Sri Lankan Adventures in Scarberia and a Chinese Yarn

Soundtrack "Nothing's Gonna Change My Love For You" - George Benson

So I decided on a whim to head east instead of west after work today. My friend Reethi told me about this amazing Sri Lankan take out place on Ellesmere (at McCowan in Scarborough) called CanBe Foods. She has had food from them in the past at backyard summer get-togethers and I simply fell in love with their rolls. I've been there myself once before a few months ago and simply powered through their chicken, fish, and vegetable rolls as I was walking away to the bus stop; vowing I would be back as soon as I could, despite the unearthly long commute back home (over an hour of buses).

Well, today turned out to be that day! Somehow I wasn't excited about the quick recipe I was planning to post here tonight and wasn't ready to post about my Niagara trip last weekend (I promise, it's coming!) so I guess the little lizard on my shoulder (Let's call her Gertrude. She wears pearls and carries a black patent handbag) was whispering in my ear "Don't go home. Have an adventure and procrastinate". I try not to listen to Gertrude as she's usually telling me how horrible I am, but I decided I really did need an adventure.

So off I went on the 95 York Mills bus with the George Benson song you see above running through my head. Truly CanBe, nothing's gonna change my love for you. Sadly, I didn't bring my camera but work with me here. A long steam table with dozens of dishes, samosas, rolls, roti, rice etc. They also have a wall with a freezer on it (as well as a straight up fridge) where you can buy some of their frozen dishes, including desserts to take home. This place is dead cheap folks. Everything I bought ended up being less than $12, total.

The rolls themselves are kind of like egg rolls but with a mealier outside. I bought chicken, fish, and mutton.

I love dipping them in CanBe's tamarind sauce. It's like tamarind chutney, but way more liquidy.

I decided to try their Chili Chicken today and bought two pieces of roti bread - one regular and one stuffed with egg.

 

The one at the very bottom of the picture above is the egg roti.

 

Close up of the amazing, delicious, delectable Chili Chicken curry. It was spicy, tart, sweet, delicious.



Biggest revelation of the night (and I'm going to amble off course here). After the hour and a quarter it took me to get home, I unpacked everything on my counter to take a look. Of course three rolls had already been demolished on my walk from CanBe to the bus stop (This is becoming a CanBe tradition for me...), so I put the other rolls and the tamarind sauce to the side to plate up my new treasures.

The egg roti bread in particular was calling my name so I broke that bad boy open to see the filling and here is what I found (hope you can see it properly, I'm not nearly as adept at photography as Karina, who did the photos for my hot pot entry):

Beautiful, delectable scrambled egg folks. I tried one bite and fell in love. It tasted just like the jian bing (煎餅) crepes I used to get for breakfast when I was teaching pre-schoolers in Suzhou, China. Basically, jian bing is Chinese streetfood. Vendors are on the street from the early hours of the morning until maybe 10am if you're lucky.

My local guy had a portable stove with a flame and a flat top. I would wander over to the little shopping street where the street food vendors used to gather in the mornings. The man poured the crepe batter on the flat top and swirled the batter to cover the surface with an implement that looked like a miniature version of a squeegee one might use to clean one's car windows. He would then crack an egg on top and scramble it around. He would flip it over very carefully and then paint the cooked side he had just turned up with hoisin, sprinkle with cilantro, green onion, and chili paste. He would then fold the whole thing up and put it in a thin plastic bag. You can see the whole procedure here.

Jian bing have always been one of the things I missed most about China, but have not been able to find in Canada. Man I loved those things. I'd eat them any chance I got. I remember one fateful train trip with my roommate Rosalind that we took to buy fabric and run errands in Shanghai. We were in such a rush to catch our train that I didn't have time to eat breakfast. I saw a jian bing vendor outside the station who was making hers with you tiao 油条, strips of deep fried dough that the Chinese love to eat for breakfast dipped in soy milk. I've never liked you tiao personally (too oily) and never ate them but I was so hungry, I just grabbed one from her - not noticing that she hadn't cooked the jian bing fresh as I was used to with my local guy. I could taste that there was something off about it and thankfully only ate half.

I was so, so sick on the train to Shanghai. I don't know if any of you have ever been sick in a toilet on a train in China or a country like it, but it was not fun or easy; especially given how hot it was. I was trying so hard not to fall into the squat face-first! We still tried to go to the fabric market (the old one, not the new fangled air-conditioned one now in place). Poor Rosalind. She was so worried about me. I kept running to the toilet to cast up my accounts. To add insult to injury, it was a pay toilet!!

Still feeling lousy and roasting in the heat, I knew I was not going to be ok to help Rosalind run her errands but they had to get done as we had come all the way to Shanghai. We were walking along the Bund (Shanghai's old European business centre, seen below)

and I begged Rosalind to leave me there on a side street in the shade to rest while she ran her errands. She reluctantly did and I leaned against a building to rest. Not long after she left me, a Chinese family happened upon me and pantomimed what I thought was asking if I would hold their baby. My Mandarin was not very good at the time, so I had no idea what they were talking about but smiled and nodded like a good, obliging Canadian girl should in these situations. They thrust their baby in my arms and started gathering around me, taking pictures with the poor, sick waiguren (foreigner). When Rosalind returned after they had left, we had a good laugh over this and - feeling much better and still loving jian bing - we wandered home to Suzhou.

So long story short, I've put the egg roti in the fridge to save for tomorrow's breakfast. Happy adventuring folks!

Michelle xoxo

Hot Pot Over Here, Hot Pot Over There!

Soundtrack: John Coltrane "Blue Train"

Sunday night, I got together with some dear friends and made my very first Chinese-style hot pot! Hot pot is like Japanese shabu-shabu whereby pre-prepped ingredients are dipped in soup and cooked. You can have different dips for when your items come out of the pot such as sesame oil, finely chopped garlic, chili oil...the list goes on. Each person has their own little bowl where they can make a dip to their taste. I've eaten hot pot in the past when I lived in China (including a memorable meal in Chongqing with two Korean girls I met at my hostel), but never made it myself. My friend Sylvia from choir and her husband hosted me and Chris - another choir friend - at their place. They have done hot pot a few times for company and wanted to try it again.(Her table only fit 6 so we're sorry we couldn't invite more!)

Chris, Sylvia, and I met up earlier in the day to go shopping at T&T Supermarket for all of our ingredients. We went a little bit mad and bought way more than we needed! I include for your perusal our final booty:

- baby bok choy
- king oyster mushrooms
- assorted fish balls
- beef balls
- soy bean sprouts
- watercress
- assorted dumplings
- white radish
- sliced beef rib-eye
- sliced fatty pork
- spring onion
- cinnamon head mushrooms
- chayote
- winter melon
- bean curd cubes
- dried cloud ear mushrooms
- lamb shoulder slices
- pork loin slices
- enoki mushrooms
- fresh ginger root
- lotus root
- Napa cabbage
- shiitake mushrooms
- snow pea greens
- beef tendons (I recommend getting the pre-cooked ones as ours never quite softened)
- calamari
- whole shrimp (which somehow disappeared once we got back to the house, never to be seen again)
- glass noodles (which never got used in the end, we were too full!)
- a cold cucumber and chili salad
- egg custard tarts

Plus, Sylvia had some homemade spring rolls a friend gave her. I also brought some beer from my trip to Niagara the day before (post in the pipeline) from a new brewery called Silversmith Brewing that was just perfect! It was their Bavarian Breakfast Wheat beer. Mmmmm... Then, we proceeded to prep it all.

Sylvia's husband graciously spun tunes and her daughter Karina took the amazing pictures you will see all throughout this post (Thanks hun!). As you can see above, the hot pot itself was essentially a wok on a single gas burner with a few slotted spoons on the side for fishing things out.

A few days earlier, I had sent Sylvia a recipe for the broth. Several members of our party can't have too much in the way of spicy food, so the recipe I sent her is not.

Hot Pot Broth

2 tbsp Shaoxing wine
3 quarts chicken stock (2 quarts initially and then one to keep topping up throughout the meal)
salt to taste

Right before serving, add

1 halved ripe tomato
the whites of two scallions chopped into 2 or 3 sections

Bring the broth to a boil, turn down the heat to a good simmer and start adding ingredients at your leisure. I've found it's best to add in the things that take longest to cook first, plus we added in bits of the slivered ginger to add flavour to the broth.

You can make up your own ingredient list based on what you like, but the above was just what we had. I'd say that between 5 of us, we only ate 1/3 of what we bought in the end. Fun night!!

Finding time for what is important in life - Friends!

Soundtrack: Blue Rodeo's cover of the Bee Gees' "To Love Somebody"


So I had yet another amazing meal at The Whippoorwill with my friend Christophe (one of these days I'll actually take pictures...). Amazing soul music all night, great service, drinks and food; as usual. I hadn't seen Christophe in months so our catch up dinner ended up lasting 3 hours!

I have to say that I've had to find ways not only to save money and calories, but also to ensure that I'm saving time so I can be with good friends like Christophe. One of the ways I deal with this is to make all my lunches for work ahead of time (usually on Saturday or Sunday) so I can just pull a Tupperware out of my fridge in the morning as I'm getting ready all week long.

One of the meals I made last week was a pork chop with simple, plain roasted veggies, which I present to you now.

Make-Ahead Pork Chops and Roasted Vegetables

Chop up any mixed veggies you like so they are all the same size and cook evenly so that you end up with 3 - 4 cups of veg. I love to do root vegetables like regular or sweet potatoes, carrots, beets, or parsnips. Plus sometimes I'll toss in chunks of red pepper, onion or entire peeled garlic cloves.

Vegetables:

Preheat oven to 400F. Toss vegetables in the oil and salt; put them on a sheet pan so they're in one even layer. Cook 45 - 60 minutes until they're fully cooked and browning nicely. Make sure to stir them two or three times during the cooking to brown evenly and so you can tell when they're done.

Pork Chops:

4 x 4 - 5oz pork chops (mine were fairly thin)
2 tbsp Original Diana sauce (or your favourite BBQ sauce)
salt
1 tbsp oil

Heat oil in pan on high heat. Coat chops with sauce and salt lightly. Sear pork chops in the very hot pan, 3 - 5 minutes each side. My chops were thin enough that I only needed a few minutes and didn't have to turn down the heat. If your chops are thicker, sear on both sides until they get a nice crust on them and then turn the heat down to medium until they aren't raw on the inside.

Voila! Lunch for the whole week for me!