Japancake

So I decided to use up a few odds and ends to make breakfast yesterday. I called it a Japancake. First you fry 3 slices of bacon on low heat till desired crispiness:

Then you drain off the bacon grease and flatten out some leftover rice in the bottom of the pan:

Over that you crack two eggs:

Then chop up the bacon and sprinkle that on top too:

Then grate cheese over the whole thing:

Put it on low heat:

Cover and let it cook for ~10 minutes:

It should look something like this:

And serve! Mmmm....

Next time I'm gonna whisk the eggs together and add some seasoning before pouring them over the rice, and fry some onions with the bacon to add as well.

I think this would go well on Shopsin's menu :P I've decided I must get a passport to be able to go there someday. If you go there make sure you know the rules! (mentioned in the Yelp reviews)

For dinner we went to Le Roi du Wonton like I had been meaning to. It was good! We got two kinds of wonton soup, dumplings in peanut sauce, and the twice-cooked pork. The wontons were big and flavorful, and the bowl had extra toppings :D There was seaweed, lettuce/cabbage, pickled veggies and some sliced omelette. Yummy!

Here's the dumplings in peanut sauce (the same ones used in the wonton soup)

And the pork. Sooo good! Served on top of an omelette fried with green onions, which was great with the sauce.

I'll definitely return there often seeing as it's right across the street from our place!

Oh how I love this neighborhood...

With it's $2 specials on a falafel pita trio! Especially on a Friday night when I don't want to cook.

I have started to find and list and dream of and drool over every restaurant in the neighborhood that I want to go to. And this neighborhood is well stocked, believe me. With a university campus supplying lots of poor students to keep prices down, and a large Asian population having earned this neighborhood it's name of Chinatown 2, as well as other ethnicities (Korean, Middle-Eastern, Brazilian, Japanese etc.), it's like having the united nations of food lying at my doorstep. And living downtown gives me a wealth of vegan and fasting food to choose from as well :)

There's the Roi du Wonton across the street, which I haven't been to yet but I've heard good reviews of, my favourite hamburger place Picks just half a block away, and another good one called Buns just around the corner, the Soup & Noodle between them both, then there's about 10 more on St-Catherine just a few blocks away that I have to go to, I'm too lazy to post them here :P And a few more on Lincoln (one street north), St-Mathieu (one street west), Maisonneuve (at the intersection of our street) and Guy-Concordia, and... there's too many to list lol. There's at least 3 Altaib Grill/Pizza places within a 5 block radius of here.

I was originally planning on visiting every restaurant starting with the closest ones, but I broke my "rule" to go to picks first thing after Pascha :P and then after reading that review of Kanbai, plus the fact that I had been meaning to go there for a while, well I had to go there too. Tonight I think I'll go to the Roi du Wonton with Carlo. Oh, and two of my favourite sub places, Dagwoods and Quiznos, within a 3 minute walk too! I'm glad I've started biking to work...

Chicken Yassa

Recipe here.

Awesomeness. My Senegalese coworker just gave me the basics of this recipe (the Maggi + mustard marinade, bbqing it then simmering with water, onions and lemon juice) and I added the rest. GO MAKE THIS NOW!

Braai-ing Boerewors

A few days ago I found a thread on Chowhound asking what is the best sausage you ever had. The poster talked about boerewors, a South-African sausage. I decided I wanted to make it for my first sausage making attempt ever, and after a few days of reading online about sausage making techniques I went to buy the casings and meat yesterday. It turned out great! Here's the recipe I used. It was the first time I used the meat grinder I got last Christmas to make sausages and it worked really well.

Here's all 3 kilos of it:

And here's some of it after it spent some quality time on the grill following this advice:

Total and complete success! I loved it and I can't wait to make more :D

I added a handful of soaked hickory wood chips in a double-layered foil packet (pricked with a toothpick on top in several places) under the grill to smoke it, I cooked it like that for about 12-15 minutes and then when the smoke stopped I took the packet away and let it crisp up a bit before removing it, turning it several times during the cooking. It was easy enough to flip with a good pair of tongs and a spatula, it only broke in one place (on the blackened side). It got an amazingly smoky flavor.

The texture was quite loose, not sausage-ey at all but I figure that's just cause it was freshly made, the other half of the batch is in the fridge and I'll cook some more tomorrow to see how the texture has changed.

Soon I'll have to go buy some sheep casings to make those hot dogs I wanted to do!

Hot dogs!

I'll start this with Christ is Risen! Le Christ est Ressucité!

Ok I recently discovered Nathan's hot dogs, they are not available in retail here in Montreal yet (except in large quantities from the distributor, which I got. And he's a great guy :D Oh and you can bet I'll be posting about it when they are!). They are in a few restos (Orange Julep, the Green Spot and Au Gros Jambon) so far though. I love them! Go buy them if you can. But that aside, I googled them and came up with this, a guy that made the hot dogs from the Michael Ruhlman book Charcuterie, which he says are even better than Nathan's. Of course lots of homemade things are better than their industrialized versions, so me, being the crazy foodie that I am thinks to myself: I must do this! Now in that link he doesn't give the recipe. But I remember reading about the Paupered Chefs making it a couple of years ago and posting the recipe! Jackpot! So now in my caffeine-fuelled hot dog frenzy, I announce to the masses that I WILL MAKE HOT DOGS!

I'm so happy I got that meat grinder/sausage stuffer for Christmas :D:D:D

I don't know when I'll get the time and money to do this, but it'll be posted here when I do. In the meantime I'll post that last link to my "cooking projects" board on Pinterest.

More on introversion

Here's an interesting talk Susan Cain gave at TED about introversion that one of my friends posted on Facebook recently.

Apparently learning to care for introverts is a theme these days, as evidenced by a Google search that came up with this article by Jonathan Raunch of The Atlantic that goes along with the picture in my previous post, as well as the previous link.

How to Care for Introverts