Tribute to Canadian Food Part 1–Vachon

One of the things people always ask me is “what do you miss about Canada?”  After the standard answers of family and friends (true of course!) I can get on to the subject of food pretty quickly.  Not just restaurants and pubs and things like I have been covering in previous posts, but some of the little foodie items that are just typical for Canada.

Vachon cakes are a fine example of this.  I made a Vachon photo stroll down the aisles of the local grocery while there…

Vachon is a Canadian manufacturer of snack foods, most of them cakes and pastries.  They have been around since the 1920s apparently and their products have been a staple of Canadian lunchboxes for all of my life.

I may as well start with the Ontario heavyweight… the Jos Louis

This yummy treat is two chocolate cake pieces with a cream filling within a milk chocolate shell.   I have no idea about the name, it always evokes thoughts of the boxer Joe Louis, but I really have no idea at all about the origins of the name.  These come from a time when parents were not really that worried about allergies, healthy snacks, childhood obesity…  You just gave your kid a Jos Louis for a dessert and everyone was happy.  Like giant Oreo cookies, people developed many techniques for eating them. 

Across the border in Quebec, the more popular choice is the May West.  Pretty much the same as a Jos Louis but with white cake instead of chocolate.  The cake used to have the spelling Mae West and is clearly inspired by the actress, but was changed in the 1980s probably to avoid litigation.  I have been told by a former Montreal resident, that a standard Quebecois meal is “Pepsi, May West”

Very similar to, BUT COMPLETELY DIFFERENT to the Jos Louis is the 1/2 moon.  Where the Jos Louis is two chocolate cakes filled with cream and then covered in chocolate, the 1/2 moon is two chocolate cakes filled with cream and then covered in chocolate.  They are not the same.  Totally different and anyone who claims otherwise is a fool.

The 1/2 moon also comes in a vanilla variety.  See, another differentiator.

The Swiss Roll… this one was a favorite in our house.  This is again a new and exciting kind of cake, consisting of chocolate cake filled with cream, covered with milk chocolate.  However, you will see that rather than a circle or half circle shape, the tube has been adopted.  I have been to Switzerland quite a few times and I don’t think I have ever seen a Swiss roll there.  There are also no Swiss Chalet restaurants, but that is another story.

The “Passion Flakie” was another favorite in our household.  Flake pastry with fruit and cream filling.  There were quite a few flavours offered on this product, but I think we had apple or strawberry the most often.  This was actually not one of my favorites compared to the cake treats, but it was certainly much better than no having a sweet treat in your lunch bag.

Last and by no means least…. the butter tart.

I probably should do an entire post on the merits of butter tarts, but for now I will just cover the Vachon version.  The butter tart is a quintessentially Canadian dessert.  A flaky pastry filled with Sugar, butter, syrup, egg, and often some nuts in the middle (although I prefer without.)

My experience with butter tarts has more often been of the home made variety.  I am not sure if I ever actually had a Vachon one, since it always seemed that someone’s mother had just baked an enormous batch of them and you could get a fresh, non-plastic wrapped version.  I am sure that the Vachon variety is a good one though, made with the same care and massive amounts of sugary goodness that go into all of their cakes.

I know I did not cover every Vachon cake and pie, but this is a pretty good sampling of what they have to offer.  Do yourself a favor and go try a Jos Louis.

Sneaky Dees – One of my all time Favorite places

Continuing the food tour of Toronto I had to return to one of my single favorite places on earth.  Sneaky Dee’s at the corner of Bathurst and College in Toronto.  I spent many many evenings in this place during my University years (and beyond.)   Sneaky Dee’s has everything I could want from a building;

-Mexican food that is very good and priced for the student budget
-a nice place to go for a beer including a patio in the warmer months,
-a concert venue upstairs that hosts tons of up an coming bands.



I can remember going there to see Lowest of the Low many many times as well as Dig Circus.  I don’t know if I could even recall how many concerts I saw there, but I do know that almost every one of them was preceded with a big plate of Tex-Mex food downstairs.  This visit was going to be purely for food, I don’t know if there were even bands playing on this particular evening.

The interior of the place is covered with graffiti, a feature that gives it some of its character and I am sure if I spent some effort, I could find a few tags put there by myself and friends in years gone by.  Check out the walls of the booths here…



If you head downstairs to the bathroom/public phone area, it gets even more extreme…



Joining me for this fine dinner were Gord and Dave.  It always feels a bit surreal going out with my Toronto friends since it only happens every few years.  It is a bit like stepping into a time capsule and so many things seem just like they did when we used to head out together of a weekend evening. 

On the whole I think time has been pretty kind to us and the main difference in going out now is that we are less worried about affording to eat out and more worried about staying out late on a work night.
 

I went for the “Guadalajara”  combination plate, one beef taco, one beef enchilada, one chicken enchilada with sides of rice, refried beans and salad.  The food quality is really great and I think that massive plate of food cost less than 12 bucks.  I struggled to get through it all, but since it could be years before my next visit, I managed to find a place for every crumb.



There was a poster on the wall next to our booth for a special menu item called “The Destroyer” which I thought was pretty funny.  A brief search of their website informed me that this beast of a dish was created to honour the “Cancer Bats” band and is comprised of;
-a bed of fries
-gravy and cheese
-covered with salsa roja
-frijoles
-ground beef
-tomatoes
-onions
-mixed peppers
-jalapenos
-more cheese
-topped with guacamole
-sour cream. 

wow.  The post mentions this is the “fastest way to a man’s heart”  so at least they also have a sense of humour about it.



Oh, here I found a colour photo of the finished calorie bomb.  I was nowhere near ambitious enough to take this on and I don’t think the stomachs of Gord or Dave are iron enough to tackle it either…



A fine meal well enjoyed in the company of people I don’t see nearly often enough. 
I think I may have to try and make “the destroyer” at home one evening as a nice surprise for family dinner.  I am sure Claudia would love it.

Swatow–Amazing Chinese Food in Toronto

While over in Canada, I spent a couple of days down in the big TO wandering around and enjoying all the things I used to enjoy years ago.  For the most part, Toronto is very much like it used to be.  The big things stay the same and the details keep changing.  So Queen street is still Queen street, but many many of the shops have closed or moved on.

On a nice sunny Friday, I found myself walking around enjoying a nice afternoon with Rene.  After a nice stroll around harbourfront the hunger bug struck us and we began to talk about potential lunch locations.  At first I thought that I would fulfill my  need for some street meat hotdog cart love, but there were none to be seen.  As we walked back up from the lake, we found ourselves in Chinatown, and we remembered some of our late night restaurant excursions from the 1990s.

There was one special place that we used to go to specifically for “crispy noodles” that neither of us could remember the name for.  Rene knew that it had a big yellow sign and red writing, but in Chinatown, that is about as useful as saying there is a duck hanging in the window…

A walk up Spadina eventually jogged our memory and we found ourselves in front of Swatow (Rene was totally right about the sign.)

 
This is by no means a glamorous restaurant and it looked to me like nothing had changed at all since 1995 or so.  It is a nice little place that is open until 4am for the after pub crowds.  I have never been there and seen it less than half full, they seem to have a good crowd going at all times.  Here is how it looked on that sunny Friday afternoon.  The wall mirror makes it look much bigger, which I suppose is the desired effect.

I went for the crispy noodles (of course) with beef and vegetable.  The other important thing to note is that this place gives a pretty massive portion of food for a very reasonable price.  I believe this huge dish cost me about 11 dollars Canadian.  Most of the meals seemed to be between 9-12 dollars though.  Rene went for the “special” version of the crispy noodles.  I forget exactly what that involved, but as a rule I like the listings for meals to be pretty explicit as to what I am going to receive.  I have had more than one interesting surprise experience by choosing “special meat”

All went well though and Rene enjoyed his noodles from beginning to end.  Swatow delivered a meal that was very much up to the standard that I recalled.

My craving for a Toronto Chinatown meal has now been satisfied for a while, but I am sure I will go for it again the next time I am over there.  The other regular Chinese experience that I can no longer enjoy is the long departed Mr. Pongs, home of the awesome jumbo.

OHL Playoff Hockey

One of the great things about visiting Canada in spring is that Hockey is still going on.  In fact, my two week stay was coinciding perfectly with the end of the NHL regular season and the first round of the playoffs.  As a special treat, I thought I would try to get tickets to a game.  Despite the Toronto Maple Leafs being one of the worst hockey teams in the league, it is still pretty hard to get tickets.  There were three home games when I was there, but the cheapest tickets available were well over $200 Canadian each.  I do like hockey, but I don’t like it THAT much.

As it happens, my sister lives very close to Barrie, home of the OHL Barrie Colts.  As it also happens, the Colts don’t suck and were in the playoffs, starting a series against the St Michaels Majors.  I mentioned it to Al and he jumped online and purchased tickets for himself, me and Adam (Thanks Al!) Here we are at the game, a first OHL experience for all three of us.

 

Interestingly enough, two days before the game, he still managed to get very good seats for only around $20 each.  I know the OHL is a minor league (players aged 15-20) but it is also a major talent pool of future NHL players, including 7 players on the roster who are already drafted by NHL teams.  The seats were not just good, they were pretty great.  We were in the second row behind the glass, so we were treated to some up close and personal body checks from guys that look pretty huge for 15-20 year olds….

I don’t think I have ever sat as close to the play as this for an NHL game, it was a pretty interesting view.  I have played a bit of hockey over the years, and sitting here felt pretty much the same as when you are sitting on the bench during a game, an experience I have enjoyed frequently.

Something that both Al and I had a good laugh at was the in-game promotions that were taking place.  Every 10 minutes or so, there would be a give away to someone in the crowd.  But the quality and content of the promotions really demonstrated that this was the minor leagues.  We heard seats called out for winning:

1) a haircut at Supercuts

2) an oil change at Mr. Lube

3) A free Pizza

We were actually looking at the names of the sponsors on the boards around the ice and trying to predict the source and content of the next give away.  Despite the Bulk Barn being prominently featured, there were no prizes awarded along the line of “ten kg of rice” or “bushel of apples”  Maybe they saved those for game 7.

Once again I was surprised and impressed with the quality of photos from my phone.  Indoor sports do not exactly present optimal conditions for a tiny phone based camera, but I think the results were quite acceptable.

All in all a very fun experience.  An exciting game with a good level of hockey and a very affordable night out.  If you live near an OHL team and enjoy live hockey, I would totally recommend doing this, maybe even more so than going to an NHL game if you want to have a higher enjoyment per $$ ratio.  I seriously doubt you would be doing much at a Leafs game other than hanging your head and lamenting that you spent a couple hundred bucks to watch some really crap game.

Local Hiking

We live next to a state park (or national park, I really have no idea to be honest) called the Schönbuch.  It is literally at the end of our street, about a 50m walk.  Something we have not taken advantage of very much since Henrik was born, since the paths starting in our neighbourhood are not really pram friendly.

Anyway, Henrik is a big enough fellow to fit in the hiking backpack, so this past Sunday we decided to make the arduous 1000m trek into the park to the castle Hohenentringen and its lovely beer garden.

Up the hill you are treated to a pretty nice view of the valley and our village, as well as the surrounding villages.  Here is me in beast of burden mode with the little traveler.

Part of the goal of this outing was to get me and Henrik used to the carrier.  Henrik had never been in it before and I have not carried it since Liam was a tiny lad.  Since we would like to use this on our upcoming trip to the North Sea as well as the summer time Starr visit, it seemed like a good idea to get in some training.

Henrik had a great time back there,  smacking me in the head, clowning around and laughing.  Here is is playing peek out at Mummy.

Liam of course was dressed in full adventure mode.  He could not go into the forest without a wooden sword (sheathed on his belt of course) a hiking stick and a pair of binoculars.  We had to stop every 100m or so for him to confirm there were no monsters and to scout the distance with the binoculars.  Needless  to say, our knight guard kept us safe.

Here is the great protector with Claudia at the same lookout point.  You can actually see our house very clearly in the background if you know where to look.  Lower left, the last street in the village.

 So one day later I had the expected sore back from lack of use, but all in all it was a good first outing.

Bradford

As is usual, I spent most of my time in Canada staying with my sister and her family in Bradford.
Let me preface this by saying right away that I am not a particular fan of the town.  I don’t want to knock it too much though, since Shona has lived there for a while, the kids seem to like it and I guess it has something to offer.  It is just not my cup of tea and never really managed to capture my enthusiasm.  On this trip, I found myself with some free time, usually in the evenings when I took the chance to walk the streets of Bradford and give it a chance to make me love it.
Here is the town hall, the centre of all things Bradford.


One of the things that I dislike about the town that remains unchanged is the way it is developed.  The houses all have a sameness about them…I often refer to them as “Lego neighborhoods” since they look so cookie cutter to me.  The way communities develop in small town Canada is this:
1) Aging farmer sells a huge plot of land to a developer
2) developer builds a few hundred houses that look identical, or perhaps vary with 3-4 models
in Germany however, small towns tend to develop very differently.  The aging farmer divides up his land into as many plots as he can, then sells them off one by one to potential homeowners.  The homeowner then engages a contractor to build the house however they want on the plot.  Personally I like this method better since it leads to a much more diverse looking collection of houses.  That being said, there is a definite sameness to German architecture that dominates housing right now.  The blocky white house with red tile roof.  I guess it’s a matter of personal taste.
Anyway, here is a typical Bradford street. (or is it stepford, how can you be sure…)

Once you get out of the residential part, you are treated to the main street of Bradford.  A fabulous collection of new and old.  Which is to say, fast food restaurants that are in new buildings or fast food restaurants that are in renovated old buildings.  These are spaced out with strip malls and huge package stores of course.  I am again being unfairly critical I'm sure, but since I am writing this, I get to use my blog as a platform however I choose.   I choose to dislike downtown Bradford.
Bradford has ~25,000 residents, yet has the following fast food outlets on a single street. 
2x McDonalds
Burger king
Pizza Pizza
Subway
Kentucky Fried Chicken
3x Tim Hortons
Harveys
Swiss Chalet
Mr Submarine
Popeye’s Chicken
Wendy’s
Pizza Nova
Pizzaville
Gino’s Pizza
Lamar’s Pizza
Little Ceasar’s Pizza
I am sure I missed some and I did not count non-fast food restaurants…  I think Bradford must have one of the highest restaurant per resident ratios on earth.    The people here must also eat at home as well, in addition to the 20 fast food and at least 15 more normal restaurants, there are 3+ giant grocery stores.  So what is there to do in Bradford, answer#1 would have to be eat.

One restaurant worth noting is this one.  Jamaican patties are one of the greatest foods anywhere:

Check out the lovely Bradford Food mart, located next to the always needed small town exotic birds store.  Apparently the people of Bradford also enjoy a parrot or two in their lives.


While out for a walk, I also saw this sweet ride.  Check out the El Camino.  this one is more polyfilla than car at this point, but I am sure with a coat of paint, this could be brought back to its former glory.  I think they should consider a giant mural of a wolf howling on the moon on the hood.  Somehow it would seem like the right thing to do.
 

Something else I liked is that there are wild rabbits just roaming around the town.  Maybe this is because West Gwillimbury is the carrot growing capitol of North America.  On a walk one evening I saw these two rabbits enjoying a visit to someone’s yard.  I thought at first they may be pets, but no, they are just neighborhood rabbits.

One really great thing that is new to Bradford is the recently completed recreation centre.  For a town the size of Bradford, this thing is amazing.  Two ice rinks with 900/500 seat capacity, swimming pool, water slide, indoor running track, multiple basketball courts.  the place is really great.  I guess with that many fast food places, the town felt compelled to give the residents a place to work it off.


OK, a longer post than I anticipated making today.  This ends my in depth look at the glory of Bradford, Ontario.  I hope I showed all of its greatness.

Canada Trip

I just recently enjoyed a nice, long overdue trip to Canada.  I had not been over since Jan 2009 or so and I was ready to enjoy all that the great white north had to offer.  A nice topic to begin this revitalization of my blogging effort is to share the trip experience. 

As usual, my trip began by making my way to Stuttgart airport.  Claudia and the kids had already left for their own little adventure, so it was the glorious bahn that took me there.  In  all truth, I don’t mind riding on the train at all.  German trains are clean, on time and get you where you need to go with the efficiency that one would expect.  From my house, I have to walk about 10 min to the local station, then take three different trains to the airport.  All in all it takes a little over an hour if your connections are well timed. Everything was smooth and good and I found myself in the departure area of Flughafen Stuttgart.

No matter how often I go there, I still enjoy the architecture of the airport.  The roof supports made to look like trees is just something that never gets old.

As I mentioned, it has been quite a few years since I was on a plane, and I noticed that the check in process is quite different now.  I flew with KLM (on an Air France flight) and at the check in area, it is all self service now.  I had to take this image from the Air France website since I forgot to take a picture when I was there;

They have successfully further removed the human element from air travel .  I just had to approach the machine, press a few buttons and let the machine scan my passport and it would poop out my boarding pass.  Then I took my bag up to the remaining human employee and dropped off my suitcase.

So having arrived at the airport a couple hours before my flight, as my many many emails advised, I killed off the next hours reading until boarding time.  I got on the plane without issue and was off on the first leg of my trip, Stuttgart-Paris. 

 

I changed planes at Paris CDG airport.  The last time I was there I thought it was grey, grubby and under a lot of construction.   I have to say, the construction was worth it.  I thought the terminal was pretty nice looking and I did not mind wandering around while I waited for the connection.  Like most things in the western world, the entire place is permeated with stores and various other stalls trying to sell you things while you wait.  I would not be surprised if all airlines had side deals with airports ensuring a minimum time for flight connections to ensure every traveller had enough exposure to fabulous retail offers.  I did manage to resist temptation though, all I purchased was a delicious Orangina.

The flight was long but smooth and uneventful.  Surprisingly, the food was really excellent.  I have since described it to people as being food that I would not send back if it showed up in a restaurant, which is about the highest praise an airline should ever expect for their meal service in economy. 

I brought along my own inflight entertainment, I had the entire series two of the fantastic BBC One show Sherlock.  I was a big fan of the first series and I had been saving the second one for the trip.  If you think watching 270 minutes of Sherlock in a row may be too much, you would be wrong.  I am already looking forward to a third series.  Without any spoilers, there is of course a twist at the end of the final episode that I think most people have not yet figured out (me included.)  The creators of the show have said that the show contains a clue to the answer that everyone seems to have missed.  I think I’m a pretty clever guy and I’ve gone back to look for this clue and found nothing.  I hope the explanation is satisfying.

Anyway, after all that travel, Shona picked my up at the airport and we drove up the road to glorious Bradford, where I would spend the next couple of weeks.

The next (many) posts are not going to follow any narrative of chronology, I am just planning to post things that I feel like as time and motivation allow.  I am sure there will be some interesting stuff for the lover of southern Ontario though.

Cheers.

Birthday Boy Henrik

Today is a big day for Henrik, he is two years old!

In celebration of this glorious occasion, I have pulled out some of my favorite pictures of Henrik from the past 12 months.  

Henrik is a tremendous joy in our lives and the two years with him have been filled with fun and laughs (mostly)

As you can clearly see from the below montage, he is a guy who always has a smile on his face.  It is a smile that I think it pretty infectious and it is pretty hard not to feel better and happier just by being around such a happy little dude.  Any of the photos below can be clicked on and enlarged to enjoy the birthday boy in all his glory!

I shall return...

OK, so I have been asked by enough people now about when I will return to writing my blog.  I am going to start up again in the next days, I have just been updating my "blogging environment" which is so say reinstalling all the applications I have used to create this masterpiece of mediocraty.

In case you are curious... what kept me off blogging for the past (many) months?

Aside from laziness on my part, the main thing keeping me from the blog was photo management.  I was trying to find a way to get my photos under control.   Picasa has been my traditional go-to program, but as the volume of photos grew and my HD filled up, I became less satisfied with it.  I wanted to move all my photos to a network drive.  In the version of Picasa I had last summer, there did not seem to be a way to do this.

I gave Adobe Photoshop Elements a try, which had a couple of features I really liked
1) chance to have all photos on a network location
2) chance to make "stacks" of similar photos to save space.

Elements had a free 30 day trial so I gave it a go.  It was ok, but I became discouraged quickly based on two things.  First, the initial time needed to organize my quite huge photo collection was daunting and second, the program performance was slow.  The second one was the killer for me, a slow running program will kill my enthusiasm pretty fast.  I hate to wait and Picasa had made me very accustomed to a fast response time.

So, my compromise is to have muliple photo repositories... on my main system, I keep all my photos on the network drive, then on the laptop I blog from, a copy of the last 12 months photos.  That keeps the program running fast and my photo storage needs to a reasonable level.

Honestly that was about my biggest limiter and when I write it out here, it makes me think I was just being lazy. 

So, I am not sure how well I keep at the blog this time, but I will do what I can to have some posts go up relatively regularly.

-F