Eating in Ottawa

Cari and I spent the weekend in Ottawa, Ontario.  It had been many years since I visited my nation’s capital, and in an attempt to find an easy-to-get-to weekend getaway, all signs pointed to Ottawa for our last weekend away before the baby is born.

Visiting a new city or country provides a foodie with the great opportunity to discover the best eating and drinking a city has to offer.  At the same time, the opportunity is too often blown by the daunting process of finding the right places to eat.  Thankfully, as we had exercised on our latest trip to New York City, the right research will often lead you to some fantastic restaurants.  In the end, our food experiences in Ottawa were varied in that we were led our way by an Internet search, a word of mouth recommendation from a chance encounter in an elevator, a piece of hotel literature and an Urbanspoon search for “Bagels.”

Eating in New York

Cari and I have been to New York together before.  In 2005, we drove down, stayed in Secaucus, New Jersey, went to see Spamalot and Fiddler on the Roof, ate a lot, and came home.  This time we flew, stayed in midtown Manhattan, went to see Jonathan Richman, A Little Night Music and Maude Night at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre, ate a lot, and came home.

Since this blog mostly has to do with eating, we thought we’d share our eating experiences.  There’s hundreds of restaurants in New York City.  These are the ones we found ourselves at.

Soapnuts!

Soapnuts!

I first read about soapnuts on a blog I visit occasionally, No Impact Man. This is a blog that a friend introduced me to – a guy living in NYC who decided to try to live with no environmental impact for a full year. He had to take a lot of pretty drastic steps in that year – but it resulted in some really interesting ideas and discussion. While his year of living impact-free is over, he still updates pretty regularly.

While we’re far from impact-free, I like to think that Adam and I try to live a fairly environmentally friendly lifestyle, though there’s certainly still a lot of room for improvement. 

So, soapnuts. Someone commented about using soapnuts as a way to use an environmentally friendly laundry alternative. I was intrigued. I read up: what the heck are soapnuts?  Apparently they are actual nuts that grow on trees in India… and they release soap! Soapnuts!

I learned you could use it for washing clothing by simply putting a few nuts into a small bag and throwing it in with laundry… and apparently it would not only get the clothes clean, but you’d not need fabric softener, and it’s gentler on the clothes so they’ll actually last longer. Oh, and while you use 4 or 5 half shells in a load, you can re-use them for 4 or 5 loads! Ok, I’ve gotta try these magical nuts out.

I got a small bag at Grassroots in Toronto – 250g for $10. A pretty little bag.. but I have a feeling it’s going to last me months. I wasn’t so sure it would work, so I tried it first with rags… and I was impressed. They came out quite clean and soft.

Sure enough, I re-used the same 5 half shells in four loads before they started to break down, and each load came out clean and soft. The softness is actually what impressed me the most. I’m a liquid fabric softener junky. I’ve not used dryer sheets in years – never thought they got my clothing soft enough. 

So yay! Soapnuts! I highly recommend others check them out.