Healthy Food?

This sesame seed salmon with red peppers is courtesy of Sheila and her new Weight Watchers cookbook (She is not on a diet. The book was on sale.):

Not bad! Not dry. It was flavoured with cider vinegar. Admittedly, I poured some soya sauce on it because I love salty.

At a recent showcase of Italian food in the Market, we made gnocchi. Ours were the most interesting looking. Note to self: don't let James use a potato ricer that he might bend out of shape.

Soup noodles and a random fried dumpling! There was no time for me to un-clump the noodles. There was eating to be done ASAP!
From: the kitchen counter!

Snowboarding Food 3

Spaghettini with sauce:

Awesome, cheapo meal. Sheila and I were pleasantly surprised by the good taste of the Great Value brand sauce. It had mushrooms too! We just picked the one with the least amount of junk ingredients (sulphites, sugar, glucose-fructose). Doesn't look saucy in the picture, but that's just because we were too hungry to mix well.

Belated ASA3 tiramisu cake:

Hacked pizza and wings:
Great wings! Sad at 'no delivery'.

Pho

Oysters with garlic appetizer:

A must-have at this restaurant. Don't touch the shell; it's burning hot! Great for garlic lovers. The oysters are pretty large.

Small rare beef and beef ball pho:
Can't complain. It takes a lot of effort to mess up pho. 

Location: Times Square Mall, upstairs.

Choco-Banana Bread!

Baked for a bit too long, but great with melted butter in the microwave! I will try this again soon.

Smoke's Poutinerie

Smoke's Poutinerie (218 Adelaide St. W., Toronto)
Montreal poutine:


Again, I'm not a fan of brown fries. Their redeeming quality is that they were crispy enough for my likings. Portion size is artery-cloggerific. One size fits all. The "Montreal" poutine had "Montreal" smoked meat, mustard and a pickle. I left all fries touching the yellow condiment in the box. The smoked meat was shaved and a bit dry. I was a bit disappointed as my friends gave this place good comments. (I still don't know what they mean by "squeaky cheese".) I guess that's what I get for ordering a "Montreal" poutine in Toronto. I should've known better.

Andrew ordered the Italian poutine. It was laden with meat: sausage and what appeared to be ground beef. Its appearance was a bit unappetizing to me, but my cousin liked it for the most part. His only beef (intentional pun) was that it was slightly too salty for him.

This experience made me want to get on a bus to Montreal and look for poutine with a gratin treatment. But first, I think I want to eat some fresh fruits and vegetables. 

Mr. Greek

The classic gyro:

I liked the potatoes. It was mentioned that rice from The Friendly Greek has more flavour.
The bread wasn't bad. We were hungry so we got three baskets of it.

We all thought the salad was going to be a small side salad, but it was a pretty big bowl. Lots of lettuce, two pieces of tomato, few crumbs of feta cheese, few olives, and some slivers of red onion.

Chocolate Pancakes

Attempt 1: Sheila's pancakes looked better. Mine were not uploaded. :P


Attempt 2: Better... but could be better. They're not burnt; they're just chocolate. And I happen to prefer flat pancakes over those fluffier doughy ones. Sometimes I put them in the toaster oven after making them for extra crispiness. I've decided that crispy = yum.

Banana Muffins

There's only one thing to do when the bananas are close to rotting: make banana muffins, of course!


Sheila: They're a bit tasteless.
Yeaaah... I just looked up and combined a bunch of online recipes since I couldn't find Casey's, and I sort of eyeballed everything.

It had good texture, and I added some flavour by pouring some maple syrup over the finished product. The muffins soaked that stuff up like a sponge.

Better luck next time, I suppose.

Bling Food 1

Madeline's (601 King Street West, Toronto)

Chef Susur Lee's (sort of) new restaurant on King Street West is a family (Chinese) style restaurant. You're meant to order several different dishes to share among your table. Instead of deliberating over the appetizing menu, the four of us had a go at two orders of the tasting menu for two. For $40 a piece, expectations were high. 

Forgive me for forgetting most of what was in the dishes, but they were chock-full of ingredients that I just didn't hear.

Starter: Apple something prosciutto salad. Berta wasn't a fan of the salty meat with the sweet apples, but I was. Then again, I like salty and by transitive properties I like prosciutto. The flat circular pastry at the bottom was pretty neat. It was like an apple pastry with salty meat and leafy greenness on top.

Next: Something something artichoke soup.

First off, it was pretty cool when four waiters came out at the same time to serve us each our bowl of soup. Synchronized food serving should be a sport. The soup was great, according to all of us. It had good taste, nice crunchy texture from the stuffs on top, and it seemed to have a bit of crème fraîche.

More: Giant scallops with crouton. I totally forgot about this until the pictures came. The scallops were pretty huge and awesome. They were like little pucks of soft, nicely textured goodness.

Main course: Beef with wild blueberries, choy, and sweet potatoes. I'm not a fan of berries, but the texture of the meat was pretty good. Not amazing, but it was pretty good. As people whose diet (presently and/or in the past) includes regular intake of choy, we all thought that they were way too mushy for any of our likings. It also had a weird bitter taste that none of us were accustomed to. This was our least favourite dish of the night. The sweet potatoes apparently had some cheese, which I did not taste. They weren't bad though, and I think there were some nuts in there too.

Dessert: Something-berry sorbet, chocolate apricot molten lava cake, and fried coconut vanilla custard. Can't comment on the berry crap that I did not eat. Of the two sweets that I actually consumed, the chocolate one was the most exciting. The apricots added a bit of sourness to the melty chocolate inside the cake. I think it was a good combination, but chocolate traditionalists (whatever those are) might not appreciate the added flavour. The inside of the fried thing tasted a bit like cream. Both sides of the table left a large chunk of it on the plate. 

Haina and Jess thought the fried custard was too large and "very Chinese", but they enjoyed the sorbet and wished it was bigger.

Amusing weirdness: Jess and Berta were discussing the lighting behind us, which was blue. The rest of the restaurant had a reddish glow. As Jess mentioned that she would've preferred the red side, the lights behind us changed to red. That is the only time that the colour of the lights changed. I wonder if they heard us. :P

Also, Berta's champagne tasted more like sparkling wine to me. It wasn't as exciting as I thought it'd be. Then again, I'm too poor to know what good champagne is supposed to taste like.

I'd go back again... when I have a job that pays me enough to eat there.

Meat on Bread

Open-faced sandwich from Jack Astor's.



It's not as exciting as meat on bread should be.