Random Thoughts in which I use the phrase "mustards of my youth"

We've been in Quebec for a month now! It feels both longer and shorter than that. While I slowly edit other pictures, here are some random thoughts for the occasion:

• I use an apron when I cook here a lot more than I did at home. I think it's because I have a limited number of shirts. (Of course, that was true at home too, but somehow it didn't feel like it.) 

• I've suddenly gotten much more adventurous with cooking too, or at least more cavalier. Something about being here in a strange place and kitchen has encouraged me to just throw caution to the wind! I've never been so willing before to just put together random ingredients and assume it will work for dinner. I am used to adjusting recipes as I go, but I've usually felt that I ought to at least be referring to a recipe, loosely. But here I find myself just throwing things together, thinking sort of crossly, "Well, I ought to be able to make up a recipe, after twenty years, for crying out loud!" 

• Part of that comes from having an unfamiliar mix of ingredients to work with and a bunch of different kitchen utensils. Since I don't have the usual things, I feel I might as well do unusual things. Not that I am making do like the pioneers, let me be clear. I have a very nice kitchen and a great bunch of equipment. Just different stuff than I'm used to! Somehow it encourages me to toss things in without measuring, add ingredients, leave out ingredients, use whatever I have. And (you will have to ask my family, of course, for independent confirmation) I think it has worked out fine! No huge meal disasters yet (knock on wood).

• Speaking of being adventurous, I suddenly like mustard! That is one of the two foods (along with pickles) I would have told you, as a child, I would never like. To be fair, I have long accepted mustard as an ingredient in things, and in recent years I have even come to embrace it in things like honey mustard dressings or creamy mustard sauces…so maybe this new liking is more like a continuation than a sudden change? At any rate, there are so many mustards here, of all different interesting sorts. On a whim I bought something called tarragon mustard at the store, and it was so good! So now I've been finding others too and I like all of them! (Basil mustard. Hazelnut mustard. Apple maple mustard!) I even like to just spread them on a sandwich and they're amazing! They aren't like the mustards of my youth at all! In fact, when throwing meals together (see above) I often throw in a bit of mustard just for fun!

• It is odd to smell cooking smells that are not from my cooking! Our house is really three apartments, and we're connected with the houses all along the street too, so I often have a sort of subconscious anticipatory feeling ("Mmm, soon I will get to taste whatever I'm smelling!") and then am disappointed to realize it's the neighbor's dinner and not one made in our kitchen for us by some Good Samaritan who has happened by. (The exception was on one of our first nights here when I was anxiously trying to decipher French websites to find parking, and after several hours I smelled food cooking and realized how late it was, and when I went sadly and drearily down to the kitchen to dredge something up, Daisy and Junie had already made dinner to surprise me! Bless them forever for that.)

• I'm sure you're thinking, "But the downside is the BAD shared smells." Well, yes, I suppose. There is an unpleasant sickly-smoky smell in the little antechamber downstairs after you come in the first two doors and before you walk upstairs to the real door of our house. Luckily, there is no trace of it in our house itself. And occasionally I will smell someone's cigarette from one of the neighbors' yards. But all the cooking smells so far have been absolutely delicious. Even when walking down the street! Like a dozen mouthwatering meals all being made side by side in a fancy restaurant!

• The upstairs bathroom in this house has a toilet paper holder I hate more each passing day:

I don't know why it's so bad. Looking at it, maybe you think it might be quite nice for keeping the end of the toilet paper tidy. It is not! The metal flap traps the toilet paper tightly so you can only pull out tiny torn-off fragments at a time. Getting the right amount of toilet paper to unroll is impossible. When the roll is closer to empty, the end gets lost under it altogether and you have to pinch your fingers trying to lift the flap simultaneously with trying to grasp the end. If you succeed, the paper pulls out unfettered and rolls all the way to the floor. When the roll is closer to full, it gets stuck and won't turn at all. I abhor it.

• Graffiti is weird, especially when it tries to make a political statement. And even more especially when it tries to make a political statement in a different language.

• The city is a completely different place in the early morning and at night. The contrast seems much greater than simply morning and night at home, maybe because the number of people around varies so widely. But there have been multiple times I have realized belatedly and with a shock that I'm in the same place I've been before, because I was there at a different time of day.

• The most French French word is, objectively, pneu (tire). You pronounce the "p" and end up with the perfect wrinkled-nose, tight-lipped "eeoo." A masterpiece of a word.

• It's so fun when I randomly run into one of my kids at the store or on the street. I'll have just run out for milk before dinner, and suddenly there are Junie and Gus walking down the street to the ice cream shop. Or I'm heading out for bread at the bakery and I see Malachi running up the hill. It makes this place feel like home.

• This object:

is the bane of my existence, first of all because I have no idea what it is (a chain, yes, but why?) or where we acquired it. We certainly did not pack it at the beginning of the trip. Yet it was already with us when we arrived in Quebec. I suspected Ziggy of appropriating it from Andrea's house, but she says it isn't theirs. At any rate, second of all, it is the bane of my existence because it is constantly fought over. For some reason all of the children under age seven find it indispensable to their play. Absolutely imperative. They cannot build a building, drive a car, pretend to be a policeman or any other thing without it, and unless no other child has it, their enjoyment and indeed, permanent well-being, is utterly impossible. Utterly.

• I wrote on instagram that we only brought one toy on our trip, to wit: a huge bin of magnet tiles. I am sorry to report that having less stuff around is just as great as the minimalists say it is. I love how easy it is to clean up the toys every day! However, that is not the full story. I can also report that the children are able to fight just as much over one kind of toy as over many. And they are able to make nearly as many messes, by the simple expediency of their using any random household object as a toy. They are also able to get attached to and fight over those things (see previous bullet point). And to break them. To sum up: getting rid of all your stuff will not solve all of your problems. 

• The kids' creativity with the Magnatiles™ (mostly Picasso Tiles™ really, I think) is amazing and fun to watch, though. I could do a whole post on the cool things they've built and the interesting ways they've used them. It does make me think we made the right choice of toy to bring!