Features

Barb made an awesome wedding cake for our friends' wedding last Saturday. Like our wedding cake, it featured multiple layers with a retro coconut frosting. Unlike our cake, it featured a double happiness motif in honor of the bride! Our cake was pure retro and had no Chinese accoutrements!

My favourite layer was an almond cake with apricot butter cream. Absolutely delicious. I am currently lobbying for Barb to reveal the secrets behind this cake and to bake it again for me soon! And of course, the chocolate layer with ganache was excellent too!

Joi Ito's awesome photos and video of his snapping turtle eating experience in Japan are compelling and fascinating even if you are not a turtle fan like myself. Check it out to get a glimpse of the wonderful Japanese food culture.

Instead of watching the first three periods of the Canucks game on Friday night, Barb and I went to Eat Vancouver 2003. We were twice lucky! Not only did we have some great food moments at Eat Vancouver, we also managed to make it home in time to watch Canucks win in overtime live!

If you like food (which luckily most people do), the show is definitely worth visiting. Admission is $9 but you can find coupons everywhere to reduce it to $7 per person as we did.

Shelora Sheldan, who is organizing the Cook's Tour of Oaxaca, Mexico that we wrote about earlier, emailed us to tell us: a) she has a new website about the tour and b) she will be giving a cooking demo on May 4 at 2p.m. at Urban Fare. Sounds like fun! Sounds great! Check it out!

Barb and I watched the German movie, Mostly Martha, Sunday night.

It's about a neurotic chef in Hamburg and her quest for happiness after the death of her sister forces her to raise her niece.

It's well done but not a great movie.

Margaret Cowan aka Mama Margaret, who organizes cooking, wine and cooking tours of Italy and who organized our excellent cooking lessons in Tuscany for our honeymoon, is organizing a cooking lesson at the La Piazza Dario on Saturday May 3 at 4:30p.m. in Vancouver.

It sounds great! Please let us know what you think if you go!

One of our readers, Shelora Sheldan, emailed us about her Cook's Tour of Oaxaca, Mexico from 4-11 September 2003 for $US 1600 with Susana Trilling, who hosted the PBS show Seasons of My Heart and who wrote a cookbook based on the series.

Now I have never been to Oaxaca and have never seen Susan's show, but the food of Oaxaca, and Susana sound like a dynamite combination.

Now that I've taken on the role of Coach, I'm thinking a lot about how to teach cooking and it's been an enlightening process!

This looks to be an excellent, succinct guide to eating sushi (something which along with a yoga studio seems to be on every corner in Vancouver these days!). Check it!

Although there are no set rules for learning how to cook, one must start somewhere. Here are some ideas about how to start cooking.