Anywhere Doug and I go is guaranteed to be interesting.  We seem to attract odd people and events like magnets of blood and bone.  Last late summer around this time was certainly no exception.

Spurred on by a need to imbibe vast quantities of alcohol, as usual, we decided to take a Sunday drive one day and stop by Peller Estates.  Peller Estates is one of the premier producers of wine in the Niagara region, even though last year they had to buy a shiteload of their grapes from South America because the crops were so horrid for 2006 and 2007.  This hardly affected the quality of the wine, merely its carbon footprint.

We signed up for a wine tour and tasting, with a wine and food pairing class to follow with one of the employees of the winery.  As it has been a while I can’t remember the poor man’s title, but it was something equivalent to brewmaster.  We went on the tour and it was quite informative; we learned how to “chuff” wine.  I almost lost my cookies when the tour guide started chuffing, until I realized that it was “OK” - amazing what socialization will do.  Chuffing involves essentially gargling the wine at the back of your throat to get the full flavour.  Wine enthusiasts are probably passing out from the simplicity of that explanation; to pacify them I will say that there is probably more to it than that.

The lady from the front desk came striding down the stairs on a mission.  That mission was to get us away from the tour group and send us up to our classroom, pronto.  We asked her if it was starting early, as we had thought that it was timed to start with the end of the tour.  She smiled blankly and just begged us to come upstairs.  We deduced later that the instructor must have hit the panic button under the boardroom table and this was her answer to it.

We walked into the room and there were wineglasses set up for us, each for a different type of wine.  There were also little plates of appetizers, each containing different combination of meats and cheeses.  There was a very scared looking instructor, and only one other couple.  The couple, of course, is why I am writing this for you, my eager readers.

The woman was stunning.  I don’t mean that kind of airbrushed stunning that you see in a magazine, but that real life, flesh and blood stunning that makes women like her extremely rare jewels.  She was casually dressed in an informal outfit - not jeans and a t-shirt but not over the top either.  Her hair and makeup were perfectly done.

The guy was a different story.  Tall and lanky, this guy got more than a few wedgies in high school.  Heck, we wanted to give him one about ten minutes after meeting him.  Outspoken and strident, to look at them you would think that there was no way the guy could have netted this lady unless he was a porn star.

We reserved judgment, made small talk, and I noticed that the lady had an accent.  I asked her what her background was and she said that she had recently immigrated from Russia, with a furtive glance at her husband.  That’s when the sun dawned on both of our little mental beaches - she was a mail order bride.

What ensued could have been a Mad TV or SNL skit, only I don’t think that they could have made this shit up.  The instructor, who was very low key and unpretentious, found himself having to deal with multiple outbursts from the lanky weirdo, who claimed to know one of the Peller kids.  The instructor asked him which one and he gave a name that the instructor had never heard of.  The instructor wrote it off to “Peller” being a common name, but you could tell he was trying to put the smackdown on this pretentious git.  He then went on about making his own wine on the balcony of his condo in Toronto, and essentially took over the conversation from there.  All the while he was twirling his Masonic ring, which we had been informed belonged to his father, who was “quite high up” in the organization.  I have never in my life met someone so keen to impress people.

When his lovely wife upstaged him with a rare remark, he essentially told her to be quiet.  This wasn’t one of those “be quiet honey, you shouldn’t really be telling anyone about that mole on my nutsack” sort of quiet, it was more the “be quiet or I’ll ship you back to Russia, you good for nothing whore” kind of be quiet.

The instructor rushed through the session as quickly as possible to just get them out of the room.  I’m sure we learned many wondrous things that day, such as the fact that wine goes with whatever you want it to go with and the traditional pairings of white with chicken and fish and red with steak had been tossed out aeons ago.    Mr. Wannabe Mason didn’t like that piece of advice at all - he had brought his mail order wife to that class so that they would look very educated and cool at the dinner parties that they probably held for his loud, obnoxious friends and he wanted to know what went with what, goddamit.  He actually resorted to picking up each wine and asking the instructor to tell him what he would serve with it - I believe the wife was writing it down.  It was a pity because the whole point of the class was how to enjoy wine with food, not how to classify wine with food.  We got it, and have since applied the lesson generously.

When we left we waited until they left the room, then the instructor left, then us.  I tapped the instructor on the shoulder and said “were you thinking what we were thinking” and he looked at me and said “hell, yes.”  We had a good laugh and he talked to us for a further 10-15 minutes about his job and the estate, and we shook hands and parted ways in bemusement over our shared experience.

The moral here?  Guys, if you have to do the mail order bride thing, don’t treat her like one in public.  It’s extremely creepy and not to mention disrespectful to her.  I wanted to grab the poor thing and enroll her in a Woman’s Studies course at the University of Toronto just so she could get more of a sense that she didn’t have to sit there and take that, regardless of how she got over here.  I guess that the message for mail order brides is that if the guy you married is an asshole in general when you get here, you don’t owe him jack.  Nothing.  Leave, and go to a halfway house where he can’t find you.  The way most of you look you will have no trouble getting a job anywhere, in this lady’s case she could have been a supermodel.  I may not have been able to help her, but I’m hoping someone reads this who is in a similar situation and it gives them the gumption to get out.  It may have been funny, but it was also very sad.

I’m sure she’s not allowed to chuff.

Posted: September 4th, 2008 under Anarchy, Food & Drink.
Comments: none

You know who you are. Fortunately for you, the rest of us don’t, but you know who you are. You are the people who left behind little pieces of yourselves in a restaurant in Oakville on the evening of Saturday, May 10, taking 2 of the 3 toilets in the washroom out of service.

One thinks that when one goes to a restaurant in Oakville, as opposed to a restaurant in Calcutta, that people in Oakville would think of flushing the toilet. Then, I started making excuses in my head like “maybe these are low flush toilets”, and then when I went to do what you couldn’t, I found out that even that was wrong. These toilets seemed to even be the extra-flush kind.

One of you committed a somewhat minor sin, that was leaving the toilet with some yellow coloured liquid in it. The other one stepped over the barrier into that no man’s land of uncouthness that I have only seen previously at a grievous hole of a dive bar in Sutton. Only I was in Oakville.

The rest of my evening and dinner was marred by the fact that I was sharing space with two complete throwbacks of our civilization. I was afraid that by eating the same chicken wings, my brain cells would devolve to the point where I would commit the foul sin that I had seen with my own naked eyes, a vision that will be seared upon my brain forever.

I started going over in my mind situations in which I would not flush a restaurant toilet. Drunk? No, no… I have been embarrassingly, sloppily drunk in a restaurant and still remembered to flush. Depressed? No, when I’ve been at my lowest things seem to take an extra long time, so forgetting to flush wouldn’t be going on. Overly medicated? Perhaps, but what I saw looked healthy enough that medication couldn’t have been involved in the process.

I had to come to the conclusion that Bronte Creek Provincial Park must be host to a series of caves like those in the movie “The 13th Warrior”, where a tribe of pre homo-sapiens Neanderthals lives, and they sometimes enjoy venturing out for some wings and beer. There are at least two females in this tribe, I didn’t see the men’s so I can’t account for the population of males.

We must take pity on these poor souls who are so desperately trying to co-mingle with their more evolved peers. Instead of ridiculing them and calling them disgusting, perhaps the Town of Oakville could hire an anthropologist (I hear Jane Goodale is in retirement - she may need some bingo money) to go out to the Bronte caves and toilet train these individuals properly, so that they will be able to blend more easily on their nights out.

Otherwise, they may teach these same habits to their children and their children’s children, thereby guaranteeing that they will not be accepted into society as a whole.

Restaurants may want to assist this process by installing self-flushing toilets to guard against the failings of these poor creatures; certainly the restaurateur is already overburdened with expenses, but the expense they incur when another customer witnesses these failings of the less evolved and never returns to their establishment again would be far greater, in the end.

I suppose I am appealing to restaurants and the cavepeople alike to please remember to simply push a button or depress a lever; and to restaurants to have staff check the bathrooms occasionally to ensure that patrons are not tarnishing the image of their establishment.

Posted: May 11th, 2008 under Food & Drink.
Comments: none

This is an awesome recipe I just concocted tonight. I know I didn’t make the sauce from scratch, sue me :).

2 - Chicken Breasts
1- Jar of Classico Garlic Alfredo sauce
1- Clove of Garlic
1/2 Jar of Roasted Sweet Red Peppers
4-5 Stuffed Pimento Olives
Dash of Lemon Juice
Kosher Salt
Pepper

In a frying pan, heat up a dollop of olive oil. Slice the garlic thin but not fine, and put it in the pan once the olive oil is up. Slice chicken into thin strips. Commence to fry chicken tits over medium heat.

Prepare your pasta as you like it - I used spaghetti for this recipe but linguine or any other form of pasta will do.

Once the chicken is starting to brown and is no longer pink, chop up your olives and the 1/2 jar of red peppers. Don’t use the whole jar as it will overwhelm the dish. Add them in and let them fry with the chicken for approximately two minutes.

Do not drain. Add the sauce, lemon juice, salt and pepper and stir the whole mess up.

This recipe pairs surprisingly well with Mill St. Brewery Stock Ale, a beer I just got turned onto by Doug’s cousin. Apparently they are in Toronto - look for a forthcoming article on Mill St. Brewery on this blog as we attempt to infiltrate it and buy their beer (or maybe they’ll just let us in).

Enjoy!

Posted: March 24th, 2008 under Food & Drink.
Comments: none