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.

I called from work to see if Shannon and her friend had dinner plans. They said they wanted to take me to a secret place they went to for lunch. It was cheap; they paid 80 cents for whatever they wanted to grab. It was something that I hadn't had so far this year. I was intrigued. They met me at the metro with my camera and we went down to Chinatown.

I knew it wouldn't be anything bizarre that I wouldn't consider eating, so I was trying to figure out what where we'd end up. We got off at the metro and down la Gauchetière street, which is a little pedestrian walkway through the center of Chinatown. After a bit of browsing, they said "this is it!" and there we were. I can't remember the name of the place for the life of me, but it's Patisserie something. Basically, a Chinese bakery.

The 80 cent whatevers were stuffed buns. The ones I sampled were stuffed with barbecued pork and a hot chicken curry. There's really no way to identify what one you're grabbing from the shelves, which seems horrible for food allergies. There was an awful lot of dough to filling ratio, but the curry was very good.

We ordered a la carte as well. I had some sort of satay beef noodle dish that was not very good at all. very oily noodles with little flavor and very cornstarched pieces of beef that had a slimy texture. I picked out the meat and scraped it slightly before eating it. I can understand the novelty of eating 80 cent buns in Chinatown, but when it comes to cheap eats I'd rather go for the 99 cent pizza.

It's really hard for me to work up the energy to make dinner when Shannon is not here, we don't really have any groceries and I get home at 7pm. I almost decided just to put it off and somehow make it up again in the future. Luckily, I mustered up the energy to go to the store, pick up a few things and create something delicious with things kicking around the fridge.

I haven't made a lot of pasta dishes mostly for this reason; it's nice to have a backup plan. When all things go awry, pasta is a good standby. It's half the reason (the other half being deliciousness) that I made so many noodle bowls not too long ago. For a moment, I had the ambition to make homemade Ravioli, but since I've already done that I figured I'd just go with the store bought stuff. Man, fresh pasta sure is expensive considering it's just eggs and flour. I bought a small package of fagioli and it was 5 bucks!

I swear it was called fagioli. I also swear that fagioli is actually Italian for beans. These were like a hybrid of tortellini and flat farfalle (the bowtie ones) filled with zucchini, eggplant, cheese and other spices. Pretty tasty. I can't actually find evidence now to prove that they were called fagioli, but I also can't find another pasta with a similar name and shape, so I'm going to stick with that. I'm just going to call them tortellini for now because I don't know for sure. There are way too many names for pasta and it's kind of scary that I know so many.

I find sun-dried tomatoes to have a really great flavor. There's a weird threshold for my taste buds and sun-dried tomatoes too. If eaten whole, there's a very definitive point where they're delicious to where they're disgusting. I have the same thing with chocolate. The first piece is divine and it all goes downhill from there before it's actually quote revolting. Anyhow, sun-dried tomatoes make a really great pesto and I especially like how they help to thicken it, taking the place of pine nuts, which are incredibly expensive. All in all this turned out to be a really good dish and I'm quite happy that I made it. It also allowed me to use my blender again!

Since Shannon has company visiting and they'll be eating out a lot, this is a perfect opportunity for me to cook things that would kill Shannon. I made a single dish tonight, Shrimp Bisque, but it was a laborious single dish that incorporated a few firsts.

1) I had never made stock from shrimp shells before. I think there's something very satisfying about making your own stock, like you're not leaving anything to go to waste. Of course, since cuts of meat from the butcher and supermarket typically have everything that would be used for stock removed already, stocks are becoming a thing of the past. I'm rarely willing to pay a couple of dollars for bones alone so I can make stock for anything. Occasionally I will use a leftover chicken carcass. It's really unfortunate, as I imagine a lot of it really does go to waste, ending up in dumpsters, when it could be rendered into perfectly good eats. The good thing about shrimp stock is that shrimp will often come with the shells in tact, so since you're going to toss them anyway, you have no good reason not to use them to make stock. This would presumably work for lobster or crab or something as well.

2) This was my first real bisque. This is a point of less interest since a bisque is basically a cream soup, which I've certainly made before, but it's distinctly not a chowder! I'm not sure whether "cream of…" soups are actually bisques. In that case, this point is a complete farce. In any case, this soup just sounds classy, looks great and was fun to make.

The only downside of this soup is that, upon reheating, the shrimp get a little tough. You could remedy this by not adding the shrimp to the soup until the last minute. There's still definitely a shrimpy flavor in the soup from the shrimp stock, but it's subtle, sort of sweet. The soup has a very rich, pleasing flavor and is not particularly overwhelmed by any single flavor, just a very nice harmony of the ingredients that went in. This, for me, is definitely something to be happy about.

Shannon's friend is visiting us for a week. She arrived later than expected tonight because she had to drive some guys she met on the plane to their hotel since they had got drunk along the flight and had already arranged a rental car. We had settled on a Portuguese type grill restaurant, but since we already went to Janos not too long ago, I wanted to go somewhere different. So I hauled them both on a 20 minute walk through the city to find this tiny little place I'd heard good reviews of called Ail Y'ail Y'ail (Garlic Garlic Garlic in French, basically). I was ready to settle for any old grill until I read that you could adjust your personal heat level from jalapeno to habanero, which pushed me over the edge after I was already in the mood for something garlicky. They could've gone somewhere else without me!

The interior and exterior was nothing like I had pictured from what I'd read. I wasn't expecting anything glamorous since it seemed like a bar and grill type place, but the whole restaurant sat maybe 6 or 7 tables and the signage was a simple banner hanging above the single pane window. I tried to decide between several tapas that looked appetizing, but I ended up going with the table d'hote (house special), with "extra spicy" curried shrimp. I wasn't really sure what I was implying by that, but figured they'd make it "extra spicy" somehow without killing me.

Apparently the dinner came with wine, which I hadn't read about, but I'm not going to deny free wine. It was like a sparkling apple sort of thing. I haven't even had a desire for my usual after dinner brandy since my weekend hangover, so I took a sip and passed it off to Shannon, who was already becoming inebriated from a capirihna. Her entree was chorizo sausage which she asked for being "medium spicy". It was "very spicy" and was flambéed in a vodka sauce. I took this as an indicator of how "extra spicy" mine would be and hoped for the best.

I ate my clams in white wine (and garlic, of course), which were very salty; chorizo, which is so much different than what I know chorizo to be like and not nearly as spicy as Shannon's; and some mushroom rice, which was basically mushrooms in rice. Along came the shrimp and I braced myself. There were chunks of a green chili in it. I took a taste of the sauce furthest from the chili and was not immediately scorched, so I popped a whole shrimp in my mouth. The flavor was nice, like a garlicky curry, but it was not particularly spicy. I ate the pepper itself and it was just a jalapeno. So that was a little disappointing and we reckoned that maybe the chorizo spiciness and my shrimp spiciness got mixed up in translation.

I was not altogether that impressed with the restaurant, especially because we expected large portions of grilled meat, which is not what was on the menu. For the price we paid we could've eaten at a much nicer establishment, so I can't imagine ever going back.

I don't normally eat salads because it doesn't leave edible leftovers. I hate how everything gets mushy and, to be quite honest, most salads don't taste very good to me. Anything with bitter lettuces and a vinaigrette is nice for a few bites in between other things, but really doesn't do anything for me as a meal. I absolutely love cooked spinach, but raw spinach starts to give me a weird pasty feeling on my teeth and unless lettuce is chopped up really fine I find it awkward to eat at all. Of course, I do enjoy non-lettuce salads, like Potato Salad or Bean Salad which actually improve while refrigerating.

The exception for lettuce salads has always been, of course, Caesar Salad. Usually Caesar salad is never remaining when brought to the table, especially if chicken is involved. Adding chicken to salad adds a nice texture and a good dose of protein. Grilled chicken adds a nice bit of smoke. I really enjoyed the Thai Chicken Salad I had at the Thai-Viet restaurant and wanted to try and emulate those flavors.

I do not have the fortune to be able to grill my chicken breasts anymore, so I just pan-fried it with a bit of salt and pepper. The dressing is the only dressing with orange juice that I've ever thought was appetizing. The flavor was a bit much after a while, since I ate it as an entree instead of a side dish, but it would've been great as a starter accompanying some noodles or curry or spring rolls.