A weekend in Seattle

Pike Market Place, downtown Seattle

We have never visited Seattle before. We stopped over briefly for a coffee break on our road trip to Oregon but that was it. It is kind of crazy because we have lived in the Vancouver area for 9 years now and Seattle is only a 2 hour drive away.

I'm reporting our trip late since it was a week ago that it happened. I'll write more in an upcoming post to explain why I have taken so long to blog about it.

I had a bunch of stores I wanted to visit and a list of restaurants for use to try close to our hotel. The main thing I wanted to check out downtown was the Pike Market Place. We went there and hung around for 2 1/2 hours. I couldn't believe how expensive the parking was! We parked at the City Target and the parking was $18. I made myself spend $20 at Target so that they would reimburse us for the first hour of parking. At least! Oh my gosh.

Original Starbucks, Seattle

Pike Market Place was cool. The flowers (fresh or dried) were the best buy I think. If I lived there, I would totally buy some. Everything else was kind of expensive. There were lots of cool stuff though.  We saw the original Starbucks but there was a HUGE lineup so we didn't bother.

We stayed at a hotel in the University district, which was just a 10 minute drive from downtown. Apparently, it was a hip neighborhood with lots of vegan cafes and restaurants. I knew Jean-Louis would be happy :) We had some hotel problems, having booked through Hotwire for the first time but in the end it worked out for us. We were within walking distance to the University Village, which was totally awesome. I loved that place! So many of my favorite stores were there and right next to each other too. The layout was fabulous because when you enter, you can see the stores right there, without looking up a directory.

After shopping, we dined at VeggieGrill, also nearby in the University Village. It was all vegan and we ate until we couldn't walk anymore. You could tell it was not real meat but the quality was so much better than what you could buy at the grocery store. Plus, it was so cheap! We stuffed ourselves silly for just $35. Tristan got the best deal of all for being a kid. For just $5.99, he got a main dish (Mac & Cheese), a side (sweet potato fries), a dessert (chocolate pudding), and a drink (soy milk). The service was excellent too. Once we ordered, paid for our food and sat down, I barely had time to go wash my hands and Tristan's hands before all the food arrived. They messed up brought us an extra order of buffalo wings and said we could just eat it anyway. Yay! Now these were vegan chicken strips so they were actually really filling. Big, no bones, all "meat," if you know what I mean :) It was all good. I read good things about the place but I was still a bit skeptic. Next time we are back in Seattle, we will definitely stop by again!

The main reason we wanted to go to Seattle was to visit the Museum of Flight. Jean-Louis is a plane geek and Tristan is a little boy so he would definitely love seeing planes and other flying vehicles. I wasn't that interested but if I didn't have to pay to go, then I wouldn't have mind tagging along. We got to use our Entertainment book coupon from Vancouver for the Museum of Flight in Seattle. Cool, right? I think it's the first time they included a few Seattle coupons in the Vancouver book. It was a 2 for 1 deal so I was basically free :)

The Museum of Flight was really cool actually. We got to go in several planes, including an Air Force One for the President of the USA. That's some serious perk for a President! The Museum was really big and although we spent around 3 or 4 hours there, we couldn't do much since we had to chase Tristan around. Two hours would have been plenty for our first visit but since we stayed so long, we all got a bit cranky near the end :( That weekend we went it was very crowded too since they had a Halloween event. We got Tristan to dress up in costume to join in on the fun. There were so many kids in costumes there, some ridiculously great costumes too. Surprisingly, Tristan was the only Darth Vader. There were lots of crafts and games but he wasn't too interested. Boo :( Tristan didn't sleep enough the night before and he totally crashed when we left the place. Instead of stopping for lunch, we decided to just drive straight to Bellingham for a Trader Joe's stop and then home to Vancouver. The border wait at Blaine was around 10-15 minutes, which was great. On top of that, we had a super easy customs guy. I don't think we have ever encountered such a nice and easy guy. We had a bad experience in the past where we were booted out of our car and sent inside to pay duties for things we bought. We're still sort of new at this so every time we cross the border by car I get super nervous.

We sure picked the right weekend to go over. I had a feeling a lot of people wanted to stay put the weekend before Halloween, which was why I chose to go then. Overall, it was a great trip and we got to do some serious power shopping. I got plenty of stuff for Tristan's upcoming birthday party too :) I can definitely see us going over again. Maybe when the weather improves.

This year's pumpkin carving is...

Can you guess?

How about now?

You know, don't you?

Darth Maul, people. DARTH MAUL.

With 2 tea light candles inside.

Darth Maul and tiny Ironman. Both Tristan's favorites this year :)

Had an early Halloween party

My little M&M

My first Halloween party table! Details on my food blog.

Costume change to the dark side:)

Halloween comparison: 2010 & 2011

Left side is 2010, right side is 2011 (but you can tell, right? ;) Also, same monkey costume was worn!

Spiderman pumpkin: this year's carving for Halloween

Tristan's favorite superhero is Spiderman. We have never watched any superhero flick with him yet but he seems to have a lot of interest in Spiderman. Maybe because Spiderman looks cool?! His recent fascination with Spiderman made this year's pumpkin design choice super easy :)

Happy Halloween!!! May you get all the treats (or tricks) you deserve :)

This took 1.5 hours to carve! Phew.

Learning all the hows-to of making sugar cookies

I'm not a big cookie person. In fact, I see myself more of a cook than a baker. I tasted sugar cookies a few times before and they were just okay. I do like shortbread and butter cookies though and when I found a sugar cookie recipe that tasted a lot like those, I have been a fan. To be honest, I am more of a fan of making sugar cookies than eating them. The challenge of decorating them is appealing to me. It's all about the presentation and presentation is something I don't focus a lot on in my cooking. Now, I get to work on that a bit. I'm learning a lot in the process too.

I made my first batch of sugar cookies during Thanksgiving. I had one piping tool, which I didn't use correctly and a cookie press that did not work. I manually cut out pumpkins with my knife on the dough. I bought icing but the only orange they had was cake icing, which ended up looking thick and horrible on the cookie. It took forever and even though they tasted great, it was overall a bad first experience:(

My second attempt at sugar cookies was during Halloween. All the other Mommys were baking for their kids so I thought I would too. Like everything I do though, I set out with overly optimistic goals for myself. I learned from my first experience and this time I made sure I had all my cookie cutters. No more of this manual nonsense! :) I cut our pumpkins, cats, and round cookies. I made my own royal icing so I could create whatever colors I would need. I tried mixing liquid food colors to get orange and black but failed miserably. Orange looked like pink and black was a muddy gray. My piping tool was too big so I couldn't add the fine details on the cat. It just looked like a blob. My spiderweb looked cool on the round cookies but the spider was another blob. I didn't have enough piping bags for all the colors so I made my own out of plastic bags. I just cut a whole in one corner. I was still using the piping tool all wrong and icing would ooze out of everywhere. It was a huge mess:( On top of that I ended up throwing away one of the decorating tips in the trash! It must have been hidden in the icing and I didn't see it:(

My third attempt was much easier but I didn't have very optimistic goals for decorating. The cookies had colored dough and messages on them. They were birthday cookies for Tristan. The decorations were minimal. Since I kept getting my piping tool wrong, I researched on youtube beforehand on how to prepare a piping bag for icing. It turns out I had to unscrew the couplers before attaching the tip in between. I didn't even know that part unscrewed. Duh. What a cookie noob I am!

My fourth and most recent attempt was good. I can only get better at each attempt, right? This time I made sure I researched everything I needed. This attempt was going to be gifts for the daycare staff and I didn't want to look like a fool. I went out and bought more supplies such as disposable piping bags, couplers, a replacement tip for the one I accidentally threw away, gel colors, and Christmas themed cookie cutters. I even researched the designs I would do instead of free-styling it. There was one design in particular that I was worried about. I had a Santa cutter and it looked difficult. I made sure I drew this one out properly so I would have the right template. I traced it a few times and colored it with Tristan's crayon markers. I had a bad feeling it was going to be a big fail. Fine details on such a small cookie? But knowing me, I did it anyway. The result was a fail but not a huge fail. I tested out my foodsafe pens beforehand but when I went to color on the cookie, it wouldn't color right. Go figure. I had to improvise and my Santa turned out recognizable. That is about all I can say. The Christmas trees were the nicest. The snowflakes had potential. The cookies were give-able! Yay.


Every time I make sugar cookies, I learn something new. Next time, I need to get a few more finer decorating tips. I know some people use a paintbrush to decorate and I thought I would need one too but it turns out I can use a tiny spoon to spread the icing and for the smaller areas, a toothpick works just fine. I wouldn't have known if I didn't try :) Piping the edges and then flooding the cookie is too painful to do so I'm glad this shortcut works. I also have to be more patient and wait for icing to fully dry before applying more icing or color. Liquid food color doesn't work well for drawing eyes. Next time I will need to use gel colors or just thicker icing. I have to be careful not to make my icing too runny as well. This was definitely the case for my Santas!

So there you have it. I have been obsessing about decorating sugar cookies lately since it's Christmas and all. I plan to give away lots for gifts. Since I took so many pictures, I thought I would document it here so that other sugar cookie newbies can learn from my experience. It's new, it's challenging, it's fun, and it actually tastes good :) Good luck!

Halloween candy stash

Once upon a time, there was a little monkey...

...and he brought us all this! Yes, we love our little monkey :)
The candy stash above includes all the candy from the Heights trick-or-treating, Halloween night trick-or-treating, and our daycare goodie bag.

Toddler's first trick-or-treat

We could not have asked for better weather on Halloween day. I don't even think it rained that day. The forecast called for rain but it was dry all day. The sun even came out in the afternoon.

On Halloween day, we had a family dinner where I cooked ghastly goulash and baked a rainbow cake in the shape of a pumpkin. We all ate more than enough to fuel us for trick or treating that night. We headed out around 6PM. My plan was to get back in time for Tristan's bath around 7:30PM. We went in a group with my sister, brother-in-law, and Tristan's little cousins, and some of their friends. Jean-Louis didn't come along since he wasn't feeling well. It was great going in a big group because it always felt safe and no one was scared.


After an hour of walking from house to house, up and down stairs, Tristan was pooped. He started out running door to door along with his cousins. I barely had to carry him for the first 40 minutes. When I did carry him, it was mainly so we would catch up to the others. Tristan seemed to have enjoyed himself. What can I say? He loves to collect stuff in his pumpkin pail :) Seriously, he did very well on his first outing trick-or-treating. We came across some fairly spooky looking houses and he wasn't scared. Well, he had a sad face once when some lady in a mask dressed like one of those killers in Scream approached him. Even when the firecrackers were going off left, right, and center, he didn't freak out too much. Near the end, I had to carry him from house to house. His candy pail was also getting full so I had to empty some into my pockets. I honestly didn't think we would get so much candy! It also helped that he would collect two pieces of candies from some houses because they said he was small. I then carried him home so he could brag to his daddy. A job well done, I'd say! :)

Halloween on the Heights and train ride

With so many events to choose from this Halloween weekend, we opted for one that would take place a bit later in the day since we had a lot of errands to run on Saturday. We were all feeling a bit under the weather and I wanted all of us to be well rested before heading out. At the last minute, we decided to go to the event at Burnaby Heights. Every year they have fireworks, trick or treating, and a Halloween train ride. The fireworks took place Friday night but Tristan would have been scared of that anyway. We headed down there Saturday for the trick or treating with the Heights merchants from 3-5PM and for the train ride from 6-9PM. Tristan loves the train at Confederation Park!
When we dressed him up and headed down there, I didn't know what to expect and was kind of worried that he would be one of the few kids dressed up and people would look at us funny. It's kind of funny when you think about Tristan. He is young enough that he doesn't know what is going on and he is fine with us dressing him up in a monkey suit and giving him a pumpkin pail to carry. He'll just go along with it, no questions asked :) When we arrived on Hastings Street, we saw a lot of children in costume. Phew! Then we soon discovered that there were a lot of people and every child was dressed up and some parents were too. I could tell there was a lot of community spirit along that street :)


Tristan soon learned that he would go from door to door, hold out his pumpkin and someone would drop a colorful package into it. He loved collecting treats. Since he didn't know what they were, he would have been just as happy if the merchants were handing out rocks or leaves. After about an hour of this, he got tired and it was time to look for dinner. Since the train ride didn't start until 6PM, we grabbed a quick bite to eat on Hastings and then walked to the Park to line up for the train.

It was pretty nuts. We lined up for 45 minutes to get our ride. Tristan was so anxious too and every time someone else would go on it instead of him, he would get a little upset. In fact, all the kids in line were going a little nuts. Needless to say, it was not easy keeping the kids in line to wait patiently for their turn on the train. It was dark and then it started to rain. Luckily, it was mostly light rain so we didn't get soaked. Considering it was October 31st, we couldn't complain too much. It was nice most of the day!

This was my first miniature train ride at the park. Jean-Louis didn't feel well so I rode with Tristan while Jean-Louis tried to take pictures. The ride was a bit breezy in the dark but it didn't go very fast. At some parts, it was going very slow so you could take in some of the displays such as read what the tombstones said on the grass. There were lit up pumpkins everywhere, lots of halloween balloon figures, a lady dressed up in a witch costume walked toward us at one point, there were spooky lights and fog, creepy noises, haunted house displays etc. And then our train derailed. Yup, the first technical difficulty of the night and it was our train. It happened just in front of a giant orange inflatable ghost. It would deflate and then the light inside of it would go on and it would inflate again into a standing ghost. So then, Tristan got a little scared and wanted to get off the train. The train ride up until now was not scary at all. Then it started to rain harder. Joy. Luckily, five minutes later, we were up and moving again. It's amazing how a bunch of old guys in the dark with flashlights can fix things so quickly :)

After we got off the train, we entered a room where we were greeted with hot chocolate and cookies. Even without the treat, it would have been awesome since the train ride was only $2.50 for me and Tristan was young enough to ride for free. It was an exciting day and if we were to do this again another year, I would plan to arrive at the train station for opening at 6PM. We arrived at 6:45PM and waited way too long.

Halloween excitement and baking

Every year I carve a pumpkin to celebrate Halloween. Kids don't come by our place for candy because we are a gated complex and so we don't buy Halloween candy. I'm scared to watch horror movies and I feel like fireworks is a waste of money and unsafe so we don't do those either. We're somewhat anti-social, which means we don't have any cool friends to have a costume party and act wild with. I'm obviously too old to go trick-or-treating and so I never dress up in costume. To make matters worst, Jean-Louis is sort of anti-Halloween because in France, they just don't do anything for Halloween. So sadly, I only carve a pumpkin for Halloween. Why? I enjoy carving and I guess it makes me feel a bit better about being so lame during what used to be one of my favorite days of the year.

This year things have changed. We bought some fall foliage to display in the house. I'm throwing a small family Halloween party. We're taking Tristan trick-or-treating for the first time. We're also taking him to a public Halloween event. I carved pumpkins we purchased from our pumpkin patch trip. I baked lots this week, including Halloween cookies for the first time. Why? Because Tristan is old enough to enjoy these things now and because I have time. As a result, I am back to being excited about Halloween and I don't feel so lame anymore :) I don't get jealous of other people's twitpics of costumes, pumpkins, or cookies and cakes. I get to tweet the same stuff now! Plus, Halloween falls on a weekend this year. It's all awesome :)