Friends in high places – When Canadians share food
I live for food.
When I go out, it’s for the food. When I travel, I can’t wait to try the foods. When I meet up with friends, there’s guaranteed to be food involved. When I meet someone online from a different country, I want to hear about the food.
Food, food, food. So anybody that knows me, knows that food is the way to woo me.
Which is why back last year when I made a trip to Canada, I was sent home with a box full of food to try. And I received another box in the mail of other tidbits. Sauces, spices, snacks. The works.
Now I’m finally sharing with you, too, so you can see all the goodies I got to try out. They’re not all “Canadian-only” things, of course, but a lot of them I didn’t have access to where I was living or were different brands to try out, etc.
The O Dor Rooibos Marabout tea – I actually had one heck of a time hunting this down currently because I can’t really find it online any more. I eventually called my sister to pull the tin out of the cupboard and read me the bottom label (thanks again!). And when I looked it up after to try to find a description, even the main The O Dor site gives a very little…..intentionally saying that it won’t tell anything about it, ha. Anyway, it’s caramel and apple flavored with chunks of dried apple chips and toffee bits. Translate this Hebrew site for an awesome bit of sorcery. Tastes like Harry Potter! :P
Shahi Garam Masala – Indian spice mix
Saffron
Instant Miso Soup – Strangely good, by the way. I wasn’t expecting it to be decent prepackaged compared to restaurants.
Cadbury Mini-Eggs “Popping” – Pop rocks meet chocolate mini eggs. Awesome.
Wasabi peas – Weird, but strangely good. 2 out of 3 girls liked them and the other thought they were too hot.
Chiquilin hot paprika – The picture on the right is actually more orange-y than it really is, but it’s still a completely different color than the paprika I use at home.
Tamari soy sauce – Nicely protected in a sock, woot
Tim Horton’s coffee that says “OMG! tastes like Canada” – I don’t even drink coffee, but Time Horton’s is quite iconic for Canada
Miso gravy (awesome on potatoes and stir fries, by the way) and Cholula hot sauce (awesome on everything and because B’s new favorite sauce for a long while).
Some other things in the pictures that I didn’t have individual pictures of and I’m not sure you can tell from these:
- Balsamic vinegar,
- Hollandaise sauce mix
- Turbinado (I couldn’t find it locally and wanted to try it out for N’s sensitivities)
- Cadbury crème eggs for the girls to try
- Poach pods – Little green cups to poach eggs in
- Cooking magazine
- Almond flavored Pocky
- Wasabi paste and nori (seaweed) sheets so I could make my own sushi
- Various rices to try
Some of these were gone in no time, but some I babied and savored to the point that I even still have some of them a year later. I should probably finish them off eventually, huh? Hehe.
Kodak Photobook + BlogHer ‘11 = One heck of a scrapbook
A couple weeks ago, Foodbuzz Tastemaker Program sent me an email saying that I had been selected by Kodak Gallery to receive a free photobook. Awesome, right?
Except I had no idea what to do the book on and the email came just days before I left for BlogHer….with a two week deadline for a review. Yikes! At first, I figured I would do pictures of my food from here, but really, my photos aren’t that high of quality and do I really need a full book of them when I have a blog for that? Not really.
But riding the high from BlogHer, I saw the opportunity to put together a memory book of sorts from BlogHer….an event I will never forget.
At first glance, Kodak Gallery website is super easy. Select the book you want to make, hit “quickstart,” and you’re ready to upload photos either from your computer or directly from Facebook. The hardest part of this process is deciding which photos you want to use!
Now I did run into a few issues. The cover concept is great in that your cover photo is actually on the first page of the book and you view it through a hole in the cover. This is great to feature a large photo with the cover showing just a snippet of it.
For me, though, I didn’t realize this initially and spent quite a while putting together a collage that I thought represented “Quirky Cookery”….and then spent a much longer amount of time, tweaking the pixel size so that it would actually fit and show correctly through the cover viewfinder. Oy. With a larger picture, you can zoom in, but there’s no option to zoom out beyond the picture to make it smaller or anything.
(Slight variations of the same picture as I edited in PhotoShop repeatedly to get it just right. )
I uploaded and uploaded, rearranged, moved, added, saved, uploaded some more, and finally reached a point where I was sick of looking at my own pictures, ha. I didn’t even take the time to edit each photo as I probably should’ve, nor did I add captions as I would with future books. I was actually expecting a more elaborate editor directly in Kodak Gallery book section, but instead, I could really only do things like zoom or make it black and white or sepia. Not even crop really or adjust location beyond it automatically centering.
But for a quickstart option, this worked really well. It did most of the work for me and I just had to tell it where I wanted the photos.
When I decided to check out finally, my code didn’t work. Wah. It claimed it had already been redeemed, which it obviously hadn’t been because I’d been gone entirely and not even played with the site yet, much less created an account and tried to check out.
Customer service live chat was really quick, though, and after a few troubleshooting ideas, it finally went through correctly. While I would rather flawless execution on something like that, I’m kinda glad mine briefly glitched out so I had the opportunity to try out their customer support. Fransisco was super nice and even when he had to be silent while he looked into the matter, he checked back a couple times to apologize for delay and thank me for my patience, hehe.
Ultimately, it went rather smoothly and while it was kind of annoying not having a few more editing options, for a quickstart book, it was awesome.
And now it’s your turn. Until August 31, the medium and large books are 40% off. Before my code worked correctly, that showed my 20 page medium *hardback* book costing only $13. That’s cheaper than most books in general so for a personalized, customized book of your own with full glossy inside paper and Kodak quality printing, you certainly can’t complain.
(In case you missed the disclosure, reread the first line of this post. I did receive a book free from Foodbuzz Tastemaker and Kodak Gallery in exchange for an honest review. )
When QJ moves – Part 8 – Banana boxes
So it was brought to my attention that even though I posted an entire series on my move last year and how it affected our eating, I never did post the pictures here on the site that involved the banana boxes. I only posted them on Facebook, oops.
Oh the banana boxes….
So many of them! No, you don’t understand….we had dozens of them. The entire hallway was covered in them. Don’t believe me?
And uh, that actually wasn’t all of them. We had a wall built in the kitchen as well. Chiquita Bananas boxes rock…they’re heavy duty and even though both the bottom and the top had holes in them, the heavy paper inside was sufficient for covering them. Great for packing.
All work and no play….well, wouldn’t have been very fun, so we had to stop for some quirky pictures a couple times, too. There’s my helper, B* above. She was a cuter bunny that day, hehe.
Here’s some of the other banana box labeling pictures, too:
^ That was an attempt at drawing fire with a flat Sharpie.
I really need to post about the Monster Masher one of these days.
I already posted that picture in this post, but it was worth mentioning again because of the boxes.
Little tape, hehe.
Proof of the above and my packing skills:
I may have just restocked our bean collection before the move, oops.
You can thank my mom for the elephant drawing here. Yay for parents who indulge silly requests, hehe.
Smiley faces make everything better, remember? Everybody agrees:
I have a couple pictures from some non-banana boxes, too, that I can’t help but share while I’m at it:
Yay for gaming references. Leave me a comment if you recognize it. :P
I promise you she’s not trying to flip off the camera or attempting a funky peace sign. She had already taken off her bunny ears, but wanted a quirky bunny in this picture, too…..so meet the shadow bunny with the cocked ear, too. <3
And as a reminder, the rest of the posts about my big move can be found here.
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