Another week gone

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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


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

Whistler

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


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


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


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


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

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

New favourite?

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

The Basement

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

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


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

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

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