10 things about me

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.

1. 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.
   
2. 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.
   
3. I was a founding member of the award winning boy band "Four"
4. I am getting married in February. OK so I guess most of you already knew that, but I kind of like telling people.
5. My favourite type of fish is tuna
6. I painted my first ever guitar purple.
7. 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.
   
8. 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.
9. I was on TV in the Philippines.
10. 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

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?

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

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

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

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

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.