HenryT's Profile
Any great restaurants in the Newmarket/Aurora, Ontario area?
Went there, based on this recommendation. Overall positive, but for a Wednesday, it was very busy and maybe short a server. Staff were good, but the kitchen was having some trouble - meat was overcooked (twice!) probably due to lack of attention in the kitchen. Manager was good about it. Arrived at 6:30, with reservation, got appetizer after 7:00; mains around 8:00 pm. Had to leave without coffee, due to time pressure.
Store is very interesting.
best bring your own wine in Montreal
Last weekend, hit O Thym - excellent French, slightly nouvelle - quail, trou normande (lemon sorbet and vodka), lovely rack of lamb.
La Raclette - Swiss - the raclette's a good appetizer, I had a very nice salmon with moutarde.
best bring your own wine in Montreal
Ate at La Coulombe one trip through Mtl last year with no reservation. About 9 pm, just dropped in. Worth it.
best charcoal grill
Weber builds a 37 inch "ranch kettle" for about $1000 - 1140 square inches. But out of sight for most home use, I think.
Ethopian Yirgacheffe coffee at Bridgehead
This just might be the world's best - Bridgehead in Ottawa has it!
Any possibility of Peruvian sushi in Toronto
IIRC, the Harbord Cafe does good ceviche. Or did, about five years ago!
Why Cora's sucks...?
The service in the Ottawa locations is spotty at best; surly at worst.
INDONESIAN restaurant??? Keen to find a good one
I think I remember a more downtown location for Bali, probably even more years ago. The food was good, but what made it truly memorable was a New Year's Eve dinner where two tires on my car were slashed. It wasn't personal - every car in the parking lot had been treated the same way:(
best chocolates in montreal?
Leonidas is real Belgian stuff and very nice.
605 De Maisonneuve West
Tel: 514-849-2620
Les Halles de la Gare Centrale
Tel: 514-393-1505
Fresh Garlic Turning Blue/Green when baked??
It is normal, it means your garlic is quite fresh and just a touch immature. The sulfur has found some copper to react with, making copper sulphate, which is very blue. It's safe to eat.
Blanching the garlic - like anything else, quickly heat, say 30 seconds in boiling water and cool in ice water - would probably prevent this. I suppose a quick saute would work just as well, might be more appropriate.
Some sources recommend using a canning salt, rather than iodized, as well.
Need raisin biscuit cookie recipe please
Garibaldis were my childhood favorite.
Reading those recipes, it seems like a very thin shortbread, only with self-raising flour. For North Americans, self-raising flour is approximated by
1 c. all-purpose flour
1 1/2 tsp. baking powder and 1/2 tsp. salt
(picked up from a google search that lead to cooks.com, but my cooking log is at home.)
Other formulations include
2 teaspoons of baking powder
or 1/2 teaspoon bicarbonate of soda + 1 1⁄4 teaspoons cream of tartar
to 1 cup of plain (all-purpose) flour.
Home made hummous just not as good as restaurants
A friend brought a hummus with just a little wasabi in it. It was just slightly green, very, very mildly "warm", and quite pleasant.
[Bragging: I was the one who could guess the "secret ingredient".]
Ottawa - Looking for Latin American/Mexican supplies
Called Mercado Latino
67 Montreal Road, Vanier, ON K1L 6E8
(613) 747-3795
It doesn't seem to have a website of its own.
ottawa
Having lived in the fringers of the GTA, once upon a time, I can generally figure out which are TO posts. But it does remind me of the old light bulb joke:
"How many Torontoians does it take to change a light bulb?"
"One, he holds it up and lets the universe revolve around him."
Microcress (with vincotto drizzle or otherwise)
I live in Ottawa. You'd lose that bet. We have this thing called winter. It's not really cold this year, but everything's dormant. Right now, everything white, though that hasn't lasted.
We some home-grown greens into December, though.
Pan Chancho, Kingston
Pan Chancho is someplace we nearly always go if we're passing through or near Kingston. We buy bread, cheese, chipotles, sandwiches, all kinds of good food there. Often if we're going from Ottawa to Toronto, we stop in Kingston to buy picnic supplies there. Even going to Prince Edward County at Labour Day, we bought lunch from Pan Chancho.
(And, on the way back, saw that someone at Pan Chancho seemed to have been where we were - at the Heritage Tomato tasting. At least, there was heritage tomato salad!)
ottawa
Some active Ottawa threads
Ottawa Fine Dining http://www.chowhound.com/topics/342983
Looking for unique places to eat in Ottata
http://www.chowhound.com/topics/354069
Wings in Ottawa
http://www.chowhound.com/topics/327344
The Advanced Search may help, but there aren't too many to find, alas.
Microcress (with vincotto drizzle or otherwise)
What I get from that is that microcress is just what I thought... Very fancy sprouts. The prices are per pound of seed, and a pound of cress seed would probably go a long way.
Is the world's best coffee made from animal excrement?
Dave Barry wrote a memorable piece on this. Quotable quote "what kind of world is it where I'm worried I might be ripped off by being sold coffee that was not pooped out by a weasel?"
Is the world's best coffee made from animal excrement?
Beware of Blue Mountain claims. I've heard that four times as much "Blue Mountain" is sold in North American than is grown in Jamaica. And 80% of the Jamaican crop is under contract to Japan. Know your supplier for that kind of thing.
Just Curious: Do any non-Montrealers love Montreal bagels?
Ottawa has good Montreal/New York style bagels at the Ottawa Bagel Shop and several Kettleman's.
But for sheer bagel style, in one of the Mtl malls , Le Fauburge I think, there's a wood-fired oven bagel place, with about 50 feet of stovepipe up to the glass atrium roof!
If you can't see the bagel boiled and smell the smoke and see the oven, feel the heat - it's not the real thing.
No cake bagels for me! Boiled hard bagels are my thing. I bought a dozen once, and ate three on the way home. Fresh from the oven!
Looking for unique places to eat in Ottawa
The Works has three (maybe four) by now "haut burger" places. I've been to the Westboro one. An insane nubmer of things done on the burger theme - you can get a full Australian, with the beet and fried egg and all, for example. Busy and cheerful, moderate priced.
We did a birthday party in their private room back in November, a great experience.
Looking for unique places to eat in Ottawa
Cabotto's is on Hazeldean Road, between Kanata and Stittsville in a building that was once Kemp's Tavern - although it looks like a brick farm house. It's certainly one of the oldest buildings in the area. They've been recommended in Kanata for over twenty years.
Ottawa Fine Dining
We celebrated my wife's birthday last night at Perspectives. It was our first time there.
The menu is somewhat challenging, but the waiter (Kyle) was helpful and knowledgeable. Some of the stuff we didn't order included the "veal bone faux pas" - veal marrow and foie gras in a potato carved to look like a bone, and the "contradiction of two fats" - scallops in coconut milk and more foie gras.
There was a sushi section and a couple of soups, also sort-of fusion-ish.
What did we have?
The amuse was a bite of mango and onion wrapped in smoked duck; lovely, tiny, interesting contrasts - we knew this would be memorable.
The bread was excellent little rolls; served with a fine light olive oil poured over salt and a japanese spice I don't recall, plus a couple of dried preserved beans.
The wine list is extensive, good on local and international. A whole page of half-bottles was great to fine, and we had a half-bottle of Angel's Gate Cabernet 2002.
My wife had the gunpowder tea smoked salmon appetizer, followed by the venison in potato crust with edmame and some kind of green pea "foam" or "rain"; I didn't write notes. I wish I had.
I had the cryovaced watermelon salad with goat cheese, olive dust, and proscuitto. The watermelon was marinated in triple sec and the olive dust was dried black olives. The presentation was as three big chunks, one a long skinny rectangular plate. The combination was a tongue-rush from salty to sweet.
For the main, I had duck breast, medium-rare, with potato-olive hash and duck confit. Again, a combination of salty and sweet and sours.
For dessert, we shared the "fruit alignment" - ginger gelato, I think, a shotglass of pomegrante seeds in jelly and a little chocolate wafer thing with hazelnuts. I had an excellent capucino; my wife had decaf, which was a disappointment.
Kyle was very good - he provided a replacement espresso, and comped the coffees. The bill was around $176 Canadian with taxes, before tip. I tipped high, because he was so good.
This is one of the few meals where I've ever wanted to go back and have exactly the same thing again, so I could understand it better. It would have been crass to photograph and write down every detail - but I wish I had!
It was Thursday; the restaurant was fairly quiet - a few business dinners, one guy on his own, some older people. We seemed to be one of the few couples. The owner, Terry Mathews, was having an apparent business dinner; he chatted a bit with the staff, then went to a corner table. Dress varied around "business casual". The staff are in all-black, pants and turtlenecks, I think. There was adequate but not excessive staff; service got a little slow around the coffee point, as it often does. We were in and out in just over two hours.
Verdict - memorable as expected, value for money, educational.
Microcress (with vincotto drizzle or otherwise)
One local New Year's Eve package offered
[quote]
Seared eggplant, goat cheese and roasted capsicum with microcress and a vincotto drizzle.
[/quote]
Vincotto I've found out about - it's a reduced unfermented grape must. What's microcress, do you grow it, buy it, or make it? I speculate it's essentially cress sprouts - in the 60's in the Britain we used to raise "mustard and cress" in eggshells to just the two-leaf stage, and make sandwiches with them.
Anyone "jazzed" about new apple varieties?
If you ever find Wolf River, they're an even better pie apple than Spy. They're also huge, some of the biggest apples I've ever seen. It's amusing when someone praises the apple pie and asks for the recipe - there's nothing special in the making, it's just a better apple.
Anyone else fed up with "molecular gastronomy"?
On average, research has made wine much better - by chopping off the bottom end. The top end is less enhanced - but there's more of it.
Anyone else fed up with "molecular gastronomy"?
Julia Child told me _to_ play with my food.
Montreal: Whippet Cookies?
I remember eating something very similar in Scotland years and years ago. My grandmother was a big fan of them. The Scottish ones, IIRC, had a dab of jam in the top centre of the marshmallow cookie, under the chocolate. Similar to the Dare "Viva Puff" http://www.darefoods.com/Products/Cookies/Viva/viva_puffs_raspberry.aspx Possibly they were a variety of Chocolate Teacakes, similar to Tunnock's - http://www.scotlandgifts.com/Products/Tunnocks/choc_teacakes.htm (which don't seem to have jam.)
(I found that the exact definition of these had been the subject of serious litigation - http://www.manches.com/text/news/news.php?id=112 !)
And they appear to be in the same family as Schaumkuesse - http://www.germandeli.com/schaumkuesse.html
Montreal, two questions (tourtiere & Laval)
"what is a sugar shack?" It's generically where you make maple syrup - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maple_syrup - but also many "sugar bushes" offer dining and a tourist experience. The usual fare is pancakes and sugar pie but can be more substantial, to tourtiere. Sugar season is late winter/early spring - February/March/April. Look for signs saying "erabliere" or "sucrerie" and take note for a seasonal trip. If you scroll down on http://www.out-there.com/tpq00trm.htm you'll find twenty or so big ones listed. I see from the links that some are offering Christmas activities - and at least one offers "Tourtière de la beauceronne". Now, these are not in-town locations, they're out between towns.
P.S. in that list there's at least one "ringer", a producer of beet sugar!
