TV Binge: The American Barbecue Showdown (Season 1, 2020)

The American Barbecue Showdown (Season 1, 2020)

Hosts: Rutledge Wood, Lyric Lewis
Judges: Melissa Cookston, Kevin Bludso

Food competition that follows the country’s best backyard smokers and competitive barbecuers as they compete for the title of American Barbecue Champion. – IMDB

Netflix has been really embracing this whole summer and barbecue theme in its latest food shows. Its latest reality food competition show is The American Barbecue Showdown which gathers up 8 contestants from America compiled of both female and male pitmasters in a series of themes challenges ranging from making different cuts of meats to assorted wild game and also having different requirements of sides and desserts as well as additional challenges announced in the middle of the main challenge. This show does go by very fast as its really one challenge per episode and announcement of one best pitmaster and the lowest one leaves the competition. The structure itself is definitely pretty good as well as the array of challenges set forth.

The judges and host are also pretty on point. Rutledge Wood who has been hosting a few Netflix shows from Hyperdrive (review) (which is definitely in his domain) to Floor is Lava (review) to this food competition. He definitely has a lot of energy that pairs up well with this show. I haven’t seen his partner Lyric Lewis before but she’s pretty fun to watch as well. I’m going to say that I know nothing about barbecue pitmaster competitions so whether the two judges are big names or not really is not in my field of knowledge but they definitely sound like they know their stuff and are very experienced plus they both have their own sort of personality that adds to the show especially Melissa Cookston who is the stricter judge but something about how she reacts added to the show. The discussions between the judges and/or the hosts also bring a lot to the table that adds context to their concerns or whatnot. Barbecue isn’t that much different from general cooking shows since its another cooking technique at least for myself is not that knowledgeable.

There’s not a whole lot to say about American Barbecue Showdown. At this point, Netflix has created a lot of these original reality TV food competition sort of shows and they have this similar structure with little tweaks that pair up with the task on hand that works pretty well and its fun and engaging. At the same time, its a professional barbecue competition so pitmasters are different from normal people who are barbecuing in their backyards and has a lot more knowledge to share as well as strategies whether its about the different cuts of meat and their quality or how it should be made or even the different smokers and such, there’s a lot to learn and as much as the show was fun because the competitors were a lot of fun to watch over the 8 episodes to see their abilities and what they come out with, the show also had a lot of other stuff to offer in terms of educating on the world of barbecue and the complexities of fire and seasoning paired with everything else. Overall, The American Barbecue Showdown is a good time.

Battle of Ingredients: October 2019 Fall BBQ

Its been a long time since our last Battle of Ingredients! To be fair, we did have a dinner outing (or two) during this hiatus but it wasn’t nothing that I particularly wanted or had time to write about but the group got back together on the last weekend of October to get in a final little BBQ session. Phoebe made a few version of ribs and brought some assorted veggies while I did some drumsticks and butternut squash for the grill and brought some extra stuff to pad the menu in case there wasn’t enough food.

Drinks

As usual, our friend provided the beverages. This time, he went for the assorted pack of Pepito’s Sangria which had three varieties: Sangria Blanca, Sangria Rosada and Bella Sangria. It had different non-alcoholic wine bases although there was still 4% of alcohol content in it so its a bit odd. Its light and fruity. I only had the Sangria Blanca and Sangria Rosada because the other one was the red wine base so while its non-alcoholic, it was more of a precaution. Sangria Rosada definitely had the berry flavors more while the Blanca was more the harvest fruits like apples and pears.

Main Dishes

Kim

To kick things off, the first thing I made was Chicken Drumsticks. They are covered with the Dim Sum Dry Rub that I had bought previously and had already used before. It was a busy weekend so still working with the more familiar recipes. The last time I had used it on chicken wings and it still worked really well with the drum sticks. We had given it a little time to sit covered between tossing it on the grill.

Butternut Squash seemed like a nice fall addition to the menu. Squashes are in abundance now so its always great to add them in. Its hard to cut but then I had done a similar recipe from Goodfood before in the oven and decided to give it a shot on the grill. This is done really simple. We just peel and then cut it into pieces, remove the seed and then sprinkle with salt and pepper and then its ready to put on the aluminium plates to grill. I forgot to add some honey to give it some sweetness at the end but that was supposed to be the plan.

As the additional stuff in case there wasn’t enough food, I went out to M&M Food Markets and picked up the veggie burger patties (because they were on sale) and also the dinner rolls. I can’t say that I liked either of these very much. The dinner rolls turned hard really fast and the patties tasted a bit odd so still on the hunt for a good veggie burger patty.

Phoebe

Lack of pictures on my part but Phoebe did make two types of ribs. The one above is the Korean Galbi style attempt which turned out pretty good. I eat rather bland food so I thought it was a little on the salty side however, for normal people who eat regular flavored food, this was pretty on point.

Her second style which is not here because it came off the grill after we started eating was a Honey Soy Sauce which is her little one’s favorite.

Finally, the last dish to show itself is an assorted veggie platter to grill. It had both yellow and green zucchini, asparagus and Portobello mushrooms.

Overall…its a bit of a normal little Battle of Ingredients but as a little BBQ to get back into the routine of things, we had a lot of fun. Everything turned out pretty good and we had a nice balance of vegetables and meat. The alcohol was also very light and fruity.

Next up in the Battle of Ingredients is our normal November hiatus as we go and explore MTL a Table offerings. Right now, we have 3 booked in (and shouldn’t have more than that on our side at least). With that said, the first one has already happened as this post goes up so that’s coming up very soon.

Battle of Ingredients #14 BBQ in the Thunderstorm

The summer is officially here and the weather has been beautiful with a heat wave of sort, more like humidity that swept through this past week as the thunderstorm just refused to roll in. Of course, Phoebe and I ended up choosing the day for the Battle of Ingredients on the day that the thunderstorm did hit. The thunderstorm did give us the perk of having a nice cool breeze. The husband was a champ and toughed out the rain under our car port to be the grill master. Summer BBQ is always a theme with us and we did try to keep things a little different and give some variety.

Drinks

As a change in pace, especially since I also found out that I had overtime on Sunday, my friends brought in the lighter coolers for our drinks and chose a mix pack for Smirnoff Ice which had the Classic, Wild Berry, Raspberry and Orange. These ones are always light and fun. Its been a while since I’ve had a Smirnoff Ice so it definitely brings me back to the early days when I first got introduced to the whole drinking alcohol business. Back to this choice, it was really refreshing and fruity and suitable for the general shindig.

BBQ Food

Phoebe

Mushrooms, Corn & Zucchini

Coca Cola Marinated Chicken Drumsticks

Phoebe bought over some mushrooms (mini bella & fresh shiitake) along with zucchini and corn to grill as our veggies. At the same time, she did a take 2 on last year’s coca cola chicken wings except this time she used drumsticks and had marinated them for 2 days beforehand to hopefully get the coca cola flavor more prominent. While the drumsticks still didn’t have the cola taste being exceptionally standout, it still had a really nice flavor to it.

Kim

Chicken and Veggie Skewers

Bacon-wrapped Sausages

My contribution went to two very basic options. The first was the bacon-wrapped sausages which I had planned for last time but didn’t end up doing so here we go. It turned out as it would to be quite good since you can’t really go wrong with sausages and bacon combo (at least to me). Chicken and Veggies skewers composed of chicken thighs, zucchini, bell peppers and Spanish onion. We also decided to try a new barbecue sauce and bought the Joe Beef one. They turned out really good as well.

Dessert

Nothing for dessert tonight and we chose the healthy route of having fruits which I obviously forgot to take a picture of. Next time, I’ll have some other plans.

That’s it for this Battle of Ingredients!
July is a busy month (as explained in the last Weekly Adventures post HERE), so we are working out some place to dine out instead.
Battle of Ingredients should resume in August (we are working out availability…). 

Battle of Ingredients #13 The First BBQ of 2019

Its been a while since out last Battle of Ingredients. As usual, we have our Winter through summer months of busy and crazy schedules so our off season if you can call it that. We are back to doing Battle of Ingredients in the home setting, which is always fun.

The First Barbecue of 2019 had a change of scenery from our previous barbecue settings and that had to do with the purchase of a new one on our behalf. Its still early in the season however with the long weekend, we were able to do a nice little meal to feed our 6 adults and a 1 kid crew.

Before we start, I’ll apologize that pictures are a bit incomplete so please bear with me as I try to add more in the description.

Wine

The wine for this Battle was provided by our friend as usual. This was the bottle left over from the previous battle. It was a nice match as a rosé wine called Pétale de Rose. Its a bit on the drier side but its pretty smooth in its end notes.

BBQ Food 

First up, this was my BBQ food ready to go on the grill. There’s some skewers of marinated chicken, some sliced zucchini and some baby Shanghai bok choy. Right before the grill, the zucchini got its seasoning of the simple stuff: salt, pepper and olive oil. Shanghai bok choy had no season other than oil to prevent sticking (unless the husband put some then I can’t remember).

The Chicken Skewers were done fairly quickly. For the these skewers, I used:

• chicken thighs
• garlic
• smoked salt (from Les As du Fumoir)
• Plumée poultry spice (from La Pincée)

We marinated the chicken in the fridge for about 3 hours (at least) before we skewered them and got them cooking. The chicken skewers turned out really well. We hadn’t had a lot of luck with bringing out the flavor when we used the smoked salt but it works really well on the grill. I really liked this spontaneous marinade for the chicken.

Sorry for the lack of a more focused picture. Phoebe brought us the more intricate stuff with seasoned steaks which are under the Portobello mushrooms.

Her steaks were marinated with:

• salt,
• oregano,
• rosemary
• homegrown fresh basil.

I don’t have the end result. We all forgot to take a picture and I thought I had taken one when I didn’t. However, the mushrooms were great and the steaks were also marinated really good also.

Non-BBQ Additions

Pasta Salad

In addition to the BBQ food, I was worried that there wouldn’t be enough food so I added a little carbs to our meal but making a pasta salad.

The ingredients are:

• Rotini
• Pedon’s More Than Pasta – Green Pea Rotini
• Cherry Tomatoes
• Orange and Yellow Peppers
• olive oil

We kept an Italian salad dressing (normal Kraft one) on the side for anyone that wanted to use it.

The pasta salad is pretty straight-forward. It turned as expected. The only new trial here was the Green Pea Rotini which has a very odd texture. We noticed that when cooking it more, it actually got more rubbery instead of mushier (which is what happens with some gluten-free pasta when overcooked). The texture was really odd in the sense. Pushing that aside, everything else works well. I left all the seasoning and sauces to however everyone liked it so just kept it as a base salad to be modified as desired.

Dessert

No recipe for this one as this was brought by our friends who also brought the wine. They are attempting the world of baking and brought us some dairy-free soy-based apple muffins. It was pretty decent.

That’s it for this Battle of Ingredients!
We are working on the date for the next one so things are picking up again in the Battle front.

I apologize again on the rusty organization skills and forgetting to take pictures.

Battle of Ingredients: Moon Festival & Autumn BBQ

Welcome to the next round of Battle of Ingredients hosted together with Phoebe over at Starry Traveler’s Road. This month’s get together was a slightly belated Moon Festival celebration as well as the last BBQ of the season.

Its a packed one this time so let’s see what we came up with. A lot of the food was really thought up simply by our brains so if we have recipes references, we’ll share it, if not, we can list some ingredients or whatnot. this time seems mostly to be checking out spices and such. Nothing too complex as we were both fairly busy with our personal lives.

Wines

The two wines offered by our friends this time were these two rose wines

• Listel
• Cote des roses

I will talk about both of these wine in the upcoming wine recap. I had already tasted Cote des Roses before but realized that I hadn’t shared it in any wine recaps before (oops..).

Main Courses

We went fairly simple this time. Phoebe took care of most of the food. She had some vegetables from various types of cauliflowers to peppers and more. She also had corn. There was also steaks which she had two types of seasoning for. The first was a gourmet steak spice blend and the second was a innovative herb type which was a mix of oregano and thyme with salt.

My contribution for dinner were kabobs. It had sausages, zucchini, peppers, mini portobello mushrooms and onions. The sausages were the IGA supermarket brands. One kabob had the honey-garlic flavor and the other one was wine and chives. There was no additional seasoning added to anything. We just put it on the skewer and barbecued it.

Results

I’m sorry that I didn’t take more of the veggies pic. However, everything turned out really good. The steaks had two different flavors. The one with the spices had more of the flavor as the spices were on the steaks itself. While the herbs and salt was more subtle, which is normal since it was just on top. As for the kabobs, I thought they turned out fairly well. It was fairly packed but cooked quickly so was good. The sausage flavors were also quite delicious.

Dessert

 

Dessert was obviously the highlight here and that’s moon cakes. Just like last year, we went for a more local brand. This one is a Canadian brand, King’s Pastry. It was a variety pack (like last year as well). The flavors were the following:

• Date paste
• Red Bean paste with melon bits
• Traditional one egg yolk lotus paste
• Five nuts

To be honest, they were okay. The five nuts had the citrus peel which was a bit intense. My husband and Phoebe was not a fan of it to say the least. The traditional was a bit too sweet. The date paste turned out better than expected. The same applied for the red bean paste.

We also had a fruit bowl that I put together with apples, clementines and grapes but I forgot to take a picture so we’ll leave that out since no one really ate any of it with the amount of sweets we already had.

Overall, a simple but lovely meal together!
This is a wrap for this Battle of Ingredients!
Back to the indoor kitchen for us as we figure out our next battle!
Nothing settled just yet..we’ll be back in a few weeks!

Battle of Ingredients #9: BBQ 2018 – Take 2!

Welcome to the next Battle of Ingredients! July was a busy month (you must be sick of me saying this if you follow all the different topics here) but we came back in August for another BBQ. Its almost tradition now that summer months are focused around more BBQ oriented meals. Its easy and fun and we can enjoy the weather. You have to live in Montreal (or the majority of Canada with the exception of maybe British Columbia or Vancouver, I’m not sure) to understand that we live half the year in winter and then another 3 months in rainy spring and autumn and then just like 3 months of warm/hot/unbearable weather. We did get a heat wave which also stopped a lot of the normal activities (notice the lack of hiking posts…). Anyways, we are back and the weather luckily after July’s heatwave is also cooling down a little.

Let’s just jump right in and see what Phoebe (aka Starry Traveler) and I came up for this battle!

Drinks

• Pepito White Sangria
• Beringer Rose – White Zinfandel

A sweet wine and a delicious white sangria that matched perfectly with the season and the event.

Dinner

Inspiration: http://moneysavingsisters.com/3-ingredient-soy-sauce-coca-cola-chicken-drumsticks-slow-cooker-meal/

Phoebe’s husband loves veggies so she added in some asparagus, corn and peppers to grill.

Aside from that,she found inspiration to make chicken that she used to have as a child and the recipe above was the one she used to change a crock-pot version to a BBQ version with this first platter of drumsticks. Normally, its easier with chicken wings but we have friends who don’t eat wings so she accommodated this one.

The drumsticks didn’t get the flavor quite so well. I would imagine that the crock pot would work better when doing drumsticks to get the flavor in it. It wasn’t not tasty by any means. To be honest, I love soy sauce chicken drumsticks. Its one of my fave things to eat. Simple but very yummy. My mom still holds the crown (because I’m biased) but Phoebe’s was pretty awesome also. Everyone enjoyed it. However, the goal was to have the cola flavor pop out and in that sense, it didn’t quite make happen.

Chicken Wings (left): Normal Biftheque spiced wings
Chicken Wings (right) inspiration: https://www.geniuskitchen.com/recipe/betty-whites-chicken-wings-13707

Phoebe decided to do chicken wings anyways for everyone else. We made one normal variety with some typical steakhouse spices. It was delicious and a guaranteed success. For her second inspiration, it was to do the recipe above but adding in a fourth ingredient, white sugar. The recipe she saw above asks for brown sugar but she didn’t have any on hand. Chicken wings work better for BBQ and for this recipe, the cola flavor definitely did pop out much more. This recipe is an absolute hit. There may some freestyling with how the recipes are as most of the recipes here were inspirations and added in our own flair.

Inspiration for Chard Rolls: http://vegdept.com/asian-style-rainbow-chard-wraps/

My contribution was luckily a lot of my own harvests. I found this chard roll idea and decided to work with what I had. I scrapped the Asian way and didn’t simmer the leaves either but on the grill, they cooked everything through as it wrapped in aluminum foil. My version ended up looking like that and the size varied to the size of the leave. Inside, there were homegrown cucumbers, bell peppers and store bought carrots. I didn’t season it but let everyone add what they wanted. Chard leaves were a little overcooked so it was slightly bitter, bit still the whole tasted fairly good.

Dessert

Campfire Cone recipe: https://hip2save.com/2015/06/25/campfire-cones-fun-easy-summer-dessert/

When figuring out dessert, I searched up what we could do on the grill and it was this easy and fun idea. Mine had blueberries instead red berries because of allergy issues (not me but others). The cook time should have been longer so it would turn into a gooey delicious mess but still, it was a pretty good one. One that can be replicated in the oven, I would think also. I would do this one again with some raspberries and I’d imagine that it would turn out fantastic. Let’s face it..these are s’mores cones with a twist, right? How can you hate on that…well, unless you hate dark chocolate or marshmallows, I guess. You can see the ingredients that I used on the top. I used a local dark chocolate maker, Rochef and it had sea salt so added a different layer of taste.

And..this wraps up this Battle of Ingredients!
We are back to monthly editions for a little bit and see how things go from there.
September’s edition is still BBQ themed with some more look at what else to cook..seasonal and whatnot.
If you have any suggestions, go ahead and suggest away in the comments and we’ll take a look at what we could do next time.

My Weekly Adventures #49

The most grueling two weeks may have just passed by. Not a whole lot to report about as most of it is personal stuff that is just homeowner stuff that has been lingering on our minds. Its definitely affected my energy and motivation to keep things going on track here. For that, I’m really sorry. However, there are a ton of other fantastic bloggers here so I’m sure you will not be bored even with my sporadic posting schedule.

This Weekly Adventures will most likely be fairly short. I’ve reported on mostly everything already in other posts.

Battle of Ingredients: Hiatus Over

Our Summer BBQ Edition is the comeback piece for our Battle of Ingredients segment. It was a lot of fun to switch things up. We went to another location than my place and had a BBQ. It was nice to hang out with everyone after two months hiatus while everyone was busy with their own things.

You can read the entire menu and post here.

Water Park with Friends

Super Aqua Club

Super Aqua Club

Last weekend, I also went to a water park with my girl friends. It is a little late in the season to go and it was a tad chilly, particularly in the morning. Our destination this year was to Super Aqua Club which is one of the closer water parks to Montreal. We have our eye on another one for next year. It would be cool to do this on an annual thing. Its a lot of fun and sometimes does test my limits but adrenaline rushes can be quite awesome. Sitting in the sun was really nice to and I love water as it keeps me calm and clears my mind. I got out of the weekend with just a tiny sunburn on my back where I couldn’t reach to put the sunscreen but it was so mild that it was gone in like 2 days or something.

Garden Update

In terms of the garden, the cool weather hitting us a little earlier is definitely not helping the harvests however we still harvested some cucumbers and lots of raspberries are still ripening along with ground cherries as well. The zucchini is pretty much dead. Its the long weekend here so I’ll be heading out to the garden to move some things around and hopefully get some of the herbs in ground so they’ll come back next year. Ground cherry might have to move as well as it has gotten way too big and it spreads.

A few projects to go for this one.

Cute Kitty Pic

Upcoming:

• Restaurants recap
• Double Features
• TV Binges
• Dreamhack Montreal coverage

Oh and I also settled on my Halloween marathon! That’s pretty exciting! 🙂

That’s it for this Weekly Adventures!
Not a whole lot to talk about! Hopefully the home issues will be taken care of soon.
In the meantime, sorry for any sporadic posting schedules. I’m trying my absolute best to get the energy level back up!

Its the long weekend. I’m taking some time to catch up with everything! Yay! 🙂

Battle of Ingredients #4 BBQ Edition

We’re back from our (previously unannounced summer hiatus). Due to all kinds of busy life things going on, we couldn’t find time to get together so we took a two month break. We still have a bit of mild weather here and there so we decided to get a dose of BBQ in there, all thanks to my co-host of this segment, Phoebe from Starry Traveler’s Road who offered up somewhere to do this, also giving us a little break from holding the event at our place. The evening was nice and we each brought our own unique take and Phoebe did all the BBQ along with the event help from my husband. With friends in place, husbands there and a toddler in tow, we all got together for the next Battle of Ingredients, we present the Summer BBQ Edition!

Drinks (courtesy of our friends)

Pfaff was a light white wine that worked well as we had chicken for the most part. It was quite good. Nothing beats summer like having a sangria and Pepito is a decent choice. I’ve never had the Sangria Blanc of this brand but it turned out really well, especially as it was used to end the evening and added in some summer fruits like watermelon and raspberries. We’ll show this in order we had it, so it’ll be a little later.

Cooking & Evening View

Downtown Montreal is a beauty especially when you can’t see the orange cones everywhere. The sunset and everything made it a beautiful night to BBQ with friends. Phoebe made the Chicken Wings marinated in Chinese Spices and grilled Bok Choy. I had the foil packets, portioned already for each person. In the foil packets were home grown zucchini and cucumbers along with chicken bacon and Mild Italian Sausages and spiced with Herbes de Provences, paprika and ground pepper. My packet was a little different because fancy sausages now all are made with milk so I picked up a pack of Lester’s Jumbo Sausages lactose-free. The extras were grilling on the top with the extra chicken bacon for the little toddler.

The Results

Chicken Wings & Grilled Bok Choy

Chicken Wings with Chinese Spices

Foil Packets

Everything turned out great. The chicken wings were marinated well. The Chinese spices gave it a nice flavor. Grilled Bok Choy is a nice way to keep the Asian theme we had and it worked well although took a little longer to cook through. My foil packets went in for about 20-30 minutes. The lesson was to make sure that the cucumbers were not sliced so thin because they cooked to a very mushy texture. however, the flavors that I chose worked well. I was pretty pleased with them and I believe the general feedback for everything was very positive.

Dessert & Sangria & Fresh Fruits

S’mores Kit – Laura Secord

S’Mores

First part of dessert was the S’mores. Phoebe picked up the Laura Secord S’mores kit to give it a go. I had to bring my own dark chocolate to make sure it was lactose free. We used the remaining heat of the BBQ to warm it up. It took a little longer but during that time we sat down and chatted while finishing our wines and whipping together our sangria. The fresh fruit was cleverly used in the sangria (as it should). Watermelons and raspberries from our garden. We let soak while the s’mores were heating up.

White Sangria with Fruits

The perfect way to end off the night. S’mores was like camping and BBQ and it was an awesome way to get back into the Battle of Ingredients. As hectic as it was (on my part) to get it all together, everything worked out really well.

And we got to enjoy it with a beautiful city lights of Downtown Montreal!

This wraps up this edition of Battle of Ingredients!
Our question to you: What do you like to BBQ?
What meals are particularly summer-y for you?

Heat Waves, US Day Trip & BBQ Dinner with Friends (and more..)!!!

I’m starting to realize how boring my life can be…on Friday nights.  So, solution to this, my personal life posts are going to be on Sundays now! Great solution, right?

On Friday, we got hit with an immense heat wave.  I went from wearing pants and 3/4 sleeves in the beginning of the week with a light jacket to wearing a tank top and capris to work.  I went to a second consecutive Dragonboat on Friday night, just because I felt like it.  Especially with such beautiful weather, I managed to get in a really really long walk along the basin and then practice felt wonderful.  I can still feel the muscle pains.

Whenever it gets all sunny and hot, I start feeling extremely youthful! Not that I’m old or anything but that cues in this awesome song that I found. By the way, I love Shawn Desman! I have no idea why..but I think that he makes some pretty good music!

Plus, I heard about something from this YouTube channel Philip DeFranco that I recently started following…check it out here.  You can watch the whole video but that part starts at 3:00 of the video.  Just saying that I would never do that EVER!

Would you send some abstract misleading text and just see how someone reacts? Of course, this guy also does movie/TV reviews on Saturdays so if you want, you can check that out.  It never ceases to amaze me how quick he can talk….

WAIT…off topic! Kinda! I was supposed to talk about something more awesome like Saturday (yesterday).  It was even hotter than Friday! 38C high *faints* I skipped my cardio workout in the morning and eventually headed out to Plattsburgh with my friend for a quick food run! Of course, this time, I had something else on my agenda and thats getting those awesome crazy 4-6-8-10 movie packs.  There was so many unknown (and possibly crappy) movies packed in one disc in so many genres I almost wanted to buy them all, if only I didn’ t have a limit crossing the border back to Canada.  Here’s what I got:

MOVIE PACKS! WHAT DO YOU THINK?

A huge thank you to Eric@ Isaacs Pictures Conclusions for bringing this up to me 🙂 Even though the Shitfest 2013 has pretty much finished at least I’m charged for next year 😉 Just need to send in the votes (as for everyone else who participated) and then wait to see who won 🙂

Then I also got some cute Stride gum.  They are getting really artsy. We have Doodle Berry over here and they have Lover Boy.

I came home to a whole lawn of blooming flowers so I ran back outside to take pictures of my fave photo subjects!

Beautiful colors make me happy! Yikes! This is where I realize that I need to run inside to finish cleaning and start baking for BBQ with my friends at 5pm! I ended up getting there late because of various situations that occurred.  Great times with friends and we hung out looking at her wedding photos (which I covered before HERE) along with drinking and eating (a lot) plus of course, desserts! 🙂

White Grape & Peach Juice + Sierra Mist + Vodka

Five Guys Fries, Pasta and Cucumber

Looks the same but delish MARGARITAS!

BBQ Ribs on my plate! I forgot to take pic of the chicken….

My friend’s Fruit Crisp! So delicious with ice cream (soy-based in my case)!

A slice of my cake!

We tried my cake much later in the night after we had some time to digest.  The recipe will be up tomorrow 🙂 A very short one! Super fun night as always with my girls and even some guys this time.  We even got in a part of Period  3 of the Boston Bruins vs Pittsburgh Penguins game last night.  We decided to leave when it was at 3-0 Bruins…At around midnight, it was homeward bound!

That was my weekend! Super fun and hot and fun! The heat may get disgusting but at least we had a sun and it made me feel super happy and energetic 🙂

Aww wait! I can’t resist but to swarm you with another hilarious video for Comedy Week on YouTube from some YouTube artists that I follow: Taryn Southern and Chester See.  Its pretty funny in a very silly way!

How was your weekend? Did you get a heat wave also? Did you have a weekend getaway or day trip? Any new finds? Did you party it up? Or maybe you enjoyed some quality me time?

Have a fantastic rest of the weekend!!!

Food Review: Casa Victoria Fine Dining

On Saturday night, we headed over to Casa Victoria as a big group to join into the 25th anniversary and chinese new year party for a company that we help out over the past 10+  years (depending on who we are talking about).  For me, its been around 10 years.  I don’t remember exactly when I started but its been pretty fun. Casa Victoria has a Victorian theme going on in their banquet halls.  With beautiful lights and golden drapes and decorations on the walls, it radiated elegance.  The atmosphere was beautiful, the group was awesome and its the first time we’ve come in contact with the main office in Toronto so it was pretty fun.

This is a food review so I’m going straight to our huge meal that we had. We had a cocktail in the beginning with some appetizers and drinks.

I’m a lover of Barbecue pork and especially when in a pastry, the fluffy crust that melts in my mouth when done well.  This one was done to perfection.  It was so scrumptious, not too sweet or salty and the texture was awesome. I’ve never had bite size pie shells filled with eel and man, were these awesome.  I’m not a huge fan of eel but this one really impressed me a lot.

After a bit of chitchat and waiting for everyone to settle into their spots, we had some speeches and some games in between the course and even had a raffle and lots of gifts.  It was super fun. The first dish to come is a very well-known Chinese meat platter…

Chinese Meat Platter

Stir Fried Jumbo Shrimp and Scallop

Braised Dried Oyster and Pork Hock

Braised Winter Melon Soup with Conpoy and Sweet Corn

Pan Fried Beef Filet with Garlic Sauce

A little cut in this because I realized that I forgot to take the picture of Crispy Fried Chicken.  It was super delicious but somehow I didn’t do it.  Up to now, I can’t say anything else about the food because it was super good.  I’ll give more of a review at the end..We’re about halfway 😉

Stir Fried Sole Filet with Vegetable served on Crispy Bone

Wok Fried Lobster with Maggi Sauce

Searfood Fried Rice with Garlic

Braised E-fu Noodle

Red Bean Sweet Soup

Anniversary Cake

Le Petite Fleur with Almond cookies, Glutinous Rice Balls

Man, that was a huge meal, right? It was awesomeness.  There were a few that were on the salty side but thats because I’m used to eating my mom’s cooking and its all healthy and minimal salt.  The meats were all done to perfection, desserts were right on.  The most memorable was the crust of the Jumbo Shrimps and Scallops.  Usually its called the Bird’s Nest and that was done so different from the other restaurants I’ve eaten at.  Another one was the fish and the Crispy Bone.  I was very tasty although I gave a part of my portion away because I was so full and I wanted to try the other food.

Fantastic meal and wonderful party with a bunch of awesome people.  It was a great night!

The next morning, the boss of this company invited everyone back to the restaurant to eat early morning dim sum. I didn’t take any pictures because I wasn’t fully awake from sleeping late watching Chopped.  But take my word for it, it was super awesome.  If you live in Toronto or visit there, go to Casa Victoria. You won’t regret it 🙂

What do you think about the meal?