20120127 and 20120128 - Edibles

Ocean King is probably my second favourite of the "basic" Chinese Food restaurants in Winnipeg (after Winter Garden). Having said that, I admit that we have not made it a point of trying a lot of neighbourhood Chinese restaurants in this town. When I call this a basic restaurant, it's because I don't put it in the same class as a place like Hu's.

OK doesn't have the most extensive menu in town, but everything we've tried off it so far has been good - especially their seafood dishes. I also like the décor - it looks like it was built in the early to mid 60s as a pizza restaurant and was never remodelled when it changed over to Chinese food. It is wonderfully homely and retro.

Anyway, why am I talking about a Chinese restaurant and then posting a picture of some custard tarts? atara and I walked up there on Thursday for dinner, and (as usual) ordered just a bit more than we could finish. When we asked the owner to package it up, she brought the bag of leftovers out to the table and made a point of dropping a sweet bun in as a "treat for later". atara already had leftovers in the fridge at her office, so I took in the rest of our dinner for lunch on Friday.

I left the sweet bun in the fridge at home, and it wasn't until I dug into it at work that I discovered the owner had also slipped some custard tarts into the bag for us as well. I snapped this picture and emailed it to atara in case she wanted me to run one of them over to her office (she didn't - her loss, because they were quite tasty). Since I didn't take any more pictures that day, this is (by default) my picture of the day for Friday.


I need chocolate eggs like I need a spike driven through my spleen, but they were on sale at Bulk Barn when we were shopping there today. If there are two things I am a sucker for, it's mini eggs and bargains. I am just going to have to control my intake until these are gone (and I'm overdue to start hitting the treadmill again now that my foot is largely recovered).

I was actually testing out a couple of things on the new camera when I shot this one. I shot it in raw, with it set for macro, and the flash manually enabled. The first one I took was too washed out to use, but when I pulled the camera back and zoomed in it worked a bit better. I guess there are limits on how well it can scale down the flash for macro shots - good to know for future reference.

20120129: Unburger

pierrekrahn contacted us from out of the blue today and asked if we were interested in an early dinner. We hadn't actually planned to leave the house at all today, but dinner sounded like a good reason to make an exception. We did the usual bandying about of dull dinner suggestions before pierrekrahn mentioned that he had never been to Unburger and was interested in trying it. UB is one of those places that we choose to keep in our regular dining rotation, so we were amenable to that suggestion.

Somewhere along the way we picked up dronon and the four of us ended up having a pleasant evening of dinner and conversation.

I set the camera to HDR mode and rested it on the table for this shot. Usually a backlit picture like this can be an exercise in futility, but I was curious to see how much the HDR would bring out. I am quite pleased with the result.


Here is the same picture in black and white. I prefer the BW version of it, but I like them both.


Here is another HDR picture, this time looking toward the street. I took this as an exercise in contrasts, and it wasn't until I was looking at the picture after I got home that I noticed I had captured a self-portrait on the Coke bottle.