Deliriously Delicious!

I love food. All kinds, any kind! I am willing to try pretty much anything and everything, however there is something about an amazing hamburger that hits my hunger spot like nothing else quite can. Fresh hot grilled beef, fresh onions, pickles and tomatoes and the perfect combination of ketchup, mustard and mayo served on a soft and delicious bun. Writing this makes me wish I had a burger in front of me right now. I just ate dinner. I would still eat it.

There are days and times when nothing will do but a burger and thankfully there are quite a few good burger places in Hamilton that can sate your craving. While every place has their features that make their burgers unique, when I need to feed the burger monster in my belly I drive down to Westdale to grab a Delirious Burger.

Simple yet classy. 

While some burger joints will offer you numerous burger options, sometimes several pages of options, Delirious Burger offers you three. A single burger, a double burger and a portobello burger for the vegetarians. Trust me when I say that any option you choose is going to be amazingly delicious and satisfying.

I grabbed this picture from the Delirious Burger Facebook Page.

I swung over to Delirious the other day to grab a burger and I ordered my personal favourite, the Double Bacon Cheese Burger. I added on sauteed onions and fried jalapenos, definitely worth the investment and chatted with the owner while I waited. I love the service at Delirious. It is welcoming and friendly and more often than not you'll get a chance to chat with the owner, who serves you with a great big smile. At the end of my wait I received my bag and below is what it contained.

Every burger, a masterpiece!

Burger Bliss!

If you think it looks like the most amazingly delicious burger in the world then you would be right. It also tastes like the most amazingly delicious tasting burger in the world. I could barely wait to dive in!

Literally amazing. Literally.

Needless to say, my burger did not last that long and pretty soon I was down to my last morsel!

Gone too soon!

It was gone far too soon but was simply amazing. I didn't get fries this time, but I definitely recommend getting them as well when you visit. They are among the best in the city.

Next time you feel the call of the burger hunger in the cold dark of night, slay that monster with a Delirious Burger. You won't be sorry you did.

I can get 70 miles to the gallon on this.....hog!

For quite a while, I have been thinking about trying to get into better physical shape. While I play sports about once or twice a week, I haven't really been doing any other physical activity aside from work. I find that I really want to feel better and healthier physically and I also want to be able to compete at a higher level in the sports I play. In order to rectify this lack of effort on my part I recently decided that I was going to start biking to work on a regular basis. I figure that it will help me be more healthy, and, as I share a car, it gives me another mode of transportation to tool around the city on.

When I started looking for a bike I really had no idea where to look or what to look for. In fact I started out by looking at used bikes and trying to find something that would be cheap and get me from point A to point B. The more I looked at used bikes, the more I realized that I have pretty much zero knowledge about bikes. I didn't know what size to look for, what brands were good quality or what price point to start at. I decided that I needed some help and I put out the word on twitter and talked to some friends. Ian Brisbin was amazingly helpful and based on his suggestions I headed out to some local bike shops to find myself a sweet ride.

When I started on my epic bike quest I figured that I should be able to get something pretty decent for about $500.00. I visited several local Hamilton bike shops in order to find my bike and I am happy to say that we have a few great bike shops. I really enjoyed my visit to Pieriks Cycle in Westdale and both Central Cycle on King St East and Scattalon Cycle and Sports on Upper Ottawa were informative and helped me narrow down my decision. At the end of the day I decided to buy my bike from Hammer City Cycle on Upper James! They are about a ten minute ride away from my house, they offer three years of bike service with every bike they sell and their customer service was exceptional.

Behind that door is my new bike! 

During my search I found that there are quite a few brands of high quality bikes and that the name on the bike isn't quite as important as to how it feels when you ride it. Most of the bike stores I visited strongly suggested riding the bikes before buying them in order to see if the fit and feel was right. I got the chance to ride and sit on quite a few expensive bicycles, which was pretty awesome! Many of them felt great and were fun to ride but when I rode the Cannondale Bad Boy it was the first bike that just felt right. While the bike was $799.00 and I had wanted to stay closer to my budget, after a lot of pondering and bike comparing I decided to splurge and placed my order! 

Cool bikes, but not as cool as my bike!

I waited for just about a week, hoping everyday that the phone would ring and my bike would be in. Finally I got the call today and after work I rushed over to find this waiting for me. 

Beautiful! 

Me and my new hog!

I rode it home and covered close to 5 kms in about 10 minutes. It was a smooth, sweet ride and handled the roads with ease. It could be the new purchase love affair, but it was just a fun ride. I thoroughly enjoyed it and I can't wait to go riding again. 

The only problem I have now is figuring out a name for my new bike! I really love the matte black colour as I think it makes my bike look sleek and stealthy, and it reminds me of Star Wars. My first thought was to name my bike after the most amazingly badass character of all time, Darth Vader!

Should I call it Vader? Lord Vader? Darth? 

My next thought was that in Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi, Darth Vader commands a Super-Star Destroyer that is the most powerful star ship aside from the Death Star, serving as a symbol of Imperial might. It also happens to have an wicked name. It is, simply, The Executor. 

It's so big and strong! The EXECUTOR!

Then, being the history nerd that I am, I remembered that King Edward III of England's first son was known as The Black Prince. He was quite the badass historical figure himself as he won both the Battle of Crecy and Poitiers, two pivotal victories during the Hundred Years War. 

BADASS!

I feel that I am leaning towards The Executor, however I am still open to suggestions and nothing has been finalized. Whatever it gets named, I am excited by the prospect of biking around my great city this summer and I can't wait to get started!

He's leavin, on the midday train to the T-Dot!

While Gladys Knight and her loyal Pips took the midnight train to Georgia, on Saturday I hopped on board the mid-day train and went on a little adventure to Toronto. 

The Farm Network very generously offered us free tickets to the Toronto Food and Drink Market so we went to see what they had to offer. The market was being held on the CNE grounds in the Direct Energy Center so we took the Go Train into Toronto. 

WELCOME!

When we arrived we were welcomed by this lovely banner and entered to find a wide array of vendors. There were numerous food trucks, new product vendors and producers from all over the province. One of my favourite vendors was Nuba Tisane. They offered a delicious tisane made from hibiscus juice. It was sweet yet tangy and amazingly delicious!

REFRESHING!

Another favourite spot was 66 Gilead Distillery. They offered rum, whiskey and maple syrup. I sampled the rum as well as the maple syrup and to say they were delicious is an understatement. The rum was delicious and smooth. I often favour Caribbean rums but I would definitely purchase this at a LCBO. The maple syrup, which is aged in whiskey barrels, is quite simply the most delicious maple syrup I have ever had. Smokey, smooth, sweet and delicious, you could drink it straight but just imagine it on waffles or pancakes!

BEST MAPLE SYRUP EVER!

Finally, The Farm Network was there to rep the Hammer and they brought a bunch of their delicious products with them. While they feature products from throughout Ontario, they made sure to profile Hamilton products, including Twisted Tomato Ketchup and Dawson Hot Sauce. They were pretty busy almost the entire time I was at the show and it was hard to get close or even get a good picture, although I did get the chance to snap the beauty below. I take the heavy traffic as a sign of good things!

Hammer Town Proud!

When we left the weather was amazingly warm and it was awesome to walk around the CNE grounds. I was able to snap a few great pictures before jumping back on the train to Hamilton to finish a fantastically fun and delicious adventure. 

Gorgeous!

Sausage Fest!

I am a very proud Hamiltonian. There really isn't anywhere that I would choose to live (although I would like it if we could get some more politicians like Matthew Green in the city). This was a big weekend for Hamilton as we hosted the Junos and I have to say we did a pretty amazing job. Thanks to Humans of Hamilton, I was able to attend the Juno Cup hockey game on Friday night and it was a blast. The same night we welcomed a new and exciting member to the Hamilton restaurant scene, Mezcal Taco and Tequila Bar. To say I was impressed with their food and service is an understatement and I feel that they will continue to help develop the fantastic food scene that is growing in our city.

JUNO CUP! RON MACLEAN WAS THERE!

Mezcal Taco and Tequila Bar

Three different kinds of Tacos! AMAZING

While our city was extremely busy this weekend, I was also extremely busy....MAKING HOMEMADE SAUSAGE! This year is going to be a year of many firsts for me and making sausage has been something that I have wanted to do for a long time but never found the time to do. I felt this was pretty criminal, especially since my father is a trained butcher. With that in mind, I went to my father's house to turn 90 lbs. of ground pork shoulder into delicious homemade sausage.

One of two boxes of meat!

Father and son Selfie!

In order to turn those boxes of meat into sausage you need a few supplies to make the magic happen. Besides the ground meat you need to have sausage casings (pig gut), spices (to make your sausage delicious), a sausage grinder/machine in order to stuff the pig gut with your meat and spice mixture and, since we were not going to hang our sausage to dry, we also needed freezer bags.

Pig Guts! GROSS

Spices! 

The lean mean sausage machine!

My father and I decided to make Hot Italian Sausage with our first batch. We spread the meat out on the table into what looked like a big meat patty, added our spices and then began to mix. Apparently I was a little soft with the meat as my father kept on telling me "It's already dead! Get your hands in there and mix it! You aren't going to hurt him now!.  Evidently, ideally when mixing your meat by hand you want to VIGOROUSLY mix the meat in order to make sure that all the meat is seasoned as evenly as possible.

The meat patty! Pre-spice!

Spiced Meat! 

Sir Mixalot! Baby got pork!

Once you mix the spice, in you have to try the meat in order to see if the meat is spiced correctly. You take a small amount of meat, throw it in a frying pan, cook it up and then give it a taste.

Sausage sample! 

I found that this part is probably the most important part of the process as it dictates how delicious your sausage is going to be. You don't want your sausage underspiced, but you also don't want to overspice your sausage. You have to hit that perfect middle ground and when you are judging everything by eye it can be tough. Thankfully, my father is a sausage making maestro and he steered me in the right direction. Once you get your meat to the desired level of spice it is time to start stuffing your meat mix into the pig gut/casing. 

Getting the pig gut ready to be STUFFED!

A few important things to remember about getting your pig gut ready to be stuffed is that you have to soak it in water to make sure it is soft and easy to work with. You should always keep the ends of the gut hanging over the side of your bowl so that you can find them easily as pig gut can get quite tangled and it can be hard to find the starting point if it's all in the bowl at the same time. Once you find the end of your pig gut, you want to get it open and then slide it onto the funnel looking piece on the end of your sausage grinder. We found that it worked best to slide a good amount of gut onto the funnel as you can get a nice long stretch of sausage at one time. When we were ready to begin stuffing, our setup looked like this.

Ready to begin stuffing!

There are a few different kinds of machines that you can use to stuff your sausage. Many people enjoy the hand powered style of machine but we opted for an electric machine as we figured it would make the process quicker. On our machine you used the black plunger looking device to push the sausage down into the machine which in turn stuffed the sausage.

The machine in action!

Once we began to stuff our sausage, we quickly learned a few things that helped to make our machine work more efficiently. The most important thing  is that you want have your meat mixture moist as opposed to dry. When the meat was moist, it easily went through the machine and into the sausage casing, but when dry it was a bit of a struggle to push the meat through. Our first batch of Hot Italian took us about 2 hours to work through almost 20lbs of meat. When we added some water into the meat hopper when stuffing or to the meat mixture itself we found the stuffing times went down. Our second batch took us about an hour and a half, and our final batch we finished stuffing in just over an hour.

Stuffed Sausage!

The last thing you need to do in order to make your sausage is to twist your sausage tube into sausages. While this can be a bit of an acquired skill (my father made it look effortless), the process itself is pretty simple. The first thing you want to do is to twist the open end of your casing closed and then twist your first sausage to your desired length. After that you move down the sausage tube pinching where you want to twist and then simply twist!

The Finished Product!

At the end of the day, I spent approximately 6 hours making sausage and we made close to 300 sausages. I took home 24 freezer bags with 6 sausages in each, a pretty sweet haul if I do say so myself.

Look at all that sausage!

I now have more than enough sausage to eat for the entire summer and enough to share with friends and family. I don't like to brag but you can't find sausage that tastes this good in your grocery store and, while it was hard work, it was definitely worth it. I am already planning another sausage fest in the fall and I can't wait!

Hello world!

I am an enthusiastic but very amateur gardener. Last year, I grew my garden from seeds and it was fantastic. My plants grew large and green, my tomatoes and peppers bore fruit and everything was excellent.

Some of last year's hot peppers

Or everything was excellent until everything started to ripen and I came home one day to find my garden RAVAGED by my three loving, adorable but insatiable dogs.

The Littlest Ravager

 This year I have decided to make sure that I eat more tomatoes and fresh homegrown vegetables than my dogs.

Check out the tomato moochers

I  am ready and prepared ahead of time this year and I decided to catalog my growing adventure online. It will be my record that I can look back on from year to year to improve my garden and hopefully will help other new growers with their gardens as well. I like to take pictures and I enjoy growing lots of different varieties, especially heirloom tomatoes and peppers. It should be a lot of fun, full of delicious, fresh food and I look forward to sharing my adventure with you.

Last year's El Jefe hot peppers