects, albeit slowly ……… click below for more ↓

Musings on Making Pasta, No.3

Daily life / Food & Drink / Pasta / Personal ReminiscencesLeave a comment

Loading

How thick should any particular type of pasta be? Seems like a simple question that could be answered by a basic chart or spreadsheet. But if it has been, I’ll be damned if I can find one online. In my numerous books on pasta, only a few actually give recommended thicknesses for making your own. Anything that deals with dried, store-bought pasta simply deals with the type of noodle and recommended cooking times, not its thickness. I’ve scoured my many books and the internet looking for this information so I could build a simple chart that told me what roller ……… click below for more ↓

Musing on Making Pasta No. 2

Cooking / Daily life / Eating / Food & Drink / Pasta / Personal Reminiscences2 Comments

Loading

In its most basic form, pasta can be made from only two ingredients: flour and water. But while true, it’s deceptively simple, and far from the tastiest or most expressive pasta you can make.  (see part 1 of this essay if you missed it) Flour is delightfully complicated; there is some interesting chemistry at work within flour and it’s fun to experiment. Wheat is classified into several categories: spring and winter (by the planting season), colour (red or white), hard or soft (high or low protein content), and durum (an amber, hard wheat). Canadian wheat has five classes for eastern ……… click below for more ↓

Musings on Making Pasta No. 1

Cooking / Daily life / Food & Drink / Pasta / Personal ReminiscencesLeave a comment

Loading

[ngg src=”galleries” ids=”16″ exclusions=”302,303,304,305,306,298,297,296,294,290,289,288,287″ display=”basic_thumbnail” thumbnail_crop=”0″ number_of_columns=”5″ order_by=”imagedate”]  Long-time readers here may recall that I used to post about making my own pasta and bread quite frequently some years back. Last spring when I was diagnosed with cancer and then went through surgery and then radiation, I stopped doing both. This week, I finally got back to my pasta-making— not quite as adroitly as I had in the past, mind you; the old skills were a mite rusty — and expect to get back to bread shortly. Both activities provide me a sense of tactile creativity and pleasure, and give ……… click below for more ↓

The Cancer Diaries, Part 24

Cancer / Daily life / Musings / Personal ReminiscencesOne Comment

Loading

My final week of radiation treatment is here. I should have felt elated that I would no longer be required to drive every day for an hour or more each way as I have for the past six weeks. Everyone told me it would go by in a flash, but it seems to have dragged on and on. I felt curiously empty when the new week dawned and the end was in sight. It’s been a difficult time — almost a year since my PSA test showed something was seriously wrong, and seven months since my surgery. While most of ……… click below for more ↓

Musings of a B-Film Junkie

Culture / Daily life / Film & Reviews / Godzilla / Musings / Personal Reminiscences / Pop Culture2 Comments

Loading

I put a DVD of the 1939 film, The Gorilla, into the player and sat back to watch. Bela Lugosi (above, centre) starred beside the Ritz Brothers (trio above), a popular American comedy trio contemporary with the Three Stooges, Abbott and Costello, and the Marx Brothers. This would be the last year the Ritz Brothers worked for Fox; they stopped making films entirely in 1943. It’s the first full film of theirs I’ve seen, but am not impressed. Lugosi is best known for his starring role in the 1931 film, Dracula. After which he was typecast as the villain, mostly ……… click below for more ↓

The Cancer Diaries, Part 23

Cancer / Daily life / Musings / Personal ReminiscencesLeave a comment

Loading

I started the New Year with another welcome three days off, with the final third of my radiation treatment ahead in the next few weeks. I can’t say I’ve ever been quite as happy to see a year pass as I have with 2020. As if the widening pandemic, lockdowns, Trump’s madness and treason, the nail-biting US elections, the stupid and selfishanti-maskers and anti-vaxxers, the QAnon idiocy spreading among the gullible, Brexit, Jason Kenney and the UCP destroying Canadian unity as well as Alberta, the waste of $9 million locally for the Saunderson Vindictive Judicial Inquiry (SVJI), and Erin O’Toole’s ……… click below for more ↓

The Cancer Diaries, Part 22

Cancer / Daily life / Personal ReminiscencesLeave a comment

Loading

Three days off over Xmas from the daily drive felt like a longer holiday, although it wasn’t enough time for my bowels to heal properly. So far an irritable bowel, reduced urine stream, and my hot “flashes” (or surges) are the only side effects I’ve noticed. They are, however, enough to make me less than comfortable at times. I was warned I might feel fatigued, too; not just the normal state of being tired from too little sleep (what with pets and hot “flashes”), but deep fatigue. Not yet, but I still have three weeks of treatment to go, so ……… click below for more ↓

Back to Top