Gourmet Hot and Spicy

Now, I'm not blaming time or anything, but I didn't start having problems with this project until I started working the night shift. It was then that I became unable, unwilling to cook dinner at breakfast time and trying to come up with a reasonable schedule to cook and document dinners, let alone try to find or come up with new recipes on a daily basis, proved to be quite difficult. When stores are not open to do grocery shopping, when it's already a couple hours past "dinner time", it's very hard to work up the ambition to cook dinner.

Tonight, instead of trying to forge a dinner from the pantry alone, we went to this restaurant called Gourmet Hot and Spicy that one of Shannon's co-workers recommended. There are 3 locations within the city; 1 downtown and 2 very far away from here. We chose the one downtown because of its proximity to us. Unfortunately, the one downtown is like a food court version in Concordia, so we hopped on the metro and went in search of the one closest to that.

After a very long trek to whet our appetites, we found the place and sat down. We were given the menu and a moment to glance it over. When our waiter came back, we had him explain the premise once again. Here's the deal: Order some food. Order some more if you want. Order as many dishes as you want, then eat them. All for one price. Don't forget soup, beverages and dessert. We thought you could adjust the heat level accordingly as well, but failed to remember this until after we'd ate our fill. There's still another 60 dishes to try, so we'll have to go back some day.

Over the course of 2 hours, we ordered 15 plates of food (hence the collage), a pot of tea and some soda. We opted out of dessert because, quite frankly, there was no room for dessert to go in to. Describing each dish would be a tedious task, so I will simply just try to remember everything. We had hot and sour soup, tom yum soup, green chicken curry, deep fried quail, Spring Rolls, hot and spicy vegetables, pineapple chicken, Sweet and Sour Pork, vegetable fried rice, hoisin lamb, duck crepes, shrimp wontons, dumplings in peanut sauce, sesame beef and pork ribs with sea salt.

My favorite of the night was definitely the duck crepe, which had very little filling but a very nice flavor with some crunchy vegetables, duck and a bit of hoisin sauce. The deep-fried and sauced dishes like pineapple chicken and sesame beef were probably next in line. The worst was the hot and spicy vegetables which were kind of gummy with a bland cornstarch sauce. I did not like the dumplings in peanut sauce at all, but it was reassuring to know that the variations of peanut sauce I've been making suck because I don't particularly like Peanut Sauce. Undoubtedly my Green Curry is superior to theirs though.

Of course, what's a Chinese dinner without a fortune cookie? I had a double fortune. "Listen to vain words or tongue" and "You have an unusually magnetic personality." I like how the fortunes here have French on the other side instead of bogus lucky numbers! Just double the bogus fortune fun.