Category: Food / drink

Like a Christmas turkey

Dan DickinsonLeave a comment

Last night Nellie and I went to Amaya, which we’d so enjoyed during Summerlicious. Nellie had some errands to do in that neighbourhood anyway, so it seemed a logical place for dinner.

I arrived before her and had a Kingfisher. When she arrived we ordered a pakora and somosa trio and some cassava fries. Next up: aloo gobi (which I don’t normally care for, but this one was fantastic) and kala chana masala, paired with a very strong Australian shiraz. Lots of naan and rice as well, of course. I don’t know how (or why) but we shared the spiced brownie (with coconut ice cream) for dessert. At this point I was so full that I prayed for sweet, sweet death, but somehow paid the bill and grabbed a cab before lapsing into a coma. I spent the rest of the evening in discomfort. I haven’t been this full since I stopped eating meat. Stupid expanding rice and bread…

I woke up this morning still full. Normally I’m ravenous by 7:00, but this morning I still felt like a python digesting a pig. I just ate a croissant about half an hour ago and I think that should tide me over until dinner. Plan for today: go see Pineapple Express, visit CBGBLB and then go out for dinner. Again. Sucker for punishment = me.

[tags]amaya restaurant, pineapple express[/tags]

Cry havoc…

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…and let slip the dogs of my brain dump:

  • Tonight we dined at Lobby with T-Bone for Summerlicious. Meh. Not great, and the service was a little sketchy. Plus…$80 for a bottle of wine that tasted like water? Alrighty then.
  • I bought tickets for 50 TIFF films today. I look forward to being able to use them some day. We had to buy a weird combo…30 pack plus two packages of 10 rather than the 50 pack.
  • I hope the rumours about Apple punishing Rogers are true. It’s rare to see condemnation so universal as what Rogers has been enjoying the last couple of weeks. I’ll be curious to see the uptake of the iPhone this weekend; I’m pulling for New Coke-like sales figures.
  • Someone’s affixing stickers to Toronto Sun newspaper boxes describing the contents therein. Where can I donate labels & toner?
  • I’m with Michael Arrington: voicemail should die. Until every voicemail system in the world is converted to unified messaging (like my home phone, which emails me with the wav file when I get a voicemail), I will continue to ignore my voicemail messages until people stop leaving them for me.
  • I can’t wait for the new David Simon (writer of Homicide and The Wire) HBO series Generation Kill. Check out the trailer yonder. [language NSFW]

[tags]summerlicious, lobby, tiff, apple, rogers, toronto sun, voicemail, generation kill[/tags]

Summer meat

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No, this is not a porn review.

I really thought that when I became (pseudo) vegetarian, summer would be excruciating. I thought that not being able to have hot dogs and hamburgers would suck the most during barbecue season, but then I realized…it’s not like there’s a whole lot of discernible meat in hot dogs or most store-bought hamburgers. In fact, hot dogs taste nothing like meat…they just taste like a slightly unpleasant excuse to eat a bun with some condiments on it. Therefore, veggie dogs — which I’ve had a few times now — taste just fine because…well, you can’t taste them. Like I said, they’re just bun, mustard, relish and bbq sauce delivery vehicles.

The lack of hamburger hasn’t hurt me either. I actually have access to a lot of very good veggie burgers all year round — Hero Burger, the nearby Jason George pub, the Auld Spot — but GB also showed us how to make very tasty burgers (the vegetable/lentil type, like the Auld Spot’s, not the meat-replica type) which we tend to only do on the barbecue.

I don’t really miss steak that much…I liked it, but I never craved it. What I do miss is barbecued Italian sausage. I tried the tofu version last night; again, you can mask the fact that it probably doesn’t taste very good with condiments, but it was definitely missing the sausage-y flavour. But for every n sausages that I don’t eat some pig lives, so I can suck it up.

[tags]veggie burger, veggie dog[/tags]

Final thoughts about our trip

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  • Pictures of our trip are finally in a Flickr set. I uploaded the 30 I liked the best. Somehow we managed not to take any pictures in Vancouver…I guess we were too busy drinking and cycling.
  • Speaking of drinking, up until the last evening (when we were all about Belgian) we managed to drink only BC wine & beer for the entire trip. Some favourites: the Mt. Begbie Tall Timber Ale, several Mark James microbrews, the Blasted Church Hatfield’s Fuse and the Sumac Rudge Meritage.
  • Google Maps puts the trip from Calgary to Vancouver at just over 1,000 km; including side trips we covered just under 1,200 km. We filled the gas tank of our brand new Toyota Corolla once, in Revelstoke, at a cost of $50. We pre-paid the fuel option on the car for $60 (so worth it…I would’ve paid more than that to fill it up since I brought the car in right at E, and I didn’t have to drive around downtown Vancouver looking for a gas station) so ultimately we paid just $110 for all that driving. Not bad, considering all the griping I hear from drivers these days.
  • Animals spotted: a bear (from the safety of the Whistler gondola), marmots, hares, several gophers / prairie dogs / Richardson’s Ground Squirrels / whatever they were, chipmunks, a pika, an elk & a few big-horned sheep crossing the Trans Canada.
  • The flight attendant I spoke to on the Toronto–>Calgary flight told me about her brother’s blog, where she said he talked about “weird” music. I was trying to describe to her what I usually listened to, and she said it sounded like what her brother wrote about. She gave me the name of his blog. I checked it out…yup. She was definitely in the right ballpark. Check out Everything is Pop.

So…where to next?

[tags]mt. begbie brewery, mark james group, blasted church, sumac ridge, toyota corolla, everything is pop[/tags]

"Wow, that's…really warm."

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I spent yesterday eating great food and enjoying even better company. First, squeezed into a solid 10-4 block of meetings, was lunch with William Azaroff. I had only spoken to William through his blog, Facebook, Twitter and over the phone once or twice, so it was nice to finally meet him in person. We had lunch on the garden patio at Fieramosca, and I could’ve happily stayed to chat and bask in the wonderful weather (and food!) for much longer than the two hours we spent there. Hopefully we’ll get a chance to catch up again in a couple of weeks when I’m in Vancouver; I guess it depends on how married I am to my hotel bed after six days of hiking.

After work T-Bone had some people over for a barbeque. I was concerned about the weather — thunderstorms were forecast for the evening — but sunshine carried the day and the rain held off until after everyone had finished their rather sumptuous feast…and then it really came down. I lost count of how many shrimp I ate. Other highlights of the evening: free shots of Carlsberg at the pre-bbq LCBO run; PC being, um, doused by his 2-year-old son; Nellie and I dominating at SceneIt?. We were pretty tired though, so even though we got home shortly after midnight it wasn’t long before we both crashed.

Today’s been…well, honestly, today’s been an exercise in avoiding the inevitable: a paper that’s due Monday. Here’s hoping I can kick my own ass into gear.

[tags]william azaroff, fieramosca, carlsberg, sceneit[/tags]

I realized two minutes later that it was "balcon"

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The warm (and by warm I mean screaming hot) weather has made for a very fun 18 hours. After leaving work yesterday I arrived home to a barbeque in progress with Nellie and CBGB. We made veggie burgers and drank (among others) Bavarian Weissbier and took solace in the cool breeze on our balcony. Sometimes that breeze was almost too much; at one point it blew some Tostitos out of the bowl and sent them skittering across the balcony. After our guests left we cleaned up (barely) and watched Battlestar Galactica. Getting! So! Good!

Nellie had to get up early for a hair appointment, so I used the morning to clean up (read: recycle the beer bottles), catch up on my news addiction, run some errands, buy more of that weissbier and take some pictures of all the puppies down the street at Woofstock.

Playing with dogs is good for the soul, even if my cats did look at me askance when I got home. Now I’ve finished off the list of little things that I need to get done before settling in for a long afternoon of MBA and Euro. Life could certainly be worse.

[tags]weihenstephaner hefeweissbier, battlestar galactica, woofstock, euro 2008[/tags]

Indiana Jones and the Ill-Advised CGI

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Just got back from Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (imdb | rotten tomatoes), following brunch with CBGB at Eggstasy. I felt pretty much the same about brunch as I did about the movie: it was what I expected, just like every time before, except for one little wrinkle.

When we arrived for brunch we were seated near the door. The crowds on weekends at Eggstasy are such that you don’t argue about where you sit, you just sit. So sit we did, and eat, and everything was fine. Good food, everyone’s order showed up as planned, quick turnaround and off to the movie. But it was cold when we ate, being so close to the open door & windows; not cold enough to put me off the meal, just enough to make me notice.

It didn’t stop there: when we got to the theatre it was freezing. Cold enough that the girls kept their jackets on and my nose felt frosty for the first half of the film. Somebody got a little anxious with the a/c, methinks. Anyway, the film: it was a good old-fashioned Indy movie, no doubt about it. It started fast & never really slowed down, it was exciting and funny, it gave the whip and the hat starring roles…everything I’d expect. It definitely got a little weird toward the end, but I can live with that. There was just one little thing that bugged me: this unfortunate tendency to use CGI even when the story doesn’t really need it. Indy’s Indy because he bashes things and jumps off of stuff and makes with the smart-ass, not because he gets help from CGI ewoks monkeys. That sequence added absolutely nothing to the story, and it looked ridiculous.

All in all the brunch and the movie were good…the cold air, the a/c and the CGI just left me feeling a little cold.

[tags]indiana jones, kingdom of the crystal skull, eggstasy[/tags]

Currently…

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reading: The Angel Riots by Ibi Kaslik and Strategic Management: An Integrated Approach by Charles Hill and Gareth Jones. Eye Weekly and Now Magazine every Thursday. Toronto Life once a month.

listening to: Saul Williams by Saul Williams, though any minute now I’ll move on to Death Cab For Cutie‘s Narrow Stairs or Visiter by The Dodos.

watching: almost nothing. I’m paying only marginal attention to sports (go Pens! go Celts!), The Office and 30 Rock are done for the season and The Shield hasn’t started yet. All that’s on right now is Battlestar Galactica, and even that’s on 2-week hiatus.

scanning: 190 news feeds, averaging about 509 articles per day. Of course, these are only my personal-interest feeds; I have just as many work feeds. I mainly skim the headlines here, and pay attention to maybe 50, flagging 5-10 to read later.

browsing: 6-7 websites per day. I rarely have a need to visit particular websites now (see ‘scanning’, above) but a few are applications (e.g., Google Analytics) or snapshots (e.g., the weather) that don’t work in an RSS channel. There’s also Bruce MacKinnon’s editorial cartoon every day which, despite my best efforts, I cannot wrangle into a Yahoo Pipe. Again, this is personal-interest only; there’re other work sites.

running: 3-4 times per week, 3 miles at a time. On a treadmill. Half flat, half slight incline.

eating: penne with sundried tomato pesto. Well…an hour ago, anyway.

looking forward to: our rockies/BC trip in June; Euro 2008; visiting Nova Scotia twice in August, once to visit with family and once to wrap up the MBA.

wondering: why the hell I started writing this blog post in the first place.

[tags]angel riots, ibi kaslik, toronto life, saul williams, death cab for cutie, narrow stairs, dodos, visiter,  google reader, bruce mackinnon, yahoo pipes, euro 2008[/tags]

Sunny! Breezy! Pleasant!

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Nice day so far. We slept in until about 10:00 (following yet another delicious, spur-of-the-moment dinner at Fieramosca last night), had a bit of breakfast and watched last night’s episode of Battlestar Galactica (gripping! exciting! sing-songy!) on the couch. The morning’s rain cleared off shortly after that, and off we went.

And whooooooeee, is it ever nice out there. Sunny and warm, but with a nice breeze too. We had lunch on the patio at the Jason George (well; I had lunch; Nellie’d already eaten her leftover pasta) and it almost got a little too warm. Also: when is smoking going to be banned on patios in Toronto? Whenever it is, it can’t come soon enough.

After lunch we walked along Front Street to Staples to pick up a filing cabinet (the one we ordered earlier in the week having been canceled for lack of stock). We checked out the eee PC laptop (tiny! adorable! sufficient!) that I want to get, but didn’t buy one, just getting a small desk/cabinet combo for Nellie. We brought that home and went back out to enjoy the day a bit more. Now Nellie’s happily putting together her new furniture and looking forward to dinner. See, I made the mistake of reading out the new beers on tap at C’est What (courtesy of Bartowel news) and once she heard “Church-Key Cranberry Wheat” her mind was made up.

[tags]fieramosca, battlestar galactica, jason george, staples, eee pc, c’est what, bartowel, church key cranberry wheat[/tags]