What do you do EVERY day to take care of the earth's environment? What could you do more of?
I take public transit on a daily basis and I don't own a car! Moving from Southern California where you pretty much drive EVERYWHERE to Vancouver, a city that has good public transit has been awesome. I can say that it's the best thing I've done in the last year. If I could live in a green home, I would.. one outfitted with solar panels, gray water recycling system, composting, geo-thermal heating and all that good stuff. It will happen one day!
Oreo Cakesters. I bought some and have been eating them.
They taste like evil. Delicious, yummy, addictive evil.
Evil Evil Evil. You know what's more evil.. .Kraft Mac & Cheese in a box. I love drizzling white truffle oil over it. Hahaha.. I am a ghetto foodie.
Which reminds me... I should try out this recipe
I'll let you know how it went :)
Life is nutty busy so I've been neglecting this. So... what's new?
I am in the midst of a major software release date, a move to a new place and recovering from a lingering cold. These are the things that are keeping me company right now..
Current reading..
Oh by the way, Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen was most excellent. I blogged about this in my last post, I think it's got to be the best book I've read this year.
On the food front.. we finally got to try out Lumiere's during a special occasion. Be forewarned, it's quite the dining experience.. it took us over 3 hours to go through the Vegetarian menu offering. Very good though. I think however, for the price and type of restaurant it is, there were some unforgivable misses. I expected every dish to be executed perfectly but it wasn't. I can see why they're replacing their head chef with Daniel Boulud. (He's the dude that's famous for his $50 burger) I don't think its a restaurant that you would want to go back again.
Oh by the way, if you're a wannabe foodie like me, you've got to read the following blogs.
French Laundry at Home
Tastespotting
On other good news with food, our new place has a gas stove. OH JOY!!!!! To break it in, I think I'm going to have some friends over and cook up a crazed amount of malaysian nosh.
Ok, time to stop procrastinating and finish packing :)
Anyways, I recently read the following books:
The glass castle was very good.. if you like stories about dysfunctional families and that sort of stuff. Eat, love, pray was ok. I think white, middle class, 30 something women would enjoy it, but not this asian, 30 something lesbian.... I guess I just didn't relate.
And on my reading list.... a foodie book, of course :)
'
Next on my list..
I picked up North Country from the library. It's the author's memoirs of his travel across the US-Canadian border. It seems interesting enough.. but I haven't started it.
Last but not least, our next book club selection is:
Now on to your regular programming...
Another restaurant that we checked out for Dine Out Vancouver was the Watermark at Kits beach.
The food was exceptionally good and the service pleasant even though they messed up on our order twice. However, they were very apologetic and graciously comp'ed our wine. I started with the West Coast chowder and my dining partner has the Minted Smashed Chick peas. The chowder was great.. not too heavy and a great way to start the meal. For my main, I ordered the Pacific Northwest Bouillabaisse and they were very accommodating to my food allergy and replaced the shrimp. My partner had the salmon on lobster risotto.. nicely cooked.. and the risotto was cooked perfectly.
The desserts were ok, nothing spectacular but very good. The best thing about the restaurant is definitely the view of Kits beach, the main seafood dishes and the great service. We'll definitely have to go back again.
On Friday, we met up with our friend and his wife for a spot of tea and dinner. Both of them are born and bred Vancouverites so it was so great to hang out, get the historical low down on various things Vancouver and also talk about the upcoming wedding plans. After dinner, they took us down to La Casa Gelato. It is seriously the most fascinating gelato place I've ever been to.. they have 218 flavours available to pick from, and over 300 revolving flavours.. everything ranging from the rather plain hazelnut chocolate to pear with gorgonzola cheese.. and to my utter delight, durian and jackfruit gelato. OH.. the tastebuds were instantly transported back to childhood hot humid days in Malaysia.
The great thing about La Casa Gelato is that you could try any flavour you want. No questions asked. I tried the pear and gorgonzola cheese, chilli chocolate, durian (of course), jackfruit, longan, passionfruit ... and I forget how many others before settling on a scoop of durian and jackfruit.
If you're ever in Vancouver, go check out La Casa Gelato. And come pick me up on your way there :)
One of the few notable restaurants we've visited lately...
Anyways, enough of the commentary... back to the food. SALT is an interesting small plates restaurant that focuses on cheese, wine and chatucherie goods. We were here for Dine Out Vancouver so had a great tasting menu of a 3 course meal for $25. We had the Roast Tomato & Smoked Paprika Soup, the Artisan Cheese plate and I had the Dark Chocolate Mousse w/ Caramel & Raspberry Jam for dessert while my partner had the Trifle with Seasonal Fruit & Sherry-Soaked Sponge Cake. YUM. The cheese we had were a P.E.I Avonlea Cheddar with a side of Cornichons, a UK Stichelton Blue with a balsamic reduction, and a Quebec Chevre (goat cheese) with olives. My favourite, and I was surprised that it was a favourite, was the blue cheese... since I've always found blue cheese to be very overpowering. But this blue cheese was delicious. We paired our meal with a flight of BC wines.. a Quail's gate Chemin Blanc to start with the soup.. a Cedar Creek Pinot Noir with the cheese, and a Quail's gate Late Harvest optima with our dessert. My tastebuds were quite deliriously happy by the end of the night :)
More exciting restaurants later..
Today on the 98 B Line coming back from work, the bus stopped at Airport Station for almost 10 minutes because some guy decided that it smelled funny in the back. The B Line bus is one of those double buses with an accordion middle.. like so:
So the last time we stopped at Airport Station (yes, exciting), the bus driver had to throw this weird saw dust stuff on some vomit and sweep it up. That was the same day I lost my bookmark cos right as he was sweeping the puke up, my bookmark fell into the vomit :(
Anyways, back to my story, some dude today decides that it smelled like carbon monoxide gas in the back section of the bus. He made the bus driver stop and walk all the way to the back of the bus to sniff around. So I'm sitting in the accordion as always across from two colleagues from work, and everyone's giggling cos it definitely smells nasty back there.. like someone ate lots of broccoli and cabbage a couple days ago, is suffering from bad gas and decided to fart all over. The guy kept saying that it smelled like burning engine oil or carbon monoxide gas.. till someone blurts out and yells.. "It stinks, yes, but like FOOOOOOOOOOOOD!" .. Yes, say it like I typed it. In which the entire bus then erupts in laughter.
We then went on our merry way.
Recent Comments
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sze said:
Seriously. Gelato is the food of gods. :) read more
on Gelato? How bout 218 freaking flavours! -
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xelle said:
I've been trying out a lot more restaurants in honor of dine LA too. I've had incredible meals at Table... read more
on Gastronomical adventures
I don't netflix anymore since the move to Vancouver :) read more
on Netflix