I’ve been incredibly fortunate to a) have family in the beautiful city of Vancouver, Canada, and b) have the opportunity to visit them regularly.

As a kid I never found it odd that so much amazing Cantonese food was always available over there. As I grew older and learned more about the world, I definitely appreciated it. And now, as an adult, I actually have the nerve to get bored of days upon days of Cantonese feasting, and we’ve started to sneak out and avail ourselves of Vancouver’s other culinary delights.

Top and bottom left: a sample of the aforementioned Cantonese feasting, a lunchtime collection of everyone’s impulse orders at Old Buddies Seafood Restaurant (for dessert, a triple order of adorable steamed “Birthday Rabbit Buns”). Top right, a collection of Beard Papa cream puffs. Middle right, hot dogs and bags of fries from Japadog (and may I heartily recommend the Terimayo dog with the butter-and-shoyu fries? K preferred the shichimi-garlic fries but we sometimes disagree). And at the bottom right, a delicious selection of tacos from La Taqueria Pinche. The best ones in my opinion were the braised beef cheeks (for meat) and the refried beans (for veggie).

Man, I want to go back already.

(Fun footnote: our two-year-old was so enamored of the jellyfish entree at Old Buddies that it was almost all he ate for lunch. The next day, upon seeing the jellyfish tank at the aquarium, he exclaimed, “Yummy! I eat!” Fortunately there was enough ambient noise that he went mostly unheard.)

Sure, it’s 20 degrees outside, but who wouldn’t want to curl up with a nice frosty cold popsicle?

Last week we went to Canada, to visit some family in Vancouver. Vancouver’s winters are pretty mild, but you still have to bundle up to go outside, and I think everyone was a little taken aback when my aunt said that she would bring over some holiday popsicles.

Turns out the holiday popsicles were from Nice Pops, a small business in Vancouver that sells popsicles out of a bicycle trailer in the summer, and makes popsicles to order in the winter. The flavors we tried were:

eggnog and rum caramel
poached pear and mulled wine
spiced cranberry-apple cider

They were really good. It was a little weird to have popsicles in the middle of winter, but the flavors definitely made them feel like part of the holiday, and the popsicles themselves were spectacular. The eggnog popsicle was my favorite, with a creamy rich texture and tasty rum caramel flavor. I also liked the tartness of the cider popsicle, and the pear/wine popsicle tasted wonderfully complex and sophisticated. I was impressed by the Nice Pops owners; it takes some guts to decide to sell popsicles in the deep of winter.

Sadly, Nice Pops is a very local joint, only delivering around Vancouver. When we got back home, I started wondering if there were any artisan popsicle joints around, or if I’d have to get into popsicle making myself this summer. A quick search popped up this post from CityEats DC, featuring Pleasant Pops Farmhouse Market and Cafe. Apparently they sell “seasonally accented popsicles” along with other locally sourced foodstuffs. I’ll have to check them out next time I visit DC. Hopefully the trend will reach Howard County by summer.

I spent the last week and a half traveling, so I missed the first week of the CSA. Sorry, folks. We split our share with another couple, so they took care of the CSA last week. I forgot to ask them to take a picture. From what I hear, though, the pickup involved mostly root vegetables and a metric ton of lettuce greens. When we got back, they were able to give us some potatoes, radishes, beets, and chard — I’m thinking of roasting the potatoes, pickling the radishes and beets, and trying Farmgirl Susan’s recipe for Tuna Salad with Swiss Chard. I’ll let you guys know how it goes.

But let me tell you about the food I encountered on my travels, because some things are just too good not to share. This is a week and a half of pent-up food blogging, so brace yourselves; this is going to get long…

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