A foodie at Feenie's

Yesterday was Rocco' one year anniversary of moving to Vancouver. We celebrated in style with a reservation at Feenie's. Iron Chef Rob Feenie opened Lumière on Broadway, quickly followed by Feenie's next door. The two restaurants share the same kitchen but Lumière is considered haute cuisine while Feenie's is supposed to be Rob getting back to his roots, cooking for the people. Uh huh.

I promised a couple people the full report, so I hereby dedicate this blog entry to a description of our sumptuous meal.
Rocco began with the daily ravioli: butternut squash ravioli with roasted pine nuts in a light citrus cream sauce. This dish was truly amazing and I could have eaten just that and been satisfied. Reluctantly I limited myself to half a ravioli and a few dips of the sauce with bread. I chose the daily soup for my starter, a gin tomato soup garnished with basil oil. Yummy, but pretty much a basic tomato soup. We ordered a bottle of Yalumba grenache for the meal that turned out to be quite full and fruity but not overpowering.

On to the main course. I opted for the single vegetarian option in the entree section of the menu, rigatoni with butter-braised tomatoes, cultivated mushrooms, arugula and goat's cheese, finished with shaved parmesan. The dish was quite good, but the tomatoes were out of this world! I'll have to experiment a little to determine exactly what "butter-braised" actually means in practice because they definitely made the dish. Rocco had a number of items to choose from and he went with the shepherd's pie. Duck confit and corn topped with truffle scented mashed spud, accompanied by an au jus. I didn't taste this but he ate every last morsel on the plate and claimed it was delicious.

To finish, we split the daily brulee which turned out to be an amaretto, vanilla bean brulee. There's no way one person could have finished it, the portion was so large. Mmm, mm good! Perfectly torched, lovely and creamy, and still light enough that we didn't waddle away from the table

This meal was very good. Did it live up to his reputation as an Iron Chef? Maybe. Apart from the ravioli, the food wasn't shockingly good. The service was excellent (our waiter's name was something like Giuseffe (Gee-you-sef-fay)) and, wonderfully, we ended up being the sole table in a little private room so we felt very special. I will absolutely go back for other seasonal dishes but there are more restaurants in this town that are begging to be explored. Have no fear, I will report on our various foodie adventures in the city!

All purpose resource

I've got a joke for you.
What do Vancouverites use when faced with light, dry, fluffy snow?
Umbrellas!

This town is funny. We get this kind of snow so rarely that no one owns the right tools to deal with it, including all-purpose radials. My bus driver today went on the PA system to make fun of the impotent road grader we passed - the blade of the grader was maybe 1.5 meters long.

At least the city looks terrific! It hasn't melted much yet so the trees are still graced with icing. Turns out that Vancouver trees aren't built for this weather either and there are many, many trees down and even more broken. Cherry blossom trees are the weakest, apparently. It's very sad to see.

Flickr Pickr

Check this out: http://color.slightlyblue.com/
The tool selects photos on flickr.com that feature the colour you have chosen. Very cool. Makes you want to redecorate - or at least that's the effect on me.

A family affair

Can anyone guess who these lovely folks are? Here's a clue, now I definitely know who I get my hair from.

Another one down

Completed my third half-marathon in driving wind and lashing rain yesterday. The Fall Classic race wanders around UBC campus on a route that would be really pretty, and fast, in nicer weather. I was hoping to break 2 hours but now I can blame my 2:07 time on the weather. There was a point in the race when I realized that, with 5km to go, I could potentially turn on my inner ninja and fly to the finish line to achieve a time right around, if not slightly under, 2 hours. Of course, this was after running 16km already and now wearing sopping wet clothes (so they were heavy!). I decided it wasn't something I needed to kill myself for so instead I finished with an almost identical time to the half-marathon in Victoria at Thanksgiving. I guess I'm just not a very fast runner, but I think I'm ok with that.

The best part of yesterday was...wait, there were two things worth noting. First, by the time I finished the race, checked out the race expo a bit and had some grub, changed every article of soaked clothing for its dry equivalent, ran for the bus but didn't make it, took another bus, and walked all the way home from the bus stop, I still got to wake Rocco up from his sleepy cocoon since it was only 10:40AM on a Sunday morning. The second enjoyable part of yesterday afternoon was publicly yelling and shaking my fist at the sky; the sun shone brightly yesterday afternoon so we roamed the city doing xmas errands with our jackets tied around our waists. I ran 21.1km in a total squall, then walked around casually, fully clothed, in gorgeous sunshine. Oh the irony.

Edit: I'm not unhappy with my 2:07 time, sorry if I gave that impression. It does get frustrating when you go out and do something big like run a half-marathon and the most you can say about it is, "my time was exactly the same as my last race." I'd like to be getting better, or even to have something bizarre happen like all I could do was run 4:20 or my knees would fall off. The final story is that this race was pretty fun because of the ridonkulous weather, and I wish I was getting better at long distance racing. I guess I'm getting better at one thing: last year I was registered in the Fall Classic 10km that happens the same morning - and I didn't even leave my apartment to go to the race! So I'm getting better at getting out of bed for a race.

Mac Spoof: Performance

Hahahahahahahahahahahahahhaha

Helsinki Complaints Choir

Quite funny! The last minute and a half are blank so feel free to shut it off then.

What complaints would you add to their repertoire?