A fine meal with my friend Lana (Eliza joined us later) at one of my favourite places downtown. Certainly my favourite Thai restaurant in the city, especially because SalaThai serves fresh young coconut! It’s my drink and dessert all rolled into one.

On Tuesday, my fondue pot (from Liechtenstein) finally saw some action again after sitting unused and lonely in Eliza’s cupboard since Kristin moved to London and I moved away three and a half years ago. Now that our Swiss Miss is back in Vancouver for a visit and I’m here, too, we brought out the pot again for some serious cheese indulgence and nostalgie.

It’s a good thing none of us are lactose intolerant.

I lapsed into a food coma directly after, and slept soundly on the hardwood floor until 4:30am!

More cake!

I couldn’t go a full day in Vancouver without my sushi fix, after a long drought of sushi-less cuisine in the two months since I was last here. Eliza tried to take me to a new place in Kerrisdale, but it was closed on Monday — boo! — and we ended up at another sushi place nearby called Asa.

Turns out Asa specialises in fusion rolls, so we went for the ones with the wacky names:

Crazy Boy Roll

Firecracker Roll

The menu was full of amusing Engrish, but we were too busy stuffing ourselves to get through more than a page of spelling nonsense. As long as the food tastes good, the rest doesn’t matter!

Since my acquisition of the Nikon D300 last Tuesday I haven’t had much opportunity to put it through its paces, that is, until Saturday afternoon. (Friday night’s photos of beer cans and the wearing of a chicken hat don’t count… those pictures to come.)

Lauren’s bridal shower took place at Shrimp Cocktail* seafood and pasta resto-lounge in Oshawa. A bit of a challenge for my first run with a new camera: a 50mm lens (no zoom), mixed lighting (pot lights, big windows), a long table, and not much room to move around. But the D300 was responsive and performed quite well — I was able to fire off most of the shots I went for and brought out the Pentax K100D for the wide-angle shots.

I’m still processing and uploading, but you can view the available photos in the usual ways:

[thumbnails] [slideshow] or view by clicking through the Pictobrowser:

* I’m going to toot my horn here and say that my food photos yesterday rival those on the restaurant website!

#412 is lemongrass chicken with chili on rice at Xe Lua Vietnamese restaurant on Spadina. I don’t know why I even bother looking at the menu anymore…

My friend Sergio’s back in town for an extended period of time, so I thought I’d introduce him to my favourite dish in Chinatown and stick him in a diptych, while I’m at it. We were really hungry, and the food — as always — hit the spot!

As you can tell by the ultra-light blogging, I’ve been rather preoccupied these days — with houseguests, work, photography, travel planning, you name it. Besides the big brunch crowd last Sunday, I had a houseguest from France over the weekend, and a few hours after he left on Monday, my Austrian houseguests arrived. The spare room has been pretty busy!

The last few days have been special — the Austrian couple are longtime friends of my Quebec City host, Georges, so I tried to ensure they received every bit of the hospitality I experienced at the beginning of the month at Georges’ place, 800kms away. And here’s where it gets a little confusing: I met Georges because I first met his younger son, Sam, a few months ago here in Toronto. (At the time I didn’t know Sam is from Quebec City, but as my luck would have it, that’s where I wanted to visit and came across this info while searching for a host.) Georges’ older son, Simon, is currently touring Europe and stayed with the Austrians multiple times, but they’d never met Sam. Sam, who’s a flight attendant and recently moved to my neighbourhood, arrived from Paris yesterday afternoon and phoned me just before I went out to meet the Austrians downtown for dinner. So I picked him up and drove us to the restaurant, where we surprised the Austrians and they met him for the first time! They left today to drive to Georges’ place, so last night was the best opportunity for everyone to meet.

I love it when things work out this way!

I’m writing this in recovery mode from the wonderful dinner you see here (and more, consumed but unpictured), prepared for me by my host in Quebec City. It is my first visit here and I rolled up at dinnertime from a long drive that started in Toronto this morning. Look what I was greeted with!

I had two passengers with me from Toronto to Montreal, people who each responded to my ad in Craigslist for a shared ride east. There was another person who was a tentative but didn’t come because he SLEPT IN* and I said we weren’t going to wait for him. But the three of us who did travel had a quick five-hour drive to Montreal thanks to music and plenty of easyflowing conversation. I dropped them off downtown and found my way to the Pont Jacques-Cartier to continue to Quebec City.

Strangely, THIS bridge photo was the only one of the batch I uploaded from my cameraphone via email that was posted to Flickr. I have several others, but I’m not reposting them now in case they’re all delayed in a data bottleneck and get released in the middle of the night, making me eat my words… really, I can’t eat my words, in fact, I can’t eat anything else — did you see my dinner plate? I’m going to crash and burn now, because Georges warned me it is going to be A VERY EARLY MORNING. We’re heading up north!

* There’s more to this story, it’s funnier in person. Remind me to tell you later!

(Soul II Soul’s track — arguably one of the best singles of 1989)

After about a week of laying low and working on various projects (except for the Summerlicious interlude), I decided to break the work-eat-sleep cycle and join in some meetups around town. On Thursday night after work, I took my houseguest Eve out to the Cadillac, a lounge in neighbouring Queen Street West to meet up with a bunch supporting a Burning Man fundraiser. Because of all the travelling I’ve been doing lately (28 days in a six week period!) I hadn’t seen the couchsurfing crowd in a long while.

Time to break out some Magners!

more…

This week I’ve been finishing off the candies that the Japanese tourists gave to me for tourguiding them around Toronto before we all flew to Vancouver on July 5. I’ve never had candies quite like this before, but only the first package has English on it so the second package remains a mystery. One thing I appreciate about the Japanese is the care they take for presentation (eg., sushi), and these little boxes of confection are no exception:

“Please enjoy traditional taste of KYOTO.” *wink* (click on the pic for text notes)

When I first saw the “DO NOT EAT” silica packet included in the plastic packets I wondered if the chalky contents were edible. It looks like chalk, has a texture like chalk, and yes, tastes a bit like chalk. Not terribly so, but make sure you’re not thirsty when you dig in.