by ·0 Comments

Last week Scott and I went to use the vaneats.ca voucher I had bought for La Casita, in Gastown. We had been there before, and enjoyed it, so I was excited to go back.

The package was called La Casita Botanas and came with all this on a platter:

A. Chipotle Prawn, grilled in butter, garlic, & our special chipotle sauce
B. Chicken Wings, served with mole sauce on a bed of rice
C. Quesadillas, handmade folded tortillas with melted cheese and Mexican chorizo sausage
D. Cabbage Salad, served with avocado
E. Super Nachos, beef & bean salsa, cheese & veggies on fresh corn tortilla chips

The prawns were nice, perfectly cooked and pretty spicy. We only got to eat two prawns each. I wish there were more! The mole chicken wings (not pictured) were ok I guess, except they were really tiny and I don’t actually like mole. I’m sure it was very nice mole, but I can’t get past the whole CHOCOLATE element. To me they seem like dessert wings, which is pretty weird. The quesadilla was fine, although oily, because of the sausage meat.

The salad was awesome, very tasty and a nice fresh thing to eat in between the other heavier food. And the super nachos were delicious. The sauce was really yummy and melted the cheese, and the super crispy chips were so good. Definitely not healthy…. but…. delicious.

The platter was really large. We didn’t finish everything. Overall I was pretty pleased with the package. It felt really funny going to a restaurant and not ordering, but I kind of like that. Theoretically it should be some of their best stuff, shouldn’t it? I am not a picky eater, so I really appreciate getting to try a bunch of new things.

I also had a lime margarita. To be honest I preferred the margaritas we made at home the other week.

We sat in a closet. Haha.

Check out the vaneats website if you are in the Vancouver area because they have contests all the time where you can win packages (like the Indian package I won that we haven’t redeemed yet!) or you can just buy a package yourself. They’re pretty good deals.

Ha, this post seems like a sponsored post. Except…. it’s not. LOL.

La Casita Menu, Reviews, Photos, Location and Info - Zomato

by ·3 Comments

What to make when you are seriously craving sushi but don’t have a lot of time:

Sushi bowls!

All I did was cook some sushi rice in the rice cooker (then stir in a bit of rice vinegar and sugar), slice up tons of cucumber and avocado and a bit of nori. I sliced up some salmon and we topped it all with a little bit of soy sauce. It definitely satisfied my craving and took barely any time at all to make.

by ·0 Comments

Yesterday was pretty cool because I won a free meal on Twitter! Scott and I will get to have a 7 course Indian meal courtesy of vaneats.ca which is obviously awesome. I won the Siddhartha’s Nirvana package. It’s actually funny timing because we were already planning on using another vaneats.ca voucher tonight! I bought the La Casita Botanas package a few weeks ago and am definitely looking forward to eating it. I do love me some Mexican food.

The Sens loss was sad. Womp womp Canada. At least now my grades should improve a bit.

That was the other day after the Canucks loss. Lol.

Scott has been working very hard lately. I have barely seen him in the past three days!!

by ·4 Comments

Well that sucks. Some company has bought jornakat.com so I guess even if I did want it back I can’t have it. Hopefully most of my old readers have switched over to this site anyway by now.

We made margaritas last night. It seemed like a good way to use up the cheap tequila someone left at our house a while ago. They were yummy and much better than drinking pop, which I seem to have lost the taste for.

I did my shift at the Open House yesterday. Before I went I was worried that people were going to ask me hard questions that I wouldn’t be able to answer, but actually once I was there I really wished people would ask ANYTHING AT ALL instead of just staring at us. It was awkward. Lesley and I ran a little booth where we had a Geiger-Muller counter and a tripad with two drops of hidden radioactivity that people could try and find.

It wasn’t very busy so instead I just ate all the treats they had got to bribe us into volunteering, and chatted with the second years and teachers, which was good. I finally found out for sure that yes we will be working full time, 5 days a week over the summer.

Well I should get back to work on my essay now. Need to get some more work done before our epic 1+ hour bus ride to my grandmas’ nieces’ cousins’ daughters’ moms’ (ok I exaggerate slightly) house for dinner tonight.

by ·0 Comments

We spent too much money on food and drink in March. We’re usually very thrifty but last month we got sloppy I guess. We went out to eat a lot, drank at bars, and spent a lot at the grocery stores.

To get back on track we’ve decided to try and bring that food and drink amount way way down, and back under budget for April.

Some ways that we cut costs:

1. Don’t eat out as much. Duh, that one is a given. If we’ve been invited out we can eat at home first so that we don’t end up hungry while out, even if it means eating at an awkward time of day.

2. Make a meal plan. Scott and I do this together on the weekend. We try to plan ahead for the next 5 or 6 days, so that we have lunches and dinners arranged and can do all the shopping at once. I’m pretty sure that you spend less when you do the shopping once than if you do the shopping every day. And we almost never end up having to buy lunch at work/school.

  • check the flyers for sales, and plan a menu around that. The stuff on sale is usually the stuff that is in season, so as well as saving money you are getting nicer quality.
  • take inventory of the food you already have in your fridge, and plan a menu around that, so less gets wasted.
  • plan out meals that have similar ingredients, reducing produce waste.

3. Eating cheaper stuff. This doesn’t mean we have to eat Mr. Noodles every day, just maybe not eating steak every day. This blog has tons and tons of very economical recipes: http://budgetbytes.blogspot.ca/ Nearly every single thing that Rosemarie or Scott or I have made from this website has been a success. I’ve mentioned her blog before and I continue to stand by it. She’s got an amazing website there.

Um well I can’t think of anything else at the moment. Some common sense tips that you probably would have come up with on your own. Saving money isn’t too hard!