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Taste of the Danforth

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Did you know that this is the weekend that the Taste of the Danforth is on in Toronto? It runs from Friday evening until Sunday at 6 pm.

Part of the Danforth is closed off and all the stores and restaurants have sales and sell food outside of their premises. Oh it’s great! There’s also rides for the kids and beer tents for the adults.

I love just walking the Danforth during this festival. Stopping at one restaurant for a shisk kebab paying on $1 for it, then stopping at another place for a barbecued corn on the cob, another for a small bowl of chilli and finally near Broadview there’s a place that makes home made ice cream. I always get a waffle cone there. It’s the only time of year that I tend to eat ice cream let alone in a waffle cone. Yummy.

The walk through the crowded 10 or 12 blocks of the Danforth takes an hour or two one way between the crowded streets and stopping at the various stores and restaurant stands.

I’m happy that we live close too. It’s only about a 10 minute walk to the Danforth so we don’t have to deal with parking. I think last year close to 2 million people attended the Taste of the Danforth!

I’ll take pictures if I go! We’ve got guests this weekend and they stopped us from going last year. I’m determined that we’ll go this year.





Foodsnooper Canada’s Food Delivery and Takeout Guide

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My husband and I don’t order take out too often, but when we do we think of it as a treat for ourselves. Perhaps we’ve had a great day or week work wise or maybe it’s been a terrible and exhausting day – it’s still a treat when when we order take out or have a meal delivered.

I’ve just heard about a new website called Foodsnooper. It’s billed as Canada’s Food Delivery and Takeout Guide. This is fantastic because I live in Toronto and this site will make it that much easier for me to find some great new restaurants to order food from when we’re in the mood.

The site is just about to fully launch so I don’t think they have quite as many restaurant listings yet as they should. I say this because I live in the heart of the Danforth in Toronto and when I typed in my Address and postal code it only came up with one restaurant for my area. The results probably should have shown at least 100 that delivered and maybe another 100 that were just take out.

Once they get more restaurant listings I think it will be a great site to use. I mean, just type in your address or postal code and a map comes up that shows you all the restaurants in your area. From there you can specify which type of food you are interested in and narrow your choices. Once you select a restaurant you can click on the magnifying glass and the map will zoom in to show you where the restaurant is located. You’ll also have a bubble that shows the restaurant address and phone number.

It looks like you’ll be able to view the restaurant of your choices promotions and menus too. I think that’s great. I hate calling a place that I don’t have a menu for and taking a lot of time on the phone asking the person who’s answered what’s on the menu. I’d rather know before I make my call. In fact, when a restaurant has a website that allows ordering to be done on line I’ll often make my orders right from my computer. Perhaps they’ll include restaurant websites soon too.

If you’re Canadian, keep an eye on this site. I’ve bookmarked it and I’m hopefully that they will list more restaurants in my area soon.

My Niece’ first successful sleep over

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This past weekend my brother in law, sister in law and their young daughter dropped in for a visit and ended up staying overnight.

I wasn’t super thrilled to have unexpected house guests but I did end up having a nice time. I was actually able to spend quite a bit of quality time with my young niece.

I didn’t know this, but she’s been getting scared lately when she’s gone to friends houses for sleep overs. The week before she’d even ended up calling her mom at 3 in the morning to come pick her up.

Not being aware of her fear of sleeping in strange places I’d made up one of our spare bedrooms with kids bedding and made it all nice for her. When I told her mom what I’d prepared she didn’t think that my niece would end up sleeping alone but to everyones surprise she did.

It could be that she was in a relatives house or the fact that I’d taken the time to make sure the room was made up nice for her … either way it was her first time sleeping on her own in our house and she felt so proud of herself when she got up in the morning.

It made me feel proud too to have helped her through a phase. Well I hope she did, maybe she’ll have more success on her next sleep over at a friends.

Planning our family reunion

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I’m helping to plan our family get together that’s set for the end of August and I spent about two hours last night trying to find Dinner Theaters in Toronto. Surprisingly there aren’t as many as I would have thought there would be.

My brothers and sister, their kids, kids spouses and or dates are all getting together for at least four days of jam packed fun! The three of us that are in the Toronto area are working together to plan all the things we’ll be doing. Along with going to a Blue Jays baseball game, we’ll be going to a dinner theater, on a dinner boat cruise and having a huge barbecue.

It should be a fun time!

We’ve got 6 people coming from Vancouver … well they’ll actually be coming from their Orlando rental home because they will be vacationing in Florida the week before our get together, then I think there’s 4 from Ottawa, 4 from Barrie and 12 from the Toronto area. That’s 26 people! I hope we can get some group discounts for some of the events we’re planning! That’d be cool.

Do you have a family reunion this year? Are you looking forward to it?

The worst border we ever had

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Last year about this time we lost faith in our Korean border. She’d been living with us for a few weeks when she decided to take the weekend trip to New York that the English as a Second language school she was attending offered.

Trouble was – she went to New York as planned, but didn’t come home on the Monday when we expected her to return. We were upset. We were scared for her!

Did she ever make it to the meeting area in Toronto? Did she get on the bus? Did something happen in New York? We called the school and the agency that had matched us up and no one new where she was. The guy at the agency said “she’s a young girl, she’s probably just out having fun”. Yeah, but the contract we signed with the agency made us responsible for her so if something happened …

We finally found out – when she called us on the Tuesday evening while still in New York, that she’d contacted a new york ticket broker on her own and got there by her own means and met friends who were visiting the US.

We were mad. She’d worried us and lied to us. She had told us all the week before that she was taking the trip with the school. Even that Friday morning as she left she told me she was meeting the other students for the bus to New York at a particular time.

After that it was all lies. She broke things and didn’t tell us, lied to us daily and even tried to steal food when she thought we weren’t looking. It’s not like we weren’t feeding her well already …

She pretty much finished us with our foreign border experiment. I know most people have good experiences but she was a head case. She even told one of our neighbors that she was was very rich and had body guards here in Canada … uh, no. No you didn’t.

I still get shivers just thinking of what she put us through.

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