Test Blog!

So this blog is simply to test if I connected my Blogger account to my Twitter successfully!

So testing, testing!

Fresh is Best

There's this salsa company based out of Kamloops called Fresh is Best that makes salsas, nacho chips, guacamole and a garlic spinach dip. They sell their products at certain places throughout BC. They have this little store on Broadway near MacDonald in Vancouver that sells all of their products, and places like Save on Foods and Whole Foods carry their chips. They are so delicious. The chips are always so light and crispy, and their dips taste as if they're made with the freshest of ingredients. My boyfriend is originally from Kamloops, and his mom introduced us to the garlic spinach dip over a year ago. Coincidentally my mom discovered the nacho chips in Nanaimo, and introduced me to those. They have a website here .

This past weekend I ate out quite a bit. On Saturday afternoon, some friends and myself went to The Foundation on Main and East 7th. It's this total hipster restaurant with 70s furniture, jam jars as glasses, and sort of crappy service. But the food is great. The menu is odd... It really takes you a while to decipher what the items are. It's difficult to describe what I mean, but if you ever go there, you'll immediately know what I mean. I had a spinach-chickpea salad in a sesame dressing. It was called Goman Salad - once I started eating the salad I realized that it was named after Spinach Gomae at Japanese restaurants as it tasted almost identical. I also had a carrot, yam and ginger soup.

Saturday evening I had my first concert as a violinist with the Vancouver Philharmonic Orchestra, and it went wonderfully! Afterwards, a few friends and myself went to Earls for a late night appetizer/drink/dessert. I had these two mini flour tortilla chicken tacos, with lettuce, avocado and this hot sauce. I also had a martini and shared a vanilla gelato sundae with Carla.

Sunday morning, Carla and I went to The Naam on West 4th and MacDonald. We aimed to go for breakfast because we really felt like eggs! She and I had been meaning to go to The Naam for a long time - I had been a couple of times for lunch, and she had never been at all. It's quite a famous Vancouver restaurant, notorious for its vegetarian menu, its poor service and the fact that it's open 24 hours for those cram-studying UBC students. We both had the special, which was scrambled eggs with cheese, mushrooms, zucchini, red pepper, onion and parsley. It came with a slice of baked-in-house multigrain bread, home-made raspberry jam, and little square potatoes fried with green onion and parsley. I also asked for a side of peanut butter and found out that even their peanut butter is made in house. I also had a small pot of "Catnap" relaxation tea, where the tea blends are made in house, also.

Today, after class, I met Carla again for lunch downtown at a little soup, sandwich, salad and hot meal place called The Dish, on Davie near Burrard. I had a simple turkey sandwich. It had real sliced turkey, mayo, lettuce, cucumber, tomato and a wonderful cranberry-pear chutney.

Let's review all of these places so I can demonstrate why Fresh is in fact, Best!

• The Foundation - Goman Salad & Carrot, Yam and Ginger soup - $11.50
• The Naam - Breakfast special and a small pot of tea - $11
• The Dish - Turkey sandwich - $6.25
• Earls - Chicken taco appetizer, martini ($1 off special) - $16.60

The three first are all single-location restaurants, and they all focus on creating foods with in-house made, fresh ingredients. All three of the first serve decent portions, at reasonable prices. After having eaten at the Foundation, Naam and Dish, I felt really well. I felt little to no pain from what I ate, and also felt energized, and even if I was full, it wasn't the uncomfortable, painful kind. 

Earls, however, was the most expensive, had the smallest portion of food, had foods that were I'm sure, mostly shipped in or frozen, and ended up hurting me so much I woke in the middle of the night from the pain. 

I'm finding this pattern more and more as I eat... the fresher the foods, the more simple and natural the ingredients, the better it is for me. Not only that, but places like Earls, Cactus Club, Moxie's, Milestones, etc. all have really pricey menus and small portions. As franchises, they need to have consistent recipes for their menus, so that means that everything is pre-prepared at a different location, and that the cooks in the kitchen make the food via a very strict formula - meaning that they're usually not necessarily trained cooks, and generally, they don't give a shit about what they're doing... Whereas in the small, single-location restaurants, everything is made on site, by trained cooks who, for the most part, generally care and take pride in what they're doing. I myself have worked in the food industry for quite a few years, in places where all the food is made on site. One place I was the main cook, and I used to create recipes and would do all the prep and a lot of the cooking, and I took so much pride in that food, and made sure that what I prepared was as fresh and delicious as it could be!

... So, all-in-all, I think we can now see that Fresh is Best! I apologize to Elijah, as he has to read these long posts for class... Sorry!

Until next time!

Quinoa and Concertos

So tomorrow is the Vancouver Philharmonic Orchestra's first concert of the season. Tonight we had a dress rehearsal for it. We did a run through of everything we're going to play, and we played the trumpet concerto with the trumpet soloist for the first time. It's amazing how the acoustics change when you're in the 25-foot ceilinged chapel of a church versus the church's little side hall. All of a sudden, the out of tune passages become much more apparent...

So that covers the "Concertos" part of the title, and now I will enlighten those lucky individuals reading this about the joys of quinoa. 

I discovered quinoa in the summer when my sister was here visiting. I always knew vaguely about it because I used to work at Whole Foods, which of course, is packed full of natural and organic foods, so quinoa was a big thing there. I had never really tried it, though. Then one of my sister's friend brought this delicious quinoa salad. I've altered the recipe to my particular tastes and now I make big batches of quinoa in various forms with various ingredients about once a week now. Quinoa is hard to explain, because it's not really a grain, and not a vegetable, but technically a seed, I believe. Here is more information.

The quinoa recipe I wish to share is a Greek Quinoa Salad.

What you need for the salad:

1 cup of quinoa

1/4 of a large red onion, diced

1/2 a large red pepper, diced

1/2-2/3 large cucumber, quartered and sliced

1/2 can of chick peas 

approx. a dozen kalamata or black olives, pitted and sliced

feta cheese - crumbled

approx. 8-10 leaves of fresh basil

For the dressing:

juice of half a lemon, squeezed

2 tbsp olive oil

1 tbsp of Dijon mustard

1 large or 2 small cloves garlic, minced or pressed

a pinch of dried herbs such as oregano, basil, thyme, and/or dill

salt and pepper to taste

So for the quinoa, it's made a lot like rice - so bring 2 cups water and 1 cup quinoa to a boil and then simmer on medium-low for about 20 minutes. It should be fragrant and look fluffy when it's ready. It should have also soaked up all the water in the pot. Set the quinoa aside when it's ready and let it cool.

Once cooled, combine the quinoa with the red onion, red pepper, cucumber, chick peas, olives, fresh basil and feta cheese in a large bowl and mix well. 

In a bowl or measuring cup combine all of the dressing ingredients and stir or whisk well. Add dressing to bowl and mix again! Give the salad and the dressing little tastes along the way and add or alter the ingredients to your tastes as you go!

Anyway, that's a sufficiently long post, so I will end it at that! 

The Purple Onion Revolution

Hello world... Or rather, those few people who will ever read this.

I'm starting this blog as a sort of combined food and recipe blog, photography blog and general life blog! I will intermittently post recipes of dishes I've made along with pretty pictures of the food. I also live in one of the most beautiful areas in the world, so I will sometimes post pictures of Vancouver and Vancouver Island.

I'm currently entering a new phase in life... I've just started school in New Media Design & Web Development at BCIT. Prior to this, I kind of didn't have any idea what I wanted to do. All I knew was that I wanted to do something that I enjoyed, that also earned me a comfortable living. I also spent most of this year sick. I only started feeling well enough to once again be a functional member of society in mid-August. So that, and other factors (such as the aforementioned wanting to do something), led to me sort of spontaneously signing up for this program. I just decided one day I was just so sick of not having a real job and few prospects to get one. Along with school, I just started playing in the Vancouver Philharmonic Orchestra as a violinist. It's a lot of fun, and it's just so nice to be playing again, since I spent the majority of my youth playing - to the point where violin took priority of high school. I travelled with my violin, I played in orchestras and groups for years, ensembles, and performed as a soloist. I missed it quite a lot, and decided to join so I could play once more!

I had taken Photoshop at BCIT a year earlier, and I really enjoyed that. I also bought a Nikon D3000 on my birthday in March. So now I am combining my photoshop and photography interests with my food and cooking interests. Enter blog!

I would also like to mention briefly the "revolution" part of my blog's name. I am realizing more and more what my body needs in order to feel well - and the biggest aspect of that part of my health lies in what I consume. Like I said, I spent most of 2010 really sick... (Crohn's Disease...) And now I'm feeling better, I feel as though my perspective on my health and my environment have changed. So I'm in the process of trying to do what I can to feel better by eating as naturally and as well as I can. Not necessarily organically, but certainly naturally. Eating organically may come, but it's quite a lot more expensive and I frankly don't have the money for that yet.

So long story short, I'm going through my own personal little "food revolution". That's what Carla and I have started calling it, anyway. She's discovering similar things, about portion sizes and foods that are just not good for us. I grew up loving food, and eating more than my body required. I was never fat because of this, but certainly felt like I could use to lose some weight. But mostly, I never felt well. And I got used to that. I didn't care and came to expect the pain. That's how it was: Eat a big, heavy and unhealthy meal, and then suffer because of it. But I was so used to it that I never stepped back to realize just how stupid it is. If there's a way I can prevent feeling that way, I'm going to try! I'm now consciously aware of every meal and I try to stop myself when I know that eating any more will end up hurting. I also, sadly, barely drink any more. Not like I was ever a big drinker, but I certainly enjoy alcohol and savouring it. So that's another huge change. I never have more than one drink at a time anymore, or I just "mooch" off others and don't have my own at all.

Anyway, that's generally what I'm looking to do with this blog. Share my pictures, share my recipes of foods that I find particularly delicious or healthy, and just general life updates!

Before I finish this post, I want to share a photo of the dinner I ate tonight. I didn't make it, but wanted to share it anyway. It's a tortellini-type pasta (but huge tortellini), that I got at Granville Island at the little Italian deli called Duso's. They're based in Langley, I believe. The tortellini is hand-made, and I bought two types: one is stuffed with Gorgonzola cheese and walnut, and the other is Brie, apple and caramelized onion. I tossed the pasta in a Cilantro pesto I bought at Whole Foods. The pesto is also local - from Victoria, by a company called Golda's. And then I sprinkled some parmesan cheese on it! It was all local and super delicious!