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11 December 2024
▪️Gift shopping on a budget: Gees Bees has a collection of honey-based gifts for under $20.
▪️Life is getting busier as December races by, and Red Apron’s heat-at-home meals can help. For example, next Thursday night December 19 you could eat the same old dinner or you could order Red Apron’s “Enright Beef and Mushroom Ragu” and dine like you’ve got a full staffed kitchen. Just sayin’.
▪️Road Trip: Shopping pairs well with food and drink. We know because tonight you can do some in-person Christmas shopping at Blondie Apparel (2394 Dwyer Hill Road in Ashton), from 4:30 pm to 7:30 pm. Once you’ve worked up a hankering for a nice dinner, you could drive five minutes to Ashton Brewing Company for a cosy meal and locally crafted beer.
▪️The Pure Kitchen in ByWard Market will close December 22 after two years in business. The company says the location did not perform as well as expected but crime in the neighbourhood was not a factor.
▪️After a fire closed it two years ago, the Gingerbread Man in Manotick has reopened. The bakery features gingerbread houses, gingerbread men, ‘kits to put together and decorate your own gingerbread home’, and cookies (presumably gingerbread).
▪️In their Apartment 613 Best Bites column, Kiersten Vuorimaki and Hannah Manning ate at Amazing Authentic Artisan Noodles (‘it was more food than I could eat, even if I tried’), Strudel & Perogi Ladies (‘For $12, you get 6 pan-fried perogi, fluffy and savoury inside with a nearly embarrassing amount of caramelized onions, fried bacon, grated cheese and sour cream’), and Union Street Café (‘My go-to lunch order is one of their grilled panini sandwiches (around $15) made on homemade focaccia and filled with delicious combos like pesto, tomato, and mozzarella; or apple and brie’).
▪️Peter Hum at the Ottawa Citizen continues to ignore concerns for his blood sugar levels as he devours a piña colada Yule log at Mamie Clafoutis in Westboro. The bakery will only make 30 piña colada Yule logs but will have plenty of the chocolate variety.
After the sugar high wore off and the munchies began (presumably), Hum sought out some dim sum. Hum says of Café Orient on Somerset Street that he was previously ‘blind to its hole-in-the-wall charm and hearty, soulful, unpretentious fare’ but now ‘Cafe Orient has risen on my list of Chinese restaurants’. He also checked out the brand new T & T Supermarket in Ottawa’s saddest shopping centre on Eagleson Road and finds it as ‘large and impressive as its predecessor that opened on Hunt Club Road 15 years ago’.
▪️Artist in Residence Distillerie has released a Smoked Maple Whisky.
▪️The United Way’s Novemburger campaign has announced the people’s choice of the top three hamburgers:
🍔 ‘Blackburn 84 at the Blackburn Arms on Innes Road in Blackburn Hamlet, featuring homemade burger sauce, caramelized onions, bacon strips, melted Monterey Jack cheese, and deep-fried jalapeño rings atop a brioche bun’.
🍔 ‘Myles burger at Bamm’s Snack Shack on Cobourg Street in Ottawa, which also clinched the No. 2 spot on the people’s choice award list. The Myles burger has a brisket beef patty, lettuce, pickles, onions, bacon jam, sweet Bamm sauce and crispy jalapeños’.
🍔 ‘Halloumi Haven from Edinburger on Springfield Road in Ottawa. With a beef kaftah patty, this burger also features mint labneh cheese, jalapeño chimichurri, grilled cucumber relish, roasted red peppers, lettuce and red onion’.