luck let a gentleman see (just how nice a dame you can be).

Luck Be a Lady Tonight

Although I've been a little down on my luck the past few weeks, be it with my job or the gentlemen in my life, I was a very lucky lady to be treated to dinner at Oddfellow's the other night. I'd been looking forward to dinner there for months, read review after review (and eschewed the bad ones from my memory), and looked in with jealousy every time I passed the corner of Queen & Shaw on my way to some other Toronto institution.

As Now & Eye Weekly have both reported, the food wasn't perfect. My photog friend & I had been looking forward to the lamb-stew-for-two all week and it didn't exactly live up to my expectations. The ambience, however, was a perfect 10. The bring-your-own-bottle policy allowed me to pick up a nice Chianti Ruffino at the local liquor shoppe, and lucky for me, he picked up the check for everything else. 

Although our quasi-pseudo-non-relationship-friendship status to me is sometimes more controversial than Frank Sinatra's switch from the Democratic to the Republican party, I had the most fun I'd had in, well, days, but the company was just lovely. And, having dinner out instead of in my apartment as usual gave me an excuse to wear my new (amazing! life-changing! head-turning!) black vintage dress, and make whiskey sours (my new specialty) for my old friend. 

One day, we may reunite as lovers-or-whatever; a revival more epic than that of Sinatra, Davis & Martin's in '87 (You know, the 'Together Again' tour?), but for now I am oh-so-happy that I have such a good friend in the city. A man who doesn't mind when I eye-ball other men down Oddfellows' famed communal table, or drool over my dream woman, Pamelia Kurstin, on YouTube because, to be honest, most of the time he's right there droolin' over her next to me. 

It's his MacBook Pro we're watching all those YouTube videos on.

a moment on the lips, forever on the hips (is okay by me).

In case you were wondering (and apparently I need to start a food blog & also buy a Digital SLR)...



The menu for last night's dinner party entailed:
-Filet Mignon wrapped in bacon, topped with a Dulchetta Gorgonzola shallot-cream sauce
-Buttermilk fried onion straws
-My secret recipe for garlic smashed potatoes (I stand by firmly that nobody makes better mashed/smashed potatoes than I do)
-Balsamic grilled baby asparagus

Total caloric intake? 1,467,634.



The entire cost of a dinner for six was roughly $100- not including wine. Considering the six of us finished off half a box, three magnums, and a regular 750mL bottle of red in just under 4 hours... the wine probably cost more than the dinner (And not only in price; I may or may not have thrown up my meal.) $100 for an absolutely wonderful dinner for six just blows my mind, and the fact that two first-year (first month, really) culinary students could pull off such a fabulous (and well-timed!) meal makes me the happiest girl in the city. A dinner party like it's 1929 all over again.

The filet itself we bought at St. Lawrence market. The cost of seven pre-bacon-wrapped-filets? $33. We grilled them off & then roasted them in a hot cast iron skillet.. in hot duck fat. Not only did we get the beautiful grill marks of a BBQ on my Breville panini grill, but roasting steaks after a quick sear always gives you the perfect pink centre; something my dad would tell me after his prerequisite post-BBQ margerita(s).

As for the sides, we made up the gorgonzola sauce. Obviously blue cheese is delicious in absolutely any form, but you can't really go wrong when combining it with about eighty thousand other forms of fat. Two shallots, a ton of butter to sweat them in, 35% heavy cream, and one $10 block of gorg resulted in fucking H-E-A-V-E-N. The asparagus we blanched, marinated in balsamic vinegar, and then grilled last-minute while the steaks were roasting off.

For the onion straws, I adapted this recipe from memory. I also took a little from the onion ring recipe I used for this epic dinner that I took from Anthony Sedlak's The Main. They turned out so well that I was surprised when I went to clean the kitchen this morning that my overnight guest didn't grab the rest to take on the streetcar to work, he loved them so much.

I'd give you my secret recipe for the best roasted garlic mashed potatoes in the world, but I'm afraid I've simply got to go eat the leftovers.