The Blog of Paul Palmer

The end of an era

2010-01-21T21:24:00.000-08:00

Well my loyal blog followers, it has been a blast writing this blog and getting to know y'all better through your many comments. But alas the time has come to say goodbye to "The Blog of Paul Palmer". But fret not, for with the ending of this blog comes the beginning of a new and better blog where postings will be plentiful. T and I have decided that we would be better served combining our blogs, as that way we will have less rude comments complaining about the long silence between posts as I come up with fresh content.
So check out the new and improved blog at http://TorCoffee.wordpress.com/

The Great Gingerbread House Bakeoff

2009-12-08T21:18:00.000-08:00

Well Christmas is fast approaching, and in keeping with the true meaning of Christmas we decided to make a gingerbread house. Our good friends Daniel and Leanne were also keen to make a house so we got together and made gingerbread houses last weekend.

Daniel and Leanne decided to go the yummy lots of candy approach, while T and I went for the gingerbread replica of a turn of the 20th century Rocky Mountains log cabin.

I don't have a lot to say about it other than it was a fun activity, so I will just give a bit of a commentary on some of the photos.

First off there was the attempt at assembling the pieces. This didn't go so well, with big gaps between pretty much every wall. So we pulled it apart and tried again with another kind of icing

This worked much better and we managed to assemble the house with only a few gaps.

Daniel and Leanne chose a fancier design for their house

Next came the decorations. We chose to put chocolate rocks for the bottom half and then pretzel logs for the upper half, and a almond shingled roof mostly covered in snow
The path was made of root beer and latte jelly beans.

Now some of the details...
Under the exposed shingle section was a pile of snow that had fallen off the roof

A snowboarding gingerbread man was going down one side of the roof

A snow angel was in the snow on the ground next to the Sasquatch footprints

Santa was stuck in upside down in the chimney, and Rudolph was trying to help him out

Stained glass windows were made of crushed boiled candy, and when a tea-light candle is put inside it all glows.
Next year we plan on making a scale replica of Edinburgh Castle. Stay tuned.

Birthday Party

2009-11-06T21:30:00.000-08:00

Well it is that time of year again. The time of year that is almost a month after my birthday. So I figure I should write a bit about what we did to celebrate the start of a new decade.

On my birthday we went out for a special celebratory dinner at Bishop's restaurant (I blogged about it a few years back when I went with Roz and Reuben just before leaving Canada). Once again it was a mighty fine meal. I especially loved the chantarelle mushroom soup that I had as a starter. It was super tasty, even T liked it, and she doesn't normally like mushrooms. I won't dwell any longer on that dining experience in this post, as there was another birthday celebration the following weekend that I happen to have a few photos of, and my dear wife is dying for me to blog about it.

Being the big 30 this year I decided to go all out and have a big party, so we invited Daniel and Leanne over for dinner.

First up we had a brie wheel baked in filo pastry with red pepper jelly and caramelised onions. It was a recipe I spotted in a Yaletown newspaper and looked pretty good in the article. The finished product also tasted rather good too. So a good start to the evening there.

Next up was a watermelon gazpacho. I had made this in New Zealand for a family gathering dinner sort of thing. I had very fond memories of this soup, but it seems the watermelon we bought may have been a little less flavourful than the the NZ version was. The soup still tasted OK though (well I thought it did, I can't speak for the others present), it just wasn't as good as last time.

Next up was a simple shrimp cocktail. I love shrimp, so I really enjoyed this course. The Jamie Oliver recipe I followed had toasted breadcrumbs to sprinkle on top. I had never seen that addition, but tried it anyway. It added a lovely crunch to the otherwise not so crunchy salad. Good job Jamie for adding that to the recipe, it is a winner of an idea.

Next up was a favourite recipe of T's from an Indian cookbook we bought a few months back. The cookbook is from the owner of Vij's, a very highly regarded Indian restaurant here in Vancouver. T and I went there for dinner a month or so after we were married, and it remains one of our favourite dining experiences. The dish we made was the one that I had at the restaurant, Lamb Popsicles with a Fenugreek cream curry sauce. The lamb cutlets are marinated in white wine, mustard salt and pepper and then pan fried. The sauce is not particularly good for you but oh so tasty. It is largely cream and oil, with salt, paprika, cayenne pepper, tumeric, garlic, lemon juice and fenugreek leaves adding the yummy flavour. We served this with a potato galette, that we made a bit healthier than the recipe by cutting back on the cream and butter.

The next course was a baked ham, with green beans. The ham was called a spiral cut ham, something I had never seen until Christmas in Arkansas last year. It is a half leg of ham that is partially cut already, so carving it is really easy. Also because it is semi-sliced the glaze is able to get inside the ham a bit more. To my shame I went for the easy option and just used the packet of glaze that came with the ham. On reading the list of ingredients later I have decided never to do that again. It had about 10 different forms of sugar and not much else, and didn't really taste all that great either.

For the final course, dessert we of course had to have a birthday cake. Well kind of. It was actually a traditional French wedding cake, called a croquembouche, or a pyramid of filled profiteroles as I knew it. In the lead up to my birthday T was asking what kind of cake I wanted, saying she would make whatever I wanted. I have vague memories of Mum making one of these pyramid shaped towers years ago, and I seem to recall that it took ages to make all the little cream puffs. I also recall really liking the toffee that holds the tower together. So it was a combination of wanting to give T a bit of a challenge and wanting that toffee that led me to choose a croquembouche cake. T did a wonderful job. I even gave her an easy way out option and said she could buy the cream puffs if she wanted, but she would have nothing of it. And the filling could have just been whipped cream, but she went the extra mile and made a custard creme filling. The toffee was interesting. We are blaming our stove. The first time we tried making it, somehow we must have heated it too long or something because it went from being a liquid to being flaky sugar again. So we had to try all over again, this time using a different element and a slightly higher heat. It worked much better, but was still a very clear colour, not at all how I had pictured it. Once the pyramid was assembled we were supposed to make the leftover toffee in to spun sugar, using two forks. Perhaps the instructions were not all that clear, or perhaps I just did it all wrong, but either way the spun sugar didn't really work out. The end result still was very tasty though. Sorry, but I didn't get a photo of it before we all tucked in and devoured T's handy work.

Monster Repellent

2009-08-27T18:15:00.000-07:00

So I was looking through my cookbooks the other day and came across a very interesting sounding recipe. It was for a repellent for those nasty monsters that chase people at night. When I saw it I thought I just had to share it with y'all, just in case it may come in handy for you some day.

Monster Repellent (Repels even the scariest monsters)

1/8 cup vinegar (the smellier the better. This is because monsters can't stand the smell of vinegar, it makes them sneeze)
1/8 cup cooking oil (this is to make them slip over if they try chasing you)
1 tsp chili flakes or pepper flakes (this will make their mouths burn, and their eyes water if they rub their eyes)

Mix all ingredients together in a small bowl or cup and place by your bed.

Well I hope that helps some of you. Let me know your results; it has worked well for Tiffany.

Happy Birthday to T

2009-08-03T21:55:00.000-07:00

So, July is a very special month in the Palmer household. It is the month where we celebrate that my darling wife is now yet another year older. I hear it is inappropriate to mention a lady's age, so I will just say that she used to be 32. To celebrate this passing of age, we had a quiet night at home, with T's favourite meal, Fettuccine Alfredo.

Later in the month however we had a right shindig with friends. Well, we had friends over for dinner, a game, and a birthday cake. It was my first attempt at making a birthday cake, and only my second ever attempt at a cake, so I was keen to document each step. Unfortunately I forgot to photograph a few of the steps, so will have to just show you a few of them.

The cake was a simple sponge cake, with milk chocolate mousse filling, and a cream cheese icing on the outside, not exactly what I would choose, but it was not my cake.

First off I made the sponge cakes (a logical place to start I'm sure you will agree). Once they had cooled I sliced them through the middle so there were 4 layers of cake.
Next step was to mix up the chocolate mousse. While that chilled a bit in the fridge I made the simple cinnamon syrup. This was just sugar, water and cinnamon sticks. The syrup was supposed to help the cake maintain a certain moistness.Once the syrup was chilled too I started the assembly phase. Each layer of the cake was brushed with the syrup before being liberally covered in the chocolate mousse. Then it was back in to the fridge to allow the mousse to set up a bit.

The next day was icing day. The chocolate mousse had set quite nicely, so the cake was able to stand quite stably. The original plan was to make a cake in the shape of Dug the dog from the animated movie Up. However I decided that a cake in the shape of an animated dog was hardly appropriate for someone of T's age, so I went for a simply iced cake with raspberries on top.

The cake was a bit on the sweet side, but tasted alright. Rudy seemed to enjoy it well enough, he managed to polish off a rather sizable slice.

Bread, bread and more bread

2009-05-31T17:51:00.000-07:00

Well April and May have been all about bread here in the Palmer household. It all started when I noticed a growing buzz on the Internet around a bread recipe featured on the New York Times a year or two back. The appealing part of the recipe was that it required very little work and resulted in a fantastic looking (and apparently fantastic tasting) loaf. I had first come across this recipe last year some time but I lacked an important item used in the recipe, a heavy pot. That all changed however when T and I took a trip to Seattle and popped in to the outlet mall on the way. There we came across a Le Creuset store, and they were having a sale too! Well it didn't take too much convincing to get T to let me buy one, I just had to let her choose the colour. So we are now happy owners of a bright yellow Le Creuset cast iron/enamel pot. I'm not sure how we are going to get this heavy thing back to New Zealand, but I'm sure we will find a way.

So now that the missing pot was not a factor we could get on to baking wonderful home made bread whenever we wanted.... so long as we thought about it 20 hours ahead of time. All you have to do is mix up the dough to combine, then let it sit out for 18 hours, then give it a quick shape and rest it for another 2 hours before baking in a very hot oven in our yellow pot with the lid on for the first 20 minutes or so.

So here are a few photos of the no knead bread...

The bread after the initial 18 hour rise

Fresh out of the oven (and our cool yellow pot in the background

And just moments before it was devoured.

While looking at websites with the no knead bread I came across an interesting recipe for German Pancakes. So for dessert one night we decided to give it a try. We have since made it a couple more times. It is super quick and easy and looks really cool when it is in the oven puffing up.

Now our no knead bread is pretty jolly good, if I do say so myself. But when my sister-in-law Sharon mentioned there was a recipe for bread in 5 minutes a day I just had to look in to it more. She had just received a cookbook called "Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day", and they have a rather useful website too. T had just joined the library and after a quick check we realised that the library has several copies of the book, so we put a request in for one and within a week I had a copy of the book in my hands. Oh the excitement. The whole deal with this technique is you mix up a big batch of dough - a rather wet dough - in a big bucket or container and then just let it sit in the fridge until you want to use some. Then you cut off a chunk of dough, shape it and let it rise before baking it in a pretty hot oven. There are a bunch of different types of dough in the book. So far we have tried the basic white dough, a peasant loaf, a brioche (very yummy), a challah dough (similar to brioche but not as rich), an olive oil dough, and now today we mixed up a Deli-Style Rye. Hmm, that is a lot of bread for less than a month, especially considering that we have made the white one at least 2 times, and each batch of dough makes about 4 small loaves.

So far we have not managed to make a basic white loaf that competes with the NY times no knead bread recipe, but the versatility of these doughs is particularly handy. We have made many basic loaves, a few pizzas, pita bread, naan bread, baguettes, cinnamon buns, brioche loaf, monkey bread (sooooo good). The brioche dough was particularly nice, it made the most delicious cinnamon buns, and they were not even as bad for us as the recipe in the book (we didn't make them too gooey with sugar and butter etc.). We undid all that being good a few days later though with the monkey bread. Little balls of dough dipped in butter then rolled in cinnamon and sugar, stacked in a loaf pan and baked to be a loaf that pulls apart. To help overcome the guilt we have had to start going to the gym in our building. Anyway we are very much enjoying this new bread technique and now own our very own copy of the book. And another great side effect is I now have even more food stuff to take photos of. So far the loaves all look very "rustic", but they are meant to be, so don't laugh at my wonky baguette please.

Cooking with T

2009-05-03T19:44:00.000-07:00

So now that the wedding blog is out of the way I can get back to the food blogs. Most of my life isn't all that interesting to write about, so if you want any new material to read here then you will just have to put up with food stuff.

It figure T wouldn't mind me adding the odd photo of her crazy cooking skills too, so from time to time I will throw some of her culinary masterpieces in too.

Right, well I had better be quick with this. I have some cinnamon rolls in the oven and hope to have this blog all done before they are done. (Hopefully I will find time to do a bread blog soon and will be sure to give a cinnamon roll review as part of that.)

Slow Baked Salmon

OK first up there is the slow baked salmon. This was a neat looking idea from a blog I have been looking at a bit lately called steamykitchen. It is a pretty entertaining read at times and the photography is really good. The dish simply involved laying the salmon on a bed of sliced oranges and onions and baking it at a very low temperature. The salmon tasted pretty good, but the oranges were sadly lacking in flavour and juice, and the onions didn't really do it for me. The asparagus was wonderful though as was my new favourite vegetable, broccolini. A friend of T's (Kate) who was staying with us a few weeks back introduced us to it and I just can't get enough of it. YUUUUMMMMMM,

Bacon Wrapped Halibut with Asparagus and Lemon Mayo

This has been T's favourite meal I have made her so far (and a really simple meal too). The lemon mayo was nice and tangy, but the asparagus and fish worked well to offset the tanginess (just like Jamie Oliver said it would).

Oh well the cinnamon rolls are ready now, so I guess I didn't meet my target. Still I am have the other photos uploaded already so may as well continue.

Satay Chicken Curry

My wonderful wife made this for dinner one night recently, and she didn't use a box. It was a kind of Thai inspired chicken curry. It was scrumptous. I even enjoyed taking it to work for lunch the next day as well.

Tandori Chicken with Sour Cream and Chive Asparagus and Perogies

Yet another T creation, this time she still didn't use a box, but made good use of a bag of perogies from the frozen food section of the supermarket. As you may be able to tell there is plenty of asparagus around here in Vancouver at the moment and we have been making the most of it. I can't believe I disliked this wonderful vegetable for so many years.

Well that will have to do for today. The cinnamon rolls are smelling jolly good and I can't wait a minute longer. So I am not even going to bother spell checking this blog entry, you can just live with any poor spelling or grammatical errors that may have made their way in.

After a long break....

2009-03-27T18:45:00.000-07:00

I am back!!!!

Apparently having T back in North America was even more of a distraction than she was when she was in PNG, as I kept finding my time disappearing and the blog was sadly neglected. Of course there was 3 weeks in Arkansas at Christmas, so that took me well out of my routine, and then another 10 days in Arkansas in February preparing for our wedding, then there was the wedding itself closely followed by the honeymoon. So really, I just simply have not had time to update all y'all with the goings on in my life and in my kitchen. Now that we are back in Vancouver and getting back in to a regular routine maybe the frequency will pick up.

So, I was discussing with T all the requests I have been getting to update my blog, and she made it quite clear that there would be trouble if my next entry was about what I have been cooking. Apparently it is important to her that I write something about the wedding and our honeymoon. So to keep the peace I will break from tradition and not write about my culinary adventures this time. All that said I will now start this entry again.

The Wedding, the blog post.

In case any of you have not heard the news yet, on 28 Feb I was married to the lovely Tiffany (more commonly known simply as T). The wedding took place in Hot Springs, Arkansas, the 8th most dangerous city in the US [edit: later research has shown it is the 13th most dangerous metropolitan area] , but thankfully through meticulous planning of security we managed to dodge all the bullets.

I flew down 9 days before the big day on American Airlines, and amazingly my luggage arrived with me this time (my bag was lost twice on my last trip to Arkansas, once on the way and then again on the way back to Vancouver). By that stage most of the wedding had been planned already, and there were just small details to sort out and organise. I was very supportive of T in this. I don't think I got in the way too much and just let her do what she needed to do. I'm sure I helped her laugh at the odd things stress was making her do. In between the organising we did manage to make a trip to Little Rock to watch the NZ Maori women's rugby 7's team play against the US women's 7's team. It was great to finally get to see a game of rugby again. But I digress, that is not really wedding related so much.

On the Sunday my family started arriving, starting with my parents who had just been on a cruise in the Caribbean. Then my brothers arrived with their wives on the Monday (sadly Craig's bag didn't get there for a few more days). The next few days involved showing the family around Hot Springs, including several trips to "the Walmart". I think we were averaging at least 2 Walmart trips a day. My family seemed to take great delight in mocking my navigational skills. I would like to point out that some of the directions I was given were not entirely accurate. The 1 hour drive from T's sister's place to the house were staying at managed to become a 2 1/2 hour drive, but at least I found the way eventually. By the end I thought I knew my way around pretty well. As it turned out I didn't, and we got a little lost trying to make our way to the church, oops.

The wedding itself went very well indeed. I made it there, so did T. We got married. A smashing time was had by all. T would really like me to tell you all about how I felt on the day. How seeing her walking down the isle took my breath away etc. but I think I know my readers well enough to know that they wouldn't want to read that kind of sappy stuff. If by any chance I am wrong, then feel free to visit T's blog, I'm sure she will update it soon or she will be in big trouble :)

I would like to point out a few very memorable things about the day though. First off, the wedding cake. This was an area I was did get involved in during the planning of the wedding. I didn't want a typical white wedding cake, and I knew T well enough to know she probably wouldn't want one either. So I had done a bit of a search on the internet for cakes and found that I really liked the topsy turvy style of cake, where each level of the cake is at an angle. One such cake I saw had a cute car on top with a road leading down the cake. We both loved this idea and totally stole it, but our one is way better (ok maybe I am a little biased). We even had little signposts down the road for the 4 countries that have been such big parts of our lives, USA, Canada, PNG and New Zealand.

The next memorable part of the day I would like to mention was the weather, and especially the weather during our photo session outside the bathhouses in downtown Hot Springs. It was freezing, so much in fact that it was snowing, making it rather cold. Fortunately I had a nice warm suit jacket on so I was ok. T on the other hand was a bit cold, but I'm sure she has learned a valuable lesson, when going out in the snow wear long sleeves.

Throughout the time my family were in Hot Springs a favourite passtime was looking for a good cup of coffee, a task that proved difficult. The store that looked most promising was unfortunately closed Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday, leading us to wonder how they managed to stay in business at all. As it so happened they were open on the wedding day while we were getting our photos done, so we stopped in at the end of the photo session. I now know where to go if I am ever in Hot Springs and feel the urge to have a decent cup of coffee. It was really very nice.

There are copyright issues stopping me from posting our official photos on the blog, but I can give a link to the photographers website where there is a highlight gallery. We are both very happy with the photos and are looking forward to getting our album printed. But in case you are not feeling inclined to follow that link, I will post a few other photos that friends took at the wedding.

Kitchen Update

2008-11-09T22:58:00.001-08:00

It occurred to me tonight that I have not posted for a while about what I have been cooking. So here is a quick update on some of the meals I have enjoyed lately and that I remembered to take a photo of.

First up there was a rather tasty slow baked salmon dish a few weeks ago, with a herb sauce thingy on top, and accompanied by some jolly good caramelized onions. The herb thing had a nice lemon note to it and was super tasty.

A week or so ago I decided to try making eggs benedict. I used to order this pretty much whenever I went out for brunch in New Zealand, but I haven't really been getting up in time for brunch most Saturdays lately, and weekdays and Sundays I never allow myself enough time for making a cooked breakfast. So I had it for dinner instead. The hollandaise sauce tasted good, but was a little bit too thin, otherwise it tasted pretty good. I don't know how highly it would rank on Andrew's eggs benedict ratings but I assure you the coffee that went with it was very good and I couldn't fault the ambiance. After making hollandaise sauce and seeing what goes in to it, I have decided maybe I should sometimes choose a different item off the brunch menu, it is not all that good for me.

Canadian thanksgiving happened to fall on my birthday this year and I was fortunate enough to have 2 thanksgiving dinners to attend (the first one the day before thanksgiving). For both events I was asked to bring dessert. For the first dessert I decided on poached pears with a red wine caramel sauce. The red wine in the poaching liquid colours the pears really nicely, it would have made for a wonderful photo, but alas I didn't have my camera handy so sorry no photos. They tasted pretty good though. For the second dessert I only had 1 days notice, so pretty much had to do everything on the Monday; and given my tendency to not wake up in the morning when I don't really have to, I had to make something that would be ready quickly. After a quick search through my cookbooks I settled on a bittersweet chocolate mousse. I realised a little late that I was 1 egg short, so had to adjust the quantities a bit, but it still seemed to work. It was super rich, so the reduced volume didn't matter so much.

As I was walking home from work on Friday I decided to stop in at the HomeSense store and see if they had any pasta machines. I had been thinking of getting one for a good 8 months or so, so I was very pleased to find there was 1 left in the store, and at only $20 it was too good to pass up. My first attempt at pasta on Friday night was not entirely satisfying. I made fettuccine, and it was not great to say the least. I still had half the dough left so put it in the fridge and decided to try it again the next day. This time I made sure the dough was well dusted in flour before running it through the machine at the various levels. It worked way better, and the Alfredo sauce that I cooked to go with it was a tasty little saucy thing indeed. Excited at the success I had with Saturday's efforts, today I decided to experiment a bit. First experiment didn't go too well. Turns out corn meal is just too coarse to work well in pasta, or maybe it needed another egg, I don't know. What I do know is that the pasta was just not coming together so I gave up and started over. This time I stuck to the basic recipe with just the addition of some finely chopped fresh basil. Bingo. I decided to have a go at making a filled pasta, so I mixed up some ricotta cheese with wilted spinach and diced prosciutto. Mmmm. And to finish off the dish I made a quick pasta sauce with canned tomatoes, artichoke hearts, garlic, shallots, olive oil and red wine vinegar. It all tasted rather good, so good that I am going to take the leftovers to work for lunch tomorrow. Hopefully reheating it won't spoil it too much.
Sorry the photo doesn't look all that good, I was in kind of a hurry to eat it.

GIIP photography outing to Ladner

2008-10-26T15:34:00.000-07:00

A few weeks back a bunch of us from the photography club at church (GIIP) took a trip out to Ladner, about 30 minutes from downtown Vancouver. Charles had planned a pretty full day of shooting for us, with 4 different spots that we were to visit.

The first spot was some broken down jetty thing. It was a lovely little spot. The water was almost perfectly still and gave wonderful reflections, except for when someone came and launched their boat there. Apparently the lighting was better an hour before we got there, but I still found it pretty good anyway.

Next up there was a spot where we could see a bunch of boats. We didn't stay here for long because the light was perfect pumpkin light.

So off we went to the pumpkin patch. The week before the trip I bought a new toy for my camera, a polarizing filter. It did a splendid job of removing the glare from the pumpkins, and also made for some very blue skies.

Our final stop was at the Reifel Bird Sanctuary. There was a big potato field there that was just full of thousands of snow geese. We were lucky enough to see them all take off at once. Charles was pretty excited about this. He has been going there for years in the hope of seeing this site, and kept telling us how incredibly fortunate we were to see it on our first visit. Unfortunately I only have a little mini-lens for my camera, so couldn't get much detail of the geese taking off, but I guess you can get the idea of the scale of it from the photo.

It was very nice to get out of Vancouver for a change. It kind of made me miss having a car, but I think I am over it now, buses are so much cheaper.

Yes I'm still alive.

2008-10-04T17:17:00.000-07:00

Hello everybody,

I thought I would dispel any rumours that may or may not have been going around. I can confirm that I am still very much alive, I just have not found the time or more to the point the motivation to update this blog in a while. So this will be a bit of an update on what has been going on in the last month and a bit.

First off I have moved apartments, just. When I say just it is because I only actually moved to the next building along, in the same complex. My old landlord needed the apartment back again so his daughter could use it while attending university. So the new apartment is kind of similar to the last one. The kitchen is almost identical, except there is slightly less room next to the sink, resulting in a more cluttered coffee area. Not ideal, but certainly workable. The layout of the apartment is a bit nicer, it is on a corner, with the bedroom having windows on 2 sides. Hmm, actually it may be easier if I just post a few photos of it here and you can all see for yourselves.

Hmm, so what else have I been up to? Good question. Not a great deal is my answer. I have been in the mood for roasts lately. In the last couple of weeks I have had both roast chicken and roast pork. The chicken was super simple and really tasty. I simply got a lemon that had been in with the potatoes as they were par-boiling, stabbed the lemon a few times and stuffed it inside the chicken along with a bunch of garlic cloves and some thyme. Par-boiling the potatoes and letting them get a bit fluffed up in the pot after draining made for wonderfully cripsy potatoes once they had been roasted in the juices that were coming out of the chicken. The roast pork was OK, but nothing special. I made a sauce to baste the pork with by combining about 1/4 cup of pomegranate molasses with some balsamic vinegar and sugar. That bit tasted really good, but the pork was a bit dry for my liking. Actually part of the pork was really good, but that was the part that I had for leftovers.

The french onion soup I made a week or so ago was fantastic, especially with the ciabatta bread and gruyerre cheese floated on top. Mmmm, yumm. I found it was even better the second or third day after making it, the flavours had developed more and it was oh so good. I think it would be my favourite soup.

Today I woke up and decided I would like some Saturday afternoon pancakes (yes I slept in this morning). I happened to have some apples in the fridge that I didn't use when I had my pork, so I decided to have apple pancakes. They were very nice indeed, especially with the maple syrup/honey mixture drizzled on top.

Autumn seems to be starting now, so with any luck I will find some nice autumn colours to photograph. Next week the GIIP photo club from church is planning on going on an outing to the Reifel Bird Sanctuary, and also some pumpkin patch somewhere on the way. It should be a good trip if the weather behaves.

Winter cooking has started again

2008-08-25T20:11:00.000-07:00

So this last Sunday it was raining in Vancouver (actually something of a rarity over the last 2 months). And although not exactly cold, it was still cool enough to put me in the mood for some kind of stew type dish. I had spotted some lamb shanks in the local supermarket a few weeks ago so thought maybe I would try cooking them for a change.

So I found a nice looking recipe from my Bishop's cookbook and got together a shopping list. Then I fell asleep. I guess I was kind of tired after a late night of card playing on Friday night followed by an afternoon of kayaking fun on Saturday. Eventually I woke up and after a quick chat with Tiffany and putting together some bread dough to rise for my bread rolls, I finally made it out to the supermarket. Given the not so pleasant weather I decided against a trip to Granville Island so just had to make do with whatever the supermarket had. Unfortunately they were all out of turnips and there was no sign of parsnip (not that I was all that keen on using parsnip anyway). They also had no celery root so there were a few ingredients I had to make do without. But they did have the lamb shanks, they are the most important part of any lamb shank recipe.

When I arrived back at the apartment I shaped the bread rolls and let them start their second rise. I hadn't made bread since leaving PNG, it is just so much easier to go to the shop and buy some, but home made bread certainly does smell good and even tastes good sometimes. Once the bread was set to one side to rise I got started on the lamb. Lamb shanks are jolly easy to cook, just season them a bit then brown them nicely then whack them in a casserole dish with some stock and and a bunch of vegetables. Then go talk to your fiance for a couple of hours and dinner is ready.

And the really nice thing about lamb shanks is they taste just as good reheated the next day. So today I had leftover lamb shanks with garlic mashed potatoes. Yummy.

Surprise - We're engaged!

2008-07-21T21:13:00.000-07:00

Yes that's right folks, the worst kept secret ever is now official, Tiffany and I are officially engaged. I had the great pleasure of having T come to visit me in Vancouver last week before we both flew down to Colorado for her family reunion.

Given that I am absolutely useless at keeping a secret and also needed to know T's ring size I didn't think trying to keep the ring a complete surprise was going to work. I did however surprise her with how and when she would get the ring. I had been dropping hints that maybe it would be at dinner on Saturday night as we celebrated her birthday. But I decided that proposing then would be far too predictable. I also wanted to make sure she had the ring before church on Sunday and didn't want to leave it until Sunday morning. So this left Saturday morning or Saturday afternoon. As I would be with her all day I figured that I wouldn't really be able to prepare much if I left it until afternoon, so decided to propose after breakfast.

I guessed she would be a bit tired after the long flight from PNG so planned breakfast for around 9:30. I got up extra early (for a Saturday at least) and mixed up some crepe batter and then went back to bed while it rested. Then I got up again, made the crepes and just as I was finishing them (a little later than anticipated) T knocked on the door (she was staying in the guest suite in my apartment). We sat down at the kitchen counter and hoed in to the crepes (very yummy crepes with ricotta, cream cheese and lemon filling with a blueberry sauce). This was followed by a coffee for me and a cup of tea for T. And accompanying the tea was a plate of dark chocolate truffles that I had made the day before. In the middle of the plate of truffles was the ring. I asked the big question and surprise surprise she said "Yes". What a relief.

We had a wonderful few days together, walking around Vancouver, taking a trip up to Grouse Mountain, going to Granville Island. I managed to reclaim the 2 player 500 title, with a rather convincing win, but I was at a bit of an advantage as T couldn't remember how to play.

On Wednesday we flew to Grand Junction, Colorado where I met my future in-laws for the first time. They were all very friendly and I liked them a lot (and no I'm not just saying that because they will likely be reading this). They are a bit louder than my family.

On Thursday we went on a trip to see Grand Mesa, a big flat topped mountain. It was a really pretty place. Then in the evening there was an extended family get together where I got to try and impress everyone with my culinary skills. I cooked a leg of lamb cooked in a blend of lime leaves, lemon grass, chili, cilantro (coriander leaves), lime, ginger, olive oil and salt. Once the lamb was cooked the leftover juices were made in to a bit of a sauce by adding some coconut milk. Thank you Jamie Oliver for the recipe. It seemed to work out OK, although I think it was ever so slightly overcooked. This was the second time I have made this recipe (the first time was for Lucas and Shannon) and both times I overcooked it, I really should adjust the cooking time next time.

The next day was white water rafting day. It was great fun. I hadn't done white water rafting since I was 14 and was looking forward to this a lot. Last time I managed to be the only person in the group to fall out, so I was keen to do better this time. It was a blast. We did the triple so got to do the rapids 3 times, each time taking a slightly different approach.

Saturday was the day of the big family reunion. The Burbridge family all had matching T-Shirts made up for the occasion, each with the person's name and an aka. Mine was Paul - aka Newest-son-in-law. I guess someone must have guessed the engagement was going to happen and had the t-shirt made up in advance.

For those of you who have keen eyes, you may have noticed in some of the photos that I am sporting a beard. This was a special request of T's and so I grew it over the last 4 weeks or so. On arriving home last night it was quickly removed so I am now back to the clean shaved look you may be more accustomed to seeing. And yep, I really do need a haircut, I will have to get on to that, 5 1/2 months between haircuts is probably a bit too long.

10 things about me

2008-06-22T22:11:00.000-07:00

This is a somewhat different post to my usual. For 1 it is going to contain a numbered list and 2 it is not about food, well not mostly. Dan tagged me the other day, which apparently means now I am supposed to write 10 things about myself that most people don't know. This is somewhat tricky as a large number of my readers are close family members or people I grew up with, and most of the remainder know me in Vancouver. So this leaves 5 months of my life where my none of my readers were around except Tiffany and I already wrote about the interesting parts of those 5 months while I was in PNG. So odds are that most of you will already know a bunch of these things anyway.

I was a member of the winning team in the West Auckland badminton interclub competition when I was at high school. If forget which year though. I would have a photo to prove it but never got around to picking it up from the badminton club.
I don't like fresh figs. I only recently discovered this one myself, much to my disappointment after waiting months for fig season to arrive. Ah well at least I still like dried figs.
I was a founding member of the award winning boy band "Four"
I am getting married in February. OK so I guess most of you already knew that, but I kind of like telling people.
My favourite type of fish is tuna
I painted my first ever guitar purple.
The first music concert I paid to go to was Guardian in 1996. They sat down on chairs until the very last song. Not a great stage presence.
My first ever game of golf was played in Fiji at the Denarau Golf & Racuet Club with water on 15 of the 18 holes it is not an ideal course for a first round. It was part of a business conference I went to with Dad and Mum (I was a part time employee of theirs) and the tournament was an 9 hole Ambrose tournament. Between the 4 of us in my team we lost around 20 golf balls.
I was on TV in the Philippines.
The first CD I ever owned was a double CD of Joe Satriani - Surfing with the Alien and Not of This Earth. It was a Christmas present from Craig in 1994. Sadly it was stolen in 1996.

So there you have it. You all know me so much better now I'm sure.

GIIP meeting

2008-06-21T23:23:00.000-07:00

A couple of weekends ago (yes I know I yet again have been very slow posting anything new) I went to the second meeting of GIIP (Get Involved In Photography) at my church. GIIP is a group of people who get together once a month or so to learn and share stuff about photography. At the first meeting we were given an assignment, we each had to take 3 photos on the theme of Spring and print them out so we can all look at them and give constructive feedback on the photos.

So for the few weeks before the meeting I was busy trying to come up with some interesting photos of Spring. It was already too late to catch the cherry blossoms and the tulips and daffodils were a little past their best. I took a few walks around Vancouver taking photos of ducklings and gosling but none of them were very good. Then one Sunday afternoon I took a long walk up to Queen Elizabeth Park where I found a bunch of flowers that were still looking pretty good. So I snapped a bunch of photos of them and a few of them turned out OK. Well, really I only liked one of them but was running a bit short on time so selected two of them as candidates for my photo assignment.

With time running out and inspiration still being somewhat elusive I decided to turn to the subject of a fair number of my photos, food. I thought about what food reminds me of Spring, and the first thing to come to mind was rhubarb. Excellent I can make something with rhubarb in it and take a photo of it. And for that added cheesy bit of creativity I thought maybe I could include the springform pan that Shannon and Lucas gave me at their farewell evening. So now I needed a recipe that would use rhubarb and a springform pan. I decided maybe a rhubarb cheesecake would work well, I had never heard of a rhubarb cheesecake but thought maybe it would work OK. So I did a bit of a google search and was surprised to find a bunch of recipes for rhubarb baked cheesecake. The next day I went off to the supermarket and bought the necessary ingredients and set to making the cheesecake. Actually before I started making it I thought I would try taking a few photos of just the rhubarb on my coffee table, just in case the cheesecake didn't look very good. I took a bunch of the rhubarb and the springform pan together too, trying to be all arty but they looked kind of stupid. Anyway, I baked the cheesecake only to find that it didn't really photograph all that well, just as well I took the photos of the rhubarb beforehand. The best photo of the rhubarb unfortunately was taken at a bit of an angle and the corner of the table made the photo look not so good. So I kind of cheated and rotated the image a bit and replaced the corner of the table with clone tool. Much better. So now I had my three photos and I was ready to get critiqued, well OK I wasn't really looking forward to the critiquing so much.

As part of the critiquing process the group had to choose their favourite of each person's 3 photos, and that photo is then going to be printed out real big, framed and hung on the wall in the foyer at church. And what photo did they choose of mine? The rhubarb. So maybe I do have an artistic bone in my body somewhere after all.

Next month the GIIP group is taking an early morning outing to Jericho Park to take photos together. The meeting time is 7am. Sadly I am going to have to miss it as I will be in Colorado that weekend with Tiffany where I will finally get to meet her family. OK I am not at all sad about that really, I would much rather be with Tiffany, and 7am that is just crazy.

What's going on in the kitchen?

2008-06-01T20:12:00.000-07:00

Well my conscience has got the better of me and I have decided to update my blog once again. It has been far too long yet again and I'm sure you are all wondering what I have been eating these last weeks. Whilst I am not feeling inclined to give you a meal by meal commentary on what I have been eating I thought I would just mention a few, mainly ones that I managed to snap a photo or two of before devouring.

So as you are probably aware it is Spring here in Vancouver, and has been for some time now. With the onset of Spring comes some rather scrumptious vegetables including one of my new favourites asparagus. Yep that's right, I quite like asparagus nowadays. And during Spring asparagus becomes very affordable. One day I noticed there was a bunch of asparagus sitting in my fridge (there are 2 for $4 bargains all over the place and so I invariably end up with way too much asparagus in my fridge). So anyway I decided that I would try asparagus soup. I had a quick look through my recipe books (very quick look as there are only 2 of them at the moment) and found a lovely looking one, wait no that wasn't the one I used, I must have found the recipe on the internet somewhere. Anyway the soup tasted jolly good and I took a photo of it before I polished it off.

Another side effect of it being Spring is that I start making more salads. This week has been a prime example of this. Last weekend I was down at Granville Island grabbing some yummy stuff, and decided to start my evening meal with a fresh mozzarella, tomato and basil salad. I first tried this combination in New York 1 1/2 years ago and I just can't get enough of it. The 3 flavours work exceptionally well together and I just love the texture of a good fresh mozzarella ball.

Yesterday I decided to have salad again as I had already had bacon and eggs for brunch so didn't need anything too fatty for dinner. As I was wandering through the vege store I spied some mandarins and decided to use them in a kind of asian inspired salad. Well OK, it wasn't really particularly asian inspired except for the soy sauce I put in the vinaigrette but it was really good anyways. So good in fact that I decided to make the same salad again for lunch today.

While I was home in NZ I watched a wee bit of the food network, ok I watched way too much of the food network. One of the shows was all about salads and one of the salad dressings had pomegranate molasses in it. I had never heard of this ingredient, but they said it tasted really good so I thought I would just have to try it some day. Today was that day. It is an ingredient used a bit in Mediterranean cooking and is available in Mediterranean grocery stores. I don't know of any of those in NZ, but in Vancouver there are at least 3 that I know of, and my bus just happened to be going past 2 of them today. So I got off the bus and bought a bottle of pomegranate molasses, ingredients - pomegranate juice. If you want to try some and can't find it in any stores then you can just make your own by reducing pomegranate juice (widely available nowadays) until it is relatively thick, one website suggested reducing 2 cups down to 1/4 cup. Now armed with my pomegranate molasses I had to think of something to make with it. I already had a salad planned for lunch (see above) and had the dressing already made for that. I didn't really feel healthy enough to have salad twice in one day so had to find another use for the molasses. After a quick google search I settled on pomegranate chicken. Basically you just coat a chicken breast in crushed walnuts and flour and cook it in a fry-pan. Then you remove the chicken and add chicken stock and pomegranate molasses to make a bit of a sauce. So I did this and the result was not quite what I was hoping for. I think maybe the ratios in the recipe may have been a little off, or else maybe more likely is I should have measured the molasses instead of just pouring it in. It is quite a powerful ingredient and is rather tart. I think it would have tasted pretty good if I had used less molasses, I will have to try it again some time. I think it would work rather well on roast lamb so I may try that some day too. It is also very tasty mixed in with orange juice and sparkling water, very refreshing.

Well that about covers all of my recent memorable meals. I guess I haven't been putting so much effort in to my cooking these last few weeks. I haven't had anyone over for a meal for a while so I will have to get on to that too, it might help inspire me get cooking again.

Life is good, I have my coffee

2008-04-27T15:47:00.000-07:00

So a couple of weekends ago I decided that it was about time I went espresso machine shopping. I had been doing a bit of research on the interweb and found that it was now actually cheaper buying the machine I wanted in Canada than in the US, and also found that there was a local retailer selling it at a very nice price. So off I went on what I expected to be a 1 1/2 hour round trip to Richmond to EsprossoTec. Unfortunately I wasn't counting on the bus service in Richmond being so infrequent on a Saturday afternoon and so the trip ended up taking about 1 1/2 hours just to get to the store so I had to pay for a second bus ticket to get home again. Still I guess $1.90 won't hurt too much.

The store was rather impressive, with a wide range of shiny chrome espresso machines of varying sizes and price points. The machine I had decided on was a La Pavoni Europiccola and I even decided to settle on the cheaper black based model rather than the slightly cooler looking chrome based model. I figured the extra $100 could be better used elsewhere, like on a Reg Barber tamper. I had been looking to get one of these tampers for several years and now that I have one I can totally see why people rave about them so much on coffeegeek.

So anyway on to the first few days with my new toy. On arriving home I unpacked the machine and followed all the manufacturers directions for first use, requiring a clean with the espresso machine cleaning stuff. No problem there, it was all nice and easy to set up and before long I was all ready to pull my first shot. Of course I had to set up the grinder first, it had been being used as a french press grinder, requiring a much coarser grind so I had to pull it apart, clean it and get it set up for espresso. So once that was all done I ground some coffee in to the portafilter and tamped it down just like I did on my machine in NZ and locked it in to the grouphead. Now for the moment I had been waiting for. I lifted the lever up (the la pavoni is a lever machine that uses a piston rather than a pump to push the water at pressure through the coffee beans). After about 5 seconds I could see coffee start dripping out the bottom of the portafilter, just like the user manual said should happen and then I pulled down on the lever and watched for the beautiful crema to start flowing in to my cup. Oh the disappointment. The coffee had absolutely no crema and looked more like a drip coffee than an espresso. I took a tiny sip and decided that it would be better off being discarded. So I tried again, this time tamping extra hard, applying as much pressure to the coffee as I could. This time there was the thinnest layer of super pale crema on top of the coffee and yet again it tasted pretty bad. I noticed that the coffee wasn't ground particularly fine and was beginning to wonder whether the grinder was simply not capable of achieving a grind fine enough for espresso. My other thought was that maybe the beans were getting a little stale, and also they were a very light roast (I had bought them for french press and I prefer a lighter roast for french press) and I know from experience that lighter roasts are not as well suited to espresso.
So the next day I went for a walk to 49th Parallel and bought an espresso blend hoping that this would achieve better results. I also decided to have another go at doing the grinder adjustment. After making the grinder adjustment I found the grind could go much finer and so I had high hopes for this next shot. I ground, tamped and loaded once again and started pulling the shot. This time no coffee started dripping out and I was able to keep it raised for the full 10 seconds I had read on coffeegeek was optimum. Then I started pressing down on the lever and found for the first time that I actually had to push down pretty hard, obviously the beans were providing more resistance than previously and after a few seconds I saw the beautiful golden streams of crema laden coffee start falling from the spouts of the portafilter. Success! That first sip of espresso was superb. I was so happy, the grinder is capable after all.

Two weeks have now passed and I can say that I am regularly pulling wonderful shots and the lattes I have made have easily matched anything I have bought from my favourite Vancouver cafes since my return here in February. I am still getting used to the milk steaming, it is pretty quick and although I have had some very nicely steamed milk I have not yet reached the level I was achieving in New Zealand on my E61 Rocket (ECM Giotto Premium) or on my Rancilio Silvia before that. Well I will let you all know how I progress over the coming months.

Oh and yesterday I bought a replacement for my camera that was stolen, so now I can add photos to my blog postings again. Yay.

Spring in Vancouver

2008-03-29T22:28:00.001-07:00

I love spring in Vancouver. It is lovely walking around the city and seeing all the blossoming trees. And with spring comes opportunity for other fun outdoors activities like tennis. Today I had a game of tennis booked in to play with Reuben, well actually a game of either tennis or squash just in case it rained. When I got up in the morning it looked like a nice day for tennis, there was a bit of cloud around but it didn't look too threatening. Anyway, as I was talking with Tiffany - as I often do - I looked out my window and noticed it was raining a bit, then I looked a bit more carefully and decided it was hailing. Bother I thought, I guess that probably means tennis is off today. When it came time to leave to meet Reuben I had another look outside, it was still raining a bit but I thought maybe it was just an isolated shower and maybe over Stanley park way it might be sunny, so I took both my tennis and squash racquets with me just to be safe. When I made it outside I realised that the hail was still falling a little, not big chunks of ice but just little ones mixed in with the rain. At this stage I pretty much realised it wasn't going to be a tennis day. As I walked on I noticed a few cars that had a lot of small hail pieces on them, then as I continued I noticed the pavement had a lot of slushy melting hail on it. Then a few blocks later and I realised that what I thought was hail was actually snow, very wet snow, but definitely snow. Snow in downtown Vancouver in late March, that is kind of crazy. By the time I got to Burrard Street I discovered that the slushy snow was quickly finding its way inside my shoes and my socks were getting decidedly damp. A few blocks later and they were totally soaked. The snow was getting deeper and deeper the further I went until by the time I approached Roz and Reuben's apartment it was a pretty decent layer of snow on the ground. By this stage I had decided that my shoes were so wet that it was not going to be such a great idea playing squash either. All in all not a very nice spring day really. But walking through the slush was kind of a nice change I guess, hopefully my shoes dry out in time for my next scheduled tennis or squash game.
For those of you wondering when some more photos will start appearing on this blog you will have to wait a bit longer. As you may recall my camera was stolen in PNG and I haven't replaced it yet. It is on my list of things to get in April.

Sorry another long overdue blog

2008-03-20T20:53:00.001-07:00

Well, with any luck a couple of you will still be reading this blog and this won't be a total waste of time. There have been a few reasons for the long gap between postings. Firstly I have moved countries again and so have been somewhat busy finding work, finding a place to live, finding furniture and other stuff like that that you have to do when you move half way around the world with just a suitcase and 2 guitars. Actually finding a job didn't take all that long, I had a job within a week of getting here so that was very nice. I also managed to find an apartment within a week too so maybe that isn't such a great excuse for not blogging either. Just today I managed to find myself a couch so that excuse won't last much longer either, I go and pick it up tomorrow. I guess the main reason I haven't been blogging so much is that I find it much more interesting chatting with Tiffany in the evenings rather than writing blogs to whoever may happen to read it. Another reason which I find to be a perfectly valid reason for not writing is that I haven't really thought of much to write about, so any blog that I do write is likely to just be a lot of rambling on about nothing in particular, much like this one is turning out to be. I will try and think of a few things I have been doing to actually write about.

I guess for starters maybe I should update you all on the state of coffee in Vancouver. I have found a few changes in the 7 months or so that I have been gone. Firstly there is a new JJBean store now. Previously I would pretty much just go to the Granville Island branch and get a takeout small latte after getting whatever food I was cooking that night. Every now and again I would take the trip out to Main St and have a latte or americano there, it is a nice store out there, but is often very busy and hard to find a seat in the weekend. So anyway this new branch is in Yaletown, very conveniently just down the road from my apartment, I guess it was one of the contributing factors in deciding where to live this year. I have been there a handful of times so far and each time have been served a very nice coffee indeed. Good work JJBean. Another change is the opening of 49th Parallel's store on 4th Ave. 49th Parallel roast a lot of beans that are used by good cafes like the Elysian Room, but until recently did not have a retail outlet. So anyway I was strolling down 4th ave the other day looking for coffee cups (I had just bought a french press and realised I had nothing to drink the coffee in). As it turned out I had left my shopping expedition a smidgen late as the kitchenware shops were closed. However as I was walking down the road I noticed 49th Parallel was still open so decided to stop in to sample their coffee. As I walked in I spied some rather cool coffee cups for sale and decided that they would work wonderfully for my morning coffee and would make a fine addition to my coffee cup collection when I get back to NZ. So I bought a couple of cups and a small latte. Unfortunately the latte was not all that good, in fact it was pretty bad. I think I may still go back again some time though to give them a second chance, maybe I just got the bad barista or something and they are normally much better. I know they have good beans and a fine looking espresso machine, a mistral which is a reskinned La Marzocco, so the potential is there for a great coffee if the barista does their part right.

It has been great catching up with people here again. I enjoyed the couple of weeks I spent staying with Roz and Reuben when I arrived. It is a big help having somewhere to stay on arriving in a new country, especially when you don't know how long it will take to find a job. They have just bought an apartment in the Westend, a nice spot, very handy to squash courts and tennis courts and not too far from the badminton place either. Reuben has started playing badminton on Thursdays and I plan on joining him there. Writing that has actually just reminded me that it is Thursday and I have just missed badminton again, bother. It has been a long time since I have played badminton properly so when I went and joined him a few weeks back I found I was somewhat rusty. Hopefully it won't take too long to get back in to the swing of things. I have enjoyed getting involved again in the bible study I was attending last year, they are a great bunch of people, as are lots of the nice folk at University Chapel. This last Sunday I was pleased to be back playing bass at church again with a great bunch of musicians too which is always nice.

I had intended on going up to Grouse Mountain a few times this week for some evening snowboarding. Unfortunately I came down with a miserable cold on Monday so have been trying not to do too much to aggravate it. It is not so nice snowboarding when your nose is constantly dripping. The snow report has been pretty good this week too, with several nights where a good 12 cm of new snow has accumulated. The cold seems to be getting better now so maybe I will find time over the weekend to head up. I decided to get myself a Y2Play pass this year, it gives me access to Grouse for the rest of this season and all of next season for a very reasonable price.

I am really missing having a camera at the moment. Early Spring is a beautiful time of year in Vancouver with all the flowers starting to bloom. I have been very self controlled so far and not gone out and bought a replacement camera. As I was researching them a month ago I found that a new model in the Canon Rebel series is due to be released in April. I am not planning on upgrading to that model, but hopefully it will help drop the price of the XTi a bit. So sorry you will just have to wait a bit longer to see photos of my latest culinary adventures, or other things I may take photos of.

The much anticipated next blog entry

2008-02-11T20:41:00.000-08:00

Well it has been far too long since I updated this blog. I guess my computer time has been taken up with chatting with Tiffany this last month and I have been neglecting all you other people. Sorry about that. So I guess this blog will be a bit of a mish mash of all the things I can think about to write about from the last month and a half.

First off I realise that a number of you readers haven't seen a picture yet of the most wonderful woman in the world. So here she is.

So now what else have I been up to? Unfortunately I don't have a camera at the moment so haven't been able to keep a photo log of my recent activities. One activity that I am particularly disappointed about not having photos of is my kayaking trip to Rangitoto Island in the Auckland harbour. There were 7 of us that went on that trip. It involved a nice little 6km paddle across the harbour to Mt Rangitoto, a dormant volcano. We had a pretty favourable wind and tide so the kayaking was pretty easy work and we got there in around 45 minutes. We then set off on a leasurely stroll to the top of the mountain (it isn't all that big and only took 40 minutes). We reached the summit just in time to see the sunsetting over Auckland city. It was a really clear evening and the view was quite something. It helped remind me just how beautiful New Zealand is, I think I forget that sometimes. We then walked back down and paddled back to Auckland again under the stars.

Last Saturday my family all got together for a meal. We actually have done this quite a bit since I have been back in NZ, but this time the meal was particularly good and worth a mention here I think. While living in Vancouver I bought a rather nice cookbook called "Tyler's Ultimate" by Tyler Florence. My sister'n'law Sharon has been eyeing a few of the recipes in it for a while and suggested maybe we could have an Ultimate Meal using a bunch of recipes from the cookbook. So we picked 6 recipes, 2 appetisers, 1 soup, 2 main courses and a dessert.

The first appetiser was one I had made for my lunch about a year ago, a caramelised onion toast. It was super good, with the anchovies adding a nice saltyness without overpowering the soft onions. This was served at the same time as the second appetiser, herbed goat cheese bites. They were little slices of toasted baguette with some herbed soft goat cheese and sundried tomato. I love goat cheese so these little things I thougth were jolly good.

The soup was probably the most interesting or unusual of the courses. Being summer here I thought a cold soup would go down well, so I made the watermelon gazpacho with chile and feta cheese. Basically it is tomato and watermelon blended up with a few chiles, then some finely chopped cucumber and onion is folded through it and finally it is topped with crumbed feta cheese. Although some people had reservations about this dish, wondering why anyone would put watermelon in a tomato soup, it seemed to be well received and there were lots of positive comments about it. I think I will make it again some time, I really liked it.

The first main course was a simple grilled salmon with smashed potatoes. This was a very, very simple dish but I thought it was really nice. I love salmon so as long as it is not overcooked I will normally enjoy it. I never had any fish in Ukarumpa, so I have really enjoyed being able to eat lots of fish since being back home.

Next up was my favourite course, grilled leg of lamb with lemon chickpea puree and greens. The lamb was marinated in a vinaigrette that was also used on the salad greens. Then the lamb was grilled on the BBQ. It was cooked just how I like it, medium rare and was oh so tasty. I have come to really love chickpeas over the last 6 months too, so the accompanying chickpea puree was just delightful.

The dessert was jolly nice too, lemon ricotta crepes with blueberries. It was supposed to have bananas too but we forgot to buy them. The simple blueberry sauce was particularly good.

All up a very nice meal with family.

Well that is about all I have to write about from the last month. I have enjoyed spending a bit of time here in NZ with friends and family and am looking forward to getting back to Vancouver now. Hopefully I will be there by the end of next week, I haven't booked any flights yet but am planning on flying on the 22nd Feb.

Sorry ladies, I'm taken

2007-12-28T16:57:00.000-08:00

Well my time in PNG has now come to an end. The last 5 months have been some of the most memorable and enjoyable months of my life. I can not speak highly enough of the friends I have made in such a short period of time. There was one person in particular that I have gotten to know particularly well over the last few months. If you look back at previous posting of the last few months Tiffany's name pops up every now and again, but to my surprise these mentions didn't even trigger a comment from any family members. It seems Daryl's comment on Shannon while I was in Vancouver has made him a little reluctant to try and hassle me in such a public forum. Any way I was rather excited when Tiffany (also known as T) suggested that she would like to come and spend a week in New Zealand over the Christmas period. T was able to get a seat on the same flight as me from Cairns to Auckland, resulting in the potentially awkward situation of being greeted at the airport by my parents, brothers and nephews and nieces. Being the somewhat cautious person that I am, my family had heard nothing of T other than the few mentions on my blog. My nephew Jordan quickly decided that he wanted to find out a bit more about T so proceeded to ask a bunch of questions, getting sillier and sillier as he went.

The next day we spent looking around Auckland a little. We went and had lunch at a cafe in town before jumping on the ferry over to Devonport where we walked around NorthHead and Mt Victoria. The weather treated us very kindly, not a drop of rain. Yep a December day in Auckland without any rain, what a pleasant change. After returning to the city we stopped in at the Domain to try and see the gardens but they were already closed so we had to settle for a little walk around the duck ponds. We tried getting some photos of the ducklings but they kept moving so none of them turned out all that good.

The next day we took a trip down to Waitomo and went black water rafting. It was great fun. Black water rafting involves floating down a river in a cave in inner tubes. There are a few small waterfalls that you have to jump off which was good fun. You get to see the glow worms too so all in all it is a pretty cool little trip. After Waitomo we went to Rotorua, taking a somewhat scenic route that wises maps recommended. Some of the directions were not particularly accurate, like when it said to go straight instead of left. Fortunately my impeccable sense of direction didn't get us lost and we made it to Rotorua. The next day we went up the Gondola and raced each other on the Luge. You sit on these 3 wheel trolley things and go down a windy concrete track, ranging in length from 2km for the scenic track to 1km for the advanced track. If you are ever in Rotorua then it is well worth a visit.

In the afternoon we took a trip to Mt Maunganui to see the beach and have a spot of dinner on the way back up to Auckland.

On Sunday we went to my church where it was nice to be able to catch up with everyone again, then we had lunch with Kris and Amy, followed by a trip to Piha beach to show T what black sand looks like. Then it was off to the carols in the park where we met up with the family for a picnic. Jiggles the clown was there too and he kept the kids amused.

Monday was largely taken up with last minute Christmas shopping followed by a family dinner so that everyone could get to know T a bit better.

Christmas day was not quite so good weather wise, with a few showers here and there but we did still manage to get a quick game of badminton in after dinner to try and burn off a few calories.

And that pretty much wraps up the week that T was here in NZ. It was far too short a visit really.

Mt Wilhelm

2007-12-13T16:58:00.000-08:00

As mentioned in my last post, last weekend I went on a hike up the highest mountain in PNG, Mt Wilhelm. There were 6 of us that went, and it was a very fun bunch of people to go with. In order to get to the hut before dark we needed to leave Ukarumpa bright and early, so we met at 6am and loaded the Hilux and by 6:30 we were on our way. Thankfully, we had no holdups and had a very smooth trip for the first 4 hours, we didn't even hit too many potholes. Then the fun started. Once we turned off the Highlands Highway at Kundiawa the road became much more interesting. This road was not sealed at all and was full of large bumps and mud puddles, not the kind of road you would go down without 4WD. Chris seemed to enjoy driving down this road. After about 2 hours of driving down this windy, steep, rocky, at times muddy road we made it to Keglsugl where we found parked the hilux and started the hike to the hut.

The hike up to the hut was a relatively simple hike, much like a lot of the bush walks around New Zealand. It took around 3 1/2 hours, including a few stops to re-hydrate and to admire the view. Most of the hike was through bush, very similar looking to the Waitakare Ranges in Auckland at points, with lots of ferns around. Near the end of the hike the trail went through a meadow with just a few ferns dotted around, it looked very much like something out of Jurassic Park. At the end of this meadow kind of thing was a pretty cool waterfall, then a little further on was the hut, nestled in at the base of a hill, a minutes walk away from the beautiful lake.

At this point I experienced being cold for the first time in PNG, sure I had felt slightly nippy a couple of times in Ukarumpa before, but nothing I would really classify as cold. This was cold, so cold in fact that I decided that it was cold enough to wear socks on my hands. Still it wasn't quite cold enough to change out of shorts.

We decided to explore our surroundings a little before it got dark, so we went on a little walk down to the lake. The lake was almost perfectly still, and a very good mirror reflection could be seen of the hills behind the lake. It was really quite a magnificent site. It would almost be worth doing the hike just to the hut to see the view there, although once you factor in the hours of driving to get to the start of the hike I think the cost/benefit ratio would not be looking all that favourable. So I guess what I am saying is if you happen to be driving past Keglsugl it would be well worth stopping and hiking up to the hut. The odds of you just so happening to be driving past are not all that high though so I guess most of this paragraph is kind of useless.

After admiring the lake we went back to the hut to eat dinner. We decided to go for the good old PNG staple of rice with instant noodles and tuna. Not exactly a gourmet meal, but it tasted just fine to us. Then after dinner we took an early night to try and get at least a couple of hours of shut-eye before starting the hike to the summit.

At 12am we all reluctantly stumbled out of bed in the freezing cold and got ourselves organised for the hike. We had prepared some breakfast bars a few days before so we all chowed in to them. They tasted pretty good, although a little on the sweet side for my liking. At 12:30 we were all ready for the hike so set off following our guides for the 5-6 hour hike to the highest point in PNG.

After about 1/2 an hour it became apparent that the breakfast bars were not sitting favourably for most of us, and the realisation was made that we didn't bring enough toilet paper to adequately deal with the aftermath of the breakfast bars. At around about that stage Lisa decided to turn back to the hut, hiking at that altitude can be tough and she was finding it really difficult. We sent one of the guides back with her, instructing him to catch us up and to bring extra toilet paper with him. Unfortunately that guide was also not feeling all that well and we suspect he decided to sleep for a couple of hours before heading back up the mountain. We caught up with him again about a quarter of the way back down again.

I don't really have much to say about the next 4 hours or so. The hike wasn't really all that difficult, although it was pretty tiring, especially as I had my pack on my back with a big bottle of water, a bunch of clothes that I had taken off after I warmed up a little, some chocolate and as I found after returning to the hut a loaf of banana bread. Hiking in the dark is not the most pleasant of experiences either, you don't get to enjoy the view so much and you don't really see much of where you are heading. Only having 3 hours sleep (and interrupted sleep at that) didn't help much either.

At around 5am Chris and Andrea decided they were feeling too sick to continue up the mountain. We stopped and discussed what we should do, whether we should split up, or whether we should all just turn back. A couple of minutes before this we had passed a plaque in memory of some chap who died on the mountain. He had twisted his ankle and remained behind while the rest of his group went to the summit. It is assumed that he must have tried finding his own way back down the mountain and fallen in to a ravine. This plaque made me more than just a little reluctant to leave Chris and Andrea to find their own way down in the dark. After 30 minutes of deliberation we decided to start heading back down the mountain again, we had failed. After hiking down for 5 or so minutes we stopped again and the deliberations started up again. By this time the first sign of sunrise could be seen and I was convinced by the others that it would now be safe enough for Chris and Andrea to find their own way back down the mountain. So Deb, Matt and I turned around and started to head back up. During the deliberation we were told that we still had a good 3 hours to go. Fortunately this was proven to be a bit of an exaggeration and we were able to make it to the summit by 7am.

The view from the top was breathtaking, or maybe that was the hike up the mountain. Either way I was breathing pretty hard by the time I reached the top. It was a gorgeous day, unusually clear for Mt Wilhelm that late in the morning. We could see all the way to Karkar island, and a bunch of other places a long way away. Some of the valleys had swirly clouds in them and looked really cool. We stayed up the top for 30 minutes or so before slowly starting our hike back down to the hut. We were all absolutely exhausted by this stage, so the walk down seemed to be a lot more difficult than the walk up was. On a couple of occasions I managed to sneak in a few minutes of sleep. Our guide was feeling pretty lousy by this stage, I think he had a really bad headache, and we found we were pretty much ahead of him for most of the trip down. At one point he fell asleep and Deb had quite a job trying to wake him up.

Finally we made it down to the hut by around 11am and had a spot of lunch, pasta with tomato pasta sauce. I then played Rook (a card game) for a while before taking a long nap.

I won't describe the rest of the trip in detail as it was nothing particularly noteworthy and this blog is long enough already and I have another blog entry I want to write after this one.

All in all the trip was well worthwhile and I enjoyed it. In saying that, I never want to do it again, it is definitely a once in a lifetime trip for me.

Lone Tree - training for Mt Wilhelm

2007-12-03T23:19:00.000-08:00

Last Saturday a bunch of us went on a little hike up to the top of Lone Tree, the top of one of the ridges around the valley that Ukarumpa is nestled in. Lone Tree is a rather poor name for the hill that we were going up, as at the top of the hill is a forest, apparently it was named before the landowners planted the forest and I guess no-one has bothered to update the name yet.

The best time for hiking around these parts seems to be in the morning, as it usually starts raining in the afternoon. That fact in mind, it was decided that we would meet at 9 in the morning, a time of day I rarely see during the weekend. Still I managed to drag myself out of bed in time and even managed a spot of breakfast before heading off. It was a stunner of a day, nice and sunny but not too hot, perfect conditions really.

Just outside the gates of Ukarumpa we came across a river that we had to cross, so we all waded across, some finding better paths than others. Not far after the river we walked through a village, then through some gardens. Around about then some children from the village decided that we didn't know the way, so they became our guides, leading us all the way to the top and back down safely. Dan rewarded them with a bag of corn chips for their hard work.

All up the hike took around 4 hours going at a somewhat leisurely pace. A grand time was had by all, as far as I could tell.

For some of us there was a secondary reason for doing this hike (although I would have still gone anyway). Next weekend 6 of us are going to climb the highest peak in PNG, Mt Wilhelm. At a height of 4,509 metres it is around 1,000 metres higher than Mt Cook, New Zealand's highest mountain, so the altitude will certainly be making the hike somewhat more difficult than lone tree was. We leave Friday morning and drive for 5 or so hours before starting a 4 hour hike to a lake and a cabin where we can have a spot of dinner before trying to get a couple of hours sleep. Then at 1am we have to get up again and start the climb to the summit in order to arrive at around sunrise. Leaving it much later is not such a good idea as the mountain usually is clouded over an hour after sunrise, and we would really like to see the view from the top. Then we will descend back down to the cabin where we will spend the afternoon and night before going the back to the vehicle the next morning. Hopefully that will give us time to go to "The Bird" in Goroka for dinner on the way home. It should be a blast, the others I am going with are really fun people. I'll keep y'all posted on how the trip goes next week.

Thanksgiving and Earthquake

2007-11-23T19:23:00.000-08:00

Well as some of you are probably aware Thursday was American thanksgiving day, and as a fair proportion of the missionaries here in Ukarumpa are of US decent thanksgiving is celebrated here too. It would appear that being a single American guy would be kind of nice this time of year, Chris my roommate has been invited to 4 different thanksgiving meals this year, not a bad effort. However the celebrations are not restricted to Americans, I went to a lovely thanksgiving dinner on Thursday at Tiffany's place along with 9 others. There were 7 Americans, 2 Aussies and myself (a New Zealander). A grand time was had by all, we had plenty of yummy food and none of the strange American dishes like sweet potato with marshmallows on top (sorry to any of you who may be reading this who gave me any of this in Vancouver, you are still all very nice people despite your eating habits). While we waited for the main course to settle we all shared something we are thankful for and then we had a good old sing-a-long. Then came dessert, now this time Americans have got it right and us New Zealanders could learn a thing or two. Pumpkin pie is the business, a great use for the humble pumpkin.

Just as I was getting in to the van to go down to thanksgiving the earth started shaking. It didn't take too long to establish that I was experiencing an earthquake, and a much more significant one than I had previously experienced. The earthquake lasted much longer than any of the other quakes that occur every now and again over here, I would guess it lasted a good 30 seconds or so. The reported size of the quake was 6.7 and was centred 100km off the coast from Lae, so it was a fair way away from Ukarumpa. Still it was violent enough to put a large leak in our water tank as well as another 8 tanks around Ukarumpa. The repair dudes replaced our tank yesterday and then finished plumbing it in this morning, so now we just have to wait for more rain to fill it up, and based on the weather pattern we have been experiencing lately I expect that it should only take a couple of days to fill up the tank. It certainly appears that we are moving in to the rainy season, every afternoon it starts raining some time between 1 and 4 and keeps raining most of the night; rather inconvenient when I forget to take my umbrella to work after lunch.

Carnival

2007-11-15T23:47:00.000-08:00

Last Saturday one of the highlights of the Ukarumpa calendar took place, the Ukarumpa Carnival.

All your favourite carnival food was available like candy floss/cotton candy/fairy floss, donuts, funnel cakes, ice cream, plus a variety of other food items of a more savoury nature. I particularly liked the donuts, freshly made with either vanilla, maple or chocolate glaze, yummy. It was a gorgeous day which in turn meant that I was kind of thirsty, so I went through a fair few bottles of root beer and cream soda (I don't think they had any water on sale or I would have chosen that). By the end of the day I had quite enough sugary stuff.

There were all sorts of fun activities the whole family could enjoy. The mini golf was pretty good, a very interesting course although it could have been improved if the grass had been mowed beforehand.

The sumo-wrestling in inner tubes was a little on the tiring side but fun none the less. I had a slight advantage in the group that I joined, as I was a little bigger than the others, and the only guy

The 12th grade boys had a great time going around arresting people and putting them in jail until they would pay to be released. Quite a little money making business, someone would pay to get you put in jail, plus they could pay more to keep their name a secret. But the prisoner could pay more to find out who the scoundrel was that put them behind bars.

But by far the most popular attraction of the day was the ferris wheel, or ferris square if you you want to be more precise. This was built by one of the men here back in 1995 and is operated each year by the 11th grade boys. They sure must have been tired by the end of the day, they were busy all day pushing people around and around. I decided to cut them a bit of a break and I just watched.

News from the kitchen

2007-11-03T23:37:00.000-07:00

For those of you who read my blog during my year in Vancouver, you may recall that I would regularly post reviews of various meals I had enjoyed cooking. I realised that I have not been doing that lately so I thought I would take this opportunity to tell y'all about my recent experimentation with the middle eastern favourite falafel. Sorry I don't have a camera any more so there are not photos to accompany this review, you will have to use your imagination.

Falafel are little fried balls made mainly of chickpeas (or Garbanzo beans whatever you want to call them). As the selection of meat here is not all that great I have been finding vegetarian dishes to be more and more of an appealing option lately, especially dishes using chickpeas. I first tried my hand at making falafel a few months ago, the first attempt was not bad, definitely a recipe I considered worth trying again and experimenting a little with. The second time I forgot a vital ingredient, flour is essential to help the falafel hold together, after trying to shallow fry a couple of them I found that my oil was extremely dirty and my falafel were very small. So I added the flour and reshaped all my falafel then tried again, still using the dirty oil. They were
not all that good and it kind of put me off attempting them for a couple of months. Then last week Chris and I were deciding what to have for dinner and I suggested trying falafel again. As good as falafel are, they really need something to go with them, some kind of sauce or dip or something, so I decided to try another chickpea staple, hummous. Wow, what a great meal that was, who would have though the humble chickpea could so easily be made in to 2 wonderful dishes. The unfortunate side effect was the strong taste of garlic left in my mouth for the rest of the evening, but that is a small price to pay. I was so impressed by the falafel and hummous that I thought I should share the experience with others, and as Deb has frequently had Chris and I over for dinner I thought I would repay the favour. So on Wednesday I invited Deb over to share in the falafel experience. This time I decided to try a slightly different recipe, as I had not been entirely happy with the texture of the previous attempts. This recipe involved rolling the falafel in sesame seeds before frying. It was a great idea, the sesame seeds added a little crunch and tasted just superb. As I had planned this meal a few days ahead I made sure I had other sauces available as well, well actually it was just more hummous and some unsweetened yoghurt, but it was certainly a great addition to the meal. Then to make the meal complete I baked some pita bread, and to my surprise they actually worked pretty well, good enough for us to stuff them with hummous, yoghurt and falafel without them falling apart.

So now after these last 2 falafel experiences I am right in falafel mode again, and each time I go to the store I can't resist buying another can or two of chickpeas, just in case. I have my eye on a rather yummy looking eggplant dip that I spotted in a magazine the other week, so maybe I will have to try that with my next falafel adventure.

The Golf Course

2007-11-03T23:12:00.001-07:00

Well once again it has been far too long since my last blog update. In my last post I hinted at an upcoming review of the Ukarumpa golf course so I guess I should start with that.

On my first day here in Ukarumpa I was having lunch with the Hinton family and was pleased to learn that Ukarumpa has it's own golf course, and whats more membership fees are non-existant (well I think they are anyway). I was eagerly looking forward to the opportunity to display my prowess with a golf club, and pretty excited at the prospect of driving a golf ball while at such a high altitude. The boost that would do to my ego would be substantial I am sure, I mean who wouldn't be impressed by 350 meter drives? After expressing this to a few people I was informed that the golf course was not really that kind of a course, it is more of a pitch and putt kind of arrangement. Furthermore it is not a full size pitch and putt, there are 3 holes and 3 tees so if you play all combinations then you get a 9 hole course, play every hole twice and there is your 18 holes.

I didn't hear much more about the golf course for a few months, when I made a passing comment to someone that I had heard there was a golf course somewhere but I had not yet seen it. In reply I was told that I have walked or driven past it numerous times. When they explained exactly where it was I couldn't get myself to believe them, it looked like a small vacant section, awaiting the time when the number of staff here necessitated the addition of a couple more houses. Melanie and I decided one day to find out once and for all if this was in fact the golf course, so went in search of tell tale signs of a golf course, the holes. This was not an easy task as the grass was kind of long at the time, but eventually I found evidence of the existence of the golf course, 1 hole partially covered by grass but most definitely a hole non the less. It turns out that the guy who was maintaining the course is not in Ukarumpa at the moment, he is either on furlough or gone for good, I'm not sure which, so the course was in a state of disrepair. Rumour has it that there has been a renewed interest in the golf course and it has been mowed now so I will have to check it out some time.

The hole.

The entire course, all 9 holes

Birthday party

2007-10-18T00:19:00.000-07:00

I thought I would take a few minutes to update everyone on what I did this year for my birthday. My birthday was on a Saturday this year so it was jolly nice being able to sleep in on my birthday for a change. A number of my friends were away for the weekend so I decided to have my party last Wednesday when more people were around. Tiffany kindly offered to make dinner for everyone and to hold the party at her place, a very good idea considering that my house cleaner only comes Monday and Thursday so by Wednesday we are normally a little low on clean dishes. On a side note it is really very nice having someone come and do laundry and clean the dishes and make a cooked lunch twice a week, I'm sure I will take a while to get used to not having this wonderful service when I leave here. Any way back to the party, Tiffany made a lovely curry for dinner and also organised party games and a cake. All I had to do was invite people, oh and I also made icecream for desert but more about that later.

A few weeks ago I told a bunch of my friends here about the little run in I had with a horse while driving my car 10 years or so ago. Apparently they enjoyed this story and I guess they thought it would be funny to hassle me a bit about it. So for the main party game of the evening we had a rousing game of "crash the car in to the horse", a twist on the party favourite "pin the tail on the donkey".

After the game I was presented with my very own racing car cake, and a very interesting cake it was. Now to accompany the cake I had made the icecream that I was shown how to make in my french cooking class in Vancouver. It was basil flavoured icecream and most people were a little skeptical about the desirability of having basil and icecream mixed together. Admittedly I was not all that convinced about the idea until I tasted it, but it actually works pretty well. Most people claimed to enjoy it, so either they were lying or it wasn't bad.

After cake we played a game of beans (a very cool card game) but unfortunately it doesn't really work so well with 10 people so the game wasn't the best, it works much better with 4 or 5 people.

That about raps up the birthday party. Tune in next time for photos of the Ukarumpa golf course, rather a grand course.

The long promised fireworks review

2007-09-28T21:14:00.001-07:00

Well time has just been flying by and I realize it has been a good couple of weeks since I promised the posting on what people do for entertainment in Ukarumpa. I would have gotten around to this sooner, but I couldn't be bothered, sorry.
Anyway…

A while ago now a bunch of us decided to have a fireworks evening. Fireworks are not readily available in the store here so we had to make to with home made fireworks. When I say home made fireworks I am not really talking about anything flash, in fact it was very basic and I’m sure you would easily be able to find the necessary items in any good supermarket, or even in some not so good ones. What you need is a metal coat hanger, some string, some steel wool and a flame, we found a candle worked well. Now tie the string on to the coat hanger so that it is at a length that you can swing around without it hitting the ground. Now wrap some of the steel wool around the coat hanger, make sure the wool is not too tight as you want the air to be able to get in when it is swinging around. Once it is securely fastened on to the coat hanger light the steel wool with a candle. Once it is sufficiently alight started swinging it around in a circular fashion as fast as you can. And that’s all there is to it. If you want to take photos of this, I suggest not using the flash, and use a relatively slow shutter speed, that way the photos show the fireworks really well. Actually you may find that looking at the photos is more spectacular than looking at the real thing.

Just to give you an idea of what it was like, here are a few photos. I can’t take credit for these ones, my photos were all stolen along with my laptop.

Lighting the steel wool

I am swinging this one. Note the fine swinging form displayed.

Warning: It is not advisable for small children to attempt this, the steel wool gets very hot. Do not stand beside anyone who is swinging the fireworks, you will get covered in sparks if you do. Ensure you have a plan for what to do in case a fire breaks out, we decided to do the fireworks outside the fire-station just in case.

This was going to be about entertainment but...

2007-09-14T19:47:00.000-07:00

Well I had planned to write today about how people here in Ukarumpa keep themselves entertained. I had some photos all ready to post about the homemade fireworks that we had much fun with one night last week. However a certain unexpected event last night means I can no longer post those pictures.

Yesterday after work I moved my stuff from the house I had been staying in, to the new house I am moving in to. I am moving in with 2 other single guys who I have been getting on pretty well with. So anyway, I moved my stuff in and then went out for dinner. It was hamburger night at the teen centre where a bunch of school students sell hamburgers to the rest of the community, quite an event for a town with no regular restaurants. After dinner I went to another friend's house to play Settlers, a board game that is rather popular here. Unfortunately this time I didn't win the game, but it was fun never the less.

On returning home at around 10pm we found that some thieves had broken in through the back door and stolen all of our laptops and cameras, hence my inability to post the previously mentioned photos. So within 4 hours of moving in to my new place, I had been burgled, that is just great.

Hopefully some of the other people at the fireworks night will have some photos I can copy so keep an eye out over the next few days and maybe there will be a couple of pictures.

Madang photos

2007-09-07T23:32:00.000-07:00

I have had a request for photos of last weeks Madang trip, so to keep my
readers happy I present Madang in colour.

There were lots of bats in Madang.

The little boys at the village we went to were very good tree climbers. They would go up to get some 'buai', a little nut thingy that lots of people chew to get a bit of a buzz. They then spit it out resulting in red stains all over the ground. Oh and their teeth and mouths are all red. Very attractive.

We saw a pet cassowary on the way home. It is just a baby one.

The store at the village we went to. There wasn't much for sale in the store.

The back of the PMV for the last little trip from Kainantu back to Ukarumpa (only about 10 minutes). It was much more crowded than it appears in the photo.

One of the lovely snorkeling spots. This is where I had my T=bone steak.

The other snorkeling spot, Rempi. Very nice little spot.

This tree was pretty cool. It was huge with a lot of different trunks all part of the same tree. Good for swinging on.

Madang

2007-09-02T22:49:00.000-07:00

I have now been here in PNG for around 5 weeks, so I figured it was about time I had another holiday. Well actually a bunch of others were heading to Madang for a 6 days and asked if I would like to come along. There were 8 of us going, so the most economical way for us to go was to catch a PMV from Ukarumpa. The nice driver picked us up bright and early at 7am on Wednesday and we set off. I was told by a national chap that it takes 3 - 4 hours depending on the driver. I now am wondering whether that chap actually had a watch, because there is no way you could drive there in 3 hours, I think we took at least 5 hours. Thankfully it was a very boring trip, no accidents, no armed holdups, not even anyone blocking the road armed with shovels asking for money.

Madang is on the coast of PNG and has some very nice snorkeling and diving spots and a great supply of coconuts, mangoes and papaya, yummy. On the afternoon that we arrived we took a short trip in to town to go to the market and to the supermarket to get most of the ingredients for the various meals we were planning to cook over the week. There were 4 supermarkets that we went to over the week and they were pretty good by PNG standards. I picked up a few ingredients that I can't find or are expensive in Ukarumpa, yay I can start cooking with olive oil again.

On Thursday we went second hand clothes shopping in the morning, not really my cup of tea, although I was surprised at the quality of some of the clothes available. Unfortunately nothing caught my fancy so I didn't buy anything. After a while I grew a little bored so went for a walk to take some photos of the town. I found a bunch of big bats hanging in a tree, they are not the prettiest of creatures.

In the afternoon we went snorkeling and I am happy to report that I did indeed find Nemo. He was darting in and out of an anemone. We also saw a bunch of other colourful fish and even a sea snake, right next to the spot I had been standing a few minutes earlier.

We then all went out to the golf club for dinner, a lovely Chinese restaurant, very tasty. We were going to have ice-cream but they had run out and they apparently didn't have anything else available for dessert.

On Friday we went to visit the village that Tiffany lived in for 5 weeks during her POC orientation course in January. They were very nice people and extremely generous. They didn't know we were coming, and yet still they fed us all a big lunch including a chicken and various root vegetables. One man was particularly talkative and liked to tell stories. I am not exactly sure what the moral of most of the stories were, but the theme that seemed to reoccur time and time again is that if you are going in a boat, don't let any cassowary birds in with you, they are not to be trusted. In one story it pushed a wallaby in to the water and then ate a turtle, very odd stories indeed.

On Saturday we went up to visit the people currently on the POC course. The course runs for either 6 weeks or 15 weeks, depending on the kind of work you will be doing in PNG. During the weekends they all have to cook for themselves on outdoor fires, so that they can learn how to cook while in a village. Ron and I were on cooking lunch that day, so we made tortillas on Friday night and then cooked up some mince and made salsa and guacamole. It was jolly tasty and everyone seemed to appreciate it. Home made tortillas are much nicer in my opinion to the store bought variety and they really are not that hard to make.

On Sunday we went to a local church in the morning, we turned up a little late, but still managed to catch the last 3 1/2 hours or so. It was mostly in English so at least I could follow what was going on. In the afternoon we went to another snorkeling spot, one that had a restaurant too. So after a nice steak lunch I went and had a snorkel for a while. I saw more clown fish and a few other of the finding Nemo cast. The water was not as clear as the first spot, but there were bigger fish around so it was nice to see a bit of variety. In the evening a few of us went out for dinner, the last opportunity I will have for a while to eat out. I decided to see whether they could top the steak I had for lunch, and what do you know they could. It was very tasty although the mushroom and red wine sauce seemed to be missing the red wine. The specials board said there were strawberries and ice-cream for dessert, but it turned out that there were none left. So we inquired about the cheese-cake of the day, "Sorry no cheese-cake today". There were only 2 more items on the dessert menu, ice-cream and pie of the day. Ah yes a nice pie, so what was the pie of the day? Well at first we were told peach pie. Then after we finished our main course it had changed to apple pie with strawberry ice-cream, apparently there was no vanilla. So 3 of us ordered the apple pie with strawberry ice-cream. What we actually got was what we are assumed to be a peach pie, and vanilla ice-cream. The steak was significantly better than the pie was.

This morning (Monday) we left the SIL guest house at 7:15 and were dropped off in town to catch a PMV back to Ukarumpa. With 8 of us we figured it couldn't take too long to fill a PMV (they don't leave until they are crammed full of people). If any of you have played Pitt and were good at it, then you may want to consider moving to PNG and becoming a 'boss man', this is the guy who calls out of the window trying to attract more passengers. It seems that the number of available seats was a pretty flexible number. The boss man started off yelling "4 pela Goroka, 4 pela Goroka" (not too sure on the spelling sorry), meaning room for 4 more passengers going to Goroka. When he realised that the 8 of us who were already in the van were only going as far as Kainantu the call changed to "4 pela Kainantu, 4 pela Kainantu". Eventually 2 more passengers were found and they jumped in. The call then changed to "3 pela Kainantu". Now it has been a while since I was at school, but last time I checked 4 - 2 = 2 not 3. Hmm, I wonder where the 3rd person will sit. We drove around town for a while more calling for 3 people sometimes and 2 people other times, possibly depending on how many people we were passing at the time. Then one of the passengers that was in the van decided to get out, right back were he got in. I guess he wanted a break from the sun or something. Finally after much futile calling and driving all around Madang centre, we took off, with 1 spare seat. The trip back was equally as uneventful as the trip to Madang and I am now back safe and sound in Ukarumpa.

Sigri Coffee

2007-08-24T20:18:00.000-07:00

One of the highlights of my recent trip to CLTC was the tour of the
Sigri Coffee processing plant. Sigri coffee is the main PNG coffee
that is imported in to New Zealand, and a significant part of most of
the espresso blends I roast. The coffee is well known for it's
acidity particularly if only roasted to a relatively light roast.
This acidity does not suit my palate on it's own, so as a single
origin bean it is not so good, but in a blend it really adds a lot.

The Sigri processing plant is right next door to CLTC and uncle Ross
has a good relationship going with the manager guy there, so we were
able to go there on Saturday afternoon for a coffee cupping session
and a tour of the plant.

First off the coffee cherries get delivered on the back of pickup
trucks or what ever vehicle the growers may have available. Ideally
the cherries would all be red, however this is not always the case as
the pickers get kind of lazy and throw in a bunch of unripe green
cherries too. This is particularly true at the beginning and end of
the season when there are less ripe cherries around.

The cherries are dumped in to a big bin kind of thing and from there
they go through a machine that squeezes the bean out of the cherry.
At this stage the bean is covered in a slimy mucilage that is kind of
sweet.

In PNG most coffee is wet processed, this means that the mucilage is
removed before the bean is dried. In some other coffee growing
countries the beans are dry processed so the beans are just set out
to dry at this stage. For wet processing the beans are put in big
vats and soaked in water for a day before being moved to the next vat
the next day and yet another vat the next day. The number of vats
varies from place to place, but at Sigri they have 3 vats.

After that they are laid out to dry, this is sometimes done on tables
to let air circulate around the beans a bit more, or other times they
are dried on a concrete pad. After the beans are dried (it takes about 7
days I think) they are called parchment, the bean itself is
covered in a layer of silvery coloured stuff that should be removed
prior to roasting.

There can be a variance in the colour of the bean at this stage, as
some were riper than others when they were picked. Ideally they
should be a uniform colour, they fetch a better price that way. So
what they do is put them in some great big conditioning vats. Air is
pumped down to the bottom of the vat then blows back up through the
beans. They are kept in these vats for something like 25 days and
when they come out they are much more uniform in colour, a nice green/
blue colour.

At this stage the beans are sent through a machine that removes all
the sticks and stones that may have made it in to the beans. I can't
remember exactly how that machine worked but it was kind of cool.

Next up they need to remove the parchment from the beans. There are
2 machines that they use to do this, the first one kind of squeezes
the beans to try and get the bean out of the parchment. The second
machine polishes the beans, not too much, you don't want the beans to
be shiny, just enough to clean them up a bit. After they have gone
through those 2 machines they are looking pretty good and are ready
to be sorted and bagged.

The beans are sorted by size, so there are a series of trays with
different sized holes in them and the beans fall through. To stop
the beans from blocking up the holes there are a bunch of balls that
knock any stuck beans back out of the holes. The largest beans are
called AA, followed by A, B, C, maybe D I forget, possibly even some
other low grades, and peaberry. The peaberry are the most rare, they
account for only about 6% or 7% of the crop and are round in shape.
Most coffee cherries have 2 beans, but occasionally they only have 1,
that is when you get the peaberry beans. Peaberry and AA generally
will fetch the best price, and A and B are also reasonably good. In
New Zealand we usually get A and B grades from Sigri.

Once they are sorted in to their sizes there are 2 different ways of
sorting out the good from the bad beans. The first way is usually
used for the cheaper grades like C and D. The beans are put in to
this machine that blows are up from the bottom. The heavier beans
are the better ones and they fall down as the air is not strong
enough to blow them up. They fall in to a sack on the left of the
machine. The lighter beans bounce of the top and are directed to the
right where another jet of stream at a slightly lesser pressure again
blows the lighter beans up and the heavier beans fall in to another
sack. The beans that are still light enough are directed in to a
third sack that is sold to places like Nescafe for their awful
instant coffee stuff.

The better grades of bean are sorted on a rack that vibrates. The
rack is on a slight angle so the heavier beans gradually move to the
one side and the lighter beans to the other.

Once the beans have been sorted they can either be hand sorted to
remove any beans that are black or beans that are deformed, or for
the better grades they are sorted by the coolest machine that they
had there. This machine detected colour differences and when it saw
a black bean it shot a jet of compressed air at the bean, sending it
in to another sack. The beans that made it through the first pass of
this machine were then processed again at a different speed to get
any remaining ones out. Once again the reject beans were bagged up
and sold to Nescafe. After that the beans are all sorted by hand,
mainly to remove any deformed beans and also to catch any black beans
that may have made it through the last step.

If after hand sorting the beans are not up to scratch then they are
resorted by hand again, what a job.

After our tour we went in to the coffee cupping room and sampled 8
different beans. The first 4 had not been processed yet and still
had the parchment on when they were roasted. They all tasted pretty
similar to me, and none of them were all that memorable. Then we had
samples of AA, A, B and Peaberry that had just been processed. The
AA and peaberry were quite different to the A and B beans, they had
noticeably more acidity in them. I actually preferred the A grade
bean, to me it was a bit better balanced so more pleasant by itself
than the other AA and peaberry. In a blend however I think the AA
and peaberry may have more to contribute.

If you have read this far through this posting then I congratulate
you, a lot of people I am sure have stopped long before they get this
far.

Back safe and sound

2007-08-21T20:05:00.000-07:00

You can all sleep easy again. I have arrived back in Ukarumpa safe and sound. The trip back was uneventful, the only stops were planned stops to deliver chickens and eggs.

I have a good report on my tour of a coffee processing plant that I will write about later in the week. It was really interesting. I don't have time to write about it at the moment so you will all just have to wait patiently.

Trip to CLTC

2007-08-20T00:07:00.000-07:00

Well I thought I would take this opportunity to let you all know what travel is like here in PNG, land of the unexpected.

Earlier in the week I received a phone call from Aunty Alison who lives at CLTC (Christian Leaders Training College), around 7 hours drive from Ukarumpa. A van was coming through from Lae on the way back to CLTC on Friday that I could grab a ride on, so it seemed like a perfect opportunity to see where she lives and see a bit more of PNG.

The van was leaving Lae at around 4am and reached Ukarumpa just before 8am, so I had to leave work early. There were 5 of us in the van, myself, Uncle Ross, another kiwi named Laurie, the driver Thomas and a lady who works in the office at CLTC named Nancy. We took off and all was going well. We drove through Kainantu (not far from Ukarumpa) taking the same route I went on last weekend for the bible dedication.

As we approached the crest of a hill all of a sudden 4 men armed with home made rifles and 2 men with bush knives forced us to stop. This was a new experience to me. It would be exceptionally rare to be held up at gunpoint in New Zealand, and in my year in Canada not once did anything like this happen. So I was a little unsure what they may do. I figured they were probably after money, and I was starting to wish that I had stored some of my money in my shoe like Jonathan has been doing in the Philippines. I thought it would probably be too late to try transferring it at that point so I just sat there in the van and waited to see what would happen. One of the men with a bush knife approached the drivers door and hit it with his knife, not particularly hard, but enough to give the impression that he wanted the driver to wind down the window I guess. The driver had some lunch money stored in the ash tray and was pretty quick to hand that over, I think it was 18 kina (around NZ $9) and amazingly after receiving that money the gunmen took off. So we were let off very lightly and continued on our way, all be it a little shaken from our experience. Apparently the driver had been held up before and he and his son were driven to a village where the vehicle was unloaded and they were stripped naked before being allowed to take the van and leave. I didn't hear about that until later, so I didn't realize at the time just how lightly we had been let off.

A few hours later as we were driving along up a steep mountain pass, we came across a group of people looking over the edge of the road, where there was a 300 metre or so drop. Apparently a bus (one of the PMVs that I was intending on returning to Ukarumpa in) had not negotiated the corner successfully and had flown off the edge. Reports from people at the scene were that they had removed 15 bodies so far, and were still trying to cut others out of the wreckage.

Once again we continued on our journey, until we came across two men armed with shovels who were blocking the road. Apparently they had been filling in a few potholes and then demanding money from travellers in return. Not wanting to be harmed with the shovel, I quickly removed a 2 kina note from my shoe and handed it to the driver who passed it out the window. That seemed to satisfy them and we were allowed to continue yet again.

So we continued yet again until we came across a big truck trailer unit that was blocking half the road. A bunch of people were blocking the other half of the road asking for money. These people didn't even have any shovels, so they were a little more negotiable on price. They wanted 5 kina, instead Laurie told them off in the name of Jesus, and they took that as a fair payment and let us pass.

And that was the last stopage on the journey. Last night I heard that there was a possibility of catching a flight from Hagen to Ukarumpa, Hagen is about 1 hour or so from CLTC. So I left bright and early this morning in a van fill of day old chickens. After waiting at the airport for about an hour I finally found out that there were no flights going to Ukarumpa today so I was out of luck. Instead I spent a rather interesting day delivering chickens and driving around Hagen (I wasn't driving, I was just a passenger). I am heading back to Ukarumpa at 4am Wednesday in the CLTC egg delivery truck. Hopefully we will be too early for the rascalls and we will have a less eventful journey this time.

Sorry I didn't have the prescence of mind to grab my camera and take photos of the gunmen, you will just have to take my word for it that they looked pretty mean.

The Bible Dedication

2007-08-12T15:52:00.000-07:00

OK so I am submitting this blog via email, so if the formatting is
kind of odd then that is likely to be the reason.

Right, well on Saturday I went on my first trip outside of the
Ukarumpa mission centre. I was going with a bunch of other people
from Ukarumpa to a bible dedication a couple of hours drive away.
When I say a couple of hours drive away you must realize that I am
talking about a couple of hours on PNG roads away, so it wasn't actually all that far, maybe 100Km or so.

Anyhoo, we all met at 7:30 am and headed out. After about 5 minutes
we had to stop because the radiator hose on the vehicle I was
travelling in blew off. Like all good blokes we all got out and
looked under the hood to see what the problem was. Being the
incredibly handy guy that I am in all situations mechanical, I
decided the most useful role I could play would be the photographer.
Some of the others were more mechanically inclined and quickly found
that the radiator hose was no longer attached and then proceeded to
reattach it making good use of some electrical tape that of course
they had in the back of the vehicle. So after 10 minutes we were
back under way with our patched up radiator hose. Thankfully there were no more car troubles for the rest of the trip.

I recall while in Vancouver complaining a little about the state of
some of the roads and thinking there were quite a few potholes
around. I now look back on those roads and have a good old chuckle
as they were many times better than the roads over here. There were
huge potholes all over the place,

some of them particularly difficult to see amongst the shadows on the road. We were in a pretty decent size 4x4 and still there were several times that I was sure we were
going to do some serious damage to the axle or blow out a tyre. At
one point the road looked barely passable and yet the 2 others that
were with me said that there had been significant improvements on
that part of the road in the last 3 weeks, apparently the road bore
more resemblance to a lake 3 weeks earlier.

Well enough about the roads, I am sure you all want to hear about the
bible dedication. When a new translation of a bible is completed and
printed the tribe who are benefactors of the new translation hold a
bible dedication. I have been told that they vary quite a bit from
tribe to tribe, some of them being pretty solemn and others having
more of a celebratory mood. This one was leaning towards the
celebratory side of things thankfully. People had walked to the
meeting spot from miles around, and there was much singing going on
as we drove along the road.

People were clearly very happy. A number of people were dressed in traditional tribal attire, they generally don't wear this any more but have adopted a more western
style of clothing. When everyone had arrived the ceremony got
underway. The 'White Skins' as we are called were invited to sit
under a blue tarpaulin to the right of the stage, however we managed
to avoid this by moving quickly to a grass bank to the side and
making ourselves comfortable there.

Once the seating arrangements were sorted out there was a drama,
re=enacting the arrival of the white skin missionaries, it was
narrated in the local language so I had to do my best to follow what
was going on by looking. I couldn't really see very well from where
I was so I went for a bit of a walk around the area to see what else
was photo-worthy. There were lots of decorations around, often
comprising of large bunches of bananas with some hibiscus flowers on
them, or in other cases a cabbage hanging on a wire. I guess they
made use of what they had available.

After the drama the speeches began, and they continued for quite some
time. Every now and then I picked up a word or 2 and Steve Curry (my
manager) did a good job of translating what he picked up. It turns
out that the original translation work was begun in 1965. The
translation being dedicated was a revision of the old translation as
the language had changed quite a bit in the last 40 years.

After the speeches we were invited to have lunch so we accepted the
kind offer and joined the other white skins in a nearby classroom for
a lunch of potato, kau-kau, chicken, coleslaw, lettuce, pawpaw and
pineapple. Not bad although the chicken could have done with a
little seasoning.

Food, lodgings and coffee

2007-08-03T17:51:00.002-07:00

As those of you who have been regular readers over the last year may remember, while I was in Vancouver I made regular trips to the public market at Granville Island where I could find all manner of fresh fruit and veggies and a wide variety of fish and meat, not to mention the vast array of gourmet cheeses. Add to that the various herbs and grains etc and pretty much 95% of my ingredients could all be found in the often very busy market.

Well the morning market at Ukarumpa is kind of like that except there are only fruit and veggies, and not so many of them. The morning market happens 3 times a week, Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Calling it the morning market in my opinion is not the most appropriate name for it, I prefer to think of it as the pre-morning market. It kicks off at 6:30 and is all over by 8:00, and the later you go the more meager the selection is. On the 3 occasions that I have made it to the market so far I have arrived at around 7:00 and there has been quite a good variety of produce for sale. There are pineapple, bananas, strawberries, some other berry looking things, bell peppers (capsicums), potatoes, sweet potatoes, broccoli, beans, lettuce, vanilla beans, and the list could go on. The prices are often ridiculously cheap, yesterday I managed to score a bunch of bananas for around US $0.50 and they have been pretty tasty so far. Then there were the vanilla beans, 4 for US$0.30, not bad at all considering I spent around $9 for 2 of them in New Zealand last month. Instead of listing all of the items and their prices I will include a picture, everything in that picture was purchased for about US$3.00, not bad at all. On my first trip to the market I was looking for garlic, and was rather surprised when someone pointed it out at one of the tables. It was tiny, the whole bulb was about the size of a regular single clove. I bought some and used it a few times, I found it ridiculously painful to work with. Each clove was not much larger than a grain of rice once it was peeled. I ended up buying a jar of minced garlic from the store, much easier to work with.

Well enough about food for now, a number of people have expressed an interest in what my living arrangements are like. They are pretty nice. I have hot water available thanks to the solar panels on the roof, so I can still enjoy hot showers. The house is a duplex, with the other half of the house currently unoccupied. My half is the half on the right in the photo. Yesterday my flatmate arrived, his name is Ron I think. He is from Canada, Labrador I believe. His accent is quite different to the few Canadians I met in Vancouver, but I can normally understand him alright. He is a physio and is here for 6 weeks before heading to New Zealand for a couple of weeks. He is then going to Singapore or Taiwan, I forget, for a wedding, before eventually heading back to Canada for his own wedding in December. Any way back to the house, um, it has wooden floors, white walls and white ceilings. There is a kitchen with a rather scary gas oven, I am yet to figure out how to turn the oven on, some other gas ovens I have seen around Ukarumpa have to be started by using a long match. There is a starter button on the oven, but as yet pressing it has not achieved anything and the smell of gas filling the kitchen has prompted me to turn the gas off again before a random spark leaves me without any eyebrows. The lounge has a rather uncomfortable couch and 2 equally uncomfortable armchairs. There is also a table with 4 chairs. My bedroom has a double bed, a small desk with chair and an empty bookcase. If anyone has any further questions regarding the house feel free to leave a question, or if you prefer your questions to be private then send me an email.

A few people have also asked what the coffee situation is like here. Well, for the first few days it was particularly tough as I had no way of making any coffee. However someone I had lunch with on Saturday came to my rescue and found a spare french press that I can borrow for the time I am here. That alleviated the problem to some extent, now the only problem is I have no coffee grinder. I will have to keep a lookout for a cheap grinder somewhere, maybe the store will have one soon (it is pretty variable what the store actually has in stock). Anyway, I was given a bag of pre-ground coffee, PNG Blue Mountain. The beans taste kind of odd, I haven't quite been able to figure out exactly what it is that was odd about it that is odd, they are not really nasty tasting, just odd. Considering they were roasted in April I would have to say they are not too bad, and they may have actually been quite nice when they were fresh. There is a coffee research centre just outside of the village, I passed it on my way here from the airstrip, so I will have to pay a visit there some time.

There seems to be an abundance of very small wildlife around my house, particularly wildlife of the type that like to spin webs. I happened to look a little closer at one the other day and noticed that it had what looks like a big shell on it's back. I have since seen a few more of these around the exterior of the house, they look kind of cool so I took a photo.

Settling in time

2007-07-30T00:03:00.000-07:00

Well for those of you who I haven't contacted yet, which would be pretty much everyone except Mum and Dad, I have safely arrived in Ukarumpa, Papua New Guinea.

I think I have now traveled in the smallest plane I will ever travel in, a Cessna 206, maximum capacity 5 passengers. I was in the co-pilot seat so had a wonderful view of the clouds and occasional river and rolling hills that make up the PNG eastern highlands. I had to be careful not to stretch my legs too straight as there were some foot pedals down there and I didn't really want to send the plane in an uncontrollable spin or anything. The flight was around 1 3/4 hours and the plane actually felt reasonably safe, it didn't bounce around too much.

On arriving in Ukarumpa I was met at the airstrip by my department bosses and Tony and Martha Hinton, the fellowship family that was assigned to show me around. Tony is a fellow kiwi although he has spent about 10 years in the UK and another 10 years in the US so his accent is a little confused at times.

There is a sign up sheet in the post office here with all the new people on it, where people sign up to have the newbies over for dinner or lunch. So far I have been out for dinner 3 times and lunch 4 times, so I am getting to know people pretty quickly. There are a bunch of young people here and the ones I have met so far have been great fun to be around and very welcoming.

On Saturday night there was a contemporary worship time with a really good worship band playing a good mix of songs. I would have to say it was one of the best worship bands I have seen. The music on Sunday morning was a little less to my liking, although they say if you don't like the style of service here, come back next week because it will be totally different, so I will have to see what it is like next week. I had a chat with one of the worship leaders and he sounded keen to get me involved in his team. There are so many good musicians over here, I guess I won't be playing quite as often as I was in Vancouver.

I haven't gone for a walk with my camera yet so don't have many photos yet, and the ones I do have are still on my camera so they will have to wait for the next posting. I was a little concerned for a while that I wouldn't be able to post pictures on my blog as I have to pay 30 cents per Mb for web usage. Fortunately that charge is only for incoming traffic, so I can post pictures for free! I will have to limit my web browsing though so probably won't be playing any of Dan's I hate Monday games for a while.

And that's all I have to say today. Check back in a few days and I may have more to say.

Final post from NZ

2007-07-22T23:12:00.000-07:00

Well my month home in Auckland has just flown by and it is now only 12 1/2 hours until I depart to on my next great adventure.

In my time back home I have once again come to realise how good my espresso machine is. I had actually gotten used to not having fantastic coffee at home while living in Vancouver and had forgotten how good it was to wake up and be able to start the day off with a perfect latte or espresso. It will be missed over the next 5 months for sure.

It has also been nice being able to play a few rounds of golf over the last month, even if I got absolutely drenched in the process. I was certainly a bit rusty after not playing since October but in the last game I was starting to be a bit happier with the way I was hitting the ball, despite the somewhat unimpressive scorecard. It has been great being able to finally use my 'new' driver on a course at last, surprisingly it didn't totally fix my slice, so perhaps there is a flaw in my swing.

Vacation montage

2007-07-03T01:33:00.000-07:00

Well I have been very slack writing about my vacation and quite frankly am lacking the inspiration right now to write a detailed commentary on all I did and saw, so instead I will put together a bit of a photo montage of the last month or so.

Whistler
It was kind of cloudy up the mountains so we just hired some bikes to ride around the valley. There are some really nice lakes that are pretty close to the village. Didn't get a chance to do any downhill riding, Mum and Dad didn't seem to keen.

Victoria
Apparently we were really lucky to see so many orcas resting. And as you can tell we got really close to the whales to. Splendid.
The deer in somebodies garden was pretty cool.

Salt Spring Island
Beautiful place, we stayed in a really nice little log cabin beside a lake. Highlight of Salt Spring Island was visiting the cheese shop, very yummy goats cheeses. The bread shop had some really nice bread too.

Las Vegas
We arrived kind of late at night so all the rooms that we had booked were taken, so we got an upgrade to a suite, a 2 level room complete with a sauna shower and jacuzzi. Unfortunately it also only came with 1 bed so I had to sleep on a roll-away. Didn't really do much in Vegas other than sleep and eat.

Zion National Park

Bryce Canyon
Well known for it's hoodoos, indeed they were the best hoodoos I have ever seen.

Grand Canyon
The grand canyon is huge, I had no idea it was that big. It is pretty hard to capture the scale of it in a photograph, I kind of failed in that regard but I got a photo of a bee and a squirrel!

Yosemite National Park
My favourite of all the places we visited. I would love to go back there in winter time, maybe next year.

San Francisco
Didn't really get any photos worth posting here. We went on a tour to the golden gate bridge but it didn't stop on the side of the bridge I wanted a photo from, a little disappointing.

Black Sheep - the movie

2007-06-29T16:39:00.000-07:00

Well I have so many things I could post on now with all the travelling that I have done lately. But I thought the first thing I would comment on should be one of the great pieces of New Zealand film making I saw on the plane on the way home.

Black sheep is a piece of class work. It is all about some genetically modified sheep that go around eating people. A truly inspired idea for a movie. For those of my readers who are in Vancouver, I believe it is going to be released over there too so you will be able to witness first hand this marvel of cinematography. It is movies like this that really make me proud to be a New Zealander.

Update from the road

2007-06-25T08:28:00.000-07:00

I know most of you have probably been pretty concerned for my safety as I travel around the US on the wrong side of the road, so I thought I would post a quick note to let everyone know that we have arrived in San Francisco without incident. Our journey has taken us from Las Vegas to Zion National park, then on to Bryce Canyon where we stayed at Ruby's Inn. Very nice place, but the food was not great. From there we moved on to Grand Canyon where once again the food was pretty bad. Then it was back to Vegas where a buffet awaited us. The king crab legs were particularly good. Next it was off to Yosemite, with some more decidedly average food. Then finally we travelled to San Francisco. So far the food here has been OK.
I found the driving to be just fine, however I had to do more of it than I thought I would as Dad kind of freaked out a bit. I have to admit it was pretty scary when Dad was driving so I understand why he was freaked.
Anyway we only have .9 miles to go to drop the rental car off.

Whistler, Victoria, Salt Spring Island

2007-06-19T06:44:00.001-07:00

Well I have now officially left Canada. I am sitting in the departure lounge on the US side of immigration, waiting for another 2 hours for my flight to San Francisco. As there is not much else to do, I Figured this would be a good opportunity to update everyone on the last week.

On Sunday night Dad and Mum arrived after spending a week or so in Toronto where Zach (my nephew) was having surgery. On Monday we drove up to Whistler where we stayed at the Delta hotel. The weather on Monday was not great so we didn't really do much other than have lunch, walk around the village a bit and have dinner. Tuesday however was much nicer, so we hired some bikes and rode around the valley for a few hours, looking at a couple of lakes and various other spots where views of the mountains could be found.

Wednesday started with a rather early morning. It was a bit of a shock for me having to be up and ready to go by 7:30. Uncle Ted and aunty Alison were picking us up so that we could catch the the 9 o'clock ferry to Victoria. The weather while on the ferry was a bit overcast so photos didn't really look all that great, so sorry you will have to take the trip yourself, or maybe do a search on the interweb, someone else is sure to have taken some photos at some stage. The main activity planned for the day was a trip to the world famous Buchard gardens. As far as gardens go they were pretty good, the best I have seen, and I have seen a few in my time. I well recall the seemingly endless days of being dragged through the Hamilton botanical gardens or the botanical gardens somewhere in South Auckland. Boy did those trips drag on. But what a difference having a camera can make. I was well entertained taking photos of the flowers and trying to get a good shot of a bee on a flower. There were plenty of bees around but they just wouldn't sit still. Very frustrating.

I had been given the heavy responsibility of organising the accommodation for our trip and had booked us in to a bed and breakfast for a couple of nights in Victoria. The house was very old, and had that awful old house smell about it, especially in the foyer. The bedrooms were decorated in true B&B style, with floral wallpaper and floral bedspreads and floral artwork. Not exactly my kind of decorating style. The breakfast they provided was not bad. The first day I had their health mix cereal, it definitely tasted healthy. This was followed by bacon and eggs and 3 small mushrooms. I happened to be sitting next to uncle Ted, who doesn't eat mushrooms so I scored an extra 3. The second day I switched the cereal for a bowl of fresh fruit, it too was healthy but tasted somewhat nicer.

Thursday was an action packed day, starting with a 3 1/2 hour whale watching trip on a very fast zodiac boat. We got up to speeds of 92 km, that feels very fast on a little open boat. Our guide assured us that we were very lucky to see so many whales, he said there were about 60. I would have felt a lot luckier if the whales were doing a little more. They were in resting mode, where they just bob up and down for hours. Due to the tight restrictions placed on the tour operators, we were not allowed to get too close to the whales, or to get in their path. As a result even with my telephoto lens I couldn't get a good close up of the whales. We did get reasonably close to the seals though so I got a few shots of them.
After whale watching and a spot of lunch, we went to the ZipLine tour place. This involved wearing a harness and getting clipped on to a wire high up in the trees and zooming from tree to tree. I was surprised to see that Mum actually participated and didn't even look too terrified doing it. The last 2 wires that we went down were a lot faster than the other ones, and when you curl yourself up in to a ball you can get quite a bit of speed up. The poor tour guide almost wore a hole in his glove when he stopped me at the end of the wire. I think he thought I was going to bowl him over. Great fun.

On Friday we had a coffee at Dolce Vita, not too bad but nothing to write home about. Then we drove to the ferry that took us to Salt Spring Island. Salt Spring Island is full of very arty people, or hippies as Dad and uncle Ted called them. There are about 30 studios dotted around the island that you can drive to and check out their work. We went to a cheese shop and a bread shop. I had been looking forward to visiting the cheese shop, as I have bought some of the cheese the shop sells at Granville Island market, and it is highly recommended by John Bishop from Bishop's restaurant. There were lots of goats cheeses and a variety of olives that we sampled before buying a few tasty goats cheeses to nibble on over the next few days.

The accommodation we stayed in on Salt Spring was a lovely log cabin by a lake. It was a really nice spot. There were kayaks and canoes that were free to use so we went for a big canoe ride to the other end of the lake. The weather was really nice with barely a cloud in the sky.

Oh how quickly the weather can change, by the next morning it was raining again. Each Saturday there is a public market where most of the studios on the island come to the town of Ganges and sell there wares. There was a lot of arty stuff there. I wasn't really in the market for fancy vases or jewelery though so didn't buy anything.

There was not much else to report about that trip so I will leave it there. My plane is about to start boarding I think so I had better start packing up my computer. I will try and find time to edit so photos and add them to this post later on. We have 7 hours in San Francisco, so hopefully they have wireless internet there too.

As Promised...

2007-06-18T23:29:00.000-07:00

Well I have been a little slack this week and am now way behind on my updates of my trip to Seattle, Whistler and Victoria. I kind of need to get a bit of sleep now before getting up insanely early tomorrow morning for my flight to San Francisco, so I will just post a few pictures of Seattle, and give a bit of an update on my last cafe.
Victrola cafe was very nice indeed. The location I visited was a pretty cool cafe, with great atmosphere. Very pleasant to sit in on a rainy Seattle morning. The latte was very tasty, although the milk texture was not quite as silky as the one at Vivace. The espresso was very nice though. I bought a coffee cup and saucer as a souvenir.

Here are a few quick photos I snapped during my visit. There are plenty more, but I need to spend a bit of time converting them to web friendly images, and given that I am already over a week behind that may not happen.

First up is Zoka, from across the street.

Next is Vivace, from inside.

And finally the big tower thing. Just to show that I did more in Seattle than jump from cafe to cafe.

Seattle first impressions

2007-06-08T15:11:00.000-07:00

Well I have now been in Seattle for all of 2 hours and so far it has been great. My first stop was a coffee shop called Zoka. It was in the suburbs so it is not surprising that I didn't stumble across it last time I was briefly in Seattle. I started off with a small latte and a turkey sandwich, the latte was not bad, but could have been a little stronger, perhaps they could work on a better blend for milk based drinks. They presented it very well and prepared the milk exceptionally well. The turkey sandwich was very nice as was the bit of salad that came with it. After finishing the latte and sandwich, and briefly stopping by the washroom to blow my nose (stupid cold just won't go away), I decided to round of the meal with an espresso. The espresso shot was very nice indeed. All in all Zoka is a very nice cafe worth a visit. I have a couple of photos of the outside of the store, maybe I will post those later.

Next up I stopped off at Espresso Vivace. When I was in Seattle a couple of years back for a day I went to another one of the Vivace stores and was very impressed, so I was expecting a pretty good coffee from them today. They delivered on my expectations, my cappuccino was fantastic, perfectly textured milk and the espresso punched through the milk very well. The espresso shot that I finished my visit there with was also superb, great job mr barista chap. Once again, I have a few photos of the store, but still need to get them off my camera, maybe I will do that later tonight.

I am now in my hotel room and am deciding what to do with the rest of the afternoon. I might take a trip to the Pike Place market. It is pretty close to my hotel and I have heard that it is worth visiting.

That's all for now.

Coffee, coffee, coffee, car, dinner

2007-06-07T22:12:00.000-07:00

Well time is certainly going fast now. It is less than 2 weeks until I leave Vancouver. This week I have been tying up loose ends like paying my GST, transferring money back to NZ and giving my laptop back to my work (glad to get rid of that awfully slow laptop. I will never by an ASUS computer).

Today after giving back the laptop I decided to visit a bunch of my favourite coffee shops, for some of them it will probably be my last visit. As I have a rather annoying cold at the moment I decided to stay away from lattes, as I have found dairy products have never helped much with colds I have had in the past. So for the last week I have been sticking with americanos and straight espressos. For those of you in NZ an americano is a long black.

First stop was JJ Bean on Main St. This was by far my favourite americano of the week, they didn't water it down nearly as much as the others I have been drinking lately. The ginger and molasses cookie I had with it was rather forgettable though, very chewy and not much flavour.

Next stop was Wicked Cafe. I don't think I have ever had a non-milk based drink there before sticking to lattes in the past. They use the Black Cat blend roasted by Intelligentsia in Chicago. People rave about this blend on coffeegeek. It is probably a lot better as a straight espresso, but I didn't find it all that great as an americano. The Intelligentsia mug was pretty cool though, wouldn't mind getting me one of those.

The final stop was my good old favourite the Elysian Room. I was kind of over americanos by this stage and had an espresso instead and a glass of water. As per usual it was very nice.

The main reason for all these coffees was that I was filling in time before my rental car was ready to be picked up at 5:30. I got myself a nice new Chevrolet Impala with only 500K on the clock. It has been pretty nice to drive so far, it should be pretty good for highway driving too, so that will be handy for my trip to Seattle and to Whistler on Monday.

This evening I went out for dinner with Roz and Reuben. It will probably be the last time I will be out at a restaurant with them before I leave. I got to pick the restaurant, and went for Bishops, the restaurant owned by John Bishop. He is a pretty well known Vancouver chef and is responsible for a lot of the recipes I have been trying this year as I got his cookbook for Christmas from Roz and Reuben. I had salmon for starters, served three different ways, all of which were amazing. Next I had a lamb dish with four different types of lamb, a lamb chop, a meatball, a slice of roast lamb I think, and some braised lamb. It was pretty good, although not quite as good as the salmon was. Finally for dessert I had a apple, fig and honey bread pudding with a slice of blue cheese. It was very small, and very, very nice. I can't remember having any blue cheese that was as nice as that piece. I believe it was from Salt Spring Island, so hopefully I will find some there next week. The service at the restaurant was very good. The waiters were very friendly and helpful. There was an interesting looking contraption on display next to our table. When we asked the waiter what it was he said it was a duck press. They were really popular in the 1920's. Basically you cook a duck, cut of the breast for plating then put the rest of the duck in this machine and press all the juices out of the duck to be used in the sauce. Bishop's will prepare a duck in this way for you on special request, and you get to go out in to the kitchen to watch it being done. Would be a good evening I am sure.

Update on my life

2007-06-05T21:41:00.000-07:00

Well, once again it has been a little while since my last posting so I guess I should write another update.

A few things have happened in the last few weeks. First of all I had a somewhat unexpected encounter with the police. It all started while I was sitting in my lovely basement having a quiet night in. Andrew my flatmate came in and asked if I could go see the police, as he had to go down to Tacoma for a conference so couldn't go. I thought about it for a few minutes and then decided that I would help him out. In the past I have certainly not made any great effort to get to know the police, not because I dislike them but rather I was just never overly interested in them. After going to see them I now have a new respect for what they do, I found I actually recognized a lot more of their work than I expected to.

Another thing that happened last week was that I finished working. Yep that's right I am now officially unemployed again. That means that I have a week of doing not a great deal before Dad and Mum arrive on Sunday. I guess there are a few things I need to do, like sorting out how much GST I owe the tax department, and figuring out what I will do with furniture, but for the most part I am not doing a lot. I think I may pop down to Seattle on Friday for a couple of days, that should fill in a bit of time. I didn't get to see much of Seattle when I was there for a night a couple of years ago, I basically just made it to a cafe and then walked back to my hotel. From memory there was some Johnny Cash tribute concert on TV that night so I just watched that. The concert was pretty good, although I feel that my time may have been better spent trying to see a bit more of the city. If I do end up going on Friday I will be sure to take some pictures and update everyone. There are a bunch of coffee shops down there that I would like to check out, hopefully some of them sell interesting cups that I can add to my collection.

Brunch, Coffee and Rodeo

2007-05-20T14:21:00.000-07:00

Well last Saturday was a pretty good day. I got up extra early for a Saturday, as I was meeting Roz and Reuben for brunch at 11. So after getting up at 9:30 and having a nice french press coffee I headed out for a gentle stroll to Feenies. Feenies is a restaurant owned by Rob Feenie, Iron Chef 2005 winning "Battle Crab". He also has been inducted in to the B.C. Restaurant Hall of Fame, quite an achievement I am sure. Anyway, I ordered the Salmon Benny, which was very nice, although I think it was pretty poorly named. It was a croissant with smoked salmon and poached egg, no hollandaise sauce. I also had a smoothy which I thought was rather nice although no particularly thick for a smoothy.

After brunch the day just got even better with a trip to the Elysian Room for a coffee or two. Reuben used to work with one of the guys who works at the Elysian Room so managed to score a nice discount and a free cup of coffee from the Clover. If you want to know what the clover is then just click on the link above, they seem to be becoming quite popular in the better cafes around Vancouver. The coffee they were brewing was a coffee flown in from the Yergecheffe region of Ethiopia by Nova coffee in Denver. It was one of the nicest brewed coffees I have ever tasted, on a similar level to the Panama I sampled at the Coffeegeek cupping session in January. I decided not to buy any of the beans though as I had just bought a pound of Kenya AA beans from JJ Bean on Friday so was well stocked already, also the price of $20 for 8oz was a little more than I have been willing to pay for coffee lately.

After coffee I had to run to catch a bus to Ryan's place where I was meeting Ryan, Mike and Kirsty to go to the Cloverdale Rodeo. This was quite an experience, I have never been in a place with so many cowboy hats before, I was even tempted to buy myself one just to fit in. There were a bunch of exciting looking rides there and lots of your typical carnival games where you can win big soft toys etc. There was also live entertainment in the form of Nearly Neil, a Neil Diamond impersonator. He was pretty good and his band was really tight, although after 3 or 4 songs I was feeling like I had heard about as much Neil Diamond as I cared to hear.

The actual rodeo started at 7:30 or so, so the light was getting a bit dark for photos especially given the quick movement. I did get a few shots of the early events that almost came out OK though so here goes.

The horses showed great athleticism, jumping really high.

In the bull riding, on of the cowboys got beat up pretty bad by a big old bull. I think he got his hand caught as he fell off and got dragged around then savagely attacked by the bull. He was carried off on a stretcher.

My funny family

2007-05-09T22:28:00.000-07:00

It has occurred to me over the last few days that the audience of this blog has started to grow, and not everybody who reads this blog knows who the other common readers may be. Furthermore, some of the readers of this blog prefer to read anonymously and don't post any comments, whereas other readers are more familiar with the whole blog thing and like to leave comments for others to read. I can categorise these two groups in another way too, friends and family from New Zealand (the anonymous people) and friends from Vancouver (the nice people who leave comments).

Tonight I decided to check the comments awaiting moderation and found two anonymous comments asking who Shannon was. The posters didn't leave there name but there was a clue from one of them leading me to believe it was a family member. Now those of you who are friends of mine from Vancouver are probably not so familiar with my family and there somewhat childish attitude when it comes to me and any female that I mention, somehow not grasping the concept that I have friends of the opposite sex, and that being friends with a girl does not necessarily indicate any more serious relationship or prospect thereof.

For those of you back in New Zealand, Shannon is a friend from University Chapel. She is in my home group along with her husband Lucas. They are from Missouri. Shannon plays the piano and sings very well. Lucas is a very funny guy, he tells great stories, like the one where he killed a snake and cooked it on the engine of his car and ate it, but he tells it so much better. To find out more about Shannon and Lucas, check out their blog here.

I think I will try and get some photos of some of the friends I have made here in Vancouver and a short blurb on each of them so that in the case that any of them feel inclined to leave a comment here in the future you will all know who the person is.

Oh and to answer the second part of one of the comments posted, yes I probably will introduce Shannon to Mum and Dad when they visit next month.

The week and a half since the last post

2007-04-22T22:03:00.000-07:00

Well, in my last post I mentioned that Detour180 was in town, but at the time of writing I had not been to their concert so couldn't write much about how they sounded. That has now changed as I went to a gig on the following Saturday night. I had not heard the band play for quite some time, probably since parachute festival 2005 I think. Since then my cousin Daniel has taken up playing the bass and joined the band, I think in that order but the timing was pretty close from memory. Naturally being a bass player myself I was keen to see and hear him play. Talking with him after the show he mentioned that he had a few 'jazz' notes in their (a nice way of saying he had some wrong notes). He must have done a pretty good job at covering them up because I didn't notice any, the entire performance sound pretty solid to me. The rest of the band sounded very good too. Nice job chaps.

It has been a pretty good week musically for me. First off with Detour180 and then on Friday night I went to see a band I had never heard of called Mute Math. One of my friends Shannon knew a couple of the guys in the band from her school days, and managed to score free tickets for 4 of us plus a guided tour of the band's tour bus and dinner with the drummer, guitarist and lighting guy. Dinner was very nice especially given the price. We went to a restaurant downtown called Relish. They have a good selection on the menu, I finally settled on a yellow curry seafood hot pot. But I digress, back to the band. The band guys were super friendly and seemed to be really nice people from what I could tell in my few hours with them. The concert was very entertaining, very energetic. I think I mentioned a last year that Jamie Cullum was the most energetic performer I have seen. He has now slipped to second place. The drummer must have had a pretty much endless energy reserve, I have never seen anyone hit the cymbals so hard. I really hope he has some kind of endorsement deal with a cymbal manufacturer because I am sure he must have to replace them rather frequently. By the end of the show there were 2 big chunks missing from the ride cymbal. He was a really good drummer though putting laying down some very cool beats and fitting in some particularly tasty rolls. The rest of the band were also pretty good and multi talented too, with all of them at some stage helping out with the drumming in some way or other, whether it be the bass player playing the bass a crash cymbal and a giant bass drum at the same time, or the singer drumming on the balcony railing. Apparently a signature of Mute Math is to destroy the stage by the end of the concert by throwing the drums around and smashing fluorescent light bulbs over their knees. All in all it was an excellent concert although I don't think Mum and Dad would have enjoyed it at all.

Spring has definitely started now in Vancouver with temperatures at a very pleasant 15 degrees or so and much less rain. I don't know if I have changed or if it is just that I am walking more over here than I did back home, but I have found myself actually looking at the flowers around the place and even taking photos of them. This last week there have been a lot of tulips popping up all around my neighbourhood. With all the nice sunny weather we have been having comes tennis season again. I have had a couple of games with Reuben over the last couple of weeks. The first one was not such a great day for it, after being fine all day it started raining literally as I got changed in to my tennis gear. It looked like it was going to clear up so we played anyway but it was a pretty wet game. Saturday was a much nicer day however so we were able to have a jolly good game once we found a court that was available. That is another fantastic thing about Vancouver, there are loads of free tennis courts around and they are all in pretty good condition.

Well that pretty much covers what I have been up to lately, oh except for dinner tonight. I have been eying a recipe in one of my cookbooks for some time now, it is a very simple dish involving wrapping some big scallops in prosciutto and frying them in sage infused olive oil and butter and served with caramelized apple. As apples are not in season and I don't like old apples I substituted the apple for pear and it seemed to work quite well. The prosciutto flavour works it's way in to the scallops really nicely and the dish tasted fantastic.

Easter and surrounding weeks

2007-04-12T22:14:00.000-07:00

Well it has been quite some time now since the last exciting episode of 'The Blog of Paul Palmer', so I guess now would be a good time to write another update.

There wasn't much going on prior to Easter so I will not dwell on the period of time form the last posting up until Easter, other than to mention that I was quite well health wise. Work has been a little dull and doesn't look like it will improve much before I head home in June. The project I have been working on is in the testing phase at the moment, so no new interesting functionality to work on. On the positive side, the view out of my office is looking particularly nice at the moment, not so much rain.

Any way, I will now move on to more recent events starting with Easter weekend. It was nice to have a day off work on Good Friday, I think it was my first day off other than weekends since February. The weather was fantastic with temperatures reaching 18 degrees. I went for a long walk in the afternoon for about 5 hours (with a few short bus trips in there as well). I went to JJ Bean on Main St to buy a coffee however when I arrived there the line up was ridiculously long and there were no seats available so I turned around and walked back towards home again stopping to buy a gelato on the way. Cousin Ryan was having a BBQ at his place with a bunch of friends from church, so I stopped off at Granville island to pick up a steak on the way there. The steak was particularly nice although I slightly overcooked it so one end of it was bordering on well done. It still tasted pretty good though. It was nice being able to spend the evening outdoors again, I don't think there had been another night since early October that we could have been outside without freezing. Spring must be here at last.

On Sunday my home group had an Easter dinner. Easter dinner over here is remarkably similar to Christmas dinner and thanksgiving dinner. I was asked to bring an appetizer so had a great time looking through my cook books for appetizer ideas. I don't often get the chance to make appetizers, it always seems a bit silly making appetizers for one person. I narrowed down my options to 8 different appetizers and took a trip to Granville island to see which ones I could find the ingredients for. In the end I settled on a pretty simple yet interesting recipe for cantaloupe (rock melon) wrapped in Serrano ham and finished with a spiced vinaigrette. Unfortunately I didn't take any photos of it so you will have do with a photo of the photo in my cookbook. When I made it, it looked exactly the same, but I arranged them in a circle on a dinner plate.
Before dinner we all went outside for a giant mini-Easter egg hunt, with over 200 eggs hidden for us to find. I really thought I was doing pretty well so stopped looking so hard so that others could find some, only to find that I was even in the top four.

This week has been pretty good so far. Detour 180 are in town so I took Wednesday off work so I could spend the day with cousin Sarah, Jono and cousin Daniel. Then we met up with Roz and Reuben for dinner. Game one of the Stanley Cup playoffs happened to be on at the same time as dinner, and I struck it lucky and had a seat that faced the big screen TV. Sorry Sarah if I looked as if I was looking straight passed you for much of the evening, I probably was, but I was listening to you. Anyway Vancouver won the game near the end of the 4th overtime, at 12:30 in the morning, the 6th longest NHL playoff game in history.

College Basketball

2007-03-25T00:47:00.000-07:00

During March every year there is a basketball tournament between a bunch of US colleges. This year I decided to join in the fun by participating in the 'fantasy basketball' tournament. Basically you just pick the teams you think will win and then get points for each win, with points increasing as the rounds of the tournament go on.

Not being a great basketball fan, and not really knowing anything about the teams I decided on a somewhat unorthodox method of picking my winners. First off if I had been to the city the team was from I picked that team to win, unless I didn't really like the town. Next, if I had been to the state that the team was from I would pick the team, with the exception of teams from California for no real reason other than that my time in LA was probably my least favourite time in my trip to the US a few years ago. Seeing as I have not really visited many places in the US yet there were a lot of games that these first 2 methods did not cover, so for those games I went for the team with the better name.

Surprisingly these selection techniques did not work out so well for me, and I am now totally eliminated from the tournament only half way through the 3rd round. I was looking pretty good after the first round, on 19 points but then only managed another 6 points in the second round and none in the third. The next closest contestant in the group I am playing in has 59 points, so I am hoping to finish with more than half of that person's total, all I need is for Oregon to beat Florida and I achieve this lofty goal I have set myself.

In other news, nothing much has been happening here. A new coffee shop opened last week half a block from work. It is actually more of a chocolate shop but also have a pretty nice espresso setup. They were giving out free coffee and hot chocolate all week so I had 3, 2 lattes and a hot chocolate. The lattes were not too bad, but I think the barista needs a bit of practice, still not bad for his first week. The hot chocolate was pretty good, not too sweet and not too milky. They sell coffee beans roasted by some decent local roasters so I may try them out some time in the next few weeks. Oh that reminds me, I bought some Bolivian beans from the Elysian Room this afternoon and my first impression was pretty favourable. Quite tasty indeed.

Oops my bad

2007-03-12T22:07:00.000-07:00

In my last post I may have got a few of the facts a little wrong. It turns out that the plane was actually part of a movie set. So for those of you who were considering traveling to Vancouver, it is still very safe. Mum, you might want to mention to your travel agent that there wasn't actually a crash at all. Sorry about that. I will try to check the facts a little more thoroughly next time.

The movie that was being filmed was called "Passengers" or something, and stars Anne Hathaway. It is due out some time in 2008.

Plane Crash

2007-03-03T21:56:00.000-08:00

You have probably heard about the plane crash in Vancouver last Tuesday night; it has been all over the news here. As far as I have heard they do not know yet the exact cause of the crash, but I suspect the foul weather we were having was a contributing factor. A domestic passenger aircraft crashed on Locarno Beach not far from my house, killing all 75 people on board.
If you have ever been to Vancouver then you will understand how surprising it was that the plane should crash where it did, as the airport is quite a bit further south so the plane was well off course.

Being so close to my house, today I decided to take a walk down to the beach to see if the aircraft was still there. As it turns out it was still there although it was roped off so I couldn't get terribly close to it. It was a pretty sobering scene, and it was clear that there would have been very little chance of survivors. The main body of the plane was broken shattered with only the nose and tail left intact. The passenger compartment had been totally gutted by fire. Scattered on the ground around the surrounding area where random items of luggage, thrown from the plane during the crash.

More tasty things

2007-02-24T11:44:00.000-08:00

Last weekend I decided that I had not been making anything very interesting for a while, mainly due to working too late to stop at the market on my way home and not being organised enough to plan my meals during the weekend. So I decided to spoil myself a little and buy a lobster. I figured that the total cost would still only be equivalent to going to a restaurant and having a nice steak, so once I thought of it that way it seemed a pretty reasonably priced meal. So I went for yet another trip to Granville island to get the necessary ingredients.

While at the island I decided to take a few photos so you all can see what this market I keep talking about is like. I thought it would be more arty or something if I took them in black and white. The market was very busy, being Saturday afternoon, so it was difficult to get any good shots without getting people mad at me so these are the best I could do.

Now back to the lobster. I have a few different recipes for lobster in my cookbooks, but decided that the picture of the angry lobster looked better than the other ones and the recipe looked tasty too. Basically you cut the lobster in to pieces and coat in a seasoned flour mixture then pan fry then in some chili infused oil. Then you add cherry tomatoes and basil with a spot of butter at the end. Very simple and oh so tasty. It was rather messy to eat though.

On Wednesday evening I went back to school for the first time in 7 years. This time however it was a very different kind of school than I had been to before, it was a cooking school. Vanya (cousin Ryan's wife) had a voucher for this cooking school at a local cooking shop and asked if I would like to come along. The class we went to was a new French cooking class where you get to participate in the cooking too. There were 5 different recipes that we were taught, with each group getting to prepare one of them. The recipes were all very tasty, starting with a smoked salmon soup followed by a chicken breast with Madeira sauce that was accompanied by a Swiss chard gratin. Then there was lamb medallions with cilantro sauce. And for dessert we had a rather unusual sounding basil ice cream. Vanya and I were given the task of preparing the Swiss chard gratin, which was probably the least interesting of the dishes but tasted quite good. For those of you unacquainted with the North American names for vegetables, Swiss chard is what we would call silver beet in New Zealand. The basil ice cream was the big surprise of the evening, it was actually a remarkably nice dessert and one that I will be sure to attempt to make at home some time.

I didn't have my camera the cooking school so have no photos to show, however I had a shot at making a variation on the lamb dish last night. I didn't fancy spending large amounts of money on lamb fillets so I used a lamb leg steak instead. It worked pretty well but didn't look quite as good on the plate. Also I felt the sauce needed a bit more to it so added some chopped up prunes just before serving. It all tasted amazing

A brief update

2007-02-14T21:46:00.000-08:00

Well it has been 10 days since my last posting so I guess it is about time I add some fresh content to this ever so dynamic blog. I haven't really done much of great interest lately, hence the delay in posting.

Last Thursday evening I went up to Grouse Mountain again with Ryan and Andrew my flatmate. It had been raining in the morning so the snow was pretty soft and wet and very bumpy. I think the snow has been completely different every time I have gone up to Grouse. Apparently it is like this more in Spring so I guess I will get plenty more wet snow experiences later in the season. With the snow being so soft I thought it would be a great opportunity to improve my jumping skills. After the first unsuccessful run I asked Ryan and Andrew for a few pointers, and sure enough there were a number of things I was doing wrong that could explain the lack of success I was seeing. On getting some tips I found the whole jumping thing to be much easier than I had expected it to be, and by the end of the evening I was landing most of my jumps and even braved the terrain park a couple of times (sticking to the easiest jumps still though).

On a slightly sadder note, one of my bass guitars was stolen back in NZ a week ago. It was a very nice bass, probably my second favourite after the MusicMan. On the bright side, my insurance has paid out so I can get myself a new acoustic guitar when I get back to New Zealand in June. I was planning on getting one on my way home in San Francisco but the insurance company paid out in credit at the rock shop so I guess that is one less item of luggage to cart back on the plane.

In other breaking news, I have decided to go to Papua New Guinea for 5 months or so in July to help out with some software development with Wycliffe Bible Translators. They have already sent me an official invitation so now I am starting to get my visa application other paperwork sorted out. Apparently getting the visa can take a while so I need to get on to it pretty promptly.

My meals over the last week have been a bit more simple than they were last month. Work has got a bit busier so I am not taking so many trips to the market on my way home. Tonight's pasta dish was pretty tasty though, I made a simple tomato based sauce with a bit of sausage and a few mystery spices to add a bit of a kick. It didn't look too flash so I didn't bother taking any snapshots of it.

Whistler and Harrison Hot Springs

2007-02-04T12:54:00.000-08:00

Last week Roz and Reuben had the week off so we all decided to take a trip up to Whistler for a few days of midweek snowboarding action. So on Wednesday afternoon we went to Enterprise car rentals to pick up our compact class car. The car they gave us was a Toyota Yaris, a very small car. After driving 15 minutes to my house to pick up some stuff I forgot, we decided that this car was really not going to work for us, as it would have been a very uncomfortable trip with 2 snowboards and a set of skis. So we gave the rental company a ring an organised to pick up a larger car a Chevrolet Malibu. This car was much nicer and fit us in very comfortably. So of we went for the 1 3/4 hour trip north to Whistler.

It was my first time driving any significant distance or in any traffic in a left hand drive, and at for the first little while it took a bit of adjusting to. Reuben was very helpful in pointing out that I was very close to the right hand side of the lane, I guess I wasn't used to having that much car to my right. The sea to sky highway from Vancouver to Whistler is a notoriously dangerous road, but after driving it I fail to see why. Compared to roads in New Zealand it was a very easy drive. I guess if it had been snowing or if the roads were icy it could have been a little scarier, but in the fine conditions we had it was quite a pleasant drive.

On arrival we checked in to our hotel then went out for a bite to eat. The restaurant was having an open mic night as the entertainment, but not many people took up the invitation to join the band and sing, so we were stuck listening to some band obsessed with reggae music. We didn't stick around long after our meal.

In the morning we got up nice and early to get our free breakfast before hitting the slopes. The weather was very nice with barely a cloud in the sky. Unfortunately it had been that way for quite a while prior to our trip, so there was no fresh snow around and some places were a bit icy. I decided that given the hardness of the ground, this was not going to be a good week to practice any jumps, so contented myself with just improving my turning and general control. I also decided to retry the run that I got very stuck on last time I was at Whistler. Last time there was over a foot of powder on that run and I had an awful time trying to get up each time I fell over. This time there was not much powder at all and I found the run to be much easier and great fun.

On the second day Roz and I spent most of the day going down the intermediate runs at Blackcomb, where the snow was a bit better. On one run Roz got a little over confident and went for a jump off a little drop off. Unfortunately for Roz she hadn't checked out what was below the drop off and she ended up bailing pretty badly as she landed amongst a bunch of moguls (big bumps in the snow). I was following a little behind her and decided to stop at the top of the drop off. When I looked down, there was Roz lying in the snow with her poles and hat 15 metres up the slope. The fall hurt her knee a bit, but she was able to keep on skiing, although her confidence was a little damaged for a while.

After our 2 days at Whistler we made our way back to Vancouver, then on Saturday seeing as we still had the rental car, we decided to take a trip to Harrison Hot Springs for a nice soothing soak. Harrison Hot Springs is about 1 1/2 hours east of Vancouver, just past Chilliwack. After driving for an hour on highway 1 I was beginning to see why people think the sea to sky highway is so dangerous. Highway 1 is really straight, for miles and miles.

When we arrived at Harrison Hot Springs we found that the public pool was a little on the disappointing side, it was pretty small and patroned by mainly old fat people. We decided to pass on the pool and just had lunch at a local restaurant that we had a discount voucher for instead. The food was decidedly average, or maybe even a little below average, except for the seafood chowder that Roz and Reuben shared, apparently that was quite nice. I had some scallops and shrimp with some kind of risotto. The sauce that accompanied the shrimps and scallops was very bland, in fact I can't even recall it having any flavour at all. The risotto was actually difficult to cut on one side, making me think it had perhaps been sitting under some warming lights a little long. The lake at Harrison was very pretty though, so the trip wasn't a complete waste of time. Unfortunately I didn't take my camera with me, so you will just have to take my word for it that it was a nice lake.

Coffee Cupping

2007-01-30T23:08:00.000-08:00

Not long after arriving in Vancouver I signed up to the coffeegeek Vancouver event mailing list. From time to time Mark Prince, the founder of coffeegeek.com organises some kind of get together for coffeegeeks in the Vancouver area. Last Sunday afternoon was the first such event that I have been invited to, and hopefully it won't be the last. This particular event was a cupping of several of the cup of excellence winners from Brazil. Cup of Excellence is a competition that selects the very best coffee produced in that country for that particular year. The winners are auctioned off to the highest bidder.

The cupping that I went to was a cupping of the 5 winning coffees from Brazil. The whole cupping thing was a new experience to me, but one I had read a bit about in the past and had always wanted to try it, so this was a great opportunity. Basically cupping involves brewing several different coffees in separate cups at the same time, keeping as many of the variables constant as possible (ie grind size, roast level, roast date, brew time etc) then taking a spoon and slurping spoonfuls of coffee and comparing them to each other. You repeat this several times as the coffees cool to see how the flavours change as the temperature drops. Of the five coffees only one of them tasted significantly different to me at first, and I found that the one that tasted different was my least favourite of the five (although still very nice). It was pretty interesting hearing some of the others describing what they were tasting, although I couldn't taste any fruit punch in cup E, it just tasted like very nice coffee to me. In one of the coffees I did start to detect what could be described as a citrus kind of taste but only very slightly. When it came time to pick our favourite Reuben was the only one there that identified the number 1 bean as being his favourite. The rest of us all chose number 5 and I actually thought bean number 1 was the worst one there, I guess taste is a very subjective thing.

After the cupping we got to sample three very special coffees as a french press. The first one was a Panama something, and roasted it retails at around US$110 a pound. By far the most expensive coffee I have ever tried. It was also the nicest french press I have had too. A very unique taste that we all agreed was exceptionally pleasing.

The second bean was the pick of the crop from the Skybury Farms in Australia. It also retailed at a pretty high price, though not nearly as high as the Panama. I didn't really like it much, actually none of us thought it was anything special. Sure it was better than your typical supermarket coffee but for the price I certainly wouldn't say it was value for money.

The third bean was a very rare Kona Peaberry. Very little of this bean is made available each year as the farmers keep the peaberry for themselves because it is so good and also because only a very small percentage of beans are peaberry beans. The coffee came from Smiths Farms a coffee farmer in Kona that sells direct to the public (well at least to US and Canada anyway). I am still deciding whether I will order any to take back to NZ, it was a very nice french press but I have been told it doesn't work so well as an espresso.

Before we left Mark Prince's house (where the cupping took place) we each got to choose 1 of the beans we sampled to take home with us. This was a very generous thing for Mark to do as some of the beans were not cheap. The only ones we were not allowed were the Panama beans (not surprising given the cost of them) and one of the Brazilians because Mark really liked them. I chose the Kona Peaberry and have been enjoying them over the last couple of days. Unfortunately as I have been typing this I have also been drinking my last cup of the Kona, but boy was it good. Reuben selected one of the Brazilian beans and seeing as he doesn't have a grinder he kindly gave them to me, so I will be able to have another very nice coffee for breakfast in the morning. Yummy.

I am going to be away for the next few days so I might have to have a couple of cups because I don't want the beans to go stale while I am gone. I am going to Whistler with Roz and Reuben for a couple of days to get a bit of snowboarding action in. The weather has been fantastic over the last week with hardly a cloud in the sky, not great in terms of fresh snow I guess but if the weather holds out it should still be pretty nice. We are renting a car, so it will be my first time driving any significant distance in a left hand drive car, should be interesting. I have been considering taking my grinder away with me, but it may be a bit of a pain carrying on the bus on my way to work in the morning.

Sorry no pictures today. I have a couple on my camera of a few meals I had last week but can't be bothered getting them off the camera at the moment.

Another week gone

2007-01-21T14:26:00.000-08:00

Yep it is now Sunday afternoon and time to review the past week.
The week started off well with yet another trip to Granville Island for the week's fruit and veges and a few cuts of meat. I was very organised this week and had an entire week's menu planned out. There was going to be an stuffed artichoke salad, loosely based on a Waldorf salad, a curried broccoli soup, an avocado orange and fennel salad, swordfish with roast fennel, and a pork tenderloin stuffed with pork sausage meat and apricot. As it turned out I only had half of those dishes and had the pork tenderloin twice after discovering that I rather liked it.

After returning home I made myself a quick and easy salad with avocado orange and fennel. The fennel was shaved from the fennel bulb with a vege peeler then soaked in balsamic vinegar. Unfortunately the avocado was not the best with lots of brown pathes through it so the presentation did not look too flash hence the absence of a photo, sorry about that.

Monday was the first night that I had the pork tenderloin. I was in a bit of a rush that night as I only had 1 1/4 hours to cook and eat before heading out to my bible study. I did however find enough time to take a quick snapshot of the dish. I had some roasted pear and roasted fennel bulb as an accompaniment. The pear was particularly tasty, it was simply brushed with a little melted butter and sprinkled with cinnamon then roasted for 25 minutes. The roast fennel however was not a winning side dish, it was definitely better in the salad on Sunday.

Tuesday was originally going to be the artichoke day, but in the end I was out at Roz and Reuben's for dinner so the artichoke day was missed. Reuben cooked a lovely pasta dish with eggplant, tomato, cheese and I'm sure some other ingredients that I forget at the moment.

Wednesday was soup day. The recipe book didn't have any photo of this recipe, and after making it I understand why. It looked kind of like sick. The soup was a curried broccoli soup with a cucumber-mint raita, which is a yogurt based dip sort of thing. It went very well with the spicy soup, adding a nice cooling element to thd dish.

Thursday I had Roz and Reuben over for dinner so decided to try the pork tenderloin again seeing I enjoyed it so much on Monday. This time I left out the roasted fennel and replaced it with roast broccoli and some 'steamed' asparagus. My Tyler Florence cookbook had this interesting looking way of cooking asparagus by throwing it in a paper bag with some salt, lemon slices and a drizzle of olive oil then putting it in the oven for 20 minutes. I guess my lemon must have had more juice than his one though, because when I pulled them out of the oven they were kind of soggy. I very nearly threw them away I was so disappointed, but after tasting one found it was not too bad after all.

I had a leftover pork tenderloin as I wasn't sure if Andrew my flatmate was going to be home on Thursday. So on Friday I decided to make a Thai style pork and coconut salad. The basic ingredients were pork, toasted coconut, coconut milk, Thai bird chili, coriander (cilantro for any North Americans reading this), mint, tomato and red onion. This is another recipe that I will have to put on my must make again list, it was scrummy.

On Saturday I finally went up Grouse mountain with Roz and Reuben for a day of snowboarding and skiing. There had been a good 50 cm of new snow in the 3 days prior, with 8 cm overnight. I guess that we were not the only people who thought that it would be a good time to head up the mountain as we spent far longer waiting in queues for the chairlifts than we did snowboarding. The snow was pretty good most of the day though, so it was an enjoyable day. There are far more runs you can do during the day as apposed to the runs open for night skiing, so it was fun finding areas I had not been on yet. I managed to land a couple of jumps, and also didn't manage to land a few jumps too. I think it was the first time that my helmet has saved me from a headache.

After snowboarding we went back to Roz and Reuben's apartment for a soak in the hot tub. A very nice way of relaxing after a day on the slopes. Later on we went out for dinner at a very nice restaurant. Each year a number of restaurants in Vancouver participate in the Dine Out Vancouver program, where you get a 3 course meal at significantly reduced prices, either $15, $25 or $35 depending on the class of restaurant. We went to a place called Joe Fortes, a seafood and chophouse. For starters I had four oysters on the half shell. Now in the past I have never really been a big oyster fan finding them a little slimy and generally just not very nice. These were fantastic though and the sauce that they came with was superb. For the main (or entree as they call it over here) I had grilled sockeye salmon with truffle risotto. The salmon was cooked just right and the risotto was very tasty indeed. If truffles weren't so expensive I would try and make it at home some time. Dessert was a New York cheesecake, yet again a very nice dish. All in all I think it was exceptional value. To give you some idea what their regular prices are, a 1/2 dozen oysters sell for $20 at Joe Fortes so $35 was a steal.

More snow and more home cooking

2007-01-13T23:37:00.000-08:00

Well it has been a rather chilly week here in Vancouver. On Tuesday evening it started to snow again and continued off and on until Wednesday evening. Fortunately it has not resulted in nearly as many traffic problems as the snow in November caused, so getting around has not been much of an issue this week.

I quite often catch a bus home from work that runs parallel to my street but 9 blocks away. This gives me a little bit of exercise on my way home which doesn't do me any harm. Occasionally I walk the 1 1/2 without any buses but not when I have my business shoes on as they would kill my feet walking that kind of distance. But I digress, why I brought up the bus route in the first place was to illustrate in a round about kind of way how cold it was this last week. So I got off the bus 9 blocks away and started walking home, thinking it was a little nippy but not too bad. However by the time I got home my hands were numb as was my chin and nose. The numb fingers made it quite tricky getting my keys out of my bag but I managed. I checked the temperature when I got inside and found it was -7 degrees at the time plus with the wind chill I think it was around -15. Hmm, that wasn't really a very interesting story but oh well it is written now.

I went for another trip to the Granville Island public market this afternoon and happened to have my camera with me. As I was walking over the causeway that takes you to the island I noticed that the water in to my right was frozen, and not just a thin layer on top but quite a significant amount of ice. Some people had thrown rather sizable rocks at the ice to try and break it, probably to go ice fishing I expect, but the ice only showed a bit of cracking.

The main reason for today's trip to Granville Island was to buy some shrimp and vegetables for tonights meal. This was a recipe from the cookbook Roz and Reuben gave me for Christmas. It was poached salmon with fennel and hand-peeled shrimp (fortunately someone else had the job of hand peeling them). Boy oh boy this was a tasty we dish, and one I will definitely try again some time. I think I may have slightly overdone the salmon but it was still delicious. I had never cooked fennel before and was pleasantly surprised at how tasty it is. I will have to look out for other recipes with fennel in them.

Lunch and Dinner

2006-12-31T21:41:00.000-08:00

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.

2006-12-30T23:02:00.000-08:00

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

2006-12-17T14:10:00.000-08:00

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?

2006-12-09T17:31:00.000-08:00

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

2006-12-02T16:48:00.000-08:00

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

2006-11-29T21:50:00.000-08:00

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

2006-11-27T23:00:00.000-08:00

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.