N’awlins Jazz Bar and Restaurant

Hi there GGG jazz lovers,

Listening to: Stormy Weather – Etta James

Last Friday my boyfriend and I redeemed my best friend, Nikki’s birthday voucher for a surprise night out to N’awlins in downtown Toronto. She has a love of jazz and my boyfriend and I thought that it would be really interesting to bring her to see a live jazz band. Here was our experience!

The restaurant was covered wall to wall with photos and paintings of great jazz bands and singers. The atmosphere was romantic and full with candlelit tables.

Each martini was named after jazz singers and bands How creative!

We started with cajun crab cakes and omg, if you’re going to this location be sure to grab a few of these! 9.5/10

I had the Seafood Dream:  linguine with tiger shrimp, calamari, scallops, mussels and baby clams in a white wine tomato basil sauce . 8/10

My boyfriend had the Bourbon St. Penne: bacon, chicken, and cremini mushrooms in a vodka rose sauce. 9/10

Nikki had the penne mushroom pasta: a cremini, oyster, Portobello mushroom pasta with shallots, basil and garlic. 10/10

For dessert I had the cheesecake. It was a fine cheesecake. I think it may have been the best cheesecake that I have ever tasted. There was no gritty texture in the cheese. 10/10

My boyfriend had a red velvet carrot cake. It was a very tasty cake with a fine texture covered with a cream cheese frosting. 10/10

Nikki had a chocolate truffle cake. It was a little too rich but it was still delicious. 8/10

Brooke Blackburn Trio were the live entertainment. They played in the middle of the restaurant and they were impeccable! They had a blues type jazz sound. I was impressed with the fact that were able to play most requests. We had requested from them to play Stormy Weather for my boyfriend and I and they played two special songs for Nikki. Happy Birthday and Georgia by Ray Charles.

This is a video of Brooke Blackburn Trio playing Georgia. If you listen carefully, you can hear the slight change in the song.

Overall rating: 9/10

I love how the place gave off a romantic vibe and I was so happy that the food, the atmosphere, the music was all outstanding. My only complaint would be how much of a tight squeeze it is in the restaurant but you could easily turn that around by saying it’s cozy lol.

My boyfriend and I also gave this to Nikki on the same night for Christmas. She loved it!

Happy belated birthday Nikster! Love you <3

When he went away the blues walked in and met me – Etta James, Stormy Weather

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Iron Chef Japanese Steak House

Last week, I went to Iron Chef Japanese Steak House in Mississauga for a get together with some friends. The restaurant is a good for groups since they have large tables for both the teppanyaki side of the restaurant or if you just want to side in the regular dining room. We all had teppanyaki so we were seated around a teppanyaki grill.

We were served with salad and soup as we waited for our chef to cook our main courses.

Our Chef starting on our meals.

First up is vegetables. We were each given a ginger sauce and a mustard sauce, but I found the veggies to be pretty nicely flavoured already when he served it.

Coco’s main course: scallops. They were very well cooked, I was impressed. Not a bit over cooked and nicely seared on the outside.

Cooking the sirloin steak.

Again, very well seasoned and tasted great!

Lastly is the friend rice, he made it into a heart shape!

There were a lot of tricks that the chef did which I couldn’t really capture with pictures. Overall, a very entertaining dinner with better than expected food. I normally don’t expect food from teppanyaki to be too great because it’s mostly for the show. Iron Chef however served us delicious food as well as provide entertainment XD. The dinners cost us around $30 – $35 each after tax and tip.

Overall I would give it a 4/5 for food and entertainment, however, the cost is slightly steep for the food.

Taipei Pictures

Happy New Year everyone!

Taipei was the last destination of my little Asia trip. We went to a hot springs in Beitou and spent around 3 days in Taipei city site seeing and eating. Lots and lots of eating.

View from our room in Beitou. We stayed at Radium Kagaya Hotel in a traditional Japanese style suite with tatami mats.

We were all given yukata to wear XD.

Our stay included a very extensive Japanese meal. This was our dinner menu, it’s in Chinese but as you can see, there were tons of courses…

Pictures of a few of our courses. Everything was super tasty, but there was so much food I had to take a break in between eating >_<

Taking a rest because I was so stuffed lol.

After dinner we went back to the hot springs, but I decided to only soak my feet.

Then we headed off to Taipei after our mid-trip relaxation at the hot springs! Nightmarkets is a MUST at Taipei.

Tons of different kinds of food, snacks, games, and random things to buy.

This was super yummy, it’s deep friend milk!

More food XD.

Can’t leave Asia without getting my nails done…

I decided to get this gel nail set.

Leaving Taipei, we had to stop over in Tokyo, and we were lucky enough to get the Hello Kitty flight!

The plane was so cute, everything was Hello Kitty. I really wanted to take that pillow, but I already had too much stuff to carry =(. My friend took the puke bag as a souvenir though =__=.

That’s it for my Asia trip! I think my favourite part was the hot springs hotel. It was so relaxing and food was really good. We even had a butler to serve our room =O. I definitely wanna go back there again XD.

Ichiban Fish House

Hi everyone!

I think I’ve said this enough times but I’m a huge sushi lover! I’m always on the lookout for good sushi and sashimi for a good price =).

Last weekend, I went to Ichiban Fish House in Richmond Hill for dinner and tried their $50 sashimi plate meant for 2-3 people. I’ve been to this restaurant quite a few times in the past, it has never really impressed me much before, I mean, it was decent sushi for a pretty cheap price, but nothing special. But this sashimi plate really deserves a mention.

What I really like about Ichiban is that their menu is a picture book, so you see exactly what you’ll be getting, it also makes picking what you want easier because you know what all the dishes mean! Sometimes, it’s just hard to remember all these foreign dish names XD.

So for 2 people, we ordered the $50 sashimi plate and grilled salmon neck. This restaurant serves complimentary salad, miso soup, and green tea ice cream dessert to everyone as well.

The sashimi plate: scallops, geoduck clam, hamachi, uni, chutoro, salmon belly, amaebi, aji, plus a few more but I don’t remember the exact fish names.

Overall, they give you a pretty good selection of premium sashimi for $50, all of the pieces were pretty big and really fresh too. Although my friend complained about the uni being not as fresh as the last time he came to this restaurant, but I can’t attest to that because I don’t like uni XD. Oh and they also have fresh wasabi, which is always a plus.

I forgot to take a picture of the grilled salmon neck, but it wasn’t anything special, pretty comparable to what you can get at other restaurants.

When you’re almost done with your sashimi plate, you can ask the waitress to deep fry the aji fish and the amaebi (sweet shrimp) heads free of charge. Some people like to eat the shrimp heads raw, I personally find it kinda gross, but it’s sooooooooooo good deep fried.

We were both extremely stuff after all this food. I think we went overboard ordering the sashimi AND the grilled salmon neck haha.

The restaurant also recently renovated so all the tables and seats are nice and new ^_^. I will definitely be going back for more!

 

Sansotei Ramen

Hello GGG Readers!

My friend from Michigan came up to Canada for the holidays because she’s originally from Toronto. We planned to go to Kinton Ramen, but on the way there we spotted Sansotei Ramen so we just walked in.

The place is cozy just like other ramen places, their menu was very simple. We ordered Tonkontsu Ramen, Tonkotsu Shoyu Ramen, gyoza (dumplings) and zangi (deep fried chicken).

Their bowl looked small, but the amount was just perfect considering that everyone was satisfied (full) in the end.

It’s located near Dundas St. and Bay St. (downtown Toronto) we saw on the way while we were walking west from Yonge St.

I recommend it, it helps you decide quick because there’s only four kinds of ramen.

Also, it gave you a whole egg instead of half like other ramen places so that’s a plus.

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Toronto Gourmet Food & Wine Expo 2012

Hello food and wine lovers!

NinjaBunni3s and I attended the Toronto Gourmet Food & Wine Expo on Friday. The expo runs November 15th-18th, so today is the last day! I had a really great time and it’s worth the money to try different vendors and experience new things. There are tons of different vendors, we didn’t even get to try everything. Sorry about the photo quality, I forgot to bring my camera so these photos were taken by my iPhone.

There is an entrance fee, you can buy online or at the door. It is $20 to enter and then you have to pay for additional tickets for food and drink samples. At first I thought that was kind of lame, but in the end I realized it was worth it. They also had to provide the wine glasses.  You can find the sample tickets at the outer sides of the expo.

Once you have your tickets you walk around and enjoy samples! The cost per sample varies from 1-5 tickets. Each sample ticket you purchase is $1 each. I think you have a purchase $20 at a time. Some vendors do give out free samples, but I found that was rare. One of my favourite vendors was Ivy Bar and Kitchen:

The scallop sample was so good! It was cold which was odd, but I still really enjoyed it. I definitely want to try this place for dinner or lunch sometime. I forgot how much the sample was, I think it was two tickets each. My other favourite vendor was Switzerland Cheese. It was weird because it smelt like stinky tofu, and we were really confused. Turns out it was the cheese! I still tried it and it was so good I got two samples XD. If you like cheese you have to try this!

They put a jam on it which was a nice combination. They have this weird tool that makes it into a flower shape. I think it helps bring out the taste. I think it was three tickets each. NinjaBunni3s favorite vendor was BAREFOOT Wine & Bubbly. I think she found her favourite wine.

I took a picture of the sign, I thought I took it of the flavours DX. It was the sweeter one that NinjaBunni3s liked. She kept going back for this vendor, she went three times! I just noticed the sign says leave the glass at the door, I took one DX. NinjaBunnies had a really lucky night! First she won my mom some coffee beans by bouncing ping pong balls into the wine glasses.

She had to do it under 60 seconds! Afterwards she also won a free Cineplex movie by spinning this wheel. With my luck I only got a granola bar DX. It was a free spin so it was really worth coming to win a movie ticket! You could also win a condom and a mocktail.

Here are some other photos of vendors and samples:

Overall I had a really good time. It was really busy and some people are a bit tipsy, but I still had fun. I really recommend going today or next year with friends or as a date! We were there for 2 hours, which seemed like a perfect amount of time to see everything.

Hope everyone is having a good weekend!

Sushi Couture

Hey guys!

I’m a big fan of sushi and love finding new and awesome places to eat sushi. Sushi Couture is located close to Korea town in Toronto. Although this one isn’t new (I’ve been there quite a number of times), I love going back there because of the quality of the fish and the amount of food you get is pretty worth it for the price haha. I usually find myself not quite full from omakase menus but Sushi Couture manages to fill me up XD.

Most of the stuff they serve in the omakase can be found on their normal a la carte menu, but of course if you add up all the prices, it is cheaper to get the omakase. They also recently raised the prices at the beginning of September. The omakase meal used to be $39/person and is now $49/person =(. The menu is obviously also changed from when it was $39 but I personally don’t feel that it justifies the increase of $10 in price =S.

The meal started off an appetizer plate that consisted of some sort of clam (sorry forgot the type), grilled eggplant, and stuff peppers.

You can let the chef know if you prefer not to eat certain things, for me it was any sort of clams and uni so i had tempura vegetables instead of the clam.

They recommended a special sushi wine to us that we decided to try with our meal. I felt that it complimented the courses pretty well =)

Next up was the sashimi course.

Since I don’t eat uni, I got butter fish instead of uni and ikura.

Next were the sushi courses. We had 4 people in our party so it was 1 piece of sushi for each type. And since I already had butter fish in my sashimi meal, I got an eel sushi instead of butter fish sushi for one of the types.

Then it was the cooked course. The others received a seared scallop with shrimp and mushrooms. Since I had said I didn’t eat clams, the chef thought I don’t eat scallops either so I got miso glazed black cod served on a bed of tempura fried noodles. I do eat scallops but it was nice that I got to try 2 different things since I stole a little bit of my friends’s portions XD.

Next are rolls. I think the number of rolls depends on the size of your party, since we had 4 people, we got 4 rolls. There were 2 normal rolls (ones you can probably find anywhere) and 2 more unique rolls that the chef probably came up with.

The last course is of course dessert. We got green tea cheese cake, it was super yummy =)

Compared to my last review of an omakase restaurant Sushi Kaji, Sushi Couture is definitely more economical and will fill you up more for a cheaper price haha. However, Sushi Couture doesn’t serve the traditional Japanese dishes like Sushi Kaji and there were also more expensive sushi/sashimi served at Sushi Kaji.

I would recommend this place to anyone looking to impress a girl who likes Japanese food =). Compared to many western restaurants, this is pretty well priced and has more of that wow factor that a tasting menu offers when you take someone out to a date .

And here’s a super cute pic of Ninja! It’s so hard to take a picture of her when she’s awake so most of my pictures of her are when she’s sleeping =__=.

Korean Harvest Festival

Hello GGG Readers!

This weekend is the Korean Harvest Festival at Mel Lastman Square. Korean Harvest is like Thanksgiving holiday in Korea called Choo-suk 추석.  It’s actually between September 29th to October 1st this year. It’s different every year because it follows the moon year.  It’s a 3-day holiday, too bad it’s on the weekend so a lot of Koreans are raging because they don’t get extra days off at work or school.

Here’s the facebook event: http://www.facebook.com/events/273864396047119/

The events include singing contest, k-pop performances, etc. on the stage. There are food booths with korean street food with beer, soju, and rice wine (mak-gul-ri).

Happy Choo-suk Everyone!

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Creamy Spinach Pasta with Walnuts

Hi everyone,
I decided to try out a recipe I found from Laura Vitale.  She’s an amazing cook that I watch on YouTube all the time.  This is her “Pasta with Creamy Spinach Sauce” recipe.  For the link to her YouTube video of this recipe click here.

Here is the recipe I got from her website:

Serves 2 Hungry People

Ingredients:
½ pound of Whole Wheat Pasta, cooked according to package instructions
8 cups of Baby Spinach, washed, dried and roughly chopped
3 cloves of Garlic, minced
1 Tbsp of Olive Oil
½ cup of Chicken Stock
¼ cup of Heavy Cream
¼ cup, of freshly grated Parmiggiano Reggiano
¼ cup of Walnuts, toasted and roughly chopped

Process,

1) In a large skillet with high sides, over medium high heat, cook the olive oil and garlic together until the garlic is fragrant and lightly golden.

2) Add the spinach and immediately cover with a lid and cook for 1 minute. Remove the lid and add the chicken stock, let it cook for about 3 minutes, season with salt and pepper. Add the heavy cream and cook for 1 more minute.

3) Add the drained pasta and parmiggiano and cook together stirring the whole time for 1 minute. Place in a serving dish and sprinkle over the toasted walnuts. Enjoy!

 

Here are the pictures of my attempt.  Definitely not as pretty as hers.  I think it would have been better if I had used the spiral pasta like she did.

Wash the spinach

 

All fresh and clean

 

Cooking Garlic

 

Add spinach and chicken broth

 

Add cream

 

Grate Parmesan cheese

 

Toss sauce and pasta together. Garnish with walnuts.

 

Yum <3

This pasta recipe was actually very light tasting, even though it contained heavy cream.  It was delicious

Please comment below and let me know what you think!

 

 

 

 

Last Summer Outdoor BBQ

Hello GGG Readers!

It’s almost the end of August, and that means Summer time is leaving soon T_T

It does get chilly during the night time, so I don’t wear short-shorts anymore.

My friends and I celebrated this moment with BBQ!

We went full out this time including sirlion beef, pork belly, tiger shrimp, mackerel, five-cheese sausage, spicy sausage, clam. And, we also grilled onions, garlics and kimchi because that’s how Koreans barbecue LOL

Between 6 people, we used two grills at Erindale Park, it’s located near University of Toronto Mississauga.

We were being silly and my friend pretended to be Slenderman with a paper plate in front of his face.

If you guys don’t know who Slenderman is, watch this video: [WARNING: If you're afraid of the dark or scary stuff, then don't click]

One of my friend bakes as a hobby and she brought us little treats for dessert.

It’s low-calorie, so it’s not as sweet but I like it how it is. On the plus side, it was homemade.

On a side note, the new patch 1.0.4 is now available on Diablo 3, followed by the Paragon system.

So, if you’re level 60 and bored of the game, keep playing! You’ll be reaching to paragon level which is available until 100. Challenging enough?

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