Category Archives: Food

Fraser River Discovery Centre Hosts Indigenous Salmon Fishing, Drying Tours

The Fraser River Discovery Centre in New Westminster, BC, had several tours today sharing First Nations fishing and fish-preserving techniques.

It was interesting learning about the cleaning, filleting, and wind-drying process to preserve salmon, and we got to try our hands out sharpening Indigenous tools.

Fraser River Discovery Centre salmon processing
An exercise sorting cleaning, filleting and wind drying into proper order.


Wind-dried salmon


Sharpening tools


Checking out the BC watersheds map, with a focus on the mighty Fraser River


The protected White Sturgeon


Yep, these massive, ancient (both in terms of time on Earth, and lifespan) fish come from such tiny eggs. Amazing!

25th Anniversary

Thank you to my lovely wife for putting up with me for 25 years.

Sashimi platter and assorted seafood to cook from T&T: prawns, mussels, clams. . . Served on a bed of rice, with grilled mushrooms and Japanese tsukemono pickled vegetables on the side.

That honking huge anniversary candle is a few years behind — it’s down to the point where it’s so thick you can’t burn “a year” in one evening  .

Served on late grandmother’s china, with late mother’s silverware.

Then I realized what I was presenting was better accompanied by hashi (chopsticks).  .  .

East-West fusion.

Gosh, where do the years go?

25th anniversary dinner

 

Paul’s Mish-Mashed Potato Pancakes

potato pancake

Paul’s mish-mashed potato pancakes.

Remember there’s leftover mashed potatoes in the fridge and get a hankering for potato pancakes.

Discover there’s less than half a cup left. Hm. See there’s rice in the rice cooker. Hm. OK, what the heck, about half a cup of potatoes, half a cup of rice, a tablespoon of flour, an egg, salt and pepper, and some sesame seeds. . .

Not bad, not bad at all 

Mason Bee Reveal Shows ‘Profit’

We unrolled the paper tubes we’d set out over the summer, and opened the unit with plastic trays.

Excited to not only “preserve our capital” but notch a “profit” of a dozen cocoons. Our location in a townhouse with only a high balcony on which to set out bee houses is not the best, so we were happy with this year’s results!

Paper tubes rolled from the Burnaby Now proved to be much more attractive than plastic trays.


The supervisor was having trouble seeing the action and was meowking indignantly around our feet, so we eventually let her on the table, where she soon fell asleep .

mason bee cocoon harvesting

Leftover Pizza Dough = Butter, Sugar, Walnut Rolls

I often have some dough left over when I use the breadmaker to make pizza dough, as with only two of us in the family, one medium-large pizza at a time is plenty.

So one of my mainstays for using up leftover dough is to simply roll it out very thin, spread some butter or margarine on it, sprinkle lightly with brown sugar and chopped walnuts, roll up, slice into bite sizes, bake and . . . yum!

butter sugar walnut rolls

Nikkei Matsuri 2017

Fun festival at the Nikkei National Museum & Cultural Centre just up the hill from our place in south Burnaby, BC. The main draw for me? Japadog . . . : -)

Nikkei Matsuri 2017

It was also great to run into a gal pushing 100 years old that we met at a party about three years ago. She was out and about at the event with her walker, since she lives in the Japanese seniors’ residence there, and we had a good long chat in Japanese, mostly Yumi and Yuki, with me following along as best I could.

Here’s a post about that convivial, multilingual, multi-generational potluck.