Homemade Sweet Cornbread

This is great for breakfast or as a snack with tea. It's quick and easy to make and you can make it sweet or savory. This time I went with sweet but next time I may do savory with some cheese and green onion to go along with soups and chili that are coming up on the menu later in the month. Sorry, no photos of the process this time.

• 1 cup buttermilk
• 1/3 cup canola oil
• 1 egg
• 1 cup cornmeal
• 1 cup flour
• 1/2 cup white sugar 
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 3 teaspoons baking powder

Start by making a cup of buttermilk if you don't keep any in your fridge, pour it into your bowl or mixer and add the cornmeal. Let the cornmeal soak for a couple of minutes while you get the other ingredients ready and preheat the oven to 400.

Now add the sugar and oil, mix for a bit and then add the egg and mix. Now add all of the dry ingredients and mix until just combined. The batter should be quite thick, pour into a lightly greased pan and thump the pan on the counter to even out the batter a bit. Bake at 400 for 20-25 minutes. Mine baked for 22 minutes and was perfect.

For savory cornbread:

• Only use 1 tablespoon of sugar instead of 1/2 cup, you could also up the salt to 1 1/2 teaspoons if you like
• Add 1/2 cup cheddar cheese and a chopped green onion as well as a shake or 2 of cayenne pepper
• Try cheese and diced jalepenos

Be sure to add these things in with the wet ingredients so that they are well mixed.

30DC2 - Day 4

Here's a quick wrap-up of the day, it's pretty late now and I just want to go to bed and hopefully get an hour or 2 of sleep before Alice wakes up again and spends the rest of the night thrashing in our bed!

• Jon spent nearly the entire day in his studio (working he says)
• laundry was put away
• dishes were put away
• cornbread post was written, that is set up to post tomorrow
• made homemade pancakes for dinner, that recipe post is written and will be up later in the week
• breakfast is set up for tomorrow morning
• Jon took the trash and boxes down
• dishes and floor are going to have to be done in the morning since Jon will have people over nearly all day again
• made another batch of simple syrup
• used the peels from the oranges with dinner to try out a batch of "orange cleaner" that I saw posted on my new favorite blog Penniless Parenting. There are tons of great ideas on her blog, I've bookmarked a bunch of things I want to try in the near future.
• I remembered to pay the hydro bill
• pets were fed
• we had to set up the AC again because it's supposed to be really frigging hot again all week. I wasn't going to set it up today but it got up to 84 with all of the curtains/blinds closed and fans going and I just couldn't deal anymore

Here's the meal plan for the next 7 days. I don't need to get groceries until the 8th. I just have to run out in the morning before it gets too hot for more cream and a bag of flour.

30DC2-Day 3

Today Alice woke me up just after 8 like she usually does. I had a decent sleep but Jon was tired so he slept in a bit. I made us coffee and tea, Alice sat on the floor and played with her toys and read a book while we enjoyed our morning beverages. Once those were done Jon went into his studio to work for a bit and we moved to the kitchen for breakfast. I put away yesterday's clean dishes while we had our cereal and fruit.

I managed to get the laundry washed and hung to dry while Alice had a lengthy early nap then it was lunch time while Jon did the dishes that didn't get washed last night.

We went out to get a few groceries while Jon had lunch and then went to get crickets. We stopped by a yard sale on the way home that I had seen on the way to the store that looked like it had a lot of baby girl clothes. Alice got a t-shirt, pair of pants, pink maryjane walking shoes and sequined silver hightops, all for just $5!

Groceries from the Asian market:

• 2 red onions
• 2 bananas 
• 2 pork chops
• 2 large oranges
• 1 large broccoli crown

All of that came to only $4.99

Groceries from Donald's Market:

• 2 bulk jumbo carrots
• 4 russet potatoes
• 1 package cut cauliflower from the reduced bin for $1 (no marks of any kind on it!)
• 2 packages salmon bones reduced to $1 each

All of that came to $6.15

The cauliflower and salmon wasn't on my list but the cauliflower is perfect for snacking and I plan on using some of it as a substitution in a meal in a couple of days. The salmon bones had a ton of meat on them so I put them into the oven with some olive oil and lemon-garlic seasoning and then easily picked the meat off once they were baked and cooled. I ended up with a full tupperware container full of salmon that I then put into the freezer. Much more meat on those 2 packages of bones for $2 than I would get from buying a $6 fillet.

I will definitely be buying the salmon again when I see it reduced, I put off buying it before because I wasn't sure how to go about preparing it, I didn't want to mess with it raw but then the idea to bake it and pick it apart came to me. We only ever eat fillets of salmon but I think I'll try to make patties or fishcakes or just heat and season it and heap it onto a pile of rice.

I also prepped dinner early since I've been having issues with getting it ready to eat by 6:30 and actually had it ready on time today. I also halved and pitted a large bag of cherries that I bought for $1.29 per pound a couple days ago, those filled a large container and went into the freezer as well for smoothies for what's supposed to be a pretty hot week coming up.

No need to buy anything tomorrow at all, don't really have anything planned either. The apartment is clean, Jon has a session so I may take Alice to the park for a bit. The only things that need to be done are putting away the laundry and dishes and making dinner.

Maybe I'll actually get time to do another project!

Kobo Touch E-Reader review

At the end of July Holly ordered me a Kobo Touch for my birthday. After a lot of research and the recommendation of a friend we went for the Kobo instead of the Kindle, because it's a simpler, more intuitive interface and a little more open with e-book formats.
Besides reading books I thought it would be a useful device for keeping my bus route information and other helpful info.
Shopping around online it seems the price is the same pretty much everywhere so free shipping was the only reason we went with Chapters.ca for the purchase.

Feature overview
Lightweight e-reader with 6" infared touchscreen with wifi available in 6 colors.
2 GB internal storage expandable with microSD cardslot.
Support for multiple content types: ePubs and PDFs from Kobo’s store; Books: EPUB, PDF and MOBI, Documents: PDF, Images: JPEG, GIF, PNG, BMP and TIFF, Text: TXT, HTML and RTF, Comic Books: CBZ and CBR.



Thoughts on the design
When I got the Kobo Touch in my hands it was a little smaller than I expected. Not TOO small, just thinner, lighter and about 1/2" smaller than I thought it would be. The shell is made of plastic with a rubberized feel. There's a diamond pattern relief on the back which is more for appearance than for helping holding the device.
I don't have big hands but I find the Kobo to be a little awkward to hold. Often my thumb creeps over the edge and touches the screen changing the page. With a real book I hate that I have to hold it open so I guess I can't win.
The rubbery texture shows finger grease and prints more than I'd like. The actual screen doesn't have this problem. (see photos)
 

The screen is not bright but it is not hard to read either. It is not backlit like a computer screen or an iPad so eye strain is reduced, but you can't read in low light. A crisp white screen might have been nicer but perhaps that would increase eyestrain.
There are two buttons: the "Home" button on the bottom front brings you back to the main screen, and the sliding button on the top edge turns the Kobo on/off. With the sleep mode activated from the menu the kobo starts up very quickly and restores the last page you were reading. A full restart takes about a minute and starts on the homepage.

Reading EPUB e-books
The books from the Kobo store (EPUB format) are very easy to read on the Kobo Touch. Font size and spacing as well as a few typefaces are available when reading epub and mobi formats.

Reading PDFs
Reading PDFs on an e-reader sucks. You have to zoom in and scroll (and wait for the screen to refresh each time) then zoom out just to read the text clearly. After a page or two of this you realize why the books in the Kobo store are worth spending a few bucks on.
PDFs and most other formats can be converted to a more friendly format with a free program called Calibre. The conversion doesn't always work well though. It doesn't seem to know what to do with text in the header or footer so it ends up randomly in the paragraphs sometimes.

Reading Kindle books
Sometimes Kindle books (from Amazon.com) are cheaper than the epubs in the Kobo store. There are also many ways to get Amazon credit (such as Swagbucks and MTurk) in exchange for your time doing simple tasks. If you have Kindle format books (with DRM) you can remove the DRM and reformat as MOBI using Calibre and a plugin (more info). I did this for one book and it came out exactly as I hoped.

Bonus features - Kobo Sketch
Kobo sketch is a simple drawing app that can be fun if you're bored. Here's a Unicorn.

Bonus features - Internet Browser
Kinda hidden in the options menu is a wifi internet browser. You are able to change the homepage, bookmark a few pages but is pretty limited. It's neat that it's available at all but expect things to take about 15x longer due to the slow loading and clunky keyboard. The worst part of it is when you enter a URL you have to type http then go to the punctuation menu, then :// then go back to the letters for www then back to punctuation etc. You see the problem. Often a light touch for a key press results in doubled letters. The wifi feature also drains the battery very quick.

What's missing/complaints
Bookmarking pages - Seems essential, I can't figure out if it's possible
Save text to a new document - It would be great to select some text or a paragraph and copy it to new document of favorite quotes etc.
Notes/annotations - There is a dictionary and built in keyboard for the browser, I could be completely paperless if I could make notes on what I am reading.
Evernote support - It would be great to have all my lists and articles and notes available on the Kobo for when I don't want to bring my laptop.
Browser should have "http://www." preset in the address bar.

I know some of these feature requests are outside the scope of what an e-reader should do. A device like this should (I hope) be expandable via software updates.

Verdict and final thoughts
For $150 its a cool device that is small and light enough to take with you anywhere. It takes up about as much space as one book but has the capacity for thousands.
It's not exactly everything I hoped, but it doesn't seem any worse than the others and I don't think you can really go wrong with any of the e-readers on the market today. The Kobo is not locked to a specific format like the Kindle is, so for about the same price, it's worth checking out.
I hope this review helped.

30DC2 - Day 2

Here's a wrap up of day 2
I entertained Alice while Holly slept in a little until my vocal recording session.
Holly built some cornbread which we ate for lunch. A recipe is forthcoming.

In the afternoon we went out to get a couple cases of diapers from London Drugs because they were on sale and we had coupons. Coffee was also on sale and we had a coupon for that too.
The floor was swept, the pet houses were cleaned, laundry and dishes put away.

Groceries Day 2
London Drugs - 1KG Melitta Espresso Roast Whole Bean Coffee $6.99 (usually $14.99)
We don't count diapers as groceries.

Tomorrow the plan is:
Dishes
Laundry
Crickets for pet food (really long walk booo!)
a few grocery items to pick up
Pay Hydro bill
a few hours of work

Sunday I have some audio work and Monday is a pretty busy day with a photoshoot, a podcast and more.

30DC2 - Day 1

Fairly successful first day of the challenge.

Some of the less important chores were skipped. The floor will be swept before the studio session in the morning.
We paid rent, cleaned the bathroom, did laundry and dishes and took out the garbage.
In the afternoon we got the money out for groceries for the month. Stopped by Rio's to check the discount meat freezer and got some of the larger and more expensive groceries for the month from Comos.

Groceries Day 1: Total $36.16
Rio's - 2 boneless seasoned chicken breasts, 1lb margarine. Total $3.50
Como Market - 8KG rice, 4KG sugar, 2KG brown sugar, regular tea, corn meal. Total $32.66

We have the meals planned for all of September. Here is dinners for the rest of this week.



We've been planning our meals in Google Calendar for a few years now. It's virtually eliminated the blank staring into the cupboards and fridge trying to figure out what to eat for dinner. Planning the meals in advance means we can make better shopping lists so we rarely run out of something essential for a meal.