There's nothing like closing off a month with a really terrible photo of noodles. The only teriyaki I've done so far this year was for Salmon and it wasn't particularly good. When Shannon requested a teriyaki stirfry I figured I should give it another go. This sauce was a lot better; thicker and more flavorful. I wonder what Asian sauces taste like thickened with a roux instead of cornstarch? I imagine that the color would be lighter.

I put basically what I had in the fridge into the Teriyaki Noodle Bowl, which was carrots, red cabbage, red pepper and broccoli. Of course, there's no reason to use these vegetables over others and typical snow peas and such with thinly sliced meat is quite scrumptious. I'm not sure I've ever used scrumptious to describe anything before, but it seems sort of awkward now.

To change the subject, I am quite happy to be going into the last month of this project. Here starts an active countdown in my head. Of course, this is hardly the last month of working on A Food Year since there is still much to be done in terms of recreating the restaurant dinners, as well as an enormous amount of editing and photo doctoring, not to mention all the effort involved in the publishing process, but it's definitely nice to feel a sense of accomplishment, completeness and some sort of resolution to this madness. Has it really been 11 months already?

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.

I've been craving grilled meat for a while now, so I searched the Encyclopedia Internet to determine the place with BBQ within closest proximity to me. Turns out it's Maison Tandoori, an Indian restaurant about a block from here that has a really good lunch buffet that I've gone to a couple times since we've been here. Since I enjoyed the lunch buffet, I figured that their dinner couldn't be too shabby either. I had already decided that I would order the Tandoori platter, complete with a full chicken leg (thigh attached), chicken breast, lamb, beef and shrimps. It all goes down from here.

There were only 4 other patrons in the restaurant during our hour or so dinner. We ordered coffees upon our arrival and, after several requests for them, did not receive them until our dinners were on the table, about 45 minutes later. We wanted coffees to warm up because we were coming in from a cold, wintery wind, not because coffee is a complimentary beverage to curry (because, I assure you, it does nothing to soothe the gentle burn of chilies). The only waiter was having a lot of trouble attending to only 3 tables of 2 and kept having to go back to the kitchen to assist with cooking.

From what I could tell, the other 2 tables did not order appetizers or desserts, so 6 dishes should not be an overwhelming task for a kitchen to handle whatsoever. Something is definitely amiss here. Shannon ordered the chicken rojan josh and was skeptical of whether it was cooked thoroughly. It came with naan that was doughy and cold. I had a similar experience with my beef, which was more like Shami than I was expecting. It was completely charred outside and very pink inside. Though it may simply be from seasoning or something, since the outside had turned brown like ground beef would and my ignorance prevented me from knowing otherwise, I simply set the rest of these aside to prevent food poisoning.

The Tandoori Chicken was dry and kind of pastey. The shrimps were extremely overcooked. I can only hope they weren't in the tandoor for the length of cooking required for the chicken, which had been overdone as well. Somehow the lamb was absolutely perfect though, very tender and wonderfully seasoned. Why couldn't the whole platter be like this? Needless to say, after a 5-10 minute wait for the check, we paid and got out of there as quickly as possible.

Tonight was Shannon's friend's last night in town. She spent the day eating at as many restaurants as possible and still managed to prepare dinner for us when we got off work, which she ate as well, then had some 99 cent pizza and snacks afterwards. I don't know where she puts it all. I'm happy to have dinner cooked for me though. I guess having company's not so bad.

Everything was good, except that the Tomato Basil Rice totally scorched the bottom of my saucepan and it's very hard to get off. The main event was Spinach Ricotta Stuffed Salmon which is a nice, rich and cheesy dish. The salmon was cooked for well and I enjoyed it. I would've added a whole lot more spinach if I had made it, but other than that I have no complaints. That's a big thing for me! I complain about everything.

There was also a Mixed Green Salad with Raspberry Vinaigrette. Fresh raspberries made a really big difference in the flavor of the vinaigrette. A nice tart and sweet combination. We omitted the walnuts from Shannon's version so we didn't kill her.

Shannon went to Pizzedelic with her and I was a little jealous. I was also hoping to try some good pizza because my Margherita was a little weird. So we went to Prato and I tried the bianca pizza to make up for it. Bianca is white in Italian, as far as I can tell, so it came with a cream sauce instead of tomato. The pizza came with a copious amount of bacon, onions and fresh rosemary. I added mozzarella.

The pizza was far too rich for me and I got really sick of bacon after a couple slices in. I really wish I had some marinara or something to dunk it in, because pieces were kind of dry. Shannon ordered the formaggio, which is not too different from the margherita, basically just tomato sauce and cheeses. The crust was pretty good, nice and flaky, but the pizza itself was kind of disappointing. The service and food really didn't match the decor of the place. The food was served on parchment lined baking sheets where fancy square plates seemed more appropriate, for example. This made it very easy to compare directly to my pizza however, since that's exactly how I had "plated" it. Kind of amusing really. They definitely won in terms of crust, but my tomato sauce blows theirs out of the water. So I just need to figure out how to make a better crust and fit a forno oven in my apartment.