Life in the Lower Mainland (BC, Canada)

From the Patty King International website: A golden flaky pastry shell filled with delicious seasoned ground chicken. Ya man it’s fantastic. Filling: Ground chicken, bread crumbs (wheat flour, yeast), textured vegetable protein, onions, salt, chicken soup base, beef soup base, spices, disodium inosinate, disodium guanylate. Pastry: Flour, water, beef suet, sugar, salt, vegetable oil shortening (soybean, canola, cottonseed oils), colour. Allergens: Wheat and soya. On sale this week at No Frills is butter, ribs , and 6-packs of Patty King International patties at $3. This works out to 50 cents per patty. It looks great in ad copy, it is not oily in your hand after microwaving, and there is a nice cracked-black-pepper flavour to the filling, but there are a few drawbacks with this product: It's so peppery that's all you taste. The recommended microwaving leaves you with a crust that is not exactly soggy, but somewhat chewy. Read the ingredients carefully (I ...

Lots of good deals at No Frills this week, including 454g sticks of Lactantia butter at $2.97 -- and (as of Sunday morning anyway) no limit on the amount you can buy. I also picked up at $5.97 Cobblestone Farms Fully Cooked Pork Back Ribs in Honey & Garlic Barbecue Sauce . It's a big box with a big bag that has a generous amount of barbecue sauce. My pack had a total of 7 ribs. The box is definitely way bigger than it needs to be. Give it a shake and you will know just how deceptively big it is. What I liked about this product was that it was hard to mess up since it's already cooked. In the worst case, you can just heat it up and eat. I have a small electric grill and a Cookina Barbecue Mat , so I gave it a go with those but the instructions allow microwaving and using an oven. Cooking instructions were simple and good enough. And with the excessive amount of sauce, you have plenty to spare after you account for loss from dripping off the grill. The Barbecue Mat...

If you've been to their sister restaurant Gurkha Himalayan Kitchen (a Mealshare supporter), you'll find Yak & Yeti quite a different experience. While a few items on the menu are the same, the rest is quite different. Price for portion is also pretty good and the filling entrees are $13-$16. It's a long and narrow restaurant, so if you have a larger party of 6+ persons, you'll definitely want to try to make a reservation so that they can move some tables around if necessary or reserve the U-shaped dining area at the very end that can accommodate maybe 6-8 persons. For my visit I opted for the two curious involves-fruit dishes but the momos, goat pickle, and masala fish were also quite good based on the feedback from the other diners in our group. Masala fish curry was served with brown rice, while jackfruit curry and goat pickle were served with white rice. Wings ($9)  Mango-mustard wings This had a tasty sauce on it, but it tasted neither like mango nor mu...

I registered for Red Robin rewards earlier this year, but never really made it out for the birthday goodies and what not. Then recently I got an e-mail about their new Big Sky Burger, and since my friend had an Entertainment Book coupon for $5 off, we decided to go try it out as well as catch up after months apart. As pictured, the burger looks pretty big and just bursting with goodness. And it is a big burger. Half pound patty. Just nowhere as mouth-watering as in ad copy, but I think everyone knows that already. For one the patty didn't look as blackened as pictured and that grilled flavour didn't come through. The patty itself, however, was big and moist, and as burger patties go, is really decent. The onion ring pictured looks like a generous portion, but it is actually a pretty small onion ring, about the size of Red Robin's smallest onion ring in their 13-ring stack appetizer. The diameter was probably just under 2 inches, compared to a burger that is over ...