Happy Birthday Chrissy! :)

Yesterday was the birthday of my very dear friend Christina and her family was kind enough to invite a few of her close friends over for a giant celebration dinner. They cooked so much food that I seriously thought it was Chinese New Year. 

A bit of background: Christina and I have been friends since grade 4 and she is definitely one of my best-est friends of all time. Growing up, she was the one that offered me a shoulder to cry on when I needed it and we try to see each other once a week ( if possible). Her family are just the nicest people in the world and I love coming over for dinner :D.

On this particular day, we had more then 10 dishes that was mostly a mix of vegetables and meat. We had some pure vegetarian dishes to accomodate her cousin's girlfriend who was a vegetarian. Here's a look at what we had last night:

Pre-cooked version. Christina's parents took some chopped pork and mixed it with mushroom and stuffed it in melons before steaming it.

What's a Chinese meal without some chicken wings? These were oven-baked and they were amazing!

Not too dry, and perfectly seasoned :)

 Her boyfriend was kind enough to grill ribs for everyone and they were amazing!

BBQ should be an all-season thing

 Here's the cooked version of the stuffed melons from above, don't they look good?

What's a chinese meal with out rice? Here's a picture of my bowl :)

          

Good thing they had a big dining table or else it wouldn't have fitted all 14 of us. Here's a view of the table with all the food :D

 

Annie and Janet chipped in to get Christina a strawberry Oreo ice cream cake from MarbleSlab.

Can you make out where her name was written?

 Extras:
 Christina's dad likes to collect antiques so there are some really fun pieces at her home.

An antique carriage set

Antique clock

This has been a very eventful and enjoyable week for me and I hope for you as well. Have a good week everyone!

Indian Food at Banjara

Another week, another birthday, it almost feels like everybody's birthday is in March somehow. This week, we ventured into the delicious world of Indian food. I'll admit that I'm a huge fan of Indian food, but sometimes I do feel a little bit intimidated by it since I don't know what all the dishes mean and the fact that some of their food can be incredibly spicy doesn't help either. So I was delighted when I found that we were going to Banjara Indian Cuisine on Bloor street for Shreya's birthday. Since she's Indian, I figured she could show me what's good and what's bad.

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I got a mango lassi to start off my meal and it was nice and sweet and thick. Lassi is an Indian yogurt drink and comes in sweet, salty and mango. I've had mango lassi before at the local indian cuisine place on campus but always found it too water for my liking. Banjara's lassi was really creamy and thick and it was so much better then the local campus place's lassi. :)

I found out later that you're suppose to drink your lassi with your food in case it gets too hot. I made the mistake of drinking too quickly and not saving any of it for my food.

Shreya got us an appetizer that had cottage cheese, onions and peppers. I think it was called the Paneer Tikka and it came on a sizzling plate. 

It sizzled when it came too!

I love Paneer!

A lot of us got the combo platters which came with rice, your respective meat/vegetarian dish and a lot of other stuff.

There's a vegetable curry with the combo platter too.

I got the Lamb Korma which I believe is like the beef version of butter chicken. The meat was really tender and I loved how much sauce I got with the dish.

There's even rice pudding with the platter!

There was also complimentary nan for everyone. Only 1/2 a piece per person, but it really complimented the food!

Shreya also got us another appetizer called Pekora and you eat them with chutney. I wasn't a big fan of these little guys since I found them a bit dry.

Overall Banjara was a great place and I would love to go back and try more dishes there. The food was good, not too spicy and the service was great.

Extras:
It also happened to be quite foggy that day and Queen's Park looked very mysterious with all the fog.

Love the light streaks of the cars

Enchanted forest anyone?

Richmond hill was covered in fog the whole day and this is what it looked like as I got off the bus.

Kinda reminds of scenes in horror movies...

 Last week was Gradball and they had mango charlotte as dessert. Very pretty and very yummy :)

Too pretty not to take another view of the food :)

Have a good week everyone!

Kris and Sophie's Birthday at Etsu

 It was Kris and Sophie's birthday and we had a small gathering at Etsu on Baldwin Street. I've never met someone with the same birthday as me and it's nice that Kris and Sophie had enough overlapping friends to celebrate their birthdays together.

Etsu was a pretty small restaurant and seats under 30 people. But the place was nicely decorated with large photos on each wall and fresh tulips on each table.

The menus had this embroidered covering and a metal plate. Very chic-looking indeed.

Even though I've never been to Japan before, the place did feel very authentic and I liked how the staff wore kimonos.

All of the food that we got was so beautifully presented, definitely a feast for the eyes. 

Kris's sushi pizza

Chelsea got this interesting dish with sashimi on top and rice at the bottom. Not sure what it was called, but very pretty looking indeed :)

Kai got the sushi set and I just love the presentation of the sushi on the plate. One thing I have noticed when I go out for "Sushi" most people get rolls or sashimi or teriyaki. We never really get sushi which is raw fish on balls of rice, sounds gross but I swear it's really good!

Even the wasabi is in a flower shape.

Kris the birthday girl got the red dragon roll and it was the prettiest roll of the night. The linear alignment of the rolls really made it look like a dragon.

Shreya got the vegetable tempura and even a simple dish like that that came in a beautiful structure. I got the spicy roll set and the spicy salmon was so good! I would definately get it again.

We got complimentary homemade coconut alcohol ice cream. I don't usually eat anything with coconut in it since I dislike the flavour. But in this case, the chunks of coconut really added texture to the ice cream and the flavour was not too overpowering. The alcohol was also subtle and added to the overall taste of the ice cream.

We got the birthday girls handbags for their birthday. A Nine West bag for Kris since she needs more feminine pieces for her wardrobe, a Tommy Hilfiger bag for Sophie so she has more choice in her wardrobe. 

Overall, Etsu was a nice, chic place to grab dinner your friends after a long day at school. Great little place, would definitely go back. :)

Extras:
They were having a buy 1 get 1 free sale at Rexall on a lot of their makeup products. Since I had picked up a Revlon Lip Butter earlier in the week, I decided to get two more. I'm just such a sucker for these deals.

At least they look pretty all lined up...

I love ice cream!

Have a good weekend everyone!

Happy birthday Chelsea!

Fridays for me usually sucks since I end class at 5. On this particular Friday however, it was Chelsea's birthday and a whole bunch of us celebrated at Fin Izakaya.

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Fin Izakaya is a Japanese restaurant that serves tapas style dishes to be shared with a few friends. Their main draw is the amount of imported Japanese alcohol that goes along with the dishes and the atmosphere of the place.  Check out the amount of alcohol they've got lying around:

The alcohol bottle display by the window.

The alcohol menu was long and extensive.

Beer Posters were everywhere and they added to the feel of the place.

The Bar Area.

This was on the wall beside me, I'm going to guess it's a calendar?

I ended up teaming up with Michelle, Sophie and Esther to share more things. To be more organized, good ol' Sophie pulled out an old receipt as scrap paper and marked down our choices. 

Can you tell that we're in engineering?

For four people, we ordered 7 dishes and everything came relatively quickly. Thank God we were organized since ordering from a huge menu can be quite time consuming. 

You eat in little dishes like this with chopsticks. 

The first dish was a squid sashimi with a wasabi sauce, which was quite unfortunate since it was possibly my most un-favourite dish of the night. I learned something new last night, I might like squid, but I can only eat it cooked.  The texture was quite gooey and chewy at the same time. It was also too fishy for my liking. 

Look at the gooey-ness!

The next dish was a clam soup which was like a breath of fresh air after the first dish. The clams were small, but quite flavourful. 

We also ordered Takoyaki or the ever so popular octopus balls. It was my first time trying them after years of watching them in anime. The texture was unexpectedly squishy but it wasn't bad and I would definitely get them again. 

The balls were the size of golf balls which made them very filling.

Sophie showing off her amazing chopsticks skills.

Then came my most favourite meal of the night, another type of sashimi dish (forgot the name). I'm not sure what types of fish it was made with but the chef achieved the impossible by it being tender and not gooey. 

Look! Esther likes it too :D

The final dishes were a grilled lamb, a hotpot with beef, soup, tofu and mushrooms and roast duck. 

The lamb dish, nothing super special.

Serving things up Asian style

The duck, I liked it more then the lamb.

After we got our stuff, we noticed the waiter playing with the blowtorch for another table.

Laura was kind enough to bring Macacroons for everyone and they were so good!

And what's a birthday without some chocolate cake and presents?

Our gift to Chelsea :D

Extra goofing off pictures before Dinner:

Sophie played with my camera and wanted me to do this. 

Butter Chicken from Veda

My phone's knitted case and phone charm

Dioramic view from Esther's 16th floor apartment on College Street