If you recall back at the start of 2010 Domino’s Pizza ran an ad campaign in the US about the process they went through in putting together their new pizza recipe.  They cited focus groups and customer comments that cite their crust is like cardboard, their cheese is processed garbage and their sauce is awful, the 3 things that are pretty much essential building blocks to making a decent pizza.   Basically they throw their old product under the delivery car, so to speak, in launching their new product.  Below is a video from that particular campaign.

It’s great that they have come up with a new recipe for their product and are committed to  creating a great product.  The big problem I see is the fact that their inferior old pizza recipe is still being sold in Canada.  I live like 3 minutes from a Domino’s.  I see their fleet of delivery vehicles every night delivering what was called “mass produced, boring, bland pizza” by their own consumers.  I can’t say I’ve ever been a fan of Domino’s Pizza.  I’ve long thought it was pretty awful for many of the same reasons that were cited in that video.  Yet here we are in Canada are still being delivered what amounts to an inferior product.

This is a beef I’ve had for awhile, but the fact it has now been over a year since the new recipe became available in the US just seems like a slap in the face to Canadian consumers.  I would have understood if the new recipe had a staged release, it would make sense.  But given a few Google searches I find no mention of the new recipe coming to Canada at all.  I’m not sure if Domino’s is aware, but us Canadians watch US television all the time.  We get the major US stations and I’m sure many of us would have seen the campaign where they essentially trashed the pizza they are still serving in Canada.  To me this seems like a company doing a recall because their product contains lead based paint, but only does the recall in US.  It just seems absolutely crazy that they would sell a product they no longer stand behind as a company to the general public.

With most Canadians feeling the pinch of rising costs I was giving some thought to how the tax system is kinda broken in Ontario at the moment. Living in Ontario the Provincial Sales Tax(PST) is applied to most transactions you might make in your daily lives with a few exceptions. One of these exceptions is on meal purchases of less then $3.99. I read an articles on the topic, which uses the example of Tim Horton’s coffee and a breakfast sandwich, which would exceed the $3.99 threshold and be charged both GST(5%) and PST(8%).

The problem I have with this scheme of taxation is that it has become outdated and has failed to keep up with the times. The PST was introduced in 1990 in Ontario, and I can assure you $3.99 bought you whole lot more food 19 years ago then it does today. As recently as last year you would be able to go to pretty much any of the major fast food restaurants and get a $3.99 value combo. $3.99 obviously being the magic number for these places because it only incurred the GST. Over the last few years the price of food has inevitably increased to the point that the $3.99 Big Xtra or Whopper meals became the smaller Double Hamburger or Whopper Jr meals to keep under that price point. Now in 2009 you can barely find a value meal that sells for the magical $3.99. Burger King has upped the daily deal to $4.29, as has McDonalds with their Double Hamburger meal. So not only have the restaurant chains upped the price by $.30, the Ontario government is now pocketing $.34 that they previously weren’t collecting.

My suggestion is that the $3.99 limit be increased to something a little more realistic like $4.99 or $5.99. I’m sure given the additional cost of food has weighed heavily on fast food places, as I’m sure the last thing they want is to cross that $3.99 threshold for their food. In 19 years a lot of things have changed, yet the tax breaks that we the consumer were allotted back then have officially become null and void. If you’re someone who might eat at a fast food restaurant 2 times a week and would have previously ordered from the sub-$3.99 menu, that is $35.36 in extra tax that you’d be shelling out over the span of the year. It all adds up.

For a long time I’ve wanted to start another blog awhile back and finally got around to it. I have long wanted to run a food blog. I love to cook and invent new things in the kitchen and never really found that modsuperstar was really the proper avenue with which to share my culinary adventures, necessitating another blog. I registered the domain deelish.ca, installed WordPress, threw on a theme then pimped it accordingly and I was ready to go. It’s still a work in progress, but it is functional and does have a few recipes on it now.

So if you’re into cooking or just like food, add it to your RSS feeds. I can’t guarantee I will update it with absolute frequency as this blog is still my first priority, but I’ll try and keep it interesting when I do blog.

Yesterday I picked up this gem from a place in the mall. I know Jones Soda does do lots of random things with their labels, but this was just too random to ignore. Normally it’s a silly picture or whatever else, but this is pretty much straight advertising for the stage productions of the movie. Either way, the cola was pretty good. Reminded me of RC Cola.

Just as an odd coincidence I found out this morning listening to the radio that 21 years ago today Dirty Dancing opened in theatres. I don’t think I’ve actually seen the whole movie before. I know at one point I was conned into watching it, but I think I only made it through about half before losing interest.

Corina and I were out driving a little after 9pm in Cambridge. She had mentioned she wanted something cold and I was in the mood for a popsicle, so I drove to the closest Lil Short Stop. As I pull into the parking lot of the strip mall I’m confronted by the most glorious of sights. One of those old school ice cream trucks parked in the lot, it was so ideal given we had wanted to something along those lines anyways. And as would luck would have it, the light was on and a guy was inside. Screw popsicles when I could get one of those ice cream ghosts with the bubble gum nose. So I pull in right beside it and get out of the car and walk over. I can see the guy inside is talking on a cell phone and pacing back and forth in the truck as I approach. He then notices me and I can tell he’s not very happy. He opens the slide window and tells me rather curtly “I’m not selling ice cream”. That dashed my dreams of having an ice cream ghost quite quickly. It just left me wondering, if he’s there after 9pm under the false auspices of selling delicious ice cream, what was he really there for? Was it like that episode of the Simpsons where they were under surveillance by the FBI and had the “Flowers By Irene” truck parked across the street? Who knows? Either way it just seemed real sketchy. In the end I settled for a chocolate popsicle from Lil Short Stop. It was no ice cream ghost.

I blogged a couple months ago about a yet to open restaurant in Cambridge called Pho Shizzle, at that point declaring it the best thai restaurant ever. Well I can now say that the food lives up to the awesome name. Corina and I went there for dinner and I can definitely say I was impressed. The decor was very chiq and modern, the service was excellent and pretty much everything we ordered was fantastic. I ordered the chicken wings with chili salt and pork balls, shredded pork and spring roll with vermicelli. Corina got the spring rolls and grilled chicken and rice. For dessert we ordered a deep fried banana with ice cream. All of it was delicious. I can say now that they are my favourite viet thai restaurant now. Here are some sketchy cell phone pictures I took of the meal.

I decided to be brave yesterday and try this Koya Aloe drink I had seen at a couple of stores recently. I had seen this fact sheet that claimed that by drinking this you would have increased healing abilities. I’m not so sold on that, but I figured it was worth a shot. The bottle itself has all sorts of chunks floating around in it, which was a little disconcerting. The drink tasted better then I anticipated, but then again I was preparing for the worst. The chunks were pretty bad. If you’re a person that isn’t a fan of orange juice pulp, then this is probably not the drink for you. It made it hard to drink when you kinda had to stop and after every sip. I could just drink the little bits, but that felt really weird. I managed to drink about half of the bottle before pitching it. It was like the Chunky Soup of weird asian drinks. The beverage that drinks like a meal. I think the drink would have been much more palatable if they had just blended the aloe chunks down. And as for the healing powers, they don’t seem to be Wolverine or Heroes’ Clair Bennett quality as far as I can tell. I tore up the back of my hand a bit helping move on the weekend and I don’t see any major leap in the healing progress.

As I was mentioning the other day we made homemade chinese food. We took some pictures so you could see how everything turned out.

Here’s the Soo-Guy being fried, then me cutting it after it was done.

Corina is here preparing the chicken fried rice. On the right is the Soo-Guy sauce.

And here’s the finished product we came up with. It was definitely a learning experience. The next time I’ll probably throw some more baking soda into the chicken balls, as they didn’t really fluff out the way I would have liked. I was pretty amazed that the chicken balls and Soo-Guy seemed to be in the ballpark of the taste we were looking for. We also learned that we could probably manage with 1 chicken breast between the 2 of us, as one each proved to be quite a lot of food. Either way, it turned out awesome, though not quite cost effective. Probably all told it cost $25, but that included sauces that we can use again. Dee-lish!

Has anyone had KFC recently? I know most people tend to frown on eating KFC, but it is something I like to partake in every so often. Well one thing I’ve noticed is that their chicken seems pretty tasteless anymore. In the last 6 months they have made the jump to trans-fat free oil and you can definitely tell the difference. I find when eating one of the drumsticks the skin is pretty much tasteless and lacks much of that famous flavour that made the Coronel’s chicken famous. I’m sure that Coronel Sanders is probably spinning in his grave over it. While I entirely support making food more healthy, having to sacrifice taste to get it kinda sucks. At least one thing remains the same at KFC. The fries still suck.

Tonight I decided I was in the mood for something a little different. I had tried some Viet-Thai food awhile back when I went to lunch with some people at work and I was quite pleasantly surprised with the food. I’m a pretty picky eater for the most part, so finding some new food that I really liked was definitely a treat. Since then I’ve had a jonesin’ to try some more Thai food. Corina and I were expecting company, so we opted for the pickup route. I took a look in the phone book and it turned out there was a nice little Thai place not too far away from our house called Mostly Thai. After taking a look at their website I decided to order some fish dumplings and some chicken rolls, while Corina got the Chicken and snowpeas. I have to say, the fish dumplings were fantastic. They came with a nice and spicy dipping sauce that just topped it off for me. I will definitely be doing that again.