As our gov'ts have pretty much grounded us and we're not allowed out even on weekends, I've spent the day in my jammies and wandering the net, finding all sorts of fun & interesting things, from free epub and pdf books to fun videos and interesting articles. Like anyone else in this situation, I'm starting to go a little stir crazy, because the weather is still not good enough for planting yet. In fact we still have some snow in our yard, so I have to wait for that to melt at least, before I can go out and survey the damage the winter left, and clean it up. So since, I'm needing things to keep me occupied until then, I've been browsing the net, doing some reading, playing games on my iPad that a friend gave me. My daughter-in-law downloaded a few games for it for me including Sims Free Play and I used to love the Sims on the computer when my daughter got me hooked on it. So I've been killing a lot of time that way. But, today I decided to do something a little different by just randomly browsing the net, here and there and came up with a lot of interesting sites, some of which I'll talk about here, so others can fritter away their more lonely and bored moments too, if they wish. In any case, it'll serve at least as a back up bookmark file for me. 😉
Having talked about planting in the paragraph above, I found a link to a gardening site that might be of interest at Seed Savers How to Plan a Garden
It's an American site and so a lot of the vegetables I listed on my page about growing vegetables in SW QC is missing. Cantalope, for one doesn't seem to be there, several herbs and some other veggies aren't there either. For the most part though it seems to be pretty good, at least the basic information for beginning gardeners is there.
I was killing myself laughing watching a few funny pet videos this afternoon. I'm not sure if it's because I was laughing so hard or if it's the sound of the barks, growls, howls, meows etc that attracted Sweetie (our dachshund) to want to come and sit with me and watch too, but she sat on my lap and snuggled against my shoulder while watching some of these right along with me:
Adorable dog moments - not only Sweetie, but my husband watched this one with me and thought they were pretty funny too.
These next 4 links are to YouTube "Funniest Dogs & Cats" videos:
Funniest Dogs & Cats Video 1
Funniest Dogs & Cats Video 2
Funniest Dogs & Cats Video 3
Funniest Dogs & Cats Video 4
Now I know that I and a lot of others are wanting to learn how to do new things with the free time we all suddenly find ourselves with, from developing current hobbies to learning new ones and cooking or baking and just learning new stuff for the sake of it (like a history buff that I know who loves learning new things about history). Or religious people wanting some religion related material to further their studies with. Or just wanting to enjoy the old classical literature and fairytales. I found sites of interest there too.
As previously posted one of the largest and oldest libraries on the internet with books in several languages dating back to the antiquities of all genres is Project Gutenberg
This site claims to have 50,000 free books, but I don't know what sorts of books those are, because my previous foray into that site left me wanting. I was looking for cookbooks and all I could find were ancient cookbooks using obscure equipment, measurements and language (like old English for example), so I don't really know if the "free" books there are worth any more than that or not, but maybe for a future excursion there when I have more time to kill, I'll mosey on over to Many Books.
The following sites have several genres of books and magazines, including novels, science, medicine, cooking, do-it-yourself, computer related, crafts, religion, and more in pdf, epub, azw3, mobi, etc . You're sure to find something of interest at one of these sites.
Ebook3000
Ebookee
Free Bookspot
Dinner Time
Dinner tonight consists of Souvlaki on Pita, but it can be served on rice if no pita or tzatziki sauce is available. It can also be skewered and grilled on the BBQ as a kebab and then served on pita or rice. Either grilling or frying the meat is acceptable. It's one of the simplest and quickest meals possible. Perfect for a lazy day. All that's required is marinating the meat cubes a couple hours beforehand and the marinade is super simple:1-2 lbs 1 inch pork cubes - depending on desired servings - should feed 2-4 people
1/2 cup oil
1 Tbsp greek seasoning or Souvlaki seasoning
juice of 1 lemon
Combine all marinade ingredients together and then pour over meat, making sure to coat as much of it as possible. Cover and refrigerate for at least 2 hours before cooking.
To make a souvlaki on pita, you simply spoon the cooked meat into the middle of a pita bread down the center, top with chopped onions, tomatoes and tzatziki sauce and fold pita together to form sandwich. Otherwise just use it with rice or oven fried potatoes (with a squeeze of lemon juice on the potatoes and/or rice), with cooked spinach for a full course meal.
If you don't have tzatziki sauce you can make your own using this recipe: Tzatziki Sauce Recipe
If you're stuck at home as we all are, and need pita bread, you can use the recipe for Peppy's Pita Bread
If you're lacking the seasoning perhaps you can making your own mix using this recipe for Greek Seasoning Blend
Or if you would prefer to try to find another seasoning blend that you can make at home, all of their homemade spice blends can be found here: Homemade Spice Blends
A few more cooking related links to try to help you make the best of the food you have on hand to make delicious meals and stretch it as far as possible, since we don't know what's happening from one minute to the next these days and how soon it'll be before we're all locked down and no one can go anywhere, and having to stretch our food we have on hand for as long as possible.
All Recipes
Delish - Recipes Party Food & How Tos
Life Made Delicious
Canadian Living Food Section
SAQ's Cocktails Recipes
Crosby's Molasses - lots of recipe booklets & recipes
Schneider's Recipes
Saputo Recipes
All the Canadian sites listed from Life Made Delicious on down, probably have a French option as well. So for French speakers who'd prefer the recipes in French, you can probably get them in French by clicking on the Fr/French option. All Recipes and Delish are both based in the US so I don't know if they have other language options, but I'm pretty sure the others do have at least an English & French option.
Here's hoping your Saturday was just as interesting if not more than mine was! Talk to you again soon.
