Hi.

Since I’ve been incredibly, insanely bad with keeping up my blog this month, I decided to write a post sharing with you some of the other things I’ve been doing. I’ve been keeping busy. Very busy, in fact. Back in October I was yearning for November. November would be a breeze, I told myself. I have so few assignments due in November.

October Hilary was naïve. She was half right when it came to the school-related aspect – she only had one thing due weekly for awhile and now has a culmination of three things due today and tomorrow – but what she failed to consider was all the outside of school writing she’d be doing. What stuff? Here, see for yourself. (also: third-person narrative is underrated fun).

I was asked to be the new, bi-weekly restaurant critic for the arts and entertainment weekly, Ottawa XPress (it just got a new website, which is wicked cool). I will now be using my undercover research skills (seriously, I used a fake name! How cool and spy-like is that?) to write about the city’s food scene. My first review was of The Manx, a pub-turned-brunch-destination that was voted the best in Ottawa in the paper’s annual survey. You can click on the photo below (which was taken by the very talented Ben Welland of Byfield Pitman Photography) to access the review. If you’re in Ottawa, you can check the paper for my next review this Thursday!

Next up, I’ve also been doing a lot of work for Local Tourist Ottawa, the fun, live-like-a-tourist-in-your-own-city blog that I help edit.  I’ve written four posts this month, all of which, I hope, show off the amazing city and people that are all around me.

The first post was about a unique Movember fundraiser that one local chocolatier started. Jen Winter is the owner of koko chocolates. She developed a line of “manly” flavoured chocolate flavours and is selling boxes for $18 a pop, with proceeds going to raise money for prostate cancer research. The flavours are – get ready to drool – double smoked bacon, espresso, scotch and “the koko” – a 75 per cent Venezuelan dark chocolate ganache. Read more about this delicious fundraiser by clicking the photo below.

The other post I’ll link to is a multimedia-driven small business profile that I created about Chinatown’s newest shop, Purple Urchin soap. This is part of a series of profiles I’m hoping to do over the next several months, creating a montage of stories highlighting the city’s hard-working entrepreneurs. The owners, Sarah and Rebecca, were kind enough to let me chat with them several times and even showed me how to make a bar of soap (spoiler: I took pictures/recorded audio, so you can find out too). Click the picture below to read about their soapy success story.

The third post on Local Tourist has to do with the Ottawa Foodie Challenge – a city-wide photo scavenger hunt that my roommate Britt and I WON! The event raised $1,500 for the Ottawa Food Bank, and put our food knowledge to the test. The post goes more into detail, but I will say that it was an amazing day of silly photo taking and fun adventures. Plus, we were the only team to do the challenge on our bikes. Biking > driving, any day, any time. We won some amazing gift certificates (not to mention quite a bit of wine…) for local restaurants, and will be doing our best to use them before Britt leaves for Paris in the winter. #Sadface. Click the photo below to access the LT Ottawa post, or go directly to my flickr album to see the hilarious things we got up to.

FINALLY (see, I have been busy!), I’ve been doing a bit of writing for the Ottawa Citizen lately. I wrote a piece for the business section about the city’s first incubator kitchen – a business model that gives small food businesses the space and resources they need to grow their product line and company. I talk quite a bit about how much I love the Ottawa food community, and this is just a unique look into why. Everyone is so friendly and willing to help each other grow. The four businesses mentioned in this story are run by some of the most talented people I know. Keep an eye out for them. Once again, the story is linked through a photo click.

And there you have it – my November in out-of-school writing. Once again, sorry I’ve been so neglectful. As soon as I’m home for more than two seconds I’ll start cooking and blogging again.

Also, it’s almost December, and who am I to resist Christmas baking?