• My latest Vue Weekly article, a profile on the man behind Origin India, Arvind Sawhney, was published last week. It’s also important to know that the restaurant offers wine pairings with their food. I reviewed the restaurant (albeit the buffet and not the recommended a la carte) back in October.
• Courtney of Take it and Like it reviewed her recent experience at the fairly new Kai Asian Grill – it seems to be on par with other casual upscale chains in the city.
• From Mack: Wildflower Grill made it onto Where Magazine’s annual tally of the 10 best new restaurants in Canada. See the entire list here.
• The “oldest wine festival in Calgary” is coming to Edmonton – Winefest, on February 28 at the Shaw Conference Centre.
• Walter Schwabe, one of Mack’s colleagues, launched the fusedlogic Food Bank Challenge last week. The goal is to have one million pictures of one million Food Bank donations by next December.
• Information about the Food Security Conference on January 29-31, organized by the Edmonton Food Security Network, was released this week – the schedule of sessions looks great!
• On a related note, the theme of International Week 2009 is food: “Hungry for change: Transcending Feast, Famine and Frenzy”. It should be a good event, as usual.
• According to Canwest, the latest incarnation of Family Restaurant, a reality-show that focuses on a family-run establishment, will debut on January 8. As I mentioned a few months back, the family behind The Lingnan and Chicken for Lunch will be showcased.
• On the topic of Food Network, I have to say that the cheesy Food Network Holiday Special, that saw a number of Canada’s celebrity chefs “get together” to cook got to me. It was staged, but still cool to see them interact. Also, I may finally be jumping on the Top Chef bandwagon. Foodie Suz wrote about her love for the show earlier this week; I’ve caught a few episodes of the season here and there (my interest being more on the side of the NY location than the competition itself), but the individual personalities involved, and the cooking challenges have been quite enthralling.
• Starbucks will be debuting a new line of tea lattes in January. What happened to the coffee focus?
• For all the accolades given for positive accomplishments, how about a negative one: Eater just rounded up its search for the worst food porn on the internet. Take a look and judge for yourself.
• If you’ve ever called someone “beefy”, here’s the perfect gift for them – meat-scented spray from Burger King.
• I bought a cute little jar of Chicken Curry spice mixture from a coworker last week, with all proceeds going to an orphanage near Mumbai. Using the mixture, I of course decided to deviate from the recipe attached and use rotisserie chicken (instead of uncooked meat) to cut down on the cooking time, and added a can of diced tomatoes. As a result, the curry flavour was weaker than it was probably supposed to be, and the chicken was unfortunately dry. Guess I need to be reminded to follow instructions closely.

Mrs. Susannah John’s Chicken Curry mixture 

• I raided my emergency food drawer at work, on a particularly hungry afternoon. This ended up in my first encounter with microwavable Kraft Dinner in a cup. Thankfully, the sauce thickened up a bit after the following photo was taken, but I’m not sure I will buy it again – the styrofoam-like cup didn’t seem to be able to stand the heat of the microwave.

Microwavable Kraft Dinner

• The franchised Sbarro replaced the family-run Italian fast food  outlet (whose name escapes me) in Edmonton City Centre a few months ago. I tried their lasagna ($4.79), but it just wasn’t the same (or as inexpensive) as what I had been used to.

Lasagna from Sbarro