Favorite Vancouver Haunts

Straight from the airport, we stopped by Church's chicken for a quick meal. This has become sort of a tradition because the children are nuts about Church's fried chicken. They opened a branch at the Mall of Asia but friends who have tried it claim that the taste doesn't come close to the original, which is right here. It is great fried chicken--flaky and crunchy on the outside, moist and tender inside!

The next day, we had dinner at Tsunami, a Japanese restaurant along Vancouver's most popular street, Robson--a lengthy stretch of road lined by commercial establishments (prime real estate), frequented by pedestrian shoppers. This is where tourists go to have a feel of Vancouver's pulse.

Tsunami serves sushi on boats linked together and floating on a roundabout canal built into the bar area. Of course the children are fascinated by this but the food is exceptional as well. My favorite is the seaweed salad and the spinach roll topped with a sesame, peanut butter sauce--simply divine!

I was also able to stop by Costco (every traveling Filipino's must-do) and I picked up another favorite: a huge slab of salmon fillet. Because of the cold waters of the pacific, salmon flesh here is transparent, vibrant orangey-pink, and perfectly marbled with fat. Ours at home is grayish and opaque--I feel so deprived.

My chef instructor told the culinary class long ago that Scottish salmon is the best in the world. But if one has to settle for something less, let it be Atlantic salmon, never Pacific salmon. Yeah, whatevaaah! As long as it tastes good, doesn't matter where it came from.

Anyway, I thought cooking such a gorgeous piece of fish would be sacrilege so I cut it up for sashimi and the children devoured it in minutes. It was melt-in-the mouth tender, creamy in texture and just saturated with flavor.

The next day, we trooped to my mother ship, Whole Foods to pick up a box of Pippi's obsession--the organic blueberry pie! She had waited a whole year for it and wasn't willing to wait another day longer. The blueberries popped in the mouth when we bit on them--that's how fresh they were. It felt like something you would take home from a state fair. She's blueberry happy now.