Back when I used to have a 6-2 job roasting Fair Trade Organic Coffee, the co-op was expanding into Fair Trade Chocolate production. My production supervisor was showing a guy around the coffee roastery one day and she introduced him to me as the guy who was going to be running the Chocolate Factory. I love it when I can manage to think up and deliver a joke simultaneously. I spoke in a regretful tone warning him that it wasn’t going to be at all like the movie. Willy Wonka was in theaters at the time.

He also had a quick wit. He corrected me by saying that he expected it to be exactly like the movie and then as, an afterthought, confirming that we were both talking about Chocolat.

I was going to make some kind of outlandish connection between Mary Kate Olsen’s childhood addiction to coffee and her edgy disconcerting strangeness…then I remembered that Shakira has also been a big coffee consumer ever since her childhood. I like her. Maybe Colombian coffee is better for you than whatever they left on the burner off camera at the set of Full House.

Here is a serious report about kids and caffeine .

The last time I talked about gift baskets, I had a real craving for dessert and I spent the whole post taking about cheese cakes. I promise to stay away from the high calorie gifts for this post.

There are some very healthy options as far as gift baskets from family owned The Fruit Company. You have a variety of ways to search for the perfect gift on their site including my personal favorite for every kind of product, ordered from the least to most expensive.

I like the idea of getting fruit and nothing but fruit packed into a really nice watercolor wooden box.

I am going to keep coming back to this site to see if the ever get a shipment of mangosteens. They are hard to find in the USA but some entrepreneurs have begun producing these amazing fruit in the Caribbean region. you can get unusual fruit from The Fruit Company. They ship Columbia Red d’Anjou Pears. These are almost too beautiful to eat. Almost.

While I was browsing through all the premium fruit, I saw that some of the products are only available seasonally. That is to be expected. Some of the best tasting fruit in the World does not store for very long. The site features a fruit encyclopedia that goes into a longer description of each of the premium fruits.

The creative force behind Toronto Delivers is Defining a World Class City. This definition seems to have a lot of caveats. The anonymous review style of things as varied as coffee shops, opticians, and fetish flea markets grace the pages of this website. As far as customer reviews go, they are very much to the point. I think they are probably quite valuable to the enterprises that receive the attention, if the can take a hint…and in some cases a joke or two.

I have never lived in Toronto, but I have had a handful of memorable visits. I am going to continue through the older posts to see if any of my haunts get a mention. I think the reason that these reviews ring so true is because the writers occupy a demographic and social scene that is not normally associated with the mystery shopping style. They are educated urban and cool. I am going to point some of my Toronto blogger friends towards this site tonight.

The authors are interested in being hired by any area retailer or service that would be interested in having this sort of write-up for their business. If I was in business in TO, I might hire them to write about my competition.

We used to have a summer tradition of buying rotisserie chicken from a local grocery store once per week. It was so popular that there would often be people lined up waiting for them to finish cooking. The commercial rotisserie had a big LED temperature display and a timer. I would count the chickens, before they were done and then count how many people were in the queue. Just to be on the safe side, I would assume that everybody was planning on getting two.

There is a way to sort of jump the queue. You could buy a residential rotisserie. They look awesome, and you would always have the best turkey in town.

Mr. Potato Head sales dropped steadily as low carbohydrate diets like the Atkins diet and the South Beach diet became more popular. I am presently looking for venture capital to start a line of cheap knock-offs called the Low Carb Friends. The first product is going to be this Mr. Cucumber Head. Not only is it a toy portraying a vegetable that only has 1/10th of the carbs in a potato, I also use Google image search to find the best legs, arms, eyes, etc.

This idea is a winner, I can feel it.

I can see a supplier of specialty Turkish foods benefiting two groups of people. There are the adventurous Americans who want to try some exotic food. These people will make up the majority of the customers. I am guessing that there will also be a lot of Turkish Americans who live in smaller cities around the country and can’t find their old comfort foods.

Turkish Food is pretty good. The savory foods often use a rich and unique blend of spices. The sweets are amazing. I have a kind neighbor to thank for getting my daughter hooked on Halva.

In my adopted country, you can get Halva at the corner store. My kid goes over with twenty cents and the shopkeeper weighs out a little slab of the stuff. I can imagine that it is much harder to find in Iowa.

The warehouse for TurkishCorner.com is located in NYC and they can ship any of their products nationwide in 24-48 hours.

I am salivating after researching Halva. I am going to go buy some and show it to my readers before eating it…

I went on a little binge of entering Blog Carnivals a couple of days ago. These things are topical themes and the way they work is that one blog has a post with a quick rundown of all participating blog posts along with links to blogs and posts.

I was pretty enthused about the idea when I first heard of it, but I slacked off after I was disappointed with the way some of them were going. The catch is that to be a good Carnival they really have to get over two hurdles. One is amount of participation and the other is quality.

The guy who runs the Carnival of Pizza is trying to get the balance right. As soon as I am done writing this post, I am going to follow the links to a couple of interesting sounding pizza recipes. The blogger who hosts this Carnival has an interesting thing in his sidebar. He is logging Pizza delivery earnings on a monthly basis.

I should also give the Carnival of Coffee another try. The woman running it chooses to postpone or cancel scheduled Carnivals rather than hold one that has of a dozen off-topic posts from people who are callously and thoughtlessly working on their site metrics and nothing else. A carnival about coffee should really the potential to take off.

Ideally, I would like to be a semi-regular participant in about a half dozen carnivals that have interesting topics.

The title is a bit misleading. I ended up eating the nectarine before I got around to posting this.

There was a small deformed piece of pit at the base of the deformity. The whole thing looked kinda like a duck or something didn’t it?

We have been having a heat wave in Southern Europe. The worst of it seems to be over now.

This is actually a winter scene of a local hangout (not the one described in this post).

We don’t have air conditioning in our home and one of our coping strategies has been to go to the cafe in the city that has the best air conditioning. I think part of the reason for their above average climate control is the fact that the cafe is attached to a retail space with imported fabrics and decor from the Far East. It is called The Fort Lai Thai. There is also an internet cafe and a DVD rental. We work at home, so it’s a nice change of pace to go where there is lots of stuff happening.

The cafe serves delicious sandwiches on a local bread called ftira.

Hobz biz-zejt is a ftira that is cut in half, spread with tomato paste and covered in a mixture of chopped olives, tuna, capers, parsley, onions, tomatoes, olive oil and fresh mint.

We don’t watch television at home. The cafe has NileSat, which includes Al Jazeera among its hundred channels. It feels strange, as a North American, to watch the news through that particular media filter. When I see American news coverage, I am aware of the bias and yet not disconcerted by it. The Middle Eastern news report puts me on edge because I don’t have any short hand for recognizing the spin. I am still glad that I am exposed to it because they cover some stories that the Western media ignores entirely.

We sit in a cafe in what is possibly the most Christian country in the World with an Islamic newscast on one side of us and a giant airbrush poster of Buddha on the opposite wall.

When we had our afternoon sandwich and drink there yesterday, they were playing Mr. Bean’s Holiday. Variety is the spice of life.

I am submitting this post to the Carnival of Cities, check it out on July 2nd.