Great sushi in the GTA

Against all odds, I love sushi. Despite never eating fish or sea creatures of any kind until I was almost 18 (my mother was deathly allergic so we never had any such stuff in the house), I have really taken to pretty much every type of seafood imaginable.

In rounding up my favourite sushi restaurants, I have to note that I'm totally aware there is a sushi strip on Bloor St., but so far I have to say that favourites remain outside of that strip, with two of them still being in the downtown core and one of them being WAY outside that strip - it's technically in Markham.

Here's a quick round-up of three of my very favourite sushi restaurants. (All links below go to a Google Map so you can see where the restaurant is.)

Daily Sushi: (Right beside Carlton Cinemas at Carlton and Yonge Sts.) Mark recommended this place to me, and it's pretty good. Cheap, central, and the sushi tastes fresh. I recommended this place to a colleague and she loved it.

Nagoya: (Kennedy Rd. and 14th Ave.) Okay, so I cheated a little on this one, because it's an all-you-can-eat Japanese buffet so we were ordering up much more than sushi: Breaded scallops, teriyaki dishes, a pretty tasty beef and green onion dish, etc. but the sushi here really is amazing.

The handrolls were not what I envisioned them to be - they came in cones of crispy unsoaked seaweed paper and you could pour your wasabi-laden soy sauce right into the cone. The salmon, avocado and cucumber one was amazing. Their soft-shell crab rolls were good too.

Nijo Sushi: Even though it's a tiny hole-in-the-wall on Huntley St. beneath an apartment, their salmon (my favourite type of fish for sushi) is to die for. It's cheap and fresh and portion sizes are bigger than what you expect from a typical sushi place and it's near my work and not far from my house ANDDDDD (as if this sentence could run on any longer!) they always give me something complimentary with takeout, usually edamame. What more can you ask for from a sushi place?! I think I'm in love!

Yours in food,
-Stacey

Featured Food: Boy Bawang Cornick

Cornick is the quintessential Filipino junk food. Cornick consists simply of crispy fried corn, loaded with salt and roasted garlic. Other flavours such as Adobo or BBQ are also available, but the plain garlic flavour is the most popular. Cornick is similar to corn nuts, though the corn kernels are harder and smaller than their North American cousin's.The biggest brand in cornicks is "Boy Bawang" (literally, garlic boy), made in Caloocan City, the Philippines. Boy Bawang is readily available in Filipino stores and ethnic groceries in Toronto.

For those who like cornick, it's a very crunchy and addictive snack. If you're not careful, you might find that you've consumed the whole bag in no time. And there lies the downside: like most snack foods, it's packed with sodium!

Sooo, it's bad for your heart and kidneys, but as snack foods go... It's pretty good.

- Mark

Mabuhay Festival: Filipino food, arts & culture

We spent half a Saturday at the annual Mabuhay Festival & Trade Show, held at the Metro Toronto convention centre. Although the festival was mostly a trade show and performing arts festival, Tasting Toronto was there for a taste of authentic Filipino cuisine.

We started off with some Sago, a sweet and refreshing chilled drink of caramelized sugar and vanilla with tapioca pearls (sago). This is the Philippines’ answer to bubble tea, and I could’ve sworn growing up that we invented the stuff. No matter. Although it only comes in 1 flavour, unlike bubble tea, it’s still one of my favourite summer drinks.

Next we had a Pork Siopao. It’s a variant of the Chinese steamed bun, and was filled with a sweet and savory Pork Asado. This was yummy, a meal onto itself.

We then had some colourful Puto. These are sweet rice cakes that can be had as a snack, an appetizer, or as the lady behind the counter was telling us, a perfect complement to the pork-blood stew (Dinuguan) she was serving. I’m noticing everything’s been sweet so far. Filipino’s must have a sweet tooth.

For our main sit-down meals we had the following:

Pancit Palabok – Noodles with fish sauce, garnished with hard boiled eggs, green onions, crushed chicharon (pork-rinds), squid adobo, flaked fish meat, and shrimp.

Tocino – Sweet cured pork.

Lumpiang Shanghai – Shanghai style mini eggrolls (lumpia), stuffed with salted pork, served with a sweet and sour sauce.

Chicken Afritada – A chicken stew.

Menudo – A stew or pork & liver with chick peas, pickles, raisins, and Vienna sausages.

Chicken BBQ – The skin on this thing was soooo good because that’s where all the marinade was. I justified eating this on the grounds that the subcutaneous fat had already rendered away. The marinade was sweet and tangy, with hits of lime, soy sauce, fish sauce, and honey.

And of course, there’s white rice at every meal!

We had some prawn crackers after the meal, which I downed with a can of Sarsi, a sarsaparilla-based soft drink that kind’a tastes like a mix of root beer and Pepsi.

For dessert we had a frozen coconut. The freezer friendly packaging is a really good idea for tropical cravings. It was a reasonably good dessert, but we were definitely wowed by the elegant presentation in a coconut shell bowl.

Dessert #2 was a Filipino classic, Halo-halo. It’s shaved ice with ice cream, evaporated milk, sugar, and all sorts of preserved fruits and beans.

There were a lot of food options, including myriad desserts that we had no room left to try. Other foods there were: Bopis, a pork lung stew; Balut, fertilized duck egg with a nearly-developed embryo inside; Adobo, chicken or pork cooked in soy sauce and vinegar; various types of Pancit (noodles); Bibingka, a sweet rice cake with salted egg, on a banana leaf … and many more.

On our way out we grabbed a Buko Pandan pie (buko means coconut, and pandan is a leaf used in cooking). It was bright green, and really good!

World Routes: Mexican Festival @ Harbourfront Centre

As part of the World Routes festivals that Harbourfront Centre is putting on this summer, we celebrated the 200th Anniversary of Mexican independence and the 100th Anniversary of the Mexican revolution with some really damn good food!

We ate:

Cactus salad:

Tasty, but not the type of thing you can gorge on, so the small portion they gave us was just right.

Guacamole and nacho chips:

I LOVE guac. When making it at home I usually cut the onions and tomatoes in bigger pieces but, that aside, it tasted almost exactly the way I like my guac and the nacho chips were really crispy with just the right amount of salt.

Chipotle chicken quesadilla:

Simple and delicious, this quesadilla didn't need any frills. It was just cheese and chipotle chicken and, with the complex flavours of the guacamole and cactus salad it came with, that's all it needed to be. Yum!

Cactus burrito (el burro):

This one was MUCH better than I expected. I was envisioning it to be all cactus and maybe a little sauce, but it actually had rice, beans, cheese, and other veggies in there, and it was very satisfying and filling for being a vegetarian dish. This was actually Mark's sister's dinner but we couldn't help stealing a few bites! Thanks Marie!

Churros:

"Rico's Churros" is a staple at every major Harbourfront festival, Mexican or not, but at least this time they didn't run out of the awesome milky caramel they fill them with; at Luminato's closing ceremonies they didn't have any filling left so I had a plain one and have been longing eversince to have a filled one. The place is forgiven though, because NOTHING tops how satisfying a filled churro from that booth is. Be careful eating it though or you'll be like me: wiping all the icing sugar off your clothes while your boyfriend and his sister laugh hysterically!

Fresh coconut:

I believe the guy who runs the fresh coconut booth is also at every major festival. We bought a young coconut - kind of expensive at $5, but less expensive than fully ripened coconuts at $7 - and he hacked it open and we stuck a straw in it and drank the juice. You can go back to him when you're done and ask him to hack it open again so you can get the meat, but you don't get much meat from a young coconut - and it's more like jelly than actual coconut. For the price, I don't think I'd get it again; the juice in the young one was a bit watery and probably less flavourful than what you'd find in a fully-ripened coconut. Next time I'll try the older one for $2 more.

Unfortunately we missed the lucha libre wrestling show (from what we could tell there was only one show each day of the festival), but the food more than made up for that. There was also a good mix of music, some traditional and some modern, coming from the stages so we weren't without entertainment.

I'm looking forward to doing a couple more of these World Routes festivals - they have different ones running right up until September at Harbourfront Centre.

Yours in food,
Stacey

What's your Toronto food event this weekend? Jul 17-19

Pizzeria Libretto Review

Restaurant: Pizzeria Libretto

Neighbourhood: Portuguese Village
Address: 221 Ossington (just south of Dundas on the east side of Ossington)
Price: $$ / $$$$$
Website: http://www.pizzerialibretto.com/

ATMOSPHERE: ♥♥ / ♥♥♥♥♥
Pizzeria Libretto's location saved it from getting only one heart: Being in a cool up-and-coming part of the Portuguese Village made for a good adventure. It's a pretty small restaurant, which is absolutely fine in our books, but there was a wait and no place to actually physically wait (the policy seems to be that they take your name and cell number and phone you when your table is ready. There was a couple in front of us who we heard say "We don't have a cell phone" and they were told to go outside and come back in 20 minutes).

So we walked around for a bit (which was fine since, as we said earlier, the area is neat and has great up-and-coming character so we explored it both before and after dinner) and were surprised when we got the phone call, as it was much quicker than we thought it would be - it took about 10 minutes to be called when we were told it could be about 20.

We got seated at a communal table and the place was unbelievably noisy. If you read the "Atmosphere" section on the restaurant's webpage, that's exactly what they want it to be. So kudos for them achieving that but it's not me and Mark's cup of tea. That type of atmosphere is okay once in a while, but we really are the more "private diner" type who appreciate a nicely-set table for two.

FOOD: ♥♥♥ / ♥♥♥♥♥

As an appetizer, we ordered the bison carpaccio with shaved piave cheese and olive oil drizzle to start. Being slightly obsessed with bison, I enjoyed it, and the cheese was very delicious. It was a nice way to start the meal.

Then came the main attraction (pizza, of course!)

Mark ordered a Margherita pizza, which was pretty good but very sparse with its toppings. I understand Margerita is supposed to be a simple pizza, but it would've been better with more fresh basil and a little more cheese.

I had the rapini, goat cheese and black olive pizza which was really good. I think my biggest problem with the pizza was the crust - it was thin to a fault in the middle and was almost chewy as Mark described in his earlier post about three pizzas in three days. The outer crust was much tastier than the middle of the pizza. It sort of reminded me of naan.

A couple pizzas there have the United Nations (correction: European Union's! Whoops!) designation of being an authentic neapolitan pizza - look for them on the menu with the letters D.O.P beside them.

DECOR: ♥♥♥ / ♥♥♥♥♥
Cute. More upscale than your typical pizza place. Lots of impromptu lighting. They try to cram in too many tables though. There wasn't much elbow room for cutting your pizza, and I found the communal table we were seated at to be too narrow. But the huge pizza oven at the back was pretty cool. However the pizza flour was stored pretty close to the bathrooms, which kind of gave even me the "icks" even though I'm the furthest thing away from a germophobe. I should mention the bags were unopened so it was certainly not a health concern, but still.

OVERALL: ♥♥♥ / ♥♥♥♥♥
For a decent price (they actually have a great prix fixe menu going on until July 19th I believe) you can get your hands on some pretty good pizza. Just be prepared for at least a 10-20 minute wait and for the possibility of being put at a communal table - be sure to mind your elbows if you get seated there, it's tight quarters. Although it's unlikely I'll be back anytime soon, I'd say it's definitely worth going to at least once if you haven't already been.

Funny food conversations

This weekend Mark and I somehow got into a conversation about whether or not people eat bear. I personally think it might be tasty, but then again I'm known to be rather obsessed with gamey meats. I also told him about some weird news story I read where a badger was lying in the middle of the road and the driver who found him called the police (wait, why wouldn't you just call Animal Control?). Everyone on the scene had thought he was roadkill but upon closer inspection, and I have NO idea how they investigated the situation enough to conclude this, they found it was drunk off of... wait for it... wait for it... fermented cherries!

I've had wild boar and cherry pasta made by Massimo Capra, who is known for his pastas, at his restarant Mistura. It was incredibly tasty. But I have yet to have had the pleasure of discovering what bear and fermented cherry pasta would taste like!

Yours in food,
-Stacey