It’s been a week of long hours punctuated by extravagant eating. Nellie kicked off the week with a test dinner (she likes to test out potential dinner-party meals on me, which I’m just fine with) consisting of salad, prosciutto-wrapped shrimp and gnocchi in a pancetta tomato-cream sauce, paired with bottles of Riesling and Pinot Grigio.

On Monday I had a work thing at North 44, still one of Toronto’s most consistent & solid restaurants. I didn’t realize it at the time but I ended up ordering the same meal I’d had there almost exactly a year earlier: butternut squash ravioli with oxtail ragout and sage, and the 12 oz. USDA rib eye. And then some kind of coconut thing for dessert.

On Wednesday night I met M² at Volo to do some catching up. They have a particularly good tap list on right now; I had a Denison’s Dunkel and a Great Lakes Winter Ale, as well as the 38th beer on my Project FiftyBrew list: a Wellington Russian Imperial Stout. Most important, though, was a few hours spent with an old friend and, let’s face it, mentor. It happens far too infrequently for my liking.

Last night was another catch-up with old friends, this time with two old mates from university, including CBJ, briefly in town from Cincinnati with his wife. The other friend and his wife made beef bourguignon and poured us copious amounts of wine and port and limoncello as we sat in their beautiful apartment and talked into the wee hours. And to top the evening off, CBJ had smuggled three more Project FiftyBrew beers across the border — and the fact that I have to import Quebec beer from northern Kentucky tells you all you need to know about inter-provincial liquor import laws. Anyway, I now have bottles of La Terrible, Quelque Chose and Ephemere Pomme in my fridge. So…win.