As some of you may know (or may have guessed, based on the fact that I wear an inordinate amount or gore-tex), I am a fan of camping. I like camping in the rain, in snow, and also in comfort, when it’s available. I camp surrounded by good food, good books and nice wine, but the most important thing to me is camping with great friends.

My female friends make for particularly entertaining camping mates, due to heightened creative instincts, coupled with a lack of some basic camping skills, and a habit of bringing an abundance of People magazines, but perhaps, no tent. Just as an example. No matter what our shortcomings are as campers, we make up for them with innovative new cocktails (boozy cowgirl coffee, anyone?), giant meals cooked on (scarily) open flames, and the most stylish and functional camping attire around, complete with plastic grocery bag over-coats.

So: This weekend I am embarking unpon my second all-female camping excursion, and to celebrate and document the occasion, I am launching my new website, ladycamping.com… I will do my best to bring you stories, tips and adventures from my motley crew of outdoorswomen, but I also invite you to join me. Take your girlfriends camping. See what happens. Then write about it, take pictures or video, and send it all my way. Contributors welcome!

Yay for Lady Camping!

Because I am a grownup with a mortgage and a job I love, I am planning to do my school part-time while working full-time. Have any of my readers (all 3 of you!) attempted such a thing, or know someone who has? Got any advice?

Nope!

The Indigo Girls are still here, folks, and thanks to YouTube we can relive all of our favourite lesbian folk rock memories. So get out there, google that tune you LOVED (you know it’s still stuck in the back of your head somewhere), lock the window and doors, and let loose. Sing, cry, belt it out like you did back when you were first learning how to harmonize while playing your acoustic guitar in the stairwells of the dormitory, and that your parents were wrong about some things, and that you were MADLY IN LOVE with the hot foreign student on campus (but he had a girlfriend back home! WHY???!?!?!?!) … The Girls knew exactly what you were going through and they sounded AMAZING, if you could hear them over the sound of your own bawling… You know, before you became a jaded singled lady with a cat and a blog about nothing.

Go for it.

Love Will Come To You.

Learn to pretend there’s more than love that matters.

Dear Reader,

Do you ever get tired of running to the computer several times over the course of preparing one focaccia recipe to check – again – how many teaspoons of salt it called for? (hint: the answer was one, no matter how much you like salt.) Do you get annoyed having to flip between open tabs in your browser’s window because you were checking out a conversion chart for grams to tablespoons (hint: they don’t convert), plus trying to review the proper method to proof yeast (warm not hot, add sugar), and also keeping the bread-baking tunes pumping with a quick youtube playlist? Yes, reader. The innevitable result is crusty dough on your keyboard, a trail of flour leading to your computer, to the liquor cabinet, the TV remote, and eventually to your cat because she was being cute and you had to pet her and – oh! I should get a fire going for you my little meow-y lady love, and … what was I doing just then? Oh right! That youtube playlist! I wonder if I can find that awesome tune from the grade five dance parties. Okay for real, why is there dough everywhere? And what is that burning smell?

Well, dear reader, may I introduce to you… the Kitchen Library. Stock your kitchen shelf with cookbooks, and refer to them everyonce in a while, instead of running for the internet every time.*

You are welcome.

* By all means, keep referring to those idiotic reader-submitted recipes if you love the helpful reviews with such thoughtful feedback as: ” I tried this but doubled the water, omitted the spices, baked it 50 degrees hotter and swapped in [insert food item] instead of [insert completely unrelated food item]. It didn’t work at all. What a stupid recipe! 0 stars out of five.”

Grab the skewers from your barbecue-supply drawer, dust off your glue gun, and treat yourself to the paper doilies from Michael’s. At 1.69, there is no cheaper way to say, Hey World, remember me? I am the single lady who made gluten-free cupakes for the entire office this year, individualized, frosted and decorated. And also planted freaking decorative LOVE FLAGS in them. Yep, I’m the one. THE ONE.

STEP ONE: BE AWESOME. MAKE LOVE FLAGS.

Valentine's Day Pokers

DONE.

Happy Love Day, dear reader. Maybe if you’re not doing anything later, you could come over… BYO frosting.

On why he wrote about almost every discipline in philosophy except aesthetics, Russell replied that he didn’t know anything about it, “but that is not a very good excuse, for my friends tell me it has not deterred me from writing on other subjects.”

Love.

30-Second Goma-ae

Today’s challenge was to use up the spinach stems leftover after yesterday’s lasagna escapade. Luckily for me, I love spinach with an affection most people reserve for their spouses or their children, and spinach stems are a special part of the experience. Raw, they are magical green straws full of that sweet, fresh, slightly soapy flavour… like pixie sticks for rabbits. When you are working with bunched spinach, you’re probably going to have spent hours cleaning and trimming it by the time you toss a massive mound of stems into the compost… so don’t! Keep ‘em! Make my 30-second goma-ae instead!

In a pan, heat up a bit of water, a splash of soy sauce, the juice of half a lemon and a dash of sesame oil. When the liquid statrs to boil, throw in your spinach stems, toss for 30 seconds or until wilted, but not completely deflated. Remove stems from the pan and pile them artfully in a cup or a small bowl. Add a tablespoon of tahini to the liquid (still in the pan) and mix it up till a nice thick paste forms. Taste it, and add more of whatever you want.

Drop the paste on the spinach nest, sprinkle with black sesame seeds, and enjoy the tastiest damn cup o’ spinach. Pairs nicely with Van Morrison.

Yes, Chairman Clue, I responded, to myself, or possibly to my cat. I can and I will.

Dear reader, I killed it, and I am now enjoying the spoils of my victory while documenting the process for your enjoyment. Brace yourself.

Imam Bayildi Lasagna with Roasted Cauliflower a la Najib

The recipes that have inspired this venture include Imam Bayildi (translated, “The Imam Fainted”), an eggplant, onion, tomato and olive oil appetizer, the incomparable Najib’s Special, a crispy, lemony, deep-fried cauliflower dish from Vancouver’s Nuba Restaurant, and my own mother’s long-standing lasagna recipe, which she sometimes just calls “Sauce-Noodles-Cheese-Noodles-Sauce-Noodles-Cheese-Noodles-Sauce”… I have no idea why.

LASAGNA or TEN STEPS TO TOTAL FULFILLMENT USING ONLY THE B-TEAM IN YOUR FRIDGE

STEP ONE: Saute some onions in a giant pot, like so. To give this the middle-eastern flavour I am looking for, I added cumin seeds and coriander, then sun dried tomatoes, and kept them going long enough to get transluscent, even a little golden. Does this involve olive oil? Yes, yes lots of that.

Step One: Onions (Note: this is ALWAYS step one)

STEP TWO: Add tomato paste, water, reduce heat. Begin flavour party!

Step Two: Tomato pasty, Very Tasty!

STEP THREE: Roast an eggplant’s worth of eggplant wheels on a cookie sheet (each 3/4 inch thick or so, at 350 for a while, flip once of twice). Cover in lemon juice and salt, then broil a bit longer. Pretty! They look like cookies!

Roast some eggplants. Feel smug.

STEP FOUR: Lay down a pre-cooked lasagna noodle in a glass loaf pan. Brush the pan with a little olive oil and lemon juice, if you’re into that kind of thing. (Note: these are pre-cooked lasagna noodles, as in I cooked them last week and then refrigerated them, not as in “pre-cooked” or instant, type.)

STEP FIVE: Fill ‘er up with the cottage cheese from your fridge. Yeah, right, were you really going to eat that, at the office, for lunch? You should thank me for forcing you to use it all up!

Step Five is where you break out the cheese

STEP SIX: Wilt, chop, and marvel at spinach. Throw a clean, trimmed bunch onto a cookie sheet as the oven pre-heats to prep it without using another element on the stove-top.

Step Six: Spinach!

STEP SEVEN: Lay on the Layers, Players! I did this: Noodles, Cottage Cheese, Spinach, Noodles, Cottage Cheese, Sauce, Eggplant slices, Noodles, Eggplant slices, Sauce. My mom does not approve.

Step Seven: Layers - or whatever

STEP EIGHT: Do not pass GO until you add parmesan cheese to the top. Of EVERYTHING.

Step Eight: Sprinkle the love

STEP NINE: Throw it in the oven, at 350, and put on a good album. This is a good time to dance around a bit, play with your cat, confirm that there is nothing good on TV, check Facebook, and finally, clean up your kitchen, you lazy slob.

STEP TEN: (Protective hand-wear recommended!) Remove hot lasagna from oven.

Buen Provecho!

THRICE-COOKED CAULIFLOWER A LA NAJIB

Yes. YES.

1. Trim and steam a head of cauliflower. Enjoy as much steamed cauliflower as you can eat. Refrigerate unused florets for 2 or 3 days.
2. Then heat a bunch of olive oil in your heavy pan, and drop cauliflower florets into hot oil . As they fry and crisp up, soak them in lemon juice and salt.  Enjoy as much lemony fried cauliflower as you can eat. Refrigerate unused florets for 2 or 3 days.
3. Now, you are ready to make this dish. Simply place your twice-cooked cauliflower in a cake pan. Throw it in the oven while the lasagna cooks. Simple!

FINAL WORDS of ADVICE FROM IRONIC CHEF CLUE-SAN:

Enjoy this meal with Queen’s Greatest Hits and a faraway look in your eyes.

I’ll start with a brief quote that inspires me, from Robert Heinlein. The quote appears before the Foreword of the 2nd Edition of Starting Strength: Basic Barbell Training (a particularly awesome tome I shall return to for comment at another time), and I have tirelessly retyped it for you here:

A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently and die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.

This philosophy makes me feel happy, and also inspired to work on all of the skills I don’t practice for income, but for pleasure. I hope you take something from it too; If nothing else, let it remind you of all the important trades, crafts and abilities in our fellows. For instance, if you are over 50, hug a computer programmer today! And everyone, hug your main order-giver, or hog-butcherer, or ship-conner, because you probably can’t do it all yourself.

Yours for now,

Lady Clue