Chickpea and Broccoli Scramble

So, I think that over the December break at least I'll probably be updating the blog more. That means that I'll probably abandon the "Frugal Sunday" format for this month. Tonight's recipe was improvised based on me seeing what food was around. I also made a small amount of stock for this recipe out of the peels and scraps from its ingredients. I also learned that my rice recipe doesn't scale as well as it could – there were remnants of water in the pot.

Chickpea and Broccoli Scramble

Oil

1 onion, diced

1 broccoli, chopped (what is the unit for broccoli?)

1 dried chili pepper, crumbled

1/2 cup stock

1 can chickpeas

1 red pepper, chopped

1 tablespoon ginger

1 tablespoon garlic

1 teaspoon soy sauce

1 teaspoon rice vinegar

1/4 small lemon

1 teaspoon cumin

Sauté the onion in the oil for a few minutes and then add the broccoli and chili. Add a bit of stock to the pan. After a few minutes, (when the broccoli are bright green) transfer them to a plate. Add the chickpeas, soy sauce, vinegar and remaining stock to the pot and cook for 5 minutes. Add the red pepper and continue cooking. Return the broccoli/onion mix to the pot and add the garlic, ginger, cumin and lemon. Serve over rice.

Serves 4.

Martin the Warrior

A few weeks ago my washing machine tried to kill me. It was the first, but not the last, instance of attempted murder in this sordid story.

I was just washing my clothing when it started to shake and heave and emit banging sounds louder than the Battle of Thermopylae. When I went to investigate it literally charged at me. A side note, I hate it when people use "literally" to mean "figuratively". But, aside from the anthropomorphizing implicit in the statement, I'm telling the truth here: that washing machine actually lunged several feet toward me as if demonically possessed. For a while my roommate and I did laundry as a team effort, when it got to the spin cycle we would both go and restrain the washing machine so it would stay in one place. We realized, ultimately, that this was both not particularly safe nor a good use of our time. Before we could decide whether we should stop doing that the spin cycle broke all together. So, no trying to kill us = good; clothes still completely wet after come out of dryer = bad.

Our landlady got a washing machine repairman to come over who made an interesting discovery. We had acquired a pet. A mouse was living inside the washing machine and had gnawed through some of the wires (he didn't see the mouse, but did find... evidence of its life inside the machine). We decided to name it Charles Martin. Also, my roommate got some traps from our landlady to kill him. I was a little sad as I went to bed, knowing he couldn't resist the delicious cheese laid out. Poor little guy.

I was right that Charles Martin couldn't resist the cheese. What I was less right about was my assumption regarding his mortality. Because when I woke up, the cheese was gone and the trap was unsprung. Over the next few days my roommate tried various combinations of cheese and peanut butter and every morning the situation was the same: no food, no mouse. He even got up in the middle of the night one time, noticed the cheese was gone, put more in and woke up to find it gone.

Last week, I noticed the trap was different. Hewing to the adage about better mousetraps, my roommate had beaten a path to Canadian Tire's door and bought an evil looking spring-loaded trap with a hair trigger. He put it out, laden with peanut butter, knowing that this trap would get the mouse. But in the morning, the peanut butter was still there. Charles Martin had outsmarted us! He became somewhat of a folk hero in my mind. Much like the protagonist of the excellent Fantastic Mr. Fox (seriously, go see it), he was a wild animal besting us in a battle of wits and stealing our food. His very existance was a critique of our petty bourgeois student life style and our social norms about property.

This morning there was a dead mouse in the trap.

He was grey with cute little white paws and a long pink tail. I buried him in the garden next to the ivy. Requiescat in pace, Charles Martin.

Frugal Veggie Semiversary

Six months ago today, I started the Frugal Veggie blog and put up the first post (appropriately enough about lentils). Since that time I've done 62 posts (including this one) and been visited 718 times with 1492 pageviews. These visits have come from 5 continents and 17 countries. The majority of my entries have been recipes and restaurant reviews (respectively about 2/5ths and 1/5 of my posts) but posts about my garden or animals eating stuff in my kitchen are also up there.

Who knows where this blog will be on its real anniversary 6 months from now.

Peaceful Lentils

Okay, this recipe is not actually called "Peaceful Lentils"; it has the more proasic name of "Lentil Barley Stew". I had made this recipe while I was a cook at Sci '44 Co-op and then there, on the board, the vegetarian option was listed as "Peaceful Lentils". It confused me for a second until I realized the cookbook it was from was called "The Peaceful Palate". I am, I think, the only one in the world who finds that story interesting. Yet I still tell it. Good times. Whatever you call it, Lentil Barley Stew is an old favourite from my childhood – its a simple hearty stew that is just as good leftover.

Lentil Barley Stew

2 cups lentils (about 1 pound)

3/4 cup pearl barley

8 cups stock

1 large onion, chopped

2 carrots, diced

2 stalks celery, diced

1/2 tsp oregano

1/2 tsp cumin

1/4 tsp red pepper flakes

1/4 tsp black pepper

salt to taste

Place all ingredients except salt in a large pot and bring to a simmer. Cover and simmer for one hour, stirring occasionally, until lentils and barley are tender. Add salt to taste.

serves 12 6.

The original recipe says it serves 12, but really half that. I guess they're talking about serves 12 as a course as a meal, but my number comes from it being the whole dinner. This is also a good exam-period meal, as once you've done the chopping it's very low maintenance and you can do other things (e.g. study). Plus, it produces lots of leftovers (and, as indicated above, it makes good leftovers).

The Cider Experiment

Happy at how the first batch of cider turned out, we decided to lay down not one but two bottles of cider. One was the same "Simply Apple" Apple Juice and the other was Mott's Fruitsations Apple Juice (I checked, it was clam blood free). For the "Simply Apple" we used Morgan's Lager Yeast. We'd read that lager yeast provided a more cider-y flavour and said "Hey, why not." For the Fruitsations, we decided to try an experiment and added honey and cinnamon to it, while using the champagne yeast from last time. For that one, we decided to do the balloon trick for an airlock – a white balloon with a pinhole in it. The fact that it's white will have some later significance. We had added more water than we were supposed to the yeast last time, so this time we added just enough. It turned the yeast into a solid (a colloid?) and made it very difficult to scope the yeast into the cider. That done, we put them downstairs in the closet.



Soon after I had the following conversation with my roommate.
Roommate (excitedly): I have a great new idea. Can I use some of your friend's honey to make fermented honey?!
Me: You mean mead?
Roommate: Mead?
Me: Yeah, that's what that's called.
Roommate: Nerds. I thought I had invented that.

As you saw above, there was a lot of fermentation in the experimental bottle and a bunch of the cinnamon had been kicked up into the balloon itself. However, when the balloon had deflated enough we decided to try it. It was gross. Like really gross. It tasted watery and sharp and bitter and a grim parody of cinnamoness. An idea struck me and I added some of my roommate's mead to it. It still wasn't great, but it really complemented it well. The mead filled out the watery taste and took away the bitterness. Seeing inspiration, we dumped in the rest of the mead and capped the bottle.

We decided to taste the other bottle and it was actually pretty good. It tasted more like cider than the first batch did, with a nice crisp apple taste and a gentle fizz.

Heartened by the good cider, we decided to check on the experimental cider. When we opened the lid, it vesuviused all over the place. I starred at it in horror for a couple of seconds as it foamed all over my floor. I suppose we should've predicted it. After the foam out, we tasted it and it was even grosser. So we threw it out.

We have since drank all our cider, but we have part 3 fermenting downstairs as I write this. We used lager yeast and a bit of honey, so we'll see how it turns out.

I knew a girl and her name was Julie...

I was on a plane recently (Perceptive readers may be able to guess where from) and so had a bunch of movies to chose from to watch. I ended up watching Julie & Julia or, as it might be titled, Women With Supportive Husbands Learn About Food And Their Feelings. Snark aside, I did enjoy it. The movie follows Julia Child and Julie Powell. One of them is a famous chef who served in the OSS in China during WWII, wrote a groundbreaking cookbook and became, perhaps, the first television cook. The other is a food blogger. So there is a bit of a disparity in terms of interestingness – certainly I did muse during my viewing that it might have been more interesting as a Julia Child biopic rather than cutting back and forth with Ms. Powell.

Still, as a food blogger, it is kinda neat to see a movie about a fellow food blogger. Now, in terms of blogging we are very different: she scorns vegetarians and I think she uses way too much butter and other unhealthy stuff [also, she had lots of readers --ed]. It is interesting what the movie shows about this type of blogging though. Her blog had a schtick, she would make every recipe in Julia Child's cookbook. That means that her blog had a lot more influence on her life than mine does. It's really a tail wagging the dog type thing, where she is always preparing meals to suit her blog. I don't really do that, if I haven't made an interesting bloggable item than I'd do something like, y'know, put up a post about a movie I saw. That said, I have made some meals to have something to blog about when I otherwise would have made something simpler.

The movie also shins a light on the inherent narcissism of blogging. Although, if you think about it, there is an inherent narcissism in writing. At least with food blogging you get, say, a recipe for chickpea soup rather than "Putting my tweets on facebook! #twitter #facebook". Julie becomes more and more obsessed with the blog and her readership that she neglects the real life relationship she has with her husband. I don't really have any comparable incidents, though I do like looking through the site statistics to see where my readers are coming from.

Amy Adams did a good job as Julie Powell and Meryl Streep did an excellent Julia Child. There was a lot of physical comedy just based on Child's height relative to everyone else. The food looked good too, there was an interesting article in The Atlantic by the person who made the food for the movie on her tricks of the trade (though I would be interesting how they did the scene where Julia Child cuts a small mountain of onion). I don't know if it's as entertaining as this (I linked there before, but it's still funny).

The House Cider Rules

My roommate has been thinking about making alcohol for a while. I like the sentiment, but beer seemed like it required too much of an infrastructure to start. Plus, we don't have a basement that could absorb any hypothetical explosion. Just when things seemed darkest for the possibility of homemade alcohol I discovered The Paupered Chef's three part series on making hard cider (Parts I, II and III).

Not a lot was required: apple juice, yeast, a container and an "airlock". An airlock is a mechanism that lets gas come out of the container while stopping bacteria from getting into it. A balloon with a pinprick in it could suffice and, as that sounded whimsical, we decided to make that our airlock.

So now we needed to go out and buy these products. We went to the Valumart to buy the apple juice, it would have to be one without preservatives. I originally misremembered this as without pasteurization which, as you can except, was not being sold. After a while of looking, I realized that everything in the store was going to be pasteurized and we ended up getting a 1.75 L bottle of "Simply Apple" Apple Juice. We also got a pack of balloons and, unrelated to this post but still pretty cool, a 10 lb sack of potatoes for $2. We weren't sure where to get yeast and briefly toyed with the idea of using baker's yeast. Thankfully, my friend Emma's dad pointed us to Danny's Wine and Beer Suppliers which is on the bus line.

I was in class all day, so my roommate ventured out to Danny's to purchase the yeast. We got Lalvin EC-1118 Champagne yeast (or, rather, yeast from the Champagne region). While there he decided to spend a few bucks to make an airlock, so we ended up not using the balloons after all. The mouth of the Simply Apple bottle was too big for the airlock, so we cleaned out an old pop bottle and poured the juice into there. Then we activated the yeast, which involves adding some warm water and waiting for about 15 minutes. The yeast packages are intended for bigger batches than we had, so there was a lot of improvised math. We erred on the side of too much yeast, because the supply of sugar was fixed and that was what was important. Just meant more sludge. So we tipped in the yeast, and let it ferment!

It was always fun opening up the closet we stored it in and watching the bubbles. Still, there was a bit of a pungent smell in said closet which did not bode well for the future. After a week was up, we opened it up and decided to taste it.

It was... actually pretty good. It tasted like a dry white wine with a hint of apples and, at least in the beginning, a nice fizz. Several of my friends tried it and expressed surprise that 1) it wasn't terrible and 2) that we did not go blind. It was especially gratifying even the slapdash way we went about making it. It's almost all gone now, but tomorrow we're probably going to get some more apple juice.

What will we do differently? Well, the way we did it wasn't terribly cost effective. It was a test run so we used a smallish bottle. For the next time we'll buy a bigger bottle of apple juice. Also, instead of champagne yeast we'll try lager yeast, which apparently creates a more cidery type flavour. We're also thinking about adding some honey to one of the batches to see what happens with the extra sugar and honey flavour. It's pretty good honey too – given to me by my friend Megan from her family bee farm. Maybe we'll ferment these ones in sanitized wine bottles to give it a classier touch than a pop bottle. Whatever we do, I'm looking forward to experimenting more with cider.

Restaurant: Samuel's by the Park

Perhaps the oddest thing about Samuel's is their wine pricing scheme: glasses cost less than bottles. Now, that statement by itself is obvious: of course, a glass of wine is going to cost less than a bottle. The surprise at Samuel's is that the relative cost is cheaper. You get 4-5 glasses per bottle and, for example, a glass of Jackson-Triggs costs $6 and a bottle costs $33. Even if we go for the higher 5 glasses per bottle, it still costs $3 less to get the equivalent amount of wine in glass form.

But aside from the oddity of the wine pricing (and, for the record, I did not get the Jackson-Triggs) you might wonder how the food was. That question is hard for me to answer, as I'm not really the target audience for this restaurant. The place is not what you would call "vegetarian friendly" as the dinner menu has no vegetarian options. Now, I was here at a big family dinner (17 people) so they had set up a prix fixe menu for us, which did include a vegetarian entree.

The bread they brought out was good, but the olive tapenade that accompanied it was amazing. Definitely the best I've ever had. So often they're too oily or too salty, but this was perfect. I checked the prix fixe menu, which had been printed out for all us on paper. It had "Mr. [one of my last name's] Menu" at the top, which made me think that I was sitting in my uncle's chair. After a moment's investigation, I discovered all the menus thus entitled as he had been the one who booked it. We had a choice of a starter, an entree and dessert. The two starters were caesar salad and the soup of the day (that's another oddity, when they printed up the menus presumably they knew what the soup of the day was. Why make extra work for the waiter who had to identity the soup to us all?) neither of which was vegetarian. The soup was made of chicken stock and the salad had anchovies and bacon in it. So that was a bit annoying (especially as a quarter of the party was vegetarian).

My entree was a spinach risotto with julienned vegetables and shaved asiago cheese. It wasn't bad, but I wasn't terribly impressed. The risotto was a little too chewy and not creamy enough, I couldn't taste the spinach or the asiago and every now and then it tasted burnt. My sister got the same thing and said there was no burnt taste on hers, so its possible I just got the bottom of the pan. Again, I'm not really their target audience so I guess they don't have a lot of experience making vegetarian food not bland.

The dessert was a delicious chocolate cake – the icing was perfectly done, rich and creamy and sweet (without being sickly sweet). I ended up having more than one piece as I got half of my aunt's (she was finished) and part of my sister's (she had left).

Bottom line: the bookends of the meal were excellent and the carnivores seemed to like their meals. I just don't think I could recommend the place to my vegetarian readers [yeah, your many vegetarian readers in Victoria, BC --ed].

Samuel's by the Park
655 Douglas St. Victoria, British Columbia

Restaurant: Bangkok Pad Thai

So this post will have less pictures than usual because I forgot to bring my camera (image from website). On the plus side, the food was excellent. I had almost gone to Bangkok Pad Thai with some friends a few weeks ago, but we went to a pizza place instead. On Sunday, I remembered it looked good and went there with my friend.

We started off with an order of edamame, which is always fun. There were a lot of good looking entrees but I ultimately decided on the Pad Kee Mao Veggie (which, I learned later, means "drunken noodles" for some reason). The Pad Kee Mao contained some of my favourite vegetables for stir-frys: broccoli, baby corn, bamboo, water chestnuts and carrots cut into whimsical shapes. It was served over what the menu referred to as "rice noodle" and topped with a spicy chili garlic sauce. Spicy-for-white-people spicy, but still spicy.

For dessert we had the deep-fried ice cream which is an amazing concept. I definitely will have to go back sometime, I've heard the green curry is excellent.

Bangkok Pad Thai
735 Richmond Street, London, ON

Curried Chickpeas and Tofu

One of the classic "workhorses" of my diet has been this simple chickpea and tofu curry from the Moosewood Restaurant Cooks at Home. I don't eat as much of it now, but there was a time I'd have it at least once a week. In fact, my copy of the book is broken open at this recipe. It's a somewhat stripped down version from the cook book, mainly because it calls for a little bit of tomatoes and I don't usually have tomatoes in that particular amount.

Curried Chickpeas and Tofu

1 medium onion, chopped

2 cloves garlic, minced

1 chili pepper, minced

oil

2 teaspoons curry powder

2 teaspoons cumin

1/2 block tofu, cubed

1 cup cooked chickpeas

salt

Sauté the onion in the oil until translucent. Add the cumin, curry powder, garlic, chili and tofu a cook for a few minutes. Add the chickpeas and a 1/4 cup of their liquid if you cooked them from dried or water if you didn't. Simmer for 5-7 minutes or so and serve over rice.

Serves 2.

I have been experimenting with adding the chili later to maintain the heat, I probably should have added it even later (maybe with a few minutes to go?). Speaking of chili peppers, the one for this meal was the last from the garden. With its picking, my garden is now officially de– I mean taken to a nice farm where it will have lots of room to run around and such. Actually, the garlic is still there – I have to decide when to harvest it, and where to store it (maybe ask my landlords if I can use the garage?) Still its kinda sad, I guess I'll pull out the stakes supporting my dead tomato plant.

The Nachos

The International Day of the Nacho occured last week, and how better to celebrate than a post on nachos?

Nachos are probably my favourite pub food. I wouldn't pretense to call myself a connoisseur, but I've had a lot of nachos and have many fine memories of some of the best like my friend Jeremy's multi-layered Super Bowl nachos or The Gem Bar & Grill's refried bean dip covered nachos. I also have bad memories of the worst nachos I've ever had: at a crappy place on St. Clair Street that will go unnamed. Even though I didn't know that International Day of the Nacho was last wednesday, I ended up having quite a few nachos last week. First up, I made myself some bareboned nachos in the hotel room using nacho chips, cheese and salsa. There wasn't a grater, so I sliced the cheese up with a sharp knife. They were okay, but they didn't have the wide range of toppings that the professionally done nachos I had at two different restaurants:

Christie's Carriage House Pub
Christie's had an impressive number of beers on tap, including the awesomely titled "Back Hand of God Stout". It was a tough choice, but I ended up going with Phillips Blue Buck, a local Victoria beer.

The name came from a contest after a lawsuit was threatened over their previous name "Blue Truck" (it was alleged as being too similar to a Vancouver craftbeer named Red Truck). While Christie's had a fair number of vegetarian options, I decided to go with the nachos:

I liked the nachos, but they had a central flaw: the cheese was baked in. Now, I'm all about baking nachos, but I think that nacho cheese should have a gooey consistency. This was the opposite, the cheese was embedded into the chip. In one way though, the picture doesn't do them justice as you can't see the jalapeños and tomatoes that were in the dish. Still, definitely not the best nachos I've had.

Ein-Stein's
'Stein's does not have the range of beer that Christie's has. Indeed they are the "local drinking hole" I mentioned here that prompted me to give up cheap beer. One thing that 'Stein's does very well though is pub food. Naturally, we had to order the nachos:

They were amazing. The cheese was perfectly melted. This was no accident, such is the dedication to detail of the chef that after baking he runs the nachos through a microwave to get that desired consistency. There was a good selection of toppings such as jalapeños and olives and they were well distributed. At some places after a while you start just getting plain nacho chips. At 'Stein's there is an abundance of cheese and toppings and no chip is left behind. We ended up ordering another, bigger, plate of nachos later in the evening. Traditionally, if my friends and I are ordering pub food at 'Stein's we get the party platter but I think that nachos should be the new paradigm. They are excellent.

Christie's Carriage House Pub
1739 Fort Street, Victoria, British Columbia

Ein-Stein Café and Pub
229 College Street, Toronto, Ontario

Scalloped Potatoes

Scalloped potatoes have always been a 'comfort food' dish from my childhood, but I don't really get an opportunity to make them (I don't usually have both cheese and milk in the house at the same time). Luckily, I was over at my friend Megan's for dinner tonight and they were on the menu. I was feeling like having dairy (some readers may be able to guess why) and, serendipitously, I got my wish. We started by having an omelet with orange peppers and onions (inspired by this video, albeit not in form) as the scalloped potatoes baked.

Scalloped Potatoes

6 potatoes

1 onion

Cheese

1 cup milk

Preheat the oven to 375°. Slice the potatoes into ovals (cut the bottom first so it doesn't slide on the cutting the board), ring the onions and grate the cheese. In a casorolle dish, add a layer of potatoes, a layer of onions and a layer of cheese until you reach the top. The top layer should be cheese, but before you put it on, add the milk. Cover in tinfoil and bake for an hour, then remove the tinfoil and bake for 45 minutes.

Serves 3 (or 2 for hungry folk)

Sunday Frugal Sunday

Hello, my neglected readers. When I started this blog I mentioned I had created this as a summer hobby (in lieu of getting a goldfish named Pushpanathan¹). Since that time the blog has gotten literally tens of hits²! While traffic has not been noticeably down during September, my posting has been. Whycome? I was really busy in September (September included the first couple weeks of October just as the 60s actually continued until 1975³). This not only meant that I didn't have time to post but also that I wasn't eating very interesting food: lots of pasta with tomato sauce and cans of chickpeas (that's not pasta with tomatoes and chickpeas, but two separate items: I actually more than once just had a can of chickpeas for dinner). However, things have calmed down a bit. So I'll resume blogging, but probably the once-every-day posts some periods of the summer had won't return. Here is what I will do: try to make sure to post every Sunday. That doesn't mean I won't post in the rest of the week necessarily, but that there will be a type to check and see new content.

In lieu of a recipe or restaurant review, here is fascinating look at the history of modern ketchup (via a comment thread on home-made ketchup at The Paupered Chef)

1 I have since found out that Pushpanathan is not pronounced Push-pan-a-than but Push-pa-NA-than. This disappointed me greatly and my hypothetical goldfish will need a new name.
2 Actually I've gotten over 1000 pageviews. But I like that expression.
3 Many decades are like this. For example, the 50s lasted from 1948-1963.

Restaurant: Raja Fine Indian Cuisine

I was up in Stratford today, seeing A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To The Forum with the 'rents. It was funny with good performances all around except for the mother. The bar at intermission didn't even have completely outrageous markups, actually relatively competative vis-à-vis certain bars. Their premium wine seemed overpriced though, it was something like $9 for a glass of Jackson-Triggs (I guess "premium" has a different meaning in the theatrical world?) Afterwards we went to Raja, which my boss had recommended to me.

The waiter brought over papadum with chutneys, including an excellent cilantro one. Still smarting over the "potato incident" at Massey's I made sure to push for getting dishes with a lot of potatoes.

We got the Aloo Gobhi, Sag Aloo and the Mixed Vegetable Dupiaza. All with potatoes and all very good. My parents vetoed dal, as they are of the opinion that I eat too many lentils as it is. The only quibble I would have is that I was hoping that the dupiaza, at least, would be a little spicy. But I guess they know their audience and don't want to rock the boat spicewise. I should have asked for it to be hot, which probably wouldn't have worked but at least I'd have known they made the effort. It was a nice place though and apperently they opened up a twin restaurant in London. So I can agitate for that one if people want to go for Indian.

Raja Fine Indian Cuisine
10 George Street W, Stratford, Ontario

Tofu Stir-Fry

I like stir-fry's quite a bit. Traditionally, I adapted a recipe from the Moosewood but this one is from Mark Bittman's book. The adaptation is very loose though, as such the recipe listed below is not intended to be comprehensive, there are so many different vegetables that can be added. So I talk about baby corn, but water chestnuts or bamboo are awesome substitutes (or really any vegetables). That said, I really like all the ingredients listed below. I love the bright green colour that broccoli turns when you cook it and it makes a welcome change from my usual colour schemata.

Tofu Stir-Fry with Broccoli

1 block tofu, cubed

3 large mushrooms, cubed

Oil

1 onion, chopped

1 head of broccoli, floretted

1 can baby corn

1 tablespoon garlic, minced

1 chili, diced

1/4 cup Shaoxing wine

1/3 cup water

2 tablespoon soy sauce

Cook the onion in some oil for a couple of minutes on high and then add the broccoli and the water and cook for about 5 minutes. Remove with slotted spoon and add some more oil. Add the tofu and mushrooms and cook for a few minutes until browned. Add the baby corn and the wine and cook until it evaporates. Return the onion/broccoli mixture, add the garlic, the chili and the soy sauce and cook for a few minutes. Serve over rice.

Serves 2

Tragedy struck when preparing this meal. I had lovingly diced the red chili I mentioned below and was about to add it into the frying pan when the fragments jumped off the plastic cutting board and on to the floor. Only a few pieces loyally stayed on board. As a result the stir-fry was underspiced. The bites I had that contained red chili were excellent, the other bites couldn't live up to them.

Housekeeping

During the year I'll probably be updating this blog not as frequently as I did in the summer. I'm considering picking a day of the week and making sure I have an entry on that day but I'm not sure. I'll keep you posted.

My parents drove up to see me (went to Veg Out with them) and provided me with some groceries. I haven't really been able to take advantage of it because there have been lots of free food/meals out in the last week.

On that subject, I went to Massey's Indian Restaurant. Ordered the Alloo Paratha which is supposed to come "with smooth potato stuffing". There was, in fact, no potato stuffing – smooth or otherwise. I was very disappointed.

I was really lazy one night (home late and had had snacks) so I just had a can of chickpeas and chili flakes. Surprisingly tasty.

Finally, I have an awesome looking red chili growing. Isn't it a beaut:

A Roast Of Garlic

I usually buy five-packs of garlic bulbs for about a buck. The problem is that if I'm away for long periods of time, the garlic isn't really keeping up at top quality. I solved that problem a while ago by planting some of the sprouting/mushy garlic – but there's only so much garlic I'm going to put in my garden. My solution was roasted garlic. When roasted garlic loses its pungeny and becomes a rather sweet mushy food. The recipe is from Mark Bittman:

Roasted Garlic

Head of garlic

Oil

salt
Preheat the oven to 375°. Take a head of garlic, remove some of the outer coverings and cut off the top. Drizzle with olive oil and salt, put on a baking pan and cover with aluminum foil. Bake for about 40 minutes.

Roasted garlic is great added to other dishes or used as a spread, but I even had some cloves as a snack. They pop right out of their coverings, there's no need to peel. I mentioned that at Veg Out we had the roasted garlic appetizer. It came with some very nice garlic toast, but honestly the roasted garlic tasted pretty much the same as mine. So, roasting garlic gets you something classy and interesting that's quick, easy and provides restaurant quality.

Restaurant: Veg Out

I wanted to go to Veg Out before, but they were closed on Sunday evenings. Which was somewhat annoying, so I was leery about trying again as I didn't want to reward that sort of behaviour. But, I'm glad I did (plus I don't want to tell them how to run their business). Veg Out is a relatively new restaurant, it has a nice simple menu that gets the job done. Plus, I believe it is London's only vegan restaurant if that's your thing. After sitting down with the parents, I decided to order the Chipotle Black Bean Burger.



The actual burger tasted somewhat similar to the burger I made but it was topped with all sorts of things I usually don't have access to at the same time: a ripe tomato slice, sprouts, guacamole and a chipotle aoili. Also, and this is important with burgers, the bun was quite good. You need a bun strong enough to hold the burger in place, but not too tough to be a detriment. We had the roasted garlic with toast as an appitizer (more on that later!) and split a chocolate cake for dessert. One of the parentals had a pâté sandwich which I tried and thought tasted like dirt, but then again, I think a lot of pâté tastes that way. The bottom line was that its a pretty solid restaurant and very professional for a place that could've been very granola (not that there's anything wrong with granola).

Veg Out Restaurant
646 Richmond Street, London, ON

Hot and Sour Edamame

So, finally, another recipe. That makes what, 3 recipes all this month. Partially this is a problem with what I eat. I mean this week has been all lentils and pasta and there's only so much I can milk out of that [maybe you should have thought of that before starting a food blog! --ed]. I was going to have another lentil dish, but then remembered I had bought some shelled edamame on an impulse buy. So I decided to make a varient of Mark Bittman's Hot and Sour Tofu with Edamame (the varient was, I had no tofu). It taught me a valuable lesson though, if you have a recipe you're downscaling fourfold, do the calculations beforehand. As a result, the proportions are wonky.

Hot and Sour Edamame

oil

1/2 onion

2 cloves garlic

1 cup frozen edamame

1/4 cup vegetable stock

2 small chilies

3/4 teaspoon fermented black beans

1 heaping tablespoon Shaoxing wine (I used Fukien Loh Chiew, which may or may not be Shaxoing wine)

1 tablespoon rice vinegar

1/2 tablespoon soy sauce

couple of squirts of honey
Sautée the onion in the oil on high for about 3 minutes. Add the edamame and the stock and cook for a few more minutes. Add the garlic, chilies and black beans and cook for another minute. Add the wine, vinegar, soy sauce, honey and a little water and simmer for 5-7 minutes. Serve over rice.

Serves 1.

For a very ad hoc meal it was quite tasty. Because it was ad hoc I grabbed, edamame right out of the freezer, if you were making this with foresight the edamame should go in with the vinegar. I used a pickled red chili and the mottled green chili from this picture. It worked out well and I hope to make the real thing at some point.

Grand Gardening Generalissimo

Gardeners are somewhat like dictators. You have, what you think, is absolute control over your land. Yet you're constantly fighting a series of internal and external enemies to maintain control. Then there's also the whole notion of the "fit" plants being allowed to survive while the untermenschen are ruthlessly exterminated. Which is to say, I felt slightly guilty about weeding – especially after I realized how many weeds there were (and this is after the weeding I already mentioned):

So I'm not saying its not politically problematic, but given that it satisfies some of the same urges I think that all potential dictators and sociopaths should be redirected towards gardening. And its not just theory, the despot Diocletian gave up the Roman Empire to tend to his garden. I'm just sayin' we need to get the proverbial Diocletian's before their reign starts....

The rest of the garden is going well. There are lots of tomatoes turning red. My chili plants are doing well, my estimate of 4 chilies growing was off, I have at least double that. I had a green chili off my main chili plant for dinner today, gave off a nice amount of heat. I'm really excited about the chili plants my neighbour gave me. They're starting to produce chilies, which should be ready to eat at some point:

Has Low's Hierarchy of Coupons

Unlike humans, all coupons are not created equal. Some are great and some are awful. I get a fair number of coupons in the mail and I've begun to see themes. Therefore, I present, to you the hierarchy of coupons:
1. Coupons for Free Things
These are self-explanatory, a coupon that lets you walk into a store and get something for free. No strings attached. Starbucks had a promotion where, on Earth Day, you could walk in and get free coffee if you had a travel mug. I don't know why I led with Starbucks and not McDonalds, which was also giving out free coffee, as McDonalds apperently has better coffee than Starbucks.
2. Coupons that give a good discount
Okay, you still have to buy something but they provide a tangible reward. I got some Quiznos® coupons in the mail, which included a $2 off coupon. That means a sub is a third cheaper. As I may I have mentioned before, I won a bunch of Quiznos® gift certificates and so it was a no-brainer to go to my local Quiznos® and use up some of these coupons (Quiznos®: It’s the sub sandwich your mouth always wanted!)

3. Coupons where you buy something and get something else free
The pinnacle of this is the "buy one get one free" though it does have its bratty little brother that gives you a couple of free, say, couple of mints. But let's stick to the high-end of the spectrum. Why do I rank it below #2? Let's use the example of Quiznos® coupons. They had a coupon for a free bag of chips and a free drink with the purchase of any sandwich and another that gave a free small sandwich (equal or lesser value) with the purchase of a sandwich and drinks. Both these examples are worth more in absolute terms than the #2 $2 off one, so why do they value it less? Answer, I don't want chips or a surgery soda. Even something that I do want, like a sandwich, I don't really need. The generalization of this is while I can always enjoy getting something I want cheaper, getting other things cheaper or free requires me to want them. And chances are, I won't (This is why we learned in economics that cash transfers were better than food stamps).
4. Terrible Coupons
You know the kind. Buy more of something to get something you don't want. Or buy a bunch of things to get a discount off something else. There are so many different kinds of terrible coupons and, truth to be told, they make up the majority of coupons.

Now, of course, these categories are not completely rigid. A big enough discount for something I like (#2) beats something I only somewhat like (#1), though its gotta be a big enough discount to beat the FREE! Effect. Likewise, the Marble Slab coupon for a buy one get one free cone of ice cream (#3) appeals to me more than their $1 off (#2) ones (because I don't see myself ever buying ice cream by myself). I can't really think of a case where a #4 coupon would beat a #1-3 one but that's because of the tautology inherent in its construction.

"The sweetest flowers, the fairest trees/Are grown in solid ground"

So, I thought I probably should say something about my garden other than various bad things that happen (I realize that this is a very expansive definition of "bad"). My tomatoes have really grown since I first planted them. Just look at the difference from how they used to look and now:

I really should be pruning these, because I really don't need that much folliage. If I'd be more diligent about that I'd probably have more tomatoes now, but what can you do, eh? Besides, I have a lot of tomatoes growing. I ate a couple right off the vine last night on my way from a concert (The Fine Print, tell your friends) which was very tasty. I also have about 4 chilies growing, all still green now but I think they'll probably be turning red soon enough. I'm very excited about some of them because they're from plants that my neighbour gave me and I've never tasted that variety before. I had a very nice conversation with her today, she and her husband have a massive garden (and then an even bigger garden in their backyard). I brought down weeds for her compost and toured it, they have a pumpkin plant lazily sprawling over a lot of real estate. There are two pumpkins and about a million spikes. Seriously, those things are covered with little spikes, including the stem connecting the pumpkin to the plant.

I think I'll try to get ahold of some fresh basil and use it with the tomatoes for pasta and with the chilies for an approximation of this dish.

Restaurant: Ghazale

Toronto has a lot of places that sell falafel. I like Ghazale. They catered my bar mitzvah and I've been a regular, if infrequent, customer. Its a cute little place, nestled next to the Bloor Cinema (along with the upscale burger joint Acme Burger, which is quite good though a little pricey).

I will occasionally grab a samosa from Ghazale on my way back from one of the area's bars (some of which don't have the greatest record) but I mostly will get falafel there. We had some family over and picked up a big order (too many, in fact, but the leftovers were pretty great when it was too hot to cook).

We also got some of their Tabbouleh, which I ate with some of the falafel. The other pita, I added some greens from a salad. In retrospect, I would've thrown in some tomatoes. You may notice that there is no tahini. After a long struggle, I have admitted to myself that I do not like tahini and eat falafel without it. I like the fact that Ghazale respects this choice, unlike another certain falafel place in the area which will always put tahini on no matter how many times I ask for it without.

Ghazale
504 Bloor Street W, Toronto, ON

Cooking With Others

Cooking with other people can be a hazardous experience. Especially in a small kitchen, there's only so much space... and I'm not just talking about counterspace. Cooking is a very kinetic activity, you're darting from one place to another: chopping, stirring pouring. The more people you throw in the more likely it is that people will be stepping on each other's toes – figuratively as well as literally. That said, it can be really fun to cook with others. One thing that helps is a division of labour. If you have one person chopping and another person throwing those chopped items into a pan you're not going to have a lot of collisions. There are also some tasks where its really helpful to have multiple people helping out with. When I was a cook at Science '44, there would usually be at least 3 cooks in the kitchen (it was, also, a pretty big kitchen). When we were breading chicken, it was great to set up an assembly line where each person could perform one of the steps (Yes, I was breading chicken. There were 150 people in the co-op and most of them weren't vegetarians).

One of the nice things about being back in Toronto was getting to cook with my parents. We went to a lot of restaurants (some of which I've blogged about, some of which I will blog about and some of which I forgot to take pictures at) but had some meals we made at home.

The 'rents had bought some pre-spiced tofu and we basically just stir-fried it with a bunch of vegetables. We were planning on making rice but we forgot to put it on so made rice noodles instead. I spent the next few days running around and living on power bars and hor d'oeuvres so it was nice to be able to have a home-made meal before that.

An Open Letter To The Man Who Crushed My Lettuce

Dear Man Who Crushed My Lettuce,
First of all I should say I appreciate you painting my house. I know you're not doing it for charity – my landlords are repainting their properties – but I appreciate you're helping make my house better. I do, however, have issues with where you decide to stand. Now, I don't have an issue that you woke me up today by standing on the roof right outside my bedroom window and spraying water higher up. I was going to wake up anyway around that time to go to work, so really what did that hurt? I am slightly concerned that your standard operating procedure is not to knock on the door first but to climb on to roof outside someone's window in the early morning! How do you know I'm not a 19 year girl. Maybe this hypothetical person would not like to wake up to hear a ladder being pushed against the roof that connects to her bedroom window as a strange man climbs up it. Just sayin'.

But, as I stated, that wasn't the standing that concerned me. When I left for work you were spraying down the porch... while standing on my lettuce plants. Really? Really?

Like, there's a lot of other places in my garden for you to stand. There are areas, for example, that do not have plants growing. There are areas that have more resilient plants, like ivy. There is a wooden path midway through it that has no plants.

Or there's the sidewalk. That's good too.

So, while I'm grateful you didn't wreck any of my other plants I'm not entirely pleased about the lettuce.

Govern yourself accordingly,
The Frugal Veggie

Buk Chang Dong Soon Tofu Korean Restaurant

I have to admit that until I decided to do this blog post I had no idea about the actual name of this resturant. I'd always previously just called it "The Korean Restaurant near Clinton's" or merely "The Korean Restaurant". Its usually pretty busy but they have a platoon of orange clad waiters who try to shuffle things along. Its clean, spartan and pretty afordable.

One really nice change this time I came was that it started of with a bottle of cold water at the table. Usually its pretty hard to get water and its a place where water is pretty great to have. The meal started off with a selection of appetizers, some of which I could identify (kimchi) and others that I couldn't.

The restaurant was a little less busy than usual (though still pretty crowded) so they refilled the mung bean dish a few times before the entrees came. The first time I went – my uncle took me – I had the Bi Bim Bop and, quite frankly, didn't enjoy it much. A few years later, I started coming back for the tofu soon soup.

The soup comes to your table in a big bowl still bubbling from the kitchen. Its filled with a delicious spicy mix of tofu, broccoli and zucchini. This is why the water comes in handy. You can either sip the soup directly, or pour it over purple rice to cool it. The practice is to crack an egg in the soup, which gets cooked by the boiling broth. I tend not to do that, though I think I'll probbaly start doing it again. The rice water is left at the table, I have a silly tradition wher I take a sip of it (though I sometimes forget, including at this meal. Dinner comes out to be $8 a person which is very reasonable in my opinion.

Buk Chang Dong Soon Tofu Korean Restaurant
691 Bloor St. West, Toronto, ON

Garden Scramble

So I've been away for a bit with real world stuff, this post is therefore a bit like time traveling as the events contained herein occured in the past (woooooooo). I was planning to make a meal using items from my garden and the last vegetables in my fridge (some onions and some mushrooms). It was going to be a pasta dish, but then you-know-what decided to wreck my pasta. So I had it as a breakfast instead, sans starch.

Garden Scramble

Handful of mushrooms

1 chili, chopped

Oil

2 small onions, diced

1 garlic shoot, chopped

1 cherry tomato, garnish
Saute the onion in some oil on high for about 5 minutes. Add the mushrooms and cook for a few more minutes. Then add the chili and the garlic shoots. Add the tomato on the plate.

Serves 1
I think this would have been nice served over something. I probably could've cooked these particular mushrooms for a shorter period as well. The tomato complemented it surprisingly well, if I'd had more ready I would've put more on (say 4 cherry tomatoes).

CSI: My Kitchen 2: The Return

I am literally angry with rage. Today, I wake up and head into my kitchen and what do I find. Some animal has ransacked it, again.

Not cool, animal. Again, if it was just the bread that it ate – I would be annoyed. I was planning on eating that bread for breakfast today. But y'know, I eat it, it eats it, it all balances out. But it wrecked and contaminated a bunch of my stuff: pasta, barley, lentils, cornstarch. I wish you ill, little animal. I wish you ill. This time it ate through my screen:

I guess that gives a slightly better idea what it is: probably not a squirrel. Whoever you are, little animal, I'd advise you to get out of here cause the town ain't big enough for the both of us.

Julie & Julia & Food Photography

Mere months after I started food blogging, a movie about food blogging is coming out! Coincidence? Yes. The movie has been over-hyped in the NYT but there have been some interesting articles. In particular, there have been two fascinating articles in The Atlantic by the lead food wrangler (not her actual title) for the movie. There are a lot of stories in food photography about glue-for-milk and the such but all the food in Julie & Julia is real.

It made me think a bit about the food photography I do for this blog. I think the photographs have improved (although the one from the Indian restaurant wasn't great). I've not though it necessary to include the whole plate in the picture which gives it a better look than the miles-of-ugly-tablecloth-and-the-food-in-the-middle look of the early blog (also, I have a better tablecloth). I mean, compare this early pasta picture and this later one. One looks like something you'd want to eat, the other does not. I usually snap a few photos and pick the best one.

I think even the early pictures that I liked could do with some cropping. this was one of my favourite early pictures... but I think I prefer this version:

"Asian-Style" Frittata

I'm not a huge fan of the term "Asian-style" (and its older, thankfully mostly disappeared, brother "Oriental-style"). I mean, it makes as much sense as talking about Euro-South-North-Amero-Afrostralian cuisine because there are more people in Asia than those places and just as diverse (you could throw in an extra North America and Europe and Asia would still be larger). This is a rather lengthy way of mentioning that I made the Moosewood's Asian-Style frittata. I was back in Toronto for the weekend and wasn't sure what to make as there was lots and lots of food. Ironically though, I have a lot more (quote/unquote) "Asian" condiments and sauces which really could have helped out this meal.
Asian-Style Frittata

1/2 red onion

1 cup sliced mushrooms

1/2 cup snow peas

3 bok choy leaves

2 cloves garlic

1 teaspoon ginger

2 eggs

1 teaspoon soy sauce
Sauce

1 dried chili

1/4 cup water/stock

1 teaspoon soy sauce

1 teaspoon balsamic vinegar

1/8 teaspoon sesame oil

1 teaspoon cornstarch dissolved in 1 teaspoon cool water
The vegetables sound eclectic, but its pretty much just any 2 cups of vegetables per egg. Sauté the onion on medium heat for 3-4 minutes. Add the mushrooms, snow peas, ginger and bok choy leaves (or the slower cooking veggies you use) and sauté for a few minuets. As you're doing that, whisk the eggs with the ginger and soy sauce. Add the garlic and the boy choy greens (or the faster cooking veggies) and cook for a minute. Poor the eggs in, cover and cook on low heat for about 6 minutes. Bring the sauce ingredients to a boil and then add the dissolved cornstarch. Pour the sauce over the frittata and serve.

Serves 1.

You may be wondering why I had balsamic vinegar in an "Asian-themed" fritatta. Well, as I mentioned above my parents didn't seem to have any mirin etc. Also, once again, cornstarch thwarted me by clumping up forcing me to spoon out half of it. The meal was okay, but I wish I'd used the greens and such for a stir fry and soft-boiled the eggs for breakfast [That's your wish?! Not world peace or something? Geez --ed].

Housecleaning Updates

So to add another hit of meta to this blog I thought I'd give some updates on previous posts.

I've updated my review of Khmer Thai to include a picture of the restaurant and fixed some embarrassing spelling errors that my friend Leo pointed out.

I did perform the promised update for my four sad vegetables post where I tripled the sauce. (I added the same sauce as before, but as there were now half of much vegetables which had gotten half of the previous sauce...) It was better, though approaching too much salt, but still nothing to write home about. I'll have to work a bit more on it.

Finally, I was challenged to go one step further and cook pasta directly in the sauce. So I did. I diluted it one part sauce to one part water and cooked it down with the pasta.

Sauce-Cooked Pasta

Like anytime you cook pasta on high its going to spatter a bit. In retrospect, I should've cooked it lower for longer. I felt the pasta was a bit too al dente for my taste but I can see how some people might prefer it. The sauce really thickened up though, not just loosing the extra water I'd added.

Restaurant: Savera

Food critic Joanne Kates once glowingly reviewed an Indian restaurant in Toronto. During the course of the glowing review she said how it was so nice that there was finally an Indian restaurant that catered to the upper class. All the others, you see, were centered on serving the plebeians and thus could not devote the proper resources to preparing sauces and such (I'm paraphrasing, but not by much). Savera is not the kind of chic-chic Indian place that Kates was lauding. It's a cute, small family-owned place that has good food.



Like many Indian places, I find the waiters are very attentive and are always refilling my water glass. I like having water, though the problem is I inevitably drink it whereupon it is filled up again and the cycle continues. The end result is that I leave the restaurant having had far too many glasses of water. We maybe ordered a little too much food – though its never a bad thing to have leftovers. We started off with samosa, which were solid – not great. Next we had some naan and rice (we had too much naan and not enough rice) with the Aloo Gobi, Channa Masala and Dal Makhani.



I really liked the Aloo Gobi, though then again I always like the Aloo Gobi. As always, I secretly prefer the potato element. The Dal was a little soupy, but that wasn't a problem for me when spooned over rice. The chickpeas weren't my favourite but they did a pretty good job with them. For those who like that sort of thing, the ambience was very nice: there was a lot of light and the interior was pretty. All in all, an enjoyable meal.

Savera Indian Cusine
815 St Clair Avenue West, Toronto, ON

I'm bored of cheap and cheerful

The Wall Street Journal reports that the reccession is causing consumers to shift away from premium beers. And – btw – by "premium" they're referring to beers like fraking Budweiser so its even worse from a beer snobs perspective. Ironically, I'm going the other way [That's not what ironic means! Was Alanis Morisette your english teacher --ed]. I have decided to move away from cheap beer.

Oh we had some good times, cheap beer and I. I fondly remember drinking, say, warm Lakeport Honey at parties. Heck, I was drinking Lakeport before it cool: back when it was a lucky find at The Beer Store. I thought the romance would never end. But lately, I've felt a sense of estrangment from buck-a-bottles. I've been feeling this way for a while but I think what clinched it was last week when I was having some beers with my friends at our old drinking hole. We were drinking their sourbrew house ($8 a pitcher!) but after a couple of pints I felt sick. If I'm going to feel sick from drinking I expect to be drunker!

So goodbye, cheap beer. Its not like I'm going to turn into one of the aforementioned beer snobs (not that there's anything wrong with that). Probably, I'll just be drinking Steamwhistle or Sleemans or even Keiths. How will I afford it? Drink more at home/parties and less at bars. Or brew my own beer. Or brew my own mead! I can put a beehive round back.

Note to my foreign readers (yes, I do have readers in other countries or, more accurately, people who have visited TFV from other countries): Steamwhistle, Sleemans, Keiths and Lakeport are all Canadian beer companies. I guess that should be "Canadian" as Sleemans is owned by the Japanese and Keiths and Lakeport are owned by the Belgians. The Beer Store is a business that has a monopoly on selling beer in Ontario for the protection of the public. Naturally, it is also not owned by Canadian companies (although, technicially speaking no one can "own" a corporation as they are legally people). The monopoly is limited as you can buy beer from, inter alia, the LCBO: a government-controlled corporation.

Four sad vegetables and their story

As I left Toronto, my parents reminded (via phone) that I could take some food back with me. I grabbed some pasta (because I was out of pasta) but I allow opened up the refrigerator to salvage some food that was just going to sit their until it got thrown out. I felt like a real humanitarian, saving those vegetables (though I guess they probably would've prefer a slow rot than a fast burn). I retreived an old cauliflower, a fragment of a red onion, part of a cabbage and a piece of celery that was actually holding up pretty well.

I decided I would turn these into a meal. Unfortunately, it did not end as well as I hoped. I decided that you, the reader, might be tired of my 3CSBOOS (curry/cumin/cayenne/small bit of other spice, pronounced three cees booze) method of cooking so I decided to do some experimenting.

Four Vegetable Experiment

1 onion, chopped

The four vegetables above (say 1/4 cabbage, 1/2 red onion, medium cauliflower and 1/2 celery stack)

1 carrot, chopped

2 cloves garlic, minced

1/2 tbsp soy sauce

1/2 tbsp vineger

1 teaspoon chili paste

1 teaspoon black bean paste

Rice

Start cooking the rice – I used my rice method. This gives a 20 minute opportunity to cook the vegetables on medium-high. I added the onions to the pan and started steaming the cauliflower. 5 minutes later I added the red onion and celery. 5 minutes after that, the carrot. 5 minutes after that the garlic, cabbage, steamed cauliflower and sauces. I cooked it for 5 minutes until the rice was done.

Serves 2

So what went wrong? In a word, blandness. Now, I liked the vegetables fine but there was no kick. I had made a rocky mistake and underspiced, fearing an outcome that was too salty or too vinegary. But all is not lost! Note the "serves 2". Tomorrow, I will reheat the leftovers and add more flavourings. Hopefully, it will be a better dish.

Restaurant: Mexitaco

Mexitaco is a wretched little restaurant. That means that this review will be less promotional than the others I have written, therefore there will be none of the accoutrement in other reviews. To make up for that, I will write up the evening akin to the game of Fortunately/Unfortunately.

Fortunately, I was going to Nazereth with my friends.
Unfortunately, it was closed for renovations.
Fortunately, that meant that, hopefully, when it reopened there would be more room.
Unfortunately, we didn't have anywhere to eat and we were hungry.
Fortunately, there was a mexican place nearby.
Unfortunately, one of my friends had a bad feeling about it and didn't want to go inside.
Fortunately, we convinced him it would be good.
Unfortunately, we were very wrong.
Fortunately, we didn't know that yet and had some delicious guacomole (though as Chris Rock says you shouldn't get credit for shit you supposed to do and its easy to make good guacomole).
Unfortunately, the entrees were about $10 each (way overpriced for the quality as we shall see).
Fortunately, the rice was alright.
Unfortunately, the burrito that I ordered had not-particularly-great beans and as for the vegetables... The vegetables were insipid carrots, peas and lima beans whose flavour had been cruelly boiled away. I thought I had gone to a Mexican restaurant – not WASP family dinner from the 1950s.
Fortunately, well actually there weren't any more fortunatelys there...
Unfortunately, there was a piece of chicken clinging to the bottom of my friend's quesadilla. When we brought it up the waitress basically shrugged it off. Then, after we'd paid for the $42 meal amongst the 3 of us with 3 twenties, she had the chutzpah to ask if we wanted change.
Fortunately, I bought a cheap Korean dvd from a random Korean dvd store afterwards.
Unfortunately, I then walked past Tacos El Asador which would've been a far better restaurant.

Mexitaco
No, I'm not giving an address – I'm not going to make it easier for people to find this awful place

Restaurant: Khmer Thai

It's a bit disingenuous of me to review Khmer Thai as a restaurant. Sure, it has my usual likes in a restaurant: not expensive, a little shabby and vegetarian selections but that's not why I go.



I only go to eat a Cambodian tofu dish I used to eat all the time back in Kingston. Alas, I haven't been able to get back to Kingston recently and thus have not been able to have the real thing at Cambodiana Restaurant. I had it last when I was in town for a wedding, staying at my grandfather's empty condominium. Everything had been cleared out for his move to Toronto, leaving rooms hauntingly devoid of anything. I sat on the floor (as there were no tables), eating the tofu with a plastic spoon (as there was not cutlery) and hoping not to drop anything and stain the carpet. That's a rather long winded way of saying that since then I have to get my spicy basil-chili-tofu fix at Khmer Thai:



I generally don't like sweetness in my meals but this dish combines sweet, sour and hot beautifully together. If this dish doesn't sound appealing to you, I can't recommend this restaurant in good conscience. After all, I'm only in it for the tofu.

Khmer Thai
1018 St Clair Avenue West, Toronto, Ontario