Spicy Chickpea Salad

Here are a few of things I am absolutely certain about:

1. I love chickpeas.
2. I love chickpea salads and can never have enough variations of them.
3. I love Joy the Baker, she of the wonderful food blog and now author of a new cookbook that is on my wishlist.I really think that she and I should be friends.

Knowing these things it is a given that I had to make Joy the Baker's spicy chickpea salad. It is also a given that it was delicious. It would be nice to have a photo of the heavenly salad but I made it and packed it up to take with me to Hot Docs and managed to eat it all with my doc buddy.

Hurray for Documentaries!

There are few things that would make me opt to sit indoors in the dark on such a beautiful spring day but a documentary is one of them. I am heading to the new Bloor Hot Docs Cinema to seeBeing Elmo:A puppeteer's Journey. It was playing at Hot Docs last year and I didn't get a chance to see it so I am happy it is back. I am going with a girlfriend who is as much of a cryer as I am, so I have a feeling we are both going to get misty eyed during this one. I am bringing lots of kleenex!

I am so happy Toronto has it's very own documentary cinema!

Hot Docs Rocked

Sigh. The Hot Docs documentary film festival is over for another year. I always come out of it challenged, exhilarated and exhausted. I am now gearing up for some heated debate over beer and french fries next week when I'm getting together with friends to discuss the films. One of my favourites was The Interrupters, about former gang members trying to stop violence in Chicago. I loved the characters for their courage and heart. I came out of it inspired and awestruck.

Hot Docs Popcorn

Hot Docs is here! I have already seen a couple of documentaries and have a few more lined up. I am gearing up to be intrigued, provoked, and stuffed with popcorn. As soon as I enter a movie theatre and smell that popcorn smell I start salivating. It is completely Pavlovian.

With ten days of movies, however, I may need an alternative to plain old buttered popcorn. I made myself kettle corn (my favourite) and some chili lime popcorn to smuggle into the shows for variety. Yum!

Doc Soup Roundtable

Doc Soup, that bastion of delight for Toronto documentary lovers wrapped up for the season last week. The Hot Docs festival is starting soon where I will overdose on documentaries from around the world. I love it. I am a documentary nerd, and luckily I have a lot of doc nerds in my circle.

A couple of years ago my documentary friends and I started a tradition of meeting for a Hot Docs round table to discuss our favourite and least favourite films from the festival. It is a lively and heated gathering over pints of beer and yummy fare at The Victory Cafe. Two of my girlfriends are consistently at opposite ends of spectrum. If one loved a movie, the other is guaranteed to have hated it. It is always amusing to see the two of them spar and scrap it out. I am always fascinated by the varied responses to the same movies, what moves one can completely irritate the other. That is part of the magic of documentaries. Truth is always stranger than fiction and a true story always seems to elicit a strong response, even from a mediocre movie.

This year we decided that we needed a Doc Soup round table as a precursor to the Hot Docs round table, mainly because it gives us an excuse for more beer and noshes.

It was a delightful evening. It is even more delightful that I can look forward to the festival and another round table after that.