Tuesday, April 30, 2013

Menu Plan Update - Week 17

I am not including lunch unless we did something special as we have else been on our own and making do with whatever is in the house.

SUNDAY 
Dinner - with family at One Duke Pub in Hamilton. 1 - fish and chips 1 - ribs



MONDAY
Dinner - roast pork, roast and mashed potatoes with brocollni


TUESDAY
Dinner - leftover roast pork with mashed potatoes and brussel sprouts

WEDNESDAY
Lunch - friends at our place with cheeses and cold cuts from a new find for us in our new neighbourhood  The Cheese Boutique.



Dinner - twice cooked pork (from the remaining leftovers) with vegetables and rice

THURSDAY - shopping new Bed, Bath and Beyond for sheets, mattress cover and oven mitts.
Lunch - Acme Burger Company good burgers but service is slow and inconsistent. Our buns and toppings sat waiting forever for the meat.The Acme Burger Company


Dinner - NEW RECIPE beef stew in the slow cooker. Now that we are settled I am excited to be using all my kitchen gadgets. Stew is stew but I wanted a recipe that I could just throw everything into the cooker with homemade beef stock.


FRIDAY
Dinner - leftover beef stew with garlic flat bread.


SATURDAY - Shopping at St. Lawrence Market

Dinner - NEW RECIPE lamb chops with broccolini and new potatoes

Ruby Tuesday

                              


April 2013 - Toronto

Taken a couple of weeks ago from our condo.

Everyone knows "Mr.Christie, you make good cookies". There really was a Mr. Christie.Scottish apprentice baker William Mellis Christie co-owned his first bakery in Toronto in 1853, five years after he arrived from Huntly in Aberdeenshire. Five years later, he was winning awards for his cookies.


Expansion and relocation brought Christie, Brown and Co. to downtown Toronto where, in 1874, the factory covered an entire block at Adelaide (then Duke) and Frederick Sts.


As his fortunes rose, the once poor baker’s apprentice joined Toronto society and built a mansion for his family on Queen’s Park Cres. He helped found what would become the Canadian National Exhibition in 1879.
Christie died in his Queen’s Park mansion in 1900; the family sold the business in the 1920s and eventually it was taken over by the American National Biscuit Co. (Nabisco) which is now owned by Kraft.
Several hundred employees are now set to lose their jobs when the more than 60-year-old Mr. Christie’s Bakery shuts down this year, and it may be condo dwellers who repopulate the site of the storied cookie factory.




Monday, April 29, 2013

Menu Plan Recap - Week 18



SUNDAY - friends visiting and staying over from Calgary.
NEW RECIPE - Banana bread I will definitely add the Dulce de leche the next time!
Dinner - prime rib with mushy peas, mashed carrots and turnips, broccolini, mashed and roasted potatoes, Yorkshire pudding.


MONDAY 
Dinner - Sunday's leftovers with brussel sprouts


TUESDAY
Dinner - ???

WEDNESDAY
Dinner - chicken curry with rice using chicken thighs

THURSDAY 
Dinner - leftover chicken curry with rice 

FRIDAY- Costco $222.00
Dinner - fajitas using flank steak

SATURDAY -
Dinner - pork chops and colcannon with kale because we bought a HUGE bag at Costco.

It's Monday! What Are You Reading?



 
It's Monday! What are you reading? is hosted by Sheila at Book Journey. For this meme, bloggers post what they finished last week, what they're currently reading, and what they plan to start this week.
My comments are not meant to be recaps of the story lines as I include a link to Goodreads for their synopsis of the book. I am merely stating how I felt about the book without giving any spoilers.


I had planned on reading The Bag Lady Papers which I had borrowed from the library but it turned out to be an 
audio version which I don't enjoy so I returned it and requested a soft copy.

FINISHED THIS WEEK:
The Expats
Kate Moore is a working mother, struggling to make ends meet, to raise children, to keep a spark in her marriage . . . and to maintain an increasingly unbearable life-defining secret. So when her husband is offered a lucrative job in Luxembourg, she jumps at the chance to leave behind her double-life, to start anew.

She begins to reinvent herself as an expat, finding her way in a language she doesn’t speak, doing the housewifely things she’s never before done—play-dates and coffee mornings, daily cooking and unending laundry. Meanwhile, her husband works incessantly, doing a job Kate has never understood, for a banking client she’s not allowed to know. He’s becoming distant and evasive; she’s getting lonely and bored.

Then another American couple arrives. Kate soon becomes suspicious that these people are not who they claim to be, and terrified that her own past is catching up to her. So Kate begins to dig, to peel back the layers of deception that surround her. She discovers fake offices and shell corporations and a hidden gun; a mysterious farmhouse and numbered accounts with bewildering sums of money; a complex web of intrigue where no one is who they claim to be, and the most profound deceptions lurk beneath the most normal-looking of relationships; and a mind-boggling long-play con threatens her family, her marriage, and her life.

I loved this book! As a former IT employee in the banking world I was fascinated with the electronic money moving that goes on. It is an excellent thriller as you twist and turn along the way with Kate as she unravels the schemes.
I also loved their travels around Europe and especially descriptions of Paris life.
I see that some readers had trouble with the flip flopping between venues and time, but that is easily solved by reading the titles of the chapters which refer to Today or Two Years Earlier.




STARTED THIS WEEK:
The Past: A Novel

On June 1st, 1914, Una O’Shaughnessy sends a postcard home from a Cornish seaside town. Back in two weeks, she promises. But seven months later, she still has not returned to Ireland, and she sends another postcard, this one signed UnaMichaelRene (!).

The Past is the story of Rene, this unexpected child, as told by her own child as he searches for the truth about his parents’ mysterious and romantic history. Through the reminiscences of his mother's friend, the pieces of the past begin to fit together into a delicate mosaic of the truth. What really happened in that seaside town? Why does the past seem to hold so many secrets? 

Set over twenty-five years, travelling from Cornwall to Dublin and the Irish Provinces, The Past is a beautiful novel of love and longing, created by one of the preeminent artists of our time.

Blue Monday



Display at Delft Factory in Delft The Netherlands (outside Amsterdam) October 2012

Mosaic Monday


This is a mosaic I did following our fantastic trip to England and Scotland with some great friends in 2010.

Sunday, April 28, 2013

Monday Mural


Posting at Monday Mural


Amsterdam October 2012, I googled this but couldn't find any information on it.






Dreaming of France





The rules for this meme are: Please join this weekly meme. Grab a copy of the photo above and link back to An Accidental Blog. Share with the rest of us your passion for France. Did you read a good book set in France? See a movie? Take a photo in France? Have an adventure? Eat a fabulous meal or even just a pastry? Or if you're in France now, go ahead and lord it over the rest of us. We can take it.
Maybe we can all satisfy our yearnings for France, until we get there again.


Crepes again!!  Paris August 2012



52 Photos Project


52 Photos Project

This week's theme is CONVERSATION.


December 2012 - Las Vegas NV

Chatting on the job.

Shadow Shot Sunday




Shadow Shot Sunday


December 2012 Jerome AZ


Saturday, April 27, 2013

Sepia Saturday

Sepia Saturday

I'm posting at Sepia Saturday today.


As more and more people get their news from on-line sources, you could be forgiven for thinking that the days of the traditional newspaper are numbered. But go back just a few decades and those over-sized, finger-inking, arm-aching beasts were the way that we all found out what was happening in the world at large. My archive image this week dates from July 1969 and shows a group of avid newspaper readers. It comes from the Flickr Commons photostream of the Netherlands' Nationaal Archief. If you are theme-following this week you might care to go with newspapers or readers or benches; or you might want to focus on the specific event that was causing all that interest 44 years ago (is it really that long ago!). Wherever you choose to go, post your posts on or around Saturday 27 April 2013 and link them to the post.


We sold our house in Baie Comeau and my Mom, my sister, two aunts and a cousin went to England for six weeks. This left my Dad and two uncles in Montreal. We came back to Montreal and rented the ground floor of a duplex. However, Dad had to find a job and it took him to Manitoba with CAE as an electrician. He worked there for a couple of years in the early 1960s.
Dad's pay would be sent to a bank account in Montreal for Mom to manage. 

This newspaper article was among the photos and souvenirs that Mom kept. 



CAE OPENED ITS MONTREAL PLANT IN 1954. SINCE THEN, THE BUILDING HAS EXPANDED 16 TIMES, WITH THE NUMBER OF EMPLOYEES THERE MULTIPLYING FROM 500 TO MORE THAN 3,500.


On Saint Patrick's Day, 1947, CAE, then known as Canadian Aviation Electronics Ltd., was founded by Mr. Ken Patrick, an ex-Royal Canadian Air Force (RCAF) officer. His goal was to "...create something Canadian and take advantage of a war-trained team that was extremely innovative and very technology-intensive."From the beginning, some of Canada's best known industrialists formed the company's board of directors. In 1951, Mr. R. Fraser Elliot joined the board and became its Chairman two years later.

A new direction
The 1960s began with the award of two milestone contracts. The first was a military contract from the Canadian government for six F-104 Starfighter simulators. The F-104 program was the company's first experience with radar land mass simulation and the incorporation of a visual system, a motion system and a compact mission recorder. Within a five year span 26 additional units had be purchased by five other North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) countries.

For the first year CAE Industries Ltd. operated out of the St-Laurent plant. In 1964 it's offices were transferred to the Place Ville-Marie complex in Montreal's city core. In 1976, it moved once again to its present location in The Royal Bank Building in downtown Toronto.



Sandwiched between the DEW Line and the Pinetree Line, the Mid Canada Line (MCL), also known as the McGill Fence was a series of military sites designed to function as the second line of detection. Its purpose was to detect enemy aircraft that had penetrated south of the DEW Line into the heart of North America. This system operated on the "Doppler" principle. Conceived during the "Cold War" in 1951 it wasn't until January of 1958 that the line became fully operational. The MCL sites were strategically located along the 55th parallel from the Alaska border to the Atlantic Ocean. At its peak, it consisted of 8 Sector Control Stations and approximately 90 unmanned sites about 30 miles apart. With the 1960's came improvements in technology and jet aircraft design in particular which rendered the MCL no longer economically feasible or strategically required, so it was shut down. The western sites were decommissioned in January 1964 and the eastern sites in April 1965.





The following extract is taken from the book "A History of the Air Defence of Canada 1948 - 1997" by the NBC Group
RCAF Cranberry Portage (Sector Control Station 700) was located on Athapapuskow Lake, one quarter mile form the village of the same name and roughly 36 miles southeast of Flin Flon MB. By April 1957, it was up to full strength. As with other sites, it was limited in the service it could provide; in this case, detection only. Cranberry Portage was operational in the beginning of the following year and supported by RCAF Station Winnipeg. As with the other Sector control Stations on the line, it was responsible for the maintenance of a number of Doppler sites that branched out in each direction. RCAF Station Cranberry Portage closed in January 1964.


Source


Weekend Cooking



Weekend Cooking is open to anyone who has any kind of food-related post to share: Book (novel, nonfiction) reviews, cookbook reviews, movie reviews, recipes, random thoughts, gadgets, quotations, photographs. If your post is even vaguely foodie, feel free to grab the button and link up anytime over the weekend.You do not have to post on the weekend. Please link to your specific post, not your blog's home page.



Grabbing a hot dog in the Borghese Gardens in Rome 2004


Saturday Snapshot



Saturday Snapshots is hosted by Alyce at 
At Home With Books. 





In October 2012 we took a Rhine river cruise aboard the MS Amadeus Princess.


We had sailed earlier in 2012 aboard the MS Avalon Creativity along the Seine and also aboard the MS Sound of Music along the Danube. I would rate the Avalon by far as the superior cruise for comfort and service and quality. The Sound of Music was also great for comfort and service but less so on quality. Amadeus was our least favourite, comfort was great but service definitely lacked as the crew were not friendly at all.



The MS Amadeus Princess has a total of 78 cabins and 2 suites. Each cabin is furnished with a bed, TV, toilet, wash basin, shower, cabinet, telephone, writing desk, chair, safe and French balcony. These rooms were much the same on the other ships.
The dessert tables were amazing aboard the Amadeus, however.



Friday, April 26, 2013

Saturday's Photo Hunting





I used to be a tea drinker but over the years of working I became a coffee drinker.

This was taken last spring in Austria as we were on our way to Salzburg, home of The Sound of Music!


We stopped for a break along the autobahn and how I wish our highway stops were as pretty as this. Landzeit own and operate the restaurants and hotels along the autobahns in Austria.
We ordered the Mozart Kaffee as was recommended by our guide and we were given the mugs to take with us!


Mozart Kaffee recipe
1 1/2 oz Mozart® Black chocolate liqueur
5 ozhot black coffee
1 1/2 oz whipped cream


Pour mozart and coffee into an irish coffee cup, and stir. Top with cream, and serve.





Weekend Reflectiions


Click to see the rules and to take a badge for yourself.
Posting at Weekend Reflections.

I wrote about the Chapel of the Holy Cross here and again when we revisited Sedona AZ and the church in December 2012.

It is built into the surrounding majestic red rock. 

Friday Finds - Recipes

Black bean avocado brownies


Recipe and image source


English muffins


Recipe and image source


Foolproof potato salad from CBC Steven and Chris Show
Foolproof Potato Salad
Recipe and image source


Cabbage slaw also from Steven and Chris
Foolproof Cabbage Slaw
Recipe and image source

Cinnamon pecan coffee cake
Overnight coffee cake @beautyandbedlam Cinnamon Pecan Coffee Cake
Recipe and image sourceTex-Mex bacon burger with chipolte ketchup  as seen on GMA.


Recipe and image source

Beer and cheddar soup
Beer Cheddar Cheese Soup
Recipe and image source

Pioneer Woman's favorite sandwich a fancy grilled cheese.


Recipe and image source


Marlboro Man's favorite sandwich


Recipe and image source 



No bake mini key lime cheesecakes

Recipe and image source