three times the fun?

I jest - an afternoon in the kitchen, baking cookies, actually isn't fun. I like it, believe me. It's what I do. But by the end of it, over-indulged with cookie dough and back sore from hunching over counters to trim and cut and roll, I'm not having fun. It's something else.

Eh, whatever it is, someone gets a treat out of it.

I spent yesterday afternoon continuing my exploration of the great cookbook Conrad's sister Karen got for me (and she and her family will benefit in a day or two from the cookies, as they will many more times in the future, I think). All told, I think I made in the neighbourhood of 12-15 dozen. Not too shabby.

One of the three recipes I'd made before, the chocolate gingerbread cookies. These turned out to be a bit inconsistent from pan to pan, and I wonder if making a double batch rather than two separate batches is partly to blame. Ah well.

The lime meltaways were fairly easy to make, though a bit messy with coating them in icing sugar. Still, I was pleased by the ease of them, and I will likely come back to them again. I would bet they'd fare nicely with dishes of a citrus sorbet for a summer dessert.

My favourites? The coconut macadamia shortbreads. I made the dough a few days before hand and chilled it until Sunday. No harm done to it for that. I loved the scent, the flavour, and the relative ease of working them. I even felt the triangles were a nice visually-appealing shape. I definitely will bring those back at Christmas, if not before.

insomnia

I hate this. Was it the strong lattes this morning? Is it anxiety over the article draft? Is it simply one of my occasional bouts of insomnia?

In bed at 10:00. A few minutes before, in fact. At 11:41ish (yes, I looked at the clock) I gave up. It's now 3:54. I've gone to the end of the Internet and back (well, no, but I did read a bunch of forum postings on TWOP), and I've finished - totally - a draft of the article.

Now what? Watch 80s videos on YouTube until it's time to get ready to go swimming? Sit and read more of the Emily Carr books I've been working through? Crawl into bed for one hour or so of just lying there?

I hate this.

If I doze off in a meeting or two tomorrow, it won't be too out of the ordinary, but it will be forgivable, I hope.

Ah, to be in the state of rest shown here. NYC in January 2003. I was too deep asleep to realize Conrad was up to mischief with the camera. Hmmm, should I sneak into the bedroom and take a stealth photo of him, swaddled in his many layers?

tough having to come home

A gorgeous, sunny morning in Vancouver, and I can only admire it from the airport lounge where I'm sitting, awaiting a flight to Chicago in an hour. For all that I get razzed at work for my travel, there are things that weigh heavily. I love Chicago, but the pull of my country is stronger with each visit. Will there come a day when I will simply not leave Vancouver?

To look at some shots from part of an afternoon spent relaxing at Stanley Park, I kind of wonder...

it's beginning to look a lot like...

... no, really. Kind of. At least at The Bay they're getting a jump on the season.



It IS only 3.5 months away. And (I almost but not quite) blush to admit, Christmas music has crept into my playlist in recent weeks...

new Vancouver Yoshi's?

Dinner for two of us last night (well, originally dinner with a couple of friends from Terrace who, alas, had to cancel) grew to three with the addition of Marie and then four when we saw Mark at the hospital. No matter, the more the merrier for trying out a place new to us: Aurora Bistro.

You know, Conrad may have nailed it. We should cultivate this place as our Vancouver Yoshi's. We liked it, in other words. It's only about a 20 minute walk from our condo, the service wasn't polished but was friendly (to the point where the hostess - or was she the sommelier? - was offering to open a bottle of wine not normally served by the glass as well as bringing Conrad a pour of a dessert wine she was recommending), the food was very good, the emphasis on local products was appreciated, and the wine list had many tantalizing options. So yes, we liked it.

Plus it was nice to sit down and get to know Mark a little better. The age gap between me and Marie, on the one side, and Mark and his brothers is large enough that we've never really gotten to know them. How pleasant to be able to do so over some good food and wine.

On to the meal...

Conrad's Olive Oil Poached Albacore Tuna on a salad of navy beans, pickled red onions, and smoked tomato vinaigrette.

Mark's soup of the day featuring corn, peaches, and (I think) pine mushroom.

My (poorly photographed) tempura fried morel filled with shrimp mousse.

Marie's Sapo Brovo Heirloom Tomatoes & Fairburn Farms Buffalo Mozzarella with Walla Walla onions, basil, organic olive oil and balsamic vinegar.


With our first course we shared a bottle of a Kettle Valley Semillon Sauvignon Blanc.

Our mains:

Marie's Sablefish in Sakekasu & Maple Marinade with chive and fingerling potato omelette, wakame-truffle broth, and pickled baby shitake mushrooms.

My Roasted Ling Cod with lobster mushroom succotash, sweet corn polenta, and truffle foam.

Conrad and Mark each had the same meal: a shoulder cut of Sloping Hill Pork. I was eying the fennel in Mark's bowl and hoping that he might not care for that vegetable. No such luck.

We chanced a potentially heavy wine with the main course, but, as with most BC reds, it was lighter bodied and not overwhelming for either fish dish. The 2004 Petales d'Osoyoos is a Merlot blend that we all drank down happily.

On to dessert (and yes, that's me, laboriously texting, sending my sister a message to shut off her darn phone during dinner. It kept vibrating in her pocket, and she'd check who it was and then ignore it. Marie, I love you, but you're not so important that on a Friday evening you can't shut off your phone while dining with family.)...

Marie and Mark each opted for the same thing (and I would have ordered it, too, had I ordered dessert): the olive oil almond cake with preserved rhubarb and creme fraiche. They also each had a glass of the suggested wine pairing, the Quails Gate Botrytis Affected Optima.

Conrad and I, meanwhile, shared cheeses. He had a glass of a Quails Gate Cabernet Sauvignon, while I went with the Venturi-Schulze Brandenburg No. 3. It was at this point that Conrad was offered a small pour of an Elephant Island Stellaport, a port-style wine made from cherries. Lovely cheeses, too. Among them (because I can't remember them all but that all of them are BC cheeses) were a gouda from Gort's in Salmon Arm, the Tiger Blue from Poplar Grove in Naramata, and a few others alongside.

Ah, happiness. We'll want to go back and try other things there, fish through the wine list for more interesting pairings. Well done Aurora Bistro - we hope you're what we've been looking for in Vancouver!

simple dinner party fare

Steven and Jenny came over last night - we hadn't seen them in quite some time since our last trip to Vancouver coincided with their summer vacation to Florida. We were glad to have the place tidied some and some proper deck furniture for them to sit on, and all in all, is was a good dinner with them.

We were pretty pressed for time yesterday, what with visiting Dad and some other errands. I felt a little harried through dinner, and so I decided not to subject them to photographs of their food. After they left, I replated some things and snapped away. Marie was home late, and she needed dinner, so the replated food served as her meal.

We snacked on some simple things out on the balcony: caribou pate, fig cake, fig and olive toasts, and a Fraser Valley ash chevrotina we picked up at les amis du FROMAGE; olives, and some nuts I toasted and tossed with some seasonings. Conrad and I shared with them the Hula O Maui sparkling wine we bought a few weeks back, hearkening back to when we went to Steven and Jenny's for dinner and they shared a bottle of Volcano White from the Big Island. You know, it was pineapple wine, but it was light and crisp.

Dinner is slightly misrepresented here. The side greens (arugula with tomatoes, red onion, and pomegranate seeds) are not dressed with the simple vinaigrette I made, nor are there any pieces of the corn on the cob I quickly cooked. The true star - pale as it may be against that bright green arugula - is the meat pie. It's a take-off on an old restaurant stand by, a Cajun meat pie. I winged it some, and it could have been prettier, but the pork filling was very nicely seasoned even if it wasn't all that spicy in the end.

For dessert, I have to thank my old friend/former colleague Gail. She got me the recipe for the Black Magic chocolate cake we used to make at the restaurant, and I knew Conrad would thrill to this dessert. It's one of the best chocolate cake recipes I've ever known. Though I was scrambling to frost it up until the minute the guests walked in the door, I was pleased with the result, and I hope the pieces I sent home with Steven and Jenny will make their kids happy.

And then I went to bed. Feeling very tired, very fat, very heavy. Well fed and exhausted. I was up a little later than usual this morning, and I've not yet bothered with either coffee or breakfast. We definitely will go have a swim today!

Lamb, peaches

So there we were, on our way home from Stanley Park by way of popping in on Dad, and Conrad tells me that he'd kind of like some red meat for dinner. Hmmm. Already almost 5:00. Oh boy, this might be fun.

It wasn't, not totally. But I made it through, and while I'm hardly entirely happy with the dinner I made, I will agree that it was edible. And the parsnips kind of rocked.

It ended up being a slightly late dinner with a few things done with the materials on hand rather than with what I felt I needed. String, for example. Always nice to be able to tie up roasts with string. I remembered for the first minute or so while at Save-On Foods, and then POOF! Gone from my mind.

We had lamb for dinner. I took a butterflied leg and filled it with a mixture of pine nuts, currants, Manchego, shallots, and spinach. Rolled it and roasted it, then served slices atop a bed of a parsnip and leek puree, some lentils alongside. With this we sipped an Oak Bay Vineyard (by St. Hubertus) Pinot Meunier.

Dessert worked out a little better. I had a few BC yellow peaches. A boiling water bath did not loosen the skins as I'd have liked, so I peeled them roughly, then poached them some in a Riesling, honey, and lime syrup. I removed the peaches before they were too soft, then reduced the syrup and let the peach halves sit soaking in it, spooning more syrup on them on occasion. With more time, it may have been a better dessert. Still, I liked that the lime gave the syrup some tang and some bitterness (from the zest), and set against some local blackberries and a scoop of vanilla ice milk, it made for a lighter dessert that we all enjoyed.

And now it's blogging before doing some reading, a bit of a Cedar Creek Platinum Reserve 2005 Pinot Noir sitting by me. Why yes, we do try to drink A LOT of BC wine back home in BC...

Night Market

Return of the egg balls, y'all!

Our condo location close to Chinatown
readily affords us the opportunity to shop, dine, and walk in that neighbourhood. A pity, really, that we don't do that as much as we should. Still, once in a while we make it there, like last night.

After dinner (pork chops coated with coarse mustard and saltine crumbs, served with steamed zucchini ribbons and a topping of leeks and Pink Lady apple - not one of my best efforts ever, but not too bad, and the Cedar Creek Dry Riesling went well enough with it), we got another layer on (it's cooler here than back home) and headed the few blocks into Chinatown to the Night Market.

The sun was low, but the blocked off street was fairly packed. Nice to see. We wandered through, not really intending to buy things, more just to look.
Not to buy? Whoops, I lie. I wanted egg balls again. Happily, we found the same stand as last year and got a nice order made up fresh. We ate them far too quickly - essentially, they are lightly sweet waffles, so they were our dessert. Yum. I have to admit, though, I was totally eying up/lusting for the fish grilling at the stall next to the egg balls stall!


We finished the evening (and a lovely sunset it was) with some goat milk gouda and a bottle of Domaine de Chaberton Gamay Noir, an excellent recommendation by the folks at Taylorwood Wines. Conrad and I sat out on the balcony and could see the Chinatown activity winding down as it got darker.