Merry Christmas from the slightly darker than usual Tdot.

A very Merry Christmas and I wish you power and heat for the new year.

Not that snowy by much of the rest of the country's standards, but pretty snowy for Tdot in comparison to the last 4 to 5 years

It's the official Toronto holiday greeting now. Things are a bit nuts here with the snow storm from two weekends ago and the ice storm of this past weekend. Power was knocked out on Saturday night for large portions of the city, and many people still don't have power or heat on Christmas day. Many Toronto Hydro workers gave up their own Christmas to try and get more of the city back up in time for Christmas. Happy thoughts everyone, and hug your local Hydro worker.

The Dinosaurs weren't too happy about the current weather either.

All of my family got very, very lucky and never really lost power. I had some flickers on the Saturday night, but woke up to a working alarm clock. Both of my work places still had power this week as well, which was a mixed blessing. I spent most of the early week entertaining friends to keep them warm. Today was the quiet family Christmas, and I was so happy to have a quiet, sleep-in, stuff your face day. It started with a great, quick recipe I found recently on Freutcake for eggnog french toast. I love eggnog and french toast, so this was going to go well regardless.

5 ingredient Eggnog French Toast
Stolen from Freutcake
Serves 4-6

1 1/2 cups of eggnog
5 large eggs
2 tbls of sugar
6-8 slices of brioche or challah bread, 1/2 inch thick. I used challah bread, and the inherent sweetness of it totally works.
8 tbls of unsalted butter, ish.

-Whisk the eggnog, eggs and sugar thoroughly in a bowl. I'd recommend whisking the eggs and sugar together first and then whisking in the eggnog. And whisk those suckers in a bowl, then pour them into a shallow baking dish.

 Noggey eggs.

-Soak bread slices for about 10 minutes or until completely saturated. The slices are super heavy when they're a soaked, so be careful when pulling them out to go into the frying pan that they don't pull apart.
(If doing all the slices in one go, preheat your oven to 200C and have a wire rack on top of a baking tray in there. After you fry up the slices, plonk them in the oven to keep warm while you're doing the rest of them.)
-Using about a tbls of butter per slice of bread, melt the butter in a medium heat pan. Fry each side until golden, about 2 to 3 minutes.

Fry it up.

 Melted butter works for a topping too.

 I'm sure this would have tasted even more amazing had I remembered to get some maple syrup prior to today, eg when all the shops were closed, but whatevs. Pretty awesome breakfast.

Merry Christmas y'all!

Celebrating the end of Halloween with snow in November.

Yep, I can post regularly to this blog. Totally.

Despite my insane new schedule (Huzzah for employment!), Halloween was a success! I finished the costume in time and managed to wear it out tot 2 parties! I'm so glad there was a second Halloween party I could go to, I spent to much damn time building that costume.

Everybody remember the stupid, sexy Little Red Riding Hood costume and the awesome T-shirt design from Threadless of "Little Red?" It all culminated in one bad Little Red, who didn't need no Lumberjack to kill that wolf.

Hello ROM camel.

He was warm at least, in death.

I'm quite pleased with how ex-Fluffy came out, even with all the issues he has. I was sewing up his butt by hand about 2 hours before we left for the ROM's Friday Night Live Halloween party, and thankfully I owned everything else already for the costume. I also learned some entertaining things about using fun fur, including that I really should have done some basting stitches along my fur and lining. There was a point around one of the paws where the lining had ridden up do far along the fun fur that I was short by about 6 inches. Also, despite being really careful and using the proper technique for cutting fun fur, there is STILL fun fur all over my apartment. 

1. Ex-Fluffy was made from scratch. I used a few weeks worth of grocery flyers to draft a pattern for all of his pieces. I also spent a fair bit of time looking at wolf stats on wikipedia and pictures of real wolf hides to work out the dimensions and basic shape. Loosely speaking, ex-Fluffy is about the same size as an adult grey wolf. Anatomically wonky, but more or less correct length wise.

Bits and pieces in No Frills' flyers.

2. Cutting the pieces out resulted in some solid blisters along my thumb from the slow, careful cutting that the fun fur required. And my knees were mildly ruined by the amount of floor action I had from tracing this pattern out. Worth it though.

 Trace, cut, repeat.

3. As I mentioned before, sewing ex-Fluffy together was a learning experience. Generally speaking it went very, very well, especially considering I haven't used a machine in a long, long time. It helps that my machine is really awesome.

The tail and ears were hand sewn into the body and head. While annoying, it did create nice seams that needed minimal combing to make then invisible.

4. This awkward bathroom selfie was done about a week after Halloween, when I had time and energy. When posed, this is was the hood looked like with it's slightly uneven ears.

However, when left to it's own devices, the hood proved to be a little too big..

All in all, I am super thrilled with this costume. Ex-Fluffy turned out great, and provided an extra source of warmth on the windy walk home, the dress and petticoat worked out really well to round out the costume, and I received several compliments from people at both parties. Now we just have to find a use for him... other than a wolf skin rug over the foozeball table.

Hallow-EEK!

It sounds better than "Hallow-month."

The roommate and I have been pondering over Halloween ideas for this year. It's on a stupid day of the week (Thursday), her family is in town visiting for a week and I'm going out of town the weekend after to Montreal. So, for a while we thought our options were limited. We've just discovered that, not only are there a few decent options for the weekend prior to Halloween, we're probably (still need to buy tickets) going on a GHOST WALK around the Tdot. We found a Groupon for Tour Guys a company I've been known to promote and love in a previous life as a Hostel front desker, and I'm pretty excited, especially with a promise of "No gimmicks, no capes and lanterns, no b.s." and a tour name of "I ain't afraid of no ghost!"

On to the important stuff about Halloween, costumes! My roommate has been collecting bits for what we all think is a hilarious and awesome costume, a killer bee. Not just a bee costume, but a bee with weapons like knives, bullet belts, throwing stars and guns. Yep. Pretty awesome. For a little while I thought about doing Lady Gaga in the new Applause video, specifically the colour blur/explosion thing she has going on, but I wasn't sure how I was going to dress up the rest of me. After some perusing on the internet I saw this, amongst the other piles of sexy costumes.

I'm not crediting this image since the store sucks ass. Look back through some of my posts to work out which one, if you're that desperately in need of knowing.

At first I thought "meh, standard sexy Red Riding Hood," but it then reminded me of a shirt from Threadless that I own, and the ideas started to form.

"Red" by Anton Chigurh, which can be found on Threadless.

I need to have a wander over to some of the fabric stores and do some swatch shopping for the wolf. He's probably going to be a pain to make, but I've got the other two thirds of what I'd want this costume to be, so there's hope yet.

We shall see....

As a semi-related note, here's "Little Blue Riding Hood"by Grant Stephen Shepley, also on Threadless. You're welcome.

Summer is over in the Tdot.

Summer is not my favorite season for personal comfort, I'm the first to admit it. I hate the high heat and humidity we've been getting for the last few summers. I hate sunscreen but I have to wear it, or lots of clothing that make the previous issue a bigger problem. I hate sweating constantly from the heat, and I feel like I can't go out and about nearly as much outside since it's fucking hot all the time. I love some things about summer, cottaging, camping, swimming, and BBQing.

 A slightly bad cellphone picture of the BBQs in the pool area of our apartment.

And an even worse, fuzzier cellphone picture of some dead fish and a side of potatoes and red onion, mushrooms skewers.

BBQing was never strictly a summer activity in my family, we do it all year long. Our New Year's tradition is doing homemade burgers on the BBQ and getting Swiss Chalet fries. However, since I've moved into an apartment, I only have access to the BBQs in our pool area for a limited time during the year, roughly 5 months spread over summer.

 The results from the previous picture.

 That time, when we fished for our own fish in a Toronto swimming pool, caught a few of them and made them for dinner.

This is the last thing I'll probably BBQ this season, a fantastic recipe for Paneer and Red Pepper Skewers. It was a nice send off to the BBQing year. The recipe needs some tweaking, admittedly, chiefly I should have cut the paneer bigger and I think the addition of tomatoes may help retain some moisture. And this did not keep well in the fridge, that's for sure. The paneer was rock solid the next day. I salvaged it by reheating it in a small saucepan with some olive oil.

I love fall. The cooler air, less death-causing sun, and the ability to wear pants and not sweat to death make me a happy dude. But as the air cools and the sun goes down earlier, I will have a moment of reflection for the end of BBQ season.

August adventures recap

August was a month of mini-vacations. Normally I do this alone since my schedule is a bit wonky and I find seat sales at 2 am when it's a bit rude to call your friends and ask if they want to go to x. However, this time round, an old hostel buddy of mine has been in town and I was able to travel with someone else for a change. It's certainly different!

First stop, Washington DC for a few days. Never been, was awesome. I got to see one of my best buds from my Masters program, who's working in DC, actually in the field, unlike the rest of us. She made sure we had a great taste of the food and drink culture in DC and I can't thank her enough for it. I brought her some maple syrup to be stereotypically Canadian about it though, so that's a start. We hit up a few museums while we were there, one of my favorites now being the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, specifically the Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Centre. Le holy crap this was an awesome way to start the trip! he Udvar-Hazy is the second location of the Air and Space museum, located out by the Dulles International airport, so we went straight there from our flight into DC. Despite the horrendously early hour, totally worth it.

 A part of the Enola Gay. Google that, you're in for an interesting read.

 The Canadarm!

 We spent an alarming amount of time making penis jokes about the monument. Yep, we're mature.

Two days after I got back from DC myself and a few friends ran up north to the cottage! This is known as the weekend of doing nothing but dock reading, swimming, campfires and cooking. I'm struggling to think of other things we did for that few days...

 It may not be paradise to most, but you can see it from there.

About a week after that myself and the hostel buddy went to Ottawa for a few days! I have soft spot for Ottawa, despite its many, many faults, since it's one of my home towns. It was fun to be super dorky about knowing Canadian history and showing off occasionally to my hostel bud (he's Australian), and we got to enjoy some time with some of his old friends that now call the city home.

 ATTACK OF THE GIANT SPIDER!

Our government buildings can be surprisingly pretty sometimes.

Now that I'm broke again, there should be more cooking and DIY postings soon. Can't afford to do much else after these few adventures.

Ottawa T minus 11 hours

Much like two weeks ago, it's past midnight, and I'm putting the last of my stuff into a suitcase so I can get up in a few hours. This time, it's a little later in the day, on a train and to Ottawa, a city I used to live outside of and have been back to many, many times throughout my life. I'm not sure I could live there again, despite the jobs that keep coming up there, but spending a few days there every now and again is always nice, no matter what time of year it is.

From the back of the parliament buildings looking out towards the Museum of Civilization in Hull.

I'm looking forward to going to the National Gallery for an exhibition they've got going on right now where I can fully dork out on Canadian photographic history. Early Exploration Photographs in Canada has been in partnership with Library and Archives Canada and focuses on 19th century exploration photographs taken by four individual photographers and one group of explorers.One of said photographers, a man working for William Notman named Benjamin Baltzley has just had a book written about him by a fellow Photo Historical Society executive.

I also just love train travel. Via rail tempts me with sales fairly regularly and I am slowly racking up points for free travel. Some day I'll head out the other way to complete the cross country train ride and head to Halifax.

Washington DC in T minus 8 hours....

It's just about midnight and I'll be getting up in about 5 hours to get on a plane to go to Washington DC  for a few days. My buddy is asleep on my couch so we can catch a taxi into the airport together and save some money. I love my city, but it's nice to leave it every now and again.

I probably won't get to much on this list, since we're aiming for galleries and museums almost exclusively, but Apartment Therapy has a Design Lovers guide to the city that makes for good reading.

Apropos of nothing, I found an interesting article about smoked salmon in Alaska on Apartment Therapy recently.

Catch you soon for some possible regular programming.

Out on the water..

July has been quite the month. I've gotten a part-time job on the weekends, which started purely as sales but may turn into collections management, and a volunteer gig I've been doing for ages has suddenly turned into a paid project. An old hostel friend of mine has been in town for a bit now, so we've been having several adventures as a result, including a recent jaunt to the Toronto Islands and a tall ship cruise around the harbour. I've got some great pictures from that harbour cruise, but they're going to wait until another post when I talk about that adventure and resulting project.

For the time being, I will post these pictures from the Islands. My friend had his birthday picnic out there, and it provided for a great view of the city.

I've got some adventures lined up for the rest of the summer, and August is looking packed. I'm headed to Washington D.C., Ottawa and the cottage! I have every intention of blogging them all, and some other bits in between, but for the time being, another Toronto Foodist adventure! Fancy Franks of downtown participated in International Hot Dog day and gave away free hot dogs!

Free hot dog!

 

I hadn't eaten anything that day when I had the freebie, so I ended up buying another hot dog from Fancy Franks, the Fancy 90210. Holy crap that was a good hotdog... avocado, tomatoes, and bacon. They weren't stingy either, it was one filling hot dog.

A late May recap.

I am really crap at this "frequent blogging" idea. It's mostly sheer laziness, but a smidgen of part-time employment on the weekends that has pretty much ruined my attempts at blogging. Huzzah for getting paid and haroo for losing my weekends again. Que sera.

Back in late May, my Mom and I did our annual pilgrimage to the Christie Antique show, and we both did pretty well from it. Every year there seems to have a trend, something that every other vendor seems to have. Last year was old school creel fishing baskets. This year, luckily for me, was vintage luggage. It's a relatively innocuous thing these days, everyone and their brother has got a suitcase from the 50s or 60s, but the big advantage of everyone having one is that they get cheaper. I picked up this beautiful mustard yellow carry-on for a whopping $12.

 Yep. $12.

Still has the mirror, a comb and some beautiful, intact interior.

My other great find of the day was the tooled leather handbag pictured above. A wee bit of haggling netted me this purse for $22. It's in pretty much perfect shape with a floral motif on the front and an Incan (?) wheel of calendar death on the other side.

Pretty bitchin' eh?

 And this is an old friend from last year. I'd imagine he's a tough sell. The trident was a nice touch.

He's so friendly!

In other news, BBQ weather is back in the Tdot. There will be some posts shortly about adventures in outdoor cooking to try and fill some of recent gaps.