Totally Inauthentic Locro

I had some locro (hominy stew) in Buenos Aires when we visited there a couple years ago and I've been meaning to make some of our own.  This is the largely inauthentic version I made after cobbling a few online recipes together and tossing out all the ingredients we didn't have at home.  But it turned out really well, so I'm writing it down for other people who like cheap, easy food.

Ingredients:

6 chorizo sausages (the raw kind, not the dried kind) or other raw spicy sausages
2 medium onions, chopped
2 cloves garlic, sliced
1 28-oz can hominy
1 small acorn squash, peeled and chopped
4 medium potatoes (or to taste), peeled and chopped
2 19-oz cans mixed beans
olive oil
boiling water
2 tsp cumin
2 tsp sweet paprika
black pepper

Heat a tablespoon or two of olive oil in a large stew pot over medium heat.  Add the onions and garlic and sautee until the onions are a little softened.  Push to the edges.  Chop the chorizo sausages and toss in.  You can saute them in batches to get some nice browning going, or you can be a little lazy and cook everything together.  It's a stew, it'll still taste good.

When the sausages are mostly cooked add the hominy, cumin, paprika and black pepper to taste.  Boil a kettle of water and add enough water to cover everything.  Add the squash and potatoes and mix everything together.  Cover and bring to a boil.  Turn the heat down to low and simmer for about 1.5 hours.  Add the canned beans and cook for half an hour longer.  You can probably add the beans with the rest of the vegetables too.

If the potatoes and squash aren't falling apart then you can mash them a bit to thicken the stew.  Serve with bread or other carbs of your choice.

Serves 6-8

2016 Summer Donair Quest

I'm going to restart this thing because I need a place to stick reviews from our great Summer Donair Quest.  We've slowed down quite a bit now that we're not cycling but (good) Edmonton donair shop suggestions are still welcome.

This summer as a family bonding activity I suggested that we try out various Edmonton donair shops on Saturdays and then I posted a few sentences about each one we tried on twitter.  People have been curious about out findings but searching through old tweets is annoying, so I'm going to compile all my listings here where they can be easily linked to & seen.

So without further ado, here is my archive of donair tweets for 2016:

The Intro:

I've decided to take Neil on a donair-eating adventure this spring.  We're trying out different donair shops across Edmonton that look unlikely to kill us.  (It is inspired by this person's reviews: http://www.eatthistown.ca/edmonton-donair-quest/)  Neil wasn't hard to convince. He's totally into mystery yak meat, which is what donairs are made out of.

April 2016

Week 1:
We hit Prime Time Donair in Mill Woods today and it was excellent! The pita was a bit mushy from donair juice but very tasty.  I tried the Prime Time with honey garlic sauce and tzatziki.  I don't think the mushrooms/peppers add much, I think I will have a Classic next time.  Neil liked the Prime Time with butter chicken sauce, tzatziki & cheese. He wants to go back for donair poutine.

Prime Time is conveniently located on the way back from bike rides too, so we'll likely fuel up there on Sundays since High Voltage is closed.  By the way, this is what Neil does on Europe trips: ignores regional food and drags me to donair stands and asian restaurants.  I think the man just wants to go to Asia but never quite manages to get there. We should plan a trip to Singapore and Hong Kong.

Week 2:

Swiss Donair on the north end.  Neil & I both got cheese donairs, his with sweet sauce and mine with tzatziki.  The meat was nicely spiced. My pita was solid, and the tzatziki wasn't very noticeable but didn't drip all over everything.  The tomatoes were a little anemic but going by supermarket prices there's some kind of tomato shortage so I'm not going to complain.

Neil had a donair sauceocalypse; despite the plastic baggie there was sauce everywhere.  I didn't notice a bathroom, so bring wet naps if you go.  Neil's fries were fresh and crispy, overall a good experience... EXCEPT FOR THE TRAFFIC.  We ended up in construction on Henday East, rerouted to construction on Yellowhead.  We haven't finished the ring road yet, Edmonton? Really? REALLY?  But if you're on the north end already then Swiss is a good place to go. (note: the Henday is apparently finished now.)

Week 3:

We tried to hit Queen Donair on Whyte but it was closed, so we went across the street to Mike's Famous, which used to be Marco's.  The other donair review site said they didn't like Mike's donair meat so we weren't sure what to expect. We both had cheese donairs... and actually we liked them just fine. Maybe the meat wasn't as spicy but the garlic sauce had enough flavour for both.  The pita wasn't soggy, there was a lot of meat & veggies, the tomatoes were nice. Neil had the sweet sauce & he liked it too.

My one beef is that the donair was wrapped so that the sauce kept trying to go up my nose. But at least they had a bathroom so I could wash.  Although the soap dispenser in the women's is INSIDE the stall.  Wtf.  What if someone's in there and you need to clean up?  "Hey, can you just pass me some soap under the stall pls?" Why have three sinks then?  The things you discover when you leave your house.




Week 4:

Donair Quest for today: High Voltage.

To tell the truth both Neil and I were a little disappointed with today's donair.  The pita was still nicely grilled and seasoned and the tomatoes and onions were good, but the rest seemed a little on the bland side.  Not sure if it's the meat, the tzatziki or the lettuce.  Still good (and convenient) but didn't quite hold up to some of the others. 

They've changed their menu lately and the donair is now listed as "federaly inspected (sic)" in the best Charles Smart tradition.  Also they are now open Sundays so I'll be going back later in the summer to see if today's experience was a one-off.

Next week we go to either Top Donair or Simon King, and thanks to Paul for suggesting Basha in Leduc and Mike's Sub and Donair on 50th.  If anyone else has any suggestions let me know, there's a lot of summer Saturdays to fill with mystery yak in a pita.

May 2016


Week 5:

Today's Donair Quest: Basha Donair in Leduc.
We discovered that it's got several locations, one of which is like... 10 minutes away from my house but we drove out to Leduc anyway.  We wanted to walk at Telford Lake and look at the waterfowl, of which there were many. There aren't many ducks in Blue Quill.

We both got small donair combos with cheese. The meat was nicely spiced and the pita was soft but not soggy.  The tzatziki was especially good, slightly tart and thick and didn't pool at the bottom of the bag. There's a good range of veggies.  The fries were freshly made but kinda bland, but when the fries are the low point of the meal you know the donair's pretty good.

It looks like they have a bunch of other interesting options on the menu so we'll likely be visiting the Blue Quill location later.  Neil wants to tackle the Sasquatch donair and I'm eyeing their shawarmas and falafel.

 Week 6:

Yesterday's Donair Quest: Duke's Donairs just off the U of A campus.

It used to be a regular lunch spot for us and it was nice to go back. My regular cheese donair was good, if not spectacular.  Pita, meat and veggies were all solid, the tzatziki was pretty mild. I liked the cheese. I usually get the souvlaki there though.  Neil got the larger size donair and it was so full of meat that it nearly defeated him. Not for the small of stomach. 

As usual the restaurant was full of kids and the nice lady behind the counter still remembered us.



Week 7:

Today's Donair Quest: Top Donair.

It's located like... 50 feet away from Swiss Donair which we went to a few weeks ago.  They have an extensive menu of kebabs, donair poutine and such which we will have to go back to sample.  Today, though, Neil and I got regular top donairs. They were a lot like the Prime Time special donairs in that they had additional toppings.  They came with fried peppers, mushrooms, onions and banana peppers. The sauce was like donair sauce combined with garlic bbq sauce.

Aaand they were really good. Like... REALLY good. Neil added these to the top of his list along with Prime Time.  I think I like Top better than Prime Time, although the top of my list had more plain donairs than Neil's. Still, this was a big winner.  Too bad it's all the way at the north end! I'm pretty unlikely to drive all the way up there when there's half a dozen great places south.  But if you're on the north end, Top Donair is worth visiting.

June 2016

Week 8:

Today's Donair Quest: Simon King Donair.

It was decent. Not one of the best ones but not bad. Nothing really outstanding about it.  The meat was nicely crisped, the pita was not dry or soggy, the veggies and sauce were veggies and sauce.  There wasn't a pool of sauce at the bottom of the donair which is always nice. I'm not a fan of fishing for meat bits in a pool of sauce.  There *was* wrestling on their television which I think added some entertainment to the experience.

Week 9:

Today's donair quest: Simply Donair on 50th street & 90th ave.  We drove by it last time on the way to Top Donair.  I got a small donair with cheese and garlic sauce, Neil got the sweet sauce as usual and also poutine.  This donair seemed more cheesy than some of the others. The pita was small but held together well and was nice and soft.  The meat was cut into smaller pieces but was nice and spicy. The garlic sauce was plentiful but hardly garlicky at all.  The veggies were a high point this time, they were fresh, good quality and there was lots of them. I was pleased with my onions.

Neil's poutine was melted cheese (not curds) and cheap gravy but the cheese was plentiful and the gravy good enough so he enjoyed it.  I prefer my poutine with peas and mushrooms but the few cheese-covered fries I had were inoffensive.

Week 10:

We went to Richard's Donair on the north side. Both of us got cheese donairs and Neil got fries.  The donairs were good but nothing special. The meat was a little less spiced, Neil thought the taste of pepper was more pronounced.  He liked that. I didn't really notice. I had garlic sauce which had a slight tart tang to it (which was nice) but was not very garlicky.  The vegetables and pita didn't stand out. It's a perfectly solid donair if you live in the area but I wouldn't drive across the city for it.

Tomorrow we hit Sir Donair with my brother guest starring in Donair Quest. We'll see what kind of donairs he's into!  Sweet sauce or tzatziki? Lettuce or no lettuce? Stay tuned!

Week 11:

Today's Donair Quest: Sir Donair on 118th Ave. and 142nd St. As recommended by my brother.

 

According to him it's somehow connected with Jomaa's Pizza & Donair in Fort McMurray, which has always been popular with him & his friends.  He recommended their sour cream-based sauce and it is quite good. Neil had the usual sweet sauce because he likes it.  Both Neil and I liked the meat, which was nicely peppery. The veggies and pita were forgettable but not bad in any way.  As I said, I liked the sour cream sauce. 

They also have a number of other things on the menu.  Neil noticed a donair meat lasagna that he is intending to come back for. There's also donair pizza but lots of places have those.  Not so many donair lasagnas around, though. I may have to try one too, I bet it's pretty good.

July 2016

Week 12:

Yesterday's Donair Quest at World's Finest Donair downtown, guest starring VJGoh.

We met up with Jan for lunch while he was in town. Montreal has a dearth of donair places & he was suffering from a donair deficiency.  World's Finest was close by. We're a little skeptical that it's THE world's finest, but Neil pointed out that "fine" has two meanings.  So maybe all the other donairs in the world are just a little more coarse. We'll have to investigate this possibility for science.

Anyway all 3 of us got cheese donairs. Neil & Jan got sweet sauce and I got tzatziki, Jan got onion rings and Neil & I split fries.  The donairs were well supplied with meat and onions. Neil & Jan both liked the sweet sauce. The tzatziki was good but a bit watery.  There was maybe a bit too much lettuce and definitely not enough tomato. Everyone thought the tomatoes weren't all that great.

The meat was less spicy than some of the others we've had. Jan liked that it was a bit sweet. I thought it was more salty than some others.  I think the lack of other spicing brought these milder flavours to the front. The pita held up well even when it was soaked with sauce.  Neil liked the fries to begin with but thought that some of the later ones were not as good. The seasoning salt was pretty good though.

The final verdict: VJGoh said he'd go again, he thought it was better than the place across the road that he'd tried several years back.  He recommends getting takeout and walking a block south to eat it while looking over the river valley.  Neil & I thought it was a decent donair. We'd go back if we were in the area but it didn't measure up to our favourites.  I liked sitting at the bar and staring at the downtown denizens. They're a more varied lot than you find in the suburbs.  Lots of very fine cyclists and joggers going by. I miss living downtown just a little bit, although I like the quiet of the older suburbs.  Like on Friday someone tossed a glass bottle out an apartment window on 116th & narrowly missed our car. I don't miss that.

Week 13:

We went to Eddie Donair on the north end, about 20 blocks north and a little west of Swiss and Top Donair.  Both Neil and I were swayed by the specials. He had the Eddie Special donair and I had the Philly Cheese donair.  Either is $12 for the regular. 

The Eddie is spicy, with hot sauce and banana peppers.  Neil liked it.  He thought the vegetables were pretty good, the meat was nicely fried and the pita was okay.  His only caveat is that you can get something similar at Prime Time, but for standard donair prices.  The Philly Cheese was pretty deluxe. It comes with bacon, green peppers, bbq sauce, mustard and mayo.  Plus the standards like lettuce & cheese. I also thought it was great. It was a good sauce combo for me, the meat went well with it.  I don't think the bacon added much, and the pita was maybe the low point (being merely okay).  The meat was nicely spicy.

Both Neil & I thought it deserved a spot near the top of our list. But we did get the specials... I wonder how their regular donairs stack up against the rest. Still, I have no regrets because that was pretty damn good. 

Still left: Queen Donair (will we ever get to this place?) and a new recommendation: Nikki's at Westmount.  Plus about a frobjilion other donair places that haven't killed anybody that we know of.

August 2016

Week 14:

Donair Quest: Special Calgary Edition. 

Today we went out to Jimmy's A&A Mediterranean Deli with my brother to pick up dinner for the family.  It's a little place that has samosas, donairs & shawarma, olives, spices and the usual sort of things one gets at a specialty grocery.  

Neil & I opted to try the combo, which is not a combo-with-fries but a chicken & beef donair/shawarma frankenwrap. It came with garlic sauce, lettuce, tomatoes, onions and banana peppers. We got the medium, which was pretty sizeable.  The pita was soft and survived quite well, considering that we got it to go and drove it around for a bit before we ate it.  The vegetables were fresh. The sauce was garlicky but both the sauce and the meat could have used a bit more flavour.  I think without the banana peppers it might have been a bit bland. Neil thinks that he would have preferred either the chicken or beef solo.  Both were good, though. Overall we agree that we'd put it above the average for the places we've been, although not at the top.

 

And that's it for our own 2016 Summer Donair Quest! I may add another post with any additional donair places we visit.  And don't forget to send suggestions for next year!

Welp, we're in the middle of the worst April blizzard to hit Edmonton in 20 years (I like how it's described as "worst" rather than "only.) This is what the world looked like on Friday, when I went out to take photos of rabbits courting out by Ag For:



As you can see, plenty of rabbits and no snow in sight:



On Saturday it started snowing:



And then it snowed some more:



On Sunday I measured the snow on the patio table and it was almost 6 inches deep. On Monday morning we dug the front steps out because it was also windy and the snow had drifted onto our stairs and against the house. It took us an hour to get to work because we stood at the bus stop for 20 minutes, I got tired of waiting and went back home to pick up a warmer coat. When we stepped out the door a couple minutes later, the bus passed us. We did eventually catch a bus, though.

On our way home, we saw a snow-covered rabbit in a divet under a lamp post. Brown rabbits covered in snow look awfully pathetic.

These pictures were taken this morning. It's *still* snowing. But we're staying home.

As you can see, the snow on the patio table is probably about a foot deep:



We've got some interesting drifts forming on the roofs in the neighbourhood. Here's the one on our garage:



We've got an even better one out front, but I'm not going out there until it's time to shovel again.

Update

It's been a few weeks, so here's some news!

NB and I endured a short-lived but annoying plague of fruit flies. We seem to have removed whatever it was that they were feeding on, though, because they seem to have died out. NB caught a cold, and then he didn't want it any more so he passed it on to me. I got a crab for my birthday! :D It was very exciting.

One evening we saw a porcupine in our backyard! It was too dark to take photos of it, but we watched it from the sunroom. It had its back turned to us and was wobbling gently, so that it looked like a grey gelatinous blob. We watched it wobble for a while and then got bored. The next day NB found an apple core in that spot, so it was probably dining on the few leftover fallen apples. We've kept an eye out for it, but it hasn't returned (as far as we know).

At the beginning of November some component of our furnace fan broke, so that it wouldn't stop running. We discovered this at midnight on a Saturday, of course, after it had been pumping cold air into our house for an hour. Luckily it's still not all that cold outside. We called the emergency furnace line, but the furnace guy didn't show up until Monday. We had to control the fan manually all day by using the circuit breaker. By Monday, the fan had managed to "fix" itself. We thought we might buy a new furnace, but the furnace guy recommended against it. He said that the old furnaces are far more reliable.

We've found some contractors to do our roof -- they were recommended by my boss, who has used them for his house and all his farm buildings. They won't be able to start until the spring, but that's just as well.

Apart from that, the weather has been fairly good, so we've been cycling in -- NB usually, I occasionally. The new (temporary?) bus station by Southgate is irritating, but they're putting up some heated shelters so hopefully that gets done before the really cold weather hits. There's still construction everywhere. It's very irritating.

Anyway, that's mostly it for us.

October

So, there's still not much happening at Casa Gazza. We finally put down the last of the hardwood in the sunroom. Now we just need to buy some baseboards. We looked at the available options when we returned three out of our four remaining hardwood boxes to Home Depot (the other box had reached its 90-day return deadline a few weeks ago). It looks like we'll want to paint our baseboards white to match the walls, so we probably won't be getting around to that until spring. But the sunroom is basically ready for use, give or take the elusive leak in the ceiling.

We didn't do much for Thanksgiving this year. My brother was in town and the three of us went to the Blue Plate Diner for dinner on Sunday. Then on Monday I cooked and mushed a medium-sized pumpkin for pie purposes. If you need to cook pumpkin pieces for pie, but aren't sure whether you want to roast them, I definitely recommend microwaving rather than steaming. I spent an hour steaming pumpkin bits in the wok (we have a bamboo steamer we almost never use) before getting sick of it and discovering that you can just microwave a covered casserole dish full of pumpkin in about 6 minutes.

Next week we'll be turning pumpkin mush into a pie or two.

Neil spent some time cleaning up the mess in the sunroom and library and putting some shelving together this weekend. We've also cleaned up the yard a bit. Neil mowed and picked up apples, while I pulled up a LOT of baby spruce trees last weekend. Luckily, the weather has been nice for the most part.

And that's about it. Time to go into winter hibernation!

Not really New!

I don't actually have much new news, but the long time since the last post made me think I should put something up.

My video card was acting kind of flaky, so I replaced it. A good video card is finally more expensive than a really good CPU + 1GB of memory, which is kind of amusing. Fortunately it's amusing in a good way: it's mostly because CPUs are less than $200, even for ones that are pretty much top of the line, and I expect to start finding 1GB memory sticks in my cereal boxes any day now.

I'm playing a new video game: Bioshock. It's been a surprisingly long time since a good single player computer game has come out. There are definitely a lot more console games now.

The sunroom is almost finished: it just needs the last row (where the boards need to be cut lengthwise) and some sort of baseboard/edging. It's still not leaking, which is irritating, because I'm not quite sure I trust it. I almost want to say "yeah, it's still leaking. Come have a look!" because I don't think they'll drop by if I say "it seems to be fine, can you check it?" After that, the next stop is in fix-the-roof-ville.

Still doing Wing Chun. Made spaghetti and sausage instead of spaghetti and ground beef meat sauce.

Back!

NB and I are finally back home. We arrived yesterday afternoon. Our house didn't burn down, our bikes, computers and tomatoes are still there, and all the plants are happy and well.

And now, for a weekend of recovering from our vacation!

NB has already uploaded his vacation photos here. Mine are slowly going up here.