Butternut Squash Apple Soup
This Butternut Squash Apple Soup is another great recipe in using winter produce. Cold weather calls for a hot bowl of soup. This creamy soup is flavourful and heart warming.
This soup can be prepared in 40 minutes or less. The trick to a great butternut squash soup is the simple addition of one tart green apple to balance the sweetness of the squash.
One of the better way to prepare the butternut squash is to roast it. Simply cut the squash half lengthwise, lightly brush with vegetable oil and place cut side down on a baking sheet and bake for 45 minutes in a 350F preheated oven until it is softened. Roasting brings out the sweetness of the squash as the sugar content is caramelized.
Butternut squash is a good source of fiber, vitamin C and A, magnesium, manganese and potassium. This recipe serves 4 to 6.
Moroccan Chicken and Rice
The main dish which Minoo planned for the South Arm Community Kitchen is a Moroccan Chicken and Rice dish. We were surprised with the use of winter squash in this rice dish.
This Moroccan Chicken and Rice dish is a all in a pot dish. It has protein, vegetable and grain in this dish. This recipe is adapted from Alive Magazine and it serves 4.
The butternut squash and raisins add sweetness to this rice dish. This is a good recipe to make use of winter squashes which are in season now. They are cheap and nutritious.
Here is a tip to peel the tough skin butternut squash. Microwave the whole squash, on high, for 2 minutes. This softens the skins, making it easier to peel. More on following page. Click here to continue reading.
Autumn Salad
It’s been a while since the South Arm Community Kitchen meet. The reason is because the coordinator of the Richmond Community Kitchen, Minoo was away on vacation for three weeks. Minoo had a great time in Germany with families and friends. She is fully charged for the coming winter.
Minoo started off the South Arm Community Kitchen with four recipes. The first item is an Autumn Salad featuring pear, cranberries and pumpkin seeds. Here are some tips on buying pears. Buy pears that are unripe to ensure they arrive home without any bruises as ripen pears are soft and easily bruised. An unripe pear can take anywhere from 3 to 7 days to ripen on the counter. To speed up the process, place pears in a paper bag along with an apple. Close tightly and check for ripeness in 1 to 3 days. Store ripened pears in the fridge.
This Autumn Salad is adapted from Alive Magazine and it makes 4 servings. You can easily doubled the recipes to serve 8. The goat cheese lends some saltiness to this lightly tangy salad. It’s a great way to start a meal. More on following page. Click here to continue reading.
Churros from Empanada Hut in Lansdowne Mall, Richmond
We are still searching for the perfect Churros in Metro Vancouver ever since we tried that great Spanish snack during our vacation in Spain this past summer.
So when Jonnek twitter’d me saying that he found Churros in Richmond, Suanne and I was pretty excited. BTW, did you know that we are on Twitter too? If you are interested to also follow us on Twitter, it is on http://twitter.com/chowtimes.
Our boys wanted to get the newly released Modern Warfare 2 from Best Buy (MW2 is an amazing game). So, we all took a drive to the Lansdowne Mall to pick up the game from Best Buy and then pop over to the food court to check out the Churros.
Jonnek informed us that the Churros can be found at the Empanada Hut.
Empanada Hut is famous for their empanadas. Having just had lunch, we decided not to try them although they looked very mouth-watering. Foodosophy did a write-up once on these empanadas, so you might want to check it out here.
Our mission here was the Churros. Here it is … More on following page. Click here to continue reading.
The Dutch Wooden Shoe Cafe on Cambie and W17th, Vancouver
It’s breaky time again.
For a change we decided that we would go all the way to Vancouver to check out the Dutch style breakfast at the Dutch Wooden Shoe Cafe. I still remember having eaten Pannekoek for breakfast when I was in Amsterdam two years ago.
Yeah, I know. Some people tell me that Pannekoek is eaten for lunch and supper, not breakfast in the Netherlands. But to us, it is pancakes and we Canadian eat pancakes for breakfast. :-)
The Dutch Wooden Shoe Cafe is located on Cambie around the intersection with West 17th Ave. It’s easy to spot the restaurant. The outside has this faux Dutch windows with flower boxes.
The inside has a Dutch ambiance and coziness to it. But the place does look old. The dining room are partitioned into three distinct sections giving this large restaurant a small restaurant feel.
I heard that this very Dutch Wooden Shoe Cafe is the origin of the De Dutch Pannekoek House franchise that you find all over BC today. So, if you like De Dutch, you should check out the real deal here.
The restaurant has a very homey feel to it. It is haphazardly decorated with wooden clogs, paintings and Dutch posters. Along the wall, they have pictures of their past customers lined on a strip on the wall with cute comments written on them.
We started off with the normal coffee and hot chocolate. However on their menu, they have a half page showing the “GIANT” Coffee Mocha for $4.25. Yeah, they capitalized the word GIANT but at the same time they also put the word GIANT in close inverted commas. It was not in anyway giant, but is sure is “GIANT”. It was quite normal.
There is a large section on the menu dedicated to Pannekoeken (the word Pannekoeken is plural of Pannekoek). We all pestered Nanzaro to agree to get the Pannekoek because we wanted to order something other than Pannekoek. He flip-flopped a few times on what he wanted. First he wanted the Nasi Goreng (fried rice!) Pannekoek. Then he changed his mind to Curry before finally settling on the Cheese Lover’s Special.
The Cheese Lover’s Special has five different type of cheeses … Edam, Gouda, Swiss, Cheddar and Mozzarella. We felt that this is really expensive because to us it is just a thin layer of pancake with 3 slices of tomatoes on top of the cheeses. This one is $12.15. Their other Pannekoeken ranges from $11 to $13.
On every table is quite a large bottle of syrup meant for the pancakes. That all-black bottle stands out and so we had to try it on the pancake.
For me, I had the Nasi Goreng and Eggs ($10). You did not hear this wrong. The name Nasi Goreng is … More on following page. Click here to continue reading.
Why Do Whites Accept Japanese and Thai Cuisine More Than Other Asian Cuisine?
About a month ago I introduce two of my very white colleagues at work the experience of eating Chinese Hot Pot at the Top Gun Hot Pot in Burnaby. In that post, I wrote about my curiosity why despite them being Canadians living in a cities (Vancouver and Toronto) with a lot of visible Asians, that they still have very little experience in enjoying authentic Asian food.
This picture sparked a discussion in a food forum. I thought it was fantastic but apparently to most this is the grossest thing they had ever seen.
Below is a comment that a reader of Chowtimes wrote in response to my question. Dyn’s comments has to be the mother of all comments for length (Thanks Dyn!). I thought it deserved to be elevated to a post on it’s own and perhaps some of you could also chip in with your two cents on this. Here is Dyn’s comments in its entirety:
I myself love every Asian cuisine I’ve tried (Japanese, Cantonese, Szechuan, Vietnamese, Korean, Shanghai, Punjabi, Pakistani, Lebanese, Syrian, South Indian…) – East and West Asian, that is. However, to answer your questions based on my own experiences and those of friends (and those I’ve tried to convince to try book-tripe!):
First, reasons why people are unnerved:
1. Media scaremongering.
There’s the recall freak-outs all the time, plus every bad comedy involving Asia inevitably has the Asian character eating something uncommon or gross to the western palette.2. Unfamiliarity.
Organ meats are classically foods of the poor, and since most Westerners have had the privilege of being relatively wealthy (and developing cheap, processed food early on), those foods are not appealing to the young. On a related note, those of us who are the children of the baby-boomers or the grandchildren or children of those who lived through the Great Depression had to hear, growing up, terror stories about organ meats and a number of other things, so that adds to the issue. Also, alot of Northern European cuisine that came over with our ancestors was very, very bland, so to many the pungent smells of Asian cuisine are as offputting to Westerners (at first) as the smell of cooking pork is to alot of Asians (I seem to recall reading that there’s a word in some Chinese dialects for the smell of boiled pork?)3. Looking Silly
Chopsticks are a bit of a learning curve, and people worry about making a fool of themselves, especially when thinking of…4. Price
it’s not immediately evident to alot of Westerners that that $20 they see is for a family to share the dish, as Western restaurants (beyond some Amish ones in the Eastern US) are not communal in nature. Most Westerners do not realize that 3 dishes for a family of 4 with rice comes to an economical $10-15 per person most of the time, and possibly much less. Those who do know this will tend to want to go in groups and might not want to look silly per #3.And now the issues that are not so much the people’s fault:
5. Translations
It can be a bit frightening to have a poorly-translated or badly translated menu, especially for would-be new folks. To their credit, most Asian restaurants do indeed endeavor to provide a translation for at least some of the dishes (see #7), but half the time they seem to be using a dictionary from the 1800s. An example of this would be, let’s say, “Yue Choy with Doufu and Fish Maw In Soup.” Let’s say this is a plausible dish. Some might get “Doufu” is “tofu”, but very few will know “yue choy” (which could easily and correctly be called “mild mustard greens” or “Chinese broccoli”) and even fewer will know what a maw is, and for those that do? Maw gives a very poor idea of what the cut/type of fish actually involved is. Similarly bad are one-off’s like “in sauce” or “in spicy soup with noodle” – what sauce? You have more than one, surely? Which soup base? Enough experiences like this can put someone off, especially if the menu doesn’t try and be descriptive. Worst-case, they’ll order a “safe” western dish, which may very well be poorly cooked and leave a bad taste in their mouths, so to speak – a local Westernized Chinese food place near me has lovely authentic Chinese food available (with names like above!), Westernized Chinese food, and hamburgers – anyone foolish enough to order their hamburgers will never return!6. Hygiene
This comes down to two issues: first of all, the cleanliness. Asian restaurants seem to have a … More on following page. Click here to continue reading.
