Life in the Lower Mainland (BC, Canada)

Even though I'm currently living on a rather severe budget, I still wanted something (cheap) to go with my homemade bread buns. After some thought, I settled on Nutella. Not only did it satisfy my requirements, it was also chocolate! Total winner! Of course being on a budget, I didn't just waltz down to Walmart and pick up Nutella, since name brands tends to be on the pricier side. I ended up with the Walmart brand Great Value Chocolate Hazelnut Spread  -- almost 40% cheaper than Nutella  and I wasn't going to be fussy about any difference in taste (honestly just having that much chocolate made me pretty happy). Now a third of the way through the jar, I got to thinking... What might satisfy my chocolate-on-bread craving and be even cheaper? The first thing I discovered was Walmart.ca didn't have nearly enough precise subcategories. You can't even find baking chocolate (slide 2) in its own category, for example. For the slide presented I actually ended up searching...

Thanks to Yelp I got tickets for this year's Gluten Free Expo (last year it was called the Specialty Food Expo ). Enjoy Life was handing out samples pretty much right when you entered the convention floor. These soft baked mini chocolate chip cookies by Enjoy Life are quite okay. Life a lot of gluten free baking, it feels grainy and in this case also seems to have a very slight gummy feel. However for tiny bites, they are pretty packed with chocolate chips so a little bit -- like one tiny cookie -- can go a long way if you take time to savor each cookie.

If you are into interesting chocolates, BETA5 offers monthly chocolate experiments. See below for their 2015-February offering. Pricing is about $60 for a one-time purchase; discounts available for memberships. You can sign up for their mailing list in-store or online .

January 31st (today!) is the last day to try  Mink 's first Hot Chocolate 2014 entry, "Paula Dean White Trash TrainWreck": 70% dark chocolate ganache with condensed milk, salted kettle chips, and vanilla whipped cream. Served with a 72% dark chocolate wafer. Don't fret if you miss it, however. The concoction is basically Mink's drinking chocolate on the bottom, a pile of potato chips (which weren't quite salty enough, I thought), and whipped cream on top. The separate layers contrasts it from many other Hot Chocolate Festival entries where you get a novel mixture of ingredients (which sometimes flies and sometimes flops). It is also a tall enough composition that you will likely make a huge mess if you try to stir it all together without eating some chips and whipped cream first. Sadly, none of the combinations of whipped cream, chips, and drinking chocolate were particularly interesting. The saltiness of the chips may have been meant to bring out mor...

Hot Chocolate Festival at Leonidas (downtown Waterfront Convention Centre) ? Well, not exactly. The festival is long over for this year, but they are introducing the flavours they presented into their regular menu. I only found this out Saturday night at their lovely 100th anniversary Easter weekend event. Disclosure: How did I get outed as a blogger? I wasn't in there five minutes and somehow I got tagged. C'mon! I don't even have my picture on this blog. So, okay, I guess I should say that the staff got me pegged as a food blogger from the get go. I normally go undercover. Incognito. Couldn't get away with that this time, though. But hey, it's not I was the only one who got free treats here. Everyone did, and you could have too, if you'd signed up for it . About a year and a half ago, Leonidas opened at the new Convention Centre at the Waterfront in downtown Vancouver. You may have attended their Grand Opening special in December 2011. The emphasis the...

UPDATE: Read some early reports / intel on this event at http://www.meetup.com/FoodBloggers/events/111301152/ Got this in my e-mail yesterday: Please join us, for "A Night of Temptation and Indulgence” at Leonidas on the Waterfront , as we sip on wine, nibble on gourmet delights, and savour the richness of Leonidas, celebrating 100 years of  Belgium’s favourite chocolate. What to expect: A fun intimate Meet & Greet with the team Networking Opportunities Wine & Cheese Bar Leonidas Chocolate Tasting Hors d'oeuvres Chocolate Fondue Bar Leonidas Signature Hot Chocolate Bar A selection of dessert items Door Prizes Gift Bag of more Happiness! The event runs through this Easter Weekend: Thursday March 28th, Friday March 29th, and Saturday March 30th. 6 PM. Register FREE at EventBrite .

Just got this bar of Venezuelan dark chocolate today as a gift. If you put the last line of ingredients into Google Translate, "mani" won't translate in spanish. But if you let Google auto-detect "mani" on its own, it coughs up "hands" from Italian. Look more closely and it's not "mani" but "maní" with the accent, which Google still won't auto-detect. Choose Spanish as the source language and it translates just fine into English as "peanut". Whew! -- No bits of hand in my chocolate!

Yesterday I wrote a bit about my drop-in on XOXOLAT Chocolaterie , and I mentioned a chocolate with bacon in it. I finally unwrapped it today, and shared a chunk with my mom, who's notoriously difficult to impress with food. My mom secretly likes chocolate (even though she always complains I spend too much money buying it for her). But will she like funky chocolate? We'll see how much of it "disappears" over the next week, but initial impressions weren't promising. Neither was she impressed by the chocolate--versus-candy angle. The chili flavour is thoroughly mixed in with the chocolate, and appears as a surprisingly hot aftertaste. Not so hot that you're reaching for cold water or yogurt to put out a fire in your mouth, but there's definitely enough heat to give your tongue a good tingle. Any bitter spiciness from chili is offset by the chocolate. Can't say I detected the influence of expresso. Or maybe my attention was too focussed on the chil...

You walk into Superstore and there's a huge candy bar for less than a dollar. Maybe Nestle or Hershey or whatever. Then you wander into a "boutique" chocolate shop like XOXOLAT Chocolaterie on Burrard and a half-sized bar costs maybe 4 times as much! You might think, "WTF?" Is it because they're obscurely-named imports? That some are organic, or fair trade, or even raw? It turns out the main difference is apparently whether you're buying candy or chocolate. What you get as "Chocolate" in chocolate bars is mostly sugar. It has chocolate flavour, or a chocolate coating, or even just a chocolate flavoured coating. But the actual amount of real chocolate may be very small. There was even an international trade war over the use of the word "chocolate" when some manufacturers wanted to use cheap vegetable oil instead of pricey cocoa butter -- which they ultimately did to varying degrees . Visit msnbc.com for breaking news , w...