Blessed by the Potato

We had dinner last night at the Dragonfly Bistro (Richmond St., just south of Oxford in London). It’s a cute, tiny little place, with just about 8 tables (consequently, reservations are recommended). The menu was quite limited (a choice of one soup, 3 appetizers, and 5 entrees) that fit on a single sheet of paper (in large font at that), and rather pricey (over $50 for two, expect more if you’re inclined to drink). The food was good though, and it was a nice, relaxed, quiet atmosphere (it’s a bit of a change being able to practically whisper at dinner, since so many restaurants are fond of blasting music lately). Note that the place is brighter inside than it looks from the street, almost too bright given how intimate the atmosphere is otherwise. Just as we were finishing up, another couple came in — a loud couple — and we found out thanks to them that the staff is open to changing up the menu on request. Apparently the fish option is pan-fried, but they were open to the suggestion of possibly grilling it, or making up a salad (and oddly enough, salad is only an option on the lunch menu).

Earlier yesterday, we went off into the country to go apple picking. There’s a cute little farm on Dundas, about 4 km east of the city. We found out about it from a little guide book to u-pick-ems that we got at Home Hardware, and the directions were something like “head east on Dundas, look for signs”. We saw one sign, and it had no directions on it, just the name of the farm, and it was in the middle of a field that had already been harvested (not an apple orchard) so we weren’t sure if it was just advertising for the place we were looking for, or what. After driving for another few kilometers, we figured that was indeed the place and went back to turn down the street the sign was nearest (Richmond Street, though not that Richmond), and found it about a kilometer down that street.

It was a pretty bustling place, with a fry/hot dog stand, a shop full of souvenirs, fudge, and pies, and of course, pre-picked apples. The apple picking was busy with all sorts of families with small children. They had a really cute train made up that cost $3 to take (from what we understood, a mandatory cost of going out to pick apples) that would drive you out to the orchards, and pick you up again after the picking was done. It was actually the first time I’ve gone to pick apples, and I was amazed at how small the actual apple-producing trees were. I always imagined them as being, well, tree-sized. Like 10 m tall. My aunt and uncle have an apple tree (it produces tiny yucky green apples though), and while it’s not quite as big as most of the maples in this area, it is an impressive tree, quite large enough for a tire swing (I know this because it does actually have a tire swing). At the orchard though, the largest fruit-producing tree looked to be maybe 5 m high, with several being not much taller than I was (2.5 m, maybe). And the apples grew much denser than I ever thought possible — they seemed to be about half the mass of the tree!

Wayfare, throwing caution to the wind, picked an apple off the tree, and then ate it. Just like that, no cutting, no peeling, no checking for worms. I felt like we were taking our lives in our hands, it was thrilling. Today, I had a few more for breakfast.
“What are you doing?”
“Making apples.”
“No, the trees make the apples. What are you doing to them?”
“Err… peeling them?”
“Hmpf.”

I have to peel them and cut them up before I eat them, I don’t quite know why (maybe I was a browncoat in a past life?), and of course the apple slices go best with a bit of peanut butter smeared on them.

After apple picking, we went to the farmers market out there (I’m not quite sure if we were in Thornton or Thames Centre) just as they were closing up. If you want to eat cheap, then that’s the time to go. We stopped at one stand to grab some field tomatoes (which were huge and cheap, but didn’t look great with lots of spots on them). “I’ve got a special on right now,” the guy said, “get a cauliflower for a dollar. Or, two for a dollar. Or, three, for a dollar. Or our best value, four for a dollar.”

I take a fair number of shopping surveys, and one question often asked is how I perceive organic products. Organic products often cost more, but aren’t necessarily of higher quality, though it’s a somewhat common misconception that they are. With the PC organics line though, it looks like they take that rather modest price increase and decide to put a bit of extra quality in there to justify it beyond the organic label: I’ve had rather good experience with most of the PC organics products I’ve tried, particularly the chips (that they then discontinued on me). It’s sort of like the opposite of decaf coffee: there’s nothing about the decaffeination process that harms the flavour of coffee, but since it’s an expensive process manufacturer’s tend to use cheaper beans for the decaf line so that the end product is the same price. (Thank you, Alton Brown, for more random food trivia)

So this week I decided to give PC’s organic pretzels a try. It was promising: the bags were sized about right for me (smaller than the giant Rold Gold pretzel bags, but larger than an individual snack size), and they also had 50% less salt than Rold Gold. While I love salty snacks such as pretzels, I don’t like it when they’re too salty, and often find myself knocking off a lot of that coarse salt. However, I just haven’t had much luck with reduced-salt pretzels: the Hannover bag I tried some time ago was rather tasteless, but it had less than a third of the salt of Rold Gold. So I thought that the PC Organics should have been a happy medium, and they were fairly healthy beyond that (loaded with carbs, sure, but very low in fat). They were also featured in the Loblaws (or was it the RCSS?) flyer this week.

They were awful. I was really disappointed in them. They were quite hard to chew, and very nearly tasteless. It was, as Wayfare put it, “like chewing glazed cardboard”. They won’t be getting another chance. And damn them for marketing to me! I was sucked in by the ads!

I find it odd sometimes how taste can be affected so much by changing the salt (or sugar). I don’t know if it was also due to the brand change, but those reduced salt pretzels were nearly tasteless (not quite as bad as the PC ones, since they at least had a decent texture, but pretty boring). Likewise, the 1/3 less sugar Frosted Flakes and Froot Loops were fairly terrible as well. Yet everything I know about human taste perception says that it’s logarithmic: taking away half the salt or sugar shouldn’t make it taste half as good, it should be more like a 30% change. Indeed, Campbell’s for a long while had 50% reduced salt tomato soup and I could never tell the difference (nowadays I don’t seem to find that variety, so I don’t know if they just stopped bothering with the original and now sell the reduced salt version as the normal one, or if they gave up on the slightly healthier choice).

And if anyone from President’s Choice is reading this, please bring back my thick-cut organic potato chips in the medium-sized bags! (They don’t even have to be organic, just yummy!)

I’m here late in the lab doing some data analysis to get ready for my presentations in Ottawa next week. It’s been pretty crazy, two 14-hour nights back to back now, leaving long after the sun has come up. And I’m still only a little more than halfway done, with just one day left to go.

During all these all nighters, I like to snack. And since everything is closed, I have to plan my snacks ahead a bit, and tend to go on the “safe” side and bring extra junk, which is of course not good for the diet. The last two nights I’ve brought some sugar-free gum to keep my mouth busy without ruining my diet or my teeth (good, especially since I just found out I cracked another tooth and am in line for porcelain crown #3). I usually avoid gum because it does stick a bit to my extensive dental work, and also because I usually have a strong desire to swallow it. Fortunately, that is not nearly as strong for mint gum (when I do chew gum, it tends to be yummy — not mint). I had two regular sized (12 packs?) last night of whatever free samples came in the mail yesterday afternoon (Trident? Dentyne?), and a whopping 60 pack of Excel that I picked up at the store tonight. After all this gum, I can share with you several observations. The first is that Excel does stay flavourful a lot longer than the Trident (Dentyne?), but that the excel gets so tough and unpleasant to chew before the flavour is gone that I spit it out not much after I would have spat out the Trident anyway. The second is that those new-fangled push-through pill-type packs for gum have essentially eliminated the gum wrapper, giving me no natural way to wrap up my discarded chew. Thirdly, my breath is very minty.

So the first thing I did when I got back was to get a pizza. I missed pizza so much over there… 10 days isn’t much to go without pizza, and I’ve done that many, many times in the past completely without noticing, but going without the possibility of pizza starts to erode the psyche. It makes their whole society seem like its a hollow sham, waiting to fly apart at the seams into unbridled anarchy. After all, where can a society expect its members to function normally when they must live each day without the security blanket that is knowing good pizza lies just a phone call away? Of course, they probably think the same thing about our society and the lack of good train/bus service.

They might be right.

The flight home was ok: completely packed this time, so we didn’t have the luxury of the empty seat. We were getting awfully sick of fish and rice, though. I mean, I don’t even eat the stuff yet I was sick of seeing and hearing about it. The dinner on the plane was fish and rice (we were aware of the fact that chicken and pasta was also an option, but it looks like everyone at the front of the plane opted for that so they were out by the time they got to us), and it reeked. Breakfast on the plane was… fish and rice (or a nasty-looking omlette and a sausage that even Dave wouldn’t eat). Our lunch/snack was an assortment of tiny sandwiches, and a giant seaweed-wrapped concoction of fish and rice.

Today’s featured Facebook gift is a paper crane. LOL, I can’t escape!

I slept 14 hours last night. It was pretty good — it would have been better if the fan at my parents house didn’t have an auto temperature detector/shutoff that made it cycle on and off all night. Stupid electronics trying to be smarter than me…

At least three times now I’ve meant to go out for ice cream (once leading an expedition for it), and three times we’ve found all the places we could find closed up. Today I finally went to the place that had the fancy crepes and ice cream, and got myself a tiny bowl. It was much more expensive than I thought: 300 Yen (~$3) for a tiny, tiny little scoop. It was really good orange ice cream though (not quite sure if it was sherbert, gelato, or something else… I think its closest to a traditional sherbert), so I think I might go back this afternoon before they close on me again, or maybe tomorrow morning, and spring for the 1100 Yen crepe + 2 scoops + toppings. Plus I probably should try the green tea flavour (thankfully this particular store doesn’t trade in whale flavour).

Yesterday, Dave completely lost his mind. Too many nights in a row drinking and not sleeping, and all of a sudden he was giggling like a madman at anything. As he was trying out the TMS stimulator, he was giggling uncontrollably. At dinner, he nearly lost it laughing over the picture of the sausage in the menu. This, I assure you, was not a normal giggling fit, but clearly one that bordered on madness. Actually, it lay on the madness side of the border, so I should say it bordered on sanity. Despite desperately needing to sleep, when he got back to the hotel he stayed up until dawn (which, to be fair, is at 4 am here — I don’t think they’re in the right timezone for their longitude) uploading photos to facebook.

Facebook, meanwhile, has started to scare me. They have all these stories, pictures, information on links and relationships between people, and chintzy gifts. The only purpose I can see for all this is that they aim to slowly replace us with robots, or perhaps pod-grown versions of ourselves, and this information is necessary for the first wave to fit in without drawing undue alarm.

For dinner tonight we found an out-of-the way Italian restaurant that was fantastic. It only had two tables and seating at the bar for about 6, but the food was really quite good, even by Canadian standards of Italian food. I had a plain penne with arrabiata, and Gen had linguini with salmon and I think a pesto sauce. The proprieter was a very friendly old woman who spoke 4 languages (including passable English). Like many places, we had a bit of trouble walking out with a receipt: it seems to be a pretty foreign concept here, at least for food.

For all those who doubted its existence, behold: bacon bread!