Sushi in Markham

This saturday we had a an unofficial field trip to Markham - lead by my school friend Natasha. We did Pacific Mall and historic Unionville - ending our trip with all you can eat sushi. As my second round at all you can eat, i'm not the greatest judge. Things came out kinda irregularly, but everything we ate was very good.

Here are a few of the highlights - we also had sushi and sushi pizza - but these were the most memorable. We ended the meal with green tea ice cream and fried bananas (i just had the banana)

Steak - this was actually really nice.

Sushi lights at night

Bi-lingual

Some chicken dish i didn't try

Eel pancake

(limit one per table)

Miso eggplant - this was so tender we had two

Soba noodles in a light broth

Jazz Festival Open House

My sister was nice enough to host an open house for the Beaches Jazz Festival. When my parents lived there we could always make a fun night of it, as its better when you have a home base. This year my sister had an afternoon event, with everyone heading down in the evening. Unfortunately it rained quite hard in the afternoon, but luckily it cleared up for the evening portion.

Of course i offered to make a food contribution for the event - since it was a drop in there was no need to make anything too intricate, so i settled with some dips. I have a great and super easy seven layer dip that people like so i thought i would make that for sure, but for the second i wanted to do something i had never done before/.

A few weeks before my friend Melanie had done a hot crab dip that went over well, so i texted her and got the recipe. It was really easy and definitely a crowd pleaser! Its originally from Epicurious - Hot Crab Dip. I did of course make a few alernations - i used shallots instead of onions, and used reduce fat cream cheese, half sour cream/half mayo.

Seven layer ingredients

The layers:

Salsa
Re-fried Beans
tomatoes, onions and jalepnos
guacamole (okay this is a layer in itself)
sour cream
lettuce
cheese
I top it off with the left-over tomatoes and onions.

Wrapped and Ready to go

The spread (yeah that's a sushi boat)

Some of the desserts

Birthday Sushi

So in celebration for Cody's birthday (and Will's belated one) a bunch of us went for All You Can Eat Sushi. We originally had reservations for Sushi D on college, but they conveniently forgot about them, and after standing outside on what was a quite mild february night for half an hour we decided to move on. We ended up, sort of randomly, Sushi Q which was a few blocks west. It turned out to be a better decision.

This was actually my first All You Can Eat sushi experience, i tend to avoid food venues where self control is non-existent, something about the crowd mentality makes you overeat. (and the cheapness - i am scottish) I did for persuasion wear a dress that could comfortably take the bloat, but overall i was pretty reserved, except for the edamame which i can't control myself around.

We ended up being the only patrons. The place was quite brightly lit, and they were playing disco, which i think we all actually enjoyed. Being alone in the place actually made our food come out pretty quickly, and it was crazy seeing what 9 people with all you can eat will order. I didn't know this, and i guess i had always wondered, you get charged for the things you don't eat, so you kinda have to be strategic.

For me, i ordered some specific things, but we ended up sampling a lot of different dishes. I thought it was crazy what my friends ordered, but they struggled through! I got tuna sashimi, deepfried tuna roll, miso soup, salad and bbq eel (my favorite) but ended up having some other things that came to the table. Good times!

Above:

Deep fried tuna roll
Rainbow roll
Shrimp tempura
Our Chef
Bento Box