Tacofino requires no press from me. It’s the single place every Tofino native and tourist alike can agree to eat for lunch. It’s grown from a single taco truck parked behind a surf shop at the edge of the world to a multi-location empire stretching it’s delicious octopus-like tendrils all over the island and mainland. It’s food is always on point, so there is no reason to review it…
…Except it changed my life!
(more…)
I know what you’re thinking; “Post-Holiday Gift Guide” sounds like an article that took a little too long in the oven, maybe a deadline or two got missed and now it’s past time to be of any practical Christmas shopping use. Well, I assure you dear reader that I’ve got a good reason why you’re reading this now instead of a week or two prior to the holidays, just stay with me.
(more…)
I’ve been making fresh pasta on and off for about two years now. It’s been a long, steep learning curve with a lot of lumpy, feathery or overly-elastic balls of dough destined for the trash bin. Many weekends I would despair that the process is too arcane to be learned from a book and that the tactile magic required to make it like some Piedmontese nona would require a bankrupting trip to the motherland, or at the very least a couple of weeks worth of classes.
But I kept at it, spurred on by the near-pornographic descriptions of fresh pasta making and eating found in audiobooks like Bill Buford’s Heat and Pasta, Pane, Vino: Deep Travels Through Italy’s Food Culture by Matt Goulding. Little by little I got better, mostly by scaling back my efforts to just the simplest recipes and easiest shapes and focusing on my technique, checking at every stage to make sure the texture of my dough matched the descriptions I would read in The Pasta Bible or the fantastic Cooking By Hand by Paul Bertolli.
(more…)
Tucked into an unassuming block of office buildings on Broadway, one of Vancouver’s busiest thoroughfares is a Tardis-like temple of Japanese gastronomy run by one of the planet’s most famous sushi chefs. This itamae titan is Hidekazu Tojo and unlike a lot of chefs with half a century of experience tucked under his apron he can be counted on to be at his restaurant nearly every day with a big smile to greet guests.
(more…)
(more…)“Friends, let us join together here in the pits of sweltering madness where we cast our bodies and unheard voices into the void of fire and toil. Look upon the wasted works of our brother and pray that his clearly overcooked roast has a slightly pinkish interior so that bits of this beautiful and costly beast haven’t completely gone to waste. Oh Kitchen Gods! Please bless our ovens so they may produce another piece in a most timely manner… Because if that doesn’t work, I don’t know what the f@%$k we’re going to do.”
– Prayers To The Kitchen Gods 3:32