A Little "Friend"

Last Thursday, I needed the car to run some errands during the day, and therefore, I had to wake up early in the morning to drive B to work.  Just when he got into the basement to go to the garage, he gasped, "I think I just saw a mouse!"  What?!  Not again?  To confirm, he peeked behind the laundry machine, and lo and behold, there was a mouse.  It then scurried away and hid under the machine.

Since my last mouse incident, I've been occasionally checking the floors for mouse poop (it's something I will have to do until the farm field across my place gets congested with houses).  I swear I haven't seen any for a while, and for sure none in the last few weeks.  So I'm pretty confident this new 'friend' just came in.

So after I picked B up from work, we went to buy some more traps.  B believed that since he is a 'rat' (chinese zodiac), he could also think like a mouse.  So I bestowed the mousetrapping responsibilities to him.  He thought he would trap something, while I thought the mouse might just leave, since I caught nothing the last time.  Well, guess what?  Before he went to work the next morning, he found this:

Poor little one, what mouse could withstand that big wad of peanut butter? 

Of course, B didn't pick it up and throw it out immediately.  He had to leave it there so that I can have a good look at it.  I, of course, stayed away from the basement all day until B got home from work.  Mind you, I'm not really scared of pet mice, since I had one before, but I can't say I'm fond of dead wild ones.  So before we left for Calgary for the long weekend, I went to the basement with B so that he could pick up the dead mouse to show me.  The poor girl (I inspected her) had already stiffened up after laying there dead for more than half the day.  I'm glad we caught her so quickly, and I also hope she didn't have any babies during her short stay here.   

New Kitchen Toy

This past weekend I got myself a new kitchen toy: a food processor.  I never believed in these things.  The main reason was cost: why am I paying so much for a machine to chop my food, when I could just use a knife?  Also, there were other inexpensive solutions too:

Before, I tried to make chopping easier by buying (as in getting B to get me) a Slap Chop.  It was ok, but to clean tiny pieces of minced garlic/ginger was a little tedious.  You also have to be very careful that you don't cut yourself when scrapping the tiny bits off the zig-zag blade.  Washing a knife was much easier.  Also, your to-be-chopped food is limited to softer items (I had a hard time chopping potatoes). It does its job, but it had its limit.  This past year, it stayed in its little box most of its days.

To shred cheese, I have a cheese grater.  It seemed like a great idea at the time when we bought it at Superstore: buying cheese blocks to shred was much cheaper than buying a bag of shredded cheese.  However, after our first grating, washing that damn thing was pretty tedious.  We have avoided a lot of shredded cheese recipes.  The grater also sits inside our drawer for most of its days now.

I was reading some food and recipe blogs this weekend, and this one blogger said that her cooking life was made easier because her food processor did most of the laborious work, which included chopping, dicing, mincing, shredding, mixing, and etc.  Just by this, I was somewhat brainwashed and went to look for one.  There are a lot of food processors out there, but I wanted one that did more than just chop and grind.  And ta da: I found my little onyx black "KitchenAid 7-cup Food Processor with ExactSlice System".

I had two Bay gift certificates: one with $50, and one with a remaining of $6.  When I got to the Bay, it was not on sale.  Oh boo.  However, the nearest Home Outfitters is only a few blocks away, and oh yeah, it was $50 off (33% off).  After ringing in my gift certificates, I only had to pay another $48.  Nice job!

So how does it fare?  Not bad.  So far, we only sliced some mushrooms and shredded cheese for our homemade pizza.  And yes, the cheese shredding was great and the cleaning was not bad at all.  I'll be using it again tonight to make another project (a surprise I'll post later).  We'll see how well it shreds other items!  More food processing to come!