Liam finally cleared off enough space on the laptop for me to download, edit and upload the Vancouver pictures from the fall. They are pretty darn good. Especially that one above right there. It’s like, the best picture of me ever.

It’s surprising how happy I am in these pictures. I mean, I’m not a grumpy person or anything, that’s actually why it’s kinda surprising. I’m pretty happy, but I am so much MORE happy in these pictures. Vancouver was a fine place to visit indeed.

I finally uploaded my edited pictures Vegas. Here I am outside of a trashy casino with a fabulous sign (tres Las Vegas, no?).

I’ve embedded a slideshow or – if you’re mobile – you can click on the above image and go straight to Flickr.

Man. I still have 10 days worth of Vancouverness to download, edit and upload.

I have seen so many things in the past few weeks, I think my brain is still overwhelmed from it all. I have a lot of little thoughts to share.

• VEGAS! I’ve just edited the pictures from the first leg of our travels, and I have gone from being on the fence about the place, to deciding I would totally love to go back again! It was exhausting, but soooo much fun. (The picture is from a hidden goldfish-filled atrium at the gorgeous Wynn Hotel and Casino.)
• VANCOUVER! I’ve been there before, but with family doing various touristy things, but (as I’ve often said) I just don’t care about stupid old mountains and ocean. They’re pretty and all, but they’re just not life changing. But this time, the pace of life there, the friends we have, the friends we made, the trout lake farmers market, the brunch at Cafe Medina, the organic shops on Commercial Drive, the friendly bus drivers, the proximity to so many amazing places (Bellingham, Japan, Hawaii, California, Oregon) , the nighttime Catan games… Those were all pretty life changing for me.
• I want to purge my apartment of all extraneous things, and am trying to spend a little while each day de-cluttering.  We enjoyed Vancouver so much that it made me really want to lighten my load so that if the opportunity ever arose, we could just pick up and move – there, or to anywhere really.
• I always try to find locally made jewelery when I travel, and have come up empty on my last few trips, unfortunately. But as we were leaving, the lovely and amazing friends we stayed with mentioned Pyrrha. I took a look at their stuff when I got home, and fell in LOVE. I want this necklace. Real bad.

I made this toad-a-hole with Japanese taro bread I got from my local Asian supermarket, so if the bread looks purple, it’s because it was! Naturally purple bread!

Toad-in-a-hole is pretty much my favourite breakfast. It’s even more delicious with taro bread.

I took these on the weekend. I went to IKEA to stock up on summer entertaining stuff (hopefully I get to use it lots this year). Anyway, It made me realise I have more than plenty pretty-pretty matchy-matchy housewares. I am a lucky girl.

I have finally (finally, finally!) sorted through, and edited our photos from France, and posted the best of them up on the series of tubes for all to see. To see them all, just just click here to go to their set on flickr.

We are brining our first turkey, and it does look rather pretty (as Nigella’s Christmas cookbook said it would). I’ve never made one before, but since they were on sale, and I got a big honking roasting pan for a wedding present, I figured: why not?

In other less pleasant new, as you could tell from my tweetings, we have Christmas mice! Not as cute as it sounds, I’m afraid.

Thankfully we have a house full of (now) seasoned mouse hunters, and have caught and released all the creatures we’ve found so far.

Also thankfully, they seem to solely be living in our lower kitchen cupboards, which store mostly cookware and well sealed pantry goods.

The little buggers were smart enough to claw through the plaster in the exact right sliver of a spot on the wall, which was not covered in wood, and would give them entrance to our cupboards.

They were not, however, smart enough to choose a house wihout 3 resident cats.

The first years my parents got married, my mom sewed up some Christmas decorations for their little Scarborough basement apartment out of bright green and red and white calico. She made two lovely stockings, and a bunch of little love birds for their tree.

Every Christmas they get pulled out from storage, and still look beautiful – they’ve held up better than most of our familys other ornaments. And on Christmas morning, if I’m at home I wake up to the handmade green stocking, at the end of my bed.

So, now that this is our first married Christmas, I figured I’d make some little love birds for us too, out of more scraps leftover from the wedding

This is my wonky little birdy prototype. He’s a little funny looking, but he’s a first attempt, and I think once I tweak the placement on the next one, he’ll be looking much cuter.

But now… Mmmmmmmmmmm… Liam is baking bread! So excited!

Today we decorated while listening to Bon Iver and Fleet Foxes on vinyl – both really cozy winter albums.

I even crafted up a new garland for the tree – it was just little circles cut out of scrap fabric from all those banners I made for the wedding. I just ran them through the sewing machine in a row. Easy!

In fact, I think I’m going to make a more thorough attempt at holiday crafting this year.

This is our new little media centre.

Yeah, it’s pretty sweet.

I like that I’ve contrasted our new (not so classy) gigantic tee vee with (classy) antique copies of Dickens procured in England. That is how we roll.

The new tv bench is one of my favourite parts of this set up though. It’s just from Ikea (of course) but is built rather solidly, out of wood rather than a wood-like product. It’s birch, and reminds of Scandinavian kindergarten furniture for some reason. There’s something pleasantly minimalist, and somehow friendly about it. It’s open in the back (meaning cords from all those consoles are an issue) but we rather cleverly stuck some baskets under it to hold all our various componants and controllers.

And warning everyone: because of all this I may just become even more of a hermit than I normally do this winter. But wouldn’t you too?

I still haven’t really talked about Paris.

I think I’m still absorbing it.

When I got back from my last big vacation – London a couple years ago – I hated being back in North America. I watched the BBC because all accents that weren’t British felt like they hurt my ears to hear.

I actually wanted out of Paris, bad by the last couple days – but not because I hated it.

I was sick with pandemic flu, exhausted, overwhelmed and wanted my own bed and North American drugs!

But being back now, living our lives here, every once in a while I am reminded of a moment, a view, a time on our honeymoon, and am transported back, quite distinctly.

Yesterday I was hit with a remembrance of perching on the edge of a crooked little cobblestone street – more of an alley, really – in the old Jewish neighborhood, with night time revelers, and scooters flying past us while we gobbled up some of the messiest and most delicious falafels of our lives.

I think that little trip of ours is going to carry us through our lives. Which I guess, is exactly what a honeymoon should be.

A couple years ago, there were a bunch of one pot wonder dishes floating around on the food blogs that involved chicken cooked in with rice. I usually have pretty specific methods of cooking rice, so the concept of just throwing it in a pot with a bunch of other stuff seemed pretty far out to me.

How did the chicken cook properly!?

How did the rice not stick!?

How did it all not end up one gloppy mess!?

Then I came across everybody like sandwiches version, and I knew I had to give it a try anyways.

And… it was delicious. Not gloppy at all. And the chicken was roasty and toasty and perfectly cooked!

Then I forgot about it for the last two years…

But I brought home a beautiful bright red Staub cocotte from Paris, and suddenly one pot dishes were on my mind. As were the rich, rustic flavoured foods of North Africa, like the Tagine I had in a little Tunisian restaurant in the Latin Quarter.

And I was reminded of that one pot chicken and rice that was so delish. And perfect for a dreary November.

So here’s my take on the dish – with a little bit of North African flair – although to be fair, they’d probably use cous-cous instead of rice. But since Liam actually said he liked this better than the food we had in Paris (high praise indeed) I recommend sticking with rice. But you could easily make this vegan, just like Kickpleat suggests by substituting chick peas (a very North African choice, by the way).

One Pot Chicken and Rice – with North African Flavours

Rub:
• 1 tsp Paprika
• 1 tsp Siracha (or equivalent of cayenne/hot sauce)
• 1 tsp Salt
• 1 clove Garlic (minced)
• 1/2 tsp Cinnamon
• 1 tbsp extra virgin olive oil (important for that extra olivey flavour kick)

• 2 pounds bone in chicken pieces, skin removed
• 1 onion
• 1 red pepper
• 1/4 cup green olives (chopped)
• 1/4 cup crasins
• 1 1/2 cup long grained rice (I use scented or Jasmine)
• 2 cups water

1. Mix “rub” ingredients and massage into chicken, leaving to marinate for 1/2 – 1 hour
2. Brown chicken in heavy bottomed, large, pot (a cast iron Dutch oven is best).
3. Remove chicken, and sauté peppers and onions in pot til brown.
4. Add rice, olives and crasins. Sauté for 1 minute.
5. Add (well salted) water. Sink chicken back in pot, and cover with lid. Cook until rice is tender and chicken is cooked through (apx 20 minutes).
6. Serve with a wedge of lemon and hot sauce on the side. Feeds 2-4.

One week ago today I was married.

I could make a list of all the things that went wrong (It rained, we forgot our bestman’s tie, we had no non-alcoholic beverages, someone cracked the croquembouche before we got to it).

But none of that mattered because it was perfect, perfect, perfect. Better than perfect, actually.

Despite all of it, I don’t feel that different today.

Happy, certainly…

Well rested (at long last)…

Relieved that we pulled it all off without a hitch (well, maybe that one)…

Excited to be jetting off to Paris in two weeks…

But I don’t love Liam any more or less. I don’t feel any more committed to him than before we slipped on our rings.

We’ve always been connected, always felt that we were forever.

The way I’ve always looked at it this big shindig, is that we were throwing this big amazing party – less to act like the glue to our relationship, the thing that cements us together – and more a celebration of the strength of the bond that was already, always, there.

And that’s what it was: The biggest, best party of our lives. With all the people we love most.

Do you get how perfect, perfect, perfect that is?

These are some of my new things from the shower. My cupboards just looked so shiny and pretty, I had to share.

So far, I’ve been sleeping on satiny new sheets, dining off these lovely dishes, and stocking my gourmet kithen and it’s enough to make a girl feel like she’s on holiday!

Also of note: look how my Fire King collection has grown! My lovely aunt Lisa did a little bit of sleuthing and found out that I love old fire king mugs. So she ordered a pretty little lot of them on eBay for me! Isn’t that so thoughtful! I particularly love the old pink one. I’ve never seen one like that before – isn’t it cute?

These are the invites, if you haven’t seen them yet. I’m pretty proud of them, actually. And I should be – they were weeks and weeks of work!

Pie? You ask.

Yep, pie. We’re asking all our friends to bring their favourite pie in lieu of desert.

Pie is, I guess, the closest thing we have to a theme for this shindig, along with a collegiate, 30′s, Wodehousian flavour (yes, we’re complex, abstract kinda people).

I’m particularily happy with the way it all came together… our concept being rather complex and abstract and all. All those colours, all those themes, all our ideas, they’re in there somewhere, represented and personified. Which is ideal really – they say an invite should be a hint, a taste of what’s to come.

So hopefully that means that all our hard work will ultimately pay off on the big day, like it did with our invites.

This is why I’ve been away from writing. Those invitations. They are beautiful, they are done, they are away, and they’ve mostly been recieved – so I can talk to you about them without ruining any of the surprise.

And so far, everyones been delightfully surprised. I like making a splash with my little bursts of carefully plotted ephemera. It makes all the weeks (and weeks and weeks) of careful plotting and planning worthwhile.

Especially since, now, I’m a little distracted from wedding planning.

What? However could I be distracted from something so vital, so big, so exciting?

Well… Paris!

We’re honeymooning in Paris. Yes, a cliche, I know, but a good one, don’t you think? Something worth doing, worth experiencing, even if it’s been done before.

Finally working on the invites. Actually the bulk of the work is done. I’ve been slow and sluggish working on things, but I want to get it right.

Other than that, I’m enjoying the summer, in a variety of ways. We went to my familys cottage last week, and yesterday we took a stroll down the street through little India looking for shawls for me and my bridesmaids. I dreamed of dressing like an extra in the Darjeeling Limited – and was nearly convinced to by a lady in a shop who told me: “everyone should wear sari!”

Then we got a snack from a street vendor – fresh grilled corn on the cob smothered in butter, lime juices and spices – amazing!

I would apologise for for the lack of reading material, but what are you doing inside reading this? Get out there, enjoy it too!

Honest Ed’s is a funny place. It makes me feel a combination of excitement and depression when I’m inside it.

It’s so old fashioned with it’s flashing lights, it’s antique entertainers eight by tens, and hand painted signage. There’s the smell of cheap, Chinese plastic, thick in the air – obviously toxic.

But then I find certified organic shampoo for sale, and all is forgiven.

You can’t go in expecting to find exactly what you want, but often you’ll find something you need anyway.

We’re sitting in a friend’s shady, cool backyard, with a couple of beers, and their dog who we just tuckered out – pretty much completely.

It’s a fancier part of the Annex, bordering on Yorkville and it’s fun to imagine living in one of the beautiul old victorian mansions somday, ripping out the walls and finding treasures and secrets burried inside.

Despite the rather European calliber of strikes in this fair city, it’s been a swell summer so far, and I’m willing to bet it will continue to be one.

I picked up new glasses this week.

I wanted something a little more nerdy, but also sophisticated, and I think I achieved that.

I went all the way to the crazy, gigantic, asian mall here (also known as Pacific Mall) to find them, as I heard from a fellow blogger that there was a good little glasses kiosk there.

The frames I found are by SALT – which is apparently a very trendy california company whose styles are worn by all the celebrities. I just liked that they were a sturdy, classic design, made of a funky, gradated, grey plastic (I’m a sucker for flashy, layered plastics).