2) It’s hardly a secret anymore, thanks to the Straight’s Best of Vancouver issue,, but Sweet Revenge on Main street is a lovely little room to eat dessert in. I had the pear bread pudding and would not recommend it (it was small, bland, and expensive), but my lovely bride had the zucotto, and it was a treat. We will go back.

Just, you know, not for the bread pudding.

Alas, it’s two great tastes that are wasted together. The dough was quite puffy; I think a crisper, thinner dough would have suited the Oreos better. Not recommended.

This thing is a beehive. It was even better than the mushroom exhibit, which I believe is one of the highlights of the PNE each year.

And it’s hardly new, nor a discovery, but the bizarrely overproduced Superdogs show is always a charmer, if only because beneath the deeply layered hype, noise, and lighting, you’ve got a bunch of dugs, and they’re both impressive and random. My favorite moment of the show was the Jack Russell Terrier that ran straight at a three-foot-tall turnaround barrel, violently knocked the barrel over with its face, and then ran back to the start as if this was how it did all its obstacle runs.

Feisty dogs, those terriers.

So, anyone here win the prize home? A few nice details aside, it seemed a fairly shabby effort, with lots of little corner-cutting misfeatures and fair bit of tasteless decorating. The kitchen in particular was an ergonomic disaster: what kind of idiot architect puts the fridge nearly 15 feet away from the sink and main prep counter? It was as if the designer had anti-learned every lesson of the Frankfurt Kitchen.

For my part, I remember that Sports Junkies had great, highly random sporting-goods deals. I especially loved their selection of bike junk, but their Boxing Day sales, in a world of overhyped sales, were the only ones I consistently attended, because if you wanted bike stuff, it was never going to cost any less. Over the years I bought bikes, frames, lights, tires…probably about 3 bikes worth of parts one transaction at a time.

Alas, the proprietor has moved out of town, and the owner of the Vancouver store doesn’t want to take on a new partner. So as of August 1st, and after one more blowout sale, they’re gone.

That’s probably not enough news to post here; I’m really posting it just for the photo of their closing-out sign.

Update: I, er, should have at least noted Jeffery’s July 14 post describing these melons in their natural environment.

My fairly good friend and local media personality Buzz Bishop had an interesting post regarding Urban Fare’s square watermelons, imported from Japan.

Buzz was seriously irked by the mere idea of an exotic melon from Japan, for various reasons, and his commentators took some specific umbrage at the potential carbon footprint of these transoceanic melons.

Now, I’m not defending the idea of square melons per se (they’re a novelty, and a pricey one, for sure) but I do like recycling, so I’ve reproduced my comment on the fuel required for shipping these things below.

Big carbon footprint? If they’re ship-shipped (which appears to be standard for all but the most delicate fresh produce) the carbon footprint per watermelon may be more for the trip from the warehouse in Richmond to the store than it is from Japan to Vancouver.

The secret is volume: the biggest container ships carry 7000 containers at a time, and note that a standard (2 TEU) container is 40′x8′x8′. So one container can carry, hm, let’s pretend a melon is 1 cubic foot, because that’s close and convenient.

So roughly 2400 [the nominal capacity of the container is 2385 cubic feet, plus a bit of space for refrigeration, so it's probably more like 2000-2300 melons; you can redo the calculations yourself -RjC] watermelons will fit in a container, which is something like 1/7000 of the container ship’s cargo capacity.

That ship would use about 350 metric tons of diesel fuel per day, and take about 15 days to make the Japan-Canada trip.

Yadda yadda, the melon on Phil’s desk consumed about 0.3 kg of diesel fuel on its trip from japan, which is about 0.35 litres of gas. How fuel-efficient is the car you drove to the grocery store, or to work for that matter?

Lessons to be learned: math is hard, but vital. Ships are more fuel-efficient than cars. Do not be deceived by your visceral sentiments.

What is in season now are the early berries like salmonberries, mild in flavor and not very sweet. But the real heyday starts with blackberries, which come into season somewhere between now and the end of August.

The fun thing about blackberries is that they grow everywhere and produce fruit like crazy. So grab a bucket and chances are you’re within 500 feet of a blackberry bush already. But I have a few hints about how to harvest them.

Keep in mind that the species you will almost certainly encounter is the non-native Himalayan blackberry (rubus discolor). Tasty fruit, came from Europe. You can tell it from the less common native Pacific blackberry (rubus ursinus) because the former has 5-leaf groups, and the latter 3-leaf groups. The Himalayan blackberry is a pest here, but that’s to your advantage: the other problem is that blackberry bushes are unpleasantly prickly. Solve the pestilent plant problem and the prickly plant problems with a hand pruner.

No, really: take a hand pruner with you, and cut the branches away as you pick. You’ll get more berries faster with fewer pricks, and you’ll be doing the ecosystem a solid by helping (however slightly) to reduce the spread of this alien invader.

Note that if you really want to wipe out a blackberry bush, you’ll have to use more desperate methods, which amount to either pesticides or completely mowing the canes and then digging up the roots. Apparently goats will eat blackberry bushes in preference to almost any other food, so if you have a herd of goats, kiss your blackberry problems goodbye.

Photo by Kris Krüg

It’s BC Superweek, the fastest 10 days in cycling. This weekend is the 3-day Tour de Delta, Next weekend is the 3-day Tour de White Rock, and in between are the legendary Tour de Gastown and the stylish Giro di Burnaby criteriums.
The riders involved are among the fastest on the continent, including past riders in the Tour de France like Chris Horner, and the racing action is brilliant. Drop by one of the events and have some fun.

If you want to watch for your humble servant for some reason, I’ll be driving in the support caravan at Delta and filming bits of Gastown for fun.

May 23-25 at BC Place Stadium. It’s a festival of food, and I really, really like food.

The reviews have been fast and furious since then, and so has the business. Along with some friends, we went there to try things out.

We had Tasting Menu A. I shall not review each dish, except to say that the meal started with a mango ravioli amuse-bouche, and ended with a red bean mousse as the dessert. The dishes in between ranged from perfectly-prepared straight takes on traditional dishes (salted chicken) to revelatory dishes (double boiled soup in young coconut) I had never imagined.

The service was trying hard, and had high-class moments (our server was very good about explaining each of the dishes, and I for one like that sort of thing), but on the other hand two different people at our table had drink-order problems. I was still happy. You’ll have to ask Ron and Ernie if they agree.

It’s not cheap, but it’s good enough that I will be back, and as often as I can justify the price. And I plan to come up with some pretty ludicrous justifications.

So I hope you took advantage of the ridiculously good weather on Saturday, followed by the merely pleasant Sunday.

And I’ll have no more complaints about the weather until it rains again, okay?