the bends
grills and chills (where did this month go?)
Due to a chain of events I won’t bother getting into, Jeff and I found ourselves heading out to the Port Coquitlam Costco on a Saturday afternoon solely to buy light bulbs and gas up the car. Of course, we ended up spending over $150 on other things, which is the way of Costco. Traffic heading back home looked awful, so we decided to detour into PoCo and go to the European bakery for a treat. Although I love and respect all the specialty donut shops, there is something about an old-school, classic bakery donut that almost always hits the spot. Jeff got an apple fritter and I got one with pink glaze and sprinkles, and we ate them on a bench near the Coquitlam River in Colony Farms while Jeff reminisced about his childhood (he grew up right near there).
Afterwards, we went to The Barley Merchant for dinner and beers. We got there just early enough to get the last available table, but unfortunately my brain found the vibes of that particular table to be so cursed that I could not relax long enough to even order a drink, and we moved to the bar. I actually love sitting at the bar when there’s only two of you— three at the most, otherwise it’s too hard to talk— because you never feel like someone will be hounding you if you sit there too long, and it’s great for people-watching.
My mom has been working like mad the past couple of weeks, and on a weekend off she asked if anyone wanted to have dinner on the Drive; she and my stepdad like to play pool at Sneaky Pete’s so they come to that area when they get the chance. Jeff and I joined them for dinner and drinks at Marcello, an Italian restaurant I’ve never been to— there’s just so many and we tend to gravitate toward the same few. I’m not sure how long they’ve been around, but it has a comfortable, old-fashioned kitchen sort of atmosphere that reminded me of some of the trattorias we ate at in Italy. Normally it’s hard for me to say no to a wood-fired pizza but their pasta is made fresh in house, which is always a selling point, and I had no regrets. The four of us shared a bottle of Montepulciano with our meal, and two impressive slices of spumoni for dessert.
Liang asked if I wanted to go see something at the Vancouver Queer Film Festival with her, and we chose Rookie, which was a delightful Filipino lesbian sports movie. It was a Sunday afternoon matinee, and in trying to choose a place to go for a drink afterward, it became very obvious how many places around Chinatown aren’t open until 5, or are straight up closed on Sundays. We ended up at Fiorino for happy hour, eating olives and drinking negronis and house wine. I respect that their happy hour is daily from 3-6, because I’ve been seeing too many places where it ends at 5. Kind of a cop-out if you ask me— you can’t lure customers in with a discount at a time when a lot of people are still at work!
Speaking of drinks, now that we’re past the solstice somehow (didn’t September just start?) I feel pretty okay about embracing pumpkin season. I’m not a pumpkin spice latte person really— I look forward more to the peppermint latte I’ll treat myself to while holiday shopping— but I do always feel the need to grab a couple of pumpkin beers before Halloween. I tried Russell Brewing’s pumpkin pie milkshake IPA, which is probably a pretty distressing combination of words for many of you, and I really enjoyed it; not too sweet, not too heavy. I look forward to buying a different pumpkin beer next week and seeing if it will enrich or betray me.
With seemingly the last of the good weather, I felt compelled to grill all the vegetables I could. Yes, the balcony is covered and I could technically grill year-round, but I know my ass is not going to be putting on boots and a coat to go out there in November. When the flip-flops get put into storage for the winter, so do I.
Corn season is just about over, so it’s very cheap at the market right now. I grilled some and added it to spaghetti with garlic, oil-packed tuna, capers, lemon zest, parmesan, and a little cream I had leftover in the fridge. This is a great and fast dish because you can mix up everything in a bowl while the pasta boils since nothing else needs cooking (sometimes I warm it over the empty pot after the noodles drain). I make variations of this all the time— grape tomatoes or green olives would be good if you don’t want to do tuna, and if you only have pantry ingredients, it’s still good without the corn. But I love the flavour contrasts here from the corn and lemon against the more robust capers and fish.
When I grilled the corn, I also did some sweet peppers with plans to make relish and shakshuka (I’ll get to it), and some zucchini to add to a pesto risotto. This was originally an Isa Does It recipe and I still make it pretty similarly, just with less volume, added butter, and stirring pesto in all at the end so it stays vibrant. I’m also very happy about how much easier it is to make risotto on this stove; the burners at the old house were very uneven, so it would take ages and I still always ended up with undercooked grains of rice. This came out perfectly creamy without being overcooked, and I wasn’t ravenous by the time it was ready, either. I was planning to make arancini with the leftovers, but we may end up just eating it all before that happens.
I don’t know if it’s the weather cooling off but lately I have been bereft if my house is even for one day without a little treat I can eat after dinner. Last week I made the espresso fudge brownies from Vegan Cookies Invade Your Cookie Jar. I love that it uses semi-sweet chocolate (for some reason the unsweetened baking chocolate isn’t sold at Bulk Barn and I always forget to pick it up elsewhere) and makes up the difference in intensity with espresso powder. Despite the recipe emphasizing that you don’t want to overcook these, even after baking them to the outside of the time range given I felt they could have used another minute or two. But maybe I just like my brownies to have crispier edges— Jeff didn’t have any complaints.
This week I couldn’t decide whether I was in the mood for cookies or cake, and eventually I kind of bridged the gap by winging it on a chocolate chip loaf-style cake with fresh rosemary. If I made it again I think I would use more rosemary and a bit more sugar, and maybe a little more baking powder— or maybe I overmixed the batter, because it didn’t rise up as much as expected. But it’s still a great snacking cake since it’s not too sweet. If I get the measurements more to my liking next time I make it, I’ll share the recipe here.
I’ve been able to get excited about soup again, too, now that the weather’s begun to turn. I spent an afternoon making chicken broth with some bones I’d forgotten about in the freezer (a mix of raw and leftovers from roasts), and about half of my bag of vegetable scraps. Every recipe you see for bone broth has all kinds of instructions on how to make sure your broth doesn’t end up cloudy, instructions I never really pay much attention to with chicken broth because I’m not opening a ramen shop or doing prep at the French Laundry. Is a broth nicer that way? Sure, otherwise people wouldn’t put in the work. Does it still taste good enough to make soup with even if some of the fat emulsifies into it? Absolutely, and soon I will roast a chicken and use the leftovers to make chicken noodle soup (and start a new freezer bag of bones in the process).
On a whim I bought a celery root at the produce store, unsure of our future together. But later I made it into a puréed soup with a carrot and some onion and garlic, plus a little smoked hot paprika and thyme. I often feel the need to fancy up vegetable soups by adding coconut milk or curry or something, but the celery root has a lot of flavour already and the carrot made it an appealing yellow-orange, so I found this didn’t need anything more! Maybe I’ll feel differently when it’s March and I’ve made every soup I can think of more than once already.
I also made a good and simple red lentil soup with rice, flavoured with cumin and tomato paste, from Milk Street: Tuesday Nights. The recipe also includes making chili oil with Aleppo pepper flakes, but I’ve made the soup a few times and just garnished with store-bought chili crisp. Basically all soup is good with a grilled cheese, but with this one I particularly enjoy the chaat cheese toast from Indian-ish (tomatoes and chaat masala with melted cheese on top).
Thanks for reading— if you enjoyed this newsletter, please share it with someone new! I like providing this to you for free, but it does still involve time and effort, so any donations, especially while I’m still out of work, are greatly appreciated. Finally, I don’t know about the rest of you, but yeah, same.
Yep, same. Closest I've come so far is a distant childhood memory of a soup my great grandmother made for me whenever I was feeling sick, I don't even know what it was, but it had spicy sausage meatballs in some bone broth with vegetables and bow tie noodles and it was incredible. She would make it with a tomatoes and bacon sandwich every time and the fact that even 30 years later I can smell the soup making just thinking about it and my mouth waters is testament to its lasting impression. Sadly it is a lost recipe, another in the pantheon of white whale recipes I was too young to have the forethought to request copies of before they were lost with those that knew them by heart.