salmon ALT with mint & honey

Totally refreshing summer sandwich.

For pretty much the last month, it has been stiflingly hot in Toronto. I'm talking 35°+ AT NIGHT. That's 95°F Americans. So at times when you have sweat dripping down the backs of your legs, sitting in your apartment in your underwhatnots, chugging ice water by the pint, all you want to eat is something that comes out of a fridge, not off a stove.

WHAT WOULD MANUEL SOLANO DO? My friend Manuel is so good in the kitchen. I trust him implicitly. He has such instincts when it comes to food. We spent time together while both living in Lyon, and would collaborate on food for our friends, and cook for one another. I have a number of friends who are easily better than me at executing food, but he always sticks out, he just has this way of making something so simple, yet always catches me by surprise. And that, for me, is the greatest delight.

Anyhow, this is something I made with Manuel in mind. I'll definitely have to do a collaboration post in the near future.

black & blue apple grilled cheese

This title gets its name from the SMOKED blue cheese used. Take a peek!

Honestly, blue cheese has always freaked me the fuck out. In fact, dairy on the whole had been a source of anxiety for years. I think once, when I was like 10, I had an unfortunate experience with chunky milk, and after that, I was just really, apprehensively, cautious when dealing with dairy. Milk had to be freshly opened, cheese had to be firm, yogurt had to be no more than a nano-second old. Blue cheese was just some scary, and revolting horror my parents kept in the fridge for posterity. Surely. Anyhow, older, wiser, more adventurous, and cheese being the most glorious of human discoveries, I thought it was about time that I tried some blue cheese. This stuff is Blue Haze, a smoked blue cheese from somewhere in Ontario. Appreciably smoky, but with a nice, rounded creaminess that I wasn't anticipating. I was expecting it to be all sharp, with an aftertaste of food poisoning. I guess it's another childhood misconception to let go of, this cheese was the shit!

The Isemanburger

It's about time this blog got some MEAT.

I'm always intrigued when a restaurant has a namesake on the menu. It means they're repping it as their best offering, and in the case of a burger, it's the way they think it's best served. The way that has the staying power to anchor that menu, something people tell their friends about, and can keep coming back for for years. I wouldn't say I'm huge into burgers or anything, but a few weeks ago, when I had some friends visiting, they were positively salivating for a burger one afternoon. I scoured around the great selection of kraft restaurants in this restauro-centric neighbourhood I live in, and it turned out, the closest one had a burger on the menu, only one, and it was the item given the honour of carrying the restaurant's namesake. And furthermore, it was the tastiest sounding burger on offer. We went. We ordered 3 of the same. We ate. We collapsed in a pleasure-and-rendered-fat-dazed stupor. I won't tell you what was in it, because I don't want to upstage this post, but I'll share that later that week, I couldn't get the burger out of my mind. I went back, but alas, they are closed on Mondays, so I thought it best to march over to a burger-specific joint. Nice, local, well-fed, ethical meat, done as many ways as one could want to chose from, and they too, had a namesake burger. And as it happened, that was the burger with all the with-all that I most wanted. And it was good. So the week after that, I still couldn't shake this hankering for burgers. I decided to get a few patties at the local organic farmer's market near me, and make a signature burger of my own. This is the way I find myself topping a burger every time I make them. I just don't think there's a better way to serve a burger. So voilà, THE ISEMANBURGER.