Pasticcio

The pasticcio turned out well. Lots of interesting flavour and texture things going on though less custardy than some dishes of the type that I've made.

Excellent wine too. We opened a couple from 13th Street Winery; the 2003 Funk Vineyard Riesling and the 2002 Sandstone Vineyard Reserve Gamay. I love that Gamay. It's more Burgundian than 9/10 red Burgundies and much less expensive. Long may Ontario's handful of small but excellent wineries remain so little known!

A walk into the future

This afternoon lemur_catta and I went out for a walk to explore the work going on on the West Donlands Revitalization Project. There would be photos but the camera wasn't behaving. Anyway there isn't much to see yet but over the next two to three years we are getting a whole new neighbourhood just to the east of us with one major new park and several small ones. The overall concept, mixing up retail, various tenure types of residential unit and a fair amount of social housing looks like a new version of our current neighbourhood but with more open space. If the outcome is as good as the plan it should be a major improvement on the derelict industrial site that we have there now. The area south of the new development is also mostly post industrial wasteland. Today we found the picnic table graveyard with literally dozens of picnic tables in various states of decay stacked up. It was quite surreal.

Anyway, it was a lovely day so we decided to head south to the lake. This time we took a route I have never taken before through the heart of the industrial bit of the port lands. There are still real manufacturing operations down there and on a serious scale. I had no idea. There are a couple of paper/boxboard mills, a roofing plant and several smaller industrial operations as well as transit, hydro and city services operations of various kinds. We ended up going as far as the bottom of Leslie Street and then coming back via the Martin Goodman, up Cherry Street and through the distillery. All in all, a long and interesting trek.