The Hunger Struck - Confessions of a Food Fanatic.

I rarely write about Vancouver restaurants here on The Hunger Struck, so I thought it was time to make a quick list of my current favorites. We do eat out at least once a week and over the past few months have been going back to these places frequently. They are all in the moderate price range and I think all of them are pretty great.

1. Nuba – If you like Lebanese food you’ll love Nuba. Not exactly a new Vancouver staple but their newish Hastings location across from their previous location has me going there more often. I just love this place. I have a tendency to always order the same thing : the vegetarian platter for two.

Nuba Restaurant
207 Hastings Street West
Vancouver, BC
(604) 688-1655
http://nuba.ca/

2. Acme Cafe – This place is great for breakfast and lunch. We have a tendency to come here for lunch lately because they make a great tomato vegetable soup, which is probably the best side of soup I’ve had in a long time from a diner style restaurant. Also any place that offers mac and cheese as a side is alright by me.

Acme Café
51 Hastings Street West
Vancouver, BC
(604) 569-1022

http://www.acmecafe.ca/

I have been the laziest cook lately. For the last few weeks as this blog will attest I have had minimal time in the kitchen. Actually it hasn’t been intentional at all, I’ve just been so busy lately. We are desperately trying to find a house right now as we’ve out grown our one room apartment, so all of my free time has been spent doing this. Any of you Vancouverites who have been through this process recently will know how frustrating it is. I wont get started on the housing prices in Vancouver, they make me want to pull my hair out.

But hopefully we will find something soon because I’m sick of this and need more time to do the things I love again. AND my kitchen misses me. AND i just got a new set of amazing pots and pans. AND figs are in season!

I don’t know about you guys but I’m absolutely obsessed with figs. I wait not so patiently all year until its fig season. Once they start showing up we go absolutely fig crazy. Seriously we eat them on a daily basis. I thought I would share this extremely no brainer recipe quickly, its the first thing we do with figs each year and it may change the way you look at bruschetta forever.

A few years back, long before this blog ever came to life, I was reading Molly Wizenberg’s Orangette and came across this post on Marcella Hazan’s Tomato sauce with onion and butter. I’d been searching around for a new Tomato sauce recipe as I was slowly becoming bored of my usual one, there just seemed to be something missing. I was finding myself adding so many extraneous ingredients that the sauce was no longer just a basic tomato sauce and I felt I needed to get back to basics, the way I remembered the tomato sauce of my childhood.

I was fortunate enough to grow up with a mother and father who at the end of each summer would make a trip to the Okanagan Valley in Southern BC, a dry desert region know for some of this provinces best fruit orchards and vineyards, where they would buy the most amazing field tomatoes at the peek of their season. These were the best tomatoes I had every tasted and this was long before you would ever see an heirloom tomato in the produce section of even the fanciest Vancouver markets.  I remember on many of these trips to the Okanagan eating these tomatoes like apples with just a little bit of salt and pepper, now if that isn’t uncharacteristic child like behavior I don’t know what is. They were just that perfect that they were even able to challenge a 7 year olds idea of what constitutes a great snack. In all truth I think I was a bit of an odd child where food was concerned. I would pretty much eat anything. Not much has changed.

There are some recipes that just take way longer than you think they will. This is one of them. Actually, I think I sort of knew it would take as long as it did, which is why I made it one evening when I was on my own. I was inspired by this eggplant dish that I love from a local Japanese restaurant here in Vancouver, but I was not trying to recreate it because lets be honest, that never works.

I’m generally of the persuasion that if there is a particular dish you love that a restaurant makes locally you should never try to recreate it yourself. There are some exceptions of course, I don’t know about you but doesn’t this sort of thing generally result disaster? I can’t tell you how many meals I’ve eaten with friends or family that have been disastrous attempts at recreating something.

Anyway, I’ll keep this short and sweet. If you have a few hours and are up for some slow roasted eggplant that it sweet and savory and might make you question that eggplant you had categorized as the best you’ve ever had, then this is your recipe. It’s not a fast recipe but it’s well worth the wait, consider yourself warned.