February 14, 2015: Akemi and I take Jodelle on a foodly excursion!

“I ate like garbage box.”

– Akemi today after lunch, her way of letting me know she ate too much.

Pictured above: the chocolates I got Akemi for Valentine’s Day. ��Jean-Paul Hevin, shipped from Paris. ��They arrived three days ago and sat in the fridge because Akemi wanted to wait. ��A dried fruit and nut chocolate medley for her – and I surprised myself with a bunch of dark chocolate bars. ��I am SO thoughtful!

Today, Jodelle finally took us up on our offer and joined us for a morning and afternoon of food-oriented fun! ��First stop, the farmer’s market for an organic fix.

Well, well, well. ��Look who knitted herself a Whovian scarf.

Chocolate-covered strawberries all around at the St. Lawrence Market. ��Dark chocolate for Akemi. ��White chocolate and strawberry for Jodelle. ��But nothing for the clearly disappointed guy in the middle. ��He missed out.

Jodelle HAD to have this origami chopstick holder. ��Keeping with the Japanese theme, she also picked up some origami paper later in the day.

We return to the farmer’s market where Jodelle picks up a nice warm hat – to add to her growing collection. ��50 years from now, neighbors will refer to her as “the crazy hat lady”.

We followed up with a trip to Kensington Market where we checked out not one but TWO comic book shops. ��And then had lunch at King’s Cafe (http://www.kingscafe.com), a vegetarian restaurant that was – surprise surprise! – actually quite good. ��We enjoyed a variety of mostly Chinese dishes. ��Despite the fact that it was missing meat, the sticky rice purse was my favorite. ��Akemi loved the crispy king oyster mushrooms while Jodelle was all over the avocado melt. ��Apparently, next to hats, avocados are her favorite things.

From there, it was a short walk over to Don’t Call Me Cupcake (http://dontcallmecupcake.com) for my weekly rum cake fix. ��Actor Roger Cross asked me to pick some up for him and I did – but he has yet to respond to my text about dropping them off so I’m thinking he one or two may not make it to his apartment.

Clearly boozed up on rum cupcake, Jodelle spent an inordinate amount of time��swooning over some indie musician I’ve never heard of.

Once she’d sobered up, we headed over to Bakka Phoenix Books (http://www.bakkaphoenixbooks.com), purveyors of fine genre reads. ��There, I picked up the above-pictured books (Ted Chiang’s Stories of Your Life and Others��is one of my all-time favorite story collections – that I leant my writing partner years ago and he never returned). ��Jodelle got A Game of Thrones, adding it to the list of titles she doesn’t have time to read.

After dropping Jodelle off, Akemi and I had a nice, quiet dinner and then, for dessert…

She baked banana bread!

“It’s gluten free, sugar-free, and dairy free!”she informed me.

No problem.

Much-improved with the addition of 45% milk chocolate chunks, a couple of scoops of Breyer’s vanilla ice cream, and a dousing of salted caramel Stoli.

Ah, damnit! ��He swung by to pick up his rum cakes after all. :(