Vancouver the Last

I'm going to sum up the rest of our Vancouver trip very briefly, because it's been over a week now and nobody cares.

If you ever find yourself in Vancouver with 300 bucks to drop on a meal, I think you should drop it at Cioppino's. It's in Yaletown, which is the trendy yuppified-old-warehouses-turned-into-lofts district. But the food is amazing and they have a picture of Bill Clinton there to prove it. I'm not even sure what I mean by that. 

We split two appetizers, a pasta, a main and a dessert along with a very pleasant bottle of wine the waiter recommended when he saw me wrestling with the three-inch thick wine list. The courses were fantastic, each one better than the last.  

My half of the main course, perfectly medium rare lamb with curry foam

Before we drove home on Sunday, we went for brunch. Fraiche is a restaurant in West Vancouver, with an absolutely amazing view back over the city. Sitting there was definitely one of those moments where I felt ridiculously lucky to be me. I had the eggs benedict, all the while thinking "hey, screw you Bourdain for trying to ruin this for me."  

Doesn't even do it justice.

I'm not sure what the problem is with the formatting, but I'm too lazy to try and fix it. Good thing I am not a blogging professional. 

Vancouver the second

We took our leave of Salt Tasting Room without a solid follow-on plan. The sun was out for probably the first time in a week (Juneuary! says the media) and we entertained the idea of a patio. But the first one we came across was way crowded, then the next one was not very well reviewed on Yelp. After walking the length of Gastown, we decided to double back and try to get in to one of the Chowhound recommended spots, The Pourhouse. Open Table claimed they had no seatings available, but we figured we could at least try to get in the bar.

Best decision ever. We walked in and the hostess showed us to a couch in the bar and said she would have a table for us shortly. This place is famous for drinks, and if the table of four women horizontal in their booth was any indication, the booze pours freely (did I mention it was all of 7:30 at this point? They asked me to join them, but I declined). The bartender came over to make friends and learn more about us so that he could make us the perfect drinks, and after a brief interview he said he knew just the thing and went off to mix. He made something bourbon based for Mo that I believe was called a Red Hook, and for me, a Clover Club cocktail. Do you know how delicious a Clover Club is? Too delicious. Gin, lemon juice, raspberry liqueur and an egg white. I decided it was in my best interest to stop at one.

Once seated, we had a seared tuna and artichoke salad that didn't work as well as I had hoped it might. Mo's entree was steelhead trout with sage and brown butter gnocchi, which was great. But it was completely overshadowed by my meal. I had braised beef, served on pureed celery root with some mushrooms, spinach and roasted tomatoes. But the kicker was the dollop of horseradish creme fraiche on top. That I have never thought of such a thing before is a travesty. It sounds like too much, right? Rich on richer? But it was amazing. I damn near licked that plate clean.

There were so many intriguing options on that menu that we had a hard time choosing, but we were both very satisfied with our choices. It's only too bad we weren't there in a larger group so that we might have been able to taste more. Of course, it would have only been sad to be there in a larger group that didn't believe in sharing. I am sure we'll go back next time we're in town, but it will be a challenge not to order that beef again.

Next time: Our Saturday night meal.

Me enjoying the view of my husband enjoying the view

Vancouver, part one

Is a post about travel still interesting if there aren't any pictures? Let's find out. The hubs and I got sprung from lockup for the weekend and went on a romantic little getaway to Vancouver, BC. It was Mo's first time there, and the first time I had been since I turned 21 and no longer needed to go to Canada to drink in bars.

Since I had no idea where to go for grown-up activities, we based all of our dining decisions on the recommendations of the Chowhound boards. I find the postings there obnoxiously self-aggrandizing and repulsive 99% of the time, but I'm glad that I held my nose and went in, because we ate at four great restaurants over our three days there.

First up was Salt Tasting Room. It's a tiny little hole in the wall on Blood Alley in the Gastown section of town, which is not altogether as rough and tumble as it sounds (although we did see a real live meth head smoking her pipe on our way out - but then a Bentley drove by, so you see what I mean).

The concept at Salt is that you order three meats and cheeses off of a big chalkboard, and pair it with a wine flight if you want. Boy, did we want. So we ordered two flights and one plate. We were overwhelmed by choice (neither of us is a great decision maker) so we let them choose.

We ended up with a Pt. Reyes blue, a Leicester I think Lancashire and some locally made corned beef. Oh, the corned beef. It was so delicious - sliced so thin you could see through it - I wanted to have them load up my purse so I could snack on it the rest of the night. It came with a condiment called mostarda which I had never heard of before, but which apparently is quite trendy. It was overkill for the beef but was very good for covering up the socks taste of the Lancashire cheese. The wine flights were unremarkable, but well paired.

If I went back, I would be piggish about it and order two plates so I could sample more meats and cheeses. We were being conservative because we did not have a solid dinner plan and wanted to keep our options open. We were just underwhelmed enough with our first plate that we wanted to move on rather than order another plate, although this is not to say we didn't enjoy it. We just weren't in love enough to stay, having not played the field at all.

I'm going to drag this out, so that I have stuff to post about! Next up, our meal at The Pourhouse!

Oh look, I do have a picture!

Firstworld problems

I think that twitter is breaking my brain. No, I know that twitter is breaking my brain because the first time I wrote that, I wrote "brian." I'm totally obsessed and I get all pissed off and frustrated if the people I follow don't tweet enough. I'm all like HOW CAN IT BE POSSIBLE THAT NOT ONE OF THE 133 PEOPLE I FOLLOW HAS HAD SOMETHING TO SAY IN THE LAST TWO MINUTES?!?!?! I NEED TO FOLLOW MORE PEOPLE TO MAKE THE FLOW OF USELESS INFORMATION MORE CONSISTENT. It's really pretty sad and proves that the end is nigh, at least for intelligent thought.

I'm blaming twitter for my lack of blog posts. Twitter and a two-year old child. One for ruining my attention span and the other for driving me to drink away my free time. It's so much nicer to find a comfortable spot to pin blame rather than to confront myself over my total lack of self-discipline.

So welcome to my blog, where the only consistent theme seems to be the inconsistency of my posts. Now appearing biannually!

I just googled "biannually" to make sure that's what I meant.

Bought meat like I said I would

The last ten days or so have been a total blur of parties and contractors and disputes in parking lots. I took the day off yesterday, with Marlo at her grandparents' house, and watched movies in bed. It was delightful. Today I feel like I've come home after an extended absence, and nothing is the way I left if or want it to be, so I'm overwhelmed all over again. Add to that the long weekend for which to prepare, and I feel stuck square behind the eight ball.

Let's see. Hearken way back to the day I was going to barbecue the pizza. I did, in fact, barbecue the pizza, and I remembered why it was I had a faint memory of there being some difficulty about barbecuing the pizza. It's because it tends to set the barbecue on fire. At least, it does if you use the pizza stone, which I do, because it is just silly difficult to put raw pizza dough directly on the grill. The pizza stone gets it all extra wicked-hot in there, and then any crud you have let accumulate catches on fire and you peer out the window to discover your grill has become a fireball and you are about to become That Idiot Who Burned The House Down With The Barbecue.

Bonus: After you get the fire under control and it burns itself out, you have a shiny clean grill!

Then we went to an auction and because apparently I think I am Mrs. Johnny Big-Shot, we bought a trip to Africa. It is a decision that seems slightly less wise without the complimentary white wine in me, but they auctioned off as many trips as there were buyers in the room for 1/2 off the list price. It seemed like too good a deal to pass up. It was Groupon psychology that a whole bunch of people fell for, including my sister and her husband, so at least we can all go together maybe. Wrench in plan: the trip has to be used within two years, and I was planning on getting knocked up in the Fall. Whoopsie! Looks like my second child will not be appearing on the cover of Time Magazine attached to my breast in May 2018.

Then it was Mother's Day and I got two cases of wine, one from my husband and one from my parents. I took a couple long looks in the mirror but mostly I'm fine with that. Giddy about that, in fact.

See, now this post is way long and I have only caught up to a week ago. Suffice to say I spent all last week running around getting ready for Marlo's second birthday party, which I was real smart about and only invited, oh, 12 of her little friends and their parents. I bought meat for that, in the form of a six month-old baby sized pork shoulder and some chicken. I really did think about trying to cobble together some party food out of the remainder of stuff in our freezers, but then my party hosting vanity won out and I bought the food to go with the theme. We have plenty of meat left. We are not going to finish it all before the month is out. I think that might say something awful about me. Time for more long looks in the mirror, I guess.

Eight, nine, ten, I'm losing count

This was much simpler when I updated on a daily basis.

I can't for the life of me remember what we ate on Tuesday. Does that ever happen to you? It was three dinners ago, and I have no idea. Oh wait, that was the night that I went to spin class and came home around eight and then we got sucked into a baseball game and ate chips and salsa in lieu of spending time cooking anything. So I guess I can remember, it just took a while.

Wednesday night was the frozen salmon's big debut. I made my favorite salmon recipe, which is a Martha Stewart recipe. I don't think I have any other Martha recipes amongst my favorites, so this is not blind Martha devotion. The recipe is for salmon with lentils and mustard vinaigrette, because I need my salmon mixed with lentils and coated in zingy mustard sauce before I consider it palatable. I may be a Pacific-Northwesterner and of almost purely Scottish and Norwegian descent, but I don't jump out of bed in the morning looking to get my mouth on some salmon. Also: Took me five attempts to spell "Norwegian" right.

Last night was another spin class and another failure to plan any sort of dinner in advance. So I finished off the leftover taco meat-ish and the leftover quinoa in a sort of burrito and Husband ate a couple of tamales from the freezer that some nice church lady friend of one of his coworkers made at least a year ago.

Tonight is pizza night! The most exciting night of the week. I'm thinking about attempting it on the grill this time, but pizza on the grill is always a high-adrenaline proposition. It seems seconds from total disaster every step of the way. We shall see how confident I feel about it when the time comes slash how emboldened by liquor.

Days four, five, six and seven

Day four, Friday night, was pizza night. I've been wanting to do Friday Family Pizza Night for years, ever since I read some blog post about happy Friday nights in the kitchen drinking wine and listening to jazz while the children happily top their own pizzas. Well, I like the wine part, anyway. I made the pizza dough and sauce recipes from Make the Bread, Buy the Butter, and both were perfect. The mystery freezer sausage turned out to be of the Italian variety, which was fortuitous, and quite tasty despite extensive freezer burn. In addition to the sausage we used olives, mushrooms, and fresh mozzarella, and the whole thing was so delicious I burned the ever-lovin' crap out of my mouth because there was no waiting for it to cool down.

Saturday we ate out - first I had a little fried chicken at a Kentucky Derby party, and then a hot dog at a baseball game.

Sunday we had burgers, because the sun was out. It's like a knee-jerk reaction. In the Spring and Summer we probably do burgers on the grill once a week. Now I am going to be sad with no burgers left for the rest of the month, unless I get wild and grind up one of those ribeyes, which is a distinct possibility. I also made a little roasted corn and tomato quinoa salad with a simple lemon juice and olive oil dressing, which used up some frozen corn and three Roma tomatoes I had slowly rotting on the counter.

Which leads us to Monday, day seven of this little experiment. We had taco leftovers. And here I am at the beginning of another week with no meal plan in place, no grocery shopping done. I even missed the cut-off for modifying my CSA box, and now I have to figure out what to do with radishes. What in the world am I going to do with radishes? Does anybody actually like radishes? I thought they just made easy seeds for kindergarteners to grow.

As far as the freezer clean out goes, you may have noticed none of those salmon fillets have been used yet. That may have to change this week. The dill in my little herb garden could stand to be taken down a notch. I'm also planning on collecting all the little half bags of nuts from the freezer and making granola. The one thing in the freezer I can't decide if I should try to eat or not? The cake from my baby shower. That baby shower having happened almost exactly two years ago.