My friend Stephanie is the owner of a little dessert shop called Petit Nuage. She specializes in macarons with unique tea flavours. Yesterday I picked up a few in black sesame, oolong honey and cocoa chai chai. I also picked up a Salted Caramel cream puff. They were just as beautiful as they were delicious so I had a mini photoshoot with them!
It’s time for another video round-up! First I had my first photo show:
I bought a new lamp and saw a band called Beams:
I unbox the Fiio X1 mp3 player
I finally had the chance to go to JaBistro, deemed one of the best sushi restaurants in Toronto. I’d been following them on Twitter since their inception and their photos were always so beautiful. Their sushi was just as much as delight to look at as it was to eat!
I wanted to try a little bit of everything so I had the Sashimi Sampler. It is a mixture of chef’s choice sashimi. I added Toro (fat tuna belly) which was not a guaranteed item on the sampler. The sampler had scallop, salmon, octopus, makarel, fried fish bone, fish eggs, and more. Everything was fresh and melted in my mouth. The fish bones were crunchy and salty to add variation in the palate.
I also ordered the Aburicious set of blowtorched sushi. It contained 2 salmon, 2 makerel, 2 tiger prawn and 2 Jabistro roll sushi pieces. Blowtorched sushi seriously will change your life. The best ones were the salmon and tiger prawn as they just melded in your mouth in perfect harmony. It had a lovely butteriness in a way that makes you forget that it’s rice at the bottom. At other sushi places the rice is always hard to get through after a while but I probably could’ve eaten 10,000 pieces of blowtorched sushi and not realized it.
My friends also ordered the Sea Bream Collar and Pork Belly which were also very tasty (I stole some bites).
Throughout the meal I sipped a Shiso Smash which was a mixture of bourbon, simple syrup, lemon and shiso (a type of Asian spice). It was kind of a play on alcoholic lemonade.
The three of us split two desserts afterwards. The first was the Matcha Parfait which was matcha spongecake, mascarpone cream, matcha chocolate sauce. I’m not always a fan of green tea flavoured things but this was very good! There were also berries and crunchy corn flakes which added a nice touch of texture
The other item was the Genmai Pudding which was a brown rice pudding, coconut milk, nigori (unfiltered) sake, maple syrup, cranberries, pumpkin seeds and almonds. It was like a rice pudding with an interesting crunch provided by the almonds.
My bill ended up being quite pricey, but my friends told me that the first time people go, they always go a bit overboard. It was totally worth it though and one of the best meals I have eaten in a while! In a matter of fact, I had to write this blog post right away. I think I will be craving blow torched sushi until the next time I set foot in these doors.
I may have grown up to be pretty Canadianized but the one thing I can’t leave behind is Asian snacks. All North American junk food cannot compare to the chocolate koala bears, flavoured Pocky sticks, ramune soft drinks, jelly cups and bizarre flavoured chips. The East was always ahead of the game in terms of adventurous snacks.
I found a Korean grocery store across from work and now my desk is stashed full of treats. What are your favourite treats as a kid (or even now)?
Singaporean influenced restaurant, Hawker Bar is located in a cozy place at Dundas and Ossington. The restaurant does their own style of Singaporean street food. To start we had the Singaporean Sweet Chili Soy wings (pictured above) which were fried with a bit of a kick. It was served with a mixture that tasted like soy sauce on hoisin sauce.
We also had Brussel Sprouts with red pepper chili which was one of the daily specials.
My main was the Braised Duck Leg with Thai Red Curry. The duck was tender and fell off the bone and the curry was very flavourful.
As I ate, I sipped a First Flight which was Gordons gin, Chartreuse, St Germain and fresh grapefruit juice.
Even though I was completely stuffed, I couldn’t help ordering fried banana for dessert!
The meal at Hawker Bar was enjoyable. We were pretty lucky to get a seat though in the small place without a reservation.
A few months ago, I left my beloved iPod Classic on the subway. I then waited way too long to buy a new one and the classics were now discountinued. This left me with not much option in terms of iPods. Spending $300 for an iPod Touch didn’t seem to make much sense since I had an iPhone, while the lower ones lacked enough space to hold my entire library. I then turned to the internet to research affordable high-end mp3 players and concluded that my best choice would be the FiiO X1 player at $99.
I bought it in gold (silver is the other option). You can watch me unbox the thing here:
Inside the tiny packaging, there were a ton of accessories that I didn’t expect it to come with: 3 screen protectors (1 of which is already on the screen); a silicone case; 2 sets of decorational stickers. Oddly enough it does not come with earphones. You also have to purchase a micro-sd in order to use it as there is no internal storage. It supports cards up to 120GB.
The player looks a lot more expensive than it’s $99 price tag. There aren’t that many instructions that come with the machine, but it’s fairly easy to use. Here are two tips for future FiiO owners:
– You must go into the system settings and hit “Storage Formatting” on your new SD card if you wish to use your own SD card reader instead of the cable to transfer songs.
– Every time you transfer songs going to “Update Media Library” in the system settings is recommended as it refreshes all the album information. Otherwise, songs only shows up in the list of all your mp3s.
Besides the above, everything is basically drag and drop. You can drag your entire iTunes library (or whatever library you use) onto the SD card and leave all folders in tact. It plays FLAC, APE, ALAC, WAV, WMA, MP3, AAC and OGG files, with up to 192-kHz/24-bit resolution. I can definitely hear the sound difference. Everything is more crisp, clear and loud sounds don’t clip. I also hear a certain warmness of each artist’s recording setting that I didn’t pay much attention to before.
Album covers display, but only if they’ve been part of the original mp3 meta data. What this means is that if you did the “Get Album Artwork” thing in iTunes, it probably didn’t embed itself in the metadata, but elsewhere.
The battery lasts very long (12 hours I think) and the system preserves it well. The screen automatically turns off after a certain time and it also turns itself off. The buttons take time to learn but really once you understand how to hit enter (centre button) and go back (top right), the rest don’t really matter. $99 is totally a steal for this thing!
You know those days where a series of unfortunate events happen in movies? Sometimes life is a little like that. It’s not funny when you’re in the experience. In fact I almost want to cry a little when they’re happening but when you look back at the events you can laugh a little.
Last night it actually snowed. The weather people have been warning us of snow storms all winter but have been wrong about it. But this time they were right. Without looking out the window, I unexpectedly walked out into a few snow banks.
Then I waited for my first bus in what felt like -20 temperatures. My toes were already beginning to freeze. When I got to the subway, someone pressed the emergency alarm at two consecutive stops on the same train. It stalled 10-15 minutes each time for emergency personnel to arrive. Then immediately after that all trains on same line I were held for a fire investigation at one station. In Toronto, when one train on the line stops, all of them are screwed. Our system is inefficient that way.
Anyways, after quite some time, I finally made the destination of my last bus, only to find out that we couldn’t leave the station. Cars were stuck trying to go up hills and as a result, so where some buses which led to a big traffic jam.
At that point I just wanted to yell STOP. Which was kind of funny because (after 30 minutes of sitting in freezing cold) eventually took a detour. On the detour I snapped a photo of a van with the word STOP on the windshield.
There’s not actually a point to this story. I did end up making it to work and the rest was normal.
However, I now have a fever. Maybe I’ll wake up fine and tomorrow will be a perfectly regular day. I mean it can’t go worse than today right?
Junked Food Co finally opened it’s doors for real last night. I tried to go to their soft opening last weekend but their power unfortunately ran out. However, we received free cake that night:
I happened to be at a show at The Garrison and Junked Food Co’s opening and last night hours (8pm-4am) was perfectly time. I headed over with a couple of friends who were intrigued when I told them about the restaurant’s crazy concepts. The menu is a treasure trove of crazy things from pizza made on literal pies, grilled cheese sandwiches with donuts, smash bags, cakes in cups and other weird combinations. My friend deemed it the food of “stone dreams”.
Anyways I ordered the 416 Deep Dish with added Pepperoni. It was literally a personal pizza done on top of flakey pie crust. A thick layer of tomato paste hid the pepperoni and cheese that was embedded inside. It was delicious but quite messy!
My friend ordered the Original Junkie waffle which had avocado, chicken, bacon, and veggies. I stole a bite and enjoyed the crunch the bacon added to the mix. He found the chicken a tad bit dry but still enjoyed it.
I didn’t order this but here’s a photo of the Poutine tater tots.
This is a perfect place for a late night after show/bar snack. If you’re going for a meal, I’d suggest you order more than one thing because one item may not be filling enough. Don’t worry though, there are plenty of things you’ll definitely want to try.
Tiana Feng 