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Category: FineDiners.ca

Housekeeping – FineDiners.ca Content

For a brief time I ran a foodie blog at finediners.ca, but after a brief initial spurt of creativity, it kind of trailed off and I haven’t published there in a long while.  I eventually let the domain lapse, and I’ve since felt bad that there were a handful of interesting articles there that were just orphaned and destined to be lost.

I finally decided to do something about that and I’ve migrated all that old content to this blog (wordpress export/import worked great!).  I still have to cleanup some of the stubs I had posted to this blog linking to the articles on the now-dead domain, but it’s nice to know that the writing I did there hasn’t been lost.  Since all those articles are buried in the archives here now, I thought I’d link to some of my favourites here:

Makin’ Bacon Part 1: DIY Cold Smoker

Makin’ Bacon Part 2: The Cure

In The Kitchen: Bacon Jam!

What do you do with day-after Risotto?

Butchery 101 – Strip Loin

In The Kitchen: Mom’s Easter Bread

In The Kitchen: French Onion Soup

In The Kitchen: Wine Marinated/Braised Beef Short Ribs

In The Kitchen: Fish in a Bag

Most of these are early experiments in my journey towards learning to cook.  Looking back at these, I realize that I’ve gotten a lot better since then and could probably do a much better job on those dishes.

Fine Diners and New Years Resolutions

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!