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via http://thedapperdude.com/2011/07/04/meat-bread-vancouver/

This Vancouver restaurant is known for their simple and delicious sandwiches. Their most popular sandwich is the porchetta, which has juicy pork and crunchy crackling in between a ciabatta bun. Very tasty.

So tasty that we wanted to eat it again. But we can’t afford $10 per sandwich!! So instead we tried making it at home. I mostly followed this recipe and these butterflying instructions, and it turned out AMAZING. The only tricky part was actually preparing the meat because my piece of meat was not exactly the same shape as the ones in the instructions. So I took a few pictures of the process to hopefully help out a bit.

First I prepared the salt rub and the herb rub. I didn’t have fennel seeds because I don’t like the taste, so I just left that out. I used fresh parsley, but everything else was just dried spices.

Have I mentioned that we live a block away from a real butcher now? I bought this 4 lbs piece of pork shoulder with the skin on for $12. The actual shoulder was much bigger but the lady cut it down into a 4 lbs chunk for me. (This odd cut was why the butterflying instructions seemed really hard.)

My butterflied piece of meat. Butterflying SEEMED really tricky, but actually it’s not! I promise!! You don’t have to do as good of job as you think you do! My piece of pork was very thick in some spots still and it still turned out perfectly.

Put the meat skin down (the yellow is the skin)and cut out any bones. Then cut your meat horizontally from the left so the piece touching the counter is reasonably uniformly thick. Cut almost all the way to the right side and then unfold your meat like a book. Then repeat! When you are done you are left with an oddly shaped flat piece of meat.

Cover it with half of the salt rub and all of the herb rub.

Then you roll it up and tie it up as tight as you can with string. You want the skin to be totally on the outside of the roll, otherwise it won’t crisp up and won’t be nice. It doesn’t matter if there isn’t enough skin to cover the whole roll, my skin part only covered about 50% and that was fine. Oh and don’t worry about making lots of rolled layers, mine barely went around 1.5 times and it still turned out beautifully like the pictures.

Then you rub the rest of your salt rub on the outside, place it on a paper towel on a plate and refrigerate uncovered for 24 hours.

The next day place it directly on your oven rack with a pan underneath to catch drips. Roast at 275 F until the inside of the pork reaches 150 F (if you don’t have a meat thermometer, go get one!! They’re like $5 and WORTH IT.) This took about 2.5 hours for us. Then turn up the heat to 450 F and roast until the skin looks brown and crispy and delicious. Keep and eye on it because it doesn’t take long (maybe 10-15 minutes).

This is when our smoke alarm started going off non-stop. I suppose there was a bit of smokiness from the splatters. Made a bit of a mess of the oven but… the smell…. oh it was amazing.

Cover it with foil and let it rest for 20 minutes. Then slice up and enjoy!!!! We had it on chewy rolls from Safeway with a bit more salsa verde on top. DELICIOUS. Oh how tasty was that crunchy skin. Mmm.

PS did you notice that our pork had a tattoo?? WE ATE THE TATTOO. Kinda weird.

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I’m not going to say too much here because… PORK. Speaks for itself.

june 2nd, 2013 – porchetta sandwiches with salsa verde

In all the excitement of having a delicious smelling crackling covered piece of pork in front of me I forgot to take a picture of my actual sandwiches. I am so so so happy with how this pork turned out, omg. We sliced the pork into thin pieces and put it on rolls with a bit of salsa verde. The crackling was crunchy and salty and the meat was super moist. It was definitely channelling Vancouver’s Meat & Bread. This porchetta turned out so well I think it deserves its own post. Coming soon.

june 3rd, 2013 – vegetarian green curry

june 4th, 2013 – maple dijon chicken with sweet potato and green beans

More after the jump…Continue reading

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Extra long summer days + sweet patio = very nice evenings. Love this view. Plus we just got a BBQ last night so soon everything we eat is going to be grilled. Haha.


Extra long summer days + early morning shifts at the hospital = very hard to sleep!! Not sure what to do about this as we are not supposed to do anything to the curtains. In our old apartment we just blocked the entire bedroom window with the cardboard from my bicycle box, but I don’t want to do that here!!

All this summer talk just reminded me that it’s almost time to make up a new Summer Goals list for 2013! I’ll have to think up some stuff this week. All for now…

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a particularly cool looking lecture

SNMMI 2013 Annual Meeting Vancouver is now over. (That’s Society for Nuclear Medicine and Molecular Imaging, btw.) Oh how I enjoyed those few days of meeting new people and NOT having to explain what I’m studying.

I thought it was a pretty decent conference. I went to A LOT of different talks. Luckily Victor is about as nerdy as me so I had a friend to hang around with most of the time.


This half dude in the Siemens display freaked me out!! He had stubble! And arm hair! And his eye even twitched a little bit. AHHH! Lesley and I stared at it for quite a long time. First I thought it was a dude lying on his side half in the bed, with his head turned. Lesley thought it was an optical illusion. Then I thought it was actually a corpse (and was quite disturbed). Eventually a Siemens rep said that it was a very expensive model. SO CREEPY!!!!!!!!

Highlights of the conference included:

  • a talk about the effects of the Fukushima nuclear power plant accident on the population and food (apparently they are getting fat from being afraid of going outside, and the food is fine)
  • a really smart lady talking about dental uptake of I-131, which I had never heard about before
  • a session where we got to interpret diuretic renograms with doctors and vote with clickers (the doctors did terribly!!)

  • free dinner out on the patio at Canada Place
  • getting a free dinner from Phillips
  • a lecture about choosing to use or not use CCK in liver studies (aka a lecture that was relevant and not too complex)
  • getting free stuff in the exhibit hall (Lesley even won $50)
  • seeing new camera designs like a chair camera

Lowlights included:

  • hearing that 45% of people will get cancer
  • a talk where the presenter was pretty much eating the microphone
  • some overly technical talks that I couldn’t understand a single word
  • getting depressed because most of the stuff is not available in Canada and probably won’t ever be

It was also cool to bump into lots of techs that I hadn’t seen since being at their hospital for clinical. It was nice to catch up and hopefully they remember me a bit better now come September.

I am so grateful that the conference happened to come to Vancouver, and that it happened when we were still students (so we could go for free!). That was really lucky.

i take this as a sign that i am in the right field

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The Summer Night Market in Richmond opened a couple weekends ago. Scott and I went with Victor and his gf on the Sunday night of the May long weekend. It wasn’t too crowded when we first got there but crowds increased steadily as the evening went on. I recommend going right at 7PM if you’re planning on checking it out sometime this summer!


These little fish only cost $1 and are filled with chocolate, custard or red bean paste. I like the custard one the most. Warning: they are lava hot on the inside!!


Rotato is a night market classic. They are cheaper at the Summer Night Market ($4) compared to everywhere else. We got salt and vinegar this time but I didn’t like it as much as the flavours I tried last year.


I liked Parmesan Garic (lol) and Sour Cream & Onion last year. They must use the exact same type of flavour powders as they do on chips because they taste identical to bags of potato chips. If I have another one I will probably try White Cheese… maybe it will taste like Smartfood popcorn, which I am addicted to.

We also had a kiwi bubble tea with pearls ($5), shrimp lamb and crispy bun skewers (3 for $7), and a duck pocket and dumplings ($5.75). The skewers were excellent and the dumplings were tasty. The duck pocket was dumb because it only had like two tiny strands of duck in the whole thing.

Victor and his gf had all the traditional night market things like bubble waffles, okonomiyaki (japanese pancake) and takoyaki (octopus ball thingies).

I really like the Summer Night Market because it is cheaper than the Richmond Night Market, but now that I’ve been to it twice I think that’s enough. We’ve tried almost all the food there that I would want to try now. Next time I think we’ll go to the Richmond Night Market because even though it is more pricey they have way more interesting food choices.