The Dress

I am mad as hell that I got drawn into this. So now I shall vent and lay it out on the table and hopefully we will never ever EVER come back to this again. Someone posted a picture of a dress, a debate ensued over the colour of the dress.

Clearly the dress is white and gold. It appears to have a blue tint because it is in the shadows, the picture taker did not have the correct settings on the camera and thus did not compensate for the different colour temperature. Nor did they then fix the colour temperature up in Photoshop, using a warming filter. Duh.
I spent four years at OCAD being told these types of things, and it was never even this pronounced. It was much more subtle. I was tearing my hair out as people were saying the dress was blue. I even made Brent take a colour blindness test. Blue, that I can understand. But black?! WHERE THE F*CK WHERE THEY GETTING BLACK FROM? IT IS GOLD.

Until some more digging and we found a picture of the dress in an online catalogue. OK, so maybe the dress comes in two colours? But they are all black trimmed. Back to the image that broke the world.

Looking at the background you can see that is blown out and overexposed. Especially in the top right. Thus we can surmise that there was a light source coming in from the top right. The picture taker used a front flash to compensate and avoid a silhouette. But why did black and blue turn gold and white??? There is a white jacket placed over the dress. Looking at the catalogue image, we see that the top is black yes, but lacy and very thin. Thus the flash went right through and bounced off the white jacket background overexposing the image and leaching out the black colour. As for why gold appeared: my guess is that the designer used a gold thread as well to give the dress some shine, and the strong flash (image taken from up close) bounced off the gold, reflecting back. The reflected light also helped overexpose the image, lightening the blue. The camera still recorded the light source from the top right, thus further overexposing the whole image… lightening the blue even more. Those of us with a trained eye, we just brushed off the blue as shadows and a need for colour balancing.

I think it now makes sense. Let us never EVER speak of it again.

 

Baconwich

At first I was not too psyched about going out for breakfast sandwiches, we had recently gone out for peameal bacon and I was satiated for a long time. However, Rashers , voted best breakfast sandwich, also serves regular bacon… and most importantly: cheese!

All well and good, however I made a terrible mistake. I forgot that brie is a soft cheese, in my head I had it mixed up with another cheese. Brie is not a good cheese for melting with bacon in a sandwich. Brent had made the right choice, ordering a sandwich with cheddar cheese and a fried egg on top. I was wary of it, it was made with peameal bacon. Again, I was off the mark. The sandwich was amazing, I did not know that peameal bacon could be that delicious.

There was some confusion however. Brent’s sandwich was done first and rather than wait for mine, they served his and said mine would be a few minutes. However they soon forgot about this and ended up making a double of his order and giving it to me along with my sandwich. When I told them about this, they thanked us for our honesty. Five minutes later we heard them offer the extra sandwich to another customer!

 

Brilliant Bailey’s Brownies

Turns out I may be a culinary genius- or I just know how to really tweak a brownie recipe to make even better. Again I was working from my Nestle Tollhouse Cookie cookbook. This time for the base I used the chewy cocoa brownies recipe. Normally I would add a package of pudding in place of 1/3 cup of flour. This time however I also wanted to add Bailey’s to my brownies. Instead of subbing out the flour, I followed the recipe. I poured the powdered chocolate pudding into a measuring cup and then measured out the equivalent amount of Bailey’s- thus maintaining the wet to dry ingredients ratio (see? I’m learning).

The Bailey’s flavour was very subtle, next time I would sub out the vanilla and add more. I was too lazy but I had the idea to also make a Bailey’s glaze, mixing Bailey’s with icing sugar until it had the right consistency and then just drizzling a little bit on top.

I also intend to repeat this with Kahlua.

 

Fat Pasha

We were really excited about going to Fat Pasha for dinner. This was partly due to the two week long wait, as the place was booked. When we walked in, it seemed empty, even still the guy asked if we had a reservation (it soon filled up).

Rather than ordering two mains, we decided to go a different route and order appetizers galore. We started out with three and figured if we were still hungry we could order more. The chopped liver and onions arrived first and it smelled out of this world delicious. We sat in anticipation as the server mixed some oil or sauce into it and finally set it on the table before us. We were faced with a GIANT bowl of sandwich spread and only four slices of toast, thick buttered delicious toast. We piled our bread high and devoured it. Even still, with more chopped liver and onions than bread, we ate about half. Thankfully it was easy to wrap up for later.

No sooner had we bitten in, the second dish arrived: squid. It was amazing! Better than the chopped liver and onions, it was so well done. And the crispy little chick peas added a little crunch to the chewy squid. With little room on our table, we had to move stuff around to make room for the latka platter. I was really excited about this, I have a deep-seated love affair with latkas. They were topped with salmon and sour cream and caviar… and I was blown away. I thought I loved latkas before… turns out I knew nothing of how good they can truly be.

We had enough room for one more dish and were torn  between the hummus and dessert. Maybe torn is too strong a word, more like hesitant? Based on the portion sizes, we surmised that the hummus dish would be huge… and I was craving dessert real bad. I’ve said before that I am not a fan of bread pudding, but the menu listed one with Nutella. Who can resist Nutella? Not this guy. Gal. Turns out I may be wrong about bread pudding, now it had been two good ones back to back.

As we were getting ready to leave we looked over at another table. They had ordered the roasted cauliflower dish that Brent had been considering but I vetoed in favour of the squid. We had made the right choice. It was an ENTIRE head of cauliflower- no thanks.
I can see why Fat Pasha was voted best new restaurant 2014. The food was delicious and the service was fast. Looking back on it, I am now left craving the Nutella bread pudding.

 

Worth the Walk

 

For a school assignment I had to head out to Queen West to a gallery. What better excuse did we need to make the hour and a half long trek than the gallery happened to be close to The Beaver, voted best gay bar in the city? They serve breakfast cocktails, therefore going there for brunch counts as going to a bar. As for what makes a gay bar good, I really had no idea. What won my vote was that they serve cocktails with brunch. We were a bit worried heading there as we were arriving there right around noon, on a Saturday, for brunch. In the past this had spelled trouble. This was doubley-so now because this was quite the trek and to get there and find out the place was full… we did not want to think about it.

Thankfully we lucked out and the place was not busy at all, though it got busier after that. We got there after noon, so it was OK to drink, so the excuse went. I was intrigued by one brunch dish that had tortilla chips, chicken and chorizo. In the end I went with my usual go-to brunch food: french toast, can rarely go wrong with that. And oh my god did I make the right choice. The french toast was fancy with walnuts and chocolate chips on top. The bread itself was soft and fluffy with what I can only guess cinnamon veins throughout, really it was like a cross between bread and coffee crumble cake. Brent had ordered the breakfast burrito, which on paper sounded kind of blah to me. However one bite and we had to swap halfway through. No way was I going to miss out on that. It was a different way of eating chili, with a scrambled egg all wrapped up nice and toasty in a tortilla. My only complaint, and this goes for all burritos so far, is that the ingredients were not well mixed. Some bites I got just egg, others just chili.

The breakfast cocktail offerings were a bit limited (unless you count a sidecar as a breakfast cocktail, which I do not). There were two mimosa options: with cider or with prosecco. Brent had ordered the prosecco mimosa. I was tempted to order the cider mimosa after my lemonade and cider cocktail but I thought it was best not to. We still had a long walk home ahead of us.

After a brief (really, five minutes at the most) stop at the gallery we headed back eastwards towards home. This was not the end of our fooding adventure however. We stopped off at R Squared Cafe, voted best cafe for free wi-fi. Based on the number of people in there, all with open laptops, I would say yes, this is indeed a good spot for free wi-fi. Alas, with nowhere to sit, we could only enjoy the free wi-fi for a few minutes while we waited for my coffee. The Spanish latte was amazing, made with condensed milk and cayenne pepper. It was an odd but satisfying drink. The cayenne pepper only started to burn a while after the sip. You cannot go to a cafe and not order baked goods, it is simply not done. We had ordered an oatmeal chocolate chip cookie and a double chocolate chip cookie. The oatmeal one was by far the winner. The double chocolate chip cookie, while it had a nice sprinkling of cinnamon on top, simply had too much (I know!) chocolate in it.

My legs are now dead dead dead.

 

Nailed It!

LaMesa had been voted best prix fixe menu, however they do not regularly offer a prix fixe. Great voting! Our luck finally broke when I was leafing through a Winterlicious booklet, lo and behold LaMesa was listed as a participant. Finally! We would get to try this prix fixe that was so good it was worth voting to number one even though it is not a regular offering!

The prix fixe consisted of three courses: appetizer, main and dessert. For each one we had three choices to pick from. It was quite easy, there were clear winners. For starters I risked it and ordered the mushroom broth, and it was well worth the possible stomachache later. It was so good! The bean curd noodles were hard to eat with the broth and I had to resort to eating them with my fork a-la spaghetti. I had won the appetizer round, Brent had ordered the pork and rice. It was good but not outstanding.

For the mains we split fish and chips and chicken with adobo sauce and barley. The presentation of the dishes was honestly more impressive than the flavour. Part of that is because I am not a big fan of milk-fish. The chicken was the best part. I had been worried that becuase it was in a adobo pepper sauce that it would be too spicy, but it was just right.

The real knock-out was dessert. We were torn, the breadpudding and the flan were both extraordinary, we could not for the life of us pick a winner. With each bite we waffled. I have never been a fan of breadpudding, even the name is unappealing. But this breadpudding may have changed my opinion. It was served warm and was oh so decadent with candied walnuts and caramel sauce. I was skeptical of the flan as well. We were presented with a ramekin of purple stuff, it tasted like custard. I was over the moon! On its own it was delicious, but then there were little lemon meringues and pieces of vanilla rice krispies! I seriously wanted to order a second one.

It did not feel like the usual Winterlicious prix fixe wherein they have a limited menu and not much variety. They truly showed culinary skill, each dish was unique and different. It was artfully presented and did not seem like they were trying too hard to impress.