Porkin' Out on Vietnamese

At the end of April, Tom and I took a Vietnamese cooking class through Cookbook Co. Cooks. Tom and I love Vietnamese. We eat Vietnamese so often that I am only one step away from being on a first-name-basis with the staff at our local Vietnamese joint. In fact, if I had provided the staff with my name, I'm sure they would be using it.

The cooking class was run by a half Chinese, half Vietnamese woman, and her Vietnamese mother. They offered a variety of recipes, including Vietnamese crepes, sweet potato shrimp fritters, deep fried bananas, and our personal favorite, grilled pork meatballs on vermicelli noodles.

On Sunday night we had friends over for dinner, and impressed them with our Vietnamese prowess.

I firmly believe that the key to our dish is all in the dipping sauce. The dipping sauce is a concoction of water, sugar, fish sauce, lime juice, rice vinegar, garlic and red chilies. Tom and I like to add matchstick carrots. The take on a delicious spicy pickled flavour! The longer you leave the dipping sauce, the more infused the flavours become. It is tangy, spicy and savoury, all wrapped into one tantalizing liquid.

Dipping sauce.

Next, we roll up some meatballs, which are formed in golf ball sized spheres. The meatballs are made of pork, onion, green onion, a liberal amount of lemongrass and some dark soy sauce. In the cooking class, grilled the meatballs on the stove top, but we prefer to grill them on the BBQ.

Uncooked meatballs.

Tom covertly sneaking a meatball sample.

Then we boil up a large serving of vermicelli noodles. We followed the course instructor's advice and bought the "Gold Swallow" brand from the Lucky Supermarket. The noodles hold up very well when cooking, and have a chewy texture.

Bowl full-o'-noodles.

I made this ever-so-pleasing arrangement of fresh veggies, including matchstick carrots, chopped iceberg lettuce, bean sprouts, cilantro and cucumber. On the side is a helping of dipping sauce.

Dinner veggies.

And finally, once you take the meatballs of the BBQ, you immerse them all in the bowl of dipping sauce. The flavours are absolutely out of this world!

Finished meatballs.

To eat as a meal, you pile noodles, veggies and meatballs into your bowl, and dollop on a little dipping sauce. I guarantee, it will be one of the most delicious homemade meals you've ever had!

This weekend, Tom insisted on using four pounds of pork in the meatballs. So.. We have quite a few leftovers for many delicious meals to come.

Yum!

Waterton Getaway

 I like to think that my friends and I do an annual weekend getaway in Waterton, but this is not technically true. At some point I convinced myself that it had been two years since I'd visited Ashley's Mountain View cabin, about 10 minutes outside of Waterton National Park. However a quick investigation into my photo archives proved that it had actually been three years since my last cabin visit. I'm amazed by how quickly time has flown!

After a 2 hour and 15 minute drive from the city, we arrived at Ashley's doorstep under blue skies and warm sunshine. It was impossible not to appreciate the rolling landscape.

Then we were treated to our first source of entertainment-- Ashley's neighbours herding their cattle down the road in front of the property.

Over the next few hours, the rest of our friends trickled in, and we entertained ourselves with a rousing game of drinking Jenga. This lead to the coining of the term, "Billy'd." It seemed like no matter what, Billy would always choose the most difficult Jenga piece to extract. So if you pulled a piece that made the tower structurally unstable, you "Billy'd" it. The most epic ending to the game came when Ashley tried to remove a Jenga piece with her toes. She was so close!

The next day we piled into cars and drove to Waterton to check out the town and the lake. It was extremely windy (I cannot stress this enough), and we all got gravel blasted when we were on the ridge by the Prince of Wales Hotel. Here are a few of the highlights from our daytrip, enhanced by my excessive use of Instagram!!!

A mangy looking Bighorn sheep.

Mountain views.

Billy to the rescue!

Choppy looking lake.

Tom and Amanda vs. the WIND

Getting misted by the falls.

And we ended the trip with a little good ol' fashion man-hunting.

As I'm sure you can understand, after all the excitement, Tom and I were a little tuckered out. We took a nap on the couch while Billy nursed his wounds, and everyone else played some low key card games.

The last sights from our trip included some large bird nests on telephone pole platforms along the highway. We saw several of these nests along the way, but this one was by far the largest, and both birds were home. If you look closely, you can see that there is garbage and toilet paper hanging out of the nest. We are pretty sure these are Osprey nests.

Mom and dad are home.

We also spotted a secondary nest about 100m away from the very large nest above. The nest was smaller and had a lot of stuff hanging off of it, but there were two birds at home in it as well.

A slightly crappier nest.

I'll try to make sure it's not another three years between visits!

More on Vegas

The Venetian by night.

New York, New York + Rollercoaster.

We road the rollercoaster, and Jill almost got into a fight with a guy from Edmonton! True story!

Jill and Mallary dancing it out at Senor Frog's.

Dinner at Bobby Flay's Mesa Grill.

I'm pretty sure Paige is wearing my glasses. I don't look pleased about it.

Venetian Gondola.

Waterfall in front of Wynn.

We all look like giants.

One of the many inappropriate pairs of shoes we saw on the strip.

 Riding the tram back to Treasure Island.

Jill vs. the mechanical bull. Mechanical bull wins.