It’s been a hell of a holiday season, or what the mighty Greg Proops recently referred to as “The frantic week of unbelievable mayhem”. And I along with my fellow hospitality brethren need a couple nights of actual sleep and a lot of beers to make up for all the Christmas mornings, New Years parties and warm fuzzy family moments that we’ve missed. *Phssssst* Here’s to 2015 and all of the surprising moments and spectacular meals that we have survived!
Last year, right around this time I posted a couple ‘o Holiday Gift Guides; one for restaurant pros and one for geeky home cooks. I promised a third list focused on foragers and the gear they’d like to see stuffed in their thick woollen stockings (that sounded dirty) so here we go! Read More
I’ve been posting pictures and vague references to my trip out East for a week or two now and I suppose I should share some of our food-related experiences while they’re still (relatively) fresh in my mind. It’s not really West coast in any way, but hey; good food is good food and connecting with family is one of the reasons this blog exists in the first place.
It had been nearly half a decade since I’d seen my ancestral home when my mom put out the call: My brother Andrew was getting married to his long-time better half Julie and the clan was converging from all points to throw a proper wedding in their honour… And there was a pig that needed to be cooked. Read More
While putting together last week’s insane love letter to Iron Chef I reviewed quite a few episodes on YouTube and thought I’d share my top five with the internet at large.
This list is by no means comprehensive or authoritative. I’ve pulled only from the fraction of episodes dubbed for Food Network in English and have used no metric more sophisticated than my own enjoyment. If you’re looking for a proper “Top” five list with statistics and pie charts showing the cultural impact of Kaga’s hairpiece, you’ll have to look elsewhere. Try Google Japan. Read More
When I was at a college residence in Southeastern Ontario during the early ‘aughts, everyone’s room looked exactly the same: Same stack of already-obsolete CDs, same Princess Mononoke poster on the wall, same mountain of clothing on the bed and wasteland of drafting paper and half-eaten Rabba’s pizza slices on the floors. And on TV, one of three things could be counted on: Undergrads, Buffy the vampire Slayer, or Iron Chef.
For the most part, TV was just part of the constant, reassuring din of college life, often mixed with caffeine-induced stress babble and the occasional Rage Against The Machine Song. You would look up every so often from your work, check in with what was happening on-screen and check back out. But sometimes (usually due to severe sleep-deprivation) you looked up and got hooked for the whole episode, homework and future employability forgotten.
This happened to me a lot with Iron Chef (which would explain my poor grades) and began an interest/obsession with the show that would last more than a decade into my later life. If it wasn’t for this strange little show from Japan I may not have had enough of an interest in food to join my then girlfriend-later wife Crystal for that fateful night of Chinatown gluttony. And if that epiphany had never happened, maybe I never would have become a professional chef. Read More