Aw, Sugar, Aw, Honey Honey

Hi, Deb in the City here, coming at you from Ontarie-arie-arie-o. OK, I’ve been trying hard to get my Canadian on and I’ve signed up for curling lessons for the fall. Very exciting! But in the meantime, I found these:

These little hunks of friend dough heaven are what are called Timbits and they are one of Canada’s culinary gifts to humanity. Dangerously bite-sized and lethally delicious, it is possible to polish off a whole box of these suckers on Hockey Night in Canada before Don Cherry has given his first period intermission report.

Today I was over on Bloor west in Koreatown and found another amazing tasty haven. This gentleman is Kim

in front of the amazing machine that makes Korean walnut cakes which are like the unofficial snack cake of Korea. They are frighteningly delicious and I’m thankful that Kim’s bakery is far from home because they are deelish, reasonably priced, hot, fresh and plentiful:

Like a Timbit, Korean style, filled with a half a walnut and red bean paste or sweet potato. Kim’s machine makes 1500 cakes an hour. Kimbits!

I wandered back downtown on the subway, happily hands-free to devour my Tim-and-Kim bits. I got off at the King Street stop by mistake instead of St. Andrew but realized that I could just walk underground in the PATH system.

Now, I don’t want to sound like a spoiled American who needs a GPS device to get anywhere, but is that system confusing or what? It’s like an underground shopping labyrinth, where all the landmarks are nearly identical. There are several food courts with stalls named things like Mr. Wok, Mr. Sub and Mr. Sushi and I swear I went past this same lottery stand four times.

And yeah, I did buy a 649 ticket each pass. OK, I know I have poor impulse control when I’m unsupervised. I was lost in the PATH for so long, the jackpot went from 14 to 16 million dollars by the time I finally climbed back up to street level. I headed south to the foot of Jarvis at the lake.

Tracing my sugar binge to the source, I ended up at the Redpath Refinery where there is a most fantastic sugar museum in the administrative part of the factory. It traces the history of the sugar industry in Canada, covering sugar import, modern refinery and extinct sugars, like beet sugar.

The sugar hut is awe-inspiring, a huge unassuming steel structure on the lake from the outside but filled to the ceiling with 10,000 tonnes of raw sugar in the inside. The air was misty with sweetness and before my pancreas conked out entirely and stopped producing insulin, I booked it out of there.

This is Deb in the City, parting, which is such sweet sorrow, from Toronto, Upper Canada, the former beet sugar capital of North America.