randomosity

I just noted that Massimo Mar­cone (one the nicest and most bril­liant guys at the Uni­ver­sity of Guelph) has pub­lished his new book — In Bad Taste? This one is def­in­itely going on my must read list. Massimo Mar­cone is a food sci­ent­ist at Guelph who is inter­na­tion­ally known and respec­ted for his stud­ies of cof­fee. Although this book is about food appar­ently it is not one to con­sume when you are actu­ally eat­ing or hav­ing any­thing to do with food.
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When in Montreal, one must savour the fine eat­ing oppor­tun­it­ies and I am thrilled to report that I stumbled across a win­ner. Rumi is a Persian/Sufi res­taur­ant loc­ated in Mile’s End at the corner of Hutchison and Fair­mount. It has a charm­ing ter­rasse and abso­lutely yummy food.
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In my research into nine­teenth cen­tury Cana­dian drink­ing habits, I very quickly learned that the tem­per­ance folks had a spe­cial enmity for the cus­tom of treat­ing. The cru­sade against this spe­cial social prac­tise informed much of the pamph­let­eer­ing and peti­tion­ing of legis­lat­ive bod­ies. You can see the threat: if you have a lot of friends, and the mem­bers of group want to main­tain the respect of their peers, the rounds just keep on com­ing. It was often the exuber­ant nature of the bar that so threatened the well being of the aver­age Cana­dian. The warm sur­rounds of the tav­ern, the good com­pany of friends and the intel­lec­tu­al­iz­ing influ­ence of alco­hol. The tem­per­ance folks figured that they might be able to some­how beat this cus­tom out of Cana­dian bar beha­viour. There are how­ever some cus­toms that simply do per­petu­ate and cer­tainly treat­ing is one of them.

So lets take that into the inter­net age…not con­strained by the need to be phys­ic­ally present, the Frog Pub chain has intro­duced TextToP­int. You can now pur­chase a round for your friends online. Its pretty simple. You pay for the round online and are provided with a simple code that can be text’d to your bud­dies and they can redeem it from their ‘gen­ial host.’ Bril­liant. Good for the pub. What will the tem­per­ance folks say???

I have spent the last dec­ade nat­ur­ally evolving towards a work day that largely takes place in cof­fee shops. Hav­ing writ­ten my MA largely at the Second Cup in Guelph and turned to the Star­bucks before that to do busi­ness plan­ning, I cur­rently spend the bulk of my time at the Second Cup in West­dale. Dur­ing this time, I have evolved from rely­ing on pen and paper to hope­lessly attached to my laptop. That same append­age has gone from teth­er­ing to an elec­trical out­let to crav­ing attach­ment through wire­less con­nectiv­ity. The way in which I work away from the office or home has evolved, tech­nic­ally and socially.

The pen and paper days also involved a good book and allowed for read­ing dur­ing the day. As data con­nectiv­ity has pro­gressed, dir­ect social con­nectiv­ity has decreased.
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I will prob­ably betray my rather unre­fined pal­ate with post, but its all about hon­esty right? Tasted a grape that I hadn’t tried before on Monday night. The Italian Prim­it­ivo. Its appar­ently a rel­at­ive of the Zin­fan­del and is har­ves­ted from the heel of the Italian boot…so appet­iz­ing. Appar­ently both the Prim­it­ivo and Zin­fan­del can be traced to vines ori­gin­at­ing in Dal­ma­tia some­time in the sev­en­teenth cen­tury. The Prim­it­ivo is gen­er­ally fairly high in alco­hol con­tent, yet it tends to be more on the fruity side, with a spicy fin­ish. I was quite impressed. I’ll have to get the label off the bottle I had.

I did find a 2003 A. Mano Prim­it­ivo (product id 972588 — can’t link dir­ectly to a page in their less than user friendly site) at LCBO vin­tages and it was quite deli­cious another Amer­ican site men­tions the Amer­ican wine­maker in Puglia who is actu­ally fash­ion­ing this fine stuff. So, I throw this out to you as a Shawn pick for all that’s worth.

I have long been a fan of the Food Guru pod­casts. This was one of the first video pod­casts that I star­ted to down­load. Peter Har­mon, the presenter kept these up on a weekly basis for quite a while then last Fall there was a huge dry period. Then they seem to have star­ted up again recently — cheers. For the last week I was get­ting down­load errors and figured that maybe he was going dark again. But sud­denly today I have re-established con­tact and three new video recipes popped my way. One for brown sugar sal­mon (sounds yummy) a very nice blue cheese and car­a­mel­ized onion buschetta and the sub­ject that drove me to blog this…an abso­lutely dec­ad­ent sound­ing pizza.
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