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Everyone who knows roadside dining knows about Jan & Michael Stern’s Roadfood book and website (though it’s too bad they decided to cash in on the site and make it a subscriber service) and lots of people know about Chowhound and its unedited forums but this evening I stumbled across Holly Eats where food writer Hollister Moore rates low food and regional eats. Check it out.

I’m up in the Toronto area for my employer. I walked around Chinatown and tried the dim sum at Bright Pearl on Spadina. The place struck me as Toronto’s equivalent to New York’s Golden Unicorn. Good, cheap and easy to find. Being by myself there was a limit to how many dishes I could sample: pork shumai topped with fish eggs, steamed bbq pork bun, baked pork bun, fried shrimp wonton, beef in sticky rice and spring rolls. I would have liked to try the mussels, beef and rice steamed in a leaf, and bbq ribs and bbq chicken but by the time those carts came through I was full. Everything I ate was fresh, hot and tasty. Flavors tended toward the sweet which surprised me a little.

I walked around the city. I stopped to take in the exhibits at the R.O.M. The Egyptian antiquities that I missed when they showed at Brooklyn were on display and then walked back toward Chinatown and Kensington market. Along the way I had coffee at one of the Second Cup cafes that dot the city. I prefer the coffee at Second Cup but the local favorite Tim Horton’s has better sweets.

Kensington market was not what I expected. The groceries, second hand shops, dried fish and barrels of dry goods are cheek to jowl with way too much new stuff and army-navy and the whole over crowded by trendy lonely planet types. Maybe it’s better at night. I tried a Jamaican beef patty from a busy shop, but I’m spoiled by the patties sold by Christy’s on Flatbush in Brooklyn, and only finished my ginger beer.

This evening, I went looking for a place recommended by a colleague and not finding it, found a Dim Sum and Seafood restaurant in a strip mall in Mississauga off Dixie Road near Dundas named Happy Jade. The number of Asian families crowding the place and enjoying their meals was a good sign. I had the soup with chicken, mushroom and vegetable which was hot but not particularly flavorful and the fried seafood with XO sauce which was very good. Shrimp, scallops and squid were stir fried with pea pods, celery, green onions and ginger. The thin, mostly clear, spicy sauce is made with oil infused with chilies, pork fat (and maybe rind), garlic and, I think from the taste, ground dried fish. Nothing was over or under done and sauce was delicious. The waiter was engaging and when I mentioned I was visiting for work noted that they are open seven days a week and have dim sum in the morning (I’ve gone back for dinner again and the hot and sour soup and fried noodles were very good).

By 12:15 today, I had made the cake, the soup and matzoh balls, the brisket, polished the silverware and set the table. The brisket took a bit longer last night than I expected, and I slept like hell and woke up at my usual time, but the recipe is very good so it’s worth it. All that remains to do is roast the chicken, cook the veggies and straighten up the apartment. This is going better than I thought it would.

Maria invited people for a Passover Seder and we worked out a menu for the festival meal: * Hard boiled egg * Gefilte fish * Matzoh ball soup * Brisket with dried apricots and aromatic spices * Roast Chicken with lemon and herbs * Braised asparagus * New potatoes * honey-soaked almond cake, recipe torn from April 1987 Bon Appetit

I intended to go in to work Friday, so I swapped the holiday for Thursday. What she overlooked was that she doesn’t have a day off to swap. Oops. So I’m taking care of everything.

Tonight I’m making the brisket and Maria prepared a Sephardic haroset (dates, nuts, an apple, honey and wine) and the eggs. Early tomorrow I’ll make the cake and soup. The gefilte fish is from a jar and the matzoh balls are from a mix so that’s a cinch. The chicken is my own recipe (rub chicken inside and out with olive oil, bruised fresh rosemary and thyme, ground black pepper and sprinkle with dry boullion, stuff with quartered lemons and roast. Works best if I don’t measure anything) and always turns out okay. The vegetables are simple, no sauces. The brisket gets sliced and reheated. I have to get things arranged and set the table.

Nothing difficult, still, it’s tricky getting the last minute coordination of a meal right, especially single-handed. Trying to pull this off alone makes you appreciate how hard our Grandmothers worked.

We took friends visiting from the Netherlands to a food joint you probably won’t find in the "Where to eat" lists: Hiram’s Hot Dogs. We try to go when the weather warms and we can put the top down on the Volkswagen and eat our dogs with the sun beaming down but braved bitter cold to share this little place with our friends. This dive eatery off Lemoine Avenue in Fort Lee, N.J. has been in the business of serving Thumann’s hotdogs since 1928. My father-in-law went as a kid to Hiram’s to get these oil cooked dogs and not much has changed- the menu is still just hotdogs, hamburgers, french fries, onion rings and soda or beer. Have them straight or with cheese, chili or red-onion sauce. There is a steady buzz from the open kitchen, six small tables crowded with a counter with another handful of seats and covered pots of self-serve saurkraut and relish sit on the counter by the door (ask for chopped white onions). The walls are covered with clipping and photos, the restrooms in the back are accessible only from outside and it fills with a clientele that cuts every which way across the social, ethnic and economic strata of New Jersey. The place is full of strongly held and voiced opinions (ask anyone behind the counter about the Rangers, for example), but the main one is that Hiram’s serves the best dogs in New Jersey.