Best Instas of the Year

December was totally crazy with holiday parties, dinners with friends, preparing for Champagne & Cookies and getting ready for Christmas. I’ll hit you with the highlights:

  • I had a catch-up dinner at Trevor with my friend Heather, and we ordered all the bar snacks, my favourite of which was the buffalo fried cauliflower with dill pickle ranch for dipping . It had been a hot minute (actually two years) since I’d been at Trevor, and it reminded me to go there more often.
  • The other Heather in my life has been raving about The Craft in Liberty Village for a while, so I picked that as the venue for a co-worker’s birthday dinner at the beginning of the month. I loved it! Just the perfect winter spot, because it’s like halfway in the basement, super cozy, and has big gigantic booths to sit in. I shared with my friend Sarah and we had: lime shrimp guacamole, lumpia spring rolls, and asada fries. I want to try SO MANY MORE things on the menu, so I need to go back there soon.
  • So Cactus Club Cafe has opened in First Canadian Place and after hearing about bouncers controlling the door, two hour waits, and them not taking reservations until 2016, I decided I was launching a personal boycott of this place until minimum 2017. Unfortunately my co-worker chose it for our team’s holiday drinks and I was forced to go against my will. We ordered a bunch of apps (this seems to be the theme so far this month) and I’m not ashamed to admit that everything was SO GOOD that I tried: spicy chicken, szechuan chicken lettuce wraps, flatbread (with caramelized onions, cherry tomatoes, feta, pesto, arugula, goat cheese and balsamic drizzle…all my trigger words) and yam fries. I know they all sound kind of basic, but they were all amazing. Boycott cancelled! (I will overlook the annoying girls with clipboards at the front, the hosts with ear pieces like they’re in the secret service, and the d-bags hanging out by the bar).
  • For Christmas dinner this year, we had the most delicious ham, these scalloped potatoes which are my go-to, carrots, biscuits with butter and copious amounts of mustard pickles. Since it was just my Mom, Dad, Aunt and me for dinner, I cut the recipe for this Sticky Toffee Pudding in half and baked it in an 8×8 pan. It was as good as Deb promised, doused with toffee sauce and dolloped with whipped cream.
  • Side note: my brother made some Nuts & Bolts snack mix and I ate the entire jar he left at my Mom’s house. I NEED to make this! He put: cheese nips, cheerios, shreddies, almonds and little pretzel goldfish.
  • My Mom didn’t feel like making a turkey dinner for our big Christmas gathering on Boxing Day (also her birthday, so she shouldn’t really cook, right?) so I got creative control over this meal! Yes! It was a huge hit! I made: beef stew with mushrooms in the slowcooker (this recipe from Jan, just left out the sour cream), white cheddar mashed potatoes, a big green salad with apple, roasted butternut squash, candied pecans, and this dressing. My Mom also made a chicken pot pie with biscuit crumble topping, which is so, so good. For dessert my Mom and my niece blew out the candles on the Shimmer & Shine birthday cake.

Other non-foodie things I was obsessed with this month – Best of 2015 edition:

  • After a lackluster 2014, there were so many movies I loved this year! Shout to Alexis who organized my entire movie-going summer. These were the ones I loved the most: Southpaw, Trainwreck, Inside Out, Straight Outta Compton and Creed. Big year for hotties in boxing movies!
  • Hands-down my favourite book of 2015 was The Royal We, which is kind of like historical fiction about Prince William & Kate Middleton. Others I loved: China Rich Girlfriend, Modern Romance, and Luckiest Girl Alive.
  • I feel like I didn’t watch much new TV this year (although I re-watched all of Entourage before the movie came out, and Seasons 4 & 5 of Friday Night Lights because I was having a Michael B. Jordan moment). I would say my cable favourites were The Mindy Project (as always), How to Get Away with Murder and The Good Wife. I was also pretty into Fargo Season 1 for the three days it took me to watch it, and the first Season of Empire, which I’m not liking as much in Season 2. After resisting for oh-so-long, I finally got Netflix, so this paragraph is going to quadruple in length for 2016.

Flashback!