Heritage (Foods) Festival

On Sunday afternoon, Ryan and I went to the festival that I have the fondest memories of from last summer. The Heritage Festival takes place over the Heritage Day long weekend in Hawrelak Park. It's highlight is the over 40 tents from different ethnic groups serving the foods of their culture.

That's a lot of food, obviously, which is bought with a ticket system. Especially later in the day, there were long lines for both food tickets and much of the food. The array of foods was staggering and we were only able to sample a tiny fraction of what was on offer. Of course there a some foods I'd rather avoid at the festival like Chinese ginger beef or Italian penne with tomato sauce as these either lack authenticity and/or are boring dishes. Their availability makes me wonder a little about the authenticity and quality of some of the food, but it's a seriously fun time.

Here's a rundown of what we ate:

-Ryan got a Kyikyinga spicy marinated beef skewer from the Ghana Site. We didn't deem it photogenic but he seemed to think it was tasty although one bit may have been too tough to chew.

-My first pick of the day was Maatjes Haring, a salted herring and onion sandwich from the Dutch Site. The fish was very salty, tender, and cool in temperature. It went well with the onions, but I opted not to eat the entire hot dog bun it was served on. It did not disappoint and is pretty exotic looking, more so than the Patat Frites (French fries) they were also serving. -Ryan looked forward all year to the Meat Pie from the Turkey Site. From this shot right down the hole it seems to contain ground beef, onions, parsley, and spices in a tortilla. I tried a little last year and it was good. Take a good look right in it's cavity:

-Next we hit up the Korea Site, which was a bit of a mistake at least in my opinion. I'd heard so much about Korean style pancakes, especially the seafood ones. The vegetable pancake I got was not so good though. I ate it, but it seemed like an ordinary pancake with green onion and bean sprouts mixed in. It was served with soy sauce and seemed a touch undercooked in the centre. Overall, this is the one think I kind of wish I didn't get. Ryan got the bean sprout salad, which looks like the one you get at any Korean restaurant with your kimchi. He ate it but didn't say much.
-We then headed to the Caribbean Site, which seemed to be mainly Jamaican. I had been unable to obtain Curried Goat last year because they ran out. So, this is what I'd been waiting for all year:It wasn't quite as I expected, since curries are usually saucy. But it was really good with tender chunks of mildly to moderately spicy curry flavoured goat on the bone. It came with white rice. I enjoyed the goat but found it to lack any distinct or gamy goat flavour. Last year the highlight of the Caribbean Site for me was the Jerk Pork, which I encouraged Ryan to try. This is it:It's better than Jerk Chicken because it's meatier and the chicken has too much skin. (Last year I was actually served a chicken back, which had very little meat.) Last year I found the Jerk Pork insanely spicy, but Ryan didn't comment about intense spicing although he got a snow cone afterwards.

-The Eritrea Site was next and Ryan got the Alicha, which is mixed vegetables with injera. Injera is the distinctive flat bread with kind of a sourdough flavour used as a utensil in Ethiopian and evidently Eritrean cuisine. The bread was okay, but the vegetables were disappointing. It's yellowish so I thought it might be curry flavoured. But, really it's just bland, mild vegetables like carrot and cabbage tasting mainly of cooked cabbage. Ryan got this and we both didn't want to finish it. Perhaps a spicy or meaty dish would have been better.
-I have been curious about green papaya salad for a while now, so we went to the Lao Site so I could get some. I have to admit it wasn't quite as I expected, not that I really knew what to expect. It consisted of slender strips of green papaya, carrot, and tomato in a sauce. The dominant flavour of the sauce was insanely spicy. It started a fire in my mouth, which I did not expect. Despite that I ate the whole bowl 'cause I'm all for the endorphin rush of spicy food pain. I think it was also a bit salty and probably contained fish sauce.
-Ryan wanted a giant mango on at stick or "Mango Loco" so we went to the Guatemala Site and he waited about half an hour for it. I wandered around a bit, while he waited. The mango was sprinkled with lime juice and "spicy" spices, perhaps chili powder. It was very juicy and made a mess. I assume it was pleasantly sweet as well.
-With my last ticket, I elected to grab Bara Brith at the Welsh site because it was one ticket and there wasn't a line up like there was for the Pakistan Site's Jaleeb. The Bara Brith was a buttery cake with dried and candied fruits. It was tasty as all buttery cakes are, although I think if you don't like dried and candied fruits it would be something to avoid. For me, it was a good dessert to end the festival.
Heritage festival also includes cultural performances and souvenir type sales. This year, I got chopsticks at the Hong Kong tent. I'm so glad I have some now. Is it really pathetic that I didn't before?

Rice and Not So Rice

I've been meaning to write for a while about one of my favourite quick dinner fixes. It has seriously become a fixture on my menu, so much so that I've stopped photographing its every incarnation. I've been making "fried rice" as I think of it. By no means do I claim that it's "authentic." It's not even always rice. That's a sacrilege if ever there was one. Basically, I've taken to tossing cold, cooked grains in with my stir fries at the end and mixing it with soy sauce, seasoned rice wine vinegar, sambal oelek, and/or oyster sauce. The other ingredients are pretty much what's on hand although onion, garlic, and ginger make and appearance pretty much every time.

I often cook grains the night before. It's important that they be cooked and cooled or it can get. . . soggy, I'd say.

I'm going to describe, to the best of my recollection what's in each photo:
This may be my original not-rice "fried rice." It's pot barley with tofu, green onions, celery, carrot, onion, and Anaheim chili pepper.

This one is millet, which Heidi Swanson recommends for making "fried rice" in her cookbook Super Natural Cooking. I don't pay attention to that recipe though, aside from using millet in this way. It also has chard, onion, parsnip, and some white meat that's either chicken or pork. I really like parsnip for it's unique flavour. I think stir frying it made it taste sweet too. It was good.
This is the first rice "fried rice." It also contains some beautiful summer squash from the garden, onion, and pork I believe. This one was really good because of the rice, which makes for a stickier and more richly carbalicious creation. It reminded me that I really like rice, it might be love.
This is some fried millet that I used as a bed for some salmon marinated in soy sauce. There's chard, summer squash, and onion in the millet. I remember I used to much sambal oelek chili sauce in this one. I could eat it, but it was a bit much with the salmon.
This was an excellent fried rice creation. I used lost of stuff from the garden like green and yellow beans, snow peas, and half of a green chili pepper. There's also onion, garlic, and ginger of course. The pepper was very hot, luckily I tasted it and discovered that after Travis told me it was sweet. Actually, it was super fiery. So, I used half of it and didn't add any chili sauce. Thus, it provided the perfect level of spice. This fried rice was mixed with a raw egg near the end of cooking, which is what we did when Albert and me made fried rice at his parents' house. There's nothing quite like egg as sauce, and don't worry the egg got cooked. If you've never tried mixing an egg with something to enrich the "sauce" try it with noodles or rice or anything. I also quite like eggs in case you can't tell.

And now. . .

One final dish incidentally with rice and eggs. But, I didn't make it. I had my first (hot stone) bowl of bibimbap at Ga Ya Korean Restaurant, which is a tiny restaurant near the university on 87th Avenue. It was a black stone bowl of rice topped with sections of fine strips of carrot, cucumber, ground meat, and a fried egg in the centre. There might have been other veggies I didn't identify. The egg was topped with the loveliest strips of dried seaweed waving in the convection currents off the hot food. It was beautiful and I wished I had a camera. Mixed with copious amounts of gochujang Korean hot sauce, it was a meal quite to my taste as I love a good hot sauce and I may be falling for rice especially sticky Korean rice. I also enjoyed the salty, mild bean sprouts and spicy, pungent kimchi that came with my meal.

The ZenKimchi Korean Food Journal had some good descriptions of bibimbap, if you're curious what it's all about. I guess I had the dolsot bibimbap, although the egg didn't begin raw. That would be cool to me, better than a fried egg with an essentially solid yolk, which is what I got. But, maybe a raw egg on hot food would violate some kind of health rules. I'm intrigued by Korean food. I may go back and try some other dishes. The ones I saw were all appealingly red with hot sauce.

Mmmm. . . Korean. . . Good Times at The Bul Go Gi House

My parents are here and everyone knows what that means. . . free restaurant meals. It's been about a year since my last visit to the Bul Go Gi House and I've been craving some more Korean food. Why? Probably because I get to wanting a little bit of all foods, plus there was the memory of a delicious spicy pork dish. A delicious spicy pork dish that led me to a massive pig out on pig last summer. Bul Go Gi House serves more or less family-style platters of meat dishes of the sort that would be expected to be shared by several people. Somehow, I ended up eating the vast majority of a platter of their Doah-Ji-Bul-Go-Gi last summer, which the menu translates as marinated spicy pork with vegetables. Now, why would I eat a whole platter of one meat? I discovered the answer today. It's not surprising. It's because that stuff is amazing. The pork is extremely tender and the sauce is a masterful blend of spicy, sweet, and tart. My parents agreed that it was really tasty and it was the only dish we finished. So try it, even if you doe enjoy it too much and need a long wander down Whyte Ave. to digest it.

Maybe I should backtrack to the beginning of the meal, but that pork was so good it snuck to the start of my post. The meal began with a round of Hite Korean beer followed closely by sticky rice, kimchi*, and bean sprout salad. The Hite was not my favourite kind of beer, it was a little too light and "American." My father noted that even the bottle seems American since it is shaped like a Miller bottle. Nevertheless, after two weeks without a beer for finals, I enjoyed it and thought it went alright with the food. I like the way the side dishes of kimchi and bean sprout salad come out early with the rice. These things make tasty appetizers and give you a little something to eat before the tasty dishes to come. I guess the big mistake you could make is to really fill up one rice. I think it would be tough to eat too much of the other two.

I've noticed that the order they bring out dishes is pretty random, but that's okay when everyone is sharing. Possibly it is the order in which the dishes are ready. First out in our order was Jap-Chae, which the menu describes as "fried, soft clear noodles with black mushrooms and vegetables." This is pretty accurate, if fried is interpreted as stir fried. This was by far our mildest dish, which I expected. In the sauce, the dominant flavour was soy sauce, I think. The vegetables included broccoli, carrots, black mushrooms, and possibly some others I don't recall (alcohol was served). The noodles were good. I sometimes cook Korean sweet potato starch noodles at home in ways that Albert thinks are inappropriate. The texture and character of my creations is similar to what we were served. The difference was mainly the sauce and the fact that I rarely if ever stir fry broccoli and usually include some meat or tofu. My mom was pretty impressed by the black mushrooms, which are tasty and chewy and mushroomy. I think my dad thought they were just okay.

The final dish to appear at our table was O-Jing-Uh-Bock-Kum, fried squid and vegetables. It was stir-fried in a tasty spicy sauce and the vegetables included broccoli, zucchini and cabbage. The squid was present in copious amounts as large pieces. We enjoyed this. There were many comments about the sheer volume of squid. I seriously wonder how many squid it takes to make an order of this dish. My family likes squid and we liked this dish, which featured plenty of reasonably tender squid.

At the Bul-Go-Gi House, although the service was friendly and the food delicious, the decor is pretty bad. I think it's been updated though because before the art on the walls was mountain paintings and this time it was flowers. Anyways, on a Friday night it was quite busy because good food brings people in.

Bul-Go-Gi House
8813-92 Street, Edmonton, AB

* Note: Kimchi is spicy, pickled cabbage and a quintessential Korean food. I heard a guy at a table next to ours describe it as "sauerkraut with a Korean accent" although I don't find it much like sauerkraut at all since it's not as sour. I didn't find the kimchi all that spicy. If you're curious about kimchi, ZenKimchi Korean Food Journal summarizes its history here.