Deb's Lunch … and dinner and breakfast too

Saturday was a little different because we had an early movie, The Man Who Knew Infinity, with Dev Patel and Jeremy Irons playing early 20th century mathematicians, Srinivasa Ramanujan and G.H. Hardy. It’s based on a book of the same title, and I liked the way Irons acted Hardy’s cold British reserve by almost never looking anyone in the eye. It was fun to watch the mathematicians delight in numbers; the matter-of-fact racism Ramanujan faced less so.

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After The Man Who Knew Infinity, we went seeking breakfast, and ended up at Aunties and Uncles. We lined up and waited our turn, and were glad we did. Even though it was pretty funky, hipster-chic, it was on all the best-brunch-in-Toronoto lists. We sat for awhile with a nice couple, the woman was a city planner and the guy working on a PhD in literature. He felt bad about sitting just the two of them at one of the large picnic tables, with everyone still waiting in line staring at him, so asked if we’d share. I asked the waitress if it’d throw things off with the kitchen if she sat a four instead of a two – and she admitted concern, but thought it’d be OK. There was an umbrella kind of over the table, and we weren’t really covered, tho the other couple was. When it started raining, the waitress asked if we’d like to move inside, which we did, but I was a little sorry actually. The rain never came down very hard, and it was kind of stuffy inside. They only had one bathroom in the basement – which was clean – and there was a knicknack cabinet next to it with RC Cola cans with baseball players on them – Robin Yount next to Carl Yastrzemski. Sort of alphabetical order, and oh, I guess Robin’s a ’55 baby like me – just turned 60 on September 16.

I had the breakfast pocket, a big slab of what we call Candian bacon, and the Candians call peameal bacon, scrambled eggs, cheddar cheese, tomato and caramelized onions, with Dijon mustard & aioli on focaccia. I got it with a salad instead of potatoes. My sandwich was overstuffed, I removed some of the egg to be able to eat it, and the bacon wanted to slide out. The combination of the onions and aioli on the herbed focaccia was perfect, and while the salad didn’t look like much, it was also a good combination of flavorful greens and a red wine vinegar dressing. Mark had the apple French toast. There was something rough but well made about the food. I waved at our new friends on the way out.

Our next film was our add-on to make up for the canceled London Fields, Parched. A bird pooped on my shoulder while we were walking there and I had to go rinse my shirt off and blot it with paper towels in the ladies room in what must be the only Starbucks left in the world without hand dryers. After the rain it turned cool so I was kind of chilled until my shirt finally dried out.

The official description in the TIFF program says

In a rural Indian village, four ordinary women begin to throw off the traditions that hold them in servitude, in this inspirational drama from director Leena Yadav.

It was fun to watch – women being rowdy, bargaining, arguing, talking about sex, and obviously changing their lives. But we’re not exactly sure how it came out because we left a few minutes before it ended to get to our next one on time. 

Which I had really high hopes for, directed by Meathead, with Cary Elwes, Being Charlie. The kid in title role (Nick Robinson) was really good, a lot of the other actors were good – Charlie’s fellow rich white addicts – Cary was pretty good as his politician running for governor dad – but I felt there were too many scenes with people yelling at each other, and mostly everyone, especially the actress who played the mom, was too pretty & actor-y. Common played a group home counselor, one of the few black faces in the film.

Being Charlie let out early enough that we stopped for ice cream on the way home. After the ice cream, Mark watched the 3rd season finale of House of Cards while I finished up recording lectures.

Sunday I took my required shot of the CN Tower while we were walking to our 1st movie. But I’ll have to tell you about Sunday and Monday traveling home in the next post.

Required tourist pic

Thursday morning, we had a little yogurt and fruit for breakfast again (or maybe Thursday was the toast and fruit day?), and worked, and our first movie of the day was I Smile Back, with Sarah Silverman as a suburban housewife who’s just about to not be able to cover up her reckless escapades into boozing and drugs and sex with one of the other husbands in her circle of friends, and the occasional random stranger in the back room of a bar. Prince Humperdinck played her estranged father, Thomas Sadowski as that other husband, her most sympathetic drugging & fuck buddy, and Josh Charles, who we also saw in Freeheld, as her husband. We thought the film ended at a kind of different point for an addict story – while the addict is still on the way down – before they hit bottom and have a chance to come back.  It was in the Wintergarden – the smaller theater with the leaves in the ceiling.

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Movie #2 was Forsaken, a traditional Western with both generations of Sutherlands. It was also nicely done for its genre – I especially liked that the gunslingers, played by Kiefer Sutherland and Michael Wincott were gentlemen – men of honor.

Our third and final movie of the day was James White, with Christopher Abbot playing a 20-something fuck-up (stark contrast to the role we all saw him in, as Charlie, Marnie’s boyfriend on Girls, who had a successful startup by the end of season two, when he left the show) trying to take care of his mom (Cynthia Nixon) who’s dying from cancer. Probably my favorite movie of the fest. I liked the NYC apartment interiors, and I felt like I knew all the characters. I liked the subtle way the mom’s illness was introduced – early in the movie, while people are gathered at her apartment to sit Shiva for her ex-husband, she looks at herself in the mirror, and very delicately, straightens her wig.

We stopped for pizza and salad on the way back to the airbnb, a place Mark tried his first night in Toronto, about 2 blocks away. They make skinny rectangular pizzas, you pass by the toppings bar and they add what you want, then run the pizza through a conveyor belt oven. All toppings same price. We had fennel sausage and goat cheese and caramelized onions, on top of a white crust and a nice spicey tomato sauce. With arugula and Parmesan to finish, and Mark asked for a drizzle of olive oil, too, which I would not’ve done, thinking no need to add oil on top of sausage, but it was good. We had their fattoush salad, which I thought meant bread, toasted pita, IN the salad, but in this case was lemon marinated garbanzos on top of romaine and red peppers. It was a nice place but I kind of felt like it was an example of the next food revolution that Ruth Reichl spoke about in Madison in June – we have more places serving farm to table, well-made food with interesting ingredients – but they’re not that comfortable. They don’t take reservations, they’re too noisy, everything is served on disposables. And we’re going to start demanding a more comfortable, grown up experience.

Like I said, Sunday no movies for me, since our only one, Families, selected for us by TIFF and therefore immovable, conflicted with Robyn Hitchcock at the Drake Hotel.

Robyn brought British – or Seattle – weather to Toronto for us – although it seems as if he has moved his US homebase to Nashville from Seattle, which makes me a little sad, because I love Seattle more than Nashville. Anyways, this meant that Sunday was grey and rainy. Mark went down to the Starbucks in our building for coffee and I recorded lectures for the next week for my classes. We ate in, and then just worked some more.

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I didn’t go outside until 5:30, when it was time to walk Mark down to the film. I bought a flat white and a cookie on the walk back, and changed into my going out clothes – my 6oth birthday dress – and rode the streetcar to the Drake. Mark was going to join me after the movie.

Emma Swift did a short set, and Robyn joined her for (Neil Young’s) Motion Pictures. He was sounding a little hoarse, so I was worried that his voice had not joined us for the evening, but he seemed to get warmed up on time for his set with the Sadies. During which they performed Sweetheart of the Rodeo in its entirety. Robyn didn’t tell us that until after they’d done You ain’t goin’ nowhere, during which I was thinking, “jeez dudes you sound like the Byrds.” Followed by Astronomy Dominie for the first encore, and then another Floyd song I did not recognize, with RH playing a pink telecaster, and then I wanna destroy you, and Queen of Eyes, and “we don’t know anything else”. We left the bar, crossed the street, got on the streetcar, and there we were.

Monday morning we saw Born to be Blue, up at the Bloor Hot Docs theater, Ethan Hawke as Chet Baker. And then at noon, we added a movie, so it was back to Ryerson for Freeheld, another one where one of the women in a relationship is dying of cancer, but so much better done than Miss You Already. I got Mark a scone at Bulldog, and I got a spinach wrap and water at Starbucks. They’re supposed to be egg white, feta, and spinach on a whole wheat tortilla, but mine seemed to have some kind of cheddar spread instead of feta. And the spinach wasn’t very good.

Ethan Hawke as Chet Baker

It was a pretty day, so we walked to the Brick Street Bakery (getting righted after a little mapping confusion that had us pointed to the branch of the bakery in the Financial District instead of the Distillery District) and ate sandwiches for lunch. I had coronation chicken – curried chicken salad on wheat bread – and Mark had a BLT on a bun, that had a truly impressive stack of really good bacon on it. We came back, and I had an online class meeting for one of my classes, then we strolled to the supermarket to get milk & bananas for the next morning, just to give me a chance to get out.

Alright, me and plenty of shoes arrived, bienvenu au Canada, yesterday. It was a long day of traveling, on the bus at 7:00 AM in Madison, through ridiculous security lines in Chicago, to the short flight to Toronto. The shoes were packed in the bottom of mammoth suitcase, which, although it is truly mammoth, is very obedient – it sits and stays upright better than any dog I’ve ever seen. I took the train into town from the airport – that was really slick – $19 and 25 minutes. I was able to pull mammoth suitcase along behind me on the 25-minute walk from the train station to our airbnb. That part was really fun – it was rush hour in Toronto and I could look the drivers who were trying to make right turns across my path in the eye and think, “Just try it. This suitcase is going to make such a bump when you drive over it, and I bet it could even bend the rim of your tire.”

I met Mark at Starbucks, after a little finagling – I went to the wrong one, because of course there are actually three within a 2 block radius, although one of them had a fire and is boarded up.

I unpacked, and we went to get my Canadian sim card. Nothing was working quite right so we went off to get dinner, while waiting for the Telus store manager to come back. We found a nice little Italian place. I had a salad of fried wild mushrooms on top of argula, with cheese and balsamic, that was delicious. Mark’s green salad didn’t have enough greens for him, but has tagliatelle with veal ragu, and my spaghetti with tomato-basil sauce were both just right. we went back to the Telus store, and the manager made my phone just right, too.

Funghi Assoluti
Baked Oyster Mushrooms, Parmigiano, Bread Crumbs, Extra-Virgin Olive Oil and Balsamic Vinegar on Arugula

Thursday was the library information technology conference. One speaker’s slides had some great metaphors for linked library data, trees and sap and apples – this is a 2-year old version, but similar. I stayed for the morning, then walked home and had lunch and worked. I picked up a salad and a plum (and some Jergens) at the big Loblaws that had been “our” grocery store the first time we came to TIFF and stayed at Liza’s on Mutual St. I was afraid our favorite coffee place, Bulldog, was no more – there’s a giant hole in the ground where they used to be – but turns out they just moved. Even closer to the Ryerson Theatre.

Loblaw takeaway salad

I went back and met Mark at the conference and watched the last two sessions.

We took the subway to pick up our TIFF tickets. Paying the membership fee was so worth it – the member line was waaay shorter, and indoors.

TIFF tix

I think this was my weekend of taking in strays, or being a good Samaritan, or something like that.

On Friday, I worked at home, and Mark got back from his Door County vacation. We had chips (leftover from new students orientation at library school) and fresh salsa and corn pudding for dinner. I made the pudding with whole wheat breadcrumbs, and sour cream, because I didn’t have heavy cream or half & half, or even evaporated milk, the more usual dairy products. It was quite good, even though the whole wheat breadcrumbs showed up more in the mix than white ones do – I only put a handful of cheese on top, and none in – I thought that balanced the sour cream somehow.

I got email from one of my students that she was passing though Madison on her way to Cleveland from Las Vegas, to do an internship at the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, and did I want to get together for a drink or something? I asked if she had a place to stay, and she and the friend she was driving with ended up staying with us on Saturday night. John and Megan were here, too. The house guests went out and wandered State St. and ate at The Old Fashioned; the rest of us stayed home and drank beer and watched the Packers lose. We had leftover corn pudding and Spanish rice – spicy, because it had leftover fresh salsa in it – for dinner.

I made a fruit crisp, from the last two peaches from last week, a couple of apples lurking in the back of the fruit drawer in the fridge, and plums and two peaches from the new mixed bag of Door County fruit I brought back from the market on Saturday morning.

Here’s what it looked like Tuesday night:

On Sunday morning I got up and started biking to the bagel place. On my way I decided to go to the hardware store and get a little globe bulb for the front hall light at E. Wash – which is for sale, but negotiations are ongoing so I’m not talking about it yet. Longer bike ride. But the hardware store wasn’t open yet, so I went to Sentry and got the light bulb, and some extra cream cheese and a carton of vanilla yogurt, too, to put on top of the crisp.

We had breakfast and the kids all left – except Megan who’s now officially moved back for the school year. I went down to Chicago with Mark, because an old friend of mine is in the process of moving from Maine to the Bay area, and is staying at Mark’s apartment. It’s kind of close quarters there, and I know her much better than Mark does so it seemed like I should be there for the first night. We went out for tapas, and were uncharacteristically indecisive about what to order.

I worked for two hours on the train down, but on the bus back, I mostly just read and texted and emailed with my realtor. The digital signing program for offer & counter offer docs worked on my iPhone, but the wifi on the bus was iffy. I walked home from the bus, and then went over to E. Wash with step ladder to install the new light bulbs. I was up on the ladder when I got another realtor call, and we spent the evening texting and emailing while I was home and she was in various airports and airplanes stuck on the runway. I managed to fit in at least an hour or two of work on Monday night, and then was at work till 6:00 on Tuesday, and I think my online classes are as ready as they need to be for the start of classes tomorrow. This year, UW starts on a Wednesday, so a 3-day week, followed by the long Labor day weekend, which makes for a 4-day week, and then if that wasn’t bad enough, we end on a Tuesday – so the lat “week” of classes is 2 days. I had all summer food in my lunch today – last of the corn pudding, cherry tomatoes, cantaloupe, and watermelon.

Cute little donut peaches from the market – they’re too good to cook with – eating only!