ChowTown.ca

More than a dozen years. A literal lifetime in the digital realm. The last time this dashboard saw the glow of my monitor, Nancy and I were wrapping up our time living in Australia, tapping out what would be the final posts on Chowtown.ca. Then, the screen went black.

We didn’t stop moving; we just stopped typing.

Now, after more than a decade of radio silence, I am reviving this old ghost of a blog from the most unlikely of places: a Canadian hospital bed. A sudden, unceremonious medical evacuation from our home in Doha, Qatar, landed me back in the great white North for major surgery. The aftermath has marooned me here for months. If you want to know what true purgatory is, try trading the vibrant food stalls of the world for the beige, soul-crushing expanse of hospital ceiling tiles and institutional broth.

This endless stretch of recovery has left me with an agonizingly empty calendar, an acute case of boredom, and a fiercely rekindled itch to write.

We have a massive backlog of history to unpack. Nancy and I didn’t just sit around growing moss during our digital hiatus. We lived a beautiful, unrelenting madness across the globe. Before this reboot looks forward, we are going to roll the calendar back to fill in the blanks of a wild, unrecorded history just prior to our disappearing from the foodie blogosphere.

Here is a taste of the archives we are about to crack open:

• The Prequel: The undocumented world tour just prior to living in Australia. Eating legendary sushi prepared by Jiro Ono himself in Japan, exploring South Korea, navigating India’s Golden Triangle, and isolating on the Canary Islands.
• The Long Way Home: Our epic seven-month round-the-world trek returning to Canada from Down Under. This is where we threw our legs over motorcycles to roar across Vietnam, took in Ha Long Bay, and wandered through the ancient spice pathways of Turkey and Jordan.
• The African Dirt: Cramming into a Land Cruiser to track Namibia’s Skeleton Coast, camp the Okavango Delta, visit Himba and San villages, stand in the spray of Victoria Falls, and eat our way across Kruger National Park while I developed a feral addiction to biltong.
• The Rainforest & Road: Winding through Sri Lankan tea plantations, climbing rainforest mountains in Borneo, and driving across southern India to discover its dizzying, complex foods.
• The Middle Eastern Basecamp: Our last three years living in Doha, Qatar, using it to launch culinary raids into Oman, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, and Egypt.
• And there’s more: Driving around Scotland and England, spending the holiday season in Germany with close friends and Bali just to name a few.

Chowtown’s resurrection isn’t just about recipes born from a desire to create—though there will be plenty of those engineered right from my hospital bed. It’s about the adventures themselves, both culinary and otherwise. Expect the raw, unfiltered chaos of the road, the local markets, and the same zero-compromise critiques analysis and great recipes you used to get.

The body is still catching up, but the fire is back in the belly. Let’s see what we can stir up. Just give me a little time to sort things out