The Week in Yum Feb 20-26 - Recipe for a Change, Bosk, Bam and i Yellow Wine Club

Last night was Food Share's 6th annual Recipe for Change at the St Lawrence Market and boy, was it a great night. 30 local chefs, a couple of breweries, some wine, amazing silent auctions and the chance to eat your face off for the greater good. Someone tweeted something like "eat the change that you want to be" in regards to this event, which made me jealous because I didn't think of it first. I will write about the event and about all of the amazing things that Food Share does for the city, as well as telling you all of the ways that you can still contribute, either with your time or your money or both.








Lemon Almond Dacquoise: lemon curd, almond cake, crispy meringue vanilla cassis ice cream


Last week, we joined a big group of Shack's colleagues on Friday night for dinner at Bosk, the fine dining restaurant in The Shangri-la Hotel. I work out of the Shangri-la all of the time and absolutely love their room service lunch and I have eaten at Momofuku but this was my first visit to Bosk. It felt so weird to have a cocktail there - almost like I was drinking on the job or something. Luckily, I soon got over that and we had a lovely dinner. We both had the smoked lentil soup from the $75 prixe fix menu - delicious, full of smoky ham flavour. I had the salmon as my main and Shack, who is a red meat kind of guy, was originally a bit disappointed to see that there was none to be found on this menu so he ordered the chicken. The boneless, skinless chicken came and it looked bland and beige and his face fell until he took his first bite. It would appear to be cooked by sous vide, my current obsession, and it was so tender you could cut it with a fork. Everyone who ordered it had the same reaction. Once they dug in, it was delicious but everyone agreed that it looked absolutely unappetizing. hmmm


I don't know how it happened but we had both ordered the panna cotta for dessert and we were both served the other dessert on the menu. Because it looked so much nicer than our neighbour's panna cotta, we kept our mouths shut and ate it quickly before someone could come and take it away. I suppose I felt a little guilty that two other people got the wrong dessert but not so guilty that I would have exchanged it. All in all, it was a pretty nice dinner for a hotel restaurant and because it's the Shangri-la, the service was impeccable and we retired to the lobby lounge afterward for coffee by the fire while some dude played guitar and sang. Even if you don't want to go for dinner, make a point to pop into the lobby lounge on a Friday or Saturday night - it's hopping and there is some damned fine people watching to boot.



We finally tried a newish Beach restaurant called Bam! Breakfast Bistro The emphatic punctuation is not mine, by the way. You might think that exclamation mark is overkill but if you had enjoyed that Belgian Waffle with Banana and Nutella down there, you might change your mind. 



I ordered a simple breakfast of three poached eggs with rye toast and amazingly tasty home fries and Shack had Eggs Benedict. Eggs were perfectly poached, the home fries were delicious, service was friendly and attentive and prices are great. We have been back a number of times now and the service and the food has been consistently good and , really, that is all you really want in a great breakfast place, right? All day breakfasts, daily specials, good, straight ahead food, cooked and served with care.
We will be back.



Bam! Breakfast and Bistro on Urbanspoon








I had a hot date with one of my favourite blogging buddies, Libby Roach this week. She took me to check out the i Yellow Wine Club to celebrate Shiraz Week , hosted by Angie Aiello. This is a really cool group of wine lovers who get together to do wine tastings, take classes and go on wine tasting excursions. You have to become a member but then you can enjoy all that the club has to offer. When Libby dragged me down a back alley, I was afraid she was going to mug me and leave me for dead, but, instead we gained entry to the cosiest little basement space I have seen in a long time, where lots of friendly folks were tasting shiraz, chatting, noshing on cheese and NOT planning to knock me over the head with a bottle of 2010 Small Gully's The Formula (my favourite Shiraz of the evening, by the way). It's free to become a member online, so hurry up and do that already.

After knocking back a bunch of little shots of shiraz, we strolled on over to Pai for a Thai feast where I ate twice the amount of food I actually needed to eat because everything was so good that I lost all self control. For once, I am actually thankful that I don't live closer to this wonderful restaurant.

"While I admire your passion for all things cooking... this looks like placenta mixed with strawberry jelly, ladled with a plop of diarrhea, raw chunk of fish, sprinkled gingerly with rabbit poop."

That was my favourite comment from someone online regarding my seared scallop up there ROFL

    Because I can not tolerate the extreme cold at the moment, I spent the entire week (except for my evening outings) at home, in my pjs, sous viding everything that is not nailed down. Stay tuned for my Sous Vide Miso Meatballs, coming up very soon. It's all sous vide, all the time around here. Today, I start sharing my sous vide journey with you, starting here with my quick primer on the whole process. In the coming weeks and months, I will be sharing all of my experiments as I also try to develop recipes that work with this amazing new cooking method.

    I have some fun new things coming up that I can share with you soon too, including my upcoming Dinner and a Book Club on April 1st at the Musgrave Loblaws. I cook dinner that ties into the theme, you read the book (Light Between the Oceans by M.L. Stedman), have a glass of wine, eat and discuss.

    Pin of the week: Sous Vide if sous vide was a planet

    Instagram of the week: This feed from the creative director for Nomiku Sous Vide machines is making me feel oogly inside

    The coolest thing I found on the interet this wee: Everything you wanted to know about cooking in one place - they offer video classes, some free and some for $$ - Love it

    Facebook share of the week:


    Post by The Yum Yum Factor.

    Tweet of the week: 

    Comments

    Post a Comment

    Popular posts from this blog

    Vietnamese Chicken Meatballs

    Image
    I have had a serious craving for bun - if you eat Vietnamese food, you know what I'm talking about. A bowl with crisp, shredded romaine lettuce, cold rice noodles, lots of chopped dry roasted peanuts, fresh mint and cilantro, shredded carrots, cucumbers and some sort of sticky, sweet bbq meat that you pour nuoc chom over and then scarf it all down like a maniac because it's so refreshingly delicious that you can't stand it?? Okay, if you don't eat Vietnamese food and don't know what I'm talking about, go find some. Honestly. So my quest today was to make some but I didn't feel like tackling the bbq pork today but The Kid loves meatballs so I thought I would whip up some sort of Vietnamese meatballs out of ground chicken and do a kind of   Bun Ga Nuong . The only thing I was worried about was the sticky, caramelized glaze on the outside when I found this recipe on the Food and Wine web site.  It's from a cook book called Small Bites by Jennifer J...
    Read more

    Travel Diary : Toronto to Nova Scotia 2021- First Stop, Montreal

    Image
     Hello my lovlelies! The family is on our first vacation in almost two years and it's a covid friendly affair. Not ready for international travel, airports and sharing air for 8 hours, we threw our Segway Ninebot Max scooters on the roof of the car and headed east. We stopped in Montreal for the first night, thinking we would just get up early and continue on our way. HAH who is going to bitch about burrata and rose outdoors? Like that was going to happen. I booked us into the brand, spanking new Hotel St Thomas on Sherbrooke, we dropped all of our crap into the ginormous room and hit the road on the scooters. It was a Monday night, which means just about any restaurant I would want to visit is closed so we did the only thing you can do in on a Monday.... we went to Old Montreal and grabbed an outdoor table at Bevo Bar and had a lovely bottle of Rose, some pizza and apps, perfect after a long day of driving. Once we woke up, we all knew we wanted to stay another night so I took ca...
    Read more

    Sous Vide Pork Souvlaki

    Image
    I love the idea of pork souvlaki. I love the flavours, I love the charcoal flavour that the grill imparts and I love any meat that gets dipped in lots of tzatziki. What I don't love is dry, leathery meat and, unfortunately, that is almost always the case when people try to cook small chunks of lean meat over the grill. That's where sous vide comes in. I just made my regular marinade and instead of cutting the pork into bite sized pieces, I cut my pork tenderloins into 1" slices and then after 24 hours of soaking in the fridge, I sous vide them before cutting some of the disks into chunks and skewering them (I left half of them as is and grilled the medallions, which worked even better) right before we threw them on the grill for a quick char. I finally have my perfect pork souvlaki - tender, moist (OH MY GOD THAT HORRIBLE WORD AGAIN) and with all the wonderful souvlaki flavours but without the dry, overcooked bits that are almost unavoidable when you grill them fro...
    Read more