Lunch and Dinner

Well today I took yet another trip to Granville Island to grab some fresh food to cook lunch and dinner with. I decided to have a simple mini baguette with caramelized onions for lunch. I remembered seeing a recipe in my most recent cookbook purchase, Tyler Florence's latest book, Tyler's Ultimate. The recipe is very simple, just caramalize some onions and a few anchovy fillets in a bit of butter and spread it on a baguette. Add a few olives then wack it in the oven for 15 minutes. When done sprinkle a bit of grated parmesan on top and Bob's your auntie it's done.


While I was on Granville Island I happened to see a shop I hadn't noticed before, The Lobster Man. The lobster man sells lobster, crabs and other live shellfish. So I decided to have a look and ended up buying a few manila clams. Once home I once again turned to the new cookbook and found a recipe for spaghetti with clams. I didn't have a few of the ingredients so had to take another trip out after lunch to a local Greek produce store where I bought a little bit of prosciutto and a vege shop where I bought some cherry tomatoes. It turned out that the recipe actually used pancetta not prosciutto but I made do. It also called for fresh basil leaves but I decided to make do with the leftover pesto from the halibut I had yesterday. Boy oh boy was that a tasty dish. I had never cooked clams before but I think I may just have to cook this recipe again because it was an absolute delight.

Well the last week has been a great time relaxing week for me. I have had the last week off work for a 1 week Christmas break. I was planning on heading up Grouse Mountain a few times to get a bit of snowboarding in, but decided against it in the end as I have developed a bit of a cough and didn't want it to get any worse.

Uncle Murray and Auntie Joy flew in to spend a little over a week with Roz and Reuben on their way back to New Zealand. It was great catching up with them and seeing a little of what they have been doing over in the Democratic Republic of Congo. I spent Christmas Eve at Roz and Reuben's where we talked to family back home. It was nice to chat briefly with everyone, although Daryl seemed more interested in getting back to his game of cricket.

Christmas day was also spent at Roz and Reuben's and I must say the food was almost as good as the company. Roz concocted a very nice roast pumpkin soup for starters and Reuben made a particularly good roast lamb for the main course. The leftover lamb then formed the base for a couple of delightful salads over the next few days (I spent pretty much the whole week eating at their place or at restaurants with them).

All the good food and the new cookbook Roz and Reuben gave me for Christmas has inspired me to start cooking more regularly; and the new camera I bought for myself has given me the idea to start posting semi-regular reviews of the food I cook or maybe the food I eat while out, we'll see.


First up is the first recipe I tried from the cookbook I got for Christmas. The cookbook is called Simply Bishop's and is by a well known local chef and contains lots of very tasty looking dishes featuring local ingredients. Today's recipe was Pesto-crusted Halibut with Red Lentil Dahl. I had never made Dahl before but it is really easy to make and pretty tasty too. Halibut is a really nice fish that I have not seen in New Zealand. It is a pretty large fish with quite a solid flesh. It is not very cheap though so I don't think I will be buying it too regularly. If anyone wants the recipe just leave a comment and I will get it to ya.

Whistler

It has been a great start to the ski season here in British Columbia with most ski fields opening early and Whistler recording record levels of snowfall for the month of November. This last week has seen significant new snow at Whistler with around 60cm falling on Friday alone!


So it was a great time to take a day trip to Whistler to check out some of this fresh powder. Ryan (my cousin) picked my up at 6:30 and we headed off hoping to get up there nice and early. Unfortunately several thousand other people appeared to have the same idea so there were significant queues at the ticket office where I needed to pick up my Edge Card (a discount card for Whistler). Eventually we made our way up the mountain squished in to a gondola with another 10 or so people, arriving at the top just before 10.


It was opening day for a new chair lift, the Symphony Express Chair so I guess there were a lot of extra people on the mountain for the opening. The new chair was not opening until 11 and a number of other chairs were still closed when we arrived due to staff still letting off bombs to make controlled avalanches, so the queues at the bottom of the chairs that were open were rather long. It took longer to wait in the queue than it did to make the run down again.


After our first few runs on the green (easy) runs we headed to the harmony bowl, an area with a lot more blue (intermediate) runs. And to make things a little more interesting Ryan likes to go off the beaten track and do a few jumps and stuff like that. Well after gaining more and more confidence I decided that I could probably follow him now so followed him off the main path in to some snow that not many people had been riding over. I soon found that I am not quite good enough for that kind of snow yet and found myself face first in a whole lot of snow. And with snow that deep it is not very easy to get back up again.


After that I decided to stick to easier runs so I headed for a long trail called the Burnt Stew Trail. Finding this trail proved to be more difficult than I had anticipated as the signposts were all covered in snow. So I took an educated guess and went down what I thought would be the right one. It would appear that I need further education in navigation as my educated guess ended up sending me on a rather tricky blue run that had an awful lot of snow on it. That short run (probably only about 500 metres) took me around 30 - 40 minutes as every couple of metres I would fall over and then try and spend the next minute or so trying to get back up again. Very exhausting.

All in all it was a fantastic day and by far the best snow I have ever had the privilege of snowboarding in. I am now very sore though, with sore thighs and triceps (from pushing myself back up again)

New favourite?

Well I was very pleased to learn this week that one of the guys in my bible study is equally as obsessed with coffee as I am. He is the only person I have met other than Dad that roasts their own coffee beans. So we got talking about where the good cafes are around Vancouver. I mentioned my favourite 2 places, the Elysian Room and JJ Bean at Granville Island. He could not believe that I had not been to any of the other JJ Bean stores, so today I set about changing that. I jumped on the 99 B-line bus to Main St a part of town I don't visit very often but home to a rather popular JJ Bean cafe. Now the Granville Island store usually serve a pretty good latte, but they only do takeaway which I find is never as good as coffee served in a quality porcelain cup. The small latte I had at the Main St store was absolutely fantastic, possibly even up to the level I get when I make myself one at home. I also ordered a pumpkin bran muffin that was also very nice, not too dry and with a rather nice pumpkin flavour.
After reading my book in the cafe for a while I decided to try a few more cafes out on my way home. There was one just a few blocks down that looked interesting but unfortunately they were too busy and had no free seats so I kept walking. Wicked Cafe on 7th and Hemlock is a cafe mentioned favourably a few times on CoffeeGeek and was on the way home so I decided to stop off there. I have only been there once before back in September and was a little unsure of where it was, but I managed to find it OK, only to find that they were closing early today. Bother. Fortunately my regular coffee shop was only another 5 blocks away so I stopped in to the Elysian Room and ordered a latte. Ordinarily the lattes I get at the Elysian Room are really good, but today I came away a little dissapointed. The latte was a little on the week side although the milk was textured very well and the latte art was up to their usual high standard.
Right well that is enough typing for 1 day, I am off to the kitchen now to make myself a french press coffee with the awful beans I have at the moment, JJ Bean Christmas blend. It is such a shame it came in 1 pound bags, I will be stuck drinking it for several more days yet.

The Basement

Well, it feels like time for some photos of the basement, so here goes.

Let's start with the view. The basement is half under ground so doesn't get much of a view. The house is in a suburb not too far from town, and 3 blocks from Broadway, a street with many shops and restaurants. This photo looks out from the main entrance into the backyard. Normally there is grass out there.


Next a couple of shots of the living area. First from my bedroon door looking towards the kitchen and external entrance. Note the beam in the middle of the room. It is at around forehead height for me. I have only hit my head a couple of times so far, and twice on the doorway.

And then one taken from the other end of the room facing the clothes drying area and central heating cupboard.

Lastly a shot of my bedroom. Not a great deal of floorspace once the bed arrived.

And it rained

Since arriving in Vancouver almost everyone I have met has asked if I like rain, because I am going to get a lot of it. Until November I was starting to think they were all exaggerating. It turns out they were not. It has rained a lot this month. In fact it has rained so much that 2 of the 3 lakes that supply water for the city suffered major turbidity from all the dirt and stuff washed in to them. The Vancouver water people issued a boil water advisory for around 2 million people and it lasted for about 2 weeks. In the end we found that there was not actually anything harmful in the water and it was just a precautionary advisory, but just looking at the water was enough to put me off drinking it.

I have been told that it doesn't snow much in Vancouver and when it does it doesn't hang around for more than 1 or 2 days. Well it seems that I have struck an unusual year for weather then, because it snowed for most of the weekend and part of Monday, then it started up again this afternoon. All up I think we have had about a foot of snow in the backyard.

With all the fresh snow I decided that it was time to start my weekly night snowboarding. So I caught the seabus from downtown Vancouver and headed to Grouse Mountain. Unfortunately I caught the wrong bus once getting off the seabus so it took about 2 hours to get to the mountain, 1 hour of which was spent standing at a bus stop in -10c weather. Finally I arrived at the mountain with just over 2 hours until closing time. My first run with my new snowboard was not particularly encouraging. For starters I got stuck on a flat patch just after I clipped my board on. Then when I finally got to a downhill section I found that all the skills I had picked up last year at Whistler had gone. By the time I made it to the bottom of the run I must have fallen over a good 10 times and was beginning to feel like the guy at the snowboard shop had sold me a lemon (yep blame the tools). However the next run was much better, I remembered how to turn and only fell over once or twice. By the end of the evening I was feeling pretty confident, not enough to attempt anything fancy like jumping but I was going reasonably fast and felt in control most of the time.
The view from the ski field was amazing. It was a totally clear night and the ski field looks out over Vancouver so you can see all the lights very clearly. If it wasn't so cold I would have taken my phone out of my pocket and taken a photo, maybe next time.
The mountain closed at 10pm so I made my way back down the gondola and caught the bus back to the seabus, catching the right bus this time.

The months of June, July, August, September, October and November

Well I guess it is about time that I jump on the band wagon and start a blog. This blog initially will be about me and my year in Vancouver Canada. I suspect that I will only rarely get around to updating it so feel free to read any posts multiple times while you wait expectantly for the next riveting episode.
So what have I been up to the last few months? Well for those who have not been keeping in contact here is a brief summary. Feel free to skip to over months that you already know about, I won't be offended. In fact I won't even know.
June:

• Arrived in Vancouver along with Joshua Brookes on the 29th.
• Went to the Capilano Suspension Bridge. Lovely sunny day. Rather hot. Bridge was well constructed but over priced. Had a sandwich from Quiznos for lunch. Very tasty.
  
• I guess I did something else but details of exactly what escape me. Can't have been too exciting.

July:

• Took a trip to Revelstoke for the wedding Jon and Jess Good. They successfully got married. I took some photos but it wasn't with my camera so I can't post them here. I suspect if you know Jon or Jess then you have already seen the wedding photos anyway and have probably heard pretty much everything else I have to say about the event. If you don't know Jon or Jess then chances are the photos wouldn't really interest you too much anyway.
• On returning to sunny Vancouver I started to settle down to life here. First thing was I needed a bed and a few other bits and pieces for the basement. So my new flatmate Andrew and I went on a day trip to IKEA. It really did take pretty much a whole day, the store is huge. I bought a rather nice bed, probably a little too nice considering I only need it for a year, but hey how do you put a price on a good night's sleep?
• Once the basement was furnished I got down to work. Datacom (my employer in New Zealand) kindly offered to give me some work for the first couple of months on a contract basis so I was working from home. The work turned out to be an average of about 10 hours a week so I had plenty of time to enjoy the Vancouver summer. Reuben and I decided that we would like to start playing tennis as there are lots of free tennis courts around Vancouver and we both had plenty of time to kill during the daylight hours. Back in our university days we regularly played squash together and were getting pretty good. As it turns out the skills developed in squash did not transfer readily to tennis.

August:

• Early in August I decided that walking and catching the occasional bus was getting old. So I did some thorough research on mountain bikes and took a trip to Dizzy Cycles. The nice sales man did a nice job of letting me convince myself that I should really skip the entry level bikes and get a Kona Cindercone. After all he said you will be able to make money on it if you take it back to New Zealand and sell it. As it turns out the same bike is considerably cheaper in New Zealand despite it being a half Canadian company. But the bike was very nice. On my second outing on my new bike I decided to check out how it handled a simple looking trail. Being the optimist that I am I thought mountain biking can't be too hard, and indeed going down hill I picked up quite a bit of speed. I was feeling like quite a pro. But alas I came crashing down to earth quite literally as a giant tree root jumped out in front of me. The front wheel went straight in to the root as I slid under the bike. I heard a loud hissing noise and soon came to the realisation that I was about to have a long walk home pushing my nice shiny bike.
• Sonia and Andrew visited for a couple of days en route to Edmonton for Evan Twist's 40th birthday. I showed them all the best cafes in Vancouver and that is about it, oh and I took them on a ferry ride over to Granville Island on one of the ferries Reuben captains. Granville Island market is a public market selling all sorts of fruit, veges, meats and deli products. It has been one of my favourite places to visit in Vancouver. Before getting a full time job I was taking daily trips there to buy fresh fruit and veges and other yummy stuff. Now I have to make do with quick trips on my way home from work when I have time or weekend trips.
  
• Late in August I took a well deserved vacation. With the ridiculously long hours that I had been putting in working for Datacom I was thoroughly exhausted. There is only so much of getting up at 10 and working until 12 that one can take. So I booked a trip to New York to visit May and Jack, some friends from university and Datacom. I wasn't really expecting to enjoy New York all that much but I was very pleasantly surprised. I absolutely loved my time there. Most days I just walked around Manhattan, checking out the few good cafes that I found on Coffeegeek. On the few days that May and Jack had off they took me to the US Open where I picked up a few tennis tips to try out on Reuben. We also went to the Metropolitan Museum. Not really something I ever thought I would do while on a vacation but it was pretty cool, much better than the Auckland museum. On another day we took a stroll through central park after finding out that our shoes were not acceptable for the tennis courts there. We ate out a lot during my visit to New York sampling a wide variety of the international cuisine on offer. It would be easy to spend an awful lot of money eating out in NY, it is not a cheap place at all. Another highlight of the trip was going to the Phantom of the Opera. I had only seen the movie version before so was well pleased to be able to see it at the theatre.
  

September:

• My trip to New York continued in to early September before I flew off to Toronto to visit Craig, Sandra and Zach who were over for Zach's first operation. We took a day trip to Niagara Falls and another day trip to Paramount Wonderland, Paramount's answer to Disneyland. Sonia and Andrew also joined us in Toronto for a few days.
• On returning to Vancouver I started work full time. I am working as a contractor for a small software company who then contract me out to a large investment company. The work has generally been pretty interesting although at times it has been rather basic and not very challenging.
• Reuben has a friend who works at the Elysian Room (my favourite cafe in Vancouver so far) who hooked us up with free tickets to the Vancouver coffee expo. This was really a trade show and not intended for the general public, but we decided to go anyway. I enjoyed getting to sample all the different espressos and lattes and french press coffees that the various roasters and coffee machine manufacturers were giving away. I was pleased to finally sample a blend that I had been hearing a lot about on the Coffeegeek forums called BlackCat. It is roasted by a roaster in Chicago called Intelligentsia. It took about 4 attempts before the barista finally got the grinder dialled in to give a good extraction. The shot was quite good but I wouldn't rave about it. Maybe he hadn't quite nailed the grind. I will have to take a trip to the cafe that imports the beans and see if they can get a better shot for me. We also saw a couple of competitors in the Canadian barista championships. The first guy was actually a TV chef doing a special show on barista competitions. He wasn't a professional barista and it showed in his performance. The second guy was a bit better but I don't think he made it to the final round. They did give me a few ideas for constructing my signature espresso beverage, but seeing as I don't have an espresso machine here in Canada that will have to wait until I get back to NZ.
  

October:

• After my first few weeks of work I decided to start biking to work as it was cheaper and quicker than catching the bus and would help keep/get me in shape. On the 4th day of riding to work someone decided that they needed my bike more than I did so they took it. When I talked to the security guard at my office building to ask if he had seen anything he informed me that for $25/year I could lock the bike in a secure cage in the basement. Nice to know, would have been even nicer to have known it the day before. So far I have not replaced the bike, and I keep forgetting to phone the police about getting a police report from them. I reported the theft online on the day it was stolen but as yet have not had anything from them.
• Gareth from Datacom came over for a visit after attending a Microsoft seminar in Seattle. We had a jolly expensive round of golf at one of the cheapest local courses. It was a really nice course with very well kept greens and fairways. Both of us played terribly, although Gareth played slightly worse than I did.
• Went with my cousin Ryan to see Jamie Cullum in concert. I was never really a big fan of Jamie but a few weeks before the concert I saw a couple of minutes of a concert of his on TV and it looked to be a pretty entertaining show. So I went along not expecting too much, but man was I impressed. It would have to rank among the top few concerts I have ever been to. He played a very long set (I didn't get home until about 2am and had work the next morning) and the quality of the musicians was fantastic. I highly recommend him to anyone who likes pop jazz music.

November:

• Following hot on the heels of the Jamie Cullum concert came the concert I had been waiting for for a long time. The Dixie Chicks came to Vancouver. I have never heard anything quite like the noise at that concert, and most of it was not coming from the stage. It is beyond me why anyone would go to a concert and just scream the whole time but that seemed to be what several thousand people payed good money to do. At points it was near impossible to hear the band playing at all. What I did hear coming from the stage was very good though and I generally enjoyed the experience, although if I was to go again I might consider going to a US concert where the whole political thing the Dixie Chicks keep going on about seems to have reduced their fan base substantially.

Well that sums up the last few months up until this week. I will write more about this week's events in the next post. There may even be a few photos thrown in. If anyone wants further elaboration on any of the happenings mentioned above then please feel free to drop me an email. If you don't know my email address ask someone who does.