Last weekend was Easter, and thus a long weekend. Eileen decided I should make breakfast on Sunday morning. One of her favorite things is this sausage, fontina, and bell pepper strata from epicurious.com.

Its a really easy recipe to make. I cut it in half this time, as there was only the two of us. It was so delicious we ate it for breakfast and had leftovers again for dinner. Yum! Highly recommended.

We went away this past weekend for a four day mini-vacation up the coast to Gibsons on the Sunshine Coast. We stayed at a great little B&B called Marian’s on the Coast. Its in a wonderful location and since they are “dog friendly” we took the two dogs Bailey and Cairo with us.

The B&B has a nicely equipped kitchen so we made our own meals most of the time. I made ham and cheese omelettes each morning and we grilled out for lunch. Dinner was usually fruit, cheese, and wine (or port – we had a nice Smith Woodhouse LBV with us).

We did have lunch in town once, at the Sweet Water Bistro (Urbanspoon link). We stopped in Mike’s Gelato as well, for a refreshing treat while poking around town. We didn’t get to Smitty’s but was recommended; next time we’ll go there for oysters for sure.

Gibsons is about 40 minutes by ferry, and the B&B is another ten minute drive. Highly recommended if you are visiting that area.

I uploaded some photos here, enjoy!

Eileen and I were at our friend Melissa’a home for dinner recently (it was an excellent meal as you’d expect) and she was telling us about this amazing bleu cheese soufflé from Ina Garten’s cookbook Barefoot in Paris. Melissa had made it once before and raved about it. Leafing through the book made my mouth water, everything looked delicious and also practical to make.

We stopped into the local bookstore and picked up a copy at the very next opportunity. There are a quite a few good recipes in this book. We’ve made the fennel salad and rosemary cashews, both are easy and excellent. Eileen really wanted to try the soufflé but I’d never made a soufflé before, and always heard it was really tricky. Certainly there are plenty of jokes about slamming doors and banging pots causing the soufflé to fall. But I decided to give it a whirl anyways, with Eileen’s encouragement. And she said she was hungry, so it was either order something or make the soufflé.

It turned out extremely well. I’ll definitely make it again. Eileen thought of making this as a side to a roast lamb dish, so I’ll have to find an excuse for a dinner party and make it!

Eileen and I went up to the Okanagan valley on our annual pilgrimage to the wine country of B.C. Every spring we go to visit old favorites and try the newer ventures. We had a fantastic long weekend, leaving home on Thursday and getting back on Sunday. The weather was really outstanding and the guest house at Burrowing Owl is very luxurious, enough so that it is easy to get relaxed in a matter of hours rather than the typical days of decompression it might take on any other holiday.

Our return trip this morning started off with very unusual weather: rain! Good thing we had decided to head out early such that we could pick up the dogs from their “spa weekend” on the way home. Unfortunately things didn’t go as planned: on one of the sharp turns outside of Princeton a car crossed the center line and smashed into the driver’s side door of our blue Saturn. The picture pretty much says it all. Fortunately no one seems to have been injured, and the story ends better than it might have.

It is a bit weird having an accident outside any major population center; there was no cell service for anyone’s phone and there was limited traffic passing by (although all who did pass stopped to see if they could help). We packed ourselves up and headed back 20km to Princeton to find the local RCMP detachment and look into how we might want to get our car back to Vancouver. Princeton isn’t exactly a major destination spot in B.C. One tow truck service, no car rental options, and quite limited choices for pretty much everything else. We stopped at the Husky gas station as it was the first place we came to, though the staff was moderately unhelpful. We got cell service and started calling around to the RCMP to report the accident.

Someone else had already reported it however, which explained the police, ambulance and fire rescue service vehicles we passed on the way back to town. I guess they weren’t taking any chances on whether we were lying a pool of our own blood and body parts, potentially pinned under a blazing car. Better safe than sorry, which is fine by me. The only downside was that we had to wait while they got out to the site, concluded there wasn’t anyone to rescue, then drove back to town to interview everyone involved.

After some waiting, then some explaining, then more waiting, we were handed our police report and sent off on our way. During part of the waiting we occupied ourselves with talking about how lucky we’d been and also trying to recollect whether we thought our car was too badly damaged to drive or not. The impact was low speed and from the side such that our airbags did not deploy. I recalled kicking open the door to get out, while Eileen’s door was pinned against the concrete barrier that protected us from driving off the road to relative safety. We weren’t really sure whether there had been damage to the wheels or not.

We got a tow truck to take us back out to the scene and investigate whether our day was going to get much, much longer. Turns out with a sharp kick to force the door securely closed, careful removal of the debris from what was left of the door, and some duct tape to secure the remaining dangling plastic fragments we could drive the car safely enough to get back to Vancouver.

All in all, we were amazingly lucky. I’m very impressed with the way our Saturn weathered the damage, but I wouldn’t want to try it again. The white Honda Accord that hit us didn’t hold up nearly as well, tearing away the front quarter panel and front bumper.

Besides not sustaining any injury and only moderate damage, the other good thing is that our six cases of wine in the trunk were not damaged at all. Whew.

It’s been pouring rain today in Vancouver, seems winter has come a bit early. We decided to settle indoors for the day, built a fire for the first time this season, and watched Ken Burns’ The War on PBS. I was going to work on my latest robot project, but laziness and some obligations for the day job got in the way.

The War has been quite amazing. The episode we’re watching now included the story of the battle for Herken Forest, outside Aachen, Germany. It is quite a stunning story, I’d never heard about it before. In fact the entire series has been about incredible stories I haven’t really heard about before. I’ve learned a lot about World War II through this documentary, and I thought I already knew a lot.

Eileen made an amazing beef bourgogne for dinner too. Yum!