The Daily Catch Seafood Company at 1418 Commercial Drive

Apologies for my delinquency over the past year; it's been one heck of a year for me. Mostly I haven't been doing much worth writing about, and when I have, there's been no time to write about it. But I have the intention at least to remedy that. (We'll see how far good intentions take me...)

I may try to catch up on some of the restaurants I've been to recently, but for now, I'm sharing what I hope will cease to be one of the best kept secrets in the city - Daily Catch Seafood on Commercial Drive.

They have a wide variety of fresh sustainably caught seafood daily. They are not cheap, and I do sometimes feel guilty for being able to afford such wonderful guilt free fare, but if you can afford it, it's so worth it. It's all so fresh, let me say that again, fresh, and flavorful. It reminds me of the seafood of my childhood. I grew up on the island, and we went shrimping crabbed, fished for cod and salmon, dug for clams, the whole nine yards. Seafood had character, and taste! I had begun to think that the flavors of my youth were wistful creations of my memories, but since I started splurging at this shop, I have learned that no, seafood really can taste like I remember.

Whether your motivation is the flavor, the environment, or some of both (like me), I urge you to take a gander by this store, and take some really great seafood home tonight.



Oh, in case you're wondering, they are an OceanWise partner

Bosa Foods - 562 Victoria Drive

I'm back, and exploring new places around Vancouver and the rest of the province as much as I can. And although having a toddler means we eat out less than before, that, and the fact that I now live in the city full time, means that I cook more, and that, in turn, means that I am always on the look-out for great local products, stores, and the like.

My recent find may be a bit out of the way for some, but worth a trip if you like Italian groceries, and a definite gem for those who live nearby. Bosa Foods, an importer of Mediterranean foods that also sells directly to the public, is located in a residential area at 562 Victoria Drive, a few blocks off of Commercial Drive, just south of Hastings Street. They carry a large selection of pastas, oils, vinegars, tomatoes, sauces, meats, and cheeses, as well as sweets, dishware, and the like. The quality is generally great, as are the prices. If you happen to be in the neighborhood, stop in. If you're not, take a trip next time your cupboards are bare, and stock up.

Be aware the store is not flashy, and you could easily miss if if you weren't looking carefully.

(Note, they have another larger (?) location on Kootenay St. that might be closer to where you are.)

Poplar Grove 2007 Pinot Gris and Comox Brie

Last night was another fun dinner at home with friends featuring some BC cheese and wine I thought I’d share. We started off with some Comox Brie (www.naturalpastures.com/awards), pepper pate, and some of the spiced pickled Fraser Valley blueberries I made in the summer (bcfoodandwineadventures.blogspot.com/2008/07/fraser-valley-berries.html). I’ll just come clean and admit I love Comox Brie. I don’t know if it’s because I lived in Comox as a teenager, or because I love good brie. Probably a little bit of both. It’s creamy and rich and was just lovely with the Poplar Grove 2007 Pinot Gris (www.poplargrove.ca) we served to start.

At the table we began with French de puys lentils finished with white wine, shallots, orange, and tarragon and topped with a salad of baby spinach and proscuitto tossed with a tarragon, orange, and white balsamic vinaigrette. This dish was what the Pinot Gris was intended for, and the pairing worked really well. The wine is clean and crisp and yet with what I can only describe as round fullness and body, without the tropic fruit one often gets on the bench. The food and wine were a perfect balance.

We moved on to herb encrusted roast BC beef tenderloin with a beef stock, red wine and shallot reduction, served alongside italian roasted vegetables and roasted garlic mashed Yukon gold potatoes. The meat was purchased from The Butcher on West 10th (www.thebutcher.ca), a local store I can’t say enough about; their quality and service are exceptional. Chris selected a Poliziano 1999 Asinone (Montepulciano) to serve with the main course, which was absolutely delicious, and worked very well with the meal.

Desert was a simple chestnut panna cotta with a chocolate ganache sauce, whipped cream, raspberries, and mint, and a moscato d’asti.

Hopefully this sets your mouth to watering, and your mind to thinking about all the wonderful meals you can make with BC foods and wines.

Bayswater Tea Co.

It is suddenly clear that my favorite time of year, fall, is quickly approaching if not fully upon us already. The change brings with it thoughts of all things warm and comforting, braises, long simmered stews and soups, and warm comforting drinks such as hot apple cider, hot chocolate, and tea.

Long before we knew much of anything about wine, we drank tea, a habit we maintain. Luckily, good lose tea is not as hard to come by here as in other places we’ve lived. (We used to have to order our tea from the Upton Tea Company in New England, www.uptontea.com/shopcart/home.asp, which has a great tea selection and good customer service. It’s just hard to smell the tea through the mail.) There are a few stores here in Vancouver where we purchase tea, but the one we buy from most often is the Bayswater Tea Co. (www.bayswatertea.com) on West Broadway.

A few weeks ago I sat down for a chat (over some tea of course) with the owner, Sabrina Fass, to find out more about her, tea, and the store. I was very interested in what would motivate such a young person to spend all her time around tea, something many of us associate with visits to Grannie or the stuffiness of high tea at places like the Empress Hotel in Victoria.

She first discovered her passion for tea in Germany. She was there for a year studying joinery. Like any student, caffeine was a necessity, but she didn’t want to buy an expensive coffee pot that she wouldn’t be able to bring back home, so she bought a stove-top kettle for tea instead. She quickly discovered that there’s more to tea than the boxes on supermarket shelves that we are most familiar with here. (Although that has changed. The next time you’re in a grocery store, check out the tea selection! It’s a far cry from the lonely three or four brands of orange pekoe available when I was a child.) She explored the wide variety of high quality teas available at the local tea stores there and fell in love. And so what started as an economic decision became a passion for her.

When she came back from Germany she found it more difficult to enter carpentry than she expected, as her training there didn’t count towards her papers here. She briefly thought about starting her own company, but research proved that to be prohibitively expensive. One day she and a friend who was an amateur herbalist were chatting, and the idea to open a store specializing in teas and herbs came to her. Her challenge to her friend “we’re 23 years old, what do we have t lose but money.” That conversation was the beginning of a store called Herbal Bliss, located at 10^th and Alma. According to Fass, starting that store was a trial by fire. It was difficult in the beginning, but they eventually got the hang of running their own business, and by the time the end of their 5 year lease was approaching, she was ready for more.

As it turned out, her friend wanted to go in a different direction with her life, and about that time there were changes in the regulations governing sales of herbs in the province, leaving just Sabrina and the tea side of the operation. So she set out to do more research, investigating the demographics of various neighborhoods, trying to find one that would suit the kind of store she wanted to run, and the Bayswater Tea Co. on W. Broadway was born.

It’s been just over three years since the store opened and she still loves it. She not only loves tea, she also truly enjoys helping customers discover tea. Like any good tea store, customers are encouraged to smell teas before buying them. No prepackaged cartons here. And with over 250 teas in the store, there really is something for everyone, from black teas to rooibos (which incidentally, is one of her favorites) and everything in between. The staff do tastings so they know the products they are selling. And all of them care as much as she does about matching teas with individual palates.

For personal consumption Fass tends to rotate teas, drinking black in the morning and rooibos in the afternoon/evening. As she put it “each tea brings something different to your body so it’s good to cycle. It’s like saying broccoli is good for you, but are you going to only eat broccoli?”

I was struck by what she said about why tea is so relaxing. It’s about the time commitment: you have to take some time out of your day to make tea. You have to take the time to boil the water, pour it in the pot, and wait as it steeps. You can’t just push a button on a machine and out comes tea. (Maybe that’s why I find French press coffee more relaxing and decadent, it too requires monitoring and attention. Cappuccino, by contrast, which also takes time and effort, involves turbulence and violent action which may reinforce the energetic and vigorous effect of coffee.) Speaking of which, I think hear the kettle boiling…

Excellent Housecured Meats at Moccia's Italian Meat Market

I treated myself last week to an afternoon exploring new (to me) stores around town. (It was a treat mostly because I was out in the car.) I went to two places that are relevant to the blog, one of which is the subject of today’s post.

Moccia’s Italian Meat Market (www.moccia.ca/index.html) is located on E. Hastings, not too far past Commercial Ave. I went there in search of house-cured prosciutto, but left with a variety of their salamis instead.

I purchased three salamis - their entire selection that day. (I found the whole place to be rather sparse in terms of merchandise, to be truthful, but in the end, this was irrelevant.) One I believe was the Friulano. The other two don’t appear to be listed on the web site. One had pieces of fig in it, the other had duck in addition to the pork. If my memory serves, the one with figs was the same as the Friulano, but with the addition of figs, and the one with duck was a different recipe altogether. But I must admit, I wasn’t listening very attentively to the clerk as he explained the selection; I was too busy swooning over the sample he had given me.

As it turned out, all three were excellent. Increadibly flavourful. When I first put a piece in my mouth the experience was one of the whole, but then the different flavors came to the forefront one by one, the pork (VERY high quality), the subtle spicing, the sweetness of the fig, the wine, the savory duck, then the whole again, in rolling waves of experience.

This is no ordinary commercial salami. You don’t taste the effects of preservatives or long storage or transportation, but rather, craftsmanship and pride in product. It is worth the trip across town, at least for special occasions, or just to turn an ordinary evening into a special one. According to their website various stores around the city sell their products, so you may not have to make your way to their store, although I suspect that the selection is better on site. As I said, I went for proscuitto. Their website doesn’t list prosciutto and so I can’t be certain that they actually make their own. However, when I asked about it, I was told that it wasn’t ready yet. This gives me hope for the future (because it suggests that they do indeed make it), as well as an incentive to visit again (although I don’t really need another one - the salami itself is enough). I must remember to thank the waiter at Mistral for letting me in on this place! (http://bcfoodandwineadventures.blogspot.com/2008/07/mistral-french-bistro.html)

Petales D'Osoyoos

Another successful pairing to report. Last night (at home) we had buffalo flat iron steak marinated in red wine, garlic, topped with bacon, onions, and mushrooms, served with mashed potatoes with roasted garlic, spinach topped with crumbled blue cheese, and a salad of cucumber and fresh fava beans with a cream mint dressing. The wine, Osoyoos Larose Petales D’Osoyoos. Was it the absolute best wine we could have paired with the meal? I don't know. We have several good bottles of French and a lot of BIG California cabs in the cellar, any of which probably would have been fantastic with the meal. The real question is whether or not it was a good meal for the wine, the answer: it was. It had more than enough tannins (and acid) to stand up to the meal very nicely. All without making us focus only on the wine. Instead, we enjoyed how the food and wine interacted, nothing playing a clearly staring role, instead, working in concert with each other to make beautiful music. (Don’t get me wrong, the wine is quite lovely to drink by itself too, as previous posts attest to.)

A plug for fresh fava beans: They are a hassle, requiring shelling and then peeling, but when they are in season, they are totally worth the effort!

I purchased the buffalo at my neighborhood butcher shop, called simply, The Butcher. They have very high quality meat, and great service, all without a trip to the craziness that is Granville Island. Check it out. (www.thebutcher.ca).

I discovered a new cheese store - Les Amis du Fromage

Have I mentioned yet how much I love cheese? It’s my weakness – not chocolate, or cake, or ice cream – it’s cheese. It’s a tough call, but if I had to give up coffee or cheese, I’d have to go with coffee. (There’s always tea after all.) Last week, we tried a really wonderful raw milk cheese from Quebec at Salt (which will at some point get its own well deserved post). When we asked if there might be any place we could buy some for ourselves, the server suggested Granville Island or a cheese shop I’d never heard of, and promptly forgot the name of. (I have a horrible memory for names.) But my memory was jogged while watching an episode of “Living Vancouver” on CBC where they did a segment on entertaining with cheese featuring Allison Spurrell of Les Amis du Fromage (www.buycheese.com). Looks like I’m the only person in Vancouver who’s never been there! So yesterday I hopped on my bike and went in search of the 2^nd Ave. store to rectify this.

I found it. Valhalla for a cheese-lover like me. (OK, so I’m not a warrior gloriously slain in battle, but you get what I mean.) They didn’t have the cheese I was looking for, but I had expected that. (The server at Salt said it was very unlikely we would be able to find it here.) So I bought two others, a cheddar with Isle of Aran whisky, and Bouq ‘Emissaire, a raw goat’s milk cheese from Quebec (which Salt was also serving when we were there last). Chris likes cheddars more than I do, and I like goat cheese more than he does. The obvious solution – one of each. We had some of the cheddar last night. It was surprisingly mild. A little sweet actually. One of the cheddars I’ve most liked in recent memory. Importantly, the cheddar fan liked it too. We haven’t tried the BE yet, but I’ll write that up when we do. I also bought a wild boar terrine with apricots, which we also tried that last night. I would definitely recommend that for your next party. Tasty! I’ll be back.

As you might imagine, we didn’t eat the cheese and terrine alone, they were accompaniments to a bottle of Poplar Grove (www.poplargrove.ca) The Legacy (2004), not because we necessarily thought it would go, but because it was already open. For just sipping, I definitely liked their Merlot better. But The Legacy was definitely food-friendly. It had good acid and tannins. More structure than the Merlot. Could easily have been left to sit for a few more years, and even improved a little with the time. The take home: for drinking, pick up the Merlot, for a dinner wine, go with The Legacy’s a great choice.