Fun Nutritional Stuff Involving McD's.

Ian and I went on an Ikea/Home Depot mission this morning to buy ourselves a decorative cinder block for the parkade. It's not actually decorative, more for chaining up the kayaks and possibly bike now that the condo people in charge are cracking down on my storing of my kayaks on top of and beside the locker :(

I think it's only a matter of time before they crack down on people's junk in the parkade, but we'll hope for the best!

Anyway, the whole point of this is, we wanted to go to Licks for lunch, but they would not sell me the kids nature burger combo since I appear to be over 12. In anger/protest, we left and then since we were hungry we stopped in at McDonalds on the way home. Ian had the Crispy Chicken - seemed to be moderately tasty.

I strayed away from my usual grilled cheese happy meal and went with the fillet-o-fish combo and shared my fries and drink with Ian. On the tray liner, they had some fun nutritional facts.

Just for information, you can take a look at the Dietitians of Canada website to find out how many calories per day you should actually consume.

I'm about 2354 cal/day! Ian around 2852 or so, give or take some due to my shady math conversions.

To find out exactly how tubby you are making yourself by eating at McD's, you can download the nutritional flier. Or even more fun...actually way, way more fun is to launch their handy nutritional calculator.

Here's some meal options that I worked out for you blog readers:

• Big Breakfast - 630 calories, but 58% of your RDA of fat, and an even more disturbing share of 70% of your RDA of saturated + trans fat. But as Ian points out, are you even supposed to be eating ANY saturated/trans??? Anyway, on to the next point. Side points though - good thing that Ian and I usually share the big breakfast. That would be pretty gross to eat the whole thing on your own.

• Even if you skip the fried food and get a single sausage McMuffin with medium OJ, you are still up there in the 650 cal range with 52% of your sat + trans level.

• Occasionally (and I mean like once every 2 months) I'll stop by McD's by work while doing some errands and pick up a grilled cheese sandwich meal with small fries, child's orange beverage and McDonaldland cookies instead of toy. Looks like I should be laying off the cookies, the meal is a whopping 800 calories all together. Ian doesn't seem concerned, he said, "that seems happy! Calorie per dollar, that is tough to beat." Also disturbing, kids eat these meals. Clearly a 3 year old does not require the same calories as me!
  
  
• The ultimate in grossness is a double quarter pounder with cheese combo meal with coke and fries. 1420 calories! A whopping 95% of you RDA of fat.
  

No wonder that guy from "SuperSize Me" got so large in a such a short amount of time!

Leftover Troubles

Does anyone else find the leftovers and/or produce stressful?

Usually on Sat or Sun, Ian and I will take a flip through my cookbooks, come up with a plan for meals and then buy groceries accordingly. Just trying to avoid the throwing out of veggies and having to make extra trips to the grocery store to pick up stuff we don't have. Usually works out pretty well...unless, we eat our more than expected. That brings me to stressful situation number 1.

Having veggies, dairy etc that are going bad. Due to our cheapness affliction, nothing makes me sadder than throwing away some spinach that has gone south or dairy that has expired.

Stressful situation #2 involves:

Ian and I are trying to healthy it up and have been eating at home more often. The leftovers often get out of control because of the lack of a microwave at my office and Ian's insistence on either eating out when he goes into school or eating PC frozen meals when he stays home for lunch. Who can blame him, they are generally tastier than home cooking, and now with the blue line of meals, probably healthier too??


For example, take the ricotta spinach dumpling items with tomato sauce that I made on Tuesday. Ian didn't quite like the look of them so he made some pasta and chicken to go along with my tomato sauce. That in itself shouldn't be a problem right???

WRONG. For some reason, Ian seems to have made a whole box of pasta, thinking that I would also partake in it. Apparently, he only made 2/5 of a box, or a couple servings, but maybe we are light eaters because it turned out to be a lot of food.

Then, I had some cooked chickpeas in the fridge (from our middle eastern feast hummus making last weekend) that I felt I should use.

Also had some fresh parsley, cilantro that wasn't getting any fresher. So despite the leftover pasta, ended up cooking my chickpea-squash curry for dinner on Thursday.

So then we had the chickpea curry, more rice, and the old pasta.

It was out of control!


Maybe we should just take up eating out all the time? But then I guess we would be stressed about packing on the pounds and lack of $$ saving?

Ethiopian House

Today Ian and I went to our new favorite cheap eats lunch spot, Ethiopian House. It's the new favorite since the previous New Gen disappointment. I would classify the walk as a "death march", but at 45 minutes one way it really is not all that bad, especially when you can walk home in the always fun "Path" underground Toronto shopping mall scheme.



Here's the guy from their website holding the usual Ethiopian platter.

He actually seems to be at the place every time we are there. Not quite sure what the guy actually does. The waitress usually hustles around and does everything. This guy just hovers around behind the bar and relaxes.

Anyway, on to the review. I always have the veg lunch special which includes one little pile of each of the following:



EG 1. Misir Wot ...................................................... 8.70
Lentil Stew in berbere sauce

VEG 2. Sherro Wot ..................................................... 8.80
Highly-seasoned chick peas (powder) in berbere sauce

VEG 3. Tikil Goman .................................................... 8.95
Cabbage, carrots, potatoes, cooked in turmeric sauce

VEG 4. Goman Wot .................................................... 8.80
Kale or collard greens in mild sauce

VEG 5. Yekik Alicha .................................................... 8.80
Yellow split peas in mild turmeric sauce

VEG 6. Kik Wot ...........................................................8.80
Split peas stew in berbere sauce

VEG 7. Misir Alicha ......................................................8.80
Split lentil stew in thick mild sauce with seasoning

VEG 8. Atakelt Wot ................................................... 8.95
Mixed vegetables - string beans, carrots, potatoes - cooked in tomato sauce

VEG 9. Vegetarian Bayaaynatu .................................. 11.50
"Of Each Kind" small servings of the above Nos.1-8) vegetarian dishes
(For two) .......................................................... 21.90

Also included is some tasty salad and two hot sauces, one brown which is rather bitter and one fluorescent green which is alright. Meal usually includes some cottage cheese, but this time they seem to have forgotten.

This menu items above are actually from dinner, for lunch the combo cost is a mere $6.50 or something ridiculously cheap like that. Also includes as much injera bread as you can stuff yourself with. The veggie stuff is always tasty and therefore is always a challenge to keep Ian from eating all my lentil tastiness. He usually goes after my yellow lentil dishes, which is actually ok since I prefer the brown lentil stuff anyway.

Ian had the meaty combo which includes two kinds of beefy fun and some spinachy stuff which Ian likes and I don't. Slightly more, like $7.30 perhaps?

Total bill including tax and tip was a mere $18 or so! How can you argue with that. We stopped by best buy on the way home and with lots of sadness held off on a new TV purchase. The way I see it, we are actually $900 ahead on the day.

Actually $882 if you include the cost of lunch. Score one for us! We also walked home past the super duper auto show people and scored three cans of coke zero. Guess that puts us ahead $883.50 if you assume $0.50 a can. At that kind of value, how can you go wrong with going out for lunch? It's almost like we are losing money by staying home??

If you would like to make your own Ethiopian, check out hese web-sites. The first one has a injera bread recipe using buckwheat pancake mix, biscuit mix and an egg. I'm SURE that's how they do it in Ethiopia!

Website 1

Website 2

Website 3

Linguini with Shrimp Marinara

While Loblaws is taking a lot of abuse in the news and in the market, they still make a quality product in my books and they keep getting better! The president recently introduced a new series of meals including "Linguini with Shrimp Marinara" and "Grain Medley with Ginger Glazed Salmon". These are blue items so the Shrimp even comes equipped with 8 grams of fibre. That doesn't hurt the taste though as the shrimp are among the best I'ver ever had in a frozen meal. Overall the meals are great and I'm not going to go back to the old menu items for quite a while

More Fun Christmas Stuff

Ian was the victim of food poisoning a few months ago...unfortunately mostly my fault. Anyway, we got a couple of meat thermometers for Christmas from both sets of parents, we kept the fun digital one. It works delightfully well and hopefully no more food poisoning for Ian!

Highly recommended for meat eaters out there!

Sushi Making Fun

Today Ian and I went on a Christmas present extravaganza and took in the matinee viewing of Breach at the Queensway. Was pretty good despite being an Ian type of spy movie. Kind of cool, one of the opening scenes has this guy walking past this "Irish" storefront that looked like a place on Bloor Street. As it turns out, movie was shot in Toronto! Ian had his doubts....

Thanks Mom and Dad for the gift certificates.

Then some grocery shopping and fun sushi making. Ian bought some salmon, but I scared him about parasites so he cooked the fish. Still was pretty tasty in the sushi.

We used the sushi making set that Margaret and James gave us for Christmas! Turned out pretty well and the cute chop stick holding whales were pretty cool.



Here's the little sushi making wooden box thingy soaking. Lid is on to prevent floating!








Were a little pressed for time at the LCBO due to melting fro yo, so could not consult with the Billy's wine handbook. In a last minute panic, ended up buying Australian yellow tail chardonnay to go along with the sushi...not so great, but not terrible either. About $11 and even had a deelightful conversation with the clerk about U of A (was wearing my U of A hoodie that I got this Christmas from Ian's mom and dad).







Here's the final result. I had squash, avocado, red pepper and wasabi sushi with pickled ginger on the side.

Jacko, take a look at the right hand side chop-sticks, they are the ones you gave us from Korea! Fun!

Ian's parents, check out the other ones, I think you guys gave us those for Christmas when I lived in Sudbury!


Then, to top it all off, Ian used the electric toothbrush that my Mom and Dad gave me for Christmas! Yeah, I know, the excitement around here never ends!!!

URGENT NEWS ALERT

The DQ is now open!!! Head to the south west side of the Skydome (aka Rogers Centre) to cash in on tastiness!

Ian already has....cookie dough blizzard. I can't lie to the blog readers out there, I may have had a few spoons too....

Steam Whistle Brewery

A couple of weekends ago I went on a Brewery Tour with a few people. It was pretty decent value...I chose the 6 pack tour for only $13. And with this ulta-close location, the convenience factor is pretty high (just thought of this, how handy would that be to become a brew-master there? No more commute for me!). Anyway, pretty good value considering they threw in a tasty 6 pack of beers that would normally cost $11.95 at the LCBO. Before, during and after the tour there was ample opportunity to replenish the samples, so I probably had the equivalent of about 3 beers on the house! Nice work by me!

Tour itself was pretty decent, although had to keep it quiet a few times with facts about "centrifuging, decanting, heat exchangers" that were a bit out to lunch. One electrician that we went with told me that "this wiring isn't up to code". At the end, we even got to pull an authentic steamwhistle. The tour guide tried to get us to eat barley, which normally I would not be aginst, but in this case, probably 1000 people had pawed through the same bucket...

Overall, worth checking out. Lots of history at this brewery and the building is a designated historic site (back in the day, steam engines used to come there to be repaired).

Boulevard Cafe

I was helping out with a recruitment event and as a result I got to go to dinner to the Boulevard Cafe with everyone. I'd been before years ago but the price prevented a return visit. This time the price was right.

Since there was quite a few of us we had the whole second floor and it was a fixed menu. The second floor was quite nice and I sat right beside the fireplace which. I had a "martini to camarones" as a starter and then the pescado del dia (which was tilapia). Finally I had a chocolate khalua cheesecake for dessert. The "martini" was terrific. The tasty shrimp came with guacamole and as we all know guacamole is where it's at. The fish was fairly good with some potato like things on the side. Of course I loved the cheesecake although it didn't seem like the serving was large enough. Other people had a pasta dish or a steak both of which seemed reasonably well liked. Overall I'd say it was a great meal but I guess I'd say that about any meal where I leave without seeing a bill.

While the food was great, one big disappointment is that this place bills itself as serving "authentic peruvian cuisine". Well if that's true where is the chupe de camerones or lomo saltado that I crave. It's like going to a Burger King that doesn't have a whopper on the menu.

Swiss Chalet

Exciting news, a swiss chalet has opened up a mere two or three blocks from our place here. It is very exciting. Now I know you people are thinking two things
1) Doesn't that mean stalkers will know where you live?
Maybe but since there are a few thousand apartments within 2-3 blocks I assume we're still our same old anonymous selves?

2) Isn't the swiss expensive?
Yes but I have a few solutions:
a) A coupon came in the mail
b) Family packs increase the value. Sure they're designed for 4 people but some days I feel hungry

Mandarin Buffet

One of my co-workers is heading to the UK for 6 months, so we had a little going away lunch at the Mandarin in Mississauga.

I was expecting the worst - Reno buffet style, but was pleasantly surprised. To start, I had some veggie sushi maki (cucumber, mixed veggie, spring roll/tempura filled). All were quite delightful + I scored a big hit of pickled ginger.

I skipped right over the salads, they didn't look bad, but they didn't look all that great either.

For the main course, I had a veggie spring roll, squash tempura, two noodle type dishes and assorted Chinese style veggies (three dishes in all). The meat eaters in the crowd had about 20 more meaty dishes to pick from...all looked reasonably tasty. They had a special bun festival going on, but sadly no veggie ones so I skipped it. They had about 4 varieties though.

Dessert was surprisingly good, I skipped the fruit, squares and cake selection and went for a mini-sundae. They had 8 kinds of ice-cream, fro yo and sorbet along with chocolate/caramel sauce and an assortment of tasty toppings.

Price was $10.99 per person. Even came with a fortune cookie at the end.

That's the Spot

In the building adjacent to us, a Spot coffee shop opened up. For all the people in the complex they had a "special" opening reception yesterday and today. Sadly we couldn't go yesterday because of Janice's work party but I guess one free food event a day is enough. Anyway back to the spot. We went today. There was free food and beverage samples. We took one of everything that came our way. Highlights include a white chocolate hot chocolate (wchc) sample that they made me. Quite good. Pepperoni pizza, a little too cheesy and various coffee beverages both hot and cold. Trying out these coffee beverages was pretty good because I've long been thinking that I should pick up the coffee habit. Fortunately for the budget these beverages convinced me that I'm not quite ready to join the coffee drinking masses. Janice had some Jasmine tea. It was OK I guess?

Overall I don't think this will be a regular spot (sorry for the pun) mainly due to the fact that we don't drink coffee and the food while reasonably tasty was a little pricy.

The dairy queen/orange julius (dqoj) in our building looks to be opening soon. They've had the now hiring sign up for a while. Janice was thinking of applying to get her access to an endless supply of Mr Misty's since she thinks (and says aloud) "I'll bet they'll hire me [Janice] because of my DQ experience". I wonder though how will the lack of orange julius experience come into play? Anyway, she's decided to stick with iron and steel for now since even though it's not quite as tasty we suspect the pay is slightly better. We'll just hope for a similar type reception event when the dqoj opens.

Ian- King of Menu Planning!

Last weekend I was working and this weekend I was bonspieling, so Ian took over on menu planning and grocery patrol!

He far exceeded my expectations...I was thinking PC frozen meals all week.

Instead, last week he planned:

• Sweet potato and black bean burritos
• Chicken coconut curry and tofu
• Thai fried rice with tofu

I ended up doing most of the cooking, but was still very impressed with his selections.






Now this week, he seems to have outdone himself and come up with:

• Shrimp bibimbop

• Home-made pad thai (with shrimp and chicken for the carnivorous members of the family)
  
• Pesto pasta with basil/potato

Potato Leek Soup for AK

As promised to my co-worker AK, here's the recipe for soup that we made a while ago! Pretty tasty stuff, although not as creamy as some (like our cafeteria for example).

Ingredients:

5 medium leeks
2 large boiling potatoes (Yukon Gold or Yellow Finn)
8 cups veggie stock
1 t salt
3 sprigs fresh thyme
1 clove garlic, crushed
1/4 cup creme fraiche or sour cream
1 T chopped fresh chives

How to make:

Clean/chop leeks well. Peel potatoes and dice.

Bring stock to boil, add salt, potatoes, thyme and garlic. Cook covered 5 minutes. Add leeks, simmer uncovered until leeks and potatoes are tender, about 10 minutes. Taste and adjust seasoning.

Remove thyme, ladle soup into bowls, garnish with creme fraiche and a sprinkle of chives.

The Westin Harbour Castle

Last night was my company's big "Dinner Dance", although I started to get a sore throat toward the end so no dancing, just dinner for Ian and I.

1370 people attended...pretty impressive stuff!



Started off ok, with a $6 cab ride there. I recently bought the world's most uncomfortable shoes, thus limiting the amount of walking I can handle.

A glass or two of French sauvignon blanc to start pre-dinner during the "cocktail" hour.. According to Billy's classification, I would say a "fresh" wine.

Some so-so tomato soup to start, then a roasted veggie (peppers, asparagus, artichoke) salad with some creamy garlicky dressing and then the main course.

A glass or two of Australian Cabernet Sauvignon with dinner.

I ordered the veggie, and received some squash and cheese stuffed tortellini/basket pasta things with a squash sauce. Came with some greens. Pretty good, although not quite the gourmet veggie meal that I was expecting.

Ian had a steak with a layered potato thing and some greens. He seemed to enjoy. Steak seemed perfectly cooked - medium well - which is probably the most appropriate for a banquet type event.

A desert sampler to finish- included a mini apple tart, a meringue thingy and a brownie with ice cream.

Overall, high marks for tastiness and service. The organizing committee and the Westin once again did a good job. Ian and I did not win any door prizes, but I suppose that we can hardly hold that against the committee. One funny thing that happened, our CEO dude ended up winning the prize for a two night stay and breakfast at some hotel in Oakville! Ha ha! They drew another name though and didn't give him the prize! What a burn....

Alice Fazooli's Downtown

A coupon came in the mail for $15 off at Alice's when you spend $40 or more. Not one to let coupons go to waste, we went on Friday night. To start, Ian had a limoncella martini which was quite strong. I thought he was being wimpy, but when I had a sip, turns out he was actually under-stating the strongness! Good value for our $6.

Then some tasty bread with olive oil with garlic and cheese dipping sauce (for free). Some bruchetta (to bolster the food bill up to $40). Then Ian had some spicy chicken seafood dish with rice and veggie (about $18). I had the portabello agnolotti with cream sauce ($14 or so). Both very tasty.

Ian then went all out and ordered the brownie sundae ($6). Pretty good but not huge, as the waitress had promised. In fact, barely enough for big eating Ian.

Service was a little suspect, they had enough people, but the people were just annoying. Like the hostess, who forced her way past a waiter talking to a table of customers, causing Ian and I to shimmy between this waiters large rear end and the tables on the other side. As Ian would say, "Awkward with two A's". We could have taken the other aisle to our table.

Our waitress was a bit freaky, and kept promising "2 minutes to bread", "6 minutes to bruchetta". She was way off though, the bruchetta came in like 2 minutes! Then she had to back-track and promise that it was indeed in the oven for a bit. She even corrected me when I ordered bruchetta with an "s" sound in there. Apparently, at Alice's, you are supposed to say it with a "hard c" sound. What was I thinking???

Even with the coupon, I think we ended up spending $50...not too bad considering the amount of food that we ordered.

The place seemed packed with the after work bay street crowd, who obviously don't mind the somewhat expensive prices.