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I achieved another one of my summer goals this weekend! We had some friends-of-a-friend to come over to play board games with us on Friday night and it was fun. We played two games of Wasabi and one game of Ticket To Ride. I totally smashed them at Ticket To Ride, I somehow managed to complete Vancouver to Montreal, Seattle to New York, AND Los Angeles to New York. That’s a lot of points.

We went to the Vancouver farmers market again yesterday. We didn’t buy that much because it is SO EXPENSIVE! We just bought 6 figs, a loaf of cheddar jalapeno bread, and one corn cob (Scott doesn’t really like corn). I am extremely excited to try cooking with figs for the first time. I’m going to make a pizza with figs, goat cheese, and prosciutto.

The farmers market is nice because everything is good quality, but I’m not at the point where I want to spend a lot of money to get organic products and fancy stuff. I would prefer a farmers market where everything is dirty, I don’t need perfectly lined up tents and neatly stacked up pyramids. I just want cheap produce!!

We also went swimming at the outdoor pool near our house. It’s a pretty big pool, and it wasn’t crowded. Too bad we didn’t really know about it until the very end of the summer!

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It’s been a pretty quiet week/weekend. Scott’s been working on a puzzle and I’ve been reading and cooking and watching Olympics.

Have you noticed that there is almost never lemon or lemonade flavoured bubble tea available? Well since lemonade is pretty much my favourite beverage OF ALL TIME, I decided to go about making lemonade bubble tea at home. With pearls, of course.

The recipe takes a while, but none of the steps are complicated.

1. That’s not my picture but that is the exact kind of pearls I bought from T&T. The bag was something like $2 and has enough pearls for about 6 generous servings. They come dried.

2. Boil a big pot of water (the pearls need lots of space to move around). When the water is boiling, dump in some pearls. Stir them immediately if they are sticking to the bottom of the pot.

1 serving of cooked pearls is ~1/4 cup dried pearls

3. When the pearls float up to the top, reduce the heat to medium and let the pearls and water simmer for about 20 minutes.

4. At the same time you can prepare your sugar syrup. I use a 1:1 ratio of sugar and water (disgusting, I know). I use half brown sugar and half white sugar but I don’t think it matters what you choose. Simmer that on the stove until the sugar is totally dissolved.

5. Put the sugar syrup into a container and use a slotted spoon to get all of your pearls out of the boiling water. Put the pearls in the syrup and let it soak in there on the counter for at least 15 minutes.

6. The pearls are ready to be eaten! If you have extra pearls you can store them in the syrup in the fridge, but they will definitely need to be heated up again before you can eat them because they turn rock hard again when they are cold. The pearls are nice and chewy when they are still slightly warm.


My gross looking homemade lemonade bubble tea. Looks yuck but tastes YUM.

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On Saturday I made Thai green papaya salad with shrimp for dinner. One of my new favourite recipes ever!! I made it a bit too spicy though… next time I will definitely put less red chili. Underneath all the heat though it tasted fantastic, and it’s nice and healthy!

After dinner we met up with Zsofi downtown for more fireworks.

The show was from Italy. It was good!! Definitely better than Vietnam the week before, although we heard that Brazil’s show on Wednesday was the best. Shame we missed it. Scott even won tickets to sit in the bleachers for that show but we ended up selling them for $50 because I can’t stay up that late on a weeknight.

I give Italy +10 points for those cool fireworks that looked like arrows going upwards that I had never seen before, but also -10 points for putting off those lame-o smiley face fireworks that I HATE.

Also the smoke from the fireworks was really thick and sometimes it blocked out a lot of the fireworks (like in the above picture). I don’t think that is really their fault though, I guess it just wasn’t breezy out.

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We went to watch the Celebration of Light fireworks with Zsofi and Dylan last night. We got a great spot and had a little picnic with lots of fruit and cheese. It was a good show.

Don’t you think fireworks should have advanced further than they have by now? Everything else in the world is getting faster, cooler, fancier, yet the most complex firework they have is still that dumb smiley face one. Yeesh. I think they should be able to spell out words or make pictures by now!! I hope by the time I die I will have seem them recreate Starry Night in firework form.

Some other stuff I haven’t shown you yet!

Chocolate hazelnut tart from Death By Chocolate that Scott and I split the other night. Reminded me of the hazelnut pie I made a couple years ago. (I never made it again because just the hazelnuts cost me like $10!!)

Crepes of Wrath’s Simple Salmon Tartar. Totally delicious. I already want to eat this again.

Well I declared today CRAFT DAY so I’d better get off the computer and do something DIY.

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Last week I was lucky enough to win another vaneats.ca food package called Maurya’s Spice. Maurya’s is a fancy Indian restaurant on West Broadway. We decided to redeem my prize last night.

So we get seated, take a quick look at the menu for drinks, see that none of the drinks have prices listed for them, and they don’t seem to have anything non-alcoholic (I have really not been in an alcohol-drinking mood for weeks now). I thought it was pretty weird that they didn’t even have mango lassi. Isn’t that pretty much an Indian restaurant classic!?! Anyway because the place looked so fancy and the drink menu was frightening we just chose to have water.

When the waiter comes over to take our orders we ask for the vaneats package and he tells us first that YOU ARE NOT ALLOWED TO SHARE. ONLY ONE PERSON CAN HAVE IT. THE OTHER PERSON HAS TO ORDER SOMETHING TOO. This was disappointing because both of the other vaneats packages we have gotten have been super huge and definitely good for two people to share. Plus Maurya’s regular dishes on the menu were expensive for me (~$16). The way he told us that we were not allowed to share was pretty harsh, and weird.

Finally we decide to get saag chicken for Scott and the vaneats package for me. Then the waiter makes a huge stink saying we can’t redeem the package if we don’t have the printed out voucher. Because I won mine in a contest I didn’t have a voucher, they just emailed me the code. He was all YOU CAN’T REDEEM THE PACKAGE LIKE THAT, YOU NEED THE PAPER WITH YOUR NAME ON IT and I was all UMMM YES I CAN REDEEM IT LIKE THIS? I’VE DONE IT BEFORE!! I CAN TELL YOU MY NAME IF YOU NEED IT! and then he left for a while to make a phone call and then finally came back 5 minutes later saying OK. YOU CAN HAVE IT. :/

Once the food arrived everything was fine, but it sure was an annoying and awkward start to our dining experience.

Scott’s saag chicken is the green dish at the top, then clockwise from there we have a small salad with a vinaigrette that we couldn’t figure out if it was strawberry or raspberry, Seekh lamb kabob, some boring steamed veggies slightly out of the picture, a delicious daal made from black lentils, chicken chettinad, and garlic naan. The chicken chettinad was nice but a little too sweet for me. I preferred the garlic-y savoury saag chicken.

Throughout the whole meal we kept joking about not being allowed to share. Like the waiter was going to come over and yell at us if he saw Scott eating a bit of my daal or something, haha. Oh and nothing comes with rice and who knows how much extra that would cost!

Anyway of course we didn’t finish everything. We brought home enough of the two chicken dishes to have another meal at home. The vaneats package totally would have been enough food for both of us.

Maurya Indian Cuisine Menu, Reviews, Photos, Location and Info - Zomato