Always.
Never.
Not if Bieber’s watching my every move.
Maybe.
(The Butterfinger Bites, if you’re offering, Rocket Fizz.)
Indubitably.
(American-style iced coffee > Australian-style iced coffee.)
Shhhh. I know. You don’t need to tell me.
Won’t repeat.
(My gluten-free dairy-free poppy seed cake is better. Probably because I use sugar.)
Will repeat.
(Happiness is freshly-baked snickerdoodle cookies.)
Recipe here.
Heel click,
Hannah
Plans and dreams and endings and beginnings and disappointments and exhilarations and sleeplessness and giddy-bursts-of-joy-beneath-my-breath and possibilities and challenges and happiness and denial and hopes have been skittering within me for a good six weeks now, and somewhere along the way I forgot to tell you why.
Oops.
So here is the result, in a nutshell, of my recent bout of debating/positing/accepting/tinkering/hoping:
On Friday, I’ll be flying into California for another few months of travelling around the U.S., later returning to Toronto to continue building a soul-soaring life in Canada.
It feels fitting, before I bid the city a temporary adieu, to write one last installment of how to fall in love with Toronto. Shall we?
29. Continue exploring Kensington Market throughout winter, delighting in its ability to constantly surprise you. A sidewalk table laden with treats offering samples galore? Why not?
30. Step into Patty King, Kensington Market’s Jamaican bakery, and gaze excitedly at such unusual (to you) sweets as Tamarind Balls and Grater Cake.
31. Buy a snack called Doubles from said Patty King (thank your friend for being the hand model), and decide after a single bite that the turmeric-spiced fried-yet-soft bread filled with channa (chickpea curry) is quite delicious.
32. Laugh delightedly upon finding a reference to your home country in a Sunday morning crossword filled out with Lisa.
33. Laugh again (though on a different day) at how ornate and complicated sushi in North America always seems to be. Remember how simple (and wonderful) sushi was when you travelled around Japan a few years ago.
33. Attend a three hour hands-on chocolate class at ChocoSol, and be so impressed with the Toronto-based company’s ethics and chocolate creations that you buy several different flavours to review (eventually).
34. Giddily order vegan and gluten-free desserts to-go from Fresh after brunch with Sarah, your favourite housemate of all time.
35. Experience a very good day at your internship.
36. Experience a very, very good day at your internship.
37. Experience one of the best days of all time at your internship.
38. Be grateful that taking these steps towards falling in love with Toronto means you’ll truly look forward to returning in the fall.
39. Start packing. No really, Hannah. Start packing. START PACKING.
Things I Have Googled Today:
1. What is the flavour of Cap’n Crunch?
2. Lyrics to the theme song from Being Erica.
3. Lyrics to Running Bear.
4. Are narwhals real?
5. Lyrics to Mack the Knife.
6. Google Maps: Distillery District to Golden Turtle.
7. Lyrics to Desperado.
8. If I can hear every noise being made in the corridor outside my apartment, can everyone walking past my apartment hear me singing inside?
Okay, so I didn’t actually look up number eight, but I wish I knew the answer. Right now, I’m moderately scared that the next time I step outside my front door I’ll be clobbered with a saucepan for Disturbing The Peace.
But hey, at least I haven’t been singing anything by Taylor Swift or that John Jacob Jingleheimer Schmidt ditty, right?
Right.
Anyhoodle, enough about that. Here are some recent Glimpses Of Toronto.
In Australia, our trees have real birds in them. In Toronto, the trees house upside-down roly-poly birds made of papier-mâché and/or plastic. (I couldn’t quite tell.)
Delicious Balzac coffee with creamy raw cashew milk made by the wondrous Lisa.
No big deal. Just some Lego people on the subway. Back to your day with you.
Except it was a big deal, because these costumes fo’ serious fit together into a cohesive Lego masterpiece and it was amazing. Thank you for being awesome, Toronto.
Almost as awesome as the aforementioned Lego people is Canada’s obsession with dill pickle as a flavour. We already know I adore pickles, so it didn’t take much for Mr Orville Redenbacher to convince me to buy his Dill Pickle Gourmet Popcorn.
And lo! It was good. Though sadly not vegan. But still good. Yet why must dill pickle flavouring include milk solids? I should start my own dairy-free pickle snacks company. The end.
The sequel to this photo. Yes, that is a drag queen twice my size. Yes, that is a slice of buttered toast in my hand. Yes, that is a giant lipstick V on my forehead, and yes, it stands for what you think it stands for. You see, Lisa ratted me out as someone who had never before attended a Rocky Horror Picture Show Shadow Cast screening.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: thank you for being awesome, Toronto.
As I sit here contemplating the fact that one hour of walking around the lake this morning without sunscreen turned me into a human candy cane (bright pink – blindingly white – bright pink – blindingly white), and as I distract myself from the prickly burningness by eating ice cream made from frozen bananas, I find myself deciding the following:
It’s time for another Glimpses of Canberra post. It’s been a year since the first Glimpse, nine months since the Fairytale Edition, and four months since the restaurant-focused one. Today, I give you the Dessert and Batty Birds Edition. Enjoy.
In Canberra, we have something that many capital cities in the world don’t: lots of space for wandering. See also: roundabouts and The Six Degrees of Canberra Bacon.
Bonus Hannah Fact: I celebrated my shared-tenth birthday with my best friend in the revolving restaurant of Black Mountain Tower, as shown in the photo above. Our meals came with edible flowers which we put on the windowsill; by the time we left that night, our flowers had gone a third of the way around the restaurant. This made us happy.
In Canberra, Lake Burley Griffin is home to many (near-)nuclear families of Black Swans, the downy cygnets of which are very tempting to pick up and cuddle.
However, keep in mind that Black Swans can be nasty little blighters capable of chasing you all over Weston Park if you threaten their babies. Also keep in mind that they have terrifying orange demon eyes. You may decide that the cuddling isn’t worth it.
In Canberra, we have a wonderful bakery called Silo which is known far and wide for its dessert delights, including this blackcurrant, cabernet, and mint tart with a shatteringly crisp and delicious pastry base (yes, Lizzi, I thought of you). However, I’m going to ignore the thing behind the tart, because it was soggy and raisin-infested and I warned Andrew, I warned him, not to get it. Next time, he’ll know to listen to me. Won’t you, Andrew?
Oh, puppy. I love you so much it hurts sometimes.
In Canberra, bouquets are made of Ferrero Rochers rather than roses and, if you’re lucky, you’ll find one of your jazziest friends hiding behind such a bouquet.
In Canberra, not all cheesecake is devastatingly bad. Some of Canberra’s cheesecake is rather exciting, splendiferously rich, and not-too-sweet, such as this Green Tea and Marscapone slice from Iori.
In fact, Iori is quite stellar in the dessert stakes, as this plate of deliciously-nutty-and-swoon-worthy black sesame ice cream shows. (And yes, you two, I know what you’re thinking about the presentation. Stop giggling.)
In Canberra, a girl and her brother can interrupt an entire restaurant to perform two songs for their grandparents on their 60th wedding anniversary (I still have to tell you about that dinner, don’t I?), without being booed even a little bit.
And, in Canberra, our birds truly are insane.
Question Time: I might open this up to you today. Is there anything you’d like to ask me about Canberra? Go on; hit me. I’ll do my best to answer.
As you may have noticed, I don’t do a lot of Canberra restaurant reviewing on this blog. When I do decide to showcase the gustatory delights that our local chefs have to offer, it’s usually because I’ve dined somewhere at the fancypants end of the restaurant scale for family birthdays or anniversaries. And I usually entwine such reviews with odes to the magnificence of my family.
(In fact, I have another paean-within-a-dining-establishment post coming your way soon.)
However, because my blog tends towards the home-cooking/chocolate-reviewing/storytelling spectrum, I’ve accumulated a fair few [not-wonderful-quality] images from around the Canberra eating traps that I thought you might like to see.
After all, there’s more to Canberra than roundabouts and my gospel choir.
In Canberra, poached eggs are served with a jug of maple syrup (not really)…
… and occasionally take the form of a drooling Pac-Man coming to get you and smoosh your brain while you sleep.
In Canberra, burgers can be enormous, haphazard, and a bit messy…
… but if you prefer your food to be pre-packaged, precise, and pristine, you can always buy frozen avocado halves from the local supermarket.
In Canberra, Australia’s only non-coastal capital city, it is possible to find fantastic sashimi…
… even if you have to put up with your lemon giving you the finger.
In Canberra, you sometimes get irrational urges to take stupid photos of yourself in the mirror because you realise that the outfit you threw on haphazardly for a day of baking and reading at home is somewhat ridiculous. Seriously, who wears thermal socks as knee-highs, with sandals, in the middle of summer (this was taken in February)? Me, that’s who.
The only thing more cutting-edge-fashion-awesome-cool-as-ice-ice-baby than socks and sandals is thermal socks and sandals.
(That point wasn’t about a restaurant, by the way.)
In Canberra, you sometimes get an amuse bouche of scallops and mushrooms in one dainty little package…
… and sometimes you housesit for a dog that makes your heart melt.
(But that’s not really about a restaurant either.)
The End.
P.S. My heart cries for the lack of dessert in this post. Just so you know.