another saturday night

It’s saturday night,
and my husband went out!
My baby goes to bed at 7.

What is a girl to do with her time?
When she usually stays up past eleven?

Baking, enjoying a glass of wine.
Scheming, thinking of now.
This life is so brand, it’s you that is new
I’ve been always this way forever.

Hey there! I’ve been doing a lot of baking lately- once or twice a week I will make something. I’ve been loving allrecipes.com, a tip from a facebook friend. There are helpful comments and feedback on every recipe, much better than my usual cooks.com. I’ve tried and loved these-

zucchini blueberry bread- I up the baking powder to about 3 tablespoons to make muffins instead- amazing! I did half blueberries/rasberries once, that was fun.

pumpkin loaf- I added a cup of chocolate chips, which was of course delicious. I made this earlier this week and froze one loaf to bring to a family brunch date at a friends tomorrow morning. When did I get so mature?

cranberry orange oat cookies- I made these tonight after buying fresh cranberries on a whim. They have a really nice moist texture and tangy flavour.

For all these recipes, I’ve been substituting half the oil for applesauce and splitting the flour quantities between all purpose and whole wheat. Everything works just fine, and is healthier I suppose. Not like I care- I was joking with a prairie friend last weekend about our mutual love affair with cooking with butter. She scandalously added that she loves to cook with cream, too.  Bold.  Everything I make is home made, and from fresh whole ingredients, so healthy is relative.

We officially bought a house this week, and also sold my old studio on the weekend. We’ve been busy getting our house ready for sale and our agent is coming to take photos tomorrow, finally.  I’ve watched enough home renovation and real estate television over the past few years to know what to do. We’ve stripped it of clutter, and personality, and it’s near immaculate. It looks great!  He is anticipating it being on the market for a week, only time will tell. The Toronto market is hot right now- everyone is buying and no one is selling, so there is competition for the good stuff. Real estate is so emotional. Wah! Yay! Eeek!

Loenne doesn’t love the vacuum, we’ve discovered in the past few days when we’ve been using it so much. She gets scared and starts crying. The solution? Yell “Vacuuuuuum” in a really loud, fun voice every time you start it up. Works like a charm.

I am busy dreaming and scheming about our new house in Maple. It was built in ’81 and the bathrooms and kitchen are original, so we will be doing a complete renovation on those. We are going to move a misplaced main floor powder room to a more discreet location too- which opens up a somewhat small kitchen into a pretty large, potentially dream kitchen. We renovated the house we live in now top to bottom, and we’ve learned many lessons along the way. One of our mottos has been- ‘when in doubt, tile it’ and we’ve become pretty adept tilers. I am ready to take on a complicated idea for my kitchen back splash, maybe similar to the pattern on this mug.

 It’s a little bit Ukranian, a little bit rock and roll- no? I’m not Ukranian, and neither is Dom, but we’ve got a modern-vintage-homey-nature-Canadiana kind of style to our decorating and this fits. I think it would look radical, especially when everything else will be ultra clean and simple.

I could also do something in a bargello pattern- which I also love. Bargello is a really old (centuries old) embroidery style that has a pixelated look that would be easily accomplished with tile.

Scheming design, as usual. Ideas abound. Tood a loo!