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!

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.

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.

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.

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!

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!

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).

Random Pizza Joint in Mississauga

Last week I went out for lunch with my friend/ex-co-worker Gordie. This time it was his pick and we went to a pizza place by the Giant Tiger on Erin Mills north of Dundas. It has a name similar to Pizza Nova - but I'm pretty sure that is was something else.

I had a the special -1 topping pizza sub with pop for $5. Moderate amounts of saucy-cheesy-pinaepply tastiness. It was rather large, so I brought home 1/3 for Ian to take care of as a pre-dinner snack.

I would go back again for a quick lunch - although wouldn't give it a hearty recommendation!

Jack Astors

Ian and I went on a little camping adventure to Awenda this past weekend and swung by Jack Astors in Barrie for a late lunch. We went there a year or so ago and it was reasonably tasty - but perhaps that was just the deelightful individual apple pie lard/sugar talking.

Today was only alright - I had some veggie kung pao stir-fry with rice, Ian had a cajun chicken sandwich with guacamole + veggies and fries. I have taken up a new healthy eating regime and Ian did not feel up to a whole pie, so no desert for us :(

The real problem this time was the service. The waitress gave us a fair bit of attitude and seemed visibly upset when we refused the drink special - $10 sapporo bottles or an equally overpriced slushy type drink. Like you honestly can't be that upset when we turn down the liquor 1:30 on a Sunday afternoon? Then more snitiness when we didn't want to order the feature crab/cheese dip special appetizer.

She seemed to neglect us for quite a while and it took forever to bring the bill after she took the dishes away. Apparently, some sort of computer malfunction. I had my doubts though...just before the bill came, she came round the corner, looked at our table, did a 180 and came back with the bill in 1 minute. Almost like she just forgot about us???

Update from Ian
Another source of annoyance for me was the fact that she argued with me when I asked for the Cajun Chicken without Mayo. She tried to tell me that it doesn't come with Mayo. I was thinking I must have misread but I argued back anyway saying the menu claimed there was mayo (fortunately I see now that I was right). She fights back a little so I just respond that as long as the thing doesn't have mayo I'll be happy. Whatever happened to the customer always being right?

Alice Fazooli's

We went out for a b-day lunch on Thursday. The bread, as usual, was pretty tasty with some olive oil and garlicy type weird stuff to mix together.

I went healthy and just had some pasta e fagoli soup with three beans, pasta and veggies. It came in a fun little pitcher type thing that the waiter poured into my bowl. The soup was odd tasting, and did not have the afore-mentioned beans or pasta. A bit of a disapointment, but at $4.95 for lunch at an expensive restaurant, I guess you can't complain too much.

Subway Pizza

We'll blame the lack of recent posts on the fact that we were out of town so our meals didn't qualify for weeattoronto posting.

Anyway on my way home from the airport, I was pleased to pick up a few slices of pizza pizza pepperoni for a buck a slice. I don't know the full scoop behind why the TTC is selling pizza but I think it has something to do with raising money for the United Way. Last Tuesday, I left the city horribly disappointed because I had grabbed a quick lunch of a slice of pizza only to find out once I hopped on the subway that I could have eaten for much cheaper.

Maybe if the TTC sold pizza more often I would actually use public transit regularly. Well, that's unlikely and with the proposed upcoming additional 15 cent hike on TTC fares they're going to need a lot more than pizza to get me on board.

Interesting note that may or may not be true. When I first came to Toronto fares were 1.80 (using tokens) and in November they will be going up to 2.25. It seems like I would have been better off buying tokens then saving money in ING?

Anyway to bring the discussion back to food, the moral of the story is when you're eating out, walk

Random Stuff

A few fun topics for the limited number of readers we actually have:

1. On Friday night, we went to the veggie food fair. Some of the magic from other years seemed to be missing for some reason. It could be that I'm no longer a veggie. Perhaps it was Ian in tow? Could have been the King's Cafe ladies trying to upsell me on my dumpling/sticky rice purchase. Maybe the lack of power bar type items to sample?

2. We went to Aroma yesterday for buffet lunch. Tasty as usual, and a deeeelightful new curry cabbage dish. As you walk in and leave the joint, they have a glassed in tandoori area with a guy making naan bread. In the last year or so, it's been my thing to wave at the guy and he usually waves back. Yesterday, he got to the wave before I did! Ha ha! We've got quite the little thing happening.

3. The original plan was to go camping, but we ditched it due to rain and a leaky tent. Instead, we planned to go for a picnic to Bronte park. The Gardiner was closed so we made alternate plans to go to Cherry beach. All was deelightful, but they had half of the park blocked off with a chain link fence. Ian speculated that it was due to some sort of contamination. I tell him to not be silly. But alas, we get home and he checks the web and he appears to be correct!




Anywho, had some veggie burgers with hummus, avocado, cheese, ketchup on Pita Break cooked on old school coleman stove. Pretty tasty. Ian wants to upgrade to a hibachi so we can do meat in style.










The back was slightly burnt in the parents day, but the real damage happened earlier this summer with a scrambled egg/overpressured fuel cylinder incident.











Ian puts away lawn chairs.



















4. T&T asian food markets come to town off Cherry Street across from the Cirque near the Docks.

Stocked up on dumplings, buns, fried tofu, seaweed and veggies.

Run For the Cure

Ian and I are running again this year. If you love or even remotely like us, you'd donate something to the cause. Go to this website! If you are torn about who to donate to, just go with me (Janice). It seems like the easy way out of dilemma!

Thanks to all the parents + Ian's favorite E-town aunt and uncle.

Looking Where you Walk

At yesterday's Blue Jays game Janice snagged a foul ball (Snag may not be the correct term - she apparently ran away from the ball as it neared her and then managed to recover and grab it after it hit a seat. Surprising behaviour because when I go with her to games she wants me to be always ready to jump and run towards the ball).

That's great but even better was that Burnett picked up the seven strike-outs that earn us a free slice from Pizza Pizza (The deal is that if the Jays get 7 or more strikeouts on a Friday or Sunday home game you get a free slice of pepperoni on the subsequent Monday). Anyway we headed out at lunch today to get our free slice and we were going to blow the bank to buy another slice of cheese pizza for Janice. Quite the meal. As we were walking out of the building though, I happened to see a Jay's ticket on the ground. Luckily I stopped and examined it and saw that it was for Sunday's game! Another free slice. So we ended up having a completely free lunch! It seems like the moral of the story is that it pays to look where you walk.

For the record, I agree it is mildly disgusting to pick up dirty paper from the ground but, hey, for 3 bucks, who wouldn't.

Island Foods

On Sat night, Ian and I went to the Ex and ate at Island Foods. Ian claims that they have a store in Village on the Grange area (apparently Dundas & McCaul area), but it is generally lined up outside so he keeps on walking.

At the Ex, this seemed to be one of the more popular joints in the "food building", but we didn't have much else to do so we waited. I had the veggie meal for $5.25 which came with rice/beans, and various curried veggies - cabbage, potatoe, cauliflower etc. It was ok, but I was expecting some more variety. Perhaps some squash or spinach and maybe some chickpeas. Alright value for my money. Decent levels of tastiness. The rice was a bit weird tasting.

Ian has a boneless chicken roti for $6 something and his direct quote was "It is alright, smaller than I would have liked."

So that's the story!