blog.olya

we drank red wine. and ate mashed potatoes with chicken. yummy!

also; spent an insane amount of money in sephora - but giddiness guaranteed for next year. how much would you pay for that pleasure?

tim and i were reading the latest LCBO food & drink journal today, and we were talking about one particular ad. the ad showed how much difference the paint can make, where as they actually have not only repainted the room but changed the bed, side tables, added a headboard, absolutely new matching modern set of linens, side lamps, a huge vintage/art deco ish poster instead of the smallish awkwardly framed smaller ones, a new white armchair… and of course they want us to think a $30 can of paint did all that.

regardless.

the poster in particular caught my eye. so i did some brave ebaying, and now i’m drooling over these:

WORLD´S FAIR CHICAGO OLD - POSTER.
ROSSLI CIGARS OLD AD - POSTER.
LOVE this one SO much: POWDER PUFF NUDE GIRL ITALIAN VINTAGE POSTER!
MELE ITALIAN SHOPPING FASHION - great shapes, colors (!)
these are small, but would look fantastic in a kitchen area: 2 VINTAGE ITALIAN KITCHEN PASTA CHEF SPAGHETTI POSTERS

maybe i can shoot something closer to this. but i like the abstractness of that style of drawing! (this picture is not mine:)

cooking tonight: spaghetti in tomato sauce with ground beef and parmesean
ingridients:
1/2 medium onions, finely chopped
2 garlic cloves, finely chopped
1 stalk celery, finely chopped (cut length wise into 3 and chop into tiny bits)
4 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil
1 cube of vegetable stock (homemade!)
1/2 cup of water
1/2 can tomato paste
pinch teaspoon salt, or to taste
2 splashes red wine
bay leaf
1/2 teaspoon herbes du provence

1/2 pound ground beef
spaghetti (for, err, 2 portions, dunno how really much)

heat onion, garlic until tranclucent in oil on medium low heat, add the stock and celery and the water, and heat for about 5 more minutes. add the tomato puree, herbs, bay leaf and heat (for as long as possible , up to an hour - i had only about 30 minutes). add wine about 10 minutes before done.

when the sauce is about ready (or you’re about starving), cook spaghetti (add another cube of vegetable stock to the water to make it the real good thing). brown the ground beef in olive oil, add it to the sauce, warm the whole thing for as long as it takes for spaghetti to cook, serve, eat.

yum.

i wish i had basil! argh.

drinking tonight: kindzamaruli red sweet wine

so, 3 exams are DONE DONE DONE!! datbases went SWEETLY, and psych was tough (3 hours of writing non stop, 2 essays, 5 terms in 3 booklets for 21 pages of writing).

the evening was spent watching csi and enjoying the food and wine. life is so good when you only have one exam ahead of you. and i can sleep in tomorrow. and then i study. but i don’t care, because i am free FREE FREE!

today tim insisted on trying the sidecar drink, and while i wasn’t too exstatic about it while biking down the cold spadina, i must admit it is something interesting.

we ended up getting the best cointreau (which is in turn the best type of triple sec), and the best brandy/cognac - vsop courvoisier, and used fresh lemons.

it is insanely strong, but smooth and definitely warms you up.

The Sidecar was developed during WWI, when a certain regular cusomer arrived at the Ritz on his motorcycle (replete with sidecar), and asked the bartender for a cocktail that would help take off the chill. The bartender was caught in a delema, a drink to remove a chill would appropriatly be brandy, but brandy was traditionally an after dinner drink, and his patron was wanting something before dinner. So he combined cognac, cointreau, and lemon juice to mix a cocktail whos focus was on the warming qualities of both the brandy, and the cointreau, while the lemon juice added enough of a tartness to make it appropriate as a pre-dinner cocktail. So a properly made sidecar should betray its roots as a drink that warms your palate if not your bones