Night at the Orpheum

As a Valentine's Day present, I got two tickets for a VSO Russian violin concert. It's been close to a year since we were last here. I was lucky to get two free VSO concert tickets at work last year and we came here for the first time. We enjoyed the architecture of the building and the excellence performance by the VSO. I figured it would be a treat for us to come back here. The place hadn't changed at all, still buzzing with activities. The pieces played during the concert was a bit too serious for my taste and apparently too boring for the guy in front of me because he fell asleep half way through. My favorite piece was the music from the Nutcracker dedicated to the famous ballerina that passed away recently. We took some pictures before the concert and during intermission. You don't have to worry about our greyish blue skin color, we are both healthy. The color came from the LED flash light on Bernard's cellphone camera.

This was me in the hall just outside the dress circle.


The huge old fashion chandelier from the ceiling




The orchestra getting ready just before the performance. There was supposedly to be a prelude concert an hour before the actual concert but was canceled. I felt jibbed :(



Bernard normally prefers to be behind camera but I convinced him to be in front of the camera for a change.

Chinese New Year Gathering

It was a quiet Chinese New Year. We just had a simple potluck with Bernard's family at his mom's place. I made bobochacha and stirred fried asparagus and prawns. The bobochacha didn't turn out as great as I like because I put too much tapioca and it was still pretty decent. I hope I can make it even better next time.

Here are some candid shots from the gathering ...


Catherine and Norm relaxing over some wine after the big meal.



Agnes and Glen still eating while Bernard moved onto the taro snacks.


Bernard finally noticed the camera and gave a satisified smile after securing a big chunk of taro snack.

Agnes and Glen still eating. Glen looked up confused from his plate of food. But Agnes was quick to react and gave a photogenic smile. Does it look like Glen is using Agnes' head as a table?




Bernard's mom was busy washing something in the kitchen ... feel kind of bad.



We forgot to take a group picture so this is the closest thing we have to a group picture.

Our stuffed kalamari creation

We love the stuffed kalarmari at this Greek restaurant and I decided to try making our own. I found a lot of different recipes but most of them don't resemble the ones we tried at the restaurant. I finally found one (from Good Eats) that seems pretty close and decided to try it one Sunday night. Bernard got quite excited as well as he also loves the squid dish. We made a mixture of bread crumbs, tomato sauce and prawns as the filling and stuffed the mixtures into small squids.

The following is a picture of what I envision the end product will look like


and this is a pictures of how our squids actually looked like after we took them out from the oven ...


OK, so our squids looked more like dog poo than squids but surprisingly, this mess actually tasted pretty good, just like the squids we had at the restaurant! The main problem was that we underestimated how much the stuffing would expand and how much the squids would shrink - to less than half their original size. So the stuffing spilled all over the place and the squids pretty much disappeared after baking.

Here's a pictures of how small the squids were after they were baked


S0 I am no Iron Chef but I think we are pretty close to getting this dish right. Just have to get bigger squids and don't get too greedy with the stuffing next time :)