Uighur, please

The island-state of Palau did the right thing and took in some Chinese Muslims from Guantanamo. The Uighurs were a weird state of legal limbo: innocent of terrorism, facing possible execution if they returned to China and not wanted in any other countries. Personally, I thought that Canada should have taken them in. I guess Harper didn't want to antagonize the PRC, he probably has to balance our national interests with concerns about morality. Still, the Uighurs are no threat to anyone and it would've been the moral thing to do.

All of this is, I guess, an overly lengthly preamble to the time my friends and I went on a voyage to eat some Uighur food. We treked out to the far northern reaches of Toronto (venturing through many buses and subways) to head to the (not vegetarian-friendly sounding) Chinese Beef Lamb House.

As it turns out, we were mistaken. The owners were not Uighurs – rather Han Chinese converts. No matter what their ethnicity, the food was excellent. My friend wrote a review of it for Mondo Magazine (I'm the "vegetarian friend"). I had the delicious "tofu with chili pepper, a dish of thin tofu skins covered luxuriously with a garlicky sauce and fresh green chilies sliced lengthwise" (I have a fairly ugly picture of it on my cell phone that I guess I'm not going to upload).

There were $8 pitchers of watery beer, which went very well with the food. It's not that it tasted particularly good or that we got drunk off it. The water-beer was perfect for cooling off your mouth after eating something spicy. Water would've just circulated the hot around my mouth and milk wouldn't have gone with the meal. I don't know if I would really recommend a trip that far for vegetarians, but if your meat-eating friends want to go on an expedition don't be turned off by the "Beef Lamb" part in the title.

Chinese Beef Lamb House
3591 Sheppard Ave. E., Toronto, Ontario