Apple Raspberry Pie; My favorite Edmonton restaurant

This weekend I packed up and shipped most of my things to the coast; helped friends move and clean their apartment; taught Sunday School; cleaned my apartment; and went to the theatre Friday night and to dinner Saturday night. It’s been snowing without stop for the past three days and it’s -10 degrees. I don’t know if it was the exertion on top of finishing my thesis or the weather, but I am home today with a sore throat and cold, feeling tired and miserable.

Saturday night I went with Forest and Lucy to have one last visit to my favorite Edmonton restaurant, the Blue Nile. They serve Ethiopian food. As you can see from the photo, it’s in someone’s house. What you can’t see is that it’s in a scary neighborhood next to Chinatown, or that the food is really good and really cheap. I’m getting hungry right now just thinking about it. It’s another Edmonton restaurant that has dual-language displays and menus– English and (what I assume is) Ethiopian. It was something new for Forest and Lucy to try, and Lucy said she liked it. Forest ate a lot so I am assuming that means he liked it too. At dinner we had another one of our discussions about food and cooking. They said they were going to stalk me and move to the coast in a few years when they were both done school. I said, if we all end up in Vancouver we should take some cooking courses together. Forest then gave me his little speech about how cooking should be a reflection of how you feel, your inspiration in the moment, and that it is not something that can be taught. I think that’s all very well when you are cooking Chinese food and everything goes in the wok, but Western food is a lot about technique, and some things need to be taught.

Then we went to Little Italy and they introduced me to the huge Italian market down there and I was wishing I still had a fully stocked kitchen with equipment so I could play with the poppy seed paste, the dried peaches, the cheeses, the dozen different types of olives. I consoled myself with a huge round of bread, some mortadella, capicollo, provolone, and olive paste (which came in a tube saying “voulez-vous pâté avec moi?” which I find weird and therefore funny), all for making sandwiches. I also bought some dried apples which taste like garbage and need to be thrown out, and some blackcurrant juice. I’m enjoying it, but it is indistinguishable from Ribena. Why can’t food manufacturers let us have some things slightly sour, instead of sugaring up everything?

Then we went to Lucky 97 so Forest and Lucy could buy rice and use my car for hauling it home. I thought about taking out my camera and snapping pictures of things but it was late, I was tired, and as I have said before, there are some scary people at these ethnic Chinatown stores, so I desisted. But looking around at the lotus roots, the display of Bird’s Nest energy drinks, the pomelos, and the little shrine just inside the doorway, I realized that I am going to miss a lot of things about Edmonton when I leave in a couple of weeks.

Last night, as the snow kept falling….and falling…I pulled out a small pastry shell I had made with some leftover pastry last weekend and tried a combination I had read about in one of my pie cookbooks– apple and raspberry pie. I wasn’t that taken with it. It’s an OK combination, not a classic. Why that is, I can’t really explain except to say that apple and blackberry works and apple and raspberry is second-best. I ate some with a bit of tinned custard, despite my sore throat (my whisk has been packed and shipped, so no homemade custard for now).