Urban Vancouver

Saturday adventures, farmer's markets now open

By Boris Mann on June 11, 2006 - 3:06pm

Kate and I had a fun day this Saturday going around Vancouver and checking out a couple of different neighbourhoods. I'm sharing our adventure here with some pictures and links, inspired by Cathy's comment for more info about the East Van Farmer's Market.

Our adventures actually started the night before; we booked our CAN car on Friday evening, and had coffees at Kits Beach watching the sunset. Whenever it rains in Vancouver, I think of experiences like that.

The next day we started out with a slow and lazy Saturday morning. First stop was the East Van Farmer's Market. The picture at right shows the typical scene -- tons of people wandering around checking out the stalls, from crafts to baking to lots of good local produce. East 15th and Victoria Drive, at the Trout Lake Community Centre is where it takes place, 9:00 am to 2:00 pm Saturdays from May 20 to October 7, 2006. More info is at EatLocal.org, which despite the name only covers info about Vancouver. The Nelson Park market (Comox Street between Bute and Thurlow. 9:00 am to 2:00 pm Saturdays) opens next Friday.

Next stop was Havana (also on 43 Places) on Commercial Drive. Havana is a great restaurant where you can get Cuban-inspired food from breakfast to dinner. It also happens to have an art gallery and theatre space. Recommended: giant lattes, whatever the breakfast special is (served until 2pm), and smoked chipotle hot sauce on everything.

After breakfast, we didn't stick around the Drive (we wandered around a few weeks ago when visitors were in town) but stopped in at European Specialty Importers (I talked about it when I described the European Food Shopping Tour of Vancouver). Since we had our CAN car, we picked up a case of Gerolsteiner -- fancy German mineral water that Kate likes and is cheap if you buy it by the case -- then swung by our place to drop off purchases.

Then we dropped off the CAN car in the West End, walked down to the water and took the Granville Island Ferry across. I still haven't figured out the difference between those ferries and the Aquabus...other than the Aquabus takes bikes; competition is good, I guess! We bumped into the Antlers (aka Stewart and Jess, who go by rightantler and leftantler on Flickr) in the afternoon at Granville Island as we were buying fresh ingredients for dinner. And diving into the second coffee at the day....the JJ Bean in the Market on Granville Island always makes fantastic coffee.

Dinner was good, too. I used a Monsoon Coast curry mixture (Goan Vindaloo) and was inspired by a recipe I got from them when I bought it. It's not on the recipes page yet. My version had garlic, ginger, basil, brown sugar, white balsamic (didn't have any apple cider vinegar), olive oil, and tomato paste, and then I added bell peppers and zucchini. You can see the ingredients here on Flickr -- we were too hungry to take pictures of the finished product.

Hope you enjoyed the Saturday adventures description. What is your weekend adventure in Vancouver?

[Cross-posted from my personal blog]