Plenty of Nothing

Instant Wakame Soup

Japanese packaging is so lovely it's a shame to open it. I am filled with despair at a world in which you must tear up beautiful art! D

Fiddleheads

Baking Pan

Pâtisseries en plein air

An Excellent Suggestion

Propeller Vanilla Cream Soda

Mmmmmmmmmmmmm. 

Cranberries And Olive Oil But No Wine

Pattypan Squash in the Pan

Cross Promotion

Nice piece of cross-promotion here.  The LCBO has loaded up on gift boxes for the holiday season, and one of them is this all-Edinburgh tandem of Deuchars IPA and Rankin's detective John Rebus.  The beer's all right, though more oaty than I'd expect from an India pale ale.  The novel is ... meh.  Maybe Rebus gets sharper in the sequels, but God he's a shitty detective in this one.  His only advantage as a cop is that he's sleeping with a coworker who knows what's going on.  The rest of the time he's drinking.    Here's the crucial moment for me, on page 194, just as Rebus has figured out the identity of the psychopath who is about to murder his daughter: "Rebus, shivering, entered a pub for the hell of it and ordered a triple whiskey."  Dude!  Catch the guy!  Douglas

Candy!

There's a new candy store in Westboro, and they specialize in imports, the stuff you can't get at Winks.  Anyone who has read Candy Freak knows that many candy bars have resisted the forces of globalisation to remain local and are common in their home country (if European) or state (if US) but relatively unknown elsewhere.  Here are five, including Heather's finger which indicates where the Cadbury Flake we ate as soon as we left the store would be.  Some notes:

Cadbury Flake.  Why these are not available everywhere I'll never know.  You get a multi-layered stick of crumbly thin milk chocolate, simple but excellent when stuck into an ice cream cone, as they do in Britain.

Boston Baked Beans.  From Illinois.  Peanuts in hard candy.  Five food dyes listed as ingredients.  Douglas would eat them again but Heather would pass.

Clark.  From New England.  High scores.

Charleston Chew.  Chewy vanilla marshmallow in chocolate.  Long.

Heath.  Heather's favorite.  Brittle toffee.