The Morning After

Coral is getting ready to hop on a jet plane and take her life on an adventure in Paris and London with one of her best friends.

Last year Coral was either pregnant or looking after our little baby rampage.  While this life changing event was going down in her world, three of her best friends all moved to London at the same time.

Wow right?  Coral went through a huge life experience with her best friends thousands of kilometers away.  Now our baby is almost a year old and Coral’s mat leave is ending and the chance has come for her to take a little trip with Alix to Paris and then to London.  It has been a herculean challenge for us to try and scrounge, borrow, beg and squeeze the dollars needed to jet off to London AND make sure the mortgage gets paid and the baby is fed, but somehow we managed.  BUT it still depleted our credit and our wedding savings reserve so we needed to make some changes.  For the past month our eating out has declined fairly substantially, and this month, if the cafe doesn’t have the words “value” and “menu” printed somewhere near the till we don’t eat there.  Problem.  Coral got a massive lust for Japanese Village.  Actually, she NEEDED the steak sauce.  Unfortunately, that would be like a $50 or $60 bill if we packed up our little family so we tried to make it at home.  And it was a triumph.

Coral found a recipe online and off the cuff, I mentioned it on the radio today.  By some act of God or perhaps a divine intervention by a pantheon of Gods, a Zoner who happened to be close personal friend of a chef at Japanese Village called to correct my recipe.  Here it is.  This sauce will make ANY bland home cooked meal completely destroy and will have you questioning the value and quality of a restaurant meal when the power my friends, lies inside of you… and your blender.

A Japanese Village Type Steak Sauce
makes a bunch, so consider halving the recipe

1 cup toasted sesame seeds
1 1/3 cup Vegetable oil
1 cup low sodium Soy Sauce
1/3 chopped white onion
1 teaspoon Dijon mustard

The Zoner was very specific on a couple points.

01) It MUST be vegetable oil.  She not get into the reasoning, only that you shouldn’t deviate form vegetable oil
02) the low sodium soy sauce.  Regular soy sauce will make your sauce too salty.  sad Fugee face 😦

Coral and I took the toasted sesame seeds and put them in our coffee grinder first.  That turned them into a fine pulp type mixture.

Then we dumped that mess into our blender with the chopped onion, soy sauce, oil and we didn’t have any Dijon mustard so we used English hot mustard.

Blend blend blend.

Coral opened the blender and took one smell.  She turned to me with a grin that went ear-to-ear.  We did it.

Fried up some pan steaks, some minute rice and mushrooms, sprouts, peppers, zucchini and voila… Japanese Village in front of the LCD screen showing Blair looking all hot and bothered on Gossip Girl.

***

How bizarre. I have had a pretty lax holiday season all told.  I worked erratically over Christmas and New Years and even managed to string 6 days off in a row!

FINALLY today is back to grind, the Monday to Friday and I brimming with creative energy and I wake up sick!  BWOAR!  AND Madelyn is sick too.  Poor little monkey.  There is nothing more heartbreaking than a sick baby.  Well Marely & Me was pretty sad… but a sick baby is like, high on my list of sad things.

Not the end of the world.  I put on my big boy pants and went into the Zone to lay down Capital Rock City #39.  It is all done and tomorrow I will work with Webmeister Bud on the infrastructure needed to distribute the show over the net.

CRC #38, where we last left off, was way back in June of 2006 if you can believe it.  I got a nice phone call from a Zone back in November wonder whatever happened to Capital Rock City.  I didn’t really have an answer.  For 38 weeks at the end of 2005 and the beginning of 2006 I delivered an episode of the local music show, Capital Rock City and then one Tuesday I just stopped.

I was organizing my iTunes a few weeks ago and I saw that I had new podcasts in my Itunes thingy.  I hadn’t listened to any podcasts since I lived downtown and walked to work everyday and I had never listened to any Capital Rock City’s since… 2006.  And there the final episode sat, unlistened to in my podcast folder.

So I punched it up.  And I liked it.  I didn’t recognize myself.  It had been so long since I had had that conversation that it was like listening to another radio DJ.  I remember that summer as being a challenge.  I was still with Alex but our relationship was on the outs and we had been separated for 7 months by then.  I lived by myself in my shitty apartment in Fernwood and was uninspired by the pace of growth for Capital Rock City.  I was tired and worn out and one day, I just stopped making them.

But when I listened back, I didn’t hear that.  The show sounded fun… so whatever was going with me personally at the time I couldn’t hear.  Just some great local music and a few stories.

On top of that, since 2006 I have learned more, grown and challenged my definition of success.  The few hundred downloads that for whatever fucked reason was not good enough in 2006 is exactly something I would be very happy to generate today.  That is a lot of people listening to local music.  and 38 half hours every week is by far NOT enough time to build any sort of audience.  If the show is to gain widespread acceptance, then that is a project that gets built over time.  Every week.

Tomorrow I will post the link for Capital Rock City on this blog and I hope you take the time to download the show.  If you dig it, you’d be helping me spread the word by sharing the show.

The other thing I could use your help on is just some basic feedback on the formatics of the show.  It is still made like a linear “radio show.”  I am conflicted as to whether I like that or not (I’m a radio guy at heart and like making radio shows).  Is there a better way to present the show?

If I had the skills and finances I’d prefer to have the entire Zone dot f-m be an audio extravaganza.  something like the CBC 3 where you can explore and listen to bands and create your own playlists.  When you need help or guidance, I or another Zone jock would be there to curate.  You could listen to not only great Victoria and Island music, but also all the modern rock we play on the Zone from our playlist PLUS all the great music that you *might* like but isn’t on the Zone.  But that is more ambitious than I can tackle right now.  So it will need to be a downloadable show with music that has rights I can clear.

Ok, good talk.

I need to finish voting for the Juno Awards (I am judge for best Children’s album… SWA?), drink my hot chocolate, fire up the Frightened Rabbits on the iPod and if I don’t pass out, try and finish Tribes.

Go with yourself.