O Canada Part 2

Days 304 & 305

On Saturday, the second day of my trip to Ontario, my cousin Scott got married. It was a little rainy that day and before the ceremony I nibbled on a leftover croissant from the spread they had for the rehearsal dinner the night before.

Despite the drizzle, the ceremony was very beautiful and after many of the wedding guests boarded idling buses that shuttled us to the reception hall at a country club a few miles away.

Waiting for us there was an open bar and a table of hors d'oeuvres. I got myself a rum & coke, a small plate of hors d'oeuvres and then sat down at my assigned table, lucky number thirteen.

The plate I cobbled together consisted of crackers, some cheese cubes, diced fresh fruit and a couple of fresh green beans. Recently I have discovered how much I love fresh green beans. As a kid green beans were possibly my least favorite vegetable. This was probably because my parents always served the canned variety at home and they always tasted yucky that way. Fresh vegetables just seem to taste better to me and they are probably better for you since they aren’t packed with sodium and haven’t lost their color settling in the darkness of a tightly sealed tin can.

My fellow table guests were my brother and his wife, my sister and her husband and their three children. When the servers brought out the butter for the rolls my youngest niece, Sophie, was delighted to see they were a spherical shape. She immediately put one of them on her plate and could not stop talking about how adorable her butterball was. That in itself was simply adorable.

The salad came next which I declined to save room for the main course. While other guests dined on steak and chicken, I of course had the vegetarian entrée. Most weddings invites give you a choice of meal options, steak or fish; chicken or pork loin and etc. The invite for this wedding gave you a vegetarian option and I sincerely thank Scott and Lindsay for choice.

The veggie option consisted of chopped squash, mushrooms and other delicious vegetables rolled up in wide pasta strips sitting in a savory tomato sauce and garnished with shredded cheese and greens. It was an exquisitely tasty and an overall satisfying dish.

Dessert was cherry cheesecake:

And later wedding cupcakes were served instead of traditional wedding cake:

Those sweet treats went perfectly with the coffee that they had just set up.

Those who know me well know I love coffee very much. It is the one vice I will never, ever give up. If my doctor told me tomorrow that I had to give up coffee or else it would kill me I would laugh and tell him, “Well, it was a good life.”

That weekend in Canada I never had a bad cup of java. Whether it was take out coffee from Tim Horton’s, coffee from the catering urn on Friday night or the after dinner cup at the wedding; it was all good joe.

Whenever I have a really good cup of coffee at a restaurant or formal occasion I always have to know what brand it is. This occasion was certainly no exception and I asked a server for the identity of that evening’s roasted beverage beans. The young server didn’t know offhand but was gracious enough to find out for me. After disappearing into the kitchen for a minute or two she returned with a small, sealed bag of the coffee with the words “McCullagh Coffee” printed on it. This was a brand I had never heard of before that operates out of Buffalo, NY. I thanked her and she surprised me by letting me keep the sample. I love pretty women that give you free, great tasting coffee, don’t you?

To be concluded...

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