Great long standing centertown restaurant, but couldn’t you have spent
five minutes more painting the can? These lines are awful, and are
nothing of a reflection of the food… All I ask is some degree of
care in painting!!! Is that too much!!!

And it is easy, theres just a few things you need, and some investment involved.

A skillet i believe is key. I bought cast iron as it has the best heat distribution (and i’ve always wanted one). And they’re not nearly as expensive as other stainless steel or fancy nonstick pans (this 12″ was 50$ from Grace).

Masa mix. This is basically ground white corn with a bit of preservative (calcium hydroxide in mr gouda, lime in the maseca brand). I used the goudas, but wasn’t sure if it was stale (it had been in my cupboard for a while) so i bought the other… it definitely was not stale. I think it was 4$ for these 2kg bags. I would recommend the maseca brand as it has a more complete “recipe” on the back.

UPDATE: Geez, i forgot to mention where to GET masa mix! Thanks to a local blogger (thanks Minty!) the Sultan Supermarket at bank and hunt club carries this stuff.

Tortilla press – this is a requirement. This one was the cheaper of 2 available from Grace (~20$ vs 30$). It was lighter, but larger, and larger and cheaper normally wins with me. Having something a little heavy may help to make flatter/thinner tortillas, but i think this one was fine.

I won’t go into the nitty gritty of how to make em (the recipe is on the back of the Maseca brand), but after a bit of practice i’m pretty sure i could turn out dozens of amazing tasting, fresh, and versatile tortillas within 30 minutes or so. Highly recommended!

The one thing i will need to work on is keeping them warm while cooking – i’ve never been very good at that. They need to stay moist so i’m thinking wrapping in a wet towel and leaving it in the over at 200 or so… any tips or ideas would be appreciated.

My cuurent lazy staple:
- reheated short grain brown rice
- thawed hot frozen peas
- good chunk of kimchi
- ground coriander
- glug of sesame oil

Mmm… am I weird, or just lazy.,.?

With placemat overlap, and a mish mash of chairs, we are now ready to
seat 10, and have dine party affairs!!!

I had quit coffee for a while towards the beginning of the summer, but now that i’ve forgotten what insanity brought me to such a decision, i’m rediscovering my love affair… i mean, having something like a hot, practically intoxicating cup of coffee to look forward to in the morning makes everything ok, and provides adequate reason to get out of bed on otherwise unpleasant mornings. Coupled with a lazy saturday or sunday morning, or even a work from home day when you have “fun” stuff to look forward to, and its a massive motivation maker.

Having said all that, most days i work in kanata. I normally float up march road north to the “high tech mecca” of ottawa, and pass by the metro (formerlly loeb) to pick up a salad for lunch. Via this route to work, there is no official starbucks. There is however an incognito starbucks within the brookstreet, but its a minor detour, parking is slow, they don’t take starbucks cards, and service is also kinda slow. When i can avoid my morning salad, my alternative and preferred route is to take terry fox and hit the starbucks at the (of all things) canadian tire gas station… wtf!!

To give a point to what would otherwise be an endless rant, why the hell isn’t there an easily accessible starbucks in the kanata north high tech area? Not ONE. We have one dedicated tim hortons, plus a tim hortons at the esso, and thats it. Every morning that tim hortons has a line up of cars and a full parking lot, and they don’t even serve coffee!!! (ok some of you may call it coffee, i would have to call it a pseudo-coffee flavoured drink – it does NOT taste like coffee). If i ever loose my job and can strap together some capital, i’m going head to head with those mofo’s and opening my own starbucks in kanatas high tech area, where everyone is friendly and smiling, and we serve wicked product at a fair price. Not only that but we’d have lots of comfy chairs, some seating outside, and all the wifi you could get at so when you need to take a break from constant interruptions at work, you could settle down with liquid pleasure and actually get some work done.

What about this spot right here? (PS – Yay google street view!!! This is the absolute extent of it though, it doesn’t seem to work any further up march).

One note – i would definitely opt for a bridgehead instead, but they should probably keep their exclusive edge and stay in hip neighborhoods, starbucks obviously has no such exclusivity principals… or do they?

However this morning during my run all i could oogle at is how many ottawa citizens were in the paper recycling. All the bins appeared to be FILLED with ottawa citizens, dwarfing any insight into new gluten free pizza joints. I am also victim of this, as i guess the citizen is doing some promotion where they are giving it away free for two weeks (at least in centertown and the glebe).

Assuming they don’t already, i think the citizen (and all newspapers for that matter) should pay some sort of tax or kickback to the city to help pay for increased recycling costs. I don’t think its fair that all they need to do is pay to have their product PRODUCED, but its the city and our taxes that have to pay to throw it out, something we didn’t even solicit. Again, perhaps they do already, so hopefully someone can educate my ignorance if thats the case.

I don’t think newspapers are useless, and occasionally enjoy them myself. Every once in a while i enjoy leafing through one over breakfast or a coffee, but maybe only once or twice a year. I’m definitely of the “new media” mind in that i can find all the sources i care about online, can read them on my computer or phone, and don’t need to print anything to access it. Newspapers days are likely numbered as we all know – i think the best way to deal with it is to raise their prices and turn them into a premium product – when i want to read the paper i would gladly pay 5 or 6 bux for it as opposed to less than the price of a tall mild from starbucks (which i’ve been enjoying a lot lately). I think anyone in the news or that does enjoy or need to read the paper on a daily basis could likely afford to pay a few bux more for all the content contained within. That, and the cost really should include some of “total” costs for creation and disposal of the paper, i can’t imagine that <2$ per paper is cutting it (again, i could be very wrong here).

One other thing that bugs me about the citizen is that they released an article a few weeks ago about how they’re going to have this great new mobile frontend – still haven’t seen it. I actually think their current interface is fine on my iPhone, i just don’t like hearing about something new then not actually seeing it or hearing anything about it ever again. What gives citizen??

Hell ya, I love breakfast in front of the computer!!!

As i can see by this post in feb, i think my poaching skills have improved, although i still have a long way to go. Its true, vinegar IS the key. Yay improvement!!!

I was with others in some remote amazonian village. There were strange locals there but for the first while we had to hide from from them because we thought they’d kill us or something. We came upon a sacred river crossing that was supposed to be “the place” where some things would happen, and sure enough they did happen. I’m just not exactly sure what but within a short period there was loud noise and thunder as the locals, seemingly hundreds of feet tall came upon us. Then they were normal size, and I was asked by some chief local some very poignant questions in a language i knew nothing about. I answered, wisely i gather, as some music went off and she riffled up a todo list of things i needed to do and collect from the surroundings. I made no effort to remember them because i knew at any point in the future i could access my inventory for a complete list… this is when i realized i was in some sort of video game.

A short while later i was aboard some boat on one of these rivers, likely out performing some of the quests. The boat was made entirely of logs and 2×4’s and had a flat surface, kind of like a barge but made entirely of wood and really high off the water… like a floating “deck”. I remember having one of my accompaniments flinging skateboards off the deck into the river below. I annoyingly asked him why he was doing that, and he seemed perfectly justified in doing so, even though the last skateboard he threw off belonged to me. I was determined to skate on top of the boat, but he wouldn’t go fetch my board, and somehow i was incapable of doing so myself. Then finally i remember thinking that the whole amazon/quest thing was some movie that often reminded people of pink floyd’s “the wall”. Then i woke up.

I like the occasional weird dream, but have been absent from them for some time. I find if i’m not reading or generally exploring some sort of creative pasttime, i don’t dream. Well after many months of being incarcerated within work and duty, i realize its time to let myself out. I picked up a copy of William Gibson’s “Spook Country” and started reading it last night, along with Neal Stephensons “Anthem” – both came highly recommended, but considering how slow and pathetically i read, i should start with the shorter one.

So much butter!!! I didn’t think you could put so much butter in one
dish!!! The risotto by initial uncooked volume definitely had more
butter than rice. Tasty, but when you see so much butter go in it’s
kinda gross.

Good class though, good chef, decent Ontario wines, and a good eve all
around.

As seen on Kent St., at the whalesbone’s sustainability laboratory.