I’ll be honest.
As much as I love handmade, lovingly prepared artisanal products, I generally opt out of the giant twice-a-year One Of A Kind Show And Sale, for a variety of reasons.
1) The shows can get really cramped and uncomfortable and I despise that slow, laboured crawl that it takes to navigate them
2) People can get really rude and pushy over this kind of original stuff
3) I find a lot of what’s on offer to be prohibitively expensive
Over the weekend, the Everyman and I visited the annual Gourmet Food & Wine Expo here in Toronto.
This year I was fortunate enough to have free admission courtesy of my editor Sheryl, so all that stood between us and deliciousness were those pesky strips of sample tickets.
And even though every year we leave the Expo lamenting how there is way more booze than food, every year without fail we also go in with many more sample tickets than we’ll possibly need. This year, we went in with 100 tickets between the 2 of us, which I could tell was probably too much, but we were both looking forward to hitting up the fancy wine room and trying a few expensive wines like we did last year.
I’d also wanted to see Grant’s presentation on the Food Network Stage which happened to be the first of the day, so we ended up getting there just as the show opened. The unfortunate thing about arriving so early is that most booths aren’t quite ready for service yet, and since we’d decided not to have breakfast beforehand, we were absolutely famished and starving for options.
In order to push back the lightheadedness, we stopped at the first booth that was open, which in this case happened to be Sassafraz. The Everyman helped himself to a pulled meat mini sandwich, while I grabbed what they were hyping as the world’s best brownie. The sandwich was decently textured, but super bland without a generous helping of the various condiments that were available. The brownie was tasty too, but much too sweet to be considered the best of the best.
Yesterday, after surprisingly little prodding, I managed to successfully coerce the Everyman into joining me for an afternoon at the Royal Agricultural Winter Fair.
As far as I can recall I don’t think I’ve ever visited “The Royal” before, but if I did, it was probably during some grade school field trip or something nearly 20 years ago. I can vividly recount visits to the Winnipeg version of The Royal, if for no other reason than the presence of Bonhomme (du neige). Bonhomme is the mascot of the Quebec winter carnival, but there’s a surprisingly large French population in Winnipeg, so for some reason he makes an appearance there, too. The toboggan slaloms were pretty awesome as well, which unfortunately isn’t something we’d ever see in Ontario, I imagine.
Up until a few weeks ago I really had no yearning to go to the Ontario Royal. But, when I met my editor Sheryl at Pantry for lunch a few weeks ago (aside from having an utterly scrumptious mushroom and oxtail tart) she made an off-the-cuff remark that made me wonder how much of a foodie destination The Royal might be.
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