Things seem to be looking up! My COVID-19 restrictions are loosening up (I say "my" because other people have different comfort levels with the constantly evolving rules and regulations), because we now have our first vaccine and the case numbers have taken a deep dive, so we had a few friends over for lunch.  P brought over some fried chicken from Chirpyhut Fried Chicken , which just opened up a location in Burnaby, relatively closer than the other locations around the Lower Mainland. You can see a sliver of the Salted Egg Yolk whole chicken in the top corner, and a full box of the black meteorite fried chicken wings:   

The salted egg yolk is not actually infused into the chicken. The flavor comes from a separate container of salted egg yolk dipping sauce, which was brutally underwhelming. Not much flavor in the chicken itself. 

The meteorite chicken looks impressive, but it didn't taste very special, just like regular fried chicken. It didn't taste bad, and it did create a wow moment when we opened up the lid, because it looked like we would be eating lumps of coal. I would probably repurchase this for a future dinner party or potluck, but it's not a staple everyday fried chicken option for me. There are plenty of juicier, crispier, and tastier fried chicken shops around town.  

I had originally hoped PVVJ would come over after the completion of our kitchen reno, but it was right in the middle, when we didn't have a backsplash or working sink. They completely missed the original chartreuse tile backsplash, which was falling apart at the edges:   

They had this view for the afternoon: 

And then they missed the (almost) final product, which came together about 2 weeks after: 

FINALLY! 

From start to finish, it took about 2 months. The backsplash was first removed in mid March, and we had to wait for our contractors to take a special class before they could start working with the original type of stone we had picked out for the backsplash and countertop (Dekton...). We ended up changing our minds, because the print on that man made stone wouldn't look as nice, and by April, we had picked out the quartz style that we currently have installed. Then, we found out that the sink we originally wanted to order from Costco actually has awful reviews, and it was eventually removed from the Costco website before we got around to ordering it. This was the beginning of the hunt for a white sink and faucet set. 

The first sink we picked out was a Blanco white granite material. Because the plumbing for our sink has special slow drainage in order for it to fit into its current configuration, the dimensions of the sink are very specific, and it took a while before we found one that could arrive quickly. Sadly, it cracked in transit, and we were devastated with the delay. We ended up going to Home Depot, picked up a regular sturdy, reliable stainless steel sink, for half the price. 

Then, the old faucet started leaking! We had planned on using the old faucet until the new white one arrived, but now, we would have to replace the whole thing. The previous faucet was made with copper, and it must've been at least a decade old, so it rusted through.  Hopefully, our Brita filter has helped us keep these any old minerals and chemicals out of our body... 

We're going to change out the cabinet handles, maybe swap out the wine bottle holder screwed into the back set of cabinets, and then, I'll be satisfied.  This space no longer looks like this though - we've already cluttered up the countertops with our rice cooker, hot water boiler, and our trusty Brita filter. 

Follow along for more updates of our almost 100 year old house! 

S brought us to Sweet Memory for dinner this week. They're mainly known for their traditional Taiwanese dishes and desserts, like the pig intestine noodles that I tried (bottom right) since it came highly recommended by S's friend. It was extremely garlicky.

C had the braised pork on rice, which also looked legit and very greasy (dish at the top of the above photo).

H had the tofu pudding, which came with a small hill of brown sugar. Maybe anthill sized. No photo.



The complimentary tea had a surprisingly pleasant sweetness to it too, and I really did not hate it, but I was too tired after a long day to really enjoy anything. This seems to be the trend these days. It's not like I'm doing a lot either, but maybe it's just being anxious and worried about... stuff.

I usually default to negative feelings, memories, and that's actually built into us, as humans evolved by being aware of their surrounding dangers, and having a better memory of what made us felt bad, so that we can avoid death. Just the way our brains are built.

How do people stay positive in times like now, when our carbon sink, the Earth's lungs, are burning up, and when it seems like even developed cities, such as Hong Kong, become dangerous to visit?

Should I quit my corporate job, leave behind all the office politics, and go plant trees?

This week will probably be the longest of 2019. I'll try to remember only the happy moments, which on this trip in Chicago revolved around steakhouses. Starting with the first night at Joe's Seafood, Prime Steak, and Stone Crab:

I had the 8z filet mignon, medium rare, as I usually like. For sides, we had the sauteed spinach, broccolini, and the Lyonnaise potatoes (seen above the steak in the photo to the top). For dessert, we had to order the key lime pie, in honor of D, who could not make it for his own legitimate reasons:

Everything was just good enough, but not spectacular. The server came by and was very good at introducing the menu, told us about how their beef is prepared, and I should note the number of days that the meat is aged next time, but if my memory is correct, I believe she mentioned that it was between 30 and 40 days.  My medium rare steak was closer to medium rare plus, which is a term that I was reminded of on this trip, referring to steak that is just slightly more cooked than medium rare, but just below medium (it's all in the temperature control). 

Not only that, it was a tad dry and chewy, but hey, I was still able to eat the whole chunk of meat.

The sides were fair. Being the first time that I tried Lyonnaise potatoes, I didn't really know what to expect, but basically, they were large pieces of hashbrown with onions and gravy on top. Not sure if I'd order this again for dinner, because hashbrowns are a breakfast food in my mind.

The key lime pie was not too impressive, based on the ones that I've had before. I prefer a firmer texture and this one was already melting on the plate.

Walking around the windy city reminded me of how fortunate I am to be here, living in a 1st world country and doing the job that I have. Although it was a difficult week, we're blessed with an abundance of food and drink, and I'm grateful for the opportunities around me. I hope to be able to hire a robot to do everything that I don't want to do, like putting together trade show demos.

Chicago Steakhouse Tour 2019:
1. Joe's Seafood, Prime Steak, and Stone Crab
2. Chicago Cut Steakhouse
3. Shula's

After a brutal week, M, C&C took me to Arisu along North Road for some much needed food and drinks. This is one of the many Korean BBQ restaurants along the Burnaby and Coquitlam border, which has now become a high traffic area. Transit if you can... We had one of the BBQ combos, which came with a pile of meat, including pork belly and short rib: 

Pretty standard Korean BBQ meal, with the usual sides of kimchi, vegetables, and marinated potatoes. I would recommend visiting for the freshness of each cut of meat, the good portion size, the flavour. They had one of those bells to request a server, and the best part was that it actually worked! We had quick and efficient service, and while the servers were Korean and pretended like they did not understand might not have understood English, they were friendly enough. 

Also, it's close to other places for dessert and groceries, which just makes it a convenient spot to meet up.



Pretty late post for this section of Week 9, 2019. Almost forgot about it, to be honest, because of all the events of Week 10, the reunions and the new faces.

Do you ever have difficulty remembering somebody's name after meeting them a few times?

A friend told me that when you can't remember somebody's name, it's because that person is cheap.

H and I met up with D and A for dinner in Coquitlam. They tempted us to travel out into the Tri-Cities with promises of Korean fried chicken, paired with grape flavored soju at OZ:

The seafood pancake and seafood soondobu soup came out first. Well, the soju came out first (side note - apparently, grape soju tastes like communion). The seafood pancake was impressively crispy, but lacking a bit in flavour, sort of boring without the dipping sauce. The spices in the soup were sneaky; they'd creep up on you a few seconds after finishing a spoonful, and it would be pretty spicy. 

Then, came the platter of chicken... 

This was the platter with 4 flavors of chicken, the padak (ie, spring onion and sweet soy sauce), the "snowing" (ie, a really sweet powdered parmesan cheese), sweet chili, and regular fried chicken with the mustard dipping sauce in the bowl. Perhaps the spices from the tofu soup numbed my tongue, but I didn't think the chicken itself was very flavorful without the flavoring and dipping sauces. The variety was very interesting though. General consensus was that the padak was the best flavour, but the chicken needed to be drenched in more of the sauce. The "snowing" and sweet chilli flavors had a strange artificial sweetness about them.



Overall, not a bad place to hang out. Check out the funky wall paper:

We went to fly our drones before getting food, and missed the true sunset by about 15 minutes. I scrambled to get the drone in the air, the propellers were bent from the mini crashes in Iceland. Eventually, I did get 3 shots, and caught the end tail of the light:

Sometimes, it's difficult to rise above the chaos. For the rest of the year, I'm making a conscious effort to stay organized and not let the the schmucks at work get to me. :)

A romantic candlelit… taco?

I was exhausted from working and furniture shopping, but we couldn’t miss this chance to catch up with J, who was leaving in another week. We met up with J along Main Street, intending to go to Burgoo, but because of the 1.5 hour long wait, we went over to El Camino’s instead for a quick bite. I ordered their drink special, because ginger beer was in it. It was too sour for me, which really masked the alcohol.



Then, H and I shared the fish taco, the carnitas, and the pollo. The fish was crispy and the jalapenos in the taco added just the right level of spiciness. The carnitas and the pollo were flavorful, but there just wasn’t that melt in your mouth feel that I’d expect. Chipotle had better carnitas. It’s a cool place to hang out, but I don’t think I’d go out of my way to come back, even for the taco Tuesday deal of $6 for 2 tacos.

Where do people go for good tacos nowadays?

Other than tacos, I've eaten out at a bunch of places because of furniture shopping and preparing to move. There's no time to cook! I’m also starting to get chills down my back, a strong sign that I’m catching some type of illness. The workload at the office hasn’t helped, but I’m getting some great advice from my coworkers. Reminder to enjoy the process.

I’m combining week 42 and 43 because I haven’t been organized enough to make time for blogging. Adulting took up my time, as I hustled to get my banking and legal paperwork done to purchase the condo, which has been 2 years in the building.

I still haven’t really had the energy to go anywhere new, mainly because if I did want to go out during this week, I just wanted to visit places I’m familiar with already and have a quick easy meal. This is actually a breakfast sandwich at Railtown Cafe along Main Street, where I visited a couple of weekends ago with R&B and the puppy they were dog sitting:



English muffin Avocado, onions, fried egg, Jalapeno jack, tomato… A perfect light snack for a walk around the neighborhood with the dog. R&B had the jambalaya bowl and a pork sandwich, which were both on point. I stole a bite from each of these, and almost ordered them for myself. The jambalaya had just enough spices and flavors. The meat to bread ratio of the sandwich was well balanced, meaning there was lots of meat.

The photo below was an attempt at a flatlay with the dog sitting in just the right spot. I don’t know how people do it with animals… Dogs don’t like me. I’m more of a cat person.

I’m really looking forward to the upcoming week – completion of the condo, going to London and Iceland. Mercury, Mars, and Venus in retrograde can’t hurt me now!

Imagine 3 of these in a pile, one on top of another:

We had brunch at Mildred’s Temple Kitchen, right after we got off the plane on a Friday morning, a few weeks back with D & B in Toronto. Do people in Toronto actually work? I was amazed at the fact that we arrived right at the time the restaurant opened, and there was already a line up. It wasn’t a long line up, and we were seated outside on the patio area fairly quickly. This gave us a chance to observe all the other people who came after us that had to line up as well. Try to make a reservation!



The food itself was amazing. Mrs. Biederhof’s blueberry buttermilk pancakes were probably the best blueberry pancakes we’ve ever had (see photo above). Definitely listen to the servers’ recommendations too, because I did not regret following their advice of getting the Huevos Monty (refried beans baked in flour tortillas with sunnyside up eggs and all the regular toppings for tacos, like salsa, sour cream, avocado).

I’m lucky enough to have the opportunity to explore Toronto’s food scene a bit, but I’m still hoping that one day, I’ll be able to get out to see the rest of the surrounding land. I’m sure the nature is gorgeous too, but does it compare to the West coast?

Visited D&T in Toronto a couple weeks ago (thanks for hosting!), with B, and I’m still recovering from all the food we ate. My favourite meal was at Kiin, which we stumbled upon while looking for a good dinner spot:

To start, we had the shrimp and pomelo salad (on the right in the image below), and the chor lada (the beautiful purple flower shaped dumpling on the left):

The pomelo was super fresh, not sour at all, and all the flavours of the shrimp were enhanced so well by the dressing (I’m sure there was fish sauce). The dumplings were an interesting texture – chewy exterior with bits of peanut inside. It wasn’t my favourite, because I don’t like that texture usually, but I didn’t hate it.

Next, we had the Khao Yum, which comes in a shiny brass bowl filled with the colours of the rainbow:

The server helped us mix all the different ingredients together (jasmine rice, lemongrass, turmeric, edible flowers, sunflower shoots, and more) with a tamarind and soy bean sauce. Although, I wanted to inhale this whole giant bowl of freshness, the best way to taste all the flavours was to really savor each bite. I’m a big fan of lemongrass, and I could keep eating this forever.

The last of the main courses was the sea bream, called Mieng Pla, which came wrapped up in a leaf of sorts:

I don’t have a photo of the little leaf wraps that we were supposed to eat the fish with, but the idea of this dish was to pick up a portion of fish, put it on top of a little piece of lettuce that was already topped off with herbs and vermicelli (at least that’s what I think it was), and eat it all in one bite.

We couldn’t say no to dessert. Our neighbors at the table behind us ordered it first, and who can resist ice cream? We chose the pandan ice cream (instead of the thai iced tea flavor), which was accompanied by 9 different toppings, including the green and red water chestnuts soaked in syrup, grass jelly, jack fruit, coconut shreds, toasted mung bean:

Thai food brings to mind red, green, and yellow curries, and meat grilled on satay sticks, but this place opened my eyes to a different side of this cuisine. If anybody else knows of a good place for khao yum in Vancouver, please tell me about it so that I don’t have to take a plane across the country to eat it again!

I’m trying to find more time to post, but it’s the  end of summer soon. This means that I’m trying to spend as much time as possible outdoors to soak in more vitamin D. It's good for bone density. Be back soon with another post!

It’s taken me a while to write about the 2nd part of P&V’s wedding (Part 1 can be found here), because it was such a packed day, full of memorable moments that I want to blog about all of it, but which would take forever to actually write up. When in doubt, go back to the basics, so I’m going to start by writing about the feast that P&V treated us to. The dinner portion was at Fortune House, located in Metrotown. We had a typical Chinese-style menu, with multiple courses, including abalone (these were a good size, for larger fist sized image of abalone, see my post about B&S’s wedding)

…and a whole slice of shark fin, versus the usual bits that are used for soup:

Traditional Chinese weddings are not for animal lovers. Don’t hate me for eating this and enjoying it, it was already cooked, so might as well not waste it. I know for sure I won’t be having this at my wedding. The rest of the food was fine, I don’t remember too much else from the dinner because of too much red wine.

The other very memorable part was the door games, which J, H, and I prepared for in great detail. P loves Winnie the Pooh (which I might have forgotten to mention in this post about her bachelorette at Disneyworld), so we planned around this theme. We made them dress up in Winnie the Pooh themed onesies, and sing Disney love songs before they were allowed into the house to see P (for those who want to see how this went down, leave a comment or email me and I can show you the video). Here’s a shot of the groom in the Winnie the Pooh onesie, and all the other groomsmen:


Onesies were purchased online by J. They were a bit pricier, ranging from $30 to about $50CAD, but you pay for what you get, and I think P will be keeping these for a while. The Eeyore suit actually has a tail that attaches/detaches via a button. They were all very warm and cozy, and roomy enough to slip over all their suits. Links here, for those who want to purchse some:

Piglet: https://amzn.to/2KtUd0U
Pooh: https://amzn.to/2AKBP4p
Eeyore: https://amzn.to/2vot36Q
Tigger: https://amzn.to/2M4VOz3

Finally, here’s a photo of me and my lovely fiancé in the morning. We will be taking lots of photos in preparation for our upcoming wedding/engagement photoshoots, and this truly shows how I feel about that (scared and worried about having to smile all day, in case you’re wondering):


Congratulations P&V.

Been too busy living life to write about it. Also, too disorganized to make time for this, but hey! I’m back after a month! July has been non stop, 50% of it work. Where has all the time gone?
Spent a good chunk of the month eating too. Here’s an acai bowl from Radical Juice in Mount Pleasant, a perfect way to cool down during this heat wave in Vancouver:



I had the berry bowl, which consists of a blend of acai, coconut water, and banana, over a generous serving of granola, berries, and more bananas. I added the nut butter for extra protein and flavour. H had the Dragonfly smoothie, which contained a good kick of ginger, while B had the Island bowl, which was similar to mine but had pineapple and bee pollen instead of the berries and bananas. It’s been about 3 weeks since we visited this little shop along Main Street, and I’m still craving it because I haven’t had a chance to go back yet.



How do they make their smoothies so refreshing? The consistency if so smooth, and it stays really cold, but there are no extra little chunks of ice, like at other smoothie places (*ahem* Jugo Juice, Buddha-ful *ahem*). Not to put down other places, because these other smoothie joints have their own advantages, but this is a smoothie place I can’t wait to visit again.

It’s been a long month, and I’ve tried to find opportunities to step out of my comfort zone, but it’s been tough. I feel like I want to grow and experience new things, but there isn’t enough space and I’m trapped in this stuffy little room. The end might be near? I might be content with my own air conditioned apartment soon, but it won’t be enough and I’ll want to escape into the mountains, to find waterfalls and glacier fed lakes, and naturally cool down.

D and I went to Take’s Sushi (pronounced TAH-KAY’S SUSHI), following a long day in the office. With some coworkers, you never want to see them after work, and with others, I don’t mind hanging out. I had never been, and apparently this is one of the best spots for sushi. Turns out that the rolls were amazing! The fish was very fresh, and there was a good ratio of rice to mayo to fish/fillings. I would absolutely return when the cravings for sushi kick in. The appetizers were decent, nothing special, so feel free to pass on those.

Here’s a shot of the unagi:

Here’s their Dragon Roll, with unagi on top of the california roll, and the Alaska roll (definitely a favourite) in the background:



D took these photos for me on his Pixel 2, because I left my phone at home.



I did remember my phone on this hike with V to the upper portions of Shannon Falls:



Beautiful hike. Drone shots to come.

Take me back to the sushi and hike please! I don’t want to have to focus on adult life responsiblities…

After our brief encounter with pasta at Disney last week, I craved more. This is how H and I ended up at L’Artista, in North Burnaby. We were originally going to visit Anton’s, but they had a line up out the door and we were too hungry to wait. H knew of other less popular Italian restaurants, so we walked over from Anton’s.

I had the carbonara:

H had the seafood risotto. I didn’t like this, because the risotto was slightly undercooked and not very flavourful, but I’m not blaming them. Risotto is hard to cook, I hear, just like fish, so I’ll try to avoid ordering this again in the future.

Fresh baked bread, with whipped butter:


Even after a full meal, we still had tiramisu. This is one of H’s weaknesses, and he deserved it after a whole month of eating healthy:


I don’t think I’ll come back, because the restaurant is a bit out of the way for us, and the food did not tickle my taste buds. There was nothing wrong with the food, and the service was great although a bit slow, but I think I would rather make pasta at home or try other places before circling back to this one.



I’m glad I had all those carbs before starting this week, because it was Bike to Work Week with Hub. I didn’t bike every day, and I used transit when I got too tired, but it’s a start I guess! I don’t disagree with increasing gas prices, because it will encourage people (like me) to use other modes of transportation.

I’m also glad to hear that there will be a plastic straw ban in Vancouver by June 2019!

Invested in these metal bubbletea/smoothie straws this week:

I just got them this morning, after ordering them yesterday afternoon on Amazon Prime, and I’m still super impressed with how fast it got to me. I’ll try these out this week, to see whether the bubbletea pearls can actually fit through the straw.

Straws can be purchased here: https://amzn.to/2JsZ3iv