CHIN International Picnic

Usually, I amaze myself by my capacity for laziness, but for some reason I really wanted to get out there again today, so after dragging Darcy downtown to the Multicultural Canada Day Festival, I dragged him to the CHIN International Picnic at Exhibition Place.

The picnic had many more food options than the festival downtown, but it was absolutely impossible to eat anything remotely healthy. So, we threw caution to the wind and tried as many things as we could, including samosas, perogies, Greek chicken pita with peppers and lettuce, trashy Chinese food combo, and ice cream.

The samosas were actually kind of disappointing -- cold and dry. They had kulfi (Indian ice cream) at the same stand, but we thought the samosas didn't bode well for the rest of the merchandise. The lady working at the stand was very sweet though.

I absolutely love perogies, so I couldn't pass them up. We got an order of 4 with sour cream on the side. The filling was bright orange, so I guess they were potato and cheddar, and they came with caramelized onions. They were pretty good except that they were drenched in oil. We thought that since they cooked them in advance, they had to keep them in oil so that they'd stay warm and not dry out.

The Greek chicken pita was semi-healthy, I suppose. They had a huge skillet with the gyro meat mixed with sauteed peppers on one side and the same mixture but with chicken on the other. They filled the nice, thick pita with the chicken and peppers and topped it with lots of shredded iceberg lettuce. It was tasty.

The little Chinese food shed was adorable and the girls working there were even more so. When I came up to the window, one girl was in the middle of noshing on one of those roasted corn cobs. Too cute. They were serving white people friendly Chinese food, including chicken balls (of course), chicken wings, fried rice, fried noodles and spring rolls. Darcy and I got a combo that included everything except the spring rolls. It was all pretty good in that guilty pleasure way.

Lastly, we stopped for ice cream cones before walking back home along the lakeshore. I kept wondering if the universe would be so cruel and to make me run into my trainer on the boardwalk. She'd be running or playing volleyball at Sunnyside and I'd have to try to ditch the cone before she saw me. Thankfully that didn't happen. And we walked all the way home, so that has to count for something. I hope. Remember, you know nothing.