I organized a picnic among friends on Saturday last weekend at the Riverfront Park in south Vancouver. Seeing that it was the last weekend before the start of another school year, I wanted to make this picnic to end the summer with a bit of a bang. There were about 9 families in all.

The Riverfront Park is a little known park located on E Kent Ave S, just south of SE Marine Drive at the turn off in Jellicoe. The park had a great view of the Fraser River and is very well maintained. It’s a great place for a quiet picnic.

As usual, the picnic is centered around food. Janice brought her peanut satay sauce marinated chicken wings. Bernie did all the barbequeing. The wings were very well grilled — and very juicy. He kept the supplies going for quite sometime.

Eric is the master chef among all of us. He always try making something new for us each time we met. This time he made Briyani Chicken Rice. The Briyani Rice were flavourful and reeked with spices. It was awesome. Sabrina is such a lucky girl to have a husband who loves to cook!

Wai Bing brought her homemade Vietnamese Rolls. She told us she learnt this from her sister just before she came to Vancouver. It was very nice, especially when it goes with sweet chilli sauce.

Polly fried some noodles (I did not take any pictures of them). She also brought along some samples of instant noodles and instant coffee and tea. There’s one packet of instant noodles called the Singapore Style Nyonya Laksa Rice Noodle that were different from the normal ones.

The seasoning, including the laksa broth, is all packaged in a bag — no water needed! Polly just poured the contents into the pot, heat it up, throw in the rice noodles and it’s all ready. Convenient.

Jessica shared with us her Rojak — Malaysian Style Fruit Salad. She told me she made the dressing herself. The dressing is made up of water, belacan (shrimp paste), honey, chilli and lime juice (is that right Jess?). Belacan has a strong smell (sometimes repulsive to others). Jess told us that the belacan were toasted. I think her new home is gonna smell belacan for the rest of this summer.

Suanne made Nasi Lemak. It was my idea to be a bit authentic by serving it on banana leaf. We bought some leaves from the Great One Supermarket in Richmond. Each packet of banana leaves is sufficient to pack about 20 packets of nasi lemak.

The rice in Nasi Lemak is cooked with cocnut milk. The normal ingredients includes fried anchovies, fried peanuts, sliced cucumber, hard boiled egg, and most importantly the Sambal. We has earlier blogged about making nasi lemak … check this link.

The banana leaf does provide a bit of additional aroma to the nasi lemak. I think the people liked it … and that pleases Suanne … right? Well, I MUST say that I contributed to this — I was 100% in charge of the assembly of the nasi lemak. So, Suanne, next time don’t say I am of no use around the kitchen, OK? 😉

Suanne also made something for dessert, Kuejadas (Portuguese Tart). Suanne had the recipe posted earlier too … check this link for the recipe.

I did not take pictures of the other food but they were equally delicious. Let’s see … Rachel brought fruits and salad. Allan brought popsicle which he forgot to tell everyone until half of them became soft drinks! Praba brought some sandwiches and I think he forgot to open it up — we did not know it was there, well, at least I did not know. Sue Hew brought some chips and dip. Oh yes, Xiao Qin made some Taiwanese sushi rolls with meat floss, carrot and cucumber.

Hey guys, Suanne and I had a great time. Thanks for making the time to meet up. Let’s do this again some time soon. Praba, you gonna be the next organizer, right?