Author: Joey deVilla

After doing some looking about and reading reviews for Quebec City restaurants within walking distance of the Chauteau Frontenac (where we were staying), I chose Le Lapin Sauté as the place where The Lady Friend and I would have dinner. A quick ride on the funiculaire took us from the Frontenac to the little pedestrian street known as Le Petit Champlain, pictured above.

Le Lapin Sauté is a picture postcard perfect restaurant right in the centre of the picture postcard perfect Le Petit Champlain. If you changed the name of the place to something Czech, you could easily drop the place in the middle of Prague’s Old Town and no one would be the wiser.

Le Lapin Sauté means “The Rabbit Jumped” and may also be a play on words since sautéing is also a type of cooking. As the name implies, their speciality is rabbit dishes. Here’s how they describe themselves on their English site:

Obviously, rabbit is our specialty. We serve it crystallized, in pies or with a delicious sauce. But we don’t just keep rabbit in our ovens. Our kitchen magicians create wonderful dishes with duck, lamb, salmon or sandwiches au gratin with local cheese. And our maple creme brulee alone is worth the trip to Petit-Champlain Street, located right across from our cousin, Le Cochon Dingue.

The rabbit motif can be found in their decor everywhere:

…and I mean everywhere:

We decided to have dinner on their patio, which offered a view of both Le Petit Champlain and the neighbouring parkette, Park Félix-Leclerc, where a busker played guitar.

We started with a couple of glasses of prosecco…

…and then moved on to a rosé, which would go well with the dinner we picked out.

We had the “tout lapin, tout canard” special, known in English as “Rabbit and Duck for Two” (literally, it’s “All rabbit, all duck”):

Here’s what was on the platter:

• Preserved rabbit leg
• Homemade rabbit “rillettes”
• Rabbit sausage
• Preserved duck leg
• Duck foie gras
• Smoked duck breast
• Preserved carrots and onions,
• “La Sauvagine” cheese
• Beet and apple salad
• Sourdough bread with nuts
• Rustic bread
• Pickles
• Mustard

This meal is the perfect solution to this dilemma:

For dessert, we had a platter of Quebec cheeses, including baluchon and La Sauvagine, both of which were excellent.

Afterwards, we walked out onto Le Petit Champlain to listen a little more closely to Bob Fournier, who was playing accordion. That led to a little jam session, which I blogged about earlier.

If you’re looking for a great romantic dinner spot in Quebec City, you can’t go wrong with Le Lapin Sauté, at least as long as your date doesn’t have any qualms about eating “cute lil’ bunnies”.

Over at HappyPlace.com, there’s a great collection of problematic images from student textbooks. Consider this image from a math textbook:

My guess is that the photo below is either from a social studies textbook or the pamphlet for a fraternity:

Here’s a snippet from science textbook whose purpose is to scare the crap out of people who don’t have red-green colour vision confusion (it used to be called “colour blindness”):

Sorry, if you have red-green colour vision confusion, you’re not going to see the humour in this one…

In order to get the joke, see my posts about the new office in the burbs and my plans to liven it up a little.

…if only just to liven the place up a little and let ’em know that I’ve moved into the building.

Steve Streza has put together a video mashup of Korean pop star PSY’s hit, Gangnam Style, which I first featured about a month ago. In his latest blog post, he writes about putting it together and the reactions it got from LMFAO (whose Party Rock Anthem is one of the mashed-up tunes) and PSY himself.

The songs featured in the mashup are:

• Gangnam Style by PSY
• Gangnam Style by PSY featuring HyunA
• Party Rock Anthem by LMFAO
• Like a G6 by Far East Movement featuring Dev and The Cataracs
• Pretty Fly (For a White Guy) by The Offspring
• Bad Touch by The Bloodhound Gang

If you’re so inclined, you can also download high-quality (320 kbps!) audio files of the mashup:

• MP3 format
• AAC format

Both have a beloved husky idol figure who barks at you, but the South Korean version seems a lot more fun than the North Korean one.

A tip o’ the hat to Greg Hughes for pointing me to this gem!

…and Starbucks is leading the charge. The pumpkin stuff is addictive, but a quick look at the nutritional info for the pumpkin bread, cream cheese muffin, latte and scone should remind you why they’re best treated as what the new-and-improved Cookie Monster calls “sometime foods”: