Gorgeous new word, found by the brother-in-law:
Richster: hipster+trust fund kid
Sugar Café closes its door(s).
(Technically, they only have one door, but you gotta respect the metaphor.)
Sugar Cafe has been open at the corner of Queen & Shaw for the past 8 years. We started going there about 7 years ago, and it has been far and away our favourite brunch spot in Toronto since our first visit (and knowing us, that is saying something). Everything about it. The owner (the beautiful and charming Susanne), the people who worked there (Danyiel, quite possibly the best server in the city), the menu, the atmosphere, the chocolates that accompanied every order of coffee…
In a city where every menu has a muesli, they had the hands-down best. Their seasonal fruit was actually both seasonal and real fruit. N’er a melon in sight. The muesli was full of berries and peaches and all things sweet and juicy. (Memo to all brunch spots: no one wants melon when they go out for breakfast. No one. If there is a melon-loving populus, they number far too insignificantly to dictate the toppings of the many.)
Their German hot chocolate was redonculously decadent. They served the much-loved Petit Déjeuner (brie, jam, hardboiled egg, ancient grains toast, yogurt with preserves), and the most coveted french toast in the city. They made wicked good lattes, had mimosa casually listed with the juices, and introduced the EF to Americanos (which changed his coffee palate forever).
It was one of those places that was good in every season. With a postage stamp treasure of a patio out back, naturally shaded in the summer, and a blaze of leaves in the fall.
The restaurant’s decor reflected Susanne’s German home, with a quietly European atmosphere. When we bought our dining room table, the choice was not only influenced, but modeled on our favourite table at Sugar (“you know, like the table at Sugar, the big reclaimed worn wood one, with the elbow divot…”).
It was warm and comfortable, open and bright and eclectic but cohesive. And it all worked because of the warmth of the people behind it, and the simple deliciousness of what they had on offer.
It may sound overly melancholy to get worked up over the closing of a restaurant, but independent stores and eateries are what give your neighbourhood its flavour. They are part of what define your sense of place. And losing one that is close to you, especially in an urban centre, is like waking up to find that one of the rooms in your house is suddenly sealed off, and you can never go in there again. For several years, we trotted out Sugar as an example of what was so great about where we lived. We were able to point to it back when our strip was mostly populated by used appliance stores, and crowned with the “Stardust lounge”.
We found out over the past couple of days just how much that was reciprocated. We showed up early this morning to ensure we would get a table, only to find a sign on the door saying they were opening at 11 today (a nod to Nuit Blanche). So we decided to wait with a coffee around the corner. But we only got as far as the street corner, before I felt a hand on my shoulder and turned to see Susanne — who had seen us gone by, and run out to make sure we were coming back. Would we like to come in and have a coffee with her while we wait for it to ‘officially’ open?
So we managed to steal the better part of an hour in a private empty version of one of our favourite places in the city. Sitting at the bar with our latte and americano (and chocolates, of course), chatting with Susanne about what it was like to run Sugar, and what was to come. Getting to know her a little better, and making that final connection. She even had a card for us (addressed to me, as she only knew the EF, accurately, as “Americano w. glasses”). Fortunately, we had a card for her too — featuring a postcard she had made up years ago, that we liked so much it has survived multiple ‘simplifyings’ of what we leave stuck to our fridge. Which brought on one of many rounds of hugs.
I’m good with goodbyes and while I say “I hate change” as often as anyone (maybe a little more), in practice I’m actually good with that as well. Everything has its time and everything ends. We got to say goodbye properly, and that’s all you can fairly cross your fingers and toes for.
A last sip of latte, a square of chocolate for the road, and years of good memories.
But I’m all done being a grown-up for today.
Sometimes being a grown-up sucks ass. First there are fruitflies, and then there are moths.
Actually, first there are moths, then there are fruitflies. But we knew where the fruitflies were coming from, the moths we can only set traps for, and kill, and put cedar by our clothes and our food in tupperware. (I swear to god, despite the contrary evidence of these infestations, I really do run a clean house…)
But then in the process of cleaning up for the fruitflies, you come across moth larvae (google it yourself, I don’t wanna put the picture up). Just a couple. And a couple of dead moths. (They have appeared to be dying out since we took preventative moth-measures). And you think, huh.
And then you start cleaning out your cool Ikea food storage thing:
(Which everyone compliments you on, cuz it looks so pretty and inspiring when filled with flour and salt and oats and such.)
And that’s when you find them. In with, of all things, the sunflower seeds. Moths, moth larvae. A writhing moth smorgasbord of “EW GROSS”ness.
But you’re a grown-up now, so what can you do? I guess you could wait for your partner to come home and get them to do it (tempting, but not really my style). So while giving your partner colour commentary on IM (now that is my style), you deal with it. You kill what you can, drown the rest, dispose of things, take the garbage straight out of the house, and sterilize the crap out of whatever you can find.
Because that’s what being a grown-up is all about. Unexpectedly discovering moths, and then dealing with it. Putting the flexibility into your food budget to be able to chuck out your flour because the critters got into it. Buying better containers to critter-proof things for the future. You can swear and shudder and cringe and talk yourself through it (“I am a big scary adult”), but if you don’t take care of your house, no one will. It is now your job to:
Deal. with. the. nasties.
That is what being a grown-up means.
That, and getting to eat cookies whenever you want to.
🙂
“When your enemy goes to ground, leave him no ground to go to.”
We have fruitflies. Just like everyone else this year. Flocks of them. I found what appeared to be a miracle solution (red wine, with a couple of squirts of dishsoap), which was in practice a miracle solution — for a couple of days. But then the top layer evaporates, and all you’re doing is feeding the little fuckers. Instead of a trap, I had laid out a buffet.
Which led to them telling all of their little fucker friends about the good eats, and soon our kitchen was overrun.
So yesterday, taking a page out of Chiwetel’s book, I vicious and unrelentingly destroyed their sense of safety and paths of retreat. My kitchen has never been so clean, my counters so free of fresh produce (*sniffle*). Are you happy now you tiny pestilences? You made me put my yummy seasonal produce into ziploc and out of sight in fridge and freezer. And now I will take my revenge. I will defeat you, oh yes. Mark. my. words.*
*Declaring war on teeny tiny insects is both fun and, I know, futile 🙂
The safest place in the world
… is the kitchen of a lapsed vegetarian.
“Did the chicken touch there? I think the chicken touched there. Oh, and then I touched the olive oil after I touched the chicken. Maybe I should mark this knife with a big red dot to show that once it was used to cut raw chicken… Or should I put all these utensils in a pot of water and boil them for sterility?”
My kitchen paranoia is off-the-hook as I regress from vegetarianism to organic meatatarian.
I cooked meat once in the whole near decade that I was a vegetarian. And that was to make Irish Stew on St Patrick’s Day for some of our friends. Because my family Irish Stew recipe will make grown men and babies cry (in happiness). But while the dish turned out be-a-u-tifully I could not relax about the stewing beef in my kitchen. I thought it would be no big deal — I’m not squeamish about flesh, was proud of the organic meat I had sourced, and hadn’t had any problems with the smell of cooking meat. But the presence of /blood/ in a kitchen that has known only veggies and wheats and dairy is just bizarre. It was dripping red danger on my low-end porous rental apartment food preparation surfaces, and I didn’t know how to handle it. Suddenly all of those over-the-top commercials about kitchen cleaners made sense to me. Of course people would want industrial strength disinfectant sprays and disposable wipes for every surface. And where could I get some /right now/?
I’m now over that, somewhat. But it is still there receded into the background, and part of the whole experience of the foreigness of meat to me. I am ignorant to its fleshy ways. By being a vegetarian throughout my late teens and twenties, I completely missed out on the growing pains and life lessons of preparing meat for myself (not that I spent that time becoming an astounding vegetarian cook and have that to fall back on, damned squandered youth). But if I ever had a memory for how to prepare, cook, store meat, it is now lost. Bake a chicken? No idea. Stick it in a loaf pan and broil it for 4 hours? Slice the skin? Cook it frozen? Wrap it in tin foil, shake it over my head and leave it in the moonlight? All equally plausible options.
I am ignorant to the point of laughability. And don’t especially know where to start. Which is why I am starting with baby steps. So as the chicken breast I deboned sits in my oven at 350 degrees until my brand new meat thermometer tells me it has an internal temperature of 165F, I will sit here eating my steamed kale and pondering where to go for guidance. Is there such a thing as a course in remedial meat preparation for ex-vegetarians?
From the little vegetarian who ate (and cooked) meat again…
Pictured above, tonight’s dinner — courtesy of the good people at Organics on Bloor who had put all meat in their chest freezer at 40% off (just to make room for new inventory, nothing gross or “call the health inspector”-y). Which, as I was in there to buy meat anyways led to a “squh-wee!” and a bit of an insane binge on frozen animal parts (ground bison, what am I going to do with you*).
Which included the above fillet of haddock. Prepared using a mustard marinade (out of Moosewood’s Low Fat Favourites), and sitting with roast red potatoes on a bed of Carolina Kale (also out of Moosewood — thanks big bro).
The photo is of the portions on the EF’s plate. Feel free to note the quantity of potatoes and haddock relative to kale (there are more potatoes hiding under the fish). I give him a speaking to recently. As I now just serve myself more veggies than him, because he never finishes the veggies I give him (unless they’re covered in cheese). And I realized that though the portion sizes have been changed to reflect reality, he was still using the same “percentage” approach to eating his veg. He’s a bad’un. (And if he doesn’t eat his kale his face will get stuck that way and he’ll go blind and a gum tree will grow in his stomach and whatever other old wives’ tales I can throw at him…)
*I’m thinking bison tacos… oh yeah…
“Let’s go get some fuckin’ artisanal cheese.”
There was no cussing in my childhood home. (There were also no sweets, no Skippy and no white bread, but that’s a separate story).
I don’t remember it being an explicit rule, the swears just… weren’t there. We didn’t do it. You weren’t supposed to do it and you knew it in your bones. The only person I remember enforcing “language laws” was Nanna, but I think it just wouldn’t have occured to us to swear in front of our parents (or even away from them).
I don’t know when that system broke down for me. Probably in my mid-teens. And I’ve never looked back.
Ready for a little reverse diatribe?
I don’t like people who don’t swear. I think it’s contrived. I think they’re missing out on the full texture of language. I think they’re missing out on the full range of their emotions. I think they’re letting certain words become taboo in their brain. And, by extension, letting certain harmless and healthy ideas, actions, and objects become taboo. And we’re already far too overzealous in tabooifying.
CBC’s And Sometimes Y recently put together two shows on this subject: on taboo words; and on the n-word. They are well-thought out and timely discussions — especially in dealing with the recurring and present question of how and whether words with a negative connotation can be reappropriated.
My personal take on word reappropriation is that we can’t or shouldn’t do it in cases where the word was specifically invented to be derogatory towards a particular group of people — the n-word being a perfect example of this (<-how much do I wish I had a different way of referring to these words, than by the 1950s schoolteacher “the x-word” formulae).
So while my list of off-limits words is teeny tiny, I am not suggesting that we should start submitting reports at work entitled “The Fucking TPS Report” (<-okay, maybe for TPS reports…). And I think that people who swear /at/ other people leave a great deal to be desired. But there are times of frustration or elation or description where laying on a little colourful language really captures the moment. And I don’t think those moments need be too extreme. There is something about calling something “fuckin’ great” that is just… accurate. (And certainly not untrue to the etymology of the word.)
Right, so. All that said, while “fuck” is certainly an active participant in my vocabulary, there are some places where I will curb its usage. The obvious places of course. But, somewhat surprisingly, I learned this week that those places include farmers’ market. Where the aggressive k’s of the expletive rub up against the happy family farm atmosphere. After sampling a scrumptious zatar-flavoured flatbread, I turned to my friend and said “that is fuckin’ delicious”.And then I said “I don’t think you can say ‘fuck’ at a farmers’ market”. And I think I was right.
“No, no, the 84011 is for the bread…”
I took this photo a few days ago while grabbing some new pictures for my aunt’s B&B website. It’s a little grainy (I refuse to use the flash), but how fantastically oil painting-esque.
However, like an uncanny valley of still-life, like poorly executed subsurface scattering, the PLU sticker on the orange compromises the believability.
It ruins my photographic trick, and leaves white smeary sticker crud on my fruit, but apparently these stickers are also informative. (The white sticker crud is food-grade, by the way. The sticker is not.) According to Everything2 (and confirmed elsewhere), the PLU codes on those tiny ubiquitous annoyances can tell you a little something about the fruit you’re buying. The four-digit numbers are standardized codes for the type of produce (e.g. banana is 4011), and a “9” in front means organic, while an “8” means genetically modified.
How much of a nerd am I if I ask the EF to “grab me a 94011 from the kitchen while you’re up?”
It is a hardship I must bear.
It is the destiny of some people to have weird things happen to them on a regular basis, so that they might tell others about these things later, and allow those people to feel comforted by the relative normalcy of their own lives.
I am one of the ‘weird things’ people.
I just got a green bean stuck (incredibly painfully) under my fingernail. Like a little vegetable splinter.* Break that down and think about it. A green bean. Stuck. Under my fingernail.
This is not atypical of the injuries I receive on a regular basis (so frequently that when the EF hears me squeak “ow!” from the other room, I can hear that his otherwise caring “are you okay sweetie?” is being delivered through a smile…).
*I was scrubbing a pan, and the green bean had been baked on and, apparently, transmutated into a shard of pain.
Blocked Tequila Receptors.
I don’t especially like booze. Though that’s not to say that I don’t especially /not/ like booze (I love you triple negative).
I just get more out of the idea of a drink more than I get out of it in practice. So I really only have a drink if it plugs some empty conceptual or flavour space. Like a cold beer on a hot day; that same beer with indian food; wine with cheese. And so on. But I’m not prone to seeking out a drink, to get drunk. Stay with me on this.
I’m not prone to seeking out a drink to get drunk, because it would just be too damn expensive. I don’t know how far back the family tree you have to go before you find either: a) professional distillers; or b) boozehounds; or c) professional distilling boozehounds. But somewhere in my genes I inherited ‘booze blockers’.
It takes /a lot/ to get me drunk. There are some forms of alcohol I’m more susceptible to — wine and beer are the most likely to get me warm-cheeked. But the hard stuff, spirits? I can put that away like a sailor. Whisky, rum, vodka, gin, and, importantly, tequila. I don’t know what the ‘average’ is, but I think I’m well above it. Something in the order of 10 or so hard drinks, and I’m still fine. Lay down a straight line lawman, and I’ll walk it.
Which is, I don’t know, good? It means that I can appreciate the qualities of the booze, because well, if you’re sober at the bar, it’s nice to have something to do… ; )
And speaking of appreciating the qualities of the booze, allow me to introduce you to Patrón:
Patrón is a high-end tequila that the everlovin’ fiance (EF) brought me back from LA. a couple of years ago, and I still hadn’t dented it. So we broke into it last night (the tiny little sticker didn’t pose much of a security challenge).
I love tequila. It has been my favourite drink since my first taste. Which is a little unfortunate, since, well, it’s not so much socially acceptable to be the guy doing the shots. Certainly not during a 6pm after-work drink with coworkers.
Nuts.
Fortunately my family and friends are becoming aware of my soft-spot for tequila, which led to the background and foreground of the photo above — the tequila from the EF, and the shot glasses and salt shaker courtesy of my dear old dad and Mexico. And last night we took all of the above for a test drive.
zomg, so good.
Patrón is incredibly, noticeably tastier than your average tequila (the average ones being the reason that tequila is drunk with lime and salt to kill the “flavour”). You could sip it as an after dinner drink. It really is quite… delightful.
Just don’t try the regular stuff afterwards. Because yeargh. All you can think is “gasoline”.