Rinse a martini glass with Islay, then make a gin martini with kelp pickle ‘juice’. Garnish with a kelp pickle and a smoked oyster.

Note: concept recipe only - no actual taste test performed.

Big Lou's Butcher is famous for their Porkchetta sandwiches. I bought a hunk of uncooked Porkchetta. I cooked it for 4 hours at 250, then added onions and parsnips and cooked it at 350 for another hour or so.

The pork was dark meat and deliciously tender, with a nice selection of fatty bits. There were some hard indelible pieces of skin.

Also pictured are traditional German red cabbage and boiled kale with garlic and mustard.

Not pictured are home made perogies. Yes, definitely a winter meal.

See the full gallery on Posterous

While I'm happy with the plating, not everything worked out as I would have liked.

The duck legs I marinated in whiskey, orange juice, red wine vinegar, sugar, salt, and star anise. Unfortunately, I used way too much kosher salt.

The spinach spaghetti I finished with olive oil, lemon zest, and fresh cracked pepper.

I was most happy with the purée. I chopped parsnips & cauliflower and boiled them in lightly salted water until soft. I drained them, leaving behind a little of the cooking liquor. Using a hand blender, I puréed them, adding a Tbsp each of honey & Dijon mustard. I added duck jus until it was salty enough.

The yellow peppers & onions were sautéed in a little olive oil.

Oh right - duck preparation! Seared in duck fat in a cast iron pan. Separately I boiled the marinade with some additional orange juice. I added several Tbsp of marinade to the pan & placed the legs fat side up in a 350 oven.

I do like duck medium rare, but had pulled pork-like consistency in mind. This was well cooked but not falling off the bone, and too salty (although the flavour was nice). I'll actually research duck techniques next time.

(Saying thank you with meat is *definitely* encouraged)

Today was the expiry date for the certificate, so I went on a meat buying spree.

For the record: 1 container duck fat, 8 maple thyme breakfast sausages, 2 thick cut pork chops, a hefty hunk of porkchetta, 2 duck legs, and 2 Pemberton Meadows Dry-Aged Striploins.

(don't worry - all the other meats had fancy farm sources, too)

I don't usually buy super expensive steaks. In fact, I'm pretty sure it's the most expensive meat I've ever bought.

I'm more of a ferial* meat eater - give me a hunk of pork, I'll sauce it nicely, and various carbs to soak up the juices and stretch it out.

In any case, this is me saying I don't cook steak like this very often. The photo is how it turned out - a very nice crust, even pink throughout, somewhere between medium / medium-rare.

The guidelines I used were from this post: http://www.beyondsalmon.com/2006/09/perfect-steak-at-last.html

The only change I did was to use butter and canola oil. The smoke and fire alarm going off tells me the pan was hot enough.

I did use tongs, did cook the steaks one minute on each side, but also held the fatty side of the steak against the pan for about a minute to crisp the fat as well.

The only change I would make would be to salt the meat more. This is easily fixed at the table - I need to get better at trusting my gut with that.

Oh right - taste! The steaks were delicious ;)

*there is a cook book / meditation on eating & cooking whose whole premise is festal (aka festival / special / rich people) vs. ferial (aka everyday / working man) cooking & eating. See my review of 'The Supper Of the Lamb' http://www.allconsuming.net/entry/view/39669

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/windowfarms/learn-to-grow-and-share-with-new-windowfarms/widget/video.html

Windowfarms is a project to fund the commercial production of hydroponic gardening kits that hang in your window.

You can read more about the project in an article on Fastco Design, or head straight over to the KickStarter page to help fund it yourself.

One suggestion is funding at $10K or more for a custom Windowfarms installation for a restaurant or other venue. I would love to see something like this in Vancouver.

See the full gallery on Posterous

The pork butt was from J N Z Deli. To my shame, I don't actually know where they source their meat, so this is a reminder to go and ask.

The pork marinated in the dry rub all day, then I cooked it for 5 hours at 300 degrees AKA the usual method. I'll see about experimenting with a whiskey based BBQ sauce in the next day or so.

It's pouring rain, so it's not exactly pleasant to be outside, but I finally have a new rain jacket so I'm dry.

Short walks between places of refuge are the way to go. My parents' place is always comfortable, with the wood stove throwing off a pleasant heat, unlimited mugs of coffee, and the special pleasure of being warm while the world outside is blustery.

Rachael and I are at Artisan Eats, looking down the hill and across Howe Sound at a world lost in mist and rain. "that ferry looks like an iceberg", says Rachael. "all it's details lost, and just the bare white outline showing."

I am sketching out tech designs on paper, writing this blog, and casting my mind forward across near- and long-term time horizons. Could-be's and what-if's swirling.

And after setting up my link blog http://links.bmannconsulting.com, my first post here.

This is a fresh tomato sauce that we're going to eat with radiatore. Nice and simple and so delicious with the fresh picked tomatoes.

2 Tbsp butter
1 Tbsp olive oil
1/2 cup minced onions
2/3 cup finely diced zucchini
1 clove minced fresh garlic
1 fresh bay leaf
4 cups diced fresh tomatoes
1/3 cup chopped fresh basil
Salt and pepper

Melt butter and olive oil and add onions, garlic, zucchini and basil. Sauté on low until onions are tender. Add diced tomatoes and turn up heat until bubbling, then reduce to low simmer, stirring in basil. Stir occasionally and cook until reduced.

More details on a nice Sunday to be added...

The team at Growing Chefs asked me to answer a few questions about why I'm participating. I thought I'd kill two birds with one stone and turn it into a full blog post.

Why did you decide to take the local challenge?

I decided to take the local food challenge because food is one of my main life passions. The local challenge is really just an excuse to spend slightly more time documenting what I'm eating and drinking this week.

Foodtree is a company that I advise which is trying to help people know more about their food (they have an iPhone app -- go download it). Getting involved with Foodtree and its founder Anthony Nicalo really opened my eyes another level. Once you start thinking about where food is from, who grew it, whether it's filled with pesticides or hormones … you can't unthink all of that.

You've turned the corner, and you start asking more and more questions about food. This can lead into all sorts of depressing realizations, but I prefer to think of it as heading into delicious realizations. It becomes a challenge in the sense that a long mountain hike is a challenge - it's the journey along the way that's most interesting, and reaching the summit is just sort of the bonus.

Now, my bigger challenge is to think about how we can encourage masses of people to think about their food, to try and make lasting changes to our food systems. And we can't do it by making people feel bad - we need to make them feel powerful, inspired, and hopeful!

What will be the hardest part for you to do this challenge?

Well, probably a toss up between finding the time and finding the ingredients. The week is busy with a conference and various activities, so we have to fit in more time for cooking or selecting what we're going to eat.

For instance, I actually forgot that we were starting today (we just got back from a short vacation), so I had to figure out what to get for lunch. Luckily, the Fresh Local Wild food truck is not far from my office, so I had some delicious cod & chips. Now, I happen to know that his potatoes aren't local, because the wet weather has been terrible. But they did the next best thing and sourced some potatoes from Washington state. 

But finding local ingredients is always hard. Heck, finding BC ingredients is hard. And it shouldn't be. But just this evening shopping at Donald's Market, the majority of the conventional fruits & vegetables were unlabeled (but many of them likely local), and virtually all of the organic ones were from far away (because organic labeling & pricing demands a level of "proof").

Finding the time is probably a common excuse. I do the majority of cooking at home, and I tend to cook everything from scratch - that is, limited use of processed foods or prepared ingredients. It doesn't take significantly more time to do this than for prepared foods. But, like a diet, it's easy to "slip" when you get crunched for time. Because of where we shop, even the prepared food is often local and/or tends to be made of good for you ingredients.

One last answer here pertains to how you define "local". Since I know how hard something like the 100 mile diet is, I don't get sticky about things like "if you buy bread, the wheat should also be local" (although I do have some Flour Peddler flour in my cupboards). Similarily, dried pasta that is local is going to be next to impossible - splurge on fresh pasta this week, Duso's on Granville Island is a good start.

Food memories

I think my memories from my childhood are all about food! I grew up on Bowen Island, which has lots of things for a kid growing up to forage. Salmon berries and huckle berries are something that you don't tend to see in stores at all - you need to stop and pick them when you see them.

My heritage is German, so most of my other childhood memories are various German meat dishes and cakes. And jam. My mom still makes massive amounts of jam every year - she just posted her recipe for currant jelly.

Shopping locally

It's been 2 years since I put up a post on Foodists about shopping in Vancouver, which has a huge list of some of the more interesting/ethnic/novel places to shop around Vancouver.

Today, we get a weekly order from SPUD.ca, visit the farmers market a couple of times a week (Wednesdays on Main, weekends at Trout Lake), buy most of our meat from Big Lous Butcher Shop, and round out the list with various stores along Commercial Drive (East End Coop, Daily Catch), and around Nanaimo at Hastings (Donald's Market, Ugo and Joe's). Famous Foods is a long time family favourite that should definitely be mentioned.

I decided to call this section "shopping locally" rather than where to shop for local food, because that's how you should think about it. Find a butcher shop, a sausage maker, and a bakery. Find a farmer's market. All of these places have local food by default, for the most part.

I confess that I find "traditional" grocery stores strange these days. I never go to them, and when I do happen to find myself in one, I just find all the packaged items disturbing. Whole Foods is a slightly better experience, but you just can't afford to shop there regularly, and even they aren't great in the fruits & veggies department (that is, lots of things from California, Mexico, etc.).

Favourite recipes

Recipes are tough for me. I tend to improvise a lot of the time, so a lot of my recipes tend to be documenting something that I've made once. And a lot of the very best tasting foods are very simple - asparagus broiled with olive oil, steak with salt and pepper, in season tomatoes popped straight in your mouth, and so on.

I'll leave you with a basic ingredient list for spaghetti alla carbonara that I made the other day and Kim Werker ended up using for a post on Vancouver is Awesome: guanciale from Oyama Sausage on Granville Island, Rabbit River eggs, and parmesan from Ugo & Joe's. 

Read the original post and updated gallery about #eatlocal, and you can follow along on my Twitter account where I'm using an #eatlocal hashtag.

Donate to my Eating Local pledge »

See the full gallery on Posterous

Growing Chefs is a program that "gets kids excited about good, healthy food". Specifically also how to grow it and cook it.

I am participating in their Going Local! Local Food Challenge. This means that I'll be eating local this week. I tend to do this in any case, but I'm very specifically going to be keeping track of my buying and eating habits, which is the whole point: to raise awareness of where your food is from and who makes it.

I've actually got a donation page up where you can help to support Growing Chefs. In return, I'm going to document what I eat, where I buy it, and the occasional recipe. The Growing Chefs crew recommends the 100 Mile Diet as a starting point, but I find that too unrealistic: it's actually hard enough to just look for BC products, never mind 100 miles.

Of course, Foodtree is another organization I've spent time supporting, and their iPhone app is meant to help solve the problem of knowing more about your food. The team is also participating in this Local Food Challenge Week - check the Foodtree blog for some great resources.

You can follow along on my Twitter account where I'm using an #eatlocal hashtag, and this blog post is where I'm continuing to add to the gallery of food throughout the week.

Donate to my Eating Local pledge »

After pulling off this risotto recipe, I'm confident that I'll be cooking risotto more often.

The recipe was mainly an inspiration to caramelize the carrots - I didn't purée any of them, or really follow the rest of the recipe. The flavour of the caramelized carrots really spread through the dish - rosemary was the other note that came through.

Make sure you caramelize the carrots - I had put in a bit too much butter & oil and the carrots sweated out some liquid, so I had to spoon some of it out to get the carrots to brown. Reserve that liquid and add it later, it was deliciously sweet & carrot-y.

The pancetta was very mild in flavour. The more pronounced smokiness of guanciale could have worked, but it would also have competed with the carrots. What was excellent from the pancetta was the fat, which added to the creamy consistency, as well as adding some nice toothsome texture.

I used Better Than Bouillon vegetable stock paste, which worked well (and in general is my favourite prepared stock base).

I briefly considered working in some of the other cheeses we had (eg a mild and creamy blue cheese) but was glad I stuck with 'just' a cup or so of grated Parmesan.

See the full gallery on Posterous

Weekends are time for me to do more elaborate / longer cooking. I'm the primary cook-er in the household, so I do cook most every day, but cooking is also relaxing downtime for me, especially when I get to try new things, or things that I don't cook very often.

Yesterday was an errand day in general. We bought 10lbs of peaches and apricots coming back from the Okanagan (at the Mariposa fruit stand in Keremeos, to be exact -- recommended by Chris Rich amongst the sea of fruit stands there). By now, it was time to process them in bulk in some way. So I made peach jam and apricot jam.

I've never made peach jam before. I used this Farmstand Peach Jam recipe, although as always, not exactly. I don't like using pectin, and I don't like to put in too much sugar. I ended up taking out a cup of cut up peaches at the last minute since I wanted to stick them in the freezer, and I think that was the error. Or, just that peaches are quite sweet to start with, and without pectin you can't skimp on the sugar. I had originally intended to also make some spicy peach chutney of some kind - I still have those peaches in the freezer, or I could even just use some of the jam and mix it with savoury ingredients to make it.

Next I made apricot jam. My mom makes this all the time, so I was reasonably sure the no-pectin method would work, and it certainly did. It turned out nice and tart. It was a pleasant surprise to find and use Jens Alfke's apricot recipe - a long time blogger whose feed fell from my reader at some point. So, score 1 for a great recipe (since it uses a formula for fruit-to-sugar) and for re-finding a great writer.

This morning I poached a couple of eggs for breakfast. Rachael is a fan of poached eggs, but I usually just find them too fiddly. I took it upon myself to actually look up some egg poaching instructions and they turned out nicely. In short: the water shouldn't be boiling, turn it off as soon as you put the eggs in, put a lid on it, and 3 minutes is about the right time length.

Wandering up Commercial Drive, I decided today would be a seafood day. So, I've got some Qualicum Beach scallop and side stripe shrimp ceviche marinating in the fridge. Recipe in short:

• 10 prawns, remove the shell and chop
• 4 large scallops, chopped
• 1/2 avocado, chopped
• 1/3 cup red onion, minced
• 1/3 cup fresh basil, chopped
• 3 tomatillos, chopped
• juice of 3 limes
• fresh cracked pepper
• small red chile, minced
• 1/3 cup cucumber, chopped

It's marinating now, it may end up gaining some other bits and pieces as I adjust seasonings when it comes out of the fridge.

Plus, look at the dinosaur images: they both (inexplicably) have blue Elvis hair.

I just finished reading "Out of the Black". It's mainly responsible for the magic part of this title, although technically it is set in the far future. You don't really notice the far future part, since you already have to suspend disbelief for the magic bits. Actually, the one technology piece that was interesting (and probably won't age well) was the concept that everyone had a tablet. The unique thing about the tablet was that it could resize. You made it small and stuck it in your pocket, but then you could take it and expand it to some maximize size for mapping or image work or whatever.

This book is a bit of a variant on The Matrix, in the sense that there is a lot of fighting and there is a "layer" underneath reality that can be accessed and manipulated (the magic bit, which is called the Loom). It has thriller pacing, plus some jumping forward and backward in timelines from different character points of view which doesn't _quite_ work (feels more like a movie script). Regardless, an enjoyable quick read.

A 2-book series that I finished some time ago was Daemon and Freedom (TM) by Daniel Suarez. I really should be writing a lot more about them rather than tacking them on to review #1, but at least I'm posting something.

Let's see, where to start. It takes place in present day / near future. An MMORPG game company CEO dies, which sets in motion a bunch of stuff involving a "daemon", or set of computer scripts that the CEO had set up. These set of computer scripts interact with the real world and people through lots of automation and scanning news feeds and bot nets and other fairly believable things (the author has a background in computers and security, which keeps things from getting too Hollywood, which I appreciated).

And then self-sufficiency in food systems (including an anti-Monsanto interlude), cryptocurrency, and DIY technology making enter the picture. With eBay-style reputation assigned to personal interactions of all kinds, plus a gamification layer where everybody has levels and classes. See, the daemon has been set in motion to kind of shepherd the human race onto a new way of living. Or at least, a new way of socio-economic organizing.

At the time I was reading the book, the following IRL things were happening:

• Bitcoin was just hitting main stream media
• I've been thinking a lot about local / direct food systems with Foodtree
• our worldwide economic systems have been hitting the crapper
• The Canadian Federal election put a robot prime minister in power

So, I tore through the first book and made it straight through into the second. It also has thriller pacing, and I'm sure is in part designed to feed into the gamer / Internet professional brain.

Fun read, makes you think. If you are at all interested in how technology-assisted collaboration, governance, and economics might work, read the book.

Thanks to Sean for recommending these books.

I'm always on the lookout for regional / unique / church basement cookbooks. I found this Come 'n Get It - Cowboys and Chuckwagons at the "Share Shack" at the Deka Lake dump … sorry, I mean "land fill".

The image below is the first page of the book. The quote says:

"Bacon in the pan,
Coffee in the pot;
Get up an' get it
Get it while it's hot."

The recipes contain a lot of lard, flour, sugar, and beans. Here's the original recipe for Charlie's Doughnuts:

Two tea cups sugar, 3 eggs, 1-1/2 tea cups buttermilk, 2 teaspoons saleratus, 1 teaspoon salt, 6 tablespoons melted lard, flour enough to roll nicely. Boil or fry in lard.

To make things a little easier, I'll let you know that saleratus is baking soda. I never have buttermilk in the house, but apparently putting vinegar in regular milk gets you close.

I'm going to leave the book here for my dad's cabin cookbook collection.

I'm at the cabin with my dad for an extended long weekend. Our cabin is a couple of minutes walk from Deka Lake. Where is that? Well, it's on the Cariboo Plateau. Here's a picture of a map outside the next-closest grocery / liquor / everything store, Interlakes:

Sometimes I also say "it's near 100 Mile House". OK, fine, here's a Google Map:

http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&geocode=&q=macabar+road,+Deka+Lake,+British+Columbia,+Canada&aq=&sll=51.609009,-120.853386&sspn=0.04099,0.07596&ie=UTF8&hq=&hnear=Macabar+Rd,+Cariboo+L,+Cariboo+Regional+District,+British+Columbia+V0K+1E0,+Canada&ll=51.618017,-120.849609&spn=8.189808,13.183594&t=h&z=5&iwloc=A&output=embed
View Larger Map

As you can see, it's over 500km from Vancouver. It used to take much longer to get here. I know, because we came here all the time when growing up, and I could read up to two books during the trip here. This time, I read an ebook on my iPhone.

I haven't been up here in quite a long time. I also realized that it's been almost a year since I've been working for iQmetrix. Did you know that when you have bosses and stuff, they give you vacation time? And you're supposed to take time off, like, more than a couple of extra days over Christmas?!?! Yeah, news to me as well. So I'm going to take a couple of long weekends over the summer for various trips and such.

I'm up here over the weekend, and then my Dad and I drive back on Monday.

I've got more pictures on Flickr if you're interested.

Since it's red and my stove is white, this can stand in as a "How I spent my Canada Day 2011 weekend".

It started on Friday with brunch. Then we headed out to Emma Lea farms on Westham Island, where the strawberries are from. Whenever we go to Westham Island, it also means a stop at the apiary. We now have fireweed honey and some pumpkin / purple loosestrife honey. I still have to figure out something to make that lets the unique honey taste shine through.

Then off to Steveston, which initially seemed like a mistake, since it was filled with hordes of people for Canada Day. Well, in retrospect, it probably was a mistake, but the sun did come out. As we walked up to a packed Hogshack (which is a BBQ place that I had been hearing a lot about), there just happened to be a table opening up.

The BBQ was good. I was even more pleasantly surprised by the awesome beer list that they have. I had a Hitachino Nest White Ale, and it was absolutely perfect for a summer day. In fact, my first sip had my face go through various transformations, after which I passed it around for everyone to taste. It's lemony fresh beer witbier that should be mandatory to drink when it is really hot out.

Then, bellies full, a wander around Garry Point Park. There is a sculpture there called Wind Waves that is great to see in person. This it way off in the distance over open fields

And then a drive back home, finally a little bit sun-kissed, and with a really full day behind us. Fireworks? Yeah, off in the distance somewhere :P

Saturday & Sunday was Foodtree's launch of their iPhone app at Trout Lake and Kits Farmers Markets respectively, so Rachael was working for the first half of both days. I got to do a bit of a sleep in and some video game playing each morning, then went off to support the Foodtree team.

On Saturday, the sun really came out for the first time. Spending just three hours in the sun just caused Rachael and I to really wilt. We came home and napped the afternoon away. Getting back up, I decided to start prepping the jam. Anthony traded some of his backyard rhubarb for strawberries, so I was able to make strawberry rhubarb jam. I like how it turned out, even though I never both measuring anything - 1 1/2 cups turbinado sugar, 1 1/2 brown sugar, and some number of cups of strawberries and rhubarb :P The jars all popped, so I'll be gifting them out this week.

Then, to get out of the house for at least a bit, we experimented with my new car2go membership. We had actually used it on Thursday to get home and parked it outside our house, since we're inside the area where you can leave the cars anywhere. It kind of feels like stealing a car. In any case, the one out front had moved a couple of blocks down to Pender, so we jumped in and went for a drive to go for gelato at Bella Gelateria. From there we went up to Queen E park, just to be out and about and enjoy the view.

Sunday morning was cleaning up the jam kitchen plus finishing off Dungeon Siege III, which some people mentioned I should never have bothered to buy in the first place. I don't know if I'll bother writing about it. Was fun to play, there is no replay value, and it pales in comparison to DS I & II. And, it was only 12 hours long. Yes, kind of like the contrast between Dragon Age and Dragon Age II. This joystiq review is pretty funny. I guess my id had fun playing.

Ahem. But I really only played like an hour or so to finish the final game. Then I jumped into a car2go again and went over to the Kits market. This was a one way rental (so I don't have to pay while I'm at the market), and I just happened to park right behind another car2go car, so I was reasonably sure one of them would be available when I wanted it.

It was another long day for Rachael, so after a short rest we biked over to the New Brighton Pool and went for a dip. It was great to be swimming, and yes, it feels like the west coast summer has arrived (even though it was raining and sunny this morning).

After biking back I retired to the kitchen and made lots of things from the farmer's market: kale chips, roasted garlic scapes, bacon, bok choy, and some red potatoes. I also decided to make some more jam, so combined guavas with some of the remaining rhubarb. After I wrote that post about my past guava experience, I thought I'd aim for something like that. I've had a taste, and I think I put a bit too much sugar in AND the whole seeds in thing didn't really work out. I need a fine mesh sieve or china hat before I try something like that again. I also have this sense memory of my mom and grandma making rosehip jam which also has tons of seeds in it, so I'll need to try that again as well.

So there you have it. Canada Day. And Strawberry Rhubarb jam. Hope you had a great weekend.

I bought guavas last night. When I bit into the first one, that flowery perfume flavour wafted out and teleported me back about almost 20 years.

When I traveled around the South Pacific on a tallship as part of Class Afloat, we stopped in Suva, Fiji. There is an orphanage and school run by Canadian nuns there. We visited and brought some gifts - school supplies, books, etc. - as well as playing the muddiest game of soccer I have ever played in my life. The teachers asked the children to bring in something for us - fresh fruit! So, they gathered tons of fresh guavas. We ended up with giant plastic garbage containers filled with guavas. Nothing like these pale imitations I bought in the store yesterday, but just that little whiff of perfume hinted at that long ago time.

Even for a boat filled with frsh fruit starved teenagers, we couldn't eat our way through all of the guavas. I spent a lot of time helping out in the galley, and I ended up making a kind of guava jam. I never did get sick of having it for breakfast pretty much every day until it ran out.

I found this via @awesome, of course.

You can find other fine songs by Disasteradio, like "Gravy Rainbow", on the Bandcamp page.

Captured for posterity, although no picture.

Chop 2 shallots and sauté in a bit of olive oil over medium-high heat.

Grate half an apple and add to shallots.

Cut tough stems from chard and roughly chop. Add to shallot apple mixture in pan and stir to mix.

Juice half a Meyer lemon and add to pan. If using a regular lemon, reduce juice used and/or add a pinch of sugar.

Stir to mix well and reduce heat. Simmer for 5 minutes or until chard is tender, stirring occasionally.

Salt to taste.

I attended Dan Mangan's benefit for homeless youth initiatives, aka Smorgasbord, on Saturday night.

I took my Flip video camera along and captured a handful of songs. The audio is pretty decent (the echo-y quality is because of the acoustics inside St. Andrews Wesleyan Church, I think) but the video is pretty terrible. You can find all the videos in this playlist on YouTube, or embedded below.

http://www.youtube.com/p/2C0F511D32225835?hl=en_US&fs=1

Performances are by The Crackling, Aidan Knight, and Dan Mangan. Plus Mayor Gregor on tuba, of course!

Other than Dan Mangan himself, I was super impressed by Aidan Knight. You can find him on BandCamp.

This was my third shopping trip to Big Lou's Butcher Shop, on the corner of Powell Street at Gore. Their tagline is "bringing traditional nose-to-tail butchery to Vancouver".

Pictured in the gallery is Karsten weighing out some freshly made ground beef. He is also the maker of the rouladen pictured in the next image. I've written about rouladen before. My mom told me in a call earlier in the day that she had been to visit Big Lou's and bought some rouladen just to see what they were like. She said they tasted great, and were about the same price as it would cost her to make them on her own. Duly noted the next time rouladen cravings strike.

The last image is the iPad sitting on top of the old school cash register. It is, of course, a software only point-of-sale system running on the iPad as an app. Which nicely collides with my day job as I think about iPhones and iPads slowly replacing all manner of special purpose proprietary systems like point of sale machines.

Below is a Banh Mi sandwich that Rachael and I shared. Big Lou's also makes sandwiches fresh to order. The bread is a giant crusty baguette, but the innards are flavourful enough to stand up to the hunk of bread. Half a sandwich was a good meal, so definitely good value for lunch. I'll be back during the week to try some of the other sandwiches.

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When I went to Seattle last weekend, Lee took me along to see the Seattle Sounders play. It was actually my first MLS game.

Attached a short video that starts out focused on the Sounders super fan section, just as the game opening ceremonies are going on.

Thanks for taking me Lee, it was a lot of fun. I’m a lot more interested in the company Whitecaps season tickets now…

See the full gallery on Posterous

I sat and blogged at the Tully's for a while, then did a walk around the neighbourhood and some parks nearby.

I was relaxed and specifically had my eyes open looking for interesting things to capture. The fact that I found a plastic Sabretooth tiger toy placed in some rocks was a great bonus.

I also had a bite to eat in a little mini Main Street down the road a bit. It reminded me a bit of Commercial Drive - lots of great restaurants and coffee shops.

See the full gallery on Posterous

Out for a walk around Kits, checking how far the blossoms are.

This is my first experience with Chicken and Waffles. Probably too fancy for my "first time", but it was tasty.

This is, of course, not a screenshot from Rango. Which, by the way, is an awesome, awesome, awesome movie that you really should go see. Animated, filled with animals as characters in an old Western style. Lots of in jokes. Dark, and very funny.

It's "the claw" machine at the Dolphin Theatre, which is in deepest darkest Burnaby. It also has $7 movies, and $2 movies on Tuesdays, and it's where we saw Rango on Saturday night.

I'll definitely be back.

These worked out quite well. Recipe found at Beantown Baker via Foodista search.

The dough was very sticky. Maybe it needed more flour, maybe I needed to knead it a bit longer and work more flour into it. Then came the tricky part.

The astute amongst you might notice that the items in the photo above don't, in fact, look like pretzels. Well, the recipe was on my iPhone and my hands were full of sticky dough, so I ended up with sort of pretzel, erm, "twists" at best.

Rachael had requested some tomato soup and buns, and these were the "buns".

The soup was a mix of a couple of roasted red peppers, celeriac aka celery root, leeks, shallots, a couple of pounds of ugly winter Mexican roma tomatoes (from SPUD, so organic, but still…) and then some ill advised dried chickpeas. That's the second time I've used those chickpeas - they REALLY do need to soak overnight. I made a broth out of simmered chickpeas and some veggie trimmings while I roasted the red peppers. I used the same cast iron pan to then saute the celery root, shallots, and leeks in some olive oil. This all got mixed together with the tomatoes and the broth and the peppers, added some dried basil, a splash of some port that I've decided is best used for cooking, and then simmered down.

I then took a hand blender and blended the whole thing. Those dang chickpeas were still a little on the crunchy side, so the result was a little gritty, but the taste was really good -- the roasted red peppers came through nicely. This was a quick soap, so a table spoon full of Better Than Bouillon vegetable stock base went in instead of salt to round out the taste.

I finished it with some flat Italian parsley, and I'm not too sure about that detail. The texture was wrong and the blended soap didn't need it -- I think I was sort of picturing an Italian minestrone with some flat parsley leaves floating in it.

I am getting better at quantities. A bowlful each for dinner, one portion as leftovers, and froze the rest in a yoghurt container. As opposed to a vat of leftovers and 2 yoghurt containers that I might have made.