Dinner with Julie

Curry Night at Jupiter and Strawberry-Rhubarb Pie

At least we have pie. And we’re in Tofino.

It alternated between rain and hail all day today – driving rain and hail and wind, like slurpee splattering from the sky. So windy we couldn’t walk out from the path in the trees onto the beach for fear W might actually blow away.

Also, the zipper on my jacket broke. The only one I brought, having conscientiously packed light. That’s what I get for being all organized – packing light and taking out plenty of cash before our trip.

Then I found out that I had missed an integral part of the Good Bite episode I had been taping and uploading like mad on Monday and Tuesday, which is what set us so far behind leaving town to begin with, and since I am now here and not there and unable to tape the part I missed, I have to do the entire thing over again. From here. Which not only means a day or so of Tofino time taken up by work (which I don’t mind so much as the cleaning myself up and putting on makeup and finding something presentable to wear when I’ve just settled into a nice grubby routine), but that everything I scrambled to get done in Calgary was for nothing and I could have just taken my time getting packed and organized, had a nice normal sleep and left at a leisurely pace and maybe everything would have gone according to plan in the first place. Humph. (Of course this sort of thing is always more difficult to swallow when it’s due to your own disorganization.)

But there’s pie. I’ve been admiring this pie all day; pushing dinner back almost to 3pm just to get my hands on it. I mean, look at it! Some pies are so beautiful I wish I could hang them on my wall.

By dinnertime we were cold and wet, having a large dog in tow who is not allowed in the main house and is lonely in the wee one-room building he has to himself, with his own kitchen, even. We spent as much time as we could hovering out in the wet, came in, tossed everything we wore into the dryer and it seemed to me a good idea that someone else cook dinner. I had heard that Jupiter, my favourite Tofino muffin destination, had started take-out curry nights Tuesdays to Saturdays. My Dad is here for one more night – our trips overlapped – and he loves curry. So I trotted down in the downpour and was excited to find that the daily special (they have three curries on offer: green, red and a daily – biryani, vindaloo, or the like) was butter chicken. But when I got it home and unpacked it was not. Red-yes. Butter chicken-no. The green one was better, but spicy.

But we have pie. As I type this a warm slice is teetering on the arm of my chair, with a scoop of vanilla ice cream (is there any other way to eat a strawberry-rhubarb pie?).

…

It would seem I misjudged the pie; it aint pretty, it just looks that way.

The crust is delicious, but the filling tastes like cornstarch-thickened red. Little flavour; no hint of rhubarb; not even very sweet. Boo. That’s what I get for raising my hopes so high over a fruit pie at the end of March. Ah well. Silver lining: just think of all the calories I just saved!

April 01 2010 | eating out | 11 Comments »

Brown Rice Pudding

We’re in Tofino, in the rain.

It was a long drive, snowy in parts, impossibly overloaded with the groceries we prematurely piled into the car in Vernon. I had a meeting in Vancouver I was late for due to poor calculations and too much construction on the highway. We’ve been behind and trying to catch up since leaving Calgary, and I kind of wish we had just waited out the rest of Tuesday and left at a leisurely pace.

My late meeting had a domino effect, and we found ourselves doing that crazy stressful right-at-the-wire mad dash to the ferry to make the 5 o’clock. As we were pulling up to the booth, I reached down for my wallet, and it wasn’t there.

It appears someone either lifted it while Mike took the boys for a walk during my meeting, or I left it on the roof after our stop in Hope to find a tiny old-school bakery that sells, among other things, big squares of puff pastry filled with pineapple and cream. (I also bought a pie – strawberry-rhubarb – for $4.79.) One guess which scenario is more likely. If anyone in Hope is reading this, a bright blue wallet may be somewhere on the road between Dutchie’s bakery, Tim Horton’s, and the highway.

Needless to say our already heightened stress level took another leap skyward as we excavated the car in the ferry lineup, removing well-arranged suitcases and shoes and toys and groceries onto the pavement while trying to keep the boy and the dog from wandering away. The wallet wasn’t there. My cash (good thing I loaded up before we left), credit cards, business cards, receipts and notes and gift cards and a thousand or so membership cards, all in the brand-new wallet I just bought at Uppercase. My still exhausted mind did not take this well. The ferry ride was an unhappy one, spent morosely trying to figure out which credit cards to cancel and going through everything in the car again. We ate Cheezies for dinner. It didn’t help.

Of course it could be worse. Of course it could. It still sucks.

Sue fed us brown rice pudding before we rushed out this morning. I’ll likely make another pot of it here, to dip into for breakfast, elevenses and snacks.

Brown Rice Pud

3 cups cooked short grain brown rice
2 cups milk
2/3 cup evaporated milk (or half & half)
2 Tbsp. sugar, honey or maple syrup
2 tsp. cornstarch (optional)
1/4 tsp. cinnamon
2 tsp. vanilla

Combine everything but the vanilla in a pot; to prevent lumps, stir the cornstarch, if you’re using it, into the sugar first, or stir it into a bit of the cold milk. If you do use cornstarch you’ll need to bring it to a simmer for a minute to reach its full thickening potential and prevent any starchiness. The great thing about rice pudding is that you can add milk in splashes, cook it until it absorbs, add more, and so on until you get the consistency you want. Even so, the next morning it will likely have thickened and need to be loosened up with a little more milk or cream.

Cook, stirring often, until the mixture is as thick as you like, adding more milk if you want. At the end, stir in the vanilla. Cool.

April 01 2010 | breakfast and grains | 27 Comments »