Life in the Lower Mainland (BC, Canada)

My mom is quite elderly now and says she can't handle many types of foods. She likes soft things like rice porridge (congee) every day, so I got her a little something to jazz things up. As she adds some chili to everything for spicy heat and occasionally likes dried seaweed, this spicy Bestore Kelp product seemed to be a promising combo.   First of all, as you can see from our slides, the product doesn't look like the picture on the packaging. It's also quite over-packaged with sub-packages inside, but I suppose that helps with keeping the product from being overexposed to dehydration or needing to be refrigerated if you don't finish it all. The taste is rather mild and the spiciness barely there. The texture is slightly crunchy like al dente pasta but more firm. And this despite being rather thin -- certainly not as thick-looking as the magnified picture on the package. For me strangely the word that initially came to mind was "meaty". Overall it's ok...

My mom loves crunchy chips of all types but is generally too conservative to try anything new, so I got her some fancy Lay's "Truffle Mushroom" Chips . Turns out she really loves them -- says they taste too good to swallow, she just wants to keep savouring the flavour! It's got that perfumey truffle flavour to be sure, and it's also strong and clear. But flip over the package to look at the ingredients and it reads ARTIFICIAL truffle. Be more mindful as you eat it and you may detect a slight sweetness, a buttery note, and a slightly bitter aftertaste. If you're still fine with faked truffle flavour, you may nevertheless want to wait for them to go on sale as it's a rather small amount of chips for your dollar. That said, the flavour is so strong that more than two or three chips at a time and you may start to be turned off, akin to having that greasy feeling from having too much rich cream in one sitting.

My mom loves cruncy chips of all types but is generally too conservative to try anything new, so I got her some Hi Tempura Seaweed (spicy flavour) chips to try, especially as she likes spicy hot stuff as well as dried seaweed. I got it at T&T where they have it listed as Tao Kae Noi Tempura Seaweed , and it comes in spicy and not-spicy versions. The spicy heat is low and it creeps up very slowly, so your initial bites may not register it at first. The overall flavour is curiously like crispy fried fish skin, despite this being a vegetarian product. This brings to mind a sushi class using potato and seaweed to fake unagi (eel) . As you can see from the back of the package, they also recommend it to go with noodles, just as dried sheets of seaweed are sometimes an accompaniment to bowls of ramen. It's versatility is great especially as it's quite pricey for the miserable 40 grams in each package.

My friend introduced me to Ramen GAOH today in Burnaby near Hastings and Willingdon. Really impressed by the deliciousness and filling portion for a decent price! Some noodle orders come with an optional extra order of noodles, included in the price. Some vegan options. My friend got the Scorpion Ramen (slide 1 -- $17.50) which was a slightly lighter bowl of noodles but still a fair portion. Based on his previous visits, he suggested the Tsukemen, and we tried the fried rice, which comes with instructions at the table for what to do. Spicy Tsukemen (slides 2-3 -- $18.95) Tsukemen is house-made thick noodles in special dipping soup with pork chunks. Comes with karaage (deep fried chicken) or chashu. Noodles can be hot or cold. Spicy Tsukemen is tossed in house-made spicy sauce that contains ground pork. I didn't find the spicy sauce particularly spicy. It doesn't come pre-tossed so if you find it too spicy you could spoon it aside. Or if you already mixed it into your noodles...

Previously I mentioned a fishy chat about investments and day trading that was in all likelihood leading to some kind of phishing scam. What made me cautious there was the chat had started just shortly after another strange chat involving investments and day trading. "Lisa" contacted me on LinkedIn . I wasn't on that platform much so we moved to WhatsApp shortly after (where her phone number was +1 (604) 332-9594). This one had a pretty strange story about how to make easy money, possibly trying to appeal to people who are not averse to cheating the system in order to make too-good-to-be-true instant wealth. It was harder to find image matches on Google Image Search for the pictures she sent, but I did get a few suspicious hits: The post supposedly showing her wearing a green outfit after a run (slide 4) is identical from that of a weight-loss website . Her healthy fruit salad breakfast (slide 5) seems to be somewhat popular, posted by @bubu87879 on Twitter and  @July20...