- Hamburger Bed. I’ve had dreams like this. [Facebook Page] [via Geekologie]
- New to me: A Hamburger Today – a subsite of Serious Eats. I love me some hamburgers!
- also of Serious Eats, Slice – as above but for Pizza!
Month: January 2009
Yes, I admit it, I love 24! The Day 6 debacle aside (man, that was a terrible season), I have enjoyed every season, regardless of the plausibility issues and repetitive trappings and all of it… and this review of the first two episode arc of Day 7 on AV Club gets to some of why I love it:
“And then there’s Jack himself. As part of the promotional material Fox sent us for Day Seven, I got a McFarlane Toys “action figure” of Bauer in his most familiar pose: two-hand gun draw, satchel slung over one shoulder, getting ready to ruin some bad guy’s day. Looking at the toy now—it’s sitting on top of my cable box—it occurs to me that the main reason I dig 24 is that at heart it’s a super-hero show. Sure, it obeys semi-realistic conventions, and Jack has no readily acknowledged powers, but c’mon; he’s got a regular outfit (jeans, dark shirt, bullet proof vest), he can do things nobody else can, and in the end, he always wins, even while his personal life turns into utter shit. As played by Keifer Sutherland, Jack is the ultimate proof of the Hitchcock maxim: you love a guy who’s good at his job. Only Bauer goes beyond good to be damn near unstoppable—and instead of making the series fall over its own ridiculousness, each new evidence of Jack’s constancy makes you root for him all the more.”
To kick off our first Favourite Things feature here at FineDiners.ca, Simply Recipes is one of my favourite recipe sites on the web. There are many others to be sure, some of which will be featured here as well, but this one I keep coming back to.
It is a blog published by Elise Bauer who started it as a project to collect family recipes and share them on the web, which has blossomed into a resource that attracts thousands of visitors a day. As she suggests on the site, you really feel like you’re leafing through an old family recipe binder and have access to tips and commentary from the people who have been cooking these recipes over and over for many years.
Functionally, the site is pretty straight-forward: it’s blog-style with new posts usually several times a week, and the archives are categorized by main ingredient or type, and also includes an index by ingredient or recipe title. There is also a Tips and Tricks section with dozens of articles about cooking techniques and kitchen basics.
The recipes are nice and simple and are accompanied by helpful photographs, and also include a comments section where people who have tried out the recipes can also make further suggestions and share their successes.
I love the personal nature of this site and, most importantly, the delicious home recipes that just keep me coming back for more.
Jaydiohead – Minty Fresh Beats
This link is a bit old, but Anne Desbrisay of The Ottawa Citizen writes about her Best Bites of 2008: My year on a fork:
“Two thousand and eight was a banner year for good new restaurants in the Capital Region. The ones that gave me most pleasure (in order of tasting) were Napo, Fraser Café, Murray Street, Big Easy’s, Navarra, and b’Side Kitchen and Wine.”
Some members of our little FineDiners club (together and separately) visited most of those places in 2008 and we’d have to agree – Murray Street, Big Easy’s, Navarra, Fraser Cafe, and b’Side are all among our faves. I’ve not personally tried Fraser or b’Side yet, but will be popping over to Fraser for lunch tomorrow and can’t wait! (None of us have heard of Napo, but I guess we’ll have to add it to the list!)
Desbrisay also writes:
“What distinguishes this harvest of new restaurants from past years’ crops is not just the number of them, but that most of these new places are chef-run. In past years, it seemed every new restaurant in this city was another big, loud, modern eatery that had more to do with the designer’s vision than the cook’s. But not this year; chef-run restaurants tend to start in the kitchen.”
Amen, it’s been a great year for foodies in Ottawa, here’s to a great 2009!
This article about How Porsche hacked the financial system and made a killing is really fascinating.
Ron Eade from The Ottawa Citizen reports on Derek Benitz’s Recession Menus at his two restaurants: by finding efficiencies in the kitchen (using less expensive cuts of meat, ditching expensive out of season fresh vegetables that have to be flown in, etc), he’s been able to drop prices on his menu in hopes that in leaner times people will still feel they can go out to eat and help keep his restaurants afloat.
I don’t usually make New Years Resolutions, and I’m not about to start now, but the soft launch of this site happens to coincide with the beginning of the new year(ish), so let’s just say that I’m hopeful that I’ll be able to make posting here a new habit in 2009.
So this is the “soft launch” of this site, meaning that I’m going to start quietly posting here and figuring out just what exactly this site is going to be before I start really putting the word out. I have some ideas of what I’d like to do, but until I get my blogging legs, I’m just not quite ready for prime time attention.
So what do I want this to be? Well, there’s a group of local Ottawa Foodies that I hang out with – we’re not critics or even very experienced foodies at all – but we enjoy getting together fairly regularly to try out new restaurants in Ottawa’s burgeoning fine dining scene.
We’re doing it anyway, so I figured why not try blogging about the experiences as well as other foodie-related things in the process. There is talk of a ratings system where we’ll rate the restaurants we visit based on a simple set of criteria, but we’ll see how this goes.
So, welcome to FineDiners.ca! We hope that you’ll find the information we post here to be useful, and more importantly hope to see you out and about in Ottawa Restaurants. Bon apetit!