Category: It Happened to Me

Last weekend, Wendy and I attended the Good Food Festival, an annual showcase of food vendors and cooking instructors sponsored by Food Network Canada. It features samples galore, either for free or a very low price, which means that you can get a complete lunch simply by “grazing”. Here are some photos I took at the festival.

I can’t resist a photo op with a mascot:

My Favourites

My favourite stall at the festival was Kozlik’s Mustard, who provided peameal bacon (that’s “Canadian bacon” to my American readers) sandwiches made with very nice ciabatta bread and a spread made with one of their spicy mustards.

Anton Kozlik makes a mean mustard — in fact, he make several varieties, both hot and sweet. They’re available at several locations across Canada — if you’re in Accordion City, you can get them at many gourmet food shops including Alex Farms, St. Lawrence Market, and one of my favourite places, The Cheese Boutique.

Another favourite of ours were the sauces by the relatively new Redhead Pantry:

They make some tasty sauces! We got their barbecue sauce and their honey peach jalapeno sipping sauce, which I used to baste some chicken thighs for Sunday dinner. It’s really good stuff, and I hope this stuff finds its way to a store near us soon.

Under the “ready-made” category, my hand-down favourites: Key Lime Tofutti Cuties. Damn, they’re good!

An Engrish Encounter

Check out this banner we saw beside the barley tea stand:

Here’s a closer look at the text:

“Drinkable Magazine?” I have no idea what they’re trying to say.

Here’s a photo of the line outside my local EB Games (the Runnymede/St. Clair location in Toronto) for Grand Theft Auto IV, taken last night at midnight:

The 30-car parking lot behind the store was full of cars that I could’ve sworn were lifted right from the previous game in the series, Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas: small sports cars painted in bright colours with lowered suspensions, chrome wheels and obnoxiously loud exhausts and stereos driven by guys in hoodies. The male-female ratio was high, but there actually were some teenage girls in line, which is a good sign: why should guys have all the realistically rendered fun in a virtual New York?

The door to the store is a few paces past the “no left turn” sign in the distance. I waited in line for about an hour and managed to get one of the last non-pre-ordered copies for the XBox 360.

A trailer for Grand Theft Auto featuring my character’s cousin Roman.

After getting back home, I played the game for about an hour, soaking up the the visually gorgeous opening sequence, running errands for my character’s cousin, Roman, shopping for clothes to impress a lady and beating up Albanian loan sharks. I’m going to have to jack a car and explore the city, as it’s so gorgeously rendered that it feels quite real. While the “San Francisco” segment of Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas gave me the feeling of deja vu (I lived there for a year), Grand Theft Auto IV made me feel as if I was in Brooklyn right now.

Here’s a video of the opening of the game, featuring the title sequence and the first few minutes of mise en scene:

The first 10 minutes of Grand Theft Auto IV.

I’ll post more details as I play the game.

[This was also posted to Global Nerdy.]

I’d like to thank Rochelle for inviting me and Wendy to her family’s Passover Seder this past weekend (and her dad for kindly sharing his brisket recipe). Both the food and the company were excellent!

As a special “thank you” to Rochelle and her family, I present the Saturday Night Live skit from 1992 featuring Jerry Seinfeld as Elijah:

(Like the Seder we had at Rochelle’s parents’ place, the Seder in the skit has some Filipino content — Rob Schneider is partially of Filipino descent.)

I work just south of Chinatown, where I saw this t-shirt on sale on Friday:

Odd as Engrish can be, it usually makes at least some sense. Whoever made this shirt wasn’t even trying.

I provide at least as much entertainment as the movie itself:

(By the bye, we saw Forgetting Sarah Marshall last night and it was pretty entertaining. Perhaps not as memorable as other Judd Apatow-produced films as The 40 year-Old Virgin, Knocked Up or Superbad, but still fun.)