Life in the Lower Mainland (BC, Canada)

Every once in a while, my mom reminisces about her childhood days growing on the farm and how they used to have pigs. And invariably she ends up talking about how cruel it is to eat those poor pigs. Closet vegan? She still buys ham and bacon and she talks about how pricey all that phoney meat stuff is. And going vegan can actually be pricey. Like "Nacho Cheese", the "vegan gourmet cheese alternative" from Follow Your Heart . It retails at Karmavore in New Westminster for $5.89 for a 284g pack ($2.07 per 100g). Compare with, say, a Black Diamond Cheese Bar ($7.97 per 700 grams at Superstore , or $10.47 regular price; sometimes as low as $4.97 at No Frills ). Still, I wanted to let my mom try it. In case she really did want to act on her don't-eat-the-poor-pigs mindset. This soy "cheese" from Follow Your Heart is wet like tofu but firmer. It's orange, so you might expect a strong cheddar flavour, but the taste reminds me more of nachos than c...

Bishop's seems to have fallen off the foodie radar, but it is still an excellent little restaurant. Superb food, superb service. It's been a long time since I went to Bishop's. My dining buddy and I talked about it since October, and finally set a date in early January. Bishop's did a quick January renovation, and our date got pushed back to January 25th -- And for this inconvenience, they surprised us with two glasses of champagne! Wow! If you haven't been by in a while, it's repainted but still retains the Native American artwork theme which to me feels a bit out of place compared to the structure and colour of the room. It is all on loan from a gallery and every piece is for sale, although that fact is not crassly advertised with price tags. One of the waiters had a native american artwork themed tie, but the hostess informed us it was merely a happy coincidence and a gift from his wife. Bishop's is a very different dining experience from any other...

EDIT: Jan-24th -- Price correction to $8.90 after tax. I was on the Food Bloggers Food Cart Crawl when we walked by Zaatar Mediterranean Hummus Bar on Davie. The restaurant name has hummus all over it, but what caught my eye was the picture of Shakshouka on their street sign. It looked YUM and I knew I had to try it. It tasted... totally not what I expected. The restaurant has been open for about 7 months. The owner is Israeli, but it's not a "family restaurant" per se. On this Saturday morning, the cashier was Ukrainian and the chef was French. Not the best start if you're looking for authenticity, but hey, as long as the chef can serve out delicious food, I won't complain. The website is, sadly, rubbish. Zaatar even points to Urbanspoon for their menu (Huh?). You may wonder why I went to a hummus bar but didn't order any hummus. I'm wondering that myself. Anyway, if you don't know what it is, shakshouka is "a dish of eggs poached in...

A few days ago, I wrote about having purchased some survival food bars for my emergency readiness backpack . I also got a pack of the 3600 calorie food bars (feeds 1 person for 3 days) to try out. Today, I decided to eat just the survival food bars, as well as only a moderate amount of water, to see how I'd make out. Each pack divides into 9 portions, each of which is about 5 cm x 5 cm x 3cm, or approximately two-thirds the size of a standard nanaimo bar. Three portions a day is the estimated intake for one adult person. I further divided each portion into half, and aimed to eat one half portion every three hours, starting from 10 o'clock. The check-in times would therefore be at 10, 1, 4, 7, 10, 1. Since I work graveyards, my "day" starts at 10pm. My job is pretty sedentary, with some walking about now and again. Of course I did not gorge beforehand, as that would be cheating. BAR #1 10 PM: Ate 1/2 bar. Had 2 cups of water (i.e., ~ 1 mug) of water. 1 AM: ...

During the dine-out with the International in Vancouver Social Meetup Group at La Bodega on Saturday, our server popped by to check on us once our group paella order had come out. She offered to tell us the story of how paella ("for the lady") came to be: Once upon a time, a beautiful princess was in love with a farmer, but forced to wed someone else. The farmer loved her and would have given her the world, but he was poor. He was a fabulous cook, however, and created this dish for her. In it, he put "the world" -- foods from the field, the land, and the sea (vegetables, meat, shellfish) -- as well as his heart, represented by slices of bright red peppers. In our group we also had a young Spanish lady. She wasn't able to confirm the server's story of paella, but she offered to tell us the story of how tapas came to be: In the distant past, there were occasionally flies in restaurants. To protect glasses of wine from flies, people would put small sauc...

If you dine as as group at La Bodega , you're pretty much forced into the Spanish culture of communal eating and shared plates -- at least that was how it turned out Saturday night when the Internationals in Vancouver Social Meetup Group went there. Somebody dropped the ball big-time here. DON'T let it happen to you! Our dining group was pretty big: About 30 people turned up out of about 40 RSVPs. Although 30 sounds like pretty big numbers for a restaurant with a small storefront ( which you can see on Google maps ), it's actually not too bad. Inside, the restaurant is actually quite spacious: There's an upper floor and fairy tight seating -- as much as 8 to one of their slightly rectangular tables, and chairs sometimes placed literally side by side with no room in between. We were one of two very large groups, and there was still seating for smaller groups of 4-6. Downstairs it looked like it was mostly a long bar. La Bodega opened in 1971, and apparently since t...

Have you ever tasted survival food bars? Now that the devastating quake in Japan has very decidedly fallen off front page news (possibly since the depressing news is that Japan is probably irradiated stem to stern), the topic of emergency preparedness is as tasty as stale bread -- But it doesn't mean you shouldn't be prepared. Previously I had written about Emergency Preparedness Kits , such as the ones from The Red Cross . Depending on where you get them, kits may come WITHOUT food or water. The Red Cross ones come with a huge collapsible plastic container for water, but it's carried separately from the backpack, and not really that portable or convenient. Also, the plastic smell leeches into the water and makes it stale, so refreshing the water periodically is important. You can get both food and water separately, and in surprisingly compact 3-day supply amounts. And if you are in British Columbia, Canada, 72hrs.ca offers free shipping with a $60+ order . 12 packs...

I had the opportunity Tuesday night to try three of the large-portioned (but $8) desserts at Cosca . This is the third and last review post for the January Food Bloggers dine-out at this restaurant. In the previous two posts, I talked briefly about the restaurant and staff that night , and the pastas we tried . Finally to the good stuff: Dessert. No chocolate cake! Argh! They even ran low on tiramisu, which our Food Blogger organizer/host and EATMarketing principal Ronald Lee has long raved about as being the best. He even bragged about having discovered the "secret ingredient" in the recipe -- something so classified he'd have to kill you if he told you. Uh, yeah. Okaaay Ronald. Only three desserts were available that night. There's no dessert menu -- ask your server. If I remember correctly, they were $8 each on the final bill, before tax and tip. Bananas Foster Tartufo Tiramisu The Bananas Foster here has chocolate drizzled over it. Very quickly the ...

As I mentioned in the previous post , the Food Bloggers had another dinner outing to Cosca on Tuesday night. I touched on the appetizers there. On to the pasta! The regular price of the pastas is $14-16, and the portion you get is maybe two measuring cups worth of pasta. No, really. Two measuring cups. It looks like about a half litre in volume. If your pasta was $15, you might just balk at the portion size, especially if you're expecting something like what you might get at Spaghetti Factory or chow mien at a Chinese Restaurant. Pasta (and noodles in general) is cheap filler and anyone can cook it al dente . But what you're really paying for is the sauce: For the chef to know what they are doing and to put together a combination with tasty ingredients. They can throw in more pasta to make volume, but if you think about it, that's not going to really be worth an extra $2 or so. At $14-$16 a plate, even if you think that is a bit on the pricey side, getting more volum...

Cosca is a small restaurant with a small storefront on Davie. Even with the wooden sign on the sidewalk, you may very well have walked by it several times without realizing it. Inside this skinny space is a bar, a row of tables, a single bathroom, then the kitchen beyond. It's a tight place, and on busy nights with a busy bar, one can well imagine the Fire Department might bust it for overcapacity at any moment. The Food Bloggers organized a dinner at Cosca -- again. Not surprising as one of the organizers, Ronald, has been going on and on for literally months (even before the Food Bloggers group began) about how divine the tiramisu is there. There was a close call at Nicli Antica Pizzeria last week when he was almost loathe to admit the tiramisu there was really good too. (Maybe even... just as good?! Horrors!) Dinner was at 6:15 pm. When I walked in at 6pm, it was dead inside except for a few diners who weren't part of our group. Not the usual packed-and-with-lineup c...

If you haven't seen this week's flyer for Save-on-Foods , you're missing out on what is probably the cheapest pizza by the pound without needing a Costco membership. In fact, in comparison to Costco, Save-on-Foods pays you to buy it with their points program. And last time I checked, Costco only had the one flavour -- pepperoni. In previous posts, I talked about pizza wars between Save-on-Foods and Superstore. Well, surprisingly, Save-on-Foods has now undercut Superstore by a mile with $10 for 3 large pizzas. It's not uncommon now to find $5 per pizza or $10 for two Delissio pizzas. In the past, it had gone to as low as $4 . At almost 1 kilogram, the pizzas are big enough to cut into thirds for three dinners, or quarters for four lunches. That works out to about a dollar a meal! But how does it taste, you ask? (Huh? You want bulk AND taste too? Next you'll be demanding actual decent nutritional value. Pfft...) So far I've popped open just the Four Chee...

I was out and about with the Food Bloggers today with Food Persuasion and Posh Pudding on our way to Loving Hut Express , we passed by The American CheeseSteak Co. on Davie. If you've never been there, it's a pretty small space with a very open kitchen. From the street and in front of the counter you can watch the cooks prep your food on a griddle . It's a great selling point and what you see is what you get, so there's no surprise when you get your order. The prices here are very good for the portion you get: Basically $8-10 for a 6" sub, +$2 to supersize it to a 9" sub. You get so much filling that some of it is guaranteed to fall out of the sub. The subs come in a basket. Curiously, there are service stations with steak knives. To me, this doesn't really add up since you don't automatically get a plate even if you wanted to knife-and-fork your sub. Their fries are double-fried, but even before any frying, they go into water with vinegar, w...

On today's Food Bloggers Food Cart Crawl with PoshPudding (who very helpfully took a picture of the menu) and FoodPersuasion , we started at the Vancouver Art Gallery and headed for the nearby Roaming Dragon . Our next step was to trek all the way to Yaletown for the vegan Loving Hut Express. Once upon a time, Loving Hut was a small restaurant on Broadway that had really decent vegan pizza (albeit with that creepy-tasting Daiya cheese ). It also had a TV with Loving Hut founder Supreme Master Ching Hai 's channel on it. There's no TV on the Loving Hut food cart. The Loving Hut Express food cart uses Gardein fake meat, which is really quite good in both look and texture to real meat. Taste-wise it was harder to tell, smothered under delicious sauce and veggies, but there wasn't anything odd about it either. Some fake meats might have a strong off-flavour because of the tofu content, but it was nothing like that here. (That said, when I carefully isolated a p...

The Vancouver Food Bloggers met this afternoon at the Vancouver Art Gallery before dispersing into the city to try various food carts. I went with just two others in a tiny trio and discovered that dividing food into three is annoying. Most things divvy into two. At three, the portion for some reason ends up being awkward. We also discovered that rainy days are the best for visiting food carts because there's no lineup! The first stop for us was Roaming Dragon , on Burrard near Robson, basically across the street from HMV. The theme here is globally-inspired gourmet food with a menu that changes every few months. We were grazing, so I just picked up a pair of Adobo Sliders for us ($6 for 2). The Sliders are sold in pairs and they refused to sell us just one. It looked like basically the buns came in pairs, and maybe selling just one would have thrown off their count. And each bun was small enough that they dissuaded us from cutting it up to share with the three of us. One per...

Even before our little Food Bloggers dine-out group tried three pizzas at Nicli Antica Pizzeria , I was asking about dessert. There was one chocolate cake "daily special" which turned out to be on the regular menu. That the server didn't know suggested it was a recent change (hey -- keep your servers updated, eh?). There's no dessert menu online, so be sure to ask about it. And do it early because the light pizzas that are prepped quickly can lead you to ordering more to fill up, and then have no room for dessert. Eat strategically both to fit it in and keep your weight loss budget. We tried three desserts (picture here) : A Panna Cotta , a Chocolate Cake, and a Tiramisu . The Panna Cotta came popped out onto a plate with what looked like red wine and softened (soaked?) chestnuts. There was a single ladyfinger on top. The panna cotta itself was strangely bland. Bland was the odd theme of the whole night, in fact -- so much so that I am suspicious that I was som...

One of my pet peeves about restaurants with websites -- especially nice flashy websites -- is incorrect information on the web. Prior to the Food Bloggers going to Nicli Antica Pizzeria, I had looked through the menu and even posted a rough translation for everyone so we would be quite prepared rather than helpless and time-consuming at what was said to be a busy restaurant. That turned out to be utterly useless because not only have the ingredients changed somewhat, but some of the pizzas were even off the menu completely -- no more Diavolo or Quattro Formaggio, for example. Before we get to my review of the pizzeria and the pizza, you can get a brief primer on certified Neapolitan pizza from this blog post . However, if you genuinely don't care about tradition or certification or whatever, that's actually okay. If you've never seen it before, Neapolitan pizza is basically a type of pizza that uses a deliberately thin, chewy, plain naan -like bread. Sometimes the thi...

Nicli Antica Pizzeria is a Verace Pizza Napoletana (VPN) Association certified Neapolitan pizza restaurant. If you don't already know what makes this type of pizza special, this post gathers some info and links for you. If you just want the super-basic Philistine 's version, Neapolitan pizza works out to basically toppings on bread that's very much like a thin, plain naan . Sometimes the thinner centre will result in the pizza being soggy there. Hopefully, it won't be. The best place to start with more info is, of course, VPN itself, for what is required for certification . BECOME A MEMBER OF VPN AMERICAS Certify your pizzeria or restaurant and join the Associazione Verace Pizza Napoletana. If you operate in full accordance with the following association rules: 1. A Wood-Burning Oven. The real Pizza Napoletana must be cooked in a wood-fired dome oven operating at roughly 900ºF. Gas, coal or electric ovens, while capable of produce wonderful pizza, are not ...

If you don't have the Street Food App for iPhones , you can still go online to find food carts at http://streetfoodapp.com/vancouver :

UPDATE: January 5th, 2011 -- Forget this menu for Nicli Antica Pizzeria. It's different from the actual menu in the restaurant . I hate it when that happens. It looks like the Food Bloggers are headed to Nicli Antica Pizzeria soon, but somewhat unhelpfully the authentic Italian menu online doesn't have quite enough of an English translation for hapless North American diners. Here's a rough translation. Pictures of some of the menu items at Nicli Antica Pizzeria are available on UrbanSpoon . Antipasti e Insalate Antipasto and Salad 15 Antipasto Misto 30 Antipasto Misti per due an assortment of meats, cheeses, peppers and olives 15 Mixed Antipasto 30 Mixed Antipasto for two people an assortment of meats, cheeses, peppers and olives 7 Insalata Mista mixed greens, roasted garlic, roasted tomatoes and shaved fennel drizzled with our red wine dijon vinaigrette Mixed Greens salad mixed greens, roasted garlic, roasted tomatoes and shaved fennel drizzled...

The Organic Lives downtown location at the Chopra Yoga Centre wasn't open New Year's Eve, so regulars had to swarm their near-the-Olympic-Village location. At close to 5pm, it was very busy and there was quite the lineup at the counter. Between waiting to order, and then waiting for our order, there was enough time to get in a good chat with NeRai of The Star Captains , a local band that was scheduled to play that New Year's Eve night at the prestigious Fairmont from 10pm to 2am. It turns out NeRai is into alternative health choices such as crystal healing and moving-toward-raw veganism. She had come by for one of Organic Lives's three types of sushi , and a large bottle of raw organic coconut water . My friend and I were headed toward Van Dusen Gardens and the annual Festival of Lights (basically plants dead in the winter dressed up with dazzling Christmas lights) and wanted to pick up some finger food to snack on along the way for dinner. We opted for the Sus...

You may recall that I had written about a wonderful visit to Karmavore not too far back where I had made-in-house hot-and-delicious croissant'wiches. My vegan-curious friend from Berkeley was in town and I dragged her over there, hoping to give her the same experience. Well, it sort of fell flat this time. It may have been the different and possibly less experienced staff at the deli, but probably the fact that I forgot to tell them we weren't doing take-out was also a key factor -- the minimal-seating deli operation means they expect solely take-out orders. (On the up side, there's now a bit of decent seating! Two square regulation-height tables plus more chairs replaced the single low coffee table from my last visit. You can squash maybe 10 persons in there easily.) The sandwiches of the day ($5.99) were the same as before -- tofu egg and smoked tomato Field Roast fake meat deli slices. We opted for the smoked tomato. It came cold and in shrink wrap. Oops -- Forgo...