Vancouver May 2012

I decided to stop over at Vancouver before my May in Memphis 2012 cooking event for a couple of reasons, one, to get over my jet lag and another, my wife and I miss our daughter Ali, a university student in Canada. Among my children, it is Ali who takes after me when it comes to food. We both like discovering new dishes and we both lack the self-control for going back for seconds and thirds of anything delicious. Having said that, as soon as we met, we went straight to doing what we do best together - eating.

YUKO MAKI - After my first bite, I realized that after being away from Vancouver for a while, I unconsciously got used to the quality of sashimi in Manila and have forgotten all about the superior quality of the fresh fish in Beautiful British Columbia. My wife, daughter and I went to one of our favorite Japanese restaurants. We ordered the usual starters, a combination of thick cuts of Sockeye salmon and BC tuna, these sashimi melt in your mouth! The BC Tuna is like biting into a Toro Sashimi and the salmon sashimi is cut thickly and it's so fresh and succulent it makes you want to jump up and down. Along with a generous portion of wasabi in your Kikkoman soy sauce, it surely made our eyes water, we were teary eyed with pure delight! The Dynamite Dragon roll and the Bento Box 2 with Terriyaki chicken and yam sushi is also a favorite here. I missed having family meals here. All of a sudden I miss the rest of my chldren.



PURDY'S - is a popular Canadian chocolatier that serves a to-die-for Hedgehogs chocolate. These are little hedgehog shaped milk chocolate morsels stuffed with hazelnut cream. But what I absolutely cannot resist at PURDY'S is their ice cream bar of rich sinfully fattening vanilla ice cream dipped in thick Belgian chocolate and then quickly coated in chopped almonds just before the chocolate hardens! I could easily have two of these but my daughter and I decided to be good this time and we both agreed to have one each only. We were both humming our way to meet my wife who was at a health food store undoubtedly looking at some vitamins for me to lose some weight.