Sanko Japanese Store

We came across this delightful little store, Sanko, at 730 Queen street East.

They had quite an extensive, but expensive, collection of Japanese pottery items for sushi, tea, bento boxes and the like.

Also a decent collection of food including seaweed, snacks (I bought some rice cracker snacks), veggies, frozen food, noodles etc etc.

Fresh/Juice for Life on Crawford

Ian and I were walking around Queen Street today and stopped in at Fresh on Crawford. I have been pretty desperate to go for about 6 years, but laziness and Ian's indifferent/meat lover attitude have won out...until today.

This joint seems to be one last stronghold of the Hippies/granola eating/vegan types - a close rival to it's neighbor Fressen.

Ian had the "breathless" smoothie which included banana, strawberry and mango tastiness all blended up for $5.

I went with the soup, salad and cornbread combo for $9. The soup special was Moroccan chickpea. The flavor was ok, but was unfortunately way too thick and hearty to eat any more than about 1/3 of it at a sitting. Hopefully Ian can bail me out of my leftover problems tonight at dinner. "Save the whale (Ian's expression)" style, they put the leftovers in a sketchy paper type container with an ill-fitting lid covered with a flimsy rubber band. Perhaps not the most practical, for all but the most steady handed type person. I'm not too sure what the problem is, at work we have the same soup containers, and they have very solid fitting lids.

Salad was the highlight of the combo - a whole whack of assorted fresh greens, shredded carrot and beets. I ordered it with the house dressing - which I found to be delightful, but they did not put anywhere near enough on there in order to fully enjoy the salad.

Cornbread was dry and non-descript. Pretty much impossible to eat without a healthy layer of butter and a swig of water after each bite.

Ian's main was the basic rice bowl ($5) with an add-on ($2) tofu "steak". The tofu was delightfully flavored, and the rice bowl was also quite good. They had some pretty yummy dressing on the brown rice and the carrots and parsley added to the whole thing.

I liked the serve yourself water that came in wine bottle type thingy's, at least until I somehow poured it all over the table and my sweater. Then, I wished that they would serve me water. They also had a lemon slice floating around in there, but unfortunately, the lemon looked as though it had seen better days a few weeks ago.

They would be wise to invest in a better kitchen exhaust system. Sweet potato fry fume permeated the entire restaurant and in fact, 1 hour later as I type, I can smell it on my clothes.

Total including tax and tip was $26.

Scaramouche Pasta Bar and Grill

Ian and I went out for a belated year 2 anniversary celebration tonight to Scaramouche, located just north of Yorkville. We opted for the somewhat less fancy and cheaper pasta bar and grill - Toronto life magazine bills it as a "neighborhood joint". Well, this is one fancy neighborhood joint if you are going on a Tuesday night before soccer practice!

They only take reservations for 5:30 to 6:30 on the weekends, so we went with 6. It was pretty empty upon arrival, but was really busy when we were leaving about 7:30. Lots of people waiting at the bar as well as in the upper lobby near the coat-check.

Dinner started well with their soup of the day for me. Curry cauliflower with some diced apple and fried lotus leaves. I couldn't really taste the cauliflower, but the curry flavor and apple were excellent.

Ian went with a huge plate of fried calmari that he seemed to enjoy. Lightly breaded as promised on the menu. It really was too much deep fried tastiness for one person ($16) and they would be better to go with half the amount for $10 or so.

A nice selection of complimentary bread (whole wheat, french, white) came with butter and some decent hummus. The bread was fantastic, but the hummus and butter could use a little work. The PC chipotle hummus we bought at the No Frills today is better. Butter was a little boring too.

Mains were generally in about the $22 to $35 price range and seemed to have some slightly overlapping items with the more expensive dining room next door.

Ian had arctic char with veggies and unusual wild rice aka "forbidden rice" ($31). The menu claimed that it was a soy lime coriander beurre blanc, but it was a bit tough to taste on there. Overall, very pleasant and a perfectly cooked medium well with crispy skin.

I went with one of the cheaper pasta dishes ($22) and it was a very good choice! The fresh peppercorn fettucini did indeed have a touch of pepper in there, but the real highlights were the big chunks of sauteed beef tenderloin. Not too many oyster mushrooms as the menu promised, but more than enough pine nuts and extremely creamy madeira cream sauce to make up for it.

We shared coconut cream pie with dark chocolate sauce and white chocolate shavings for dessert. Extremely light and a tasty coconut flavour!

Since Ian drove, we decided to go with a glass of wine each. A pretty decent selection of about 8 whites and 8 reds. I went with a California Shiraz and Ian had a pleasant Pino Grigio to go along with his fish. About $12 each for a large 6 oz glass. It seems a little steep, but was comparatively rather cheap when compared to the seemingly overpriced $44 half bottles on the wine menu.

Service was generally excellent and very efficient.

Total bill including wine, tax and tip was a fairly reasonable $150.

Quizno's

Yesterday in the mail we got a fresh batch of Quizno's coupons. There was a bit of sad news though as they no longer have the precious buy one get one free coupon or even the buy one and a drink and get one free coupon. Instead they've switched to the buy 1 sub and two drinks and get one free. I'm willing to shovel down 2 subs and a drink but 2 with two drinks is too much and it's no longer a good deal.

Fortunately some of the coupons are still decent deals. And to make things even better the in-laws gave me some delightful quizno's gift certificates so I of course had to hit quizno's for lunch today. I had a regular Mesquite Chicken and used a free combo coupon. Tasty as usual.

Faithful readers can look forward to a few more quizno's trips this month. They seem to be pushing their new pizza and the "sammies" with the coupons so I will likely have to give those a try

Veggie Burger Harvyey's Style

On Thursday night, I take a class and am unable to go home after work. Thus, the need for fast food of some sort to tide me over till 9:30 when I get home. As far as fast food joints, the least objectionable item seems to be the Harvey's veggie burger.

- 317 calories (perhaps a normal amount of food for a non-obese person to eat for dinner)
- 9 g fat
- 5 g fibre
- and an all important 20 g of protein to keep me awake while the teacher is droning on in a language I do not understand

I wouldn't rate it as a "beautiful thing", but the tasty factor is moderate. At over $4 for a burger though, it's not a great value.

The service at my joint last night was rather poor. They seemed to have the burger kinda precooked and only needed a light grilling, but despite that, they didn't let that stop them from taking about 15 minutes to hand me my burger. Some problem about them typing in cheese and me not wanting cheese? Now that I think about it, I hope they did not charge me extra for that cheese???

I do like that they seem to use a designated green "flipper" that hasn't been tainted by meat! Not that I really care, but I do appreciate the concept.

Sushi Star

On the way to pick up a burrito the other day, an amazing sign caught my eye. It had three key features "$9.99", "All you can eat" and "Sushi". Those three bits made the sale and so for Thursday lunch I convinced the lunch crew to go.

This new place is the Sushi Star on Spadina adjacent to the Red Room. They also advertised cheap lunch combos but of course we went with the all you can eat. The all-you-can-eat menu was somewhat limited though: 2 types of sushi (salmon and red snapper), 7 or 8 types of rolls and a bunch of stuff from the kitchen. We quickly filled out our first order and the food started rolling in. I skipped the soup and salad courses to ensure I could take full advantage of the sushi but people seemed to enjoy them. First for me came the shrimp tempura. Pretty good, better than Ho Su's tempura but a little too bready to rank amongst my best ever. Then the rolls started appearing. We went for the multiple of everything policy without knowing what any of the names rolls were and that seemed to work out well. We ended up with some salmon skin rolls that I quite liked and a bunch of others.

We devoured all that and there was still no sign of the sushi so I was starting to get a little anxious that the big numbers we had put down for number of sushi pieces had scared them off. But not to worry, the sushi eventually showed up and we quickly finished that off.

For the next and final round of orders we basically repeated our first order with a few new items from the kitchen.

Overall for 13 bucks with tax and tip it was definitely a good outing. As one guy who just finished remarked, "I only wish this place was around 4 years ago when I started"

Janice's Cake Gone Horribly Wrong...but Then Got Better

Usually, I'm a decent cook, but today it went wrong. I attempted to make the "ginger cake with hard sauce" from my William's Sonoma Bride and Groom Cookbook, but it certainly did not turn out like the picture!

Sorry no photo's, Ian has the camera in E-town till tomorrow!

My cake ended up with a liquid layer of dark molasses at the bottom and a light tasty cake on top. The picture did not show any sort of split.

Since the molasses on it's own is not that tasty, I decided to try and get rid of some of it.

I turned the cake out of the pan and scraped off the molasses. Of course, at this point the cake looked pretty gross! To fix it up, I used the "hard sauce" - basically butter icing - to attempt to fix it! Unfortunately, it is now extremely squat. Arggghhhh! Hopefully it will be tasty - but as back-up I bought some PC sticky toffee pudding!

PC Brie and Cranberry Filo Parcels

I went to a clothing swap event last night and the host made some PC Brie and Cranberry Filo Parcels. I was expecting a high amount of tastiness, but they were actually a bit bland and leaning toward odd tasting".





I have purchased some PC fig and goat cheese items for the scrabble crowd tomorrow night - hopefully these are tastier!

Toronto Life Eating and Drinking

Ian's aunt sent us this magazine for Christmas and it turned out to be very deelightful!

Good descriptions of most of the medium/high end restaurants in Toronto as well as a few of the cheap-o places too.

Also included: a good bar/pub section, wine guide, and foodie type info like where to purchase fish.

I found most of the ratings and descriptions to be decent.

I laughed pretty hard regarding their Kit Kat comment "Offhand servers lack necessary polish" and "Italian fare is up and down". How true!! Check out our review.

Magpie and Stump (Banff)

As per skiing tradition, we visited the Magpie and Stump upon arrival in Banff.

The waiter was a little creepy, but the tastiness of the food more than made up for it! Although, the Magpie may have been the cause of Ian's illness? Who can really say for sure??

Ian went with his usual combo - bean/veggie burrito, chicken almond enchilada and beef taco. Came with a side of refried beans - all for $14.95.

I broke with tradition and got a smaller $7 veggie/bean quesidalla + salad. Jack-0-lantern went with some bean and cheese nachos! They were the real star of the night! A huge mound of refried beans with chips along the side, some tasty house red sauce and a whole hit of cheese on top. All that tastiness for only $9 or so.

Wild Flour (Banff)

After Ian's stomach troubles hospital visit in Banff we went out for lunch to Wild Flour Cafe in Banff. This place was completely packed, even for lunch at 1:30!

I had the salad of wild rice, apple, cucumber and creamy orangy dressing. $3 for a rather large bowl! Then some tasty potato-kale soup. Again, a rather large bowl for $3.50 including some whole wheat bread.

Janice's Christmas Eating Strategy

If I'm going to eat junk anyway - why not work around it! The main idea is to not eat real meals and instead substitute fruit cake, buttertarts, shortbread, chocolates etc. You get the idea.

For the last week or so with the desserts at the office and Christmas parties - this is what I've been doing.

Normal breakfast of toast + PB

Light lunch of coleslaw/fruit with some dried fruit or a few nuts

Dessert/party pig out!

Steamed or sauteed veggies for dinner or snack at night

Ho Su

We walked in the "Blizzard" to return Ian's library books so to reward ourselves for the bravery, there was basically no choice but to go to Ho Su for an early dinner.

We both partook in the specials for the day- I had the vegetarian roll set with avocado maki and kappa/yam tempura maki (12 pieces in total). Ian had the Korean chicken which came with a horrendous amount of reasonably tasty chicken in sauce, glass noddles, bean sprouts/carrots, rice and coleslaw.

Also included were two (only lukewarm) bowls of miso soup, salad x 2, edamame, sweet potato, beans and kimchee.

All this tastiness for only $15.80 including tax/tip and tap water x 2!

Martin's Party

I have been keeping track of years working at my current company by number of boss' Christmas parties attended. This year is number three and they went with the same caterer as for party #2.

The drinks started off well - this year quite a selection of wines with 6 to choose from. I went with Pino Grigio. Pretty tasty.

Appetizers were pretty good - salmon springs rolls, mushrooms on toast, thai beef stuffed in cucumber and some shrimp/salmon on toast things that Ian partook in.

The real theme of the night seems to be stuffed items. Dinner was stuffed tomatoes, stuffed zuchini, more salmon stuffed in pastry, stuffed pork of some sort and lamb chops. Also a lettuce salad with pine nuts.

The real highlight was dessert. Not a lot of selection, but the tastiness made up for that! The usual two bite brownies were on the menu, but were made extremely tasty with the addition of some icing and spinkles. Basically I feel that you cannot go wrong with anything that has sprinkles on top so perhaps I am a bit biased. Also some cranberry & chocolate scones arranged precariously on a layered tray and a platter of oatmeal chocolate chip cookies....mmmmm....

To top off the night, the big boss was giving away very cutely wrapped boxes of chocolate as a parting gift. We each sampled one when we got home - my maple cream was yummy and Ian seemed to enjoy his boring solid chocolate.

This year, they went with some door prizes by pulling names out of a bag. Most prizes seemed to go to the higher up dudes on the board of directors including our CEO.

I think the only thing that we can conclude from this is the board of directors got to their positions through luck??

Although, now that I think about it, I suppose we were all lucky that the stairs did not collapse with 70 of us on there for a photo op!

The "Maddy" aka Madison Avenue Pub

On Friday night, we ventured over to the "Maddy" after the grad student party for a work/french class person birthday party. This joint was a good follow-up to the somewhat grungy scene from Ian's party.

It seemed to mainly consists of drunk people packed into a two renovated houses of fire hazard-y-ness quality. Again with sketchy bench seating - but this time I sat down and made a mental note to throw jeans direct into the washer!

Kelly and Ian has pints and total cost was about $14 including tax and tip- not a bad deal at all for the barely north of bloor area.

Some other people in the crowd ordered fries and nachos - overall pretty decent and I was a bit surprised to taste fresh cilantro in the salsa! Ian was easily impressed by the inclusion of some festive green and red chips with the nachos.

I note from the web-site that appetizers are half price from 3-7 with purchase of a drink. So a similar deal to the Unicorn Pub, but much, much, much closer to us!

Further Uninteresting Followup to the Discussion about Our Uninteresting Blog

The discussion about our blog that Janice linked to earlier was interesting. Kudos to Sheryl Kirby for defending us in her comments and setting Douglas straight about a few things.

I feel the need to more vehemently attack douglas though but I'll stick to just reminding him that:
1) Yes BK & PC are everywhere but they're also in Toronto. If I only talked about foods that are only available in Toronto, would I have anything to post about?
2) If I didn't eat it should I really talk about it? I'll stick to stuff I know - what I ate for dinner.

And where exactly does the idea that my ideal meal consists of a whopper come from? I eat whoppers, yes, but I'll go so far as to say I don't really like them. They're a decent deal (well at least before the massive price increase) but I sometimes specifically work from home on Wednesdays so I don't have to partake in Whopper Wednesday.

And just to reprise the discussion about island foods now that I've had a few weeks to calm down, I did like the food. They make a decent roti. In terms of decent service though, it appears the Village on the Grange location is best avoided. It sounds like things are better at the Parkdale location.

Bedford Academy

Besides the aforementioned terrific grad student christmas party, I also had the TA union christmas party last week too. It was at the Bedford Academy up on Prince Arthur (I know north of bloor but only by a block)

We of course arrived just as the party started to ensure we'd have maximum time there. We found our union brothers and sisters in a nice room off to the side that was set aside for the party. The food soon started coming and it was pretty good. The usual bar fare with fries, nachos, pita + other dip-ables with sketchy dip and chicken wings was all reasonably tasty. There were some terrific surprises though. First decent sushi arrived which made the night for me. It wasn't the mediocre california rolls that I would expect (if I were expecting sushi) but instead decent pieces sushi nigri. Then much later on platters of mini-burgers came around and conveniently came to rest right in front of me. Once we also procured the condiment tray we were set for the night.

The food was plentiful and it definitely makes this month's union dues seem like good value. I just need 7 other events like this to make me happier about the other months of dues.

In general we upheld the stereotype of introverted engineers but we did end up talking to our "Grievance Officer" for a while. The union's key phrase is "Don't work for free" so it was funny to hear that this guy who handles all the "Don't work for free" quarrels feels like he's working too many hours.

Fun things of only marginal interest to most

Fun link to us...

So it appears as though our blog was discussed on another TO food blog. The general consensus is that we suck!

It mainly appears that way because we admit to eating fast food (well Ian does) and we are obsessed with PC! What the heck is wrong with that? PC is tasty!

Check it out.


Ian's Party...

Ian hosted a little grad student party at school on Friday evening and he has been talking about it every since. Hopefully by posting on the blog world, he will stop harassing me about it!

The party was in full swing when my friend Kelly and I arrived after work. The party had sort of a dingy/low-class feel to it that I haven't been involved with since my university or perhaps Thompson days. The couch was a bit sketchy and we avoided sitting on it. Poker was in session too, so the other two girlfriends and Kelly and I were stuck making only mildly awkward conversation.

The beer was marginal, but in good supply - three varieties of Lakeport and Ian really splurged and got some Labatt Honey priced at an additional $0.04 per bottle. I would have to say that Lakeport Honey is probably the tastiest, although lowest alcohol content of the three.

Pizza seemed pretty good - the vultures has swooped in already and polished off 15 large Pizza Pizzas. Only a few strays left by the time we showed up, so I avoided. I have to give Ian credit though - he did manage the pizza situation beautifully and ended up with only a few slices leftover! Nice work!

Chips were in sufficient quantity and variety, but were unfortunately of the Price Chopper house brand for the most part. Since I was hungry, I ate a few bbq and called it dinner.

Anywho, in summary - the food was plentiful and the price was right and Ian is the king of party hosting.

Dim Sum and Inca Kola

One of the new items in the insider's report was Dim Sum. It comes with Har Gao and a bunch of other dim sum items but the har gao was enough to make the sale. I tried them last week in the microwave and they were alright but this week I decided to do things properly with a homemade steamer arrangement since we were too lazy to find the steamer in storage











Up close and personal with the best looking item









Me eating the meal with inca kola. I assume you can't get any more authentic than that?













Overall, the items were pretty good. I hate to bash the president but the real issue is the price, $7.99. The president certainly isn't a benevolent leader with those prices which work out to 53 cents a piece. Sure that's cheaper than the places on Dundas I go to with 2 buck items (3 or 4 pieces per basket). I don't know if this is a well known rule but Ian's rule indicates that eating at home should be 50% cheaper for it to be a good deal.

Gluttonous Insider Report Item of the Week - Dulce de Leche

We went to our usual Joe's (a.k.a. No Frills to the rest of the Toronto and other areas served by them) today for the first time in a few weeks. (As a complete aside, it hardly seems surprising that Loblaw's is in trouble with confusing name issues like Joe's and the Rennie and Liz's we frequent). Anyway they have a pretty decent selection so we were able to pick up some Dulce de Leche. We'd seen the ads on tele and eyed it hungrily in the Insider report so it was only a matter of time before we picked it up.

We had it straight up with some frozen yogurt and it was terrific. I would have taken a picture
but it didn't last long enough. Next time I may mix it up and have it with bananas. I didn't this time so I could fully appreciate it on it's own.

In the mildly concerning department there was no foil or wrapper on the container when we opened it. Nor did I hear it pop when it opened (but an examination of lid seemed to suggest it might not have made a noise). So if this is our last blog post it looks like contaminated food or botulism? may have been our downfall. Given the tastiness though, we have no regrets.

Coming up tomorrow if all goes well, up close and personal shots of the President's Choice Dim Sum I had today (along with my comments of course!)