Blueberry Custard Pie with Ginger Nut Crumb Crust

I think I’ve probably mentioned at some point or other that while I like to cook (a lot!), the one kind of food that I rarely make is dessert. It’s a combination of several reasons; I don’t have a particular sweet tooth, and in fact, usually crave salty, crunchy things (My weakness is crunchy, salty, melted cheesy things, like nachos, pizza or raclette). In a fine restaurant, you’ll often see me ordering the cheese plate for dessert. I also don’t have a lot of faith in my ability to get the exact measurements that cake baking requires (I tend to work on estimates, a dash of this, a splash of that, a handful of the other…). Finally, my mother admitted that she could never bake a pie. For all of us in our family, pie-making was a black art, a skill that my mother had never been able to gain, being a European immigrant from a place where they made strudel, tortes and palatschinken, but rarely tarts and never pies. Since I learned most of my early cooking from her, I also lacked the ability to make a pie.
So tonight, at the end of the summer, I decided that instead of the usual way that I’ve been dealing with the abundance blueberries this summer, due to the area’s bumper crop, I would throw together a little original dessert creation, which I’m going to call: Blueberry Custard Pie with Ginger Nut Crumb Crust. It’s dead easy, and if you also have some of those blueberries (or strawberries, bananas or other fruit that goes well with custard), this might be a good way to use them.

Blueberry Custard Pie with Ginger Nut Crumb Crust

For the crust:
1 package/roll of McVitie’s Ginger Nuts (their version of Ginger Snaps)
3 tablespoons unsalted butter, chilled and cut into small pieces

For the filling:
3 tablespoons Bird’s Custard Powder
3 tablespoons sugar
1/2 cup milk
1/2 cup water
2 cups fresh blueberries

Instructions:
Preheat the oven to 350° . Crush the cookies in a food processor (or put them in a bag and hit them with hammer, if you haven’t got one).  After most of the bigger pieces have gotten broken down (about 10-12 pulses), add the butter, and process for another 15 seconds or so. Butter a pie plate and dump the crumbs onto it. Press it down on all sides so that it’s even. Bake in the oven for about 15-20 minutes, but be careful not to burn the crumbs.Let cool.

Make the custard: Put sugar and custard mix in a pan, and slowly wisk in milk and water. Bring to a full boil while stirring nearly continuously (custard will thicken as you cook it. This is essentially the recipe from the side of the can.). Let cool, covered, to just over room temperature.

Pour the custard over the crust, and top with the fruit. Serve after chilled. Resist the urge to eat it right away or the custard won’t let you cut nice neat slices. Which may or may not matter to you.

The Finished (and partially devoured) Pie

This is about as homely and ready-made as I ever get (Custard from a mix!? Cookie crumb crust!?) and has a 1950s-English-household feel to it (not surprising, given that 2 of the ingredients in it are British). However, I have to admit that it does taste awfully good, since the molasses and butter in the crust taste a bit like toffee, and the custard and blueberries go well together. While I don’t plan on making it for company, it is probably going to show up on the dinner table next summer, especially if we are getting as good a blueberry crop as this year’s.

Cold Season and Another Try with FontKit

I haven’t had a cold in quite a while, so the one I have now feels particularly annoying. It’s not as if I’ve forgotten what a cold is like, but I think you can get used to them, when you get them more often (and I’m sure I did suffer from frequent colds- nearly every few months or so when we lived in Boston). It’s a rainy day, and this is Cold: Day 2 ( which means, runny nose, sneezes and a little less energy), Cold: Day 2 is always easier for me than Cold: Day 1 (sore throat, runny nose, feeling like crap). Hopefully, this cold will progress at the usual rate, or maybe even faster.

It’s Labour Day weekend, and although I do have a contract I’m working on, I do have the luxury of not having to work very much this 3-day weekend. This holiday falls on the last weekend of summer and ushers in School, Work, and general ‘Lets-Get-Down-To-It’ sort of things that we associate with the Fall season. We’ve had a spectacularly sunny summer, and it really was extraordinary, with months and months of sunshine, sunshine and more sunshine. That was unfortunate for those people who had to deal with wildfires to the East of us, but for those of us in the city or near the water, July and August have been a rarely interrupted succession of one beautiful day after another. Does this mean we are in for some weather comeuppance?  Will we see a January and February monsoon, or worse, lots of snow, like last year? Time will tell, I suppose. What I can say for sure is that for the first time in ages, the rain that we have (and there has been a little of it), is falling on a weekend. Rainy weekends hold their own charm for me; you don’t have to feel guilty about indoor pursuits like movies, TV, blogging, listening to iTunes or even cleaning up the place. I’m not missing any precious hours of vitamin D harvest, and it can be nice to be cozy, wrapped in a blanket, snoozing through some of those sniffles.

The end of the Summer really began a couple of weeks ago when Pam and I once again went to the PNE, which is in its last weekend right now. While we missed Dal Richards, (Canada’s answer to Guy Lombardo and Glen Miller and a living legend, still performing well into his 90′s), we did make it to see many of the animals (and on Opening Day, there are many of them):

The Opening Day crowds, brought out by the perfect weather were large:

We chatted with an old friend at the Home Improvement Pavilion, ate some of those famous little donuts:

and Pam got a bargain of 4 ears of roasted corn for the price of 1 (the line was so long, they were getting behind and she got a plate of not-quite-good-enough-for-1-serving ears):

We also went to the ‘Marketplace’ where you see all of those demonstrations of everything from Shammies to Blenders and ended up getting a Smart Living Steam Mop. We’ve since put it through it’s paces on our carpets, wood and tile at home and while it does not perform miracles, it does work pretty well, and we hope it will help us keep the place a little cleaner. We still do need new carpet, but that will hopefully come in the next few months or so.

So, with the season now clearly coming to an end, it’s time to return my attention back to this blog, which I’ve been giving a bit less attention this summer. With that, I’m trying to once again look at the new Font technology that will be coming soon to a web page on your screen…

Squishy Fonts?

I’ve tried some different Typekit fonts, and it seems as if the body text is always looking a bit squished. I’m convinced it’s not the fonts themselves, but the metrics I’ve specified on the original Georgia font (which is what older browsers see when they view my pages). I’ll keep at it, but for reference, here are the fonts as they appear on the TypeKit Editor page:

As you can see, the new font, Luxi (Sans and Serif) are not supposed to be that squishy, so I’ll have to work on the original CSS (and do so without ruining the look of the page for older browsers. Backward compatibility without messing up the new fonts is going to be one of the challenges for us using these new fonts, I guess.

Helen Back (As In, I’ve Been To)

I’m a little bleary-eyed, but I am here, awake, and still able to blog. I believe that I’ve exorcized all of the demons (or daemons for the UNIX folks out there) that were putting in the SPAM in my posts and RSS feeds. I did locate code in my xmlrpc.php file that had a graphic of a spider (in ascii – how old school!) and then a bunch of what looked like Russian. It had everything but ‘From Russia with Love‘ in it. I didn’t keep it around long enough to figure exactly what it was doing, but after several tries at cleaning out, I inevitably had to blow away my WordPress install and reinstall from fresh files. After all of that, reinstalling and reconfiguring plugins, re-entering and updating passwords, and pinging servers,  I finally appear to be back in business, and most of what I had is back (save a few plugins and other niceties).

So, by way of a test, here’s a video I took with the Flip Camera of our second visit to the Night Market in Richmond last night. This evening I had Bánh mì (the incomparable Vietnamese sandwiches of ham, paté and crisp vegetables on crunchy French style baguettes) and Taiwanese deep-fried squid which was absolutely fantastic. Pam had a Green Papaya Salad with shredded beef jerky and a piping hot waffle filled with red bean paste. Too bad the video can’t be smelled or tasted.

This is also a first attempt at using the quick and dirty FlipShare software to make a movie from my short clips, and despite the rather ugly opening titles, I think it actually does a pretty good job.  It’s certainly faster than iMovie, but then again, I didn’t do much but trim a few of the clips. Let’s hear it for raw video, free of spam!

Summer in the City

It’s been a while since I’ve written anything, mainly because I always feel the need to take a little time off in the summer, particularly since this summer weather has been so spectacularly good. True, it has been a little warm, and even on some days, downright hot. Still, that hasn’t kept us from getting out and enjoying the city, visiting with friends, taking long walks along False Creek, and even a few outings with the car.

An Intimate Evening with Hummingbird604 and Some Exotic Potent Potables

It was one of those hot nights in Downtown Vancouver when we went out one of the evenings a couple of weeks ago. Rather than try and escape the heat (as any sane person would do), we embraced it. We climbed the staircase to the third floor of The Network Hub, one of the shared office space and social incubators in town on West Hastings and Richards, a couple of blocks away from Waterfront Station. Hummingbird604 (AKA Raul to those who know him), hosted a small group of friends and bloggers to try out some interesting new beverages from China. When we arrived, we were greeted by Christy Nguyen and Minna Van of Urbanbella Marketing Group. To go with the liquids, they had already begun to put out some Chinese food (which was helpful to see how the liquids might go with different dishes).

The 15 or so of us dug in and chatted as we were trying to keep cool. I was happy to see plenty of friends, including Gus (and Russ), Tanya (with her new fiancé, Barry), Degan, Erica and John.

So what were we trying? There were three different items. First, there was a red wine, a saki (or rice wine) and a whiskey, which we could try straight up as well as a mixer in a sort of lemonade (which was perfect for a hot night). I opted immediately for the most unusual (at least for me) thing to try first: the whiskey, straight up from a shot glass. This is not because I wanted to get drunk fast, but because I tend to be a bit of a purist when it comes to liquor, and love Single-malt Scotch. I was also intrigued, because this whiskey , called Chu Yeh Ching Chiew, was, as an accompanying information card put it:

…a special ancient liquor made from traditional Chinese herbal recipe. It has (a) transparent golden and slightly green colour, and intense floral herbal aromas of dried apricot. It’s off dry with a hint of anise and packs a lengthy finish.

What this information does not include (and which the name and pictures on the bottle do), is that this is alcohol fermented from bamboo shoots. I tried it and was impressed. To me, it had the strength of an Irish Whiskey, but the finish was exotic; with a bit of ginseng, and perhaps another spice. Here’s what the bottle looked like:

Here’s my own photo of the bottle:

The company who provided it is Hi-Bridge Consulting, although as I mentioned, Urban Bella was the Public Relations firm who arranged for the tasting. I have to say that this product, with some repackaging, and perhaps a new, English name, could do extremely well. They also offered it in a lemonade mixer, which wasn’t as interesting (but did prove that it could be a fine mixer), but I have to say that straight up, it is a very impressive drink. I propose that they call it, Bamboo Mist, and put it in a distinctive, frosted bottle with bamboo brush style lettering on the label (and keep the bamboo leaf art as well). Market it to upscale liquor stores and put it in the section that has other drinks strongly associated with a country (like Jameson Whiskey, Aquavit, Midori or perhaps Sabra). I realize that some of those are liqueurs, but hopefully you can see where I’m going with this. In addition, there’s the whole sustainability angle, since bamboo is one of the world’s most sustainable natural resources (it grows in a variety of places like a weed). Many people in North America have floors and furniture made of bamboo. It makes excellent cutting boards. If you don’t use a lot of nasty chemicals, it also can produce wonderful, earth-friendly and silky fabric. One of my all-time-favourite T-shirts is a long-sleeved greenish cocoa one that feels an awful lot like silk. It is also washable and wicks perspiration well. To have a whisky from the same material seems a natural for a marketing campaign that not only plays off the exotic sound of liquor from ancient Chinese bamboo groves, but also of a whisky that ecology-minded folks can love as well. Are you listening, Hi-Bridge?

There was also a less impressive Sake (Sake from China? Well, OK) which did have a strange, thick, almost chocolate taste and consistency, and an extremely undistinguished Cabernet Sauvignon (sorry), but the Chu Yeh Ching Chiew (although the name doesn’t exactly trip off the tongue for those who don’t speak Chinese) made the evening, which in addition to friends, imbibing and talk, also included some appropriate Chinese food to nibble on.

Another Evening

As I mentioned, Pam and I have been taking lots of walks after dinner (mainly to walk off the meal – we have been eating so well lately!) One time we actually drove somewhere, however, was a trip down to Richmond for the famous Night Market. It’s an open air market in an industrial park, far from everywhere, but you feel as if you’ve gone further. Besides the booths of everything from socks from Korea and iPod/iPhone accessories from China, there are the food booths. Oh. My. I really do love street food, and this was no exception. In addition to some fantastic squid, cooked up on the flames right in front of us:

I also got a ridiculously fun (and silly) spiral of a fried potato, drizzled with a hot and sweet chili sauce. Truly a wonderful blend of ‘carny’ food and Thai-style spices. As you can see, I was grinning like a kid. I think I’m really getting psyched for our trip to Southeast Asia that we’re just starting to plan for next year:

A Summer Full of People

Up until recently, many of the photos I’ve been taking this past couple of months have been of nature; flowers, birds, the forest, etc.

Then, Vancouver went all gregarious on us. The fact is, when the days are as beautiful and comfortable as they have been, you just have to get out, and everybody else has the same idea. So this month has been a series of festivals, meetups, tweetups (think impromptu get-together flash-mob via web messaging), BBQs and general get-togethers.

A couple of weeks ago was Car-Free Vancouver day, in which several sections of the city blocked off areas to automobile traffic and vendors (and others) set up booths. Pam and I went up and down a large section of Main Street, but didn’t get to the other streets that were participating, including Commercial Drive (where the movement started) and a large swath of Denman. We saw everything from Tai Chi:

to crowds and balloons nearly as far as the eye could see:

Then, this past weekend, it was the Greek festival, which took over a stretch of Broadway to the east of us. It was an enormous crowd, and Pam and I chowed down on Souvlaki…

…and Baklava (Pam opted for a lemon pound-cake with almonds called Samali, after a Ugandan friend she has of the same name). I learned that my name in Greek is NTABINT (although phonetically it’s spelled ∆ABI∆ ). We also realized that this section of the city was full of great little Greek restaurants and delis, so now we know where to get the best pita and treats like Kourabiethes (sugar cookies), Kataifi (Baklava with shredded dough) and the nearly unpronounceable but delicious Galaktoboureko Rolla (Phyllo stuffed with custard).

Last night was the Meetup of all Meetups at the Ceilis Irish Pub downtown. A combination of the Third Tuesday Meetup, The Vancouver Sales Performance Meetup, Vancouver Blogger’s Meetup, Real Estate Technology Meetup, Young Professionals Meetup, WordPress Meetup and the Vancouver Entrepreneur Meetup Group all made for a huge crowd on the rooftop:

I was glad to see a lot of friends and fellow Vancouver bloggers there, including Raul, Tanya, Monica and Shane:

One fun part of this meetup was that there were door prizes, and by pure luck, I won one! Digital Smart Homes provided a Kanto Zed iPod Speaker system, and I’m having fun unboxing it today! Thanks, guys!

See, it wasn’t just a month of flowers, birds and trees…