Thursday, December 29, 2011

What does a $100 meal look like?

There's this guy in Montreal who's like some kind of mini restaurant mogul, owning three restaurants in three different genres.  He's got an upscale one, a bring-your-own-wine place and a "market restaurant" place.  The "market restaurant" place is this place where they serve "market fresh" food or something -- you know, the whole "eat local" movement. (The "eat local" thing seems to be a thing in Montreal.  Even Gordon Ramsey's Rôtisserie Laurier boasts Quebec-grown chicken.)  

The "market fresh" place is fucking expensive and is located in a random working-class neighbourhood (up-and-coming!).  I honestly don't know how they stay afloat.  I mean, how many working class (or even up-and-comers) are going to eat at a place where dinner for two (with shared dessert and only one glass of wine) costs a hundred bucks before tip?  And I honestly don't see the fancy-shmancies of the world trekking out to a neighbourhood that boasts ... nothing.  

But the rent's probably dirt cheap.

A slab of chocolate custard isn't a tart.
Oh, as for dinner:  I had duck with bbq sauce (tasty!) and a chicken-corn-coriander soup.  Spousal Unit had veal cheeks and crab cakes.  We shared a dessert of crustless chocolate custard tart (so basically a slab of dense chocolate custard) with dulce de leche ice.  I won't lie:  it was damned good. I don't know if it was $100 good, but it was damned good.

Saturday, December 24, 2011

In which we eat out with Irene

The beauty of the holidays is that you can go out for lunch to places that aren't the place next to your office.  I mean, that panini place is awesome, but I've had enough chicken-and-goat-cheese sandwiches.  

The other awesome thing about the holidays is that I actually get to see Irene in person instead of over dodgy cellphone connections.  

My parents had the day off and offered to take care of The Toddler while my Spousal Unit and I did some last-minute Xmas shopping and went out for lunch.  The last minute shopping went very badly:  there was a line-up in the bookstore that made us despair and leave; the liquor store was so packed, we couldn't find anything; and we totally forgot what we went into the fancy soap store for.  But we had a nice lunch at Gordon Ramsey's rotisserie!


On the table, there were pickles.  Instead of bread, you get pickles.  I didn't have any, but Spousal Unit said they were really good: crunchy, not too salty, not too vinegary.
Then we had our mains.  Spousal Unit had a 1/4 white meat rotisserie chicken with fries and coleslaw and I had tourtière.  Spousal Unit ate the salad that came with my tourtière and I had his fries.  They were damned good fries and it was a damned good tourtière.  It had cherries in it!
Throughout the meal, we kept seeing these slices of lemon meringue pie passing us, so we ordered lemon meringue pie for dessert.  Damned that was good!  The lemon part was a thick, creamy lemon curd.  I don't think I've ever had such a good lemon meringue pie.  This is like the time I was in Florida and had key lime pie at this upscale restaurant and then I could never have key lime pie ever again.  
The End of The Meal

After our lunch, we went next door to meet Irene for a coffee at Juliette et Chocolat.  We had a cappuccinos and a brownie ("Le Balsamico").  Again:  Damned that was good!  

Irene and I both took pictures of the cups.  Guess whose picture is whose.
Cappucino Study
I took a picture of cups.

Wednesday, December 21, 2011

Endangered Dessert: Chocolate Ravioli

When I was a little kid, Christmas meant two things: cannoli and chocolate ravioli.   Everyone knows what cannolis are thanks to a bunch of pop culture references to them.  Of course, the TV-and-movie versions of cannoli are the (inauthentic) Sicilian cannoli, with their sugarry ricotta filling with chocolate chips, and greyish, bubbly shell.  (Authentic Sicilian cannoli have candied fruit in the filling rather than chocolate chips.  But people hate candied fruit, so over the past 30 or so years all North American Sicilian cannoli have become candied-fruit-free.)

Anyways.  

My family makes cannoli, but not Sicilian cannoli because we aren't Sicilian.  I know:  shocker!  How dare there be variations in Italian food!  It needs to be homogeneously monolithic just like Indian and Chinese foods! (Yes, I am being sarcastic.) Our cannoli are made with a light, crisp shell and stuffed with chocolate custard on one side and vanilla-lemon custard on the other.   Does that sound good?  Are you wondering why you can't find these in pastry shops?  Yeah, me too.

Unlike the cannoli, I'm pretty sure no one outside of my mother's town has ever heard of chocolate ravioli.  There may have been some chef on Top Chef or Iron Chef who made a chocolate ravioli.  Of course, no chocolate ravioli made on a Foody Show would ever resemble what my family makes.  In fact, my family's chocolate raviolis would probably make you lose Top/Iron Chef.  The filling is cocoa, ricotta and sugar in a lumpy, inhomogeneous, somewhat revolting mass.  The filling is stuffed into a light sweet dough and deep fried. 

The result is...fantastic!  But very unsophisticated.  You would have thought that some enterprising pastry shop would have tried to make a nice, tasty chocolate ravioli, but no.  Instead they just keep making what white folks expect.

The only people making these desserts are old Italian ladies from my mom's town.  And people like me don't even know what the recipe is for the sweet dough.  And so, the chocolate ravioli is an endangered dessert.  




Monday, December 19, 2011

Philosophical Food Blogging: Guess Who's Not Coming To Dinner?

If you're not imaginary and you have actually read this blog regularly (as opposed to accidentally landing here because Google went berserk and returned this as the top link when you searched for "winter gazebo maintenance"), you may have noticed that I haven't posted anything lately.  That's because I had a deadline looming, I had to move cubicle and I was spending my free time with the Silvia.  

Cup of mystery








But now I have time to tell you what I ate, but you probably don't care.  Nor should you.  Because I could totally be lying to you.  How do you know that I'm not totally making up what was in these empty plates and containers?  For example, I ate some Veggie Straws in this paper cup the other day.  (Veggie Straws are what you eat from the snack closet once the chips are done.  When the Veggie Straws are done, you eat the Ritz crackers.  When those are done, you start prowling the cubes for random food on people's desks.)  But maybe I didn't.  

Maybe I'm just pretending that this cup was full of Veggie Straws to make my life seem more mundane.  Because you'd be more likely to believe that I ate Veggie Straws out of this stupid paper cup while discussing memory leaks with a developer rather than the truth:  That it was full of marshmallow and popcorn Jelly Bellys that I ate while discussing the Cirque Du Soleil with a guy in Support who's also an amateur opera singer (he's a "true tenor").


Bad dahl or a clever decoy?
This other container contained red lentil dahl with rice and yogurt.  There wasn't enough water in the rice and it came out gloopy and partially burnt.  There was too much tomato in the dahl, so it looked like globs of orange stuff.  The yogurt was OK, though, as it was store-bought.  But maybe I'm actually a better cook than I'm letting on and the dahl was super-flavourful, the rice was perfect and the yogurt home-made.  You will never know.

Tuesday, December 13, 2011

The Espresso Strikes Back

A: 50 engineers and 1 Technical Writer
So it came.   The Rancillo Silvia made its appearance in the office today to great fanfare and rejoicing.  All the engineers crowded around it and tried it out and everyone made the "How many engineers does it take to make an espresso" joke.   When I say that everyone made that joke, I literally mean that every single person who walked into the break room made that joke.
After everyone got over their bad selves, it became obvious that neither the Rocky grinder nor the fancy-ass coffee had arrived.  My stash of espresso was "volunteered" to serve as the office coffee until the real coffee arrived.  

My office coffee is, shall we say, not the best.  It's tasty, yes, but it isn't made for a high quality machine.  Consequently, the coffee that the Silvia made was bitter and insanely strong.  And by "insanely strong" I mean that people were bouncing off walls and unable to focus. 

The work of Imperial Stormtroopers?
Meanwhile, Desktop Espresso sat dismantled in a corner of my cubicle.  It reminded me of that scene in Empire Strikes Back where  they're in the cloud city and they've just been taken prisoner by the Empire and Chewbacca finds C3P0 dismatled. My Desktop Espresso reminds me of Headless C3P0.  That's very sad.  But I don't think Desktop Espresso has anything to worry about:  There is so much clean-up needed for the Silvia that I'm pretty sure that laziness will prevent the engineers from using it.

Saturday, December 10, 2011

The Usurper

It was announced that the Rancillo Silvia (with Rocky Doser) will be arriving in the office at some point before the Xmas/New Year holiday. 
The Usurper

Desktop Espresso isn't too scared.  Desktop Espresso is pretty sure that the usurper will be too hard to use for anyone to really use on a regular basis and so Desktop Espresso's reign will be long and prosperous.

Long live Desktop Espresso!

Thursday, December 8, 2011

This Is The End, Desktop Espresso, The End

The office is getting an espresso machine.
"You're up to something, Chartreuse Mug!"

This all started last week when the QA manager acquired a Nespresso machine for his office. Everyone flocked to his office to taste the fruits of those convenient little capsules. I had an allongé instead of my usual Starbucks VIA Xmas Bleuch and it was so much better. My espresso cup, though, seemed to know that something was up. It regarded my chartreuse mug suspiciously.

A day or so after the Nespresso arrived in the office, an email went out asking for suggestions for espresso machines.

And today we got word that a new espresso machine would be arriving fortwith.

This may be the end of my Desktop Espresso and the end of my barrista services to the office. No more will I share an afternoon espresso with the guy in the cube next to me.

Desktop Espresso and I go way back.  I received it as a gift from the guy who would later become my Spousal Unit.  He got it for me after I complained about the coffee in the café in our building at the University.  We were promised a Starbucks (not ideal), but what we got was a "We Proudly Serve Starbucks Coffee".  The nice ladies who manned the place had no idea how to make an espresso as this isn't a skill Sodexo teaches its employees.
Family Portrait, 2011

I left academia and started a job downtown, where there was plenty of good coffee.  But then I switched jobs and ended up in a business park in the 'burbs.  Our building had a cafeteria that was owned by a family of bitchy people.  The son was OK and when he was there he made a decent espresso, but his mother and father couldn't brew an espresso to save their lives.   After several months of enduring their barely-edible swill, I violated safety policies and brought in Desktop Espresso.  Soon I was brewing espresso for a group of about 10 people, including some of the nice folks on the Health and Safety Committee.

Then I changed to my current job and brought Desktop Espresso with me.  For the past year, Desktop Espresso has been providing tasty espresso for me and the guy in the cube next to mine.  Now it's all over.

This is the end.

...ride the snake...

Monday, December 5, 2011

Sad Music and Sadder Food

Today was a rainy December day.  You know the type of day where it's too warm to snow, but too cold to really feel like it's not winter?  It's the type of day they fail to discuss when they talk about Global Warming.

The snack closet appears to be channeling this craptastic weather as it's been "festively bare".  It's full of bizarre crap like sesame and poppy seed crackers and Ritz crackers in the shape of Yuletide Trees. The cheese is some kind of spreadable variety and the cookies are some fancy cranberry almond biscotti thins.

I ate some sad little Yule tree crackers, downing them with Starbucks VIA Xmas Bleuch while listening to Pink Floyd's The Wall and editing a document. It was a dismal moment and, as Comfortably Numb came on, I seriously considered putting down my pen, shredding the document, deleting its electronic counterpart, and leaving work to go sit near the duck pond in the next business park over.  In the rain.  In the cold, cold winter rain.


But then The Show Must Go On  was next and I remembered that I don't like the rest of The Wall, so I switched to a different playlist.  As REM's These Days played, I felt better.  I also discovered that there were Two-Bite Brownies hiding behind the sesame seed crackers in the closet.


Later on I had the homemade chocolate chip buttermilk muffin I had brought from home.  It was tasty.  I also changed my playlist to something fluffy, like the muffin, and listened to Friend Crush by Friends while I ate it.