Life in the Lower Mainland (BC, Canada)

There are many reasons to try to speed up cooking pasta. Maybe you're too impatient to stand around waiting for the pasta to boil properly and test it periodically. Maybe you like to step away and do something more productive while it's boiling but lose track of time. Whatever the reason, there's a lazier way to do it with less attention, at long as you remember to prep ahead of time. Then you can go straight to preparing the dish. In slide 1 you can see I'm soaking some dry pasta. The minimum time is around two (2) hours of soaking in cold/lukewarm tap water. Don't worry too much if you go overtime. If you completely forgot about it and went to sleep, don't freak out. Just drain the water and try to stir fry it gently in a non-stick pan. As long as it was swimming in water, it shouldn't all glue together. After draining the water, put some oil on them and gently mix/toss, so they don't melt together once they are in the frying pan. After two hours, yo...

Black Diamond Cheddar Cheese Slices are on sale at Walmart this week, at the very low price of $1.97 per 410g pack (normally $3.88). You can get regular thickness at 22 slices per pack, or extra thick at 14 slices per pack. At this price, it is amazingly cheap compared to basically every other type of cheese you can get at Walmart. I bought two packs of the regular Cheddar, and immediately regretted it as soon as I ate a slice. The problem is the flavour is so very weak as to barely be present -- especially for a cheese that claims to be cheddar, normally a stronger-flavoured cheese. It is so weak as to be easily overpowered by pretty much anything else you are having it with, thus making it pointless to add. Even eaten on its own, the cheddar flavour is disappointingly feeble. Too bad I had discarded my receipt already. Otherwise I'd go back for a refund on the unopened pack.

This is a simple recipe to make simple yet delicious meals, on a budget, and in batches ready to heat up and serve for busy people -- whether you are single or preparing meals for the family they can just grab from the fridge and prepare themselves. Here in slide 1 we see the "deluxe TV dinner" garnished with cheap extras of vegetables, pickles, and perogies. But the bare basics are rice and cheese (slides 2 and 3). Prepare rice. I use a parboiled rice that recommends 2 cups of water to 1 cup of rice, but I found that you can get away with as little as 1 cup of water per cup of rice. You can throw virtually anything in here to flavour it a bit and make it more interesting, such as diced potatoes and carrots which will cook while the rice is cooking. In the worst case, if you are on a strict budget, just add some salt. 1 teaspoon of salt per 1 cup of raw rice is more than enough. A useful product is Knorr Chicken Broth Mix , which you can use to make broth / soup of course but...

My friend treated me to lunch and All About Pho was her choice. It was the first time for both of us, and for me it was also the first time basically since Covid was a big deal that I'd gone out for lunch. I'm tempted to say the price for portion is terrible, but sadly this is what you can expect nowadays, so it is probably hovering around average. My order of regular sized Vegetarian Pho was definitely not a filling meal except that it had a lot of soup. 41. Grilled shrimp & grilled chicken on vermicelli / Bún tôm gà nướng ($15.50) Slides 1 & 2 This was my friend's order and she was very happy with the chicken and the plate overall, enough to want to come back. I'm currently on a no-shellfish low-meat diet because of my gout, so I declined to give it a taste. 62. Vegetarian Phở - served with rice noodle, bean sprout, basil, lemon & pepper, tofu, vegetarian ham,  baby corn, veggie, carrot ($12.50 Large: $13.50) Slides 3 & 4 Where's my baby corn? F...

My 8-quart InstantPot with Air Fryer worked so well on crisping up raw potatoes that I wanted to try them on Walmart's Great Value brand perogies . Here are the results at the default 400 degrees Farenheit setting on the Air Fryer. I used the air fryer bin, used straight-from-the-freezer frozen perogies, did not add any oil. 5 minutes (slide 1) Did not appear sufficiently cooked. add 5 minutes (slide 2) From the same batch as slide 1, I closed the lid and added another 5 minutes of air fryer time. Since the lid was opened for inspection, there was a lot of heat loss, so this is not exactly the same as an uninterrupted 10 minute fry. The skin was still slightly undercooked but palatable. Steaming the perogies first and then air frying for 10 minutes produced similar results. 15 minutes (slide 3) This was a new batch, cooked from frozen with 15 minutes on the air fryer timer. Still too long. The skin was crisp on the outside but still had a chew to it. The filling that came out wa...

I was looking for something novel for Mother's Day and came across Galina's Euro Food in Surrey and was recommended this "souffle cake" as something with a more modest price tag ($15) than most of their cakes in the freezer ($35+). Turns out, it's not very novel at all. Imagine a chocolate coated marshmellow, but the white marshmellow part is just a bit more firm. Add token amounts of cake And that's really close to what this tastes like. Maybe if you were from Europe this might be a nostalgic treat, but for me (and I do admit I'm rather picky), this is not novel enough to justify $16.50 for taste and portion size.