I put my LivingSocial coupon to work today. $35 for two six-course tasting meals (originally $35 pp) at Mis Trucos. I made reservations through OpenTable, which I found out you can use to gather points to convert to dollars for dining! Downside, the reservation times available through OpenTable aren't necessarily all that's available at the restaurant. The only time slots open when I made the reservations online were 5pm/5:45pm/9pm. I went with 9pm, so Aaron and I had time to kill. We went to The Score on Davie for drinks and wings. $3 wings at The Score on Wednesdays! Anyway, after killing time at the bar, we stumbled to Mis Trucos. When you walk down Davie street you'll notice it right away- it's the one that looks like a house. We walk in to a less than 10% filled restaurant. I guess OpenTable only has a few time slots and doesn't have the restaurant's full reservation time table. If I had phoned it in, we probably could have had dinner at 7pm like regular folk. The food was amazing, so I wasn't bothered for long. With drinks and before tip, it came to $108. Thank goodness for the coupon and my remaining lucky money from new years. Unemployment can be enjoyable.

#4 was my favourite.

Joined Twitter yesterday. I felt completely lost. I finally figured out the "@" business, but I'm still clueless with "#" and when I saw "Lists" my brain wanted to cry. I quickly went to Facebook started to click the tabs I was familiar with and read the "@" and "#"-less status updates before my brain exploded. I'm still not into tweeting, but reading celebrity tweets are pretty entertaining, especially during the influx of crazies running around Hollywood.

I've been craving dan tats for a while and I finally got my hands on one. It's been brought to my attention that there is more than one version of the dan tat. There are ones with the flaky crust, the butter crust and the Portuguese style (Po-tat). If I had more money I would have went for the Po-tat, but I stuck with my $1 budget and happily ran to my car with my flakey crusted dan tat. I think I'm on a dan tat craze now. I'll take Joey's advice and trek over to New Town Bakery in Chinatown.

I drove up to a "high point" in Richmond and enjoyed my treat. Ah, what a lovely view off of The Bay parking lot.

Fun times with Koda in the snow.

I started my day early again with a boot camp class at 6am. Whenever I have these early classes I usually go back to sleep when I get home. Today, I fought hard against my sleepiness and made a breakfast pita, and then watched The Romantics with a nice cup of hot water. Right away, I knew I was going to love this movie no matter how good or bad the direction, writing, or acting was going to be. The look and the wardrobe already had me sold. I wanted to wear everything everyone wore and I wanted my future home to be decorated with everything seen in the movie. I'm not going to review this movie because my reviews are usually yes I enjoyed it, no I didn't enjoy it. Besides, I was too distracted by the aesthetics. IMDB tells me that the book, as always, is much better than the movie. It's got a Big Chill vibe to it, but at the same time, it's nothing close. I took a nap an hour after the movie.

I'm still a Katie Holmes fan (last man standing?), and if are you too, you should see this.

Earlier this year, Aaron and I went to our friends', Mike and Krista, place for dinner. Mike served up a fantastic Indian themed meal. I'm not huge on Indian food because I've had some bad experiences. Well, I've never had bad experiences with any of my friends' mom's cooking, but I've had bad experiences with eating out. So when I normally get Indian food, I get the white washed butter chicken. Anyway, Mike's dinner inspired me to give it a go and I thought if I can control what goes into the pot, then maybe there's less chance of chaos. The result: delicious! I still have to say, Mike's curry was much better because 1: His recipe came from Vij's and mine came from Jamie Oliver who described his recipe as "a bastardized British dish". And 2: Mike is a better cook than me. I'll continue to try to perfect my curry paste!

Some ingredients for my vindaloo paste posing with my lovely bamboo cutting board (from Aaron) and my incredibly precise knife (from Jordan). You can't tell here, but I can cut slivers of onion slices with that knife.
Our dinner from last night. The big success of the night
were the bhajis (shredded carrots, onion, and ginger with cilantro all deep fried).

We had some leftover curry so I took it home for lunch today. I layered the curry with some freshly cooked rice and fried onions in my rice pot and baked it for 20 minutes. I enjoyed today's leftovers more than last night's fresh pot. It may have been because yesterday's curry was a bit too watery and the extra rice from today probably took away some of the moisture. Also... I love rice.


Update
I almost forgot about yesterday's lunch. I prepped some pasta I made Tuesday night. I mixed the dough with cooked and blended spinach, and rolled out the sheets with the Kitchen-Aid machine. The pasta was hand cut so I could get the ho fun-like thickness. I had to preserve my energy for that night's dinner, so I stuck with a simple canned plum tomatoes recipe.
Fresh basil with leftover snapper.

I enjoy making pizza from scratch. From the dough to the sauce, but not the cheese. That's too much work for something that doesn't always make me feel great. As much as I love kneeding my own dough (brings me back to pottery class), I was happy to be introduced to personal pita pizzas (thanks, Amanda and Jesse!) I was still able to get the satisfaction of building my own pizza with the toppings. Since I already threw out the "from scratch" theme with the dough, I went ahead and used Newman's Own Marinara pasta sauce and mixed in some chili powder and garlic.

Toppings: red onions, broccoli, jalapeno peppers, diced tomatoes, spinach and snapper.
Another friend, Darryl, gave me a great tip for making vegetable stock. Most people make it whenever they're trying to clear their fridge of old vegetables, but Darryl added that his stock consisted of discarded veggie peels and stems. Him and Meg would throw their peels and such in a bag, and at the end of the week they would throw the collected peels and any old vegetables into a pot and then boil down the water to make a cup or two of stock. Some add salt to give it more flavour, but I leave that out because one of the main draws to homemade for me is to avoid all the sodium in the store bought boxes. No, I'm not trying to be better than people who buy boxed stock... I'm doing it to offset the fact that I'll be eating bags and bags of extremely salted corn nuts in the near future.
Freezing almost three and a half cups of stock

Yesterday I made my first pasta without a tomato sauce base. I was uncertain balsamic vinegar would taste good with pasta and when I measured it out, its dark colour intimidated me more. It was another Jamie recipe, so I had to trust it would turn out okay. It turned out way better than I expected. I wish I could brag about my cooking skills, but it would have been a bigger surprise had I screwed up this two step meal.



The lunch menu for today was set for pea soup (Jamie). I always forget to check for all my ingredients before I start chopping and cooking. I was so sure about there being peas in the freezer because we're never low or without it. Today we were without. I had to improvise and went with corn instead. It tasted fine, but when my stomach is set on eating something, it doesn't like to settle for anything else- no matter how great the replacement dish.

Behind the soup is a snapshot of Char and me. This meal was sort of dedicated to Char.
I'll never forget the time she projectile vomit corn soup. Chunkeh.

First day, first meal off Wild Rose.

7 am at Kam Do for breakfast.
I had the $6.95 Good Morning Special. One iced lemon tea + two sunny side up eggs + one slice of ham + spaghetti with BBQ pork in soup.

I made sure not to order breakfast sausages. You see, breakfast sausages at Chinese cafes are just hot dog wieners. The tiny Schneiders kind. I always remember the story of my Gong Gong being extremely peeved when he received the hot dogs instead of the traditional breakfast sausages. I don't mind them, but I had to stand by my Double G and chose to go with the ham and eggs instead. The ham was a warmed up slice from one of those Schneiders packages. I'm not sure why I expected anything else.

My mom didn't care about food, she just wanted her coffee with CREAM.