week's muse

There hasn't really been much baking around the birdhouse lately. It's a demonstration of self-restraint in anticipation for tomorrow evening.

Big Taste!

The Big Taste is a ten-day eating festival designed for Calgary foodies which features downtown restaurants and specially coordinated menus for three- or four-course meals at a set price per person. When I heard about it, I became so enthused that I immediately fired a text message to sister bird: a screenshot of the Big Taste mobile homepage.
Almost instantly, arrangements were made, and after poring over the list of participating restaurants and their menus, we chose Blink Restaurant & Bar on Stephen Avenue. I've been following #bigtasteyyc updates on Instagram this entire week.


In other news, I've developed an enormous taste for eggs. I like mine over-easy, so I can break the soft yolk with the tine of my fork and then use plain whole-wheat toast as dipping sticks. It's my new favourite breakfast routine - healthy and light and really satiating. Mother bird keeps me company at the breakfast table and we talk while we eat our egg and toast (and, in her case, coffee).
An alternative to coffee that sister bird introduced to me is diluting two or three teaspoonfuls of sweetened condensed milk with boiling water. It's a hot, sweet drink perfect for mornings or evenings or even just lazy afternoons and I like it a lot more than hot chocolate.

I need to stop eating ice cream!
Wait a minute - this sounds familiar. Didn't I make a similar resolution at the beginning of this blog? Heaven forbid, I'm an absolute failure at resolutions.
(If it makes any difference, I've elevated my taste from the cheap Dairy Queen soft-serve to Purdy's cream.)
Funny how easy it really is to give up a certain food, though, in retrospect. Ice cream aside, I've managed to beat a severe Pepsi addiction, unreasonable cookie infatuation and a not-life-threatening-but-not-very-healthy chocolate problem in the past. I think my new vices are ice cream and muffins, and since muffins are just paper-wrapped miniature cakes, I don't see myself cutting this out of my diet anytime soon. (I love cake.)
I often do wish, if you must know, that I was born without a taste for sweet things.
On some days I like the more subtle flavours, like fresh strawberry ice cream or something minty and light. But other days I indulge to the max and douse pancakes in syrup and pour condensed milk over my desserts and eat lemon bars and cream-cheese danishes, then by the time I crawl under the covers at night, I feel sick to my stomach and so drugged up on sugar that I simply can't think anymore.
I need to find a way to recall this numbness when I next reach for something processed and sugary.


I am a binge eater.
Really not difficult to say at all. It's even simpler to admit it aloud. I'm confessing candidly but not without the ambition to change it.
I've cultivated this tendency to come home from school, saunter in the kitchen, attack everything in sight that tempts me, and then crawl away to my bedroom and inhale a few litres of water in shame and regret.
And it's not really a weight issue; I'm a healthy weight, I might even be underweight, I could care less about my weight. I just don't like how I constantly feel so unbalanced in my diet, never feeling well or right or fine, only too hungry or painfully full and sometimes if I'm not full to the point of being uncomfortable, I'm just not full. There's no meter, not one that I can detect, anyhow, that my satiety travels along as it makes its way to feeling full; the sensation just kind of sits at hungry until one bite too many sends it flying over to the other side in a fraction of a second.


Somehow I find that I'm more excited for Saturday than I am for Friday night. Blink is scheduled for Friday night, but because I know it's there, and I know exactly what I'll be doing and wearing and ordering and eating, I'm just not looking forward to it as much as I am to Saturday and Sunday, which have the potential to be just about anything right now, and that's pretty darn enthralling.
If I had it my way, Saturday would be an adventure with father bird. Last week he expressed interest in taking me to the farmers' market, which I would love to go to! This week I'm hoping that we'll find time to squeeze it in, and maybe grab lunch together there, or around.
I'd also really like to fit in another dining date with mother bird before she undergoes surgery on her right hand, which will foreseeably leave her helpless and in pain and unable to do much in general. Something cheap like Baton Rouge or Swiss Chalet sounds optimal, since father bird will likely come too, and rarely does he appreciate the high prices that come with high class.



This weekend I might get back into baking. I ate all the oranges before I could use any for a Daisy Cake recipe I had bookmarked, but that's okay. I'm sure there are plenty of other things I could make without any fruit.
One of my bucket-list recipes is the crepe cake, but that requires about fifty crepes or so, all arranged with cream between them, then flattened and perfected into a circular shape. Not only am I doubtful that anyone in the world has this much time, I've also never in my life and likely my past life ever made a single crepe, or tried to. Making fifty passable crepes? I think I'll need a little practice first.


In other news, I discovered another pretty beautiful face on Instagram. Her name is Kristina Bazan and she's a young fashionista who runs the blog at kayture.com. Her pictures are so endearing and her image is just so cute and her passion for fashion and the world that she thrives in is simply inspiring. I find it so adorable how she loves to model clothes, take photos, eat out, and jet-set. (Needless to say anyone would love this sort of lifestyle, but she goes about it all with the enthusiasm and attitude of a rookie, or a kid.)



In stark contrast, I am a highly independent, withdrawn, and introverted soul who has been known to kill hours doing nothing but reflecting on the insignificance and boredom of living.
I think I need to start taking some leaves from Kristina Bazan's book.