Saturday, I turned 46, and had the good fortune of being surrounded by friends and family who like to feed me. After seeing a review for Banu last week and passing it on to Pat, she and Betty decided to take me out for lunch there. The restaurant bills itself as an Iranian Kebob Vodka Bar, and we were not disappointed in any of those respects.

We started with Nan o Paneer, an appetizer plate of sesame flat bread, a sheep’s milk cheese that I had never tasted before, fresh herbs, walnuts and watermelon slices. This was the only dish that I took time to photograph, and only then after we’d demolished most of it; the others were so good that we tucked them back before I even thought of the camera again.

At that point, we moved on to the vodka. There are several varieties on the menu, and they’re served very cold and on ice so that you can sip them with your meal. I had the Wokka Saki from the UK, which is a grain-based vodka flavoured with Japanese sake (LCBO #602573): a distinctive taste of sake, and very smooth. Betty and Pat both had the Zubrowka Bison Grass vodka from Poland, pale greenish-yellow in colour and a really lovely aroma and taste (LCBO #35840). We also had the tiny glasses of fresh juice: sour cherry for Betty and I (yum!) and pomegranate for Pat.

For the main course, I had Koobideh, which was the most delicious minced beef, formed into kebabs, grilled and rolled with herbs in lawash flatbread. All of their meats are from the Healthy Butcher, an organic butcher in my ‘hood, and I don’t know how much of the taste was from the high-quality and organic nature of the meat versus the preparation, but it had an amazing rich taste, and very lean. In addition to a side dish of diced cucumber, tomato and onions in a light herb vinegar dressing, there was a little dish of powdered sumac to sprinkle on the grilled meat. The evening before, I had been walking with Ingrid near her sailing club when the weather turned too rough to sail, and we were looking at the now-ripe sumac and I commented that it was edible but had never eaten it. Now I have, and can say that it imparts a slight citrusy flavour as well as (so I’m told) being a good source of Vitamin C.

Betty had a dish of saffron-infused grilled chicken breast chunks, which I can’t find on the Banu menu online — the lunch menu is slightly different from the dinner one shown there. Very distinctive taste of saffron, as opposed to it just being used as a colouring agent.

Pat, always a “balls to the wall” eater, had Dom Balan, the lamb testicles, which were marinated in vodka before grilling, and served with a tasty pickle side dish. The testicles themselves were reminiscent in flavour to sweetbreads, although a bit too mushy in texture for my liking.

To accompany all of this, we shared an order of Adasi (lentil salad) and Mast o Moseer (yogurt with shallots, served with more lawash flatbread).

At the end of all this, the server delivered some tiny squares of a baklava-like dessert: definitely flavoured with orange-blossom water like a middle-eastern baklava (as opposed to the Greek variety that uses honey), but it seemed to have a layer of crushed nuts in the middle rather than just layers of pastry, and sported a tiny little puffed pillow of pastry on top. Not sure if this is standard practice or because of the birthday cards on the table, but definitely a nice finish to the meal.

The decor is really lovely: all Mediterranean blues and whites, with a small waterfall fountain near our table by the front, and music that could be Iranian pop/jazz or something else entirely. Unfortunately, because of the rain, we didn’t have a chance to smoke the hookah on the patio; I remember smoking a mild, apple-flavoured tobacco through a 3-foot-high hookah in Dubai and was looking forward to repeating the experience, even though I don’t smoke.

Discovered via blogTO.

Some beautiful long-exposure photos of the rides at the CNE by night — you can feel the motion! Via blogTO.

On the third anniversary of the date, I want to come clean on my responsibility in the Great Blackout of 2003, when 30 million people in Ontario and eastern US went without power for a few days. Oh, it wasn’t completely my fault, I still blame it on the Radio Shack sales guy, but I suppose that I provoked him.

It all started that morning…actually, it started a few weeks before that, when my clock radio alarm went off one morning, I hit the snooze button for another precious nine minutes of sleep, and didn’t wake up for an hour when the alarm failed to go off again. That morning, Thursday, August 14th, 2003, the same thing happened, and I decided that I had to get a new clock radio. First, though, I felt like lunch with my friend Pat and a bit of sushi.

After exchanging a few emails on the subject (we communicate almost completely by email when we are not in the same room), we decided to meet at a favourite sushi restaurant close to her office, far enough away from my place for a decent walk there and back since I wasn’t really working that day. Unusually, I was early, so I went into the used goods store across the road in order to make myself late — otherwise, she couldn’t rib me about being late. For a measly $1, I picked up a used paperback copy of The Difference Engine by William Gibson and some other sci-fi writer since I had been on a Gibson kick lately, then dashed back across the road to meet Pat, who was sweltering on the sidewalk outside the restaurant. The heat was oppressive, even in shorts and a tank top, and I was a bit hot after my walk over. Over lunch, we chatted about the usual stuff, about the book that I just bought, and about my stupid clock radio with the intermittent snooze alarm problem. She said “You can stop at Radio Shack on the way home and buy another”, which started a conversation about Radio Shacks in the downtown core. She only knew of the one in the Eaton Centre, but I knew that there was at least one in the financial district, which was more directly on my way. We finished lunch and went our separate ways: she back to work, me back through downtown for a bit of retail therapy.

Along the way, I decided to look up the address of the Radio Shacks downtown through the web access on my Blackberry, but by then (2 minutes after leaving the restaurant), I had forgotten completely what I had to go to Radio Shack to buy. I walked along a bit, feeling stupid, but found a list of them and decided that I would just go in and my memory would come back to me by then. A longish detour to Business Depot for a new file case and some pens, then a quick stop at a fruit market for some mangos and bananas, and I stumbled across the Radio Shack in the Metro Centre. I was still having my “senior’s moment” so fired off to Pat via Blackberry email:

“Ok, you’re going to laugh, but I found a Radio Shack down here and can’t remember what I needed!!!”

I decided to walk around the store and see what came into my mind. Hmmmm, all these nice toys…oh, I need a memory card for my digital camera! That wasn’t the main target, but at least gave me something to buy. I snagged the sales guy from behind the counter and asked him for the memory card, then continued to wander around the store while he located the key to the display case holding the memory cards. Now this is a little store, so it didn’t take long. As he brought my memory card back to the counter, the memory in my head was jogged by a sign on the wall: “Clock Radios”. Eureka! That’s it! I headed for the sign, only to find the area stocked with power bars and other uninteresting electrical paraphernalia. Okay, but at least I remembered what I was there for. Back to the sales guy to ask about clock radios, and he pointed me to where they are actually displayed, as opposed to where the “Clock Radios” sign is. I find, miracle of miracles, the exact same clock radio that I already owned, just five years newer and in a lovely electric blue colour instead of a drab green. Bonus, I didn’t have to learn a new set of controls that I usually operate either in the dark or in a mental fog. I grabbed one of those and headed for the checkout.

While I was at the checkout, Pat replied to my email:

“clock radio yup, i’m laughing.”

I sent back:

“So I went in and walked around until I remembered that I needed a clock radio… d’oh! I’m checking out now…”

That message was time stamped 2:19pm, less than 2 hours before the blackout. I looked up from my thumb-typing to the sales guy’s “would you like fries with that?” questions that were probably indoctrinated in during Radio Shack boot camp. First, he asked if I would like an extended warranty for only $10. On a $25 clock radio? I think not. Next, he asked if I want to buy a 9-volt battery for the battery backup feature of the clock. Fatefully, I replied “No, we never have power failures in the city”. The rest, as they say, is history.

Next time, when the sales guy asks if I want to buy the battery backup, I’m not going to turn him down — these guys are powerful!

I was on the subway a few days ago and noticed one of the poetry posters that they regularly feaure. This immediately burned images on my brain, and I could smell dead leaves as if it were winter already. I quickly jotted it down in my Blackberry for later consumption, but missed the name of the poet, unfortunately.

One of the things that I love about living in Toronto is the multiculturalism. Walk the streets, and you’ll see people of all colour, hear at least 150 different spoken languages (that’s how many the local 9-1-1 emergency service offers), and, best of all, experience restaurants from every country in the world. We’re blessed with very little cross-cultural violence, and lots of cross-cultural social mixing: my circle of friends includes people from Croatia, France, Australia, Serbia, Trinidad, Jamaica, England, the U.S. and Northern Ireland. I even mixed the Croatians and Serbians once, with nary a cross word spoken between them: it must be something in the water here.

One of Toronto’s biggest cross-cultural events is Caribana, which has its roots in the Trinidad and Tobago pre-Lent carnival: Trinidad, having a cultural mix of African and East Indian descendents itself, is the perfect inspiration for our cross-cultural party. This two-week-long party culminates in a huge parade along Toronto’s Lakeshore Blvd. on the Saturday of the August long weekend (the weekend that includes the first Monday in August), and during the two weeks of the festival, the city is awash with visitors attending Caribana parties, playing in soca and calypso bands, working on parade floats and — at an extravagant event two days before the parade — choosing the parade king and queen. The streets downtown, where I live, are exuberantly noisy with people until late at night, getting into the Caribana spirit; although I could live without the thumping bass from someone’s car parked outside my window at 2a.m., I appreciate that it’s a non-violent outlet for the heightened energy level in the city at this time of year.

This past Saturday’s parade was classic Caribana: a million (!) people peacefully gathered along the parade route to watch, listen and dance to the hours-long pageant of fabulous floats, exotically-attired dancers and mas’ (masquerade) bands. There’s fierce competition between the bands with their music, but the best part is the dancers and their costumes, and how they turn the parade into an audience-participation event by inspiring us all to dance at least a little as they gyrate past. In a previous year, I remember watching one beautiful woman in a costume that included a lot of feathers and not a lot of fabric as she danced up to one of the policemen along the parade route. The cop tried to look blasé as the dancer turned her back to him and — grinning devilishly at the audience — shimmied right up rub full-length against him, dancing all the while, but he finally broke a smile and shuffled to the music, to the applause of those standing around. That moment: blazing sun, the breeze off the lake, calypso music, visual overload from the decorative floats and dancers, crowds pressing in on all sides, and that tiny black woman making that big white cop break his facade and be human for our amusement — that moment will always represent Caribana for me.

I dropped my car off for service this morning near Richmond and Sherbourne, then walked back to my condo near Queen and Spadina. It was like a journey through time: I’ve had my office in three different locations along the route, and since I’ve owned three different condos near where I live now, I’ve walked this route (or parts of it) hundreds of times. Somehow, I never get tired of living in downtown Toronto: even when it looks a bit ragged around the edges, as it often does in the morning light, I pull it around me like a comfortable old jacket.

Today’s forecast, according to Bloglines. Not sure how many mm of rain have to fall to constitute “tons”, but someone had some fun with this one.

This is a bit weird: does anyone else notice that they seem to have relocated the Ontario Place Cinesphere east of where it should be, somewhere around York Street?