GOOD FOOD TIMES IN CANADA - THE AMUSE - BOUCHE
Day 1 Tuesday 9th September
This trip had been a very long time in the making. Michael and Cindy had suggested we come back over to Canada after their trip to see us in 2023.
After making arrangements, booking flights, hotels, tours and, most importantly, restaurants, we were finally on our way in September 2025.
We were flying from Inverness to Heathrow and Katie drove us to the airport. We sat, relaxed in the departure lounge, where I noticed the sign at the restaurant. You might think it listed offers alphabetically, but no, this is the order of consumption in any Scottish airport!
We had plenty of time to spare at Heathrow, so we spent that relaxing even more in one of the airport lounges.
Then, on to the plane bound for Toronto. A Bloody Mary helped us on our way.
Even the food on board the plane was reasonable. The pecorino rigatoni with courgette cream was way more tasty than it looked.
Our flight went without incident and we arrived in Toronto a little late, but happy to be there. Michael and Cindy seemed genuinely pleased to meet us at the airport and we were soon on our way to their house at St Catharines, about an hour away. Yes, there is no apostrophe in St Catharines!
We arrived at Michael and Cindy's new house, said our hellos to Alex and Katie and had a cold drink and a chat before it was time for us to go to bed before an action packed day tomorrow.
However, we were unaware that Snowy, the cat, was prone to disappearing under the bed in our room, if given the opportunity of an open door. Despite Michael's best efforts, Snowy was not for leaving. At least, not then. Apparently, Snowy was spotted downstairs later in the night and then the gallant Michael crept up and shut our door to prevent any further feline incursions.
Day 2 Wednesday 10th September
We slept very well and, after a fine breakfast, we had a proper look around the house.
The living room.
The kitchen.
The dining room, with Michael in the office next door.
The garden
The front porch.
The domestic goddess.
In the basement there is acres of space, much of which is consumed by Alex and Cindy's crafting rooms. It is also where Michael has a stock of wine and wine fridge that would surely be the envy of Iain, our son.
St Catharines is close to Niagara Falls, so it would have been impossible not to visit. Michael drove us, stopping first at his favourite fruit and vegetable roadside stall.
Queenston Heights is an important location in the history of Canada. It was here that American troops attempted to invade and annex territory during the war between the US and Britain in 1812. General Brock was instrumental in ensuring the readiness of British, Canadian and Indigenous warriors against invasion by the US. He was killed in action at Queenston later in 1812. There is a large memorial erected in his memory on the hills above the river.
Our next stop was the Sir Adam Beck power station. We actually could see the New York Power dam on the US side of the river. The Canadian hydro scheme here was instrumental in bringing power to rural Ontario. The dam and associated works were originally built in 1920 and named as Queenston-Chippawa Hydroelectric Plant. It was renamed for Sir Adam Beck in 1950. He was a Canadian politician and great advocate of hydro power. The plant was the largest hydro scheme in the world when it was built.
Not far from the power plant is the Niagara Whirlpool. This was formed about 4000 years ago as a result of river erosion. You can take boats on the water, but swimming is absolutely not permitted! It is125 feet deep and very unpredictable. On the other side from where we were standing is the USA.
There would appear to be a cage contraption that travels on a line across the whirlpool, but we didn't go anywhere near that!
The highlight of the trip was the stop at Niagara Falls. Whilst they may not be anywhere near as high as Eas a Chual Aluinn in North west Sutherland, they are certainly very impressive!
Well, maybe they are a bit more than impressive.
Certainly, the Canadian Falls are much more impressive than the US Falls.
These have been the subject of a rockfall, which has rendered them less precipitous and so, less magnificent.
Here we are nearly blotting out the falls.
All this water made us a bit hungry. As luck would have it, there was a good restaurant with seats overlooking the falls. Just as well, really, as this is a gourmet trip after all. There can't be many restaurants with such an iconic view.
Cindy had an equally alarmingly large salad.
While Sharon had a flatbread with blue cheese, pears, rocket and balsamic.
That was the first of many meals out that we had, and a great start.
Our next destination was Peller Estates winery. Canada does not feature much in European consciousness as a big and good producer of wine. This is undoubtedly a shame. Whilst not everything we tasted on this trip was great, we didn't have much on the way of poor wines at all, and we did try a lot!
Peller Estates are known for their sparkling wines and for their reds.
Michael had signed up for their club and, so, we were treated to a glass of their Signature series sparkling wine, which we all agreed was very good indeed.
There was more to come.
We tried a few more wines, before wandering through their terrace restaurant to look about a bit. I have to say, it was all very well done and undoubtedly a place to come back to.
An oasis of calm, really.
After our lovely tasting, we did a bit more touring about, before getting back home. In the evening, we had a lovely dinner - tuna steak, with beans, olives, and tomatoes, with a chilli and lime yoghurt dressing, all prepared by Michael. We had bought most of the vegetables at the roadside stall that very morning.
A fine way to end a really good day out.
Day 3 Thursday 11th September
The weather is looking beautiful again and there surely is another exciting day on the horizon. After breakfast, Michael took Sharon and I down to the marina on Lake Ontario, less than 5 minutes drive away.
We went for the short walk along the Port Dalhousie West Pier. Before you get carried away, it is apparently and, frankly wrongly, pronounced "daloosy". No apostrophe for St Catharines and now some weird pronunciation, can things get etymologically worse?
Anyway, the pier was very picturesque, with its lovely little lighthouse. What is more difficult for us to understand is that this is a lake. A very big lake, but a lake nonetheless - it looks like the sea.
The pier is very long and inviting to walk along.
Sharon artfully managed to get a photo of Michael and me, along with a ship and a seagull.
From here, we drove to Niagara again to meet Cindy, Alex and Katie. Remarkably, you can see the spray of mist from the falls from miles away. It looks like a cloud on the horizon. Of course, clouds are generally made up of water vapour, so it really is a cloud.
We did see the falls, but that was really by the way. We were there to go on an interactive cinema flight over the falls. You could get your photo taken before going on this journey. We were told to look terrified! I probably was terrified, given my previous experience of this type of thing at Universal Studios!
The reality was much less daunting and actually really good. It was a kind of fly through the Falls and surrounding landscapes. It was pretty realistic and good fun. You were not allowed to take photos, so you'll have to take my word for it.
After a cup of tea and an enormous sticky bun, Michael took us across the road to the Niagara Parks Power Station. This is an enormous building, constructed between 1901 and 1905 to harness the immense hydro power at the Falls. The station no longer generates electricity and it is now a giant museum. It is also almost a shrine to the genius of Nikola Tesla, who was involved in design work and engineering choices for the power plant.
This is the turbine hall, which is truly a huge space.
The hydro plant was being built at a time of huge competition between power companies. Much of that competition revolved round the means of actually generating the electricity. The Canadian plant was modelled on the American plant on the other side of the Falls. It used generators based on Alternating Current. The plant was part of the Westinghouse Electric Company founded and owned by George Westinghouse. He collaborated with Nikola Tesla to advance development of AC power. This was in direct competition with Thomas Edison's championing of DC power. Tesla had once worked with Edison and the rivalry between the companies was intense.
Edison went so far as publicly electrocuting animals and dubbing the world's first electric chair execution as a Westinghousing. Of course, Tesla and Westinghouse won the day as their use of AC power was much safer and more efficient then using DC. Tesla had already invented an induction motor that would operate on AC power.
The museum illustrates this well and also demonstrates many of Tesla's other ideas relating to wireless power transmission and most spectacularly his Tesla Coil. This was a device to produce high voltage, low current, high frequency alternating current electricity. He would go on to use this in his work to develop wireless power.
The Tesla Coil demonstrates the power of high voltage electricity with lightning arcing above our heads. It can even be used to create music - they played Happy Birthday while we were there!
As with most hydro plants, the water used to turn the turbines at Niagara, is returned to the river below the level of the falls. There is a huge 670 metre long tunnel underneath the power station that funnelled the water away and back to the river. You can walk along that tunnel.
To get there you have to take a lift 200 feet underground. The lift is located within one of the turbine housings, which is pretty cool. It is glass sided so you can see the old machinery on your way down.
The tunnel is awe inspiring, and quite long. It is also cool. Literally.
Of course, there is light at the end of the tunnel.
As you might guess, you emerge to the river and an amazing view of the bottom of the Falls. As you might also guess, it can be pretty wet. All that water going over the Falls doesn't get to the bottom without making a bit of a splash. We had, of course, seen the cloud of spray on our way here.
Luckily, they give you a waterproof poncho to put on before you get outside.
Some people were more adept at putting these ponchos on!
It doesn't take more than a few seconds to realise why you have a poncho!
The ponchos may be waterproof, but they don't actually keep all the water out!
It was like having a shower.
Once you are wet, there's no going back.
After that really fascinating visit we went back to St Catharines, where Michael later made a very good dinner of lobster roll, scallops and salad.
After that fine dinner, we went to Niagara on the Lake to see a play - Tons of Money. It was very quaint and a little elderly, the theatre, I mean.
It was a farce and we all enjoyed it a lot more than I think we might have been expecting.
That was the end of another fascinating and educational day.
Day 4 Friday 12th September
Another beautiful day. Sharon was up very early and went off with Michael to the bakers to buy some honey butter sourdough bread for breakfast.
They didn't buy any of the delicious looking sticky cakes that the baker also sold. There was a reason for that, which would become apparent later in the day.
We had some of the bread along with sheet pan omelette for breakfast. Cindy's omelette was revelatory and delicious.
Apparently, this bakery is famous for butter tarts, which are a bit of an institution in these parts. You will also notice that they do art and, it is also a winery!
It would appear that the glasses were not big enough for Sharon and Cindy!
Then we sat in the sun and enjoyed the wine with a butter tart - cherry in my case. Butter tarts are very delicious puff pastry tarts, with lots of different fillings. They were really very good and very moreish.
Despite the temptation to sit and while the day away with more wine and tarts, we took the tarts home. Michael and I drove to a Chinese restaurant, while Cindy and Sharon took Katie and Alex to the same restaurant. Apparently, Katie and Alex wanted to go out to lunch with us.
Michael and I did make a detour to order a rib of beef for dinner that night. Remarkably the butcher and his wife had lived in Leith for some time and the butcher had worked for Tom Kitchin during that time. He certainly knew his way around a rib of beef.
Once we were all gathered at the restaurant, we had a veritable feast of small plates.
Here we all are, waiting for our order to arrive as if we hadn't eaten in weeks!
We then took the girls back home, with Michael and I making the same detour, this time to pick the beef up. It was a very good butchers, I have to say. They even did Scotch Eggs and black pudding. All that Edinburgh magic had rubbed off on them!
Once we had dropped the girls off, it was back on the wine trail!
We sat in the lovely garden in the sun and forced our way through some more wines. Sharon and I both really liked the Baco Noir. Baco Noir was a hybrid variety first used in France in 1902, but it fell out of favour and never became one of the recognised grape varieties there. However, it was well adapted to cold winters and became established in North America. It again fell out of favour and many vineyards were dug up. The vineyard we were in - Henry of Pelham - was instrumental in saving and championing the variety and their wines are now highly regarded in Canada and elsewhere.
We certainly held it in some regard and we bought a couple of bottles, as we knew that later in the trip we would be staying at an unlicensed lodge! I know, hard to believe, but true.
Our next winery concentrated on Riesling grapes, which is not a favourite of Sharon's or mine.
They had some very nice wines to try, though.
The ladies did seem to be enjoying the sparkling wine.
I'm told there is a limit to how much nice wine you can drink, so we had to leave and get home to put the beef on the barbecue. This is what it looked like after a couple of hours.
It was. Very.
The veg from the produce stand were great with it.
The surviving butter tarts and other cakes made a glorious, glutinous end to the meal.
That was the full end to a very full day.
Day 5 Saturday 13th September
Another fine day and we were off to Niagara on the Lake to do a bit of shopping with Alex and Katie. They do like to shop and they are very particular about what they like to shop for - mainly sweets!
Naturally, the healthy ones among us stopped for some fruit on the way through to the shops.
Niagara on the Lake is a very dinky place, with lots of nice houses, gardens, flowers and shops.
Naturally, such a nice place means that parking can be problematic, and for Michael, getting a coffee was impossible.
Sharon and Alex managed to find a shop with lots of indigenous art and souvenirs. Luckily, there was nothing expensive that caught Sharon's eye.
Sharon and Cindy managed to find some nice flowers that, for some reason just seemed to annoy Michael.
We dropped the girls back home with their various purchases and then we headed out to meet Bob's cousin from America. Chris lives in Buffalo, which is no real distance across the border from Niagara and St Catharines. It seemed too good an opportunity to pass up the chance to meet up together. We met at a craft brewery/kitchen called Grist, in a place called St Davids (without an apostrophe - the grammar crimes are mounting up).
This is Chris, me and Michael. Chris is my cousin through my father's side and Michael a cousin though my mother's side. That simple sentence hides a huge mountain of family skeletons that nobody left alive can really unravel!
Rather than dwell on the past, we had lunch. Chris and I both had the same burger, and very good it was too!
Cindy and Sharon had a melted brie/bread thing and salad.
Michael had a flatbread with prosciutto, mozzarella, ricotta, tomatoes and rocket with a basil and garlic aioli.
We had a very long lunch and a really good catch up. However, we did have go our separate ways at some point. Time for one more photo to remind us of our time together. It really had been good to meet up.
We had to get back to St Catharines because there was dinner to be made. Meatballs tonight and they were really very good. So good, in fact, that I downloaded the book they came from! There was also corn from the produce stand and bread from the baker. I could say that Alex ate all the corn, but that would be a slight exaggeration. Only a slight one, though!
Cindy had turned the peaches and raspberries from the stand into a crumble. Clearly not as good as my mother's, but my plate was clean at the end!
After all our eating, it was time to get out a bit. There was a Celtic concert at the marina, so we went down there to see how it was. The concert was OK, but mainly Irish rather than any other kind of Celtic. However, no matter how good it would have been, it was no match for the sunset over Lake Ontario!
Sharon and I had short dance on the sand, as my phone played our favourite Skerryvore song.
"Take my hand
And we'll go dancing
Underneath the stars
On a beach that's only ours"
Never let it be said that I'm not just an old romantic at heart.
Michael and Cindy didn't dance, but I guess they were swept up in the romance of it all. As an aside, the Chief of Clan Cameron once told me that our surname was an anagram of romance!
You can get carried away with a sunset.
We listened to the concert for a little while, then made our way home after another great day.
Day 6 Sunday 14th September
Alas, today was our last day in St Catharines. We were going to Toronto to pick up a rental car and then on to meet up with Michael's older brother, James and his wife Hope.
We did, however, have time for a last seat in the sun on the porch.
Cindy and Michael very generously gave us a little hamper of goodies to take away with us. As I write this, most of it has gone and it was very tasty!
The gifts may be diminished, but we certainly won't forget all the generosity and hospitality we were shown in St Catharines.
There was time for a last photo of Katie, Alex, Sharon, me, Cindy and Michael on the lovely porch. Then we were off with Michael to Toronto.
It was a bit sad to be leaving - we really did have such a fun time, but there was more to come.
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