Lucky Button

Feeling like a very, very lucky button this Sunday morning.  We've got a funk mix on the stereo, we had a delicious Sunday Breakkie of Dotytron buttermilk pancakes, bacon, and a mixed-berry banana smoothie and we've got a lazy day of mostly nothing ahead of us.  As far as Daylight Savings Spring Forwards go (the worst of the Daylight Savings), we're doing okay with being robbed of that extra hour so far.

This weekend has been absolutely splendid.  I met my friend S for coffee before the ROM with the Yam on Friday and we had a nice, long one-on-one chat that was absolutely delightful and heart-warming.  She is such an incredibly talented artist and she is so committed to her craft and so inspiring to be around.  Her heart is so big and talks with her always mean getting to the heart of the matter - no b.s., no boundaries.  

The ROM itself was a bit of a bust, but a learning experience nonetheless.  The Big Yam was completely enamoured with the fish tank they have, which wasn't really worth the cost of the $15 admission for me.  He's too young.  I have to remember that.  I don't usually plan high-concept outings but then I feel pressured because so many other young, urban parents do.  I gotta trust my instincts.  The ROM isn't particularly fun for young kids, either.  As far as museums go, it's not that hot.  Children's museums and the Science Centre are way better for the under-5 set.  He was just as happy to sit outside the ROM eating a hot dog watching construction across the street and then taking the subway home.  I will say though, that I feel lucky to live in downtown Toronto.  We have access to the AGO and the ROM and it doesn't take us more than half an hour by public transit to get there.  When he gets to a certain age, it's going to be so much fun raising him with a huge metropolis at his fingertips.  

Friday night I had an awesome, side-splittingly funny International Women's Day evening with SMcKay and Lolly.  We went to Pacific Mall and got frozen yogurt and then went out for a delicious Chinese food dinner and they got to experience the wonder of Asian food value-for-dollar.  I think the price of dinner blew Lolly's mind, even if she did white person out and tip an egregious 20%.  The Dotytron's Record Club went until 2am.  It's so cute.  I love the concept and I'm glad he gets to do it.  The four guys get together, listen to an album and then drink and eat nibblies and talk about the record and associated music.  It's such a great outlet for him and the boys in the Club are a good crew.  

It was the Dotytron's first time hosting, so it was B's first time at our house.  He was really impressed with our dead-end street.  In his words: "You can't put a price on that!"  I have a few friends who are making their first forays into home buying in Toronto and it makes me feel so lucky that the Dotytron saw what he did in Lil' Ugmo.  We got really, really lucky.  In the price we paid and in all the stuff we dumb-lucked into.  I didn't think a dead-end street would be so awesome, and it is.  When you have kids?  It's the best.  Our street itself is the cutest.  Our neighbours knocked on our door yesterday afternoon and asked if the Big Yam could come out and play.  That's the kind of Jane Jacobs/Sesame Street type thing that I love about small towns like where my sister lives, and I never would have imagined that we would luck into living on a street where stuff like that happens.  It makes me so happy that the Big Yam will have the opportunity to grow up in this Norman Rockwell-y type setting in a big urban centre.  Yesterday was the first real warm day we've had - the day that signals the beginning of spring.  Thinking about walks to the beach in the summer, or playing in the splash pad or the park or the outdoor swimming pool THAT'S AT THE BOTTOM OF OUR STREET makes me feel so grateful that the Dotytron convinced me that Lil' Ugmo was the house for us.  It was the most solid call he's ever made.  We decided that he can coast on that for the rest of his life, and the only thing that will get these daps taken away from him is if he makes a call that causes us to lose the house.  Pretty fair, I'd say.

Then we had a Supper Club dinner at Momofuku Daisho.  I had pre-ordered us the Bo Ssam large format meal, which serves 8-10 and costs $240.  That's the base price and then any additional drinks, food, tax, and tip are added on top of that.  Here's the menu:

The Dotytron and I shared an extra dish of the halibut cheek crudo, because I love crudo.  The crudo was sliced a little thick for me, for a fish like halibut cheeks.  It would have been better if things had been sliced thinner.  It wasn't as nice as the crudo at Porzia.  The toppings for this crudo were kind of unimaginative (caper berries, fried wonton crisps, some thinly sliced white radish) and there wasn't any lubricating element like oil, or acid to bring all the elements of the plate together.

The Bo Ssam - a 6lb slow roasted pork shoulder served with lettuce leaves, white rice, pickled cucumber, 12 oysters, and a chili sauce, some kimchi, and a ginger-scallion sauce for making rolls.

Overall, I wasn't overly impressed with Daisho.  I thought the service, for a "fine-dining" establishment was really poor.  When the Dotytron and I walked in, we were told there was a 2 hour seating limit, which hadn't been made clear to me when I made the reservation or at any of the multiple points of contact the restaurant made to confirm the reservation.  Then, even though we were clearly waiting for the rest of our party to arrive, the server was like, "Well, your bo ssam is ready, and it's at its peak of perfection now," and I'm like, well what the heck am I supposed to do about that?  That's not MY FAULT.  What kind of restaurant expects to throw out a giant hunk of meat as soon as you sit down?  It's just poor and it set a bad tone.  The Bo Ssam was delicious, I have to admit.  The fat was nicely caramelized and the meat tore off in fat-soaked chunks.  The menu at Daisho was uninspiring, overall.  If the crudo and the service was any indication, I wasn't impressed and I had a hard time, looking at the menu, thinking of other dishes I would have ordered, had the Bo Ssam left us with any room.  The room is beautiful, but I'm in no hurry to go back.

Our company was wonderful, as always.  It's a mix of high school friends and some other peeps.  I love them all.  They are all so worldly, and interesting, and passionate, and brilliant conversationalists - it's just so nice to be surrounded by your smart, funny, accomplished friends, ya know?  Half of them we went to high school with and the other half are friends of friends and we all share a love of talking around good food and drink.  My friend L works at Hot Docs (her job is incredible) and was talking about starting a Documentary Film Club.  I love all these clubs!!!  It's like all these mini-salons with people I love.  What's not to like???

We have so many disparate groups of friends that it feels like we never get to see any of them as much as we'd like.  When we do, I'm reminded of how lucky I am to be surrounded by so many brilliant, talented, bright young things that love us as much as we love them.  So lucky.

Now we have the whole day to lazily prepare for Mexico.

Happy March Break, all!

Fin.

Momofuku Noodle Bar / Is You Tweaking?

This is a summary of my post-work/weekend activities for the upcoming week:

Monday - meeting with the Friends of Greenwood Park (FROG) to plan the upcoming Fall Festival
Tuesday - rehearsal for Lolly's wedding
Wednesday - dodgeball (but we will likely skip)
Thursday - our friend A is visiting from NYC and coming over for dinner and hangs
Friday - dinner at B & G's house, their thank you for all the peeps who helped with their wedding
Saturday - Mandarin school and then a birthday party in Whitby and then one of us (only the Dotytron, probably) going to see A's show at the Rex
Sunday - hosting the Dotytron's former colleague K and her partner G for brunch followed by an afternoon Halloween party at a neighbour's house

FML FML FML FML FML FML FML FML FML FML.

The Dotytron added the brunch in yesterday and I was like, this is NOT a good idea but he heeded me not.  He says he's going to do all the work.  OMG - I'm SO TIRED just looking at that schedule of events!

This weekend was jam-packed but fun.

Friday night we went to Lolly's colleague's house and she bought us dinner and we listened to the Dotytron and her colleague run through the wedding music.  Lolly's colleague's wife also proceeded to TERRIFY the Big Yam with a series of activities/toys that I think she thought were going to be kid-friendly but really just ended up reducing him to tears (this included: a monkey mask, a toy rat that looked like Nicodemus from The Secrets of Nimh, and a wizard puppet).

Saturday I stayed home and prepped the house while the Dotytron took on Mandarin school duty with the Big Yam.  Who ran into the ping pong table and cut his lip and bled all over the place.  Running into the ping pong table at Chinese school is beyond perfect.  The only thing better would have been if he had tripped over a panda.

Then SMckay came over and I got to witness her and the the Dotytron doing individual fake slow-dancing in my living room as they figured out the tempo of a song.  I love that girl.  She is such a good friend and so positive and funny and warm.  

My youngest bro came over for dinner with his new girlfriend and told us tales from dental school which scared us STRAIGHT.  If you don't brush your teeth every 12 hours there's an impenetrable wall of bacteria that gets built up on your teeth.  And the school is INTENSE.  It's like four years of 12 classes each term or some craziness.  And he went through hell to get there.  But once you're in, they give you lots of chances - you can re-take exams and tests twice or something.  He told us his professor said the following, in response to some of the student's qualms about the heavy workload, "Do you know what they call the person with the worst grades in dental school?  Doctor."  BA-DUM, CHING!

 Saturday breakfast: English bacon, avocado, tomato, and egg sandwich (totally off the record)

I made us honey glazed ribs (that were marinated in a hoisin-sriracha-honey-ginger sauce), baked squash, brussels sprouts, and potatoes with sour cream and chives.  Pumpkin pie with whipped cream for dessert.

I also whipped up the Big Yam's Halloween costume which is looking more and more hilarious by the second.  I basically sewed up a nehru jacket, guys.  No big deal.  It was my first time sewing something from a pattern and it was pretty doable!  I think all-told with the cutting and sewing, it took me about 3 hours to do?  That's not too shabby!

Sunday morning the Dotytron whipped up a batch of his signature waffles and we ate that with sausage from our CSA.

Then we did backyard-y type chores at our house and at Momma D's house.

Then we met our friends MHui and her hubby for dinner at the Momofuku Noodle Bar.  We ordered almost the whole menu (I think we skipped 3 items) and the bill came to $148 (including tax, without tip).  Overall, I'd say the food was good, but not great (individual comments will follow the pictures of the dishes below).  I think David Chang is suffering from being over-hyped (not his fault) and that the concept has to be situated in a particular time and place.  When we first went to Momofuku Noodle bar, 8 or 9 years ago, ramen restaurants weren't as ubiquitous as they are now.  This was a time pre-Ippudo, in NYC.  No one was really taking Asian foods and making them with Berkshire pork or serving it in a no-reservations place in the East Village.  No one was doing updated, re-imagined Asian street food and serving it up all low-key styles.  At the time, what Chang was doing was revolutionary.

The problem is that this is TORONTO.  We have Banh Mi Boys (who are admittedly, in the debt of Chang for blazing a trail for them to follow), we have amazing regional Chinese, Japanese, all kinds of Asian cuisine, a billion ramen joints on every block.  So for Momofuku to touch down now, so long after the seismic shift, there's no way it's not going to feel like a bit anti-climactic.  The food was good, the service was poor (diffident, bordering on rude), but I'm not in a rush to go back.  It was aight, but at that price, and with that limited selection, (wait for it) (you know where I'm going to go with this)...I'd rather go to Guu.

 Momofuku rice cakes.  These were fat, dense, rice-flour gnocchi-like dumplings, which were very chewy.  The sauce coating them was nice, sweet and mildly spicy, but the sauce didn't penetrate the "cake" and so you got a thin coating of flavour and then a rubbery, bland rice flavour underneath.

 The famous bao.  Rice flour bread around pork belly with cucumber and hoisin.  Delicious.

 Chicken wings: lightly smoked, meaty, very tasty, in another sweet-spicy sauce.

 Chicken and egg - sticky rice with more thinly sliced pickled cucumber, crisp-skinned roasted chicken and the famous Momofuku soft-poached egg.

 A cold vegetarian rice noodle dish.

 Chilled spicy noodles with crispy-sugared cashews, pork sausage, baby spinach, with a spicy sauce that you tossed together with the noodles.  This was probably my favorite dish.

The ramen.  Somewhat anti-climatic.  The broth was very mild, but not too salty, which is nice.  The noodles were overcooked.  The egg runny - I doubt they make the fish cake in-house.  Good but not great.  I like it less than Kinton's.  

I will say that this was the PERFECT Sunday night night out.  We left the house around 4pm, finished dinner by 6pm, stopped by Baker Bots for ice cream sandwich desserts and we were home by 8pm, in time to put the Big Yam to bed and watch a few episodes of Sons of Anarchy.  SO GOOD!  That's exactly what I want out of a Sunday evening, nowadays.

This is the Big Yam's new favorite show that he gets to watch at J's.  It's called "My Big Big Friend."  I've never watched an episode, but the Big Yam started singing the theme and now it's in my head all the time.  I discovered that it's actually from Brazil, so the new rule is, if we let him watch an episode, it's got to be in Portuguese.  Ha!  Are there no ends to my diabolical attempts to ruin his childhood?  

Fin.