Features

Last night we participated in the East Side Culture Crawl. The Crawl is an annual event whereby artists open up their studios to the public for a grand weekend of gallery hopping and shopping.

How does this relate to VanEats? Several of the studios we visited had finger foods and beverages. Our favourite food spot was at Paneficio, where they served a variety of food and a tasty brie filled with tapanade...oh, and the art was great too!

While on vacation, I made an effort to slow down from my usual frantic pace and savour extra time to prepare some slow cooked meals. This was inspired by the "slow food" movement that started in Italy and is now finally influencing North America. The movement celebrates a slower paced approach to enjoying food, from producing to cooking to eating (a real backlash to our fast food, fast everything mentality!).

I fixed the problems with the FAQs, privacy & policies, colophon and feedback. Please let us know if you encounter any more dead links.

Hi! More technical difficulties; it appears that 90% of our site structure (or user friendly names for those not familiar with Manila) was erased sometime between October 15th and 21st.

Not only the stuff that I mentioned yesterday was lost, the FAQs, Privace & Policies, Colophon and Feedback were also lost.

I will restore these tomorrow. Again my apologies for the inconvenience.

Al from ViewFromTheHeart dropped in on our discussion group to tell us about An Edible Journey Through China.

Please check it out and let us know what you think!

Thanks, Al!

Hi!

For some unknown reason, the user friendly names for Sides, Desserts under Recipes, Kitchen Tips, Shopping and Reviews were all deleted!

I just restored the names today by hand. Please let us know if there are any outstanding problems. Sorry for the inconvenience. We will work with our web hosting service provider to ensure that this doesn't happen again.

If you want to make a real Philadelphia Cheese Steak Sandwich, check this out as well as this followup item (via ViewFromTheHeart) Both Al and Brent are so right about bread in Canada and the United States. 90% of the bread in Europe is better based on my experience in Germany!

After seeing the awesome Louis Prima movie at the Vancouver International Film Festival today, Barb and I went to La Grotta Del Formaggio to buy some pancetta.

La Grotta is an excellent place to buy Italian food supplies, please try it out! You will not regret it!

The VanEats gallery for Behind the Curtain 2000 is now up at the Behind the Curtain Site. Hope you like it!

Tasting menus are popping up more frequently lately. Thank goodness!! I suppose it's because I have a really fickle palate, but I enjoy having a variety of flavours and courses in a meal. I am always intrigued by how chefs combine and coordinate different flavours and textures within the menu while maintaining each course's and ingredient's uniqueness and integrity. Possibly the best tasting menus in the city are offered at Lumiere (see my recent review).