Carriage House Cafe

(No Pictures...but a milestone!)

Brunch: my least favourite meal of the day because it means that I didn't wake up early enough for both breakfast, second breakfast, AND lunch. However, brunch at the Carriage House Cafe this afternoon was quite a relaxing and novel experience.

Carriage House Cafe is a restaurant that offers local food. It is blatantly obvious when pointed out, on Stewart Ave, but is otherwise camoflauged because it has no blatant neon sign and it is painted an olive green that matches the nearby trees. It kind of looks like a barn, and the front door is difficult to open. The interior is both bubolic (with stone brick walls, lazy fans, and a winter scene painted on a giant saw) and old-school modern (with typewriters, a turtle lamp, old-style radio, and glass tables), if that's even a style.

It was really busy when we arrived at noon, so we either had to wait upstairs (really pretty, natural lighting, clean, quaint), or sit at the couch. We decided that we might as well eat at the wooden coffee table with the velvet, paisley-seated couch with plump beige cushions in which you could lose yourself (or your wallet, haha). It felt a little uncanny to be about 50 cm lower than everyone else seated at tables. Maybe it just seemed too casual. If the entire restaurant were couches and beanbags... well, then, that's a business plan.

The locally-killed animals included salmon, cow, pig, and rabbit (there may have been others but I don't recall...). As I have never been offered the opportunity to try rabbit, I was in quite a quandary. I like rabbits. They're cute. I frequently consider getting a pet rabbit after I graduate. Heck, a rabbit face is on my login screen! So...no rabbit, rabbit pate, or rabbit sausage? What a eerie feeling, which was soon overwhelmed by my animalistic desires to try new animals and not be a hypocrite (because I eat cows. Why not rabbits?).

I ordered the breakfast sandwich, which was an apple and rabbit sausage, egg (I asked for poached), and salad lettuce, served in house-made ciabatta (one side coated in butter, the other side with some mildly spicy mustard mayonnaise), with fried potato chunks on the side and homemade ketchup. The apple and rabbit sausage was really good. It was slightly peppery, and the apple cuboids were the size of rice grains. The rabbit part was very juicy, chewy, and sausage-like. It was kind of like eating a cow burger patty, but more fatty and chunky. I wonder which part of the rabbit they used. I would assume that the legs would be too muscular, thus rendering the patty too lean if they used it. But then, where do they use? The poached egg were great. The ciabatta was perfectly crisp on the outside and chewy on the inside, with lots of holes. The butter soaking into the ciabatta made me question why I never buy good butter to put onto my toast - or rather, why I never eat buttered toast in the first place. I also really enjoyed whatever mayonnaise sauce thing they threw on the other half of ciabatta.

The potatoes and ketchup were pretty good. Perfectly fried.

I also tried a slice of bacon which was pretty thick and not very fatty. It was pretty good but a bit too salty.

Overall, I currently do not regret adding rabbit to the list of animals I've consumed, though I think I prefer lamb more. The list is:

Cow

Pig

Chicken

Duck
Goose

Lamb

Various fish (eel, salmon, etc.), but not shark

Various other seafood and crustaceans (clams, mussels, oysters, squid, octopus, in various states of rawness)

Turkey

Quail

Snake

Turtle

Rabbit

Contrary to stereotypes, I have not tried kangaroo or dogs or cats. Possibly because of the stereotypes, I would prefer to keep it that way for now.

Hot Diggity

So! I haven't had an animal-filled hot dog since something like 2006. (Hmm. That's actually kinda scary). Sure, I make vegetarian hot dogs at home every once in a while, but it's not the same as biting into a slightly charred barbecue hot dog at a friend's place, or trying an overpriced hot dog at a fair. For some reason, everyone remembers the veggie burgers, but no one remembers the hot dogs. In all honesty, though, I've never had a super delicious veggie burger or hot dog; they all lack that meaty zing.

My most important hot dog memory is that of when I was really young in Australia (so maybe I was 5?), and my brother, dad, and I were probably at a town fair. It was a cloudy, possibly rainy, day, and there was a food truck on some sports field. My dad got a hot dog, asked the person in the truck to cut it in half, and my brother and I each had half of a delicious hot dog with tomato sauce. Other hot dog memories include consuming them at rugby games. I'm not sure why I absolutely LOVED rugby as a kid, but I know that I stopped liking once I realised that it was a "boys" sport and that others would make fun of me for it.

I don't think I've had many super hot dog memories since then, except that there was this brand in Hong Kong that sold cheese-filled sausages. If someone could tell me what the name of the company is, I'd be super grateful. They even sold cocktail hot dogs the size of baby carrots!

Anyway, my friend J and I went to Hot Diggity, which is on South St., because they have vegetarian (and vegan) hot dogs. I was super excited! They have multifarious flavours, a zillion cute posters lining the walls, and a warm atmosphere (with 3 long tall benches with holes cut into the middle so that one can plop the cone of fries into the holes--unfortunately, as both J and I got the "small" fries, we both feared that the cone would fall through).

I got the Desert Dog while J got the Big Kahuna (I think?). The sausage was much longer (5 cm?) than the bun, which was a little odd, as the sausages were also really skinny. The vegetarian sausage was a little bland, not really charred, and didn't have the juicy, squeaky, sausage texture. It was alright, though. The bread was nicely grilled, and the toppings were... dry. Despite there being a chili sauce spread on the bun, the whole hot dog was as dry as a plain slice o' cheese on a piece of bread. It lacked juiciness. Although some people may love the vegetarian hot dogs here, I was not a fan.

The fries were nice (when are non trans-fat fries NOT nice? They're even yummy frozen!) and they even had the skins on them. They aren't the best I've ever had, and they're thick cut (while I prefer thin). Each dipping sauce costs 25c, and the guy gave us the House flavour for free. It has horseradish and ginger, and tastes really similar to the salad dressing from Samurai Sushi. In the end, the best part was just hanging out with J and being... "social" with someone other than my boyfriend and/or 2 close friends.

This episode culminates in me wondering, again, why I am a vegetarian. Sure, it's easy to do, environmentally better, provided I don't eat a ton of other imported processed food (read: candy), possibly more ethical, and healthier (except for the lack of vitamin B12 and iron). However, I now miss eating animals a little. I miss being ignorant about the ingredients of burgers, miss contributing to abusive cattle farms in the Amazon rainforest, and miss devouring umami by the truckload.

However, what I really wish to be, and more for environmental than economical reasons, is a freegan. You know, forage for food, obtain food from dumpsters that have only expired by half a day, eating friends' leftovers etc. This way, I could eat pretty much anything (animal or plant or fungi) I want without guilt of ruining the environment, since all the energy used in producing said food would not be wasted (and energy to transport these expired/unwanted foods to the landfill would be saved! Better for all!). As I'm in a city, I feel like this should be easy to accomplish. I guess I'm just scared of going alone and/or being labelled as a weirdo.

Harry Potter: Bertie Bott's Every Flavour Beans

My brother got these from Harry Potter World, and we split the package extremely evenly in half (in terms of the number of beans and the flavour of the beans). Although I find the packaging neat, I guess I've always imagined the beans in a small, maroon coloured draw-string sack.

 The main problem I have with these beans is that half of the flavours are "normal" jelly bean flavours, and they even taste like normal jelly bean flavours! Sure, that's not the majority, but 80% (maybe more) of the beans are composed of these 10 trite flavours! See below:

10 "Harry Potter" Flavours:

Bogies - 5

Black Pepper - ONLY 5 IN TOTAL.

Dirt - 4 total

Earthworm - 5

Earwax - 1

Grass - 4 total :(

Rotten Egg - 3

Sausage - 2 or 3

Soap - only TWO in total! Grr!

Vomit - 3

10 "Normal" Flavours (with Jelly Belly names in ()):
Banana ("Top Banana")
Blueberry ("Berry Blue") - At least 20 blueberries. :( So unfortunate.
Candyfloss ("Cotton Candy")
Cherry
Cinnamon
Marshmallow - only 5 :(
Green Apple
Sherbert Lemon ("Lemon")
Tutti-Fruitti
Watermelon

Could it just be chance that all the interesting the flavours from Harry Potter are so rare?

Sure, they didn't want to give us 24 rotten egg flavoured beans because (presuming that they taste disgusting) no one would eat all 24 of them, whereas everyone loves a kilo of lemon jelly beans! But, now I can't share with my friends. I can't watch my family's reactions, or my friends' reactions; I only have enough to try :(.

1. Black pepper (grey): Tastes like a sugary gummy dipped in a lot of pepper (but not enough to burn your mouth after swallowing the bean). Extremely realistic and replicable in the kitchen. Actually, this is a good combination; pepper and dried cranberries (or other sweet dried fruit) unexpectedly go extremely well together.

2. Bogies (off-green): Sweet, slightly tastes like ginseng, saltiness.

3. Rotten Egg (speckled white/yellow): A weird sweet twist of durian, onion, garlic, and sourness.

4. Vomit (speckled orange/red): Initially, it tastes like oranges, but then after chewing a bit, it tastes like mild slightly like chili sauce oil. I guess the oranges part was an attempt to recreate HCl (acid).

5. Earthworm (red with black spots): Sickly sweet, and tasted like traditional Chinese medicine and ginseng root.

6. Sausage (pink spotty): My brother hated this one, but I actually thought it tasted like a combination of sugar, pepper, bacon, barbecue sauce, and stale jerky. Again, I haven't eaten animals in a while, so I'm not calibrated to bacon or barbecued food.

7. (Earwax-to-be) Marshmallow (the other 2 white ones): We thought that they were earwax flavoured, but it turned out that they were BOTH marshmallow. Unfortunately, I did come across 1 earwax flavoured one, but it looked like a marshmallow one...
Earwax (white with sparse yellow streaks, not in picture): um. gross. Not sure how they got this flavour (did they taste earwax?). Not sure how to describe it either...

8. Soap: Sweet lemon detergent. It's funny because detergents are usually basic, and here we are, chewing an acidic, soapy, lemony bean.

9. Dirt: Smelled like dirt. Tasted a bit like dirt and ginseng, but it was way too gummy to have the texture of gritty dirt. I mean, smooth dirt? Not too real. If they threw in sugar grains or sprinkles to add to the texture of the dirt, this jelly bean would've been cooler.

10. Grass: Tasted like sweet, fresh, grass. Amazing! I want grass jelly! (but not actual Asian grass jelly) 

My favourite flavours were grass (for sure!), sausage, and black pepper. My least favourite were earwax, rotten egg, and bogies.

La Tasca

Spanish food is NOT Mexican food. It is NOT even close to Tex-Mex. People tend to forget that. Anyway, at D.C., we were wandering around the Gallery Place, after having visited all those museums, and we decided to go to the Hard Rock Cafe in order to show grandpa the "American" cuisine. Of course, being the disorganised family we are, we only decided this after trudging through random streets. By that time, we couldn't relocate it. Earlier, to prove that we actually passed by it, I had taken a picture: In the end, we went to La Tasca, which is a Spanish restaurant that sold tapas. On WordReference, "La Tasca" means "cheap bar" in Spanish, and "tapas" basically means "tapas". Or, "hors d'oeuvres". Or "snacks". [Today, I presented my senior project about The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao; great book! and there was tons of Spanish that I pronounced very badly. Je parle francais; haha]. Anyway, this is one of the times in which QUALITY is much more valued that "quantity".
My dad got some shrimp/scallop thing. $7
Grandpa got salmon. For these two, I have no opinion to give as I didn't consume animal pieces. $7.25
My bro got some kind of sausage with white beans. $6.75
My mum got this Spanish potato and egg and onion omelette. $5.75. In all honesty, this was really good [I tried some, because the mayo was spicy and my mum didn't like it]. Actually, it tasted more like mustardy-mayo, or something. It was EXOTIC!
My delicious mushroom risotto. Oh-so-smooth. $7
It's not really "La Tasca" because at Costco, you can get tons of food for $7. As in, you can get 48 pieces of sausage, or 92 mozzarella sticks. However, this restaurant had damn high quality [except for when they forgot to cook my brother's dish. By the time we 4 had finished, his dish hadn't arrived yet]. Although you can't really tell from them photos [they could be the size of my laptop, I guess], the serving sizes were really small, compared to other restaurant chains [the restaurant with the largest serving size has to be the American Olive Garden. I don't think I "love" Olive Garden. Anyway, good culture! [In the outskirts of D.C's Chinatown].