Memos: September ember ember

A few things I've been up to lately..

• A few friends and I went to the Dayboat restaurant on Wednesday and all decided to go for the tasting menu. We were told by the chef before-hand to skip lunch and wear loose pants. I'll say after just the second course, which was goat cheese stuffed into little baby tomatoes, I was sure it was going to be in my top meals I've had my whole life. The wine we had recommended was Teddy Hall chenin blanc 2007. Next, they brought some teasingly delicate shrimp and scallops in a light batter and garnish that complemented it just about perfectly. There was also a beet salad that, just like most of the rest of the ingredients, apparently all were grown within about 20 minutes of the restaurant. The main course was a pork dish made au torchon, not sure what that means but it must have something to do with it being the softest, tenderest cut of pork that is physically possible to make. I'll say pretty confidently that the Dayboat is now the best restaurant on the island, ,hands down. Last year I never checked it out mostly because the menu, while all the local ingredients sounded amazing, just didn't have any dishes that I could get excited about. This year they've kept the focus on local food but the new chef has jazzed up the dishes considerably.
  
  The funniest part was while we were all enjoying the great food we kept coming back to talking about comfort food we all liked as kids and still do, like lipton noodles and which kind of no-name chocolate chip cookies were the best to the utter pointlessness of 'golden oreos'. Perhaps it was the pleasure in eating such good food that brought back genuinely pleasant memories of food taht wasn't fancy but still had pleasing qualities to it.
  
  
• My thought about the US financial crisis is that the one thing Republicans know how to do well, and that helps them win elections, is to destroy hope. And they're shooting the moon on this one. The wave of Obama's enthusiastic supporters must have been so scary that nothing short of destroying the entire economy was enough to put a stop to it.
  
  
• I just re-read Infinite Jest. Sad that it took the tragic occasion of David Foster Wallace's suicide to get me to do it but I am glad I did. The themes of sadness and human struggle in the face of addictoin and bleak societal cynicism leave me shaking my head but feeling hopeful at the same time. The quest for genuine experience and expression, he seems to be saying, is what leads people to ever more harmful behaviour patterns. There's a 30-some-odd page sequence near the beginning of the book where a character overthinks himself into a state of paralysis while waiting for his pot dealer to show up that grabs you by the gut and forces you to experience the powerlessness of addictoin and the mental acrobatics we try to do to deny it.
  
  I want to some day either find or perhaps take some time and write a comparison of DFW's depiction of Americans and that of Kurt Vonnegut. Vonnegut's insitence on small words and straightforward sentences would seem to be anathema to DFW's embracing of esoteric technical terms, unapologetic use of precise jargon when talking about the progression of a tennis match or how a radio transmission works, but I had the same feeling when reading the two that this was the truly most expressive and full-bodied expression I had ever read. I want to find waht it was in both of them taht triggered my empathetic reaction in that wawy.
  
  
• I just got some paintings I ordered from art.com back from the framer today, I'm very pleased with them, The Studio on Queen St. Sure I could have crazy glued and ebay'd my way to framing them myself but these are going to be on my wall for years so I think having an expert do the framing is probably the best way to go for me.
  
  
• I spent the last couple of days adopting some pretty heavy JavaScript code to work on IE 6. And, while I still fully embrace the new movement to just plain drop support for the ancient browser in favour of more standards-compliant browsers, I am still glad I did it as it at least forced me to go over the code again in the same way a rejected article should proof-read every sentence of his work before re-submitting it. So the work is better in the end, even though my cruel master of an editor is the browser world's senile, stuck-in-his-ways boss who makes you write for an audience of reality-TV enthusiasts.
  
  
• Heroes season 3 premier verdict: I'm still gonna watch, but the writers better break out of the arc they seem to be heading in and not repeat the same inter-character and internal struggles of the first season's main characters. I hope they still go ahead with the prequel series that they were talking about towards the end of the first season. Sylar is still my favourite character. "Eat your brain? Claire! That's disgusting!" : best one liner of the whole series so far.
  

Labels: Books, Food, JavaScript, Restaurants, Television

Memos: Hey Pussycat, Smile a Bit

• Felt really gross today at work, exhausted even though I had 8 hours of sleep, and stuffed up and my stomach felt weird. I feel better now, though, which is good because I'm giving anotehr course at work tomorrow.
  
  
• Finished re-reading Breakfast of Champions today. What I love most about the book is Vonnegut's way of mentioning an object or a concept and the ngiving a humourous description of waht is is, as if the reader was fro manother planet and was unfamiliar with things like pornography or fast food. The thing I am most fascinated by with him ersonally is his stated unconditional love for music. He says even a military marching band, who's purpose is to celebrate the thing he hates the most, violence and obedience, can bring a tear to his eye.
  
  
• Somethi9ng I love about the show Heroes: when Hiro and Ando are speaking in Japanese to each other, the subtitles don't just appear at the bottom of the screen, rather they are all over the place, and it reminds me of a comic book's speech bubbles. Man I am agitating waiting for NBC to show another new episode. The last of April can't come fast enough. Same goes for The Office.
  
  
• What is with CBC radio on PEI's right-wing, pro-business content? It just seems so out of place. Who's pulling the strings there, anyway? I think I'll write a longer post about this next time Michael Hlinka spews his horseshit and I'm not fortunate enough to be out of radio earshot and I'm consequently worked up.
  
  
• I went out to dinner with my dad today at Pizza Delight in the 1911 Jail. It was pretty good for what it is, but I noticd that the pizza I ordered was pretty much exactly the same quality as what you can buy in the grocery store nowadays. I remember as a teenager how awful frozen pizza was. But the best was still when I was on a made-from-scratch pizza kick. You could get really good fresh dough from the Sobey's in Saint John, where I was living at the time, when I worked at Point Lepreau, and I'd cook up sausages and use canned pineapples and good little red onions.. I should do that again. I just don't seem to enjoy cooking as much these days, though. I think what happened was that when I was working at Lepreau I would get home at 4:30, watch Win Ben Stein's Money, then start to make supper. And by the time I had everything prepared and cooked, had eaten, and then cleaned up after everything, it was rolling up on 8:00pm, and since we had to get up so early to get on the road for the 45 minute to an hour commute, that meant it was nearly bed time. I like it on the weekendss, though, when I can relax and cook and not feel like I'm taking up too much time.
  
  
• Recently every time I'm out in public at a restaurant or someplace, and there's a lull in my own conversation, and I overhear the people at the next table over talking, about 50% of the time they're talking about facebook. Ugh.
  
  
• Book question: I thought The Da Vanci Code was very very overrated, but I seem to hear better things about Holy Blood, Holy Grail. To anyone who's read both: Is Holy Blood Holy Grail any better than the other one? Or should I just skip it?
  

Labels: Books, Memos, Restaurants, Work

Claddagh Room

So Sabrina and I have decided to eat Macaroni and Cheese and Chef Boyardi five nights a week and then go somewhere really nice once a week. This makes sense to me.

So last night we went to the Claddagh Room, just because my friend Kelly keeps raving about the desserts she just had when we get together in the evenings. I'm surprised it took this long for me to try the food there, actually.

It's the kind of place where the waitress takes your coat but doesn't pull your chair out for you. We were seated next to a table of Russians who were ordering oysters by the hundreds who were pretty loud and boisterous but in a genial kind of way so it was fun to listen to them.

As for food I ordered chicken samosas as an appetizer, , they came with spinnach that made me cry when I think of what you get from the grocery store. They were perfect, thick little leaves with a little bit of lemon juiceon them and all I thought eating them was 'this is what food is supposed to taste like'. The samosas theemselves were naturally a far different affair than the ones they sling at the farmer's market.

For the main course I ordered the feature of the night, which was seafood bouillabaisse, which was pretty much just a really indulgent pile of mussels and shrimp and salmon and holy christ it was good. The soup base was light and didn't intrude on the seafood's flavour at all. I didn't have good seafood since the Summer so it tickled some tastebuds that have been languishing for months. I was so stuffed at the end that I didn't even get dessert, I just stole a little nibble of Sabrina's cheesecake which had raspberries baked into it and looked beautiful.

Labels: Charlottetown, Food, Restaurants, Reviews

The New Town & Country

Went to the newly-reopened Town & Country today, thanks to an invitation from my friend Heather. They've re-opened after being closed for about six weeks for renovations by the new owners. The overall structure of the place is still the same, but they have all new lampshades and cuttlery, all proudly from Ikea, according to the waitress. It was good to see that most of the old staff are there including Val and the one of chefs, Jamie.

The prices on all their items are excellent, I didn't see anything on the new menu that was over $10. One thing that's disappointing is that they don't have the all-day breakfast anymore. Now there's no place downtown besides the Seathreat where you can get brakfast any time of day.

The 'favourites' from the old menu are still there, like the house burger and salads and Shish Touk, and then there's the asian items, divided into appetizers like a dish mushrooms and peas and things in a cream saucd and various kind of chicken wings like spicy mustard, and the main course menu wich has a lot of curries and stir fries. The Shawarma stir-fry sounded really good, and sounds like something they invented.. Lebanese-Indonesian fusion, anyone?

I ended up getting the Balinese Chicken, which was chicken and veggies like snow peas and broccoli served with rice that came in a perfectly-shaped blob of sticky rice on another plate which I felt bad about disturbing. Normally I guess you're supposed to put the stuff on top of the rice, but I've always preferred dumping the rice into the stuff, personally. The food was very good, I especially noticed that the vegetables were nice and crips and not over-cooked at all.

One ip: If you're going with a girl you're looking to impress don't order the curries or you'll have a runny nose all through the meal. The spiciness was just about perfect for my taste, which is a little spice-tolerant than the general population I think. If they offered the options of mild to medium to hot that would be a good improvement. The guy whom I guess is the new owner came out of the kitchen to ask how everything was, and if I thought it was too spicy, I told him it was just right. Then the chef came out and asked the same thing. I think they're concerned about our largely wimpy PEI palates.

The portions were also very generous, especdially for what you pay. It's right along the lines of Leo's Thai place where $8 can get you enough rice and whatever to feed two people easily.

I just realized I forgot to eat the irish cream chocolate mint stick thing that came with my coffee. D'oh.

Anyway, definitely check the place out, it's good to see it open again, and the cleaned-up decor is a very nice improvement.

Labels: Charlottetown, Restaurants, Reviews