312 Des Meurons

Tipu and I checked out In Ferno’s tonight. Let me begin with the good and work my way down. The decor is exquisite. Wonderful rich walls, beautiful art work and I loved the flower arrangements on the table. They use slender flat vases. You normally take a bulb/flower/large fat leaf/major feature and have it tilted to one side and take a stringy slender leaf tied back to it to make a loop-ti-doop. I tried to find a pic on the web but couldn’t. Apologies.

The appetizers were wonderful. I had lobster potstickers. Tipu had lamb tempura. Both very happy. Dinner Tipu had lamb again and I had a fillet. I honestly thought that fillet meant fish, silly stupid me. Anyways, so it was the first time I’ve ever had steak at a restaurant. I was kind of dissapointed. The meat wasn’t seasoned enough and I felt it was dry. However I do not believe I am used to the idea of steak so steak eaters should not base their opinion on mine. A big thick slab of beef with nothing else, no sauces, etc. does not appeal to me. Tipu was happy with his lamb. Both dishes came with baked potatos, some slightly runny sweet potatoes and some steamed cauliflower. Not impressed with the cauliflower. Seems a little too domestic for a nice restaurant.

The disaster was the dessert. I got a brick hard torte. I had to send it back. I felt really bad, I’ve never done that before but other tables were doing the same. The torte was just a brick. It looked beautiful but you couldn’t cut into it. I tried and almost broke the dish. I asked the server for a steak knife and then she just suggested I try something else. If they broke it up for you it might work. It was whole hazelnuts held together in a sugary mixture that went and became some industrial strength material. So instead I got some Paris pastry dessert with different kinds of creams in the middle. I didn’t like it either. It was obnoxiously sweet. Tipu had a cappucino creme brulet. He liked his dessert.

So the restaurant is a popular restaurant. I’ve heard about it a few times. You could also tell by the line-ups and amount of reservations that it’s very well known in Winnipeg. It’s a very small pretty eating place. I told Tipu when I walked in that some day I’d love to have a place like this of our own. That being said, I don’t know if they were having a bad night or I am too used to mom and pop restaurants and not meant for sophistication because I was not thrilled.

3.5/5

If you love eating out as much as I do you MUST take advantage of “Winnipeg’s hottest restaurant event”

So basicly you can get an entire meal for a fixed price not including tips and drinks. I’m not sure if the prices are special or not because I haven’t gone to a lot of the places on the list. However I really want to go. I’ve known about this event for a while and every year for some retarded reason or another we weren’t able to. I’m going to try and make reservations tomorrow. Wish me luck/Pray for me depending on your convictions. I found out about it this year pretty late. Reservations began January 10th. I hope I find something I like.

For muslim eating-out novices please be sure to wiki/google all ingredients you’re not sure about so as not to eat something you aren’t supposed to. Do not blame me.

Good acting. Long movie. Some people in the audience complained it was boring. I don’t think it was boring but it was very subdued. There’s little action and very little humour so I can understand why it didn’t appeal to everyone. The movie is about a Yale student who’s called upon during WWII to serve his country by joining a secret intelligence society. The group works closely with the British to topple Hitler. After the war, the group is called upon again to serve by gathering intelligence against USSR. After the war the group gets formal status and becomes CIA. The movie weaves in and out of time explaining how the Bay of Pigs defeat occured. It’s fictional but still interesting. It shows how power and control held by a very few can corrupt. The main character is not corrupted however. He sort of turns to work out of patriotism but also out of regret of past personal mistakes.

As an engineer I was impressed with all of the signal processing work the CIA was doing. It’s not like they had Matlab to figure stuff out. They slowly went through the frequencies and found what they could.

3.75/5

New year and thus new blog topic category entitled “Cooking”. I begin with my meat sauce. Below are the vegetables I use. Onions, celery and carrots are standard, add hot chillies if you like spice.

Wash and dice vegetables. Heat oil. I try to cook as light as I can, add enough oil so that you can swirl the pot once and the floor of the pot will be covered with a uniform thin layer. Also, add salt and pepper to the vegetables. I try to go light on the salt too. This all goes on at medium to high heat.

Once the vegetables our soft. Add ground meat. You can use chicken, veal, beef, whatever… no fish. I think that would be nasty.

Keep meat and vegetables at medium to high heat. Let the meat brown in the vegetable mix. Once it’s pretty well cooked through it should look something like this:

Then add canned tomatoes and tomato paste. If you use whole tomatoes like I did then while the sauce is cooking you have to press it with a potato smasher every now then.

After adding the tomato stuff you’re basicly done. All that’s left is the seasoning. Add as much basil, oregano, salt, pepper, parsley as you desire. You can cut up and add more hot chillies if you like. Leave the sauce on medium to low heat for atleast a half an hour. The longer the better.

Final product:

Ok, so the last pic wasn’t actually the final pic. There was some potato smasher action in the pot afterwards to get the meat sauce less tomato-chunked. If you don’t add meat you can make a really good smooth tomato sauce by putting it through the blender after it’s cooked but still warm. You can use diced tomatoes and save yourself some hassle. This sauce takes a while to make but you can use it for many things.

Sorry for the gap. State of flux. Some high school friends started a cooking blog and I’ve been planning on contributing but I’ve been too lazy to upload the pics. I’m awful about posting pics. So far I have a meat sauce, meat pastry and moussaka to put up but haven’t. Perhaps this weekend. I started taking a fitness class at the U of M called “Women and Weights”. It’s thrown me off because I have to rearrange my schedule so that I work out and attend the classes. The classes allow me to try out stuff but not really get a proper work out so that’s thrown me off my gym rhythm. Have been really enjoying Little Mosque on the Prairie. Been watching them on YouTube. Watched the all important film Gandhi (Ben Kinsley). What else? Lots of Cadence. Lots of ponderings on how to converge life goals into reasonable expectations.