Saturday, October 27, 2007

Farmer's Market - The Second Edition

Just a little bit more about the peameal concoction. I was reading the paper today and the "new" Weekend Edition of the globe and mail now has a column from that much over-hyped Richard Florida. That's a rant for another day but, anyway, he mentioned having the uber-Toronto peameal and egg sandwich at the St. Lawerence market so that planted the idea in my mind. We spied the shop hawking these sandwiches while at the market so we couldn't resist. 4.95 with tax so certainly not cheap (maybe that helps make it authentically Toronto-ish?). It was pretty good. Just like the Tim Horton's egg mcmuffin is a better version of the original McMuffin, this sandwich was better than the TH edition. However, the bacon wasn't as flavourful as it could be. No other complaints except obviously the price. Except for rare special occasions, I'll have to stick to clogging my arteries with the chain versions.

Oh and sure Janice claims to "care about the environment" but you should ask her whether she'd still be carpooling if her company didn't pay her to do it.

St. Lawrence Market Adventure

In the last few months I've become obsessed with the concept of the farmers market. I guess one too many article about eating "local" food etc.

I am also starting to feel a bit bad about killing the environment and have taken on a carpooler (yeah, he would be taking public transit...so not really taking people off the road...but it's a start!)

Have also ditched the plastic bags, even the little produce ones too! Ian claims that I am putting the petrochemical people out of business, but the in-laws are pretty much retired so that's ok right?

I decided to turn the farmers market obsession into action and convinced Ian to walk over to St. Lawrence market with me. They have a special warehouse type thing across the street from the regular market on Sat only. Supposedly, these are authentic farmers.

I picked up all sorts of good stuff! 3 squash for $5. 4 colored peppers for $1.50. Some tasty tomatoes and some beets that I plan on eating tomorrow. Also picked up a broccoli that I turned into some not very tasty soup. Not really the broccoli's fault though.

Ian couldn't stop stressing that these farmers were likely not reporting the income from these transactions, but a peameal bacon egg cheese bun combo cheered him up slightly!

Wednesday, October 24, 2007

Cleveland Fun

I went on a two day trip to Cleveland for a course. The location was pretty good - hotel was right beside the police headquarters so the potential for mugging and drug dealers was actually quite low! Should have brought the running shoes....

We were near the trendy "warehouse" district, so I walked over and went a place called Crop on Sunday night. In general, it was packed with an older crowd, but I thought busy is good and went in. They have a special Sunday dinner deal for $23. I got some cornbread with three tasty butters, some salad with all sorts of fun pickled stuff on there, my choice of main - I went with salmon, but there was also pasta, steak etc, then some rasberry ganache cake type thing for dessert! All very tasty, but the salmon was slightly undercooked in my opinion.

Then some sushi the next night. Overpriced and poor selection but nice restaurant and friendly people sitting at the sushi bar.

Thursday, October 18, 2007

ROM Fact or Fiction

Last night I scored some free tickets to a fundraising event for the ROM. The basic idea was there were 20 tables - each with 1 artifact. Each table had two curators - one telling the truth about the artifact, one with a fake story. Our job was to pick the correct one. Winner got a trip to Egypt!

I got 10/20, Ian got 12/20 and winners tied for 17/20!

The best part was the free food and drink - and I guess $500 worth of tickets for free! Caterer was "Presidential Gourmet".

Ian enjoyed the appetizers ...
-peking duck in rice paper rolls
-ice cream cones with melon balls and some meat
-bbq eel in sushi format
-shrimp on a stick
-deep fried eggplant on a cracker
-yellow tomato gazpacho in espresso cups

Food stations included:
- antipasto with lots of roasted veggies, bread, cheese, meat, salad etc - very tasty
- mushroom risotto with braised short rib - mmmm
- Japanese coated tofu with mushrooms - so so
- pickerel with squash - mmmm
- ricotta spinach pasta with tomato sauce- also mmmmm

Dessert included:
-chocolate, caramel, pecan squares
-raspberry square tastiness
-fruit
-petit fours

Also highly tasty. Drinks were ok - Ian sucked back a couple of his fav - vodka + fruity juice and later some rum and coke. I went with a white wine and a red wine. White wine smelled extremely alcohol-y, red wine was pretty good.

Sunday, October 14, 2007

The More Litter Free Way to Grocery Shop


With the addition of a few more PC bags, we now have enough for a week of groceries! Today, I was on my own and decided to ditch the plastic bags that you put fruit and veggie in! They really have no use and I just end up throwing them out anyway.

It wasn't all that bad! I just put them all on the top shelf and it only seemed to take the cashier an extra few seconds overall. More deelightful for unpacking too!

Woodbine Race Track

We had a little work related conference type thing-y this past Friday and Saturday. For Friday night, we headed over to the track for a buffet dinner and some racing. The buffet was pretty tasty - salad, roast beef that was actually pretty good, fish/seafood, chicken etc. The highlight was some squash that had an eggplant type skin. I was a little thrown off, but the tastiness level was quite high!

The gambling went alright - initially down $6, but made most of it back with a win prior to leaving! They only had the carts - it's a bit ridiculous - whoever can trot the fastest wins! That's like Ian winning $50 K because he can walk the fastest!

Ian is getting all upset by my comments. He said, "they are younger horses. Well, I don't know if they are younger - they just aren't as good." Sounds like an argument gone wrong for Ian!

Lone Star


Not being people to turn down coupons, we headed over to the Lone Star on Front to collect our free bag of chips and container of salsa. Sure, they give this stuff out for free at the start of the meal, but we thought it was good value to take some home with us too!

For the meal, we shared a 1/2 lb of steak + chicken fajita with rice, beans, guacamole, cheese, tomatoes and lettuce. Pretty tasty overall and decent value for $26 for two including t,t &tw x 2.

Tuesday, October 09, 2007

Healthy Snack Food for Those Who Do Not Want to Die





PC fig newtons. Seriously tasty, fat free and 60% whole wheat. They even pass the Ian taste test. Check out this link. He may be off the chocolate for good - at least for between meals. He still eats at breakfast and the non-newton desserts.







PC flax seed chips. Ian likes plain, I like spicy. No trans, low in saturated and include fiber and other good booty that flax seed seem to have (it's hard to keep track of the omega's).





Who doesn't like m-wave popcorn? Just remember steer clear of the fumes while opening the bag to avoid popcorn lung.

No trans here! Yeah!

Sunday, October 07, 2007

Boston Pizza & Hockley Valley









































Yesterday, we went on a little hiking adventure to Hockley Valley Conservation Area near Orangeville Ontario. Halfway through, the rain started, so we cut it short and took one of the short-cut loops back to the start and only went on a 2 hr adventure instead of 4.5 hours.

This seems like a pretty popular place. An old-people hiking group was there and a bus load of tourists seemed to be arriving as we were leaving.

For the last stretch, the hike went through a farmers field. The cows made Ian hungry, so stopped off at BP's so he could have an individual Meteor Pizza (3 kinds of meaty topping and meat sauce instead of regular tomato) and get his meat quota for the week. Actually, that is a lie, the gift certificate situation is a bit out of control and BP's was the original plan, even before the cows.

I had a half penne + tomato sauce with garlic bread. All food was sufficiently tasty and quick. Final bill with tax, tip, tap water x 2, cola x 1 was about $27...but only $7 for us after the certificate! Nice! The funniest part came on the way out the restaurant. This family was walking in front of us to the parking lot, and this little dude -about 2-3 years old - was walking slow and staring at Ian. Dad got mad and told him to hurry up, but then the kid points out "those big kids are following me!" Ha ha!

Tuesday, October 02, 2007

Run for the Cure and Aroma

Thanks to the faithful blog readers that sponsored us on the run this past weekend. Those who thought they were sponsoring us on a 5km run will be pleased to hear that it was actually 5.6 km according to mapmyrun.com (the route was very different than previous years). That's a bonus of over 10%! For free!

Anyway it was a relief to see that it was longer than expected. I took 28:01 minutes and Janice was 30 and change. Somewhat disappointing as it ends our multi-year streak of continuously getting better times. Also disappointing is how much faster some people ran than us on Sunday
- the fastest marathon on Canadian soil happened in Toronto (2:09:30)
- the fastest marathon ever was run in Berlin (2:04:26)
so if I had run 5km alongside any of those people during their races they would have beat me by 10 minutes while still going on to run for almost another 2 hours.

After the run we broke with tradition and skipped fressen. Instead we went to Aroma for lunch. It lived up to it's usual standard except for gulab jamon which was awful. All of my gulab tim bits were rock hard. Disappoint but of course we'll likely forgive and forget.

Green Mango Take Out Version

In the infamous summer of 2004, I couldn't get enough of Green Mango - the take-out version, not the restaurant version. Well I haven't been back in years - not due to a lack of tastiness but rather because it wasn't really convenient. Anyway last Thursday I was in the area so I couldn't resist going back. First the bad news, they've raised prices! Significantly! Previously they were the best deal around with the 6.88 (with tax) combo but alas now it was 7.40. So we'll downgrade it to an alright deal.

Anyway, the choices seem the same as always. I had pad thai with 1/2 lemongrass chicken and 1/2 curry chicken. I was quick enough on my feet to remember to say no peanuts on the salad. In the end it seems like they put them in a container on the side now and if I had known that I would have accepted the peanuts to add to my collection of McD peanut bags!

Now on to the actual meal. It was basically as tasty as I remembered. However, I remember that I used to find it a disgusting amount of food - hence me thinking it's a good deal. Sadly, while I left full, it didn't seem like that much food. So I'm not sure if I eat more now or the servings are smaller?

Muppet Wedding Extravaganza!

This was a few weeks ago, but since Ian has turned into the world's laziest blogger, I have to pull stuff out of the brain archive to keep the content "fresh" as they say in internet land and at the grocery store.

Anywho, gist of the whole thing was, my mom was in charge of the drink tickets and they served perogies. How can you go wrong with that? And I guess my cousin actually getting married - that was alright too.

Venue was Shalom park waterski club outside of E-town (Edmonton for those in live in ontario).