Chris is pretty excited to eat the Sockeye Salmon cooked on a Cedar plank.

Chris pre­pares the Salmon by cutting off the head, tail and fins.

He ensures the insides are clean and gives the entire fish a wash.

I just like how the water looks in this photo, espe­cially with random fish parts.

For the past two hours, the cedar plank has been soaking in water. Before remov­ing it from the water Chris stuffs the Salmon with fresh lemon slices and fresh dill. He also seasons it with some freshly ground pepper and Kosher salt.

The BBQ is hot and ready. The salmon is care­fully placed on its cedar plank and cooked to perfection.

The salmon was com­pli­men­ted nicely with a salad: cut olives, blue cheese, red pepper, cucum­ber, green onions and lettuce.

The final result before the dinner party devoured the entire deli­cious creature. Even Zappa, the cat, enjoyed a nibble.

The next morning, I tossed some flour, yeast, sugar, butter and sliced walnuts into the bread maker for a fresh loaf of bread. I then used the bread to serve Chris and I homemade cinnamon-nutmeg French Toast topped with sliced bananas, icing sugar and Maple syrup.

While waiting the 2.5 hours for my bread to bake, I made short­bread cookies with some dino­saur cookie cutters I bought at the Buck-or-Two at the Grande Prairie Mall. I didn’t have any vanilla extract in the house, so I used the equi­val­ent amount of Maple syrup instead. I also didn’t have any corn­starch. To replace this I used flour, doub­ling the amount of corn­starch it asked for. The cookies turned out amazing. We enjoyed them at my office Monday morning and at our Halloween party on Friday, October 29^th.

For an inter­lude to my baking, I con­tin­ued to paint designs on the paper­mache water jug I have to make for my belly dancing class. We are doing an Egyptian style of belly dance where we are sup­posed to be peas­ants with water jugs. I won’t admit how many hours this jug and the sewing of the dress took me. It’s ridicu­lous! The class seems more inter­ested in cos­tumes, dressing-up and per­form­ances than actu­ally learn­ing how to dance! Ha,ha. Nonetheless, I have a lot of fun at it. It’s a social exper­i­ence more than any­thing. Thanks to my belly dance class I’ve actu­ally met a couple other ladies in town and atten­ded a belly dance work­shop two week­ends ago with my friend Marcia who’s in the weekly class with me.

Finally, I got the inspir­a­tion to make homemade chicken stock and soup. We had chicken bones from lunch and a frozen carcass from a few days before. I tossed them in a pot with water, 1 coursely chopped onion, 3 chopped carrots, 1 box of chicken stock, salt, pepper, thyme and oregano and let it simmer for about 3.5 hours.

While waiting for the soup to simmer, I cut up the veget­ables I was going to use for the soup itself. We bought the carrots and pota­toes from the Hutterites at the Grande Prairie Farmer’s Market.

Everything chopped up and ready to go.

The homemade chicken stock, soup and freshly baked homemade bread, just before I dove into it.

I ended the night by making a banana-squash loaf. I had cooked the squash the night before, so it only took 15-minutes to whip it together with a banana, flour, an egg, sugar, vanilla extract and baking soda before throw­ing it into the oven to bake for 1-hour. Um. Yummy!