TV Binge: Restaurants on the Edge (Season 1, 2020)

Restaurants on the Edge (Season 1, 2020)

Creator: Courtney Hazlett

Host: Karin Bohn, Nick Liberato, Dennis Prescott

Three food and design experts travel the world to revive failing restaurants by connecting them to the local culture beyond their gorgeous views. – IMDB

Restaurants on the Edge is a new reality makeover series that uses the concept of choosing restaurants on the edge of a city with a gorgeous view but on the edge of failing and leaving their own savings in jeopardy. Its the basis of how each of these restaurants of chosen on an international scale. The three hosts go in as specialists to not only fix the restaurant by introducing better menu options and interior design elements that bring it together with the area they are in to unify the concept but also at times, to help the owners clear up some of their own mindset and mentality on this restaurant. While it does a lot of the makeover elements, what makes Restaurant on the Edge stand out is that its much more of a food, travel and culture show than a makeover reality show. Sure, it explores the owners and their own leadership and business values, giving each of these locations and restaurants their own life and purpose and exposing the world of the different beautiful views that these places have to offer but it also spends most of its time in each of these places visiting the artists and cultural elements and exploring the food and local produces and resources.

While I’ve never heard of any of the hosts before, they each have their strengths and manage to create a nice balance in what they do. The places they go to whether its food, culture and design all brings a good element as they implement it into the end product of the makeover in the final reveal. Dennis Prescott takes on the food and local produces side of things which leads him in some locations to discover some interesting experiences. At the same time, Karin Bohn is responsible of the design and she focuses a lot on use of space and art and bringing culture together. Whereas, Nick Liberato is more of the culture and brings in the entrepreneurship know-how as he usually has the sit down with the owners about their bad online reviews and how to improve it and brings the owners back on track with finding the right mentality of running those businesses. Each of them are good in their own domains.

Restaurants on the Edge is definitely a fun reality show. Its great on the makeover level but I love for its focus on bringing restaurants to embrace their local produce and showing off some of the culture in the area whether its with food, design or whatever else. It chooses some interesting locations to visit and really picks some restaurants that probably would have been hidden if it wasn’t for the show. Of course, for myself, I always love it when the show focuses a lot in Canadian cities as well as even making a stop in Hong Kong where I can truly relate. I’d be down for this to have a second season for sure!

My Weekly Adventures: A Little Bit of Everything…

Welcome to the next Adventures post!

First of all, if you do drop by here frequently, I’m sorry for the sparseness of the posts, I’ll have a general explanation of what went down and kind of took over my life. I feel like I’ve said that a lot in 2018. While there were a lot of things that have been fairly cool in 2018, overall on a personal sense, 8 months in and I’m sure my husband and I are quite over it and ready for something incredibly great to balance things out. Anyways, we gotta stay positive to hopefully attract some more positive things..at least thats the concept in my mind.

Let’s see how the second half of August went!

The next Battle of Ingredients

We skipped a month of Battle of Ingredients in July because well, its busy in July for myself. However, we got things set for mid-August and had it all ready to go for our Take 2 of BBQ. This time, we each made some nice twists and there were a lot of success. Some recipes are ideas for other cooking methods in later challenges for non-BBQ and others, we learned from its not so perfect execution. Overall, it was a fun little time together to hang out and catch up and explore some new recipes. Its hard to imagine we just did the 9th Battle of Ingredients and the next is the 10th!

You can check out the full post HERE.

Lachine Half Marathon – Spectator

No pictures for this event. I’ve grown so accustom to doing half marathon support for my friend that I just kind of chill out a lot. It was a super hot day and I got a mini sunburn. Honestly, my bad for choosing to sit on a bench under the blazing sun catching up on reading. It was a super nice and honestly, I kind of miss it because the weather’s slightly cooled down and after that race and going home for a pool session, our pool motor is dying but as its the end of the season, we are only replacing everything next year and closing the pool early for the year. However, in terms of the Lachine Marathon, it was a tough one because the heat came in fairly quick. My friend did finish it within the time he wanted but so close. This season has been a tough one for him. A few more races to go for the season and with the heat ramping down a little, I’m hoping that its gets a positive turn for him. However if you haven’t been to the Lachine Half, its set in a pretty cool pier/park area with some stuff set up to look at and nice little sitting areas and all that fun stuff.

The 15 Hour ER Adventure

Life takes us for some crazy time. Don’t freak out! I didn’t go to the ER personally however, my husband did have some pain that he was enduring and we had chalked up to maybe indigestion or stomach flu until he had pains on his side which because just very unbearable by the time we hit the end of the work week. For those who don’t know about Canada’s free healthcare, it just means that there is an incredible wait time more so because in Quebec, medical professionals and the whole system is fairly messed up so we ended up doing a 12 hour wait time in the ER then got sent to the room to wait for the doctor another hour before he saw him, took tests and proceeded to round out another 2 hours or more waiting for test analysis, results and diagnosis. It turns out it was something of the beginning of a stomach ulcer and its time for meds to stop it before it gets more serious and well, the pain still showed up every once in a while so further test is in the horizon at the moment. Quite the stressful time and honestly, after my 5:30am arrival to home after the ER adventure and staying awake to make sure the husband was okay and being over 30, the all nighter and sleeping 2.5 hours just kind of murdered my entire week that followed and with it, any energy or motivation to process thoughts on movies and reviews. I spent most of the time after work sitting in my chair just resting and relaxing this week.

Either way, with that little scare…we are officially enforcing…

A Transition to Change in Eating Habits and having more Balanced Meals

Not sure why that’s a section in itself! But I’m totally grasping for straws for something to talk about. Anyways, I’ve been getting back to working out as you can see. As I’m typing this up, we just literally finished binging Ultimate Beastmaster Season 3 and boy, am I excited to talk about it in the next TV Binge! Yes, its moved forward in priority because I’m so hyped by it. However, that is good because Ultimate Beastmaster usually gets us super motivated to train again. We are already working on the eating healthier thing and for that reason, I’m decreasing Goodfood boxes to help get into a groove of making food from scratch on our own and not always relying on boxes because the reality is that the boxes were meant to help support the crazy weeks and not so that we could get lazy and that is what we’ve been doing a lot, which results to some bad eating habits whenever we don’t get boxes. Either way, transition going on already and I’m probably not going to share that except perhaps on Instagram or if I try out any cool new recipes.

We did make this recipe today as a little throwback: Basil Avocado Bacon Pasta. The post is HERE. We found this recipe 5 years ago and we still make it a few times a year. Its actually the first time we made it this year so like I said, we’re off our game a little.

If you have any healthy and tasty recipes, do share it in the comments below. We’re always down for suggestions!

New Dairy-Free Food Discovery

View this post on Instagram

So happy to see @breyers joining into the #dairyfree #icecream alternative with this #cookiesandcream #flavor. #sweettooth #desserts #food #tryingnewthings

A post shared by Kim (@tranquildreams) on Sep 1, 2018 at 9:22pm PDT

Upcoming:

• TV Binges
• Book Reviews & Blog Tour
• Restaurant Review/Recap

Kitty Cute Pic

If you are following me on Avenue of Daydreams, you already saw this pic!
A silly kitty cat moment as she pulls down our towels that was hanging to dry on the railing to the ground to improvise a bed.

Thats it for this Weekly Adventures!
Its a little short but its just what happens when life gets taken over by more serious things!
On a side note, I am more avid on Instagram when I’m not posting or adding random posts on Facebook, so be sure to follow me there.

What adventures have you been up to?

My Weekly Adventures!

After some intensely busy holidays, life feels like its tapering off into quiet.  Slowly but surely it is. The one thing I do notice in January is the immense amount of birthdays.  Not a complaint, of course.  I like being invited to parties, even the hermit in me likes to go out and have fun. The first half of January is a little slower than usual. You will see that this might be a rather short Weekly Adventures that isn’t really that adventurous but I still have a few things to talk about.

Cat Naps

Wait a minute! That’s not an adventure! I already told it isn’t but the first half of January was all about my cat napping and recuperating her nerves from all the unexpected visitors that invaded her safe home and once her purring starts, she makes me want to doze off. It was an endless cycle.

Family Dinner at the In-Laws

Last weekend, we had a proper feast at my in-laws with everyone in my husband’s family.  I drank a little too much of my father in-law’s heavily spiked punch and totally channelled all the French speaking me and tucked away all the self-conscious part of me. It was a ton of fun.  I think this picture is just missing the chicken wings that were still in the oven at this point.  Those were fantastically delicious!

Lifestyle Changes: Eating Habits and Working Out

Two years ago, I was great at this, maybe it was 3 years now.  Then, I got that eye infection that wouldn’t go away and it just kicked that perfect sleeping, eating and exercising routine out of the equation.  I get it back in the summer and if anything, I proved that in some pretty extreme conditions, I can still push myself to work out when I need to. Then winter rolls around and things get out of whack again. I didn’t mention it for the New Year’s post but its kind of a the past week decision to slowly make the transformation.

Consider this a new goal this year and I’m going to give you updates so I stay accountable!

I’m going back to a mostly gluten-free diet, working out (weights and cardio) 2-3 times a week and getting back a good sleeping routine, which means no more procrastinating and being much more efficient at organizing everything.

Revamping and Updating

I’ve posted during the holidays that I was updating the site and getting linked up and making sure the indexes were all good.  I did a bit of editing and actually finished all that up that day. But it also occurred to me that we’re approaching 5 years and I’ve been wanting to make a banner and reposition where I am. I have some funky connected Google+ accounts and I really just use social media for the blog except for Facebook but I don’t have a Facebook page.  Which reminds me? Should I set one up?

Either way, story is…if you happen to drop by any videos on any pages like vlogs or whatnot, they won’t work because while I was trying to work out some magic to transfer my Youtube accounts and change the connected Google accounted, I deleted my own Youtube by accident and there we go…all the subscriptions and likes and lists and videos are ALL GONE! It was my mistake in the beginning while setting up the Google + account and realizing it wasn’t done right and now, it was hard to fix it up. I’m not particularly skilled at technology so that didn’t help either.

Well, I do firmly believe that to revamp something completely, you need to break it down and rebuild it in some ways.  Just like when you want to clean something thoroughly, you first create a bigger mess and then clean it all back up. Maybe its a weird method. It works for me though.

With that said, its just an open invitation to clean up a ton of stuff on the site and fix the menu and widgets and all that stuff.  Expect to see some changes gradually show up over the next week or so. If anything doesn’t work, its because I’m messing around with it so just drop by again and things should be all good again.  It shouldn’t affect anything recent since I’m just relocating and evaluating posts from 2011-2012 mostly.

 Blogathon Announcement

In case you missed it, I’ve teamed up with Drew at Drew’s Movie Reviews for an upcoming Blogathon called the Ultimate 80s Blogathon to be held on February 15th.  For more details, you can check out the announcement post HERE! Its actually my first time to run a blogathon so its very much thanks to Drew who helped push me to do this one.  Even if you don’t normally write reviews, you are still welcome to do a little write up of your favorite movie. Even if you aren’t a blogger, we really looking forward to see everyone’s choices!

Mini Tribute to Alan Rickman

I don’t normally do much for the death of actors.  I did only once before for Paul Walker.  This past 15 days marked two influential stars passing away but just yesterday, we lost Alan Rickman, someone who my husband and I really love as an actor.  He is so talented and will definitely be missed. I feel it right to take a little moment here to look at some of his memorable roles to us.

Hans Gruber (Die Hard)

David Weinburg (Dark Harbor)

Colonel Brandon (Sense and Sensitibility)

Harry (Love Actually)

Severus Snape (Harry Potter series)

Event updates + Upcoming…

Events are kind of picking up again. I’m just trying to find time to get to them. I did go to one restaurant in Janvier a la Carte at Quartier Dix30, which is a little shopping/entertainment/dining complex in the suburbs of Montreal.  I’ve probably mentioned it somewhere else. Regardless, I will have a post for that going up.  I do want to check out another one if I have the time and company, but no promises on that one.  As I do need to make time to catch up on some movies at the theatres like The Revenant.  I personally want to go to see 13 Hours and later on, The 5th Wave. There are a myriad of winter festivals starting to pop up so I want to try and get to one of those as well, maybe see some ice sculptures.  I’ll fill you all in with an upcoming Events post very soon. I have some plans in the making for February and March weekend getaways if things work out well.

I’m going to keep this short since I’ll have something special go up in just a few days.

To wrap it up, upcoming posts…

• Special post with some announcements
• Netflix A-Z: D-G (at least) and catching up with more 2015 movies
• Janvier a la Carte Restaurant
• Baking Through Disney: Pinocchio theme Baking
• The Classics Adventures: Persuasion Book Review

Happy Friday, my lovelies!