My earlier post about discovering – to my joy and, frankly, amazement – that “Beer Can Chicken” is a fantastic way to grill an entire bird, prompted not one but two replies from a couple of Ducklings.
With the first one came a photo (and if you thought the mental image of one gracelessly posed chicken thus prepared was rude, just get a load of these two.
It reminds me of the last dance on “Pep Rally” Night from my long-ago days at the Perth Collegiate. All that’s missing is the background music… I’m thinking maybe “Stairway to Heaven”.)The sender said in an accompanying e-mail that it was taken a couple years ago, which surely places the chef in the photo among the vanguard of Canadian chicken-butt-cannery-grilling pioneers. That being said, given the tiny amount of scotch remaining in his glass, he probably needed very little convincing to try it out. (It’s a guy thing. It’s the same kind of inspiration that puts a man aloft in a lawn chair supported only by a few dozen large helium balloons yet flying high enough to attract a radio warning from the pilot of a passing commercial airliner. And no, I am not making this up.)
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With the second message came another photo, prompted by the one I had included of a grilling frame designed to give the bird more support than just the tall-boy beer can. The message was a note asking, “Guess what I got for Father’s Day this year?” and the photo, as you’ll note,
raises “Beer Can Chicken” to the domain of high art when it is cooked on a “Stainless Steel Vertical Roaster With Infuser”.And a final footnote: The rack in the photo I included in my Beer Can Chicken post came from the website of one of world’s leading barbecue manufacturers. A few days ago, I happened on a special mid-season sale at our neighbourhood Loblaws where all of their barbecue accessories were priced at least 50% off, and the very same grill rack was tagged at a price that was almost, to the penny, one-tenth (!!) of the barbecue website’s price. So I bought two. (Because whenever we have space on our grill, given that the cooking gas’s consumption is the same we will often cook twice the meat we need for a meal so as to produce a second meal’s worth of leftovers.)
So cue up “Stairway to Heaven”. (Either that, or “Chicken Dance”.)
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Recently I was clearing up some old receipts and found the one for my pro shop purchases when we visited the Pebble Beach Golf Club during our California sojourn earlier this year. I know I purchased a sleeve (three) of Pebble Beach logo-marked golf balls and a really nice hooded sweatshirt for the coming Fall walking part of my daily commute to and from work.
But the receipt, I’ve just noticed, says only that I purchased “BALLS; SWEAT”.
Pebble Beach: for manly men only!
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And continuing with our recurring theme of “How did this get by the editors?”, here’s one that will happily clear spellcheckers everywhere, but really needed a human eye. It’s one for the ages, and comes from a story in the July 17th Victoria Times-Colonist about the growing number of shutdowns being experienced by seniors advocacy centres:
“Recognizing that seniors wee falling through the cracks, roundtable discussions were held…”
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Knowing the almost entirely Canadian content of this little blog’s readership (sorry David, you’re definitely in a minority here… eh?) I’m thinking that a full-blown travelogue account of our most recent trip – to Toronto – would garner the same enthusiastic response as the thought of watching a YouTube video of a new coat of Benjamin Moore semi-gloss latex drying on our ceiling.
But here are a couple highlights:
If you’re a sushi fan, you will find a happy place among the menu items of an upscale little restaurant called Doku 15, in the Cosmopolitan Hotel on Colborne Street, just off Yonge. If you’re a grown-up, however, you likely will be less than thrilled to find that the rather Spartan décor does not exactly lend itself to quiet conversation.
The tables and the floor are both fashioned of equally sound-reflective surfaces and the walls are bare concrete. And while the dining area is fairly small, it is also a two-storey tall space. There is therefore absolutely no sound absorption or muting anywhere. Quite the opposite, in fact; there are echoes and one is forced to spend one’s entire meal sitting amid a clatter of noise that would be appropriate to maybe ten times the number of tables actually housed inside.
The problem would be easily mitigated through the placement of a few panels of something – tapestry or shoji screens – on the bare walls, or even some banners of primary-coloured fabric hung on the ceiling far above. But heaven forbid that anything should disrupt the ice-cold industrial chic the designers seem to be reaching for. Unfortunately, a nook of discreet conversation this place ain’t.
That being said, the food was excellent. But with a few caveats.
Caveat number 1: My wife Leslie and I each ordered soup as an appetizer. She also ordered a main course and I chose four platters from the appetizer menu to make up my main course – a traditional rolled sushi; a lightly battered tempura sushi and a serving each of a flash-grilled but cold tuna, and hot cod. Within minutes, our effervescent waiter was back to inform me the kitchen had exhausted its cod for the day. Would I like an order of “white curry wild sea bass” in lieu? No problem, I replied, having previously eaten and greatly enjoyed the light, flaky white fish.
(Caution: if you ever decide to cook sea bass at home, forget about doing it on an open grille like a barbecue. This fish is fall-apart flaky and needs the gentle manipulation of a full spatula and the solid surface of a pan underneath it.)
Our respective appetizers were seafood soup (Leslie) and miso soup (me). The seafood soup, she said, was unbelievable – and that’d be the positive use of the word. My allergy to anything water-born whose biology includes a shell leaves me to rely solely on other people’s opinions when it comes to describing the quality of such a dish. But I can certainly vouch for its appearance. It was a large bowl with a light broth overflowing with an array of all sorts of seafood, so much in fact that it was less a “soup” than a “stew”, and Leslie was exceedingly happy at finding huge chunks of several tasty sea creatures in her bowl.
By way of contrast, in Ottawa our experience has all too often been that many of our local restaurants sadly interpret “seafood” to mean “made with brine”, and they will present you with a treasure hunt in your search for some actual seafood – the “find-the-vermouth-in-the-martini” school of content.
But Leslie’s bowl received the full four stars! As for me, I was delighted with my miso soup. I’m not enough of a connoisseur to be able to identify its preparation method, but there was plainly much about it that was fresh. But just a couple of spoonfuls in, as I was about to sing its praises across the table, the first of the above-noted “excellent, but…” caveats occurred.
I was barely four minutes into the soup when a waitress showed up with four platters carefully balanced along her arms. As she rhymed off the name of the item on each, I said, in turn, “That’s mine… Um… that’d be for me. That too, yep. And I guess that’s mine, too.”
All of the post-soup items that I’d ordered had just arrived, each on its own platter, bare minutes after we’d both begun our appetizers. And at the same time, there was no sign of Leslie’s entrée. As I started pushing things aside on the small table to accommodate four separate plates, the waitress seemed uncomfortably aware that something had gone wrong. Seconds later, the cheery waiter who had taken our initial order re-appeared and announced. “Oh we’re sorry… for some reason the kitchen mixed up your table’s order and delivered all this at once. Here’ I’ll take back the sea bass and we’ll just keep it warm for you.”
Baby Duck’s readers will be all too familiar with my reaction to bad service. But I’m not unreasonable, and it’s relative. Were I standing at, say, Harvey’s, separated from my server by an arborite countertop and a sneeze guard, I would not only be satisfied with the simultaneous arrival of everything I’d ordered, I would expect it and call it great service.
Sure, I had ordered entirely from the appetizers list by way of making up my meal. But the waiter (a likeable chap named Roland, who was especially proud that he and his girlfriend had together created several of the exotically-named cocktails on the drinks menu) understood that, yet this information had not made the short trip from the dining room to the kitchen. And in a high-end dining room just loaded with cachet (No kidding!: “At Doku15, Chef G.Q Pan puts a dash of harmony and a gram of balance into his entrees.”), that’s not even good service.
On to dessert. Both Leslie and I are big fans of tiramisu and, at meal’s end, she opted to order the menu’s “green tea tiramisu”. I asked for a bread pudding dessert topped with dark chocolate on one half and a crème fraiche on the other, two complimentary toppings that gave it its name, “Mongolian black-and-white”. (Although when bread pudding became Mongolian is unknown to me. Googling “mongolian bread pudding” at this writing turns up zero hits. Oh well, I’m sure it was probably by way of the Khyber Pass and the Darjeeling Railway. With a 6400 km detour, of course, to get around the Great Wall of China. But that sure seems like a lot of trouble to go to in order to mongolianize bread pudding… Whoops, my apologies; the voices are telling me I digress.)
We shared bites of each other’s desserts as well as our own.
Let me go on the record right now as saying I have never actually eaten grass clippings. And neither has Leslie. But I have pushed a mower around back – and front – yards for several decades now, and on many such occasions, she has sat yardside on our porch. So based on the aroma of fresh-cut grass, we can both feel quite safe in stating that Doku 15’s green tea tiramisu is pretty close to what grass clippings probably taste like.
Despite the rave review that “Hype1” (above) gives it: “Spongy light-as-air cake with green tea tangled in with the smoothest mascarpone and showered with golden flakes. Indeed, it is flavour fusion!”, I’m afraid both of us, after our respective bites, sort of looked at each other and reached the same conclusion: lawn clippings.
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A Toronto experience that was nothing BUT positive for us (including offspring who actually shared it 24 hours later as part of her University of Toronto “summer camp” experience) – eardrum assault notwithstanding – was a stage show called “We Will Rock You” that, all by itself, has probably sent sales of this album into the stratosphere.
Anyone with even nothing more than an occasional interest in rock music knows that the premature death of Queen’s lead singer, Freddie Mercury, placed him immediately and prominently on the list of rockers who died way before their time, the victim of AIDS in his case. (For a signature example of why, if you can find it, watch a clip of Queen’s performance during the 1985 Live Aid concert at Wembley Stadium.
It’s a half hour tour-de-force that might just as well have been playbilled, “Freddie Mercury and some back-up musicians”.)The stage show, “We Will Rock You” (WWRY), takes a solid couple dozen of Queen’s biggest and best known hits and slings them together to advance a storyline that, sure, has been done many times before, but in this case it just saturates the stage with colourful costuming, humour and noise. Omilord, is there ever noise!
Start with yer corporate behemoth that seeks to control music and crush originality in the process; add yer basic misunderstood, socially ostracized youth and Bob’s your uncle! And will creative youth triumph over all? Hmmmmmmmmmmmmm...
Without spoiling it for you, here’s a brief summary of the plot. The musical opens on a high school graduation day some 300 years in the future when the bulk of the class are brightly dressed, preppy, lacquer-haired and plastic-smiled, cookie-cutter “Ga-ga boys” and “Ga-ga girls” (who look like an “Up With People” gang that went way over the top experimenting with psychedelic drugs).
The show opens with a thundering ensemble dance done to Queen’s – no surprise here – “Radio Ga-ga”.But in the same class are a young man, Galileo Figaro, and a young woman, Scaramouche, both of whom refuse to fit the mould. Figaro keeps hearing bits and pieces of “something” in his head (which launches the show’s humour when he reviews what’s been plaguing his dreams for months). And Scaramouche is simply the square peg in the round hole. (Geez, do you think maybe they’ll find each other?)
Enter the forces of darkness, represented by the “Killer Queen” and her lead henchman, Kashoggi, who is a combination of Max Headroom, and Colonel Carl Jenkins,
the “Starship Troopers” Intelligence Officer played by Neil Patrick Harris. (Incidentally, a somewhat inspired bit of naming one's forces-of-evil character.)Their goal, of course, is to crush dissent and creativity, and the stage show’s plot runs from there, via nothing more complicated than a simple good guy vs bad guy chase, with some truly jaw-dropping renditions of Queen’s tunes. You’ll find yourself hearing / seeing echoes (Wait… can you “see” an echo? Oh hell, never mind) of "Peter Pan"’s Lost Boys, "Star Wars"’ Yoda and even Walt Disney’s “The Sword in the Stone”.
By the time you reach the last half hour or so, it becomes apparent that the writers, two of whom – Brian May and Roger Taylor – were members of Queen, have simply abandoned any pretext of even vague credibility in their story and turned the show over pretty much entirely to the music. But also by this point, you’re having such a good time at the party, you don’t care.
One thing both Leslie and I came away with was a whole new appreciation for the complexity and the range of Queen’s music. Musically, we already knew that Queen was no three-chord wonder band (“Bohemian Rhapsody” – the defence rests); but the show also showcases, occasionally in quite touching ways, their lyrics.
It helps that the show has some wonderful singing voices in its cast. Googling information about Toronto’s “We Will Rock You” will turn up many accolades for Erica Peck, the young woman who plays Scaramouche, and she is deserving of all of them. Early on, her rendition of “Somebody to Love” simply soars.
“I work hard every day of my life
I work till I ache my bones
At the end I take home my hard earned pay all on my own –
I get down on my knees
And I start to pray
Till the tears run down from my eyes
Lord - somebody – somebody
Can anybody find me - somebody to love?”
(And Erica is a Canadian Cinderella story. Two years ago, she was one among the sea of Canadian Idol hopefuls. “We Will Rock You” is her first professional theatrical gig.)
Certainly, it was among the best times we’ve had in a theatre. (Possibly the best live theatre ever for me. But Leslie’s experiences include seeing Richard Burton in “Camelot”, Katherine Hepburn in “Coco”, Lauren Bacall in “Woman of the Year” and Sir John Gielgud, so I’m not going to presume to rank WWRY’s “fun” with “best times” on her chart of live theatre faves.)
But in WWRY, as a member of the audience, you’re not asked to think a lot about the show’s message. It is, after all, delivered like the proverbial two-by-four right between your eyes – but oh my heavens is it ever entertainment!
Its staging doesn’t require vastly complex sets either, so my hope is that it might pay a visit to our local main stage theatre – the National Arts Centre – after it’s done its Toronto run later this year. But if it comes your way wherever you are, and even if your Queen awareness is so far limited to this:
“[Clap-clap-WHONK!
Clap-clap-WHONK!
Clap-clap-WHONK!]
Buddy you’re a boy make a big noise
Playin’ in the street
Gonna be a big man some day.
You got mud on yo’ face
You big disgrace
Kickin’ your can all over the place
We will… we will ROCK YOU!
We will… we will ROCK YOU!”
give yourself a break and go. Just try to come out of that show without a huge grin on your face. Just try.
Until la prochaine. À la next time.
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