The Fluffsters go to Toronto, eat too much

view of Gordon House Museum taken from the 10th floor of the Hotel Novotel

I’m back. Time to start writing again (December posts were lined up in advance so I could take a few weeks off). Brace yourself: I have lots of accumulated photos/ideas.

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When we bought plane tickets four months in advance, life (i.e., the state of the pandemic) looked manageable. Booster shots were due any day, case and hospitalization numbers were down across Canada, and I’d visited friends I hadn’t seen in person since March 2020.

So Mr. Fluffster and I made Big Plans. We’d visit his mum and other relatives, as well as my sister and her family. Proposed a get-together with a Vancouver friend who’d be in Toronto at the same time. Bought tickets for Come From Away, and for a New Year’s Day “Live from the Met” opera (Cinderella) at a cinema. Even talked about eating out at restaurants.

Then Omicron hit. Gradually our Plan devolved. We would see only Mr. Fluffster’s mum, nobody else. Audience capacity for Come From Away was reduced to 50%, then the show was cancelled altogether. While we did make it to the opera, we were 3 of only 21 people in a theatre that can hold 300+. No intermission, no food or drinks, no removing masks (though, unsurprisingly, two bozos wore them at half-mast). But nobody sat near us, and we took an Uber back to my mother-in-law’s place to avoid transit crowds and get to dinner faster.

Despite all the constraints, we enjoyed ourselves. Our hotel (overlooking Gibson House Museum, see photo above) was comfortable and quiet, the weather better than expected (temperatures mostly at or above zero, with a bit of snow, just as I requested at the end of The Fluffsters break with tradition). The meals Mr. Fluffster’s mum served were delicious and plentiful.

Still reeling from the crowded plane and airports (more people than I’ve seen in two years!), I was apprehensive about transit. On our first day, we walked from our hotel to my mother-in-law’s place (an hour away) and took a packed bus back. For the next 8 or 9 days, we walked both ways. We only got lost once (that new smartphone proved useful). On the one day we didn’t visit, we walked down Yonge Street for two and a half hours (about 10 kilometres).

We took transit the last couple of days because temperatures plummeted, but buses were much less crowded after New Year’s Eve.

How did we spend our time? We ate. And ate. My mother-in-law’s dining principle is if you enjoy something, you must eat it in enormous quantities. She’d started cooking and freezing food months earlier (in her three freezers). Over the course of 10 days, she fed us homemade ravioli, gnocchi, ricotta/rice balls, eggplant parmigiana, vegetable soup (with chicken in Mr. Fluffster’s), roasted cauliflower/broccoli, cucumber salad, breadsticks, meatballs and lamb skewers, and Abruzzese fritti di patate (traditional fried potato rings with raisins and topped with sugar, which we had for lunch. Twice.) And for dessert: panettone, torrone, roasted almonds, sasamelli cookies, cheesecake, and Turtles (my mother-in-law’s favourite chocolates).* Also, lots of wine, Averna, and brandy as a “zip-zip” (her term for a tipple) to go with meals.

Mr. Fluffster joked that I was being treated like a second-class citizen because I got leftover ravioli whenever they ate meat. I wholeheartedly embraced second-class citizenship.

We persuaded my mother-in-law to let us order takeout once. We must have caught her at a weak moment, as she adamantly refused to consider it again, even though she enjoyed the food. She would have prepared/thawed even more meals if we hadn’t pointed out that her fridge wasn’t big enough for all the leftovers. Half the food she prepared for us remains in her freezers.

All but the ravioli and some sasamelli were gluten-free — quite an accomplishment for an 85-year-old who has used wheat flour her entire life. Mr. Fluffster had given her a heads-up about his new dietary limitation so she mastered preparing traditional favourites with gluten-free flour. The taste and quality far outranked store-bought options.

Most days, we’d have lunch soon after arriving, then lounge around digesting for a few hours before having dinner and waddling back to our hotel. I felt like a glutton (though that didn’t impair my appetite, of course).

When we got home, I stepped onto the scale, fearing the worst. I’d lost five pounds. Must have been all that walking. We may have to do this again.

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* Panettone is an Italian sweetbread filled with dried fruit and raisins, torrone is nougat, and sasamelli are like biscotti but softer.

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