Dragon’s Beard Candy. A traditional Lunar New Year treat.
The making of Takoyaki – fried squid balls – in a special Takoyaki pan. The process was fascinating to watch, especially when the balls were flipped.
Category: events and festivals
Choco-holic
After years of writing about events in Toronto, there are times when I still can’t help but feel like an imposter. I’m not – I’ve never attended an event and not covered it fully, but there have been times when I’ve found myself wedged against a buffet table at the ROM, balancing a plate of pastries and a glass of wine, while I try to avoid getting in the shot for Fashion Television or the CBC, that I begin to doubt my credentials. Nevermind that the lovely PR ladies all assure me that the fact that I give them any coverage at all puts me in their good books (you wouldn’t believe the number of people who attend media previews for the free grub and never write a word about the event or show), but as a kind of weird looking gal writing for various Internet sites, I still often feel as if I’ve somehow sneaked in and could get caught and kicked out at any second.
When in the same situation but also presented with all the free chocolate I can stuff into my little chocolate-loving mouth, my guilt does overtime. Not the least because chocolates are one of those things that you are only supposed to have one or two of. You don’t want to make a pig of yourself, after all. So when we walked into the Ganong Chocs-o-Fun party last night, the feeling of being “kids in a candy store” was close to the surface.
Food Flicks
We spent Saturday in the darkened confines of Innis Town Hall, a theatre on the U of T campus, watching films from the Planet in Focus film fest. It was a very foodie day with very foodie films.
The morning started off with the organic pancake breakfast prepared by Real Food for Real Kids. For $10 you got two hemp pancakes with organic maple syrup, organic green salad with organic brie, fresh fruit, breads made from the ovens at Dufferin Grove Park, plus a selection of organic jams and hemp spreads. And of course organic fair trade coffee and Happy Planet juice. The price included a free travel coffee mug, and the juices retail for $1.99 each, so it was not only delicious, but a really good deal.
A Fallen Maple
The first film was called A Fallen Maple and looked at one family’s issue with lead content in the maple syrup produced on their farm. Turns out, while the maple syrup industry is highly regulated in Quebec and Vermont, in Ontario, this is not the case, and small family producers using older equipment often have problems with lead in their syrup. The only solution is to replace the entire production system, which, for this family, would have cost in excess of $100,000. The kicker is that the woman running the farm, one of the few women maple syrup producers in Ontario, had voluntarily agree to test the province’s “Best Practices” system, only to discover that they actually caused higher levels of lead in her syrup than she would have had otherwise. The maple syrup production, which had been in the family for generations, had to be shut down because they couldn’t afford to upgrade the equipment.
Salad Days
People should not throw wedding receptions on Daylight Saving Time switch overs. Or at least not the day after. We went to a wedding reception last night and stayed out far too late and drank far too much. There were drink tickets and the G&T’s were being made with premium gin and an 8 to 1 ratio of G to T. There was much dancing and eating of cake and sushi, not to mention the spitting out of little tiny quiche upon the discovery of the bacon contained therein.
This morning, after little sleep, combined with too much booze and too much dancing (there’s nothing like a gay wedding for good tunes on the dancefloor), I’m feeling a bit rough around the edges.
Ever since I can remember, a hangover demands a salad. My body just wants something fresh and crisp and cold. I have the makings of an excellent salad in the kitchen, of course, but moving from a reclining to a standing position causes me to emit loud “Urrrnnnnggghhh!” noises reminiscent of Lurch from the Addams family.
The quick lunch choices in our immediate vicinity are few. Two burger joints, two sub places and a roti place which, while I typically adore the roti place, didn’t sit well in my brain today.
Two For Tea and Becoming an “Expert”
I’ve been to two different tea events in the past week. Both very different in scope and both of which left me with a curious little bug in my brain.
The first tea was an afternoon tea and lecture on the health benefits of tea at Toronto’s Casa Loma. Having never been to Casa Loma after living in Toronto going on twenty years, I figured it was high time to do so and tea in the gorgeous marble conservatory was as good an excuse as any. Casa Loma is, indeed, a big freakin’ castle, and was as marvellous as it had been made out to be. It would have been more pleasant had there been considerably fewer tourists, however, because nothing takes the charm out of tea in the lush conservatory of a castle than a bunch of people in ugly shorts and sneakers and ball caps peering through the glass doors taking your photo.
The meal itself was your standard afternoon tea fare – scones, pastries, fruit and sandwiches. Passable, but not outstanding on any level: California strawberries when local ones are still in season, too many super-sweet pastries that got left behind, clotted cream passed around in the jar (!!!) instead of in a dish (am I at someone’s house??), and, as is always the case, not enough vegetarian sandwiches, because inevitably, the meat-eaters will ignore the roast beef and turkey and scoff *all* of the egg salad before you even knew there were any there.
The actual tea for drinking threw us all for a bit of a loop. It seems that Lipton was a sponsor in some capacity because all that was on offer was different varieties of Lipton tea – in bags. There were prize baskets from Lipton given out at the end, and I suspect that the guest speaker was a shill for Lipton as well, so frequently did she tout their products.
Helpful Dining Tips for ‘Licious
A few days ago, someone over on a LiveJournal community posted about a server they knew who got stiffed on a tip during Summerlicious.
Summerlicious, for those of you not familiar with it, is a two-week long event where participating Toronto restaurants offer a three-course prix-fixe menu at a significantly reduced price. It’s typically a loss-leader, where the restaurant makes money off of beverages, and hopes that their food is so good it will encourage the cheap-ass Summerlicious diners to come back at full price.
Now because Summerlicious diners have a reputation for being cheap-asses, they tend to get poor to bad service, especially when the restaurant is still offering their regular full menu. And as many people pointed out to the poster on the Toronto community… a lot of Summerlicious diners leave crappy tips not because they’re cheap, but because the server anticipated they would be cheap and gave them crappy service.
Greg and I are not normally cheap-ass diners. Nor are we poor tippers. Today, however, we left an 81 cent tip on a $41 bill, because we suffered through one of the crappiest meals we have ever experienced.
I’m not going to give a play-by-play, but rather some basic commonsense tips for both restaurants and diners.
How Sweet It Is
At first, we weren’t sure we had read it right. Scrolling across the screen on the 24-hour news channel was information about a Sweets Expo at the Toronto Convention Centre. It took some investigating to finally find the website: http://www.sweetsexpo.ca. No, Beavis and Butthead, not “sweet sex po”, get your minds out of the gutter. Sweets Expo, aka, a room full of candy.
Bright and early, there we were, headed into the convention centre, the smell of sugar surrounding us. However, had it not been for two things, the Sweets Expo would have left a rather sour taste in my mouth.
First of all, it hadn’t been especially well-promoted, as far as we could tell. That fast-moving news scroll was the only mention we had seen of the thing, and judging by the turnout, not many other people knew about it either. And apparently, the same amount of effort that went into promotion went into attracting exhibitors. It was considerably smaller than we expected, and with a couple of exceptions the calibre of product wasn’t that great. None of the many Toronto area chocolatiers were present; Stubbs, Soma and JS BonBon were not to be found. There were also none of the chain, or indie, candy stores – no Sugar Mountain, Tutti Frutti, Nutty Chocolatier or Candy Island. Also, no big brand names – no Nestle, no Cadbury.