Tag: dinner

Toronto

Until today I couldn’t really say “I’ve been in Toronto”. When I was a teenager I spent a few hours there on a trip to Niagara with my American family, I remembered the CN tower and around but that was all. So when D. and C. proposed to spend the weekend in Toronto while I was visiting Waterloo for work, I thought it was a great opportunity. A. could join for the weekend from Florence and we would enjoy what the city has to offer in the end of winter: good food, nice walks, theater shows…

We walked all over the city, from the Old Toronto to the East Bayfront, and the Distillery district, through China town to Kensington market and back to the Waterfront… stopping for a bite, a show, or design stores (on King street)…

Here are a few recommendations for enjoying you stay in Toronto.

– stay: I would recommend the Old Toronto where you can find all the big 5 stars hotels. It’s convenient to walk everywhere or so. We stayed at the Ritz-Carlton. Nothing exceptional about it but great efficient service.

– coffee/breakfast: Hot Black Coffee on Queens street is a nice tiny coffee shop open early in the morning. Nice Chai latte, and a wide selection of items for breakfast: muffins, toasts…

– lunch: El Catrin is a Mexican restaurant in the distillery district, their vegetarian tacos were amazing, inventive and refreshing.

– dinner: Actinolite is THE place to eat. A restaurant with a chef that uses exclusively local and oc course seasonal products and makes an inventive, perfectly balanced menu, with the right textures and flavors, and the perfect size. Plating was also great. There is no Michelin guide of Toronto but if there was, it would surely be in with 2 stars at least.

Picture from Actinolite website

Simple Japanese dinner

A simple piece of horse mackerel marinated in soya sauce and oven grilled; dashi blanched green beans and eggplants, white rice and umeboshi make for a perfect dinner in this rainy season period. Simple, tasty and colorful. I wish you a nice end of week! 

Improvised dinner for friends

Our friends visiting from Germany spent the weekend with us in Tokyo with daytime busy visiting the city, museums, flea markets, and kabuki, trying some nice cafes too, and evening at home, I’ve cooked for them Japanese as much as possible but not only, in particular for an improvised late dinner at home after a long day out and a fridge almost empty. So I opted for a potatoes and baby spinach salad with tofu and poached egg and topped with sunflower seds and flax seeds. Simple, ready in 10min and delicious!!

Setting priorities

Recently I found this urgent need to prioritize both at work and at home to get the best of my time. I don’t know if it’s specific to my job, or to being in Japan where working long hours is common yet with poor productivity, but I feel inefficient. At work it’s quite difficult to prioritize because for me the most important is research and teaching, but I spend most of the time doing paperwork, administration, budget plan and research proposals, though what I really want to do is spend more time with my students and read and write more. In the lab I’m on my own, without any assistance and a growing number of problems to solve, all being more pressing and paying often for others poor organization. At home it’s much more simple and rather the contrary, I have a lot of help, good organization and sharing tasks allow to always have time for urgent matters, and for cooking. Which is absolutely important for me because the kitchen is the place I can make the transition from work to home, set my brain to a quieter pace after the bustling day by keeping it busy with thinking and inventing but on a diffferent topic, by keeping my hands busy with a knife requiring velocity and precision. The more veggies to cut, the more relaxed. And only after that can I sit and relax. That’s why for me going to the restaurant after work is hard because I lack the transition.

So here is a little pasta dish, nothing too exciting but still delicious with trofie, plenty of leek cut in small pieces and diced tomatoes, olive oil of course too!  Something that just require the perfect amount of time to move on and of knife manipulation to stay focused. Happy Wednesday!

Left over diner

We had friends at home for diner the other night, and I over spec the diner portions, so, rare enough, I had enough left overs for a second diner. But because I don’t like eating twice the same thing I arrange it in completely different maner.

The original dinner consisted in plain white rice, Japanese autumn veggies (sweet potatoes, litus roots, carrots, eringi mushrooms, turnips…) in dashi and sake, salt-grilled sawara, and a mushrooms and tofu miso soup.

The new version was a cha-an (sauteed rice)  with sawara and sauteed veggies, with sesame. For that I fried the rice in a bit of oil, added a table spoon if sesame seeds, added the veggies, and stirred often. I removed the skin and bones of the fish and crumbled it in the rice, stirred again and served. A super delicious diner, ready in 5 min, just perfect after a long day at work!

Another quick dinner fix

An other evening when I needed a quick fix for dinner (to be honest it’s almost every day!!), thus a “one plate” and a happy husband!
In these situation quinoa is particularly adequate because you can cook it very quickly, it’s full of proteines, so perfect for my almost veggan diet.
I quickly cooked red quinoa, and added a bit of raw avocado, a slice of wild smoke salmon (not mandatory, it can go veggan), some sprout and young leafs, and a few brocoli that were just 2min in steam (you can steam them on top of the quinoa). For seasoning a bit of lemon juice, olive oil (olives from Provence), salt and pepper. Always simple, always delicious. Plates ready to eat in less then 10 min for 2 (the quinoa os basically what takes the longest but you’re free handed in the mean time!).
 

Quick dinner fix

It is very often that we come back home quite late from work, starving and tired. In that case I like to prepare what Japanese call a “one plate”. It is usually a composition of several unrelated elements all combined in one plate. In some restaurants the one plate can cover from starter to dessert!!! I don’t go that far, but it is a nice way to fix rapidly something for dinner. 

This time it was awfully simple: and colorful: baby leaf salad with a bit of olive oil, red cabbage+carrots+linseed (I shredded roughly the cabbage and carrots and because it’s winter and cold I wanted something warm to eat I cooked them 5min rather than serving them raw), some fresh delicious “katsu” from Saboten*.

* Saboten (http://www.ghf.co.jp/saboten_rest/) is a shop that sells “katsu” in various forms. They have a lot of veggie: asparagus, potato croquette, edamame, and porc: tonkatsu, hirekatsu… They are made on the spot, ingredients are chosen carefully, menu changes with season and they are always yummy. They have a few antenna shops in town. Since I never fry at home, it is a good option once in a while, and I know some that are always happy with these, but it means leaving work no mater than 21:00, if not there’s nothing remaining…

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