A lovely lady who goes by the handle Rosella on Twitter posted a link to pictures of her visit to Toronto's Chinatown yesterday evening.

rossella76 May 21, 09:25 PM
A selection of my first day in Toronto last week http://bit.ly/Sgq4e

Her tweet prompted me to rifle through foodiePrints' image archive and fish out some pictures of fruit from the trip Jenn and I took to Vancouver two years ago.

Mostly, the images come from a produce shop located in a lovely marketplace called "Granville Island."

Granville Island
There, Vancouver demonstrates one benefit of being so close the Pacific rim: proximity to Asian fruit producers:

Donut Peaches

$2.99/lb
Unfortunately, we didn't purchase any donut peaches, so I'm not sure how they differ from regular peaches. Though, I am a fan of Niagara peaches, gorging myself come late August or early September.


Rumbutan

Product of Thailand, $5.99/lb
Rumbutan are essentially hairy versions of the more familiar lychee fruit. They are quite sweet when ripe. Like lychees, they store poorly.


Longan (Dragon's Eyes)

$2.99/lb
I prefer longan over lychee fruit. Firstly, I find them sweeter than lychees. Secondly, while longan fruit have less flesh surrounding their round nut-sized seeds, the flesh has no papery membrane separating it from the seed. Such is characteristic of lychees. Like lychees and rumbutans, longans store poorly.


Dragon Fruit
Regarding dragon fruit, I could not resist buying several to share with Jenn and her family. I have long read about this fruit online on Asian blogs, but fresh specimens are difficult to come by on the Atlantic end of Canada.

To serve, find a ripe dragon fruit. It should be bright in colour and firm, but yielding. Mushy flesh signifies either bruised or rotten fruit.

Place it on a cutting board or chopping block

Halve it with a large knife

Segment the halves into thirds

Enjoy
The flesh from dragon fruit comes off of the skins very easily. It has a wonderfully fresh taste. When fresh, its texture is a cross between a kiwi fruit's many seeds and a just-ripe pear. It is honey sweet.

Back in Ontario, I refuse to buy dragon fruit because shipping them across the continent tends to mangle the fruit. I surmise this is the same reason that I've come across more South African lychees than Thai, in the past couple years.

Don't worry! As a proud resident of Ontario, I brought a pair of yellow watermelons with me to Vancouver, vine ripened from a farm in Quebec. Jenn's cousins were as amazed with yellow watermelon as I was, fresh dragon fruit.

BTW, in Ottawa, we can still get our hands on our fair share of some odd fruit:

Pomegranates
Try explaining this fruit to someone who hasn't encountered them.


Persimmon
Persimmon taste like funky mango, but with a firmer flesh. It has a fuller and somewhat tarter flavour.

For the curious, here's how I was taught to serve them:

Peel the skin

Quarter and remove the core

Perhaps the new T&T opening at the corner of Riverside and Hunt Club in Ottawa will provide better quality exotic fruit...Otherwise, I'll be going back to Vancouver to visit and soon!

During the Tuesday evening of my week in Toronto, Mademoiselle Ling took me to Little Korea (aka: Korea Town or K-town) for dinner. In Toronto, Little Korea is located along a stretch of Bloor Street between Christie and Bathurst Streets.

There, we went to a restaurant whose name neither of us could pronounce. She found the restaurant on chowhound.com. It comes highly recommended.

Korean Restaurant

For dinner, we both ordered a popular Korean dish, called bibimbap in a heated stone bowl or dolsot.

Dolson Bibimbap
Essentially, bibimbap is a dish of hot rice, a variety of cooked and/or raw vegetables (stir fried slivered carrots and daikon, blanched bean sprouts, sliced boiled mushrooms, and spinach) and cooked beef (roughly minced or coarsely ground). Traditionally, it is also served with a raw egg, freshly cracked on top. The egg is meant to be mixed into the hot rice and cooks in the residual heat. Ours came partially cooked, fried, but runny.

Of course, our bibimbap mains were served with soup starters and a myriad of communal "banchan" or side dishes, which are meant to be finished with the meal.

Banchan
One particular side dish seems obligatory to any Korean meal. Called Kimchi, this banchan is a revered and traditional preparation of fermented vegetables. The most popular, is made, from Chinese cabbage and is flavoured with garlic, ginger, onion, chili, and fish sauce. It is somewhat analogous to German sauerkraut. However, kimchi can be made with other vegetables such as cucumber, which was also served that evening.

Bibimbap can actually come in two ways, as we were served or with the ingredients in one bowl and hot rice in another. To eat it, sauce to taste with chili paste and mix all the ingredients together using your spoon and characteristic Korean metal chopsticks. If your bibimbap is served in a heated dolsot, the rice mixture resting against the bowl will crisp and toast.

Crisped Rice
I found the rice crisp easily came away from the bowl. It was the best part of the meal. Otherwise, it can be eaten softened by pouring hot water into the dolsot and scraping the rice off.

Together with the banchan, the meal displayed tremendous balance in its contrasting flavours (sweet, sour, salty, savory, and spicy), colours, and textures. I had an excellent meal. I should note that the runny egg somewhat emulsified the rice mixture, allowing it to carrying more flavours.

Afterwards, instead of taking a subway back, we actually walked back to my hotel.

Along the way, we stopped at a walnut cake or Hodo Kwaja bakery.

Hodo Kwaja Bakery
Hodo Kwaja are miniature cakes that are somewhat analogous to Tim Horton's Timbits, only they are not nearly as sweet, slightly more dense, and taste of ground walnut.

There, we purchased a box of two kinds of cakes. Both walnut cakes, they differed in their fillings.

Box of Cakes

Filled

After Sampling

Potato Filling

Red Bean Filling
I found the sweetened potato filling starchy and a little much to take after dinner. The familiar red bean filling was also sweet. Though it was less dense and somewhat richer in flavour.

Here is the bakery's business card:

Front

Back

Apparently, the little cakes with their intricate designs are made by the machinery Ling and I walked by to get to the front counter to order. Here is a youtube video of it in action.


We also stopped at Honest Ed's. Located at 581 Bloor, Honest Ed's is an institution in Toronto.

Honest Ed's

It sells the largest assortment of cookware of varying qualities I have ever seen.

Cookware far and wide

Thanks to Mademoiselle Ling for introducing me to dolsot bibimbap and taking me on a lovely tour of Toronto at night.

For the record, downtown Toronto is not walkable. The trip from little Korea back to my hotel took several hours.

Update:
Since the talk these days is a faltering economy, Honest Ed's decided to have a three day mega sale, featuring prices from the Depression Era. According to its current general manager, Russel Lazar, if economist are going to predict a recession reminiscent of the dirty thirties, consumers need a break so he discounted a selection of his merchandise to match. Dubbed "Hones Ed's Hungry 30s" Bargains, the sale ran for three days (January 22-24, 2009) and attracted crowds of grateful customers.

Here's a short list of the 30s priced "items":

• White sliced bread - 25 cents
• Dozen eggs - 25 cents
• Italpasta spaghetti, 900g pkg - 25 cents
• 1L Sealtest 2% milk - 25 cents
• Mac & cheese dinner - 25 cents
• 200 mL carton apple juice - 17 cents
• Assorted bouillon cubes - 25 cents
• Aluminum picture frame - 15 cents
• Evenflo 4oz glass baby bottle - 10 cents for 4
• 10 pack pencil set - 10 cents
• Ombra bath & body wash (20 mL) - 10 cents
• Ladies T-shirts - 10 cents
• Men's briefs - 25 cents
• Facecloths - 10 cents
• Tapered candles - 10 cents
• Salt & pepper set - 25 cents
• 5x6" framed oil paintings - 25 cents
• Men's gloves - 25 cents
• Men's suit bags - 10 cents
• Porcelain salad plate - 10 cents
• Coffee mugs - 25 cents
• Nail polish - 12 cents
• Light bulbs - 17 cents
• Garbage bags - 5 for 25 cents

Source: citynews.ca

For posterity, foodiePrints is going to host the flyer. We don't see this kind sale happening ever again.

Particulars:
Honest Ed's
581 Bloor Street West
Toronto, Ontario
Tel.: (416)537-1574

Last month, I spent a week in downtown Toronto, schooling in the ways of SAP, an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) solution that is popular among medium and large scale enterprises. Since my course was 5 days long, I was initially apprehensive about being unable to sate my foodie appetites for a week. Toronto is a big city. It has much to offer foodie-wise, but culinary adventure is limited when you are unfamiliar with Toronto's public transit system and you've a grueling day's instruction the following morning. Happily, if your hotel just happens to be located on Bloor, 10 paces from Yonge Street, finding a decent meal isn't difficult.

After I checked into my hotel, I went looking for a convenience store to purchase a calling card. During my search, I noticed that I was famished and stopped by a cafe-style Vietnamese restaurant, called Ginger (695 Yonge Street). There, I ordered a really nice bowl of pho, but what really impressed me was the sheer variety of inexpensive menu items available and the large number of people Ginger served. When I finished my meal, a quick glance at the latest set of patrons and their orders compelled me to return. I even took a colleague to Ginger the following Thursday to introduce her to pho.

However, it's not the pho that I enjoyed most. It's the bahn mi, the Vietnamese incarnation of the submarine sandwich.

Beef and Chicken Bahn Mi

Beef Bahn Mi - Close-up

Chicken Bahn Mi - Close-up
After I observed two of the line cooks polish off a couple of the sandwiches on their break, I told myself that I had to give it a try. Made to order, these sandwiches featured either thin cuts of chicken breast or thinly shaved beef. Each seemed marinated in a sweet and slightly spicy sauce that reminded me of Thai sweet chili. When ordered, the meat was seared on the griddle and then placed into a buttered crusty roll with plenty of pickled daikon and carrots and young stalks of cilantro. Oddly missing was the thin slather of liver pate that is characteristic of bahn mi, but the full seared flavors more than made up for it. The meat was tender and savory. The vegetation provided bright herbal flavors and textural contrast. Both the chicken and beef bahn mi were delicious.

The crusty roll actually reminded me of the "paposeco rolls" from the Ace Bakery that are sold by the Superstore back home.

Supermarket Paposeco Roll

For breakfast the next morning, against my better judgement, I went to the nearby Tim Horton's for a Bagel, Egg, Lettuce, and Tomato (BELT) sandwich and a cup of joe. Considering that most Timmies aren't equipped with a flat top or griddle, the sandwich's egg and bacon are more than likely ready-made and microwaved. This explained the unnatural round shape of the bacon and the strange rubbery texture of the eggs. Gratefully, I discovered that SAP courses come with complimentary coffee and muffins, so breakfast was sorted for the rest of my stay.

Here's what a Timmie's BELT is supposed to look like:

Timmie's BELT as advertised

For lunch, I dined with the rest of my fellow students in the underground food court, linking the SAP learning center and the connected mall next door. Twice, I went to the Soup It Up for the sandwich and salad special. Neither special warranted any pictures.

On Thursday, however, I ate at Druxy's, a familiar purveyor of deli sandwiches. There, I had the "chicken special", which was worth writing about. With its smear of mayo, fresh lettuce, sweet tomato, swiss cheese, grilled chicken breast, bacon, and sliced avocado, the sandwich demonstrated perfect flavor and texture harmony. Sweet and bright tomatoes balanced the savory chicken and salty bacon. Crunchy lettuce balanced the firm meat, crisp bacon, and soft avocado.

On Tuesday evening, I wandered into a Popeye's for some fried chicken for supper. Ottawa actually has no Popeye's Chicken and Seafood location, so the restaurant was novel to me.

Signage

Toonie Two Piece Chicken Deal

Close Up
I found Popeye's chicken's crust both thicker and much darker than what I was used to. The chicken itself looked over fried and had a very greasy mouth feel. I finished one piece before I came to my senses and disposed of the other. This is when it dawned on me that the chicken most likely sat under a heating lamp and was re-fried when served.

My Friday class ended at 1:00 pm so I took a final stroll before having a late lunch and catching my train home. This is when I decided that I couldn't leave Toronto without having sushi of some form. With luggage in tow, I stopped at Natural Japanese Restaurant (714 Yonge) for an Okinawa combo.

Restaurant Interior

Salad Appetizer

Okinawa Combo: Salmon, Tuna, Mackerel, and Crab Nigiri + California Rolls
Alas the sushi was little better than the buffet-eria-style sushi from typical all-you-can eat restaurants. The California rolls were poorly constructed and the nigiri was somewhat unevenly formed. Fortunately, the fish was fresh and the rice was loosely packed so each piece fell apart in my mouth as they should. Cost: $10.99 before taxes or tip.

Nevertheless, I realized that I needed to pickup something for dinner during the trip home, so I ordered a cooked combo, called Kyoto Sushi on the menu. Cost: $11.99 before taxes or tip.

Kyoto Sushi Combo: shrimp, crab, egg, and surf clam + salmon tempura rolls + eel hand roll
The combo served me well on the train ride home. I actually found that I enjoyed the cooked combo better than the raw. Particularly, the salmon in the maki was fatty and fresh, imparting both a pleasant flavor and texture.

This Just In: If you're interested in making authentic bahn mi at home, head over to the Wandering Chopsticks blog. There, you will find recipes for a grilled pork bahn mi (banh mi thit heo nuong), a breakfast (egg) bahn mi (banh mi hot ga op), a barbecued pork bahn mi (banh mi xa xiu), and even a meatball bahn mi (banh mi xiu mai). For the record, the characteristic pickled daikon and carrots are called "do chua." I gather they can be purchased at an Asian market.

Menus follow after the jump:

More after the jump...

Sometime during the fall, a friend and colleague threw a party to bid farewell to the house he designed and built himself. He had just put the property on the market and decided to invite friends and co-workers over to admire his handiwork.

The approximately 2200 square foot bungalow with custom baths, a spacious kitchen, solid wood cabinetry, and laminate hardwood floors is located in Cornwall, Ontario. Personally, my main draw was my friend's custom built barbecue enclosure. It weather proofed his barbecue from rain, wind, snow, and sleet, permitting him ready access to a propane grill year round. I had heard so much about the enclosure that I had to see it before the property sold.

Since this was the first time my better half and I ventured into Cornwall, we volunteered to drive down with my colleague to setup for the party. On the way, we stopped by a cheese co-op to purchase curds for the party and had lunch at Shoeless Joe's.

St. Albert Cheese Co-operative Inc.
According to its website, the St-Albert Cheese Co-operative Inc. (aka: St-Albert Co-operative Cheese Manufacturing Association) is located in the Casselman region (just a few kilometers from Ottawa) and represents approximately 50 producers. It employs approximately 60 people and has been producing quality cheese for over 100 years with 100% pure milk.

There, I purchased a package of pre-sliced old (fort) cheddar from St. Albert's dairy bar.

100% Milk Old Cheddar

At $4.78, quite the bargain

Nutritional Information
Originally, I intended the cheddar to make a baked macaroni and cheese. However, after I sampled a slice, its strong sharp cheddar flavor - tangy, slightly salty, and smooth - made me reconsider. I ate the rest of the cheese over the period of a week with whole grain crackers. It has to be the best cheddar I have ever sampled.

Shoeless Joe's
When we arrived in Cornwall, we had lunch at Shoeless Joe's. Shoeless Joe's is a chain sports-oriented restaurant with well over a dozen establishments throughout Ontario. According to my colleague, the Shoeless Joe's in Cornwall had newly opened. My better half and I, however, were quite familiar with Shoeless Joe's pub fare and menu. You see, we often frequented the Kingston establishment while she schooled at Queen's. We are particularly fond of Shoeless Joe's freshly made lattice fries and garlic dip.

Here are pictures of our orders:

Fish and Chips w/Garlic Dip ($12.45)

Pulled Pork Sandwich w/Lattice Fries($10.68)

San Diego Chicken Wrap w/Lattice Fries($9.95)

Personally, I ordered the San Diego Chicken Wrap. With its fresh vegetables, soft tortilla, and slices of crisp seasoned breaded chicken, I had a good lunch. The wrap must have been made to order because wraps made with slices of freshly fried chicken quickly go soggy with the moisture from the vegetables and sauce (typically mayonnaise or ranch dressing).

Total cost for 2 platters of fish and chips with garlic dip, 1 pulled pork sandwich with lattice fries, 1 chicken wrap with lattice fries and 3 drinks: $63.58 (before tip, after taxes).

Oh and here are pics of my colleague's barbecue enclosure. It was made with several sheets of plexi glass, pressure treated lumber, and a composite material that fits snugly around the pressure treated lumber:

Barbecue Enclosure

Composite Material
Cheers to my colleague for coming up with this solution. If I ever get the opportunity, I plan on plagiarizing the design :)

Particulars:
St-Albert Co-operative Inc.
150 St-Paul Street,
St-Albert Village
(613)987-2872

Shoeless Joe's
1110 Brookdale Avenue,
Cornwall
(613)937-4838