Greek Summer Festival 2009
Suanne and I were invited by Amir, the Executive Director of the Greek Summer Festival, to the event to experience Living A Day The Greek Way. Suanne and I had been having way too many invites these days but this was one event we could not turn down because we felt we had so much to learn.
We met Amir and to our surprise, he had actually gotten the people behind the event together so that we could meet them. Never in our imagination how much history there are behind this annual event.
The Greek Summer Festival had started as a one day event 23 years ago organized by the Greek Orthordox Community of East Vancouver. The event’s main goal is to raise funds (this year they partner with Make a Wish Foundation) and to introduce to Vancouver the richness of Greek culture, traditions and FOOD!
They told us how this one day event grew from one-day event to an event that spans two weekends around Canada Day. This year’s event runs from June 26th to July5th.
George Economous was our host of the evening who was gracious enough to spend two hours that day to bring us around the place and showed us the event behind the scene. He he he … Suanne and I felt like we were on a guided tour of Greece! We were so intrigued by the stories we are hearing we decided to learn more before digging in to the food. But since this is a food blog, I gonna share with you the most important aspect of this festival … FOOD … especially …
… LAMBS. If there is only one thing we came away impressed, it was the lamb. Being Chinese who generally finds lamb gamey, we ended up thinking of lamb in a much different light.
The Greek Summer Festival sold a whopping 465 lambs within 10 days in the festival last year. This year, they are on track to break last year’s count and I am not going to be surprised. We met George “The Real Boss” (the person above is George “the Host”). George “the Real Boss” is the man behind these lambs since the inception of the Greek Summer Festival. Boy, he sure has lots of stories to tell and BBQ burn scars to show too!!
They used to do this by hand and using charcoal but today they have a whole row of rotisseries imported from Greece that slowly cooks this. It takes four hours of slow cooking to make each. They use the very best New Zealand lamb because of the tenderness of the meat and of the consistent size. They tried to use local lambs but gave up because it was best only during Easter period.
They used to chop the lamb piece by hand. It is impossible to keep up with the demands that they had introduced new ways and machines to do the job better and faster.
Many people actually come to the Greek Summer Festival only for their lambs. People would drop by the festival on their way home to pick the lambs on the spit up by the kilo ($32) or half-kilo ($16).
Some people even order the whole lamb. That is $185 and is more than enough for 20 people. They will cut it to your choice. Sometimes there are customers who comes in a group and order an entire lamb to feast at the festival. That would be fun!
This is what Suanne and I had — the Lamb Dinner, Bone-In. This is wonderful … perfecto in every aspect. More on following page. Click here to continue reading.
Crisp Seedy Oatmeal Cookie
For the dessert, Minoo made some Crisp Seedy Oatmeal Cookies in the Gilmore Park Church Community Kitchen.
This Crisp Seedy Oatmeal Cookie will satisfy anyone. It has a variety of seeds like sunflower seed and water melon seeds. The original recipe has pumpkin seeds instead of the water melon seeds.
This cookie is great for snack or lunch box. This recipe yields 42 cookies.
The puffed rice cereal in the cookies make them a bit chewier than my preference. I would leave out the puffed rice cereal in these cookies as I find that the baked rice cereal kind of sticks between my teeth.
Ingredients
- 1 cup (250ml) unsalted butter, softened
- 1 cup (250ml) packed brown sugar
- 2 eggs
- 1 teaspoon (5ml) vanilla
- 2 cups (500ml) quick-cooking (not instant) rolled oats
- 1 1/2 cups (375ml) puffed rice cereal (such as Rice Krispies)
- 1/2 cup (125ml) all-purpose flour
- 1/2 cup (125ml) whole wheat flour
- 1/4 cup (50ml) unsalted sunflower seeds
- 1/4 cup (50ml) water melon seeds
- 1/2 teaspoon (2ml) baking soda
- 1/2 teaspoon (2ml) baking powder
- 1/4 teaspoon (1ml) salt
Creamy Bow-ties with Broccoli and Ham
In the Gilmore Park Church Community Kitchen, Minoo demonstrated two recipes. The first recipe is Creamy Bow-ties with Brocoli and Ham.
This creamy pasta dish is simple to prepare and it has vegetable and meat in it to make a complete meal. This recipe is taken from eat well and it serves 4.
Ingredients
- 12 oz bow-tie (farfalle) pasta
- 12 oz broccoli (1 bunch), cut into florets
- 2 tablespoons butter
- 1 medium onion, diced
- 1 cup half-and-half
- 1/4 teaspoon salt and peppr
- 8 oz cooked ham, cut into cubes
Kintaro Tonkotsu Ramen on Denman, Vancouver
Suanne and I went downtown to cover an event a couple of weeks ago. Since the event was late beyond our normal dinner time and does not really serve food, we decided to just go check out the place which Rey was raving about.
Many would claim that Kintaro’s Ramen is the best in Vancouver. If I recall correctly, Rey even said that Kintaro has the best Ramen outside of Japan … something like that … something like wow, you just gotta try it!
We had seen lines outside the small restaurant before and it was something that put us off trying Kintaro. This time we were there at 5:30PM, just before dinner rush hour. There were tables available at that time. However, by 6PM there were already people patiently waiting outside the restaurant for a table.
Despite its popularity, the restaurant is unbelievably small and if I could add, spartan. I guess it is the charm of a place like this. It is its simplicity that adds to the charm. In Kintaro, it is all about Ramen, and about Ramen. I always believe that a setup like Kintaro is best left as it is … i.e. they should not change a proven formula by expanding this place or remove the long lines! LOL!
I absolutely had no idea what they were all shouting about throughout the time we were there. They shouted the moment we walked in … each time a customer walks out or make an order.
Service was polite. They were polite and patient when they took our orders even though we had so many questions on their menu. I guess it was OK then because there were not so many customers. When the lines starts to form, they were politely coming around very fast the moment we put down a chopstick asking if we are done. I understand that they wanted to turn the tables as fast as they can. They did it politely and we understand. Kintaro is not a place where you would dine … I say spending 45 minutes here is stretching it a bit too long during peak hours. It’s order-eat-pay-go here.
The Red Pepper Mix above (called Shichimi Togarashi) is a common Japanese spice mix used for soups and noodles. It’s a mix of 7 kinds of ingredients.
Kintaro’s menu is a simple 1-pager. We opted for the one that stated “Kintaro’s BEST!”. It is the Miso Ramen ($8).
At the time of ordering here, you need to decide on the richness of the broth (rich, medium or light) and either you wanted fat or lean pork. We asked for RICH broth and FAT pork.
Kintaro’s menu says that their soup is flavored with a blend of soy bean pastes from 4 different Japanese regions and twelve spices. Whatever it is, the soup was very flavorful. The broth was way too rich which somehow made us feel full. We should have asked for medium instead. You could ask for additional toppings ranging from $1-$2 but we did not bother with that.
There were 2 big slices of rather thick pork with mouth-watering marblings. This was like the ultimate in pork … goodness-delicious melt-in-your-mouth type. It was way better than the rather comparatively pitiful ones we had at G-Men — no comparison really. More on following page. Click here to continue reading.
Hai Phong Vietnamese Restaurant on Kingsway and Inverness, Vancouver
Every now and then we do get emails from our readers sharing with us a review of their favorite restaurants. About two weeks ago, Julie sent us a longish email giving a description of what we should check out in her family’s favourite restaurant. That restaurant name is Hai Phong. I had heard of Hai Phong, reading it from Tiny Bite’s site and was actually on my list of restaurants to visit.
The Tamarind Crab above was what made us decide make the visit. We had enough of Pho, as you probably already know. We want to discover more of Vietnamese cuisine.
For meals with crabs and such, we had to have more people. We asked if Julie wanted to join us but by the time she got back to us, well, the dinner was already over. However, we got Angie of Sea Salt With Food to come along for this meal. Oh I want to mention this. If you are not familiar with Angie’s site, her site exploded onto the blogosphere a couple of months ago — at the peak she had 40,000 pageviews in a day and that made her Alex ranking leaped to 60,000. Gosh, her site was also featured on BBC two days ago. She is like a superstar of recipe blogs now. [Note to self: blog about recipes, not restaurants. LOL!]
Anyway, Hai Phong is located along Kingsway by Inverness. With so many Vietnamese restaurants along this stretch of Kingsway, it is very easy to dismiss Hai Phong as just one of the many.
The interior is bright because of the glass wall along the facade of the restaurant. The place looks new and even have wide screen TVs mounted on the walls. A very pleasant difference; its not only it looked clean but it is also spacious.
Service was great. We like it when the waitress is genuinely helpful and takes the time to help us understand the menu. Admittedly I do sometimes ask of the waitress questions like “So, what is YOUR favourite dish?” or “what is the dish you are most proud of here?”. I find that this sort of questions do tell a lot depending on how they answer these type of questions. Sometimes they would just sort of decline to answer by asking in return if you like beef! Sometimes, they would point out their most expensive dish. But sometimes I could see the genuineness in their answer and could sort of sense the recommended dish is what we should go for … we often use this way to validate our selection. More on following page. Click here to continue reading.
POM Wonderful — 100% Pomegranate Juice
We do get samples every now and then. Molly sent us an email asking if she could send us some coupons to sample. We said yes and true enough the package came in the mail just a couple of days later. That was fast.
Chowtimes had often been contacted asking if we would like samples from food manufacturers. We replied to Molly saying that we’re in Canada because we thought that she may have mistaken us for a US blog site. Very often, the samples comes from the US and the products are not available outside of the US.
POM Wonderful, as it turns out, is available widely in Canada. It is just that we had never paid much attention to it.
We went to the Real Canadian Superstore to get some. Never knowing where to look for it, we spent quite a bit of time looking — thinking that it is somewhere in the beverage section. We actually had thought it was some form of a concentrate because of the word “concentrate” on the bottle.
As it turns out, it was in the section where food like salads are … i.e. at the produce section. POM Wonderful came in a nice and unique bottle and is supposed to be drank cold. They have a few flavours all identified by the colors on the cap. The bottle is so nice, I know it will end up in the drawer where Suanne keeps these kind of cure bottles — she can’t bring herself to throw cute things away.
The above is Mango. To me it tastes like More on following page. Click here to continue reading.
Lemon-Garlic Pita Chips
Sydney and Joyce made some Lemon Garlic Pita Chips to go with the Creamy Hummus. It’s a perfect match.
This recipe is adapted from Cooking Light and it makes 24 pieces Pita Chips.
This Lemon Garlic Pita Chips is super crispy and can be eaten on its own as snack. We just cant stop munching on this crispy chips.
Ingredients
- 3 (6-inch) pita bread rounds
- 2 teaspoons olive oil
- 1 1/2 teaspoons lemon pepper (since we do not have lemon pepper, we added lemon juice to the olive oil for brushing)
- 1/4 teaspoon garlic powder
