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.

My October Adventures!

Welcome to the October Adventures! Its been a crazy month full of lots of things going on. Suffice to say other than cooler weather and some really windy and rainy days where we got some of the closing gardens and other preparing the house for winter thing going on (which I won’t talk about because I’m not sure anyone wants to know about it), it was a clash for festivals. Let’s look back and see what happened!

Hiking: CIME Haut-Richelieu at Mont St-Gregoire

I’m not sure how many more hikes we can get in before the season is too cold to go, but we’re taking them as we can between festivals and other commitments and getting the house ready for the winter season and whatnot. After a much debated weekend with bad weather looming over our heads, the weather finally changed and we decided to go for a hike a little closer to us and went to the nearby tourism area and found CIME Haut-Richelieu at Mont St-Gregoire which had a very reasonable 4km hike. It was steep and rather quick elevation with lots of steps and stairs and rocks to walk over. We took the panoramic trail and got a pretty nice view of the area around.

Festival Du Nouveau Cinema (October 9 to 20)

Festival du Nouveau Cinema kicked off on October 9th with the program mostly starting the next day (since press doesn’t access to opening and closing films). With that said, this is the first day doing media to cover this festival so a little of the jitters as this festival has some rather deeper films and a lot of the films themselves are all about taking chances with the synopsis provided as well as having very limited evening timeslots to fit them all in making the scheduling very time-consuming and constantly going through changes during the festival. However, that is behind us now and things went fairly smoothly. I had wanted to do on average one review per day and overall, I managed to achieve it.

Here’s the full list of films if you missed any of them:

• Little Joe
• Color Out of Space
• Family Romance LLC
• Diner
• Adoration
• Sole
• J’ai Perdu Mon Corps
• Mickey and the Bear
• A White, White Day
• Dirty God
• Carte Blanches Shorts : Aujourd’hui ou je meurs; Pluie sui tole volée

Highlighted are my top 5 in no specific order. If you want to know my top movie, its Diner. Hands down, no competition because while the other films were great, this one has rewatchability in its favor.

Sherbrooke Met La Table & Parc de la Gorge de Coaticook

Like previous years, we take a day out to the Eastern Townships to go check out a restaurant part of Sherbrooke Met la Table. This time, we decided to go back to one of the first ones we tried called OMG Resto which is actually located in a what used to be a church. We went for the lunch menu but ended up getting the normal.

After that, we headed for a little hike at Parc de la Gorge de Coaticook. We had previously gone at night for Foresta Lumina. Its a nice little family trail although has a lot of steep stairs and slopes.

Toronto After Dark Film Festival (October 17 to 25)

Overlapping the last few days of Festival du Nouveau Cinema was receiving the approval for remote coverage for Toronto After Dark Film Festival for its short films, which was a lot of them. About 95% of the films were available and I managed to review almost all of those available. All the movies are above and I’m not going to list them all separately but just in how I batched them in the posts and then share my top 5 (which will be hard).

• Shorts 1: We Three Queens/Eyes Open/Make Me A Sandwich
• Shorts 2 Blood Machines: Turbo Killer/Far Horizon/Flip
• Shorts 3: Ocimokw!!/Grave Sight/Down the Rabbit Hole/Hearth
• Shorts 4: Barbara-Anne/Kakatshat/Schism/A Noise That Carries
• Shorts 5: Dark Before Dawn: Convoy/Patterns/The Changeling
• International Shorts After Dark
• Canadian Shorts After Dark

I don’t review a lot of short films over here but this festival’s shorts definitely opened my eyes to some very creative premises and some outstanding stories. With that said, these are my top picks:

• Turbo Killer
• Hearth
• Barbara-Anne
• La Noria
• Moment
• The Haunted Swordsman

Lambcast: Evil Dead Franchise

Nothing like a little last minute podcast call-up to add into festival season. However, it did help binge watch the Evil Dead Franchise to prepare for the Evil Dead discussion over at The Lambcast with a bunch of people with rather interesting opinions about this one. Its always a fun time at Lambcast recording so head over to check out the episode HERE.

Battle of Ingredients

With the summer and warm weather going away and festivals slowly fading in the background with events and such, we’re back on track with Battle of Ingredients. October Battle of Ingredients is the Fall BBQ. The post is a bit delayed but its currently in the works. Expect it up next week some time.

Other than that, November Battle of Ingredients is always hiatus due to our checking out the MTL a Table event. We will be checking out three restaurants this year if all goes to plan so I’ll be talking about it as it happens!

Game Warp Podcast is Back!

We’ve been on a huge podcast hiatus for Game Warp. While we have been getting back on the blogging side of things, which is always a great start and will continue to be focused on the blog. The podcast is back in our recording schedule. After some changes a few months ago and the festival coverages and such, we have moved ourselves onto Anchor and be an audio podcast from now on. I’m sure I mentioned it before. The episodes will be audio format only available on Youtube as well.

To kick things back into action, and to show our diversity on this whole rebranding thing we’re doing, we start off with something a little different and that is a discussion on Essential Horror Games!

You can check out the episode over on Game Warp HERE.

Halloween Marathon Wrap-up

With all the crazy stuff going on in the final 2 weeks of October, suffice to say that the marathon somewhat didn’t quite happen although Toronto After Dark did work in my favor on that level. I still have one double feature to come out for the marathon and it will be done ASAP. However, in general, things are wrapped up here! Its been a fun month and I actually got quite a bit done in the first half of the month.

Upcoming November Events: MTL a Table, MEGA MTL, Blood in the Snow Festival

Cute Kitty Pic

That’s it for the October Adventures!
What have you been up to?

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.

Restaurant: Brasserie Elements (Brossard, Canada)

Next up in the food adventures is a long-awaited Friday date night at a restaurant that we’ve been thinking of checking out for a while which has been only opened in the last few years called Brasserie Elements.

Brasserie Elements is for 18 and over as it is focused on its beers and cocktails while it has quite a limited but interesting menu also. You need to be aware of which days the kitchen closes at what time.

I apologize that the menu is only in French but just to show you the limited choices. You can find the menu on their website. Either way, its to get an idea.

Let’s check out what we got!

Drinks

Elements Blonde Beer

Avril Sour

When you go to a brasserie, it wouldn’t be right to not order some kind of drink. The husband likes beers to went ahead to try their house brew blonde beer. I had a sip (because I’m not a huge beer fan) and thought it was pretty decent. Its smooth and pretty good. I had a few items on the cocktail list that I was interested in but essentially got sold on the Avril Sour which is like an Amaretto Sour except it uses a Quebec-made almond-nut liqueur. its small and delicate and tastes really good. With any sours, its always good to keep them well-portioned mostly because its pretty acidic and sometimes the different liqueurs can be too much when the quantity is too much, which is why I’m pretty happy with their flavors, the balance and the size of the drink.

Appetizer

Smoked BBQ Chicken Wings with peanuts and green onions

There were two things that caught my eye in the menu right from the get-go and one of those were this Smoked BBQ chicken wings with peanuts and green onions. They tasted really good. On top of that, I like the concept that they really promote the whole finger food thing so yeah, its casual and fun because there is no elegant way to eat wings without wasting a ton of meat. At least I’m not skilled that way.

Main Meal

Burger Elements

The husband had the Burger Elements which has roasted shishitos, crispy shallots, cheese sauce infused with beer (not sure how to translate that). He really enjoyed it a lot but there was something in it that we couldn’t quite pinpoint.

Pulled Pork Sandwich

I’m a huge fan of pulled pork sandwiches so chances are if they have that as an option, I’m going to choose it. This one had a lot of stuff in it or just very leaky coleslaw along with a good amount of pulled pork and with smoked BBQ sauce. It tasted absolutely fantastic even if it was a completely messy experience. I do say that the coleslaw was a bit too generous which made me not be able to finish up the also very generous portion of fries which was comparable to a mountain.

Overall

Brasserie Elements is a pretty nice place. Its laid back and casual which works very well with the menu it gives and all the kinds of beers that you can try. There’s a good selection of beers from all over and very unique ones that you probably won’t find everywhere. Other than that, the food menu is also pretty good with appetizers, main meals as well as desserts. For a brasserie, they had pretty decent service as the waitress is very attentive to make sure that we were satisfied with our food and drinks and anything else that we needed. However, with a brasserie experience comes a bit more of a noisier atmosphere. The music however was really good, at least to our tastes and the place was split a little bit more in half so the more drinking side definitely felt like they had more speakers than say the more restaurant side. Maybe it wasn’t deliberate but it definitely worked for the better for our preferences.

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: Family, Friends & Events

Its been a month everyone! I had to make the executive decision to skip last time because well, the end of June was kind of sad with not much going on. Seeing as the first part of July had just enough to pair it up, here we are!

A note for some things below. Events are in town and in the next two weeks, the main focus going into August will be on Fantasia Festival. However, you will see that I have other posts planned that aren’t all about movies in case you followed this blog for some of the other hobbies that I have and share around here! I have a lot of stuff planned from books to TV series to gardening and other cool stuff. Plus, most of the projects are still going on so busy but fun stuff coming up! 🙂

Let’s check out whats been going on this past month!

Family Visit

Last month, I had some family come to visit. We ended up going to one of my favorite breakfast restaurants in Old Montreal called Le Cartet. I’ve probably already talked about it before. Either way, they loved it and its always a great time. Most of my family has moved away from Montreal so its always so fun to have visit and catch up.

Battle of Ingredients: St-Jean BBQ

Check out the full post HERE.

Our first summer BBQ of this year was on the St-Jean Baptiste day for Battle of Ingredients. We have decided to lower the frequency just for less stress however, it still a ton of fun to get together and hang out. I actually have some fun ideas for next time if it happens to BBQ again (which I believe it is for now). It was a tad rainy this long weekend but it didn’t bother us too much.

Canada Day, Heat Wave & Pool Time

Shameless selfie time! Sorry about that but I didn’t really take a lot of pictures of swimming. Haha! Good news is that the pool is FINALLY opened after last year’s absolute nightmare. Everything seems to be going well and all the credit goes to my husband figuring it all out. Lucky because it was a record-breaking weekend hitting well above the 40s degrees Celsius. We don’t have air conditioning system so we just rigged our unit with a fan to get the cool air around the house. Luckily it worked pretty well. Along with time in the pool, it was a lot of fun! I’m one of those people who love water. It makes me so happy when I’m just in water or near water hence why I love hiking and being near rivers, lakes, creeks, streams, and especially waterfalls!

Montreal Comiccon 2018

You can the recap of Montreal Comiccon HERE.

I am so grateful to get the media pass again this year for Montreal Comiccon. For the first year, I angled one week of my vacation here so I actually went for all three days of the comiccon weekend. It was a ton of fun. Maybe a little crazy to get all the coverage done in a timely fashion for That Moment In but it all was finished and I thought it turned it pretty alright. There was a lot of see and the Q&A was absolutely awesome. I actually am still working on getting some of the Q&A audio edited for my own channel but if you want to hear the audio for Shadow of the Tomb Raider Q&A and understand French, its on the Game Warp channel and for your convenience, the video below.

Dinner with Friends

Vacation is the perfect time to catch up with friends. The first dinner was a meet-up with Phoebe and her family before the opening film of Fantasia Festival. We finally had my husband go try out their best-kept secret restaurant called Fuschia at Lasalle College. Its never disappointed and let me tell you, the meal was fantastic. So I’ll have that post go up finally since I’ve been respecting their desire to keep it a best-kept secret but they gave me the okay for this time. 😉

Second dinner was just yesterday. My monthly hangout with the girl friends have been a lot less this year because everyone is just so busy with different transitions and personal life and whatnot. We finally met up for a dinner at this little Czech restaurant called Restaurant Bohemia. I’ll have a full post on it also going up soon. It’ll be little things to cut between all the movie reviews in case you aren’t here for that.

Fantasia Film Festival 2018

Fantasia Film Festival is officially in town. Like last year, I had a media pass approved and so incredibly grateful for it. I have a fairly intense schedule the starts up next week. I only managed to fit in two movies as I try to get a lot of my house stuff done before the intensity really kicks up. You know, real life needs to be taken care of. I felt a little bit bad of skipping out a lot of the screenings this weekend but life doesn’t stop for this even if I love it so very much.

However, two reviews have already been up. You can check it out below

Nightmare Cinema
Playing Hard

The next two and a half weeks is going to be intense. I plan to review about 20+ films in total so next week alone, there are currently 11 screenings planned tentatively so if it all pans out, it’ll be my busiest week of the festival and I’ll get the reviews uploaded. All reviews will also be over at That Moment In. Actually, we are aiming for almost full coverage at That Moment In because of some arrangements. So head over there and check out what David has going on over there as he reviews some other movies at Fantasia that I won’t be able to make it to like this one:

La Nuit a Dévoré le Monde (The Night Eats the World)

I will retweet all of those reviews so either subscribe to That Moment In to not miss out or just follow me on Twitter @tranquildreams_

As for what’s planned, here is a list of the movies I’m aiming to go see in alphabetical order :

Anna & the Apocalypse
Big Brother
Bleach
Cam
Fireworks
Kasane
Knuckleball
La Quinceneara
Laplace’s Witch
Luz
Nightshifter
Our House
The Outlaws
Pledge
Searching
Under the Silver Lake
The Vanished

I’m hoping to fit some more in there but I doubt that sounds remotely possible as my actual paying job will be hitting some crazy work phase by the end of July. Gotta pay the bills after all 😉 Still, I’m more than happy with the schedule here and if it all works out, I’ll already be super pleased! I have a rule to have quality instead of quantity so excuse me if some double day film watching days have a little delay in the review going up.

Cute Kitty Pic

Thats it for this “Weekly” Adventures!
What have you been up to?
Any cool events going on where you are? Some fun summer plans? Perhaps vacation in the horizon?

Battle of Ingredients #8 St-Jean Baptiste Summer BBQ 2018

Welcome back to another Battle of Ingredients! Summer is here and our Quebec provincial day was this past weekend so what better way than to meet up and do a little barbecue with friends and get back into the Battle of Ingredients action, right?

Drinks

Main Meal

We’ve done a few barbecues now for Battle of Ingredients and to make things easier this time, my lovely co-host and friend Phoebe (Starry Traveler’s Road) took care of the meats saying that she found a spot near her that supports local businesses and we love to do that. This stuff is from Fruiterie Boucherie Longueuil.

They pretty much sell barbecue boxes and she tried the Econo Mix which is $90 worth of meats and potatoes and such. Here it is!

Now for the unpacking of what is inside and preparation she did. Here you go!

And the first batch into the grill…

And finally, the results of the taking turns of cooking between the husbands and Phoebe, while I took care of their little one and helped carry the umbrella as it was raining. My skill sets unfortunately don’t extend to barbecuing so I left it to the experts. Here is how it turned out – hopefully I didn’t forget anything.

BBQ meats

Chicken leg

BBQ Foil packs

The box itself is a lovely assortment. The seasoned meat was really good. There was a good variety to share. It provided a lot of food. The meats were pretty fresh. It was a good choice to not have to worry about the preparation ourselves and just be able to get something ready to just pop onto a foil and cook on the grill. It was a smart and efficient choice for Phoebe and I’m totally supportive of it. She mentioned that there are other things to substitute in the boxes and other choices and whatnot that we could try so maybe we will talk about that in the next barbecue.

Dessert

With that said, my job was desserts. I made some Rhubarb Apple Tarts. It was a super simple recipe. I bought tarts from the grocery store since making pastry is still one of those things that I haven’t quite figured out well enough yet. Its a work in progress. Rhubarb is fresh from the garden and I used Cortland apples. It was an attempt to balance the acidity of the rhubarb a little.

The recipe for the filling was taken from here: http://www.coffeeandcrumpets.com/apple-and-rhubarb-galette/

This recipe had more than 12 tarts worth of filling so if you do intend to try it out, just keep that in mind.

The tarts turned out pretty well. They were very cinnamon-y and I think it had to do with the fact that it wasn’t in a galette but used in a tart. Although to be fair, when making apple desserts usually, there is some cinnamon. I thought they turned out pretty good since I don’t have an issue with cinnamon.

Overall

This was a lovely choice. The BBQ box made our lives a little easier. The cooking still took a long time just with the sheer amount of items in it and the variety and different cooking times and such. However, it is a good idea. The tarts turned out how I wanted them to and I think in general everyone enjoyed it well enough. Fruit tarts are always tricky especially since we have an array of allergies to take into consideration between our friends, Phoebe and myself. Hopefully by the next BBQ, I will have more vegetable harvests to work with to give it even more of a personal touch.

Before we finish, you will notice that the Battle of Ingredients will officially decrease in frequency just a little which is already in effect, due to busy schedules and just the need to not overstretch our time. It was a decision I needed to make for myself. However, we are still chugging along and planning for the August meet-up after this one.

Have you started your grills and enjoyed the first BBQ?
What do you like to make?

Recap: Goodfood #19

Welcome back to another recap for Goodfood!

We’ve been ordering these boxes at quite regular intervals. Its nice to see that this time’s menu actually reflects quite a bit on the warmer weather and gives us a very nice summer vibe. These recipes are on the more time-consuming side though as they estimate approximately 40-45 minutes for each of these and we usually always surpass that time.

Let’s just get right into it.

Enchiladas Verdes with Zucchini, Rice & Fresh Tomatillo Salsa

I haven’t had enchiladas for pretty much as long as my lactose-intolerance relapsed back in 2008 or something. I still remembering loving them whenever we went to Mexican restaurants with my friends back in college. This one is a little different as its our vegetarian meal of the box. I don’t usually start with the vegetarian meal however, I was tight on time and this was the easier one to put together. It also had an ingredient that I’ve never used before: Tomatillo. A fun little one to put together. There is a decent amount of chopping but putting it together was quite fun. It yielded 6 enchiladas so we made them in two separate oven pans. Mine excluded all dairy products, which means no sour cream mix for the rice and not cotija cheese on top. My husbands had everything as it should be. I wasn’t sure how I’d feel about this recipe but it turned out to be quite tasty. Not too crazy about the tomatillo salsa but the wrap itself (which is what it is without the Mexican parts was really fresh and delicious.

Mojito Chicken with Crispy Rice & Chayote-Mango Salad

One of the more unique recipe ideas from Goodfood has to go to transforming mojito to clash with a chicken dish. I get the concept behind it but I wasn’t quite sold. It didn’t help that they gave a mango that was over-ripe for a crunchy salad texture. It was mushy and in the end, I actually put it aside from just eating by itself. At the same time, I’ve had a traumatizing chayote cutting experience last year so I had my husband do that part since apparently my hands (and it happens to a lot of people) react to the chayote when you cut it and it dried out my skin and I just start peeling so its best to use gloves when you cut them as precaution. And they suggested to not cook it, which I didn’t like the idea of seeing as my hands didn’t like it, imagine my mouth, right? So we ended up grilling it a little so changed the recipe up for ourselves. I like chayote when its done good and it was pretty good, the crispy rice had a good idea but not sure in execution it worked as well and the best part did go to the chicken itself as it got infused with various mojito-ish flavors and the spices worked well. A little disappointing but it had some good elements and cool ideas.

Miso Butter Pork with Red Rice & Yu Choy

And we present to you the highlight of the box and also my experiemental choice which turned out to have some really nice trick up their sleeves. Miso in anything usually is a really salty idea. So I went light on the salt and pepper in general for this one. If I remember correctly, the rice had garlic and then had mirin and sesame oil added to it afterwards which adds a lot of nice flavors to it. There was some cool marinated apples on the top also with mirin and vinegar and sesame oil (maybe). Which made everything very marinated and helps that the pork was only cooked with salt and pepper and not some special spice. The Miso Butter element was really just the sauce that was poured over it. I could definitely have lowered the salt a little bit more however, it still was really delicious. I only ever use mirin when I get these boxes and I’m not sure using sesame oil on rice is a good long-term eating habit plan but every once in a while, its a pretty nice touch.

BBQ Pork Burgers with Crispy Onions & Garlic-Butter Corn

Onto my husband’s time in the kitchen as he makes delicious burgers. He took over while I did gardening so I actually have no idea how any of this recipe works. I can tell you that this burger buns were better than the last one we had. The patty was also quite delicious. The garlic-butter corn was really good also. Crispy onions do add a nice little bite to the burger as well. This one was a pretty decent success. We don’t eat pork burgers a lot, mostly because I never think about ground pork but its a nice change from beef. Our second fave of the box for sure!

That’s it for this Goodfood recap!
Next one is the 20th recap and while I debated to stop doing it, I have so much fun sharing these cooking experiences.

Any of these recipes appeal to you?