Vancouver Again

As I mentioned in my first post on my Vancouver trip (I just got back on Saturday! That red-eye flight back to NYC is great for squeezing extra time out of the trip, but not so much when you have a wedding to attend a mere 7 hours after you land!) we took a seaplane up to the Sunshine Coast for a weekend. There's our seaplane! It's very very small (I think it seats 6 total including the pilot). Note the floating Chevron station in the background; I don't know why I am so tickled by the idea of a floating gas station, but there you go. I thoroughly enjoyed our short flight; takeoff and landing all happens on the water and you get amazing views along the way. I wish I could show you, but my camera was in my bag, which was stashed in the tiny little cargo hold. The last time Py took the plane, he saw a whale! We weren't so lucky on this trip, but I thought it was utterly cool when we flew through a cloud.


Unfortunately, it was pretty rainy all weekend despite the Sunshine Coast name! Well, it's got to rain sometime, right? Anyway, this is the view from our friend's marina, and specifically from the back deck of his boat. It's beautiful in the rain, too. And guess what--THERE ARE SEALS LIVING IN THE BAY!!! I kept seeing a seal (although I think there are two that live here) popping his head up above the water, looking around, and then diving back down again. Never did get a photo because I was too busy squealing. Man, I love seals.


Given the rain, we mostly ate and relaxed but we weren't the only ones--on our way to dinner we saw this deer skulking around. Apparently this is the culprit that's been munching on the recently planted shrubbery around the marina. But it's so cute! Who would begrudge it some leaves, I say.)


It was a very short trip, but fun! And too soon we were being dropped off at the ferry back to Vancouver, where I found this absolutely terrifying statue in front of an ice cream shop. This does not make me want ice cream.


Back in Vancouver, I wandered around Denman St. one day and got myself a falafel sandwich for lunch. It was a beautiful day and I thought I was being very clever, carrying my lunch over to the beach at English Bay. Wrong! The beach is very scenic and relaxing, to be sure, but it is also full of seagulls. Very aggressive seagulls! Seagulls that will walk right up to you and wait for you to put your sandwich down or look away. Even after I wrapped mine back up and stashed it in my bag, this guy just stood on the log next to me and watched my bag! I tried to shoo him away; no dice. In the end, I gave up and took my sandwich home to finish. Hmph, darned seagull.


A more successful lunch from Japadog; my oroshi on the left and Py's kurobuta terimayo (billed as the Kobe beef of pork!) on the right. Delicious, of course. I've said it before--these hot dogs are genius! After this particular lunch, Py went back to work and I wandered accidentally across the set of Fringe (a show which I now feel compelled to watch). I saw Joshua Jackson! (He'll always be Pacey to me.) It was strangely exciting, and the film crew were much nicer than the film crews in NYC (who tend to be serious jerks; yeah, I'm talking about you, film crew for Premium Rush.)


Okay, one more photo before I stop (this is getting really long)--here's my caramel banana waffle from Miura Waffle Milk Bar which I had for a between-meals-snack one day. (Hey, wandering around and being a tourist is hard work!) Caramel and bananas is a perfect pairing and combined with a crisp waffle? Oh boy. I'm sort of glad that I'm separated from this place by an entire continent; otherwise I would be eating way too many waffles. It's a cute little shop and they have savory waffle sandwiches as well, not to mention flavored milks (and Yakult!) I'll definitely revisit this place when I go back to Vancouver.

I think my next post will be entirely about food :) Tomorrow's my first day at my new job, wish me luck!

Read the first part of my Vancouver trip here

Greetings from Vancouver

I'm a week into my vacation and I feel utterly relaxed. I left 90 degree weather and arrived to 65 degree weather and I'm sitting at the kitchen table in Py's apartment. There's an absolutely amazing view of English Bay from here (the photo above is pretty much exactly what I'm looking at right now, if you add in a few more clouds) and I've got a mug of tea. These are good conditions for blogging, my friends. (Even if I've only got a tiny little netbook at my disposal! It's cute and functional but dang does it make me feel like I have giant fingers!)


On my first day, we went to Wreck Beach and listened to music and waited for the sun to set. Actually before we did that, we went to Japadog and I had a spicy cheese terimayo; Py has a photo of me looking positively gleeful but you'll have to wait until he uploads it to see. But anyway, back to the beach.


This guy showed up with a shovel and started digging an enormous hole--eventually he ended up planting a bunch of tree trunks in the ground, as you can see above. I dunno if he was out for some exercise or what, but...okay! It looks kind of neat.


This was as close as we got to sunset, as eventually it just got toooo cold. So we adjourned to Chutney Villa and ate entirely too much food. But it was delicious. And then the good eating continued:


One of my Flickr friends is always posting shots of awesome looking food on her stream, and she happens to be from Vancouver! And ever since I saw her photos of Sun Yee Cafe, I knew we had to go check it out. And we did! This is really far out from where we are, but it happened to be on the way to Rice Lake, so we hopped in the Zipcar (man, what a brilliant service) and drove over to East Hastings. Sun Yee Cafe is kind of an HK style coffee shop and they have absurdly cheap prices. Py got the chicken chop above and I ordered a lunch special of stir fried beef and hor fun noodles (which I neglected to take a photo of). What arrived was an absolutely enormous platter of flat noodles. ENORMOUS. Like, enough for 3 people huge. And that was $6 or $7! It included a drink (lemon tea for me!) and because we had no idea that the portion sizes would be so enormous, we also ordered an appetizer of fried squid:


Salt and pepper style. Delicious, especially the bits of spicy chili. A bit tough, but for the price, I'm not going to complain. We rolled out of there with leftovers and made our way to Rice Lake for a much needed walk. Rice Lake is pretty, but it was starting to drizzle when we got there so we probably didn't get to experience its full glory. Nice for a walk, though!


On another day we went to Stanley Park and saw a couple of raccoon families--I love raccoons! They are so cute and make the best noises.


There were a couple of young ones which were extra cute; you can see a short video that Py made. I cannot for the life of me remember the name of the place we had dinner that night but they had a very reasonably priced set menu which included the new-to-me "tofu cheese". I think it was pretty much cream cheese (possibly mascarpone) and tofu, topped with honey and strawberries and it was surprisingly good. Not enough tofu, though.


Apparently I arrived at the tail end (no pun intended) of the wild sockeye salmon season; from what I've been reading, they've had the largest run in 100 years. Lucky me! I picked up this gorgeous salmon fillet for something like $7 CAD; do you know how much this would cost in NY???? Probably triple that amount.


We made a really simple dinner with it; the salmon was just salted and then pan-seared for a crispy skin. It was amazing, and I'm not sure I can ever go back to eating farmed salmon. (The roasted potatoes and sauteed sugar snap peas were tasty too, but man, that salmon.) Just what the doctor ordered!

Tomorrow we're hopping on a sea plane (exciting!!) and going up to visit our friends' marina. Hope I get to see some seals!

saying goodbye, saying hello

So, the news I've been sitting on for a month? I'm leaving my job! Today is my very last day, and I find myself with mixed emotions--I'm happy to be moving on, but I'm sad to be leaving some very fine coworkers who have become good friends. How do I tell them that I'm going to miss them dreadfully?


Well, since I have a reputation as a, ahem, not very emotional, mostly crabby person to protect, I say it with cake (mini cupcakes, naturally). And they know me well, so I think they will understand what I mean when I leave these in the pantry with a note that says "Eat eat eat! Thanks for everything. P.S. Please leave the boxes, I need them."


Strawberry lemon on the left, good old Guinness on the right
Dear coworkers--seriously, thanks for everything. You've dealt with my meltdowns, my moods, my silly moments (okay, I know sometimes I have laughing fits and can't stop! It's because you're all really funny!), my obsession with that falafel sandwich place (I'm sorry I made you eat there 3 times in one week), my insistence on showing you the Maru and Meat and Cheese videos 800 times, my attempts at organizing bowling/karaoke/bar night/dinner, my papercrafting, my bitching, moaning and complaining. You are all saints. Please keep in touch. Best wishes to each and everyone of you. Thanks for coming out last night to celebrate with me. Because you are my friends, I know you won't use any of my drunken babblings against me ;)


The monkeys! They keep following me!!
(And after I clean out my desk I'm off to Vancouver for two weeks where I will decompress, take a lot of photos, eat a lot of seafood, and maybe even write a blog post or two. And then I'll say hello to my new job.)

Cupcakery Indeed

And the celebrations keep on keepin' on! (Which is why I have not been blogging. Or at least, that's my excuse ;)) Last week was my friend's birthday (on Friday the 13th no less) but since we were all swamped, we celebrated with dinner on the following Wednesday at the Maple Garden Peking Duck Restaurant (one of our two standby dining places for girls' nights out--maybe we need to branch out. But it's so gooood!!!!) Let me just say, we in the girls club are all Asian, so you can rest assured that there is never any shortage of food (or any lack of putting food on each other's plates). Despite that (and knowing that they would be providing us with complimentary ice cream), I held firm to my belief that a birthday is not a birthday unless there is cake. And since I still had 4 bottles of Guinness left from my coworker's birthday, it seemed only natural and frugal of me to make some more Guinness cupcakes.


But before we got to the desserts, we had an entire duck (naturally, since this is a Peking duck restaurant!), followed by a plate of stir-fried crabs (not on the menu and something we get special--it's good to be regulars), then followed by rice, greens, and one of my favorite things of all time, jiao yian pai gu. In English, that translates to salt & pepper pork chops, but we call them Crack Chops because they are SO DARNED ADDICTIVE. I can't figure out how they do it, and I don't care, as long as I get to eat them.


Finally, it was dessert time, and I hauled out my box of mini Guinness cupcakes (because they are so tiny, I had to core out the center to make room for the ganache with one of my small piping tips. Do you know how hard it is to get cake crumbs out of a piping tip?!). Then the birthday girl presented a box of macarons made at her cafe--but wait, there was even more! She even brought along brownies and a couple of slabs of cake, and that was when the waiter showed up with our dish of ice cream (and obligatory fortune cookies and orange slices). At this point, we were all groaning and holding our bellies, but I took a break by taking some photos. You can kind of see in that macaron photo that the left side of the photo is somewhat brighter--that's because my dear friend was trying to assist me by using her Blackberry's screen as a light. We were definitely getting some funny looks from the adjacent table (who had already been staring at us, probably because we demolished so much food. Or was it because we were laughing like hyenas?)

I discovered that I have a second stomach for ice cream. And my fortune? "You should be able to undertake and complete anything." (Obviously they were talking about dinner!) (Although I ended up toting home more food than I had brought, including macarons, one leftover cupcake, a brownie, a slice of red velvet cake, and the duck bones, which are currently simmering away for soup!)


And as soon as I got home, I was back in baking mode, for my coworker's birthday. I had emailed her sister to ask what her favorite cake flavor was; the response was "I don't know about cake, but she likes tiramisu." Well okay then! I went with tiramisu cupcakes. I didn't actually eat any of these, but did taste the mascarpone filling--yum. I guess you can't really go wrong with mascarpone, alcohol, coffee, and sugar.


And here is your bonus shot, a tiramisu cupcake next to a tiny Guinness cupcake. A still life representing happiness and joy.

My Apartment is now a Cupcakery

Whew, did I say that May was a big birthday month? I think I am wrong--I think there are way more birthdays in August to be celebrated. It started in the beginning of the month with my cube-neighbor, who, poor guy, has had to put up with me for way too long. Although, funny story (I really hope he never reads this)--he has this tendency to fall asleep at work (sleep apnea, he says) and for the 4 years that I've worked with him, I've tried and tried to get a photo of him asleep (he sleeps totally upright, one hand on the keyboard, one on the mouse, like he's just REALLY deep in thought) and every single time I whip out the camera, he wakes up. EVERY SINGLE TIME.

Anyway, that was kind of a digression, wasn't it? What I was going to say is, the man loves his beer. And so, what could be more appropriate than beer cupcakes? (Well, maybe I could have just gotten him a case of beer, but where's the fun in that?) And so I was googling away (at work, shhh) and came across this brilliant recipe for Guinness cupcakes over at Smitten Kitchen. They seem so over the top--Guinness in the cupcakes, Baileys in the frosting, whiskey in the ganache filling...perfect!


I resisted the urge to make these super girly with pink sugar. See, I am considerate. Chocolate shavings are slightly more manly! Anyway, I waffled a bit about actually filling the cupcakes because the cakes themselves are so moist that I thought it would be too much. In the end, I stuck with the recipe, but omitted the whiskey. It did make it insanely indulgent and rich, but hey, it's a birthday! And the frosting--holy yum.


Over the weekend, I made a batch of mini buttermilk cupcakes for my friend's cafe--is there anything more cheery than a pile of mini cupcakes in the afternoon sunlight?


Okay, how about a chocolate frosted mini cupcake? AREN'T THEY CUTE??? I know I'm a sucker for all things small and mini, but dang, these are especially cute. I hope they went over well! (By the way, in case you are interested, a standard sized cake recipe makes 81 mini cupcakes. 81 PEOPLE!!)


And last, but not least, Mamegoma wants to wish a belated happy birthday to bento blogging buddy Bentobird! (Mamegoma picked out the sugar flower on this one ;)).

Watermelon Granita

A couple of weeks ago in the midst of the heat wave (oh it was so hot), I was holed up in my bedroom, sitting on top of the air conditioner, reading foodblogs for ideas for icy treats. And, like a bolt from the sky, I saw this post from Petra of Zoom Yummy. (Have you seen her blog? It keeps me giggling constantly. And hungry.) Granita! Brilliant idea! Cold, sweet, delicious, none of the guilt associated with ice cream--I was sold.

I also had no oranges. SOB.

But, according to an old work evaluation form that I found the other day, I am able to adapt in tricky situations. Surely you will agree with me that this was a tricky situation!

Oh have I mentioned the fact that I've had an unbroken supply of watermelon in the fridge? And that I was starting to get tired (blasphemy!) of watermelon juice? What better way to revive my love affair with watermelon than to turn it into a delicious, sparkly, icy, pink granita!

No need for a recipe. Blend yourself some watermelon chunks. Pour into a shallow container (watermelon juice is so sweet you won't need to add any sugar or syrup, but you may want to try a little lemon zest or juice for zing!). Stick in freezer. Stir every hour or two to break up the ice crystals. It'll start getting slushy, then more granular, and finally, you'll have a container of granita. Scoop or scrape into a bowl, and eat. Or directly into your mouth. Either way, mmmmm. Nothing better on a hot summer day.

All the Things I've Been Eating

Hi everyone! Well here we are at Sunday again--where does the time go? Why aren't weekends ever long enough? Sigh. Well, I guess I should stop moping--I mean, it's still only Sunday afternoon, so I still have a few hours to do whatever I feel like. Anyway, right now, I feel like sharing some of the things I've been eating lately, in lieu of any content containing recipes (hey, it's Sunday after all!) First, the weather has finally cooled just enough for me to turn my oven on. HOORAY! The first thing to emerge from the oven is these plain shortbreads. I cut them with a pie-pastry cutter which has a vein pattern stamp built in and then dusted them with some green sugar I found lurking in my freezer. (I went through this phase a while back where I discovered how easy it is to tint sugar with gel paste.) I quite like the way they came out!


And of course, green leaves made me think of Yatta and now I can't get the song out of my head. (In fact, I just rewatched that video AGAIN.)


I had dinner with my girls this past week which is always a blast. We went to Ouest on the Upper West Side (because I had been meaning to try it out for ages) and had a delicious meal. We did show up a little late for our reservation and thus were banished to a table by a waiter station, but I suppose that's our fault! Anyway, the important thing was the food, and our favorite thing all night (well, mine, anyway!) was this apple frangipane tart with caramel sauce and cinnamon ice cream. I wanted to lick the plate (I didn't, you'll be happy to know). But we also had delicious braised short ribs and a gorgeous piece of pork belly and soft shelled crabs...I walked home. It put the smallest dent in the number of calories we consumed, but hey! It's the effort.


About a week ago, my family and I had dinner at L'ecole, which is run by the French Culinary Institute and staffed by its students. They have a pretty good value dinner menu of either 4 or 5 courses (depending on what time you go) for $42. And the quality of the food is pretty good (although I thought the service was a bit patchy). Plus, you get a little treat to take home; ours were these crumbcakes, which made a nice breakfast the next morning. I only took a couple of photos because of the lighting, but the two below were my favorites: roasted shrimp and my chocolate tart.




I can't remember what type of ice cream the tart was served with (perhaps coconut, judging from the garnish) but what I do remember is the disk of caramelized bananas the tart was set on. Oh boy! They really made this dessert and I would definitely not have enjoyed it nearly as much without the bananas.

Oh dear, well, look at the time. I have to go get some Guinness cupcakes into the oven. Don't worry, I'll tell you about that next time (and about the zongzi we made this weekend, yum!) Hope you had a great weekend!

Ouest
2315 Broadway
New York, NY 10024
Tel: 212-580-8700

L’Ecole
462 Broadway
New York, NY 10013
Tel: 212-291-3300