Toronto food adventures

So I've been in Toronto for almost 3 weeks. Fortunately, Toronto is pretty friendly to someone who is on a cash saving mission (plus I live at home when I'm here) as there's not much to do ... so eating and horse riding (mutually exclusive events) have been the highlights of my trip. Here are some of my favourite foodie experiences so far.

1. Shiso Tree Cafe

Japanese cafe that sells pasta, regular style and J-style. I mean, seaweed and tartare sauce on your fries? Genius. Plus, they have a salad / pasta / garlic bread combo at lunchtime. Here's some of the weird and wonderful stuff we ate

2. Ten Ren tea house

Bubble tea plus taiwanese food, great for cheap snacking or lunching. Bring on the tapioca and brick toast with condensed milk!!!

3. Asian Legend

I love asian food shop names eh, but this one is actually pretty legendary as far as their siu long bao goes (I have no idea what this is in English, soup-filled pork dumplings?) And they had a crispy rice with seafood thing ... was almost like eating deep fried rice crispies. Sounds weird, but it was awesome.

4. Yoghurtys

Froyo is in abundance here and we're fortunate enough that we have one round the corner (ok its 10min walk but by Toronto standards its around the corner). I love the marketing, love the flavours, love love love just generally. Miss B and I went on a froyo walk on more than one occasion and this was definitely the winner for me. Who can resist flavours like caramel corn, tiramisu, passionfruit, green apple, peanut butter and pistachio? Plus about 50 different toppings?

5. McDonalds.

Yep, its as good as Sydney here. Mr T and I go and eat Maccas everywhere we go just for comparative purposes and Toronto is pretty high on the list. There's also a Maccas at either end of our street (no kidding and its a recipe for disaster!) Can you believe the strawberry sundae actually had chunks of strawberry in it ... sooooo exciting!!! and they even asked if you wanted peanuts! (we ended up giving these to dad who ate them as part of afternoon tea) There was also a mysterious McChicken sauce, who on earth knows what kind sauce it actually is ...

6. Assortment of random yummy food

I love food here, its almost like being back in Sydney. Even the lettuce tastes good. Below is a mixture of family food at home and some more yummy stuff outside ... oh and I gotta finish off with the orange juice. Extra pulp orange juice! Unheard of! (don't worry I know you're shaking your head at this already so I won't bother with a picture .... though I did take one). I also made a couple of cakes whilst here, but more on that next time.



Till next time, Happy Eating guys!

Snow in London

I'm so so over the cold here and the grey skies. I used to think that the whole London overcast grey and rain was completely overrated, until I actually lived here. Unless its April it actually doesn't rain all that much, but it seems to be constantly cloudy, to the point where sunscreen is no longer a staple in my make up bag (bad, bad, bad habit to break, but I figure there's not much point when I'm outdoors for 1min between home and the train station, 10min at lunch to go get lunch, and its dark by the time I leave the office). Let me repeat, cloud and grey = depression and I totally understand why people leave here after a few years and say they can't take another winter.

While we're still in winter though with temperatures hanging around the 0 mark, a few weeks ago it snowed on the weekend so Mr T and I went for a wander and remembered to bring a camera. Needless to say, the tube wasn't working that day. Here's some snow outside our building:



This is the square near our house.



I think we counted 3 snowmen in the square already, so Mr T decide to make a snowbear instead just to be different. I think his features give him a lot of character, eh? A bit cartoonish even. I'm hopeful that he lasted at least 2 days (I didn't go back to check for fear of being too sad if he wasn't there anymore).



It ended up taking us 2hrs to go to the supermarket after the snow detour, but it was a bit of weekend fun.

And because this blog has a lot about food in it, we made spring rolls for lunch and finished it off with Teh Tarik and double choc tim tams for dessert (no, I didn't need dinner but I ate more spring rolls anyway). More on the actual making another day!



Till next time, bring on Spring!!!

Afternoon tea at the Landmark Hotel (Marylebone)

If you have known me for a long time you will know that I love tea, and particularly the concept of afternoon tea. My favourite place for afternoon tea is Gunners Barracks in Mosman - on the verandah on a sunny afternoon you can check out the water, be away from people and surrounded by trees and grass all at the same time.

Unusually, in my 3 previous visits to London plus and having lived here for more than a year I still have not been to afternoon tea. One reason is the formality of it all here (whilst Gunners Barracks isn't exactly a shorts and thongs kind of place, I never felt the need to fully dress up); and the other reason is that the amount of scones and tea I've eaten here (especially at National Trust cafes) means I've never felt the need to expand this to a full on a meal like afternoon tea which always seems to be the case these days. Anyway it was time to break the afternoon tea drought and on this occasion Mr T and I paid a vist to the Landmark Hotel in Marylebone. Of all the places we could have gone, why this particular one?

1. I wanted a swanky hotel just to see what it was like, but I didn't want anything that was in a stuffy and opulent but ugly room (yes I'm fussy!) The Landmark has an atrium type thing (photo below courtesy of Here is the City) which looked pretty light and airy so that was a tick for me.

1. There was a chocolate afternoon tea menu which I was busting to try. We were able to order one chocolate afternoon tea and one regular afternoon tea, and there was waaaaay too much food (even if we had planned to eat this for lunch!) Looking around we were the only two people with a stand each which was slightly embarrassing, but then the waitstaff told us that if we wanted anything else (more pastries, more sandwiches) just to let them know and they would bring out. Also the afternoon tea is priced per person so its basically all you can eat afternoon tea (not that you'd want to).

General comment on high end food - is it just me or does high end food (whether it be afternoon tea or dinner or lunch) typically seem to involve a lot of oval shaped mousses made from complicated ingredients?



The sandwiches 

This was a fairly standard selection with a choice of: egg, mayo and cress; chicken with tarragon crème fraîche; and smoked Scottish salmon; cucumber.

Mr T commented that they were really really tasty - probably due to the lashings of butter which we would never put on sandwiches at home :-) I do really like cucumber in a sandwich though; I think my fave was when Mrs P fed me cucumber, cream cheese and dill sandwiches for afternoon tea once. They were completely and utterly delish!!!

The pastries and sweets

We only ordered one chocolate afternoon tea for fear of being all too chocolate-d out. There is just too much chocolate, even for someone like me who likes nothing better than to sample a bunch of different flavoured and textured things to make and eat (and dream about). I think our strategy of alternating sandwiches and sweets was as effective as could be expected - even so Mr T claimed to be all sugared out by the time he finished his third pastry! I got a little further but probably only because I only sampled each sample size pastry before deciding if I liked it (and therefore went back for more). All of them were so rich it would have been impossible to eat all of them!! Here are some of the eating highlights.

Manjari chocolate mousse brownie; and Chocolate ganache with milk chocolate Chantilly and coconut nougatine

Both like eating mouthfuls of dark chocolate and I couldn't really detect much coconut                       

White chocolate mint shot; Star anise and milk chocolate panna cotta; and classic fruit cake with rum and Caraibe chocolate glaze

Really enjoyed the white chocolate mint shot; not such a big fan of the panna cotta. Interestingly though, there was marshmallowy texture in both the top layers, whereas they looked a little more foam like. Mr T was a fan of the fruit cake, despite it being fairly chocolatey.

     

Flourless pistachio sponge, fig jam and pistachio mascarpone;  Lime cheesecake with vodka cranberry truffle.

The highlight of this for me was the pink vodka cranberry truffle, despite being a non-alco fan. The cheesecake was pretty easy to eat; by the end of it I was on the lookout for sweet treats that were a bit more airy or liquidy in texture.

Coco mango: coconut macaroon with mango bavarois;  Chocolate and passion cream “financier”

I thought this is a great idea for a macaron. Macarons are so sweet the zing of the mango cut through nicely. Not sure what a mango bavarois is (besides another moussey thing) but Mr T thought it was a little like the mango pudding you get in chinese restaurants at yum cha... The green triangle on top is just a piece of white chocolate.



Scones

Miss M's mum taught me to make scones and I remember Miss M laughing at me for the delicate way that I rubbed butter and flour at the time (I didn't want to get knee deep in the stuff so I just used fingertips ... now I cheat and use a food processor though it doesn't come out quite as nicely as by hand). Needless to say we have moved on since then and after many years of scone making, I have pretty high expectations of scones. Mr T took the first bite and said "yours are better" - although this did give me a sinking feeling I did beam happily that Mr T prefers my scones, so it is a bit of a twisted win I guess!. The scones were a little too floury and dense and they just didn't taste fresh. I did like the strawberry conserve though which had big chunks of strawberry in them.




There were a few more things but I was too full to try them so I gave up at this point and we decided to have a rest for 10min, after which we were no better and decided it was home time.

Till next time, happy eating guys!



 

Gingerbread cookies

It is SO cold here (-1 when I left the house) that its really unpleasant. I really really dislike cold weather, but it does make the festive season really quite Chirstmassy. One only has to consider the number of Christmas markets available for visiting (we chose Zurich; more on that another day) and look at the crazy lights on Regent St / Oxford St to get an idea of how hectic Christmas really is in Europe. The best thing of course is that its the season to be watching Love Actually again!

Anyway back to the food... I was sitting solo in my local Pho Cafe (yes its actually called that) munching on pho and spring rolls tonight - the food isn't particularly awesome but its local and I do like the flower tea they have there (this is the jasmine one); its so pretty!



As I was eating my thoughts turned to chocolate cookies and gingerbread for no apparent reason. Since the house is stocked with supplies for making both, I wandered home thinking I'd decide then, but as I walked past Starbucks I saw the gingerbread latte sign --> time for gingerbread. I haven't made gingerbread for years, but it occurred to me that I should try and improve on the disappointing dry tasting one from Munich (see the last picture of  this post) at some stage. There's no family favourite for gingerbread so I went over to google Nigella Lawson's one and compared it with the one in my Stephanie Alexander book. Is it just me, or is it weird that in both of these recipes there is no actual ginger in gingerbread??? I decided to put some in anyway for good riddance - the spices are practically identical to those used in pumpkin pie or pumpkin spice latte.

Fortunately for me, gingerbread is pretty simple and there's not a lot of ingredients and measuring which immediately sold me to making it. Its another one of those lovely things where the ingredients just fit on the table nicely and there's even room for Stormy my toy mini schnauzer to sneak in the photo behind them.



 

Kate's gingerbread recipe (adapted from Nigella):

Ingredients

• 1 cup of flour


• 1/2 teaspoon baking powder


• 1/2 teaspoon each (around 2 shakes of the spice bottle) of cinnamon and ginger


• 1/4 teaspoon each (around 1 shake of the spice bottle) cloves, all spice, nutmeg


• 60g butter


• 1/4 cup brown sugar


• 1 egg


• 2 tablespoons golden syrup (or honey if you don't have any)

Method

1. Preheat oven to 170 degrees


2. Cream together butter and sugar


3. Add in egg and golden syrup (or honey) and keep mixing


4. Add in flour and spices and combine to make a ball of soft dough (there's really no need to be precious about measuring out the spices)


5. Roll it out on a floured surface and cut out shapes (you may need to put the dough in the freezer for a few minutes if its too soft to work with). I tried manually cutting out Christmas trees initially but then decided it was too much hard work for a Thursday night so I ended up grabbing the baking powder lid and using it as a cookie cutter (no idea where my cookie cutter set went... either left it in Sydney or lost it in the shipping somewhere!)


6. Bake for 5-10 min till golden on top (I'm sorry I can't be more precise on the timing of this - our oven is a bit funny with temperatures so its a guesstimate plus keeping an eye on it!)

Note that this isn't a particularly sweet gingerbread; I think most people like to eat theirs with icing. Since I'm not a royal icing fan (I don't feel the love for using raw egg whites in my icing... I'm going to have to get over this one day), I made a lemon glaze instead.

Lemon glaze - No measurements required, simply take a few big spoons of icing sugar, add a few drops of lemon juice and mix with a spoon (I do recommend always adding the lemon juice to the sugar and not the other way round - this way you can control the consistency / runnyness / thickness without wasting an excessive amount of sugar).

By the way, this is the first time I've baked cookies using a silicon mat and I can report that its completely superduper. There's absolutely zero sticking and no baking paper required! No idea how I have only discovered this in the last 6 months!

Mr T decided it would be fun to dye the glaze different colours so we could have a proper edible Christmas tree - here is the resulting kindergarten style artwork. The round face is meant to be a replica of Heath Ledger's joker face (Mr T just got back from a Xmas party where he dressed up as Heath Ledger's version of the joker) and the bottom round one is a tree on an island with a plane going past.



Finally, all the photos today have (perhaps obviously) been Instagrammed, as one camera is in for repairs and the SD card is missing from the other camera - what do you think? I actually don't mind it since its something a little different from my norm. In fact, I might even use this a little more often for happy snaps of food ...

Till next time, Happy Eating everyone!