Oh Canada! Wednesday: Home Again Home Again

Wednesday walked into town for lunch with Jeanette before heading to the airport.



We had lunch at a homespun diner called The Maid's Cottage. My Sheherd's pie was homey, and would have been perfect if not for the mixed frozen vegetables. My mom, in a moment of indecision, felll under my bad influence and ordered herself a stuffed cabbage AND a meat pie.



My aunt had a more dainty soup-sandwich combo. The service was super-friendly. It's the kind of place you want to find when you are travel-weary or ill. A little hot soup, fresh-baked bread and mothering. They also had meat pies and small pre-packaged homemade dinners, a nice convenience for singles and senior citizens.



Their bakery section also boasted the "world's best" butter tarts. They were definitely the biggest. They boast of a secret ingredient, but if I had to bet the farm I would guess Lyle's Golden Syrup.



My aunt worked at this restaurant for about 30 years.



This little English shop sold meat pies, and my favorite - Thai Lime Chili chips!







It was a beautiful day so I took a lot of pictures of wildflowers along the way. This first picture reminds me of the easter Ideals magazines my mother used to buy.















It was hard for me to say goodbye, but I know it was much harder for them

Oh Canada! Wednesday Continued: Canoe Canoe

Canoe is a well-reviewed restaurant serving nouvelle Canadian cuisine. It is part of a restaurant group similar to Patina. I was surprised to be dropped off at a high-rise office building with instructions to take an elevator up to the top floor.

Sometimes I order things that sound strange because I am daring the restaurant to make it taste good, which is how I ended up drinking a "Locust". It is a combination of Grasshopper wheat beer, ginger ale, and Limoncello. And you know what? It worked. Far better than a shandy. After that one experiment, I went for my usual champagne - they had my favorite, Perrier Jouet with the flowers on it.



I started with a chowder of Ontario fiddlehead ferns and BC spot prawns. Fiddleheads are kid of like asparagus, only grassier, maybe a little like pea shoots. It was topped with a wild leek and yukon rouille, a Provencial French sauce for soups. Yes, only the French would think a soup needs a sauce.

Next I was a little daring and had a plate from the tasting menu - Potato gnocchi with crispy sweetbreads and foie gras. The sauce/foam was rich with cream and morel mushrooms. The person who was delivering plates and explaining the ingredients had a very strong French-Candian accent, and I couldn't understand hardly anything he said. In the dim restaurant, it was difficult to make out what was what. The waiter, who I was loving, was staring at the plate trying to help me make out the individual ingredients. You know you are in an expensive restaurant when the waiter is willing to stand and ponder your dinner with you. Suddenly I remembered in a pack-for-emergencies moment I had thrown a Mag light in my bag. So I shone a spotlight on the dish, sweetbreads were identified, and voila!



I was brought an intermezzo of a celery foam. I expected a light refreshing palate cleanse, but there was a layer of salt on top that was so intense, instead my palate received an intensive salt scrub by a vicious Swedish masseuse. Uncle! Uncle! I'm cleansed! My palate is immaculate! I give in!



For my main dish I ordered the bison striploin with North woods mushrooms, confit potatoes and a peppercorn sauce that was similar to a bernaise. There was such a treasure trove of exciting new mushrooms to try - Black trumpet, cinnamon cap, yellow foot, blue foot, and more, that I ate them all before I remembered to take a picture. The confit potatoes were so delicious I am just going to start cooking everything in duck fat from now on. Meatloaf? Confit! Apple pie? Confit!



The buffalo was lovely - kind of like beef with a taste of the wild. It's strange that I am not usually a fan of game, but I love buffalo. Maybe it is my native roots. Or maybe it is the fact that when I was growing up my mom had a freezer stuffed full of buffalo meat. I never knew where it came from. Or if it was really buffalo. Recently when I asked about it she told me she had traded for it.

Check out this crazy Dr Seuss garnish



I only have one memory of my great-grandmother Hopkins. We were at a rare family picnic somewhere in BC. I was asking her what saskatoons looked like. She said, "Well, they look...like that!" We had stumbled upon some wild bushes and picked enough to bring back to the picnic. Canoe had a dessert that came with saskatoons, which the waiter was kind enough to bring me on the side, and they made me a little maudlin.

I have been going easy on desserts, but I had to try Sticky Toffee Pudding made with Glen Breton Rare Whiskey, Toffee Sauce and Parsnip ice cream. Seriously. Standing alone, the parsnip ice cream was successful, but didn't do anything for me. When my waiter convinced me to try it together with everything in one bite, it did actually make it good. Trippy. This is the third time in a month I have seen kumquats in a fancy restaurant, so I guess they are an up-and-coming fruit.



I loved the service I loved the atmosphere and I loved the food. I loved the chef, Anthony Walsh, so much I sent him a glass of champagne. The dishes were all creative but based upon local ingredients. They definitely disproved the theory that restaurants with views all suck.

Downstairs there were two city blocks of taxis waiting. Normally you go to the first taxi in the line, but it was cold, and that first taxi was really far away. So I opened the door of the nearest taxi and asked what the pecking order was. He said there wasn't one, so I hopped in. Within seconds, there was another cabbie at the driver's window, screaming in his face that he was stealing fares and he knew I should go in the first taxi. I thought about getting out and going to the first taxi, but then the guy screamed in the window, "I am going to fucking stomp your fucking face in!" I didn't really want to get in his taxi after that. So my cabbie and I drove off with the guy still grabbing at the window.

Oh Canada! Wednesday: Dim sum and other delights

Wednesday I woke up and headed straight to Lai Wah Heen. It is quite possibly the best dim sum in Toronto. At the very least it is definitely the most elegant. The elevators have different paintings but I love this one because it looks as if they are deciding what button to press.







The menu is filled with exotic and glamourous-sounding temptations that sometimes border on the mysterious, as with the "rainbow chopped in crystal fold" and the "Billionaire egg white fried rice flavoured with shredded conpoy." The pan-seared foie gras arrived with a sweet sauce, mildly touched with ginger alongside tempura asparagus.



I ordered the shark fin soup - just because. The dumpling was really the star of the dish. The shark's fin were long strands of clear straw. Mmmm, cartilagenous.



The dumplings pictured starting on the left are the Phoenix eye purse (fish maw and sprouts), steamed crabmeat, corn and cured ham dumpling, chicken and scallion, and steamed duckling dumpling with foie gras. The Phoenix eye purse was interesting looking, but did not stand out. It was adorable that the corn dumpling was folded to look like an ear of corn, but the simple chicken and scallion was actually the best of the dim sum.



It is so wrong that the duckling dumpling is made to look like a little duck - but in a good way. The foie gras flavor was so mild as to almost be absent.



The chilled duo of lychee and jasmine tea puddings was clever and definitely tasted like tea. They were probably made with agar agar.



Afterwards, I checked out the Bata Shoe Museum. It not only had the pop culture and fashion shoes I expected, but a number of interesting anthropological exhibits.











Bowie's shoes from the "Serious Moonlight Tour". I wanted to smash the glass and steal them so I could burn them and salt the ground so nothing could ever suck that badly again.



I took a cab over to Kensington market. My cabbie was from trinidad, so we sang calypso songs along the way. He got so caught up in singing, he forgot to put on the meter. He offered me a free ride, but I know they are hard up so I gave him a fair sum and asked for a recommendation for a Trini restaurant.

Kensington Market has a lot of cool hipster and hippie shops.













I especially enjoyed a store called Blue Banana where I bought some gifts for friends back home and some bath bombs to spoil myself.









A fellow Roadfooder had recommended the debrezini sausage at European Meats and Sausages. By the time I got there near closing they were out of debrezini, so I enjoyed a knockwurst, which was scored and resembled a stegasaurus tail in a bun.