The 42nd season of the Rideau canal skateway opened yesterday! I was all excited and ready to drag Grandma J and Elizabeth onto the canal, but the conditions website said the ice was "poor" and Environment Canada said it was -23C (or -32 with the wind, if you believe in such things).

 

Since it was supposed to warm up to -5C today, we decided we'd better curb our enthusiasm. Sure enough, the temperature did rise and 5pm found the three of us standing "where the water goes" and admiring the "white white white everywhere".

 

"Do you want to skate first or ride in your stroller first?" I asked. She opted to skate, which tells you how excited Elizabeth was at this first opportunity to actually skate outdoors. Grandma J was impressed to see her moving down the ice, though Elizabeth was a little uncertain about the ice. "My skates are going all bumpy, bumpy, Momma!" She consequently didn't skate on her own too much, though she insisted on trying a couple of times.

 

We checked out the controversial new $750,000 skating huts and were underwhelmed. They are smaller than I expected. They are nice, but they are definitely not $750,000 nice.

 

Elizabeth and I skated from Pretoria Bridge to Fifth avenue. After that she rode in the stroller and even briefly napped. When asked later she told Daddy that "sleeping in the stroller" was her favourite part. Grandma and I skated all the way to Bank street and then back to Pretoria, so we've done the full open length (currently 2.2 km) Elizabeth was all bundled up but her feet got chilly and she howled the last kilometer or so. Then she cried uncontrollably all the way home. "I'm so cold I'm mis-er-able", she sobbed.

 

At dinner she told us all about how she had a "nice blanket to keep her nice and warm". Then she paused, thought about it and added "but I did get a little bit chilly". She's decided that next time we need a bigger blanket, because she's bigger than last year. But of course there will be a next time, because skating on the canal is "very fun". Mommy was extremely relieved to hear this...

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Brendan and I are particularly fond of Greek food. We've celebrated many a significant romantic milestone in Greek restaurants, from proposal to tenth wedding anniversary.

 

We always order saganaki (flaming cheese) for Brendan.  I like flaming cheese too, but in Canada the cheese is usually dipped in wheat flour so I can't eat it. This is very sad.

 

So I couldn't resist when I found myself in a specialty cheese shop just before Christmas and discovered they had the right sort of cheese to make gluten-free saganaki! There are actually several "acceptable" cheeses; what we bought was Kefalotyri, which is an extremely salty hard Greek cheese.

 

Following instructions online, I dipped the cheese in egg and then in gluten-free flour, before pan-frying it in butter. The trick is to cut the cheese thinly enough so that it doesn't take too long to get properly melty on the inside, but not so thin that bits fall off and get eaten by your toddler. I think we might be rather impatient, but somewhere around 3/4cm seemed to work best for us.

 

Once the cheese is melted, heat your flamable alcohol, light it and pour over the cheese. Extinguish the flames by squeezing half a lemon over it.

 

Opa!

 

Or that's how it's supposed to work... We were a little shocked the first time we did this by the huge fireball. Lesson learned: use less booze! Luckily I was leaning way back or I might have lost my eyebrows!

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The best part of winter is getting to shop with a sled.

 

I may need to lobby my grocery store for sled parking though as it takes up an inordinate amount of space in the grocery cart.

 

And Elizabeth would be more "comf'able" in a bigger sled.

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One of the best parts of having Auntie Janice living with us is that Elizabeth gets to learn useful skills without Mommy having to model them.

 

Elizabeth loves handwashing things (and Janice says she's even reached the stage of being helpful with the task!). Mommy, on the other hand, believes that man invented power tools for washing clothes for a reason...

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One of the perks of not "celebrating" Hallowe'en is that we can play "dress-up" year-round.  So when Elizabeth demanded to go to the store in her dinosaur costume, I totally indulged her.

 

A few people cooed over the adorableness of shopping dinosaur, especially when dinosaur got out to help push the cart. But to my surprise (and then amusement!), most pretended they hadn't noticed, quickly averting their eyes.

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