Wednesday, July 06, 2022

If You're Feeling Fried, Read the Wednesday Hodgepodge

 From this Side of the Pond

1. July 6th is National Fried Chicken Day...are you a fan? Do you make your own or have a favorite place to buy from? Do you own chickens? If not chicken what's your favorite fried food?

No to most of that. Sorry, Mitfordians.

Alternative fried food? The easiest answer: French fries.

2.  What's something you're too chicken to try?

Most of the recipes in the Nigella Lawson how-to-cook-everything cookbook I thrifted yesterday. (Most of which aren't chicken.)

3. When did you last find yourself running around like a 'chicken with its head cut off'?

I mostly prefer to keep my head attached.

4. Something you've done recently that makes you think 'I'm no spring chicken'?

Realizing that some of the wedding presents that we've been using for 30+ years are finally wearing out.

5. 'Winner winner chicken dinner'...tell us about something good that's happened in your life lately. 

We had a wedding anniversary recently, and decided to take a little day trip somewhere we'd never been before. Where should we go?. Our place of choice, that we'd never seen much of up close, was Dundas.


Dundas was, originally, an important town in Upper Canada, sort of a transportation hub, and many other towns in Ontario still have a Dundas Street (as in, this is the road you take to get to Dundas). Now it's just a small place on the edge of the city of Hamilton (on Lake Ontario): a funky, artsy little place, with eco stores, bike shops, and even an olive oil boutique. 

The look of the original downtown is much like the place where I grew up, and other Ontario towns too--they all seem to have been designed by the same person, and probably some of them were. The old Carnegie Library (didn't every town have one?) is now quite a good small art gallery, and we spent some time in there. Amazingly, even the children's art they were exhibiting seemed to be above average--something in the water maybe? The town also has a local museum, which has one corner dedicated to something I've never seen in a town museum: a Chinese restaurant that apparently was a local favourite place in the mid 20th century, and then when the husband died, the wife closed the restaurant and continued living upstairs, but kept things in the restaurant just as they were, for years--so when she eventually passed away, they discovered this amazing little time capsule and decided to preserve one booth's worth of it in the museum. (I won't even get into the really good used book store we found on the main street.)

Having the time to wander somewhere like that brought back memories of trips we used to take, like our honeymoon. Maybe we're still spring chickens at heart.