After two years of hearing about Beaucoup, and completely tasting the difference in their catered sandwiches at a work event, I ventured in.
The layout of the place, at first glance, makes you want to run away. Zig zag space, industrial feel, no place to wait in line.
But as soon as you sit on a table, suddenly, a complete coziness embraces you - ideal set up to enjoy their baked goodies and freshly made quality beverages.
Who ever thought a passion fruit hot chocolate can taste so good!
Their baked goodies are as unique as the place is. Small amounts of simple selection, but everything looked tempting that I restrained, for this time.
I should have carried those peanut butter sandwich cookies home; but I was philosophically distracted.
Beaucoup Bakery & Café
2150 Fir Street
Vancouver, BC
With a busy month at somerville kitchen, Chinese new year's eve was celebrated in a not too stylish way, albeit tasty enough.
A delivery order was placed from:
成都川菜
4181 Fraser Street
Vancouver, BC
And this was dinner.
Overall mediocre food, but it did the trick and a celebratory spread appeared.
Good chow mein; beef with tangerine peel I liked; chicken curry pathetic.
But the hot and sour soup they excelled on.
But what was key was the new year welcomed with food, friends and lots of leftovers.
Wonder what Saturday will bring...
This is the last of the three Aleshka Meals articles (Read Roasted Chicken and Baked Salmon).
This Aleshka meal is a specialty of hers - hand made perogies.
Simple meal - the perogies, sausage, bacon, cheddar cheese, sour cream and hot sauce.
Again, home cooking at its best and a meal that looked as beautiful as it tasted.
Thank you again Aleshka!
And of course, every Aleshka meal includes an inventive salad. Tonight's is simple greens with tomatoes and light dressing.
Dessert was healthy tonight - fruit and yogurt.
Looking forward to more.
Please read the first article in the series first - Aleshka Meals - Roasted Chicken.
Tonight's salad was a mixture of kale, cabbage, tomatoes, cheese, and basil with a lemon-based dressing. Inventive as usual, this Aleshka salad was the best I have tasted so far - the addition of fresh basil was a great idea.
The meal itself was a simple baked salmon with lemon.
Baked until just cooked, succulent and tasty - a comfort food meal at its best.
I just love seeing Aleshka dressing up the platters with a bit of this and a bit of that.
What may have been a boring looking platter of greens came to life with splatter of red peppers.
And with basil and lemon, you cannot go wrong Aleshka.
And leaving the best to last - home made apple crumble with apples, oranges and grapefruit - I always look forward to those.
Thank you again Aleshka!
Aleshka is a wonderful mother, wife and friend.
Very caring about those in her life and looking after everyone; she also loves to cook and feed us all.
I collected the following three articles over the last month on meals cooked by Aleshka and will be featuring them over three days.
Read, enjoy and thank Aleshka for all those lovely meals she makes.
Let's start with Roasted Chicken meal.
An Aleshka meal always includes an inventive salad.
Kale, cabbage and greens were today's salad with some cheese curds.
Dressing? Not sure what it was, but I could have easily dined on the salad only.
After the appetizers, roasted chicken with vegetables and mashed potatoes were served.
Always simple, always tasty and always colourful.
Thank you Aleshka!
This is my third attempt at Ghormeh Sabzi and I think I am getting closer (Read My Attempt at Ghormeh Sabzi and A Second Attempt).
Research on blogs, with Iranian friends and Iranian stores pinpointed few areas where my previous Ghormeh Sabzi failed.
For example, turmeric is a key spicing that I have never added before.
And using frozen uncooked herbs that I cooked myself was another trick to make sure the real flavours come out.
Also learned that you don't want to get the herbs too dark while frying them.
And lastly, do not add the dried lemons from the beginning.
Add them 30 minutes before the stew is ready and make sure you push them under the meat so they don't float.
Yes, this was way closer to the ones my Iranian friends make - it will never taste the same of course, but good enough to satisfy my Ghormeh Sabzi cravings when I get them.
somerville kitchen cookbook club meetings are becoming more fun each month.
For January, two members at one side of the table pulled out Korean cookbooks. Facing them, the other two members pulled out Moroccan cookbooks.
And the referee was an Iranian cookbook. Perfect set up for world war III.
Our gracious hostess' addiction to Korean soap operas developed into a fascination with Korean food.
Her featured book, A Korean Mother's Cooking Notes by Sun-young Chan, was highly praised for the details of the recipes and how well they turn out.
We sampled her home made Japchae which was delicious, served with Korean Barley wheat.
The Japchae looked exactly like the picture in the Korean books and used almost 100% authentic ingredients.
A pleasant meeting all around.
Now I wish we find some guys who want to join to tip the ratio of 1 to 6 males to females.
Any males interested to join? Email me.
Something from the freezer - but what is it? Guess we have to wait until it defrosts.
Now I remember, leftovers beans soup from a package turned into a stew months ago.
It is Friday night and I don't want a boring soup for dinner. Add a few red chilli and let's see what we can improvise.
First comes an empty plate.
The empty plate gets filled up with french fries, upon which the soup turned stew is ladled.
Sprinkle with grated cheese, top with sour cream and eat this all weekend.
When My Dear Lovely Neighbour invites me for pizza, I automatically assume it is Indian Pizza.
And there was no reason to assume otherwise tonight.
The pizza had peppers and chicken coated with what looked like tandoori spicing.
The pizza was out of the oven and it tasted very Indian. Spicy chicken, hot peppers.
So there was no reason not to believe it is Indian pizza until the packaging appeared - Palermo's Chicken Fajitas pizza.
Well, isn't Mexico a direct straight line from India??
