Officially completed 1 week of work after having my first child! I dedicated my whole weekend to celebrating this, and what better way to celebrate than with food? 

Right after logging off on Friday, H and I hopped over to Hi Five Chicken. 

I came into this with lots of bias. I originally wanted Church's Chicken, because they are by far the superior fried chicken fast food chain with the crispiest fried chicken skin, juiciest greasy meat, and the most satisfying gravy. H convinced me to go to Hi Five because it is closer, and we would be able to drop by J's house for a quick hello from the doorsteps... I was not disappointed. 

With the UberEats BOGO deal, we ended up with a pile of fried chicken and a spicy chicken sandwich: 

Church's still has my favourite fried chicken, fries, and gravy. Hi Five wins the chicken sandwich game though. Will be back for more. 

Also, high five to me for getting through this week of work, and going straight into it. It feels like not much has changed after 9-10 months - same processes, same programs and tools. The difference is the work from home environment, and a few new faces. With all the conference calls, it's great that most people keep their cameras off. Not only do I get to keep mine turned off as well, but I would prefer not to see certain faces. It's enough to have to listen to their voices blabbing on for 45 minutes about issues that were raised over 2 years ago. 

If you enjoy reading about my work from home and interpersonal dynamics with coworkers, please follow along here! I'm sure future posts will have more on this topic. I know I should let it go, because it's not healthy to keep letting other people's work ethics or attitudes affect my thoughts, but it's also nice to vent once in a while. :) 

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. :)

Fraser Valley Specialty Poultry (FSVP) invited me to dinner at Edible Canada to find out what happens when poultry meets wine!

FSVP coordinated this event at Edible Canada with Ripples Winery to share a 4 course meal, designed by Edible Canada’s own Director of Culinary, Tobias Grignon, and wine pairings chosen by Sommelier at Home’s, Ashley West.  Chef Tobias put on a great demo before the meal started, and taught us the best way to make a quick and delicious chicken (250°C for about 20 to 25 minutes in the toaster oven!):

Prior to the demo and the introductory speeches about FSVP, they served a generous amount of crispy duck hearts…

…and duck liver pate on a bit of sourdough…

…which I was very grateful to for, having just rushed over from the office.  The Radiance Blueberry Sparkling Refresher paired extremely well with both of these, and warmed everybody up for the dinner party. H was sitting across from me at one of the long community tables, and we both sat between complete strangers, which made for interesting dinner conversation throughout the meal.

Before the Fraser Valley Smoked Duck Salad, paired with the Cheam Gewurtztraminer Blend (photo above of the flavourful, juicy smoked duck breast slices on top of the endives), we learned a lot about the history of FSVP from their General Manager, Joe Falk himself. He talked about the history of the FSVP farm, which has been a local source of poultry since the 1970’s, and now provides duck, goose, specialty chicken, and squab to the Lower Mainland. They’ve been very resourceful with diversifying their products, and now, they even have their line of ready-to-eat products, including a duck sausage, and of course, the smoked Pekin duck breast, which was creatively paired in our salad with the huge duck egg.

The next course was the squab, which I did not get a good photo of due to the fact that it had been a long day already and the wine was very good. I’ve had squab before at many Chinese restaurants, and usually it is fully roasted. This time, it was a medium rare meat, with honey on top, served with a croquette on the side. INTERESTING…

The wonderful men and women around H and I all enjoyed the squab the most, because it had the most original flavour, and I cleared it off the plate too. However, for me, the best was the chicken breast dish after this one. Even though it looks like just a small piece of white meat, it wasn’t just boring old chicken! It was the juiciest, most perfectly poached free range chicken breast I had ever had the chance to taste.

My knife slid through it like it was butter, there was no resistance from the meat at all. Check out how tender it looked:

Wiped the plate clean, with only a small piece of greenery left behind as evidence that there used to be food here.

The squab and the chicken both went well with Intemperance, the blueberry table wine from Ripples.

To close the meal, they served a butter cake, topped with fresh Okanagan peaches and cream, garnished with basil: 

The sweetness of the dessert was matched by Cupere, a dark blueberry dessert wine:

I know for sure I won’t be able to recreate the poached chicken breast without more work and practice on my end, but I was happy to find out that FSVP’s ready-to-eat smoked duck breast from the salad was available at Edible Canada’s market from Aug. 17th to Sept. 30th. Stocking up on these to throw in my salads for lunch (well probably not mine, because I get lunch from work, but H would love it):

One of the reasons I really enjoyed this dinner was that the sources were all local. It always eases my conscience to be able to contribute to the buying local movement. If you’re interested in learning more about buying local meats from the Fraser Valley Specialty Poultry group, check out their website and social medias.

It was also pleasantly surprising to be able to meet interesting new people at an event like this, and spend just that brief moment of my life with them, learning about their families and hobbies and jobs. I would definitely recommend this type of event, as a way to learn more about your food and meet new people around the city.

Family Day long weekend was an opportunity to get the family together and go eat. I took my parents out to the Gray Olive Cafeteria to try out this new(ish) brunch spot in Burnaby:



Pictured here is the salmon eggs benny, hash browns, salad, chicken and waffles. Not pictured is the ham hock benny. Their eggs benedict sauce is smooth and creamy, one of the best. The salmon was very fresh, and perfectly done, paired very well with the medium poached eggs (I didn’t ask for it, it came medium). the hashbrowns were crispy and lightly seasoned so they weren’t too salty. The waffles though… H mentioned there might have been lemon zest in the batter, and the waffle just melts in your mouth! None of that doughey sticky texture that sometimes makes your mouth feel too dry.



Really, the only complaint was that the coffeee came in a paper cup. Their seating was very limited, so I can see why they wouldn’t want people to linger with a cup of coffee. Food was perfect.
Birds of a feather, flock together… All the foodies were at the Gray Olive that day, the line ups were about 10 minutes long.

At work, all the lazy people hang out together too. HA.

The one thing I've really learned is that you can't stay negative when something bad happens, because there will always be difficult times. Why not just get over it and do something about it instead?

According to Google, Sam’s Quality Jerk & More! is the place to get the very best jerk chicken on the island. H found this, and after our little foray around Cabana Bay, we were ready for food. Maybe we weren’t quite ready to be greeted by the piles of meat at the entrance of the shop:







Piles of very fresh meat, and extremely spicy jerk sauce (be careful with this sauce). I was very excited for an affordable meal that would actually be filling. We also came back again on the morning of Day 4, simply because it was so irresistible. They open in the morning at 7AM for breakfast usually, except Sunday, when they’re closed all day on. Why, you might wonder? 

H asked one of the cooks, “Are you guys open tomorrow?” (GCM Day 2 for us was on a Saturday).

The man chopping the meat chuckled, “No man, CHURCH!”

Imagine a Jamaican accent.

CLICK HERE FOR JERK CHICKEN TOURS PART ONE.