gluten free Archives - Curiously Carmen

Nice Vice 0% Dairy Creamery

July 3, 2016

This review is long overdue, especially since I went to Nice Vice in May! Nice Vice has been buzzing around town for being Vancouver’s first ever 0% dairy creamery shop. To me, this is like heaven and especially important because I can’t have dairy anymore.

I was really excited to try this place out and see if it would satisfy my ice cream cravings!
Nice Vice is located in Yaletown, a quick walk from the Canada Line station. It is pretty small, so it is easy to miss.

Inside, the store is pretty bare and basic, and there are also no washrooms for customers. It is an open space, with bar seats on one side of the wall but I found the seating to not be that comfortable. I would recommend grabbing your dessert to go and walking around Yaletown instead.
Vegan Buddy and I came on a Tuesday evening. It was cloudy, but not cold or rainy that day. Due to the weather and seeing how it was a weekday, the store was empty except for us! Luckily, this meant we could sample more flavours.
I wasn’t particularly in love with any of the flavours, but they weren’t bad either. In the end, I ordered strawberry fiends forever and mango. I ordered the one scoop for $5.00, but you can get two flavours for an additional price – I don’t remember exactly, but it was either 50 cents or $1.00 extra.

Both tasted like sorbet, and weren’t that creamy. They both had a very sweet fruity taste, which was good! The mango reminded me of exactly of the Asian mango pudding.
VB ordered one scoop of the matcha and vanilla strawberry swirl. The matcha had a medium matcha taste, not too strong or subtle. I didn’t really like the vanilla strawberry swirl because I found it a bit bland and just icy.
They also have a bunch of assorted salts that you can top off your dessert with! We tried a bunch of salt flavours. Some went well and brought the flavour out, while some did not pair well at all. I recommend you sprinkle a super, tiny bit of salt – I’m talking about like 4 or 5 grains tiny, because we found that even just a pinch was too much!

Overall, I don’t think Nice Vice compares to real dairy ice cream at all, it was just okay. I was a bit disappointed because I had heard such great things about this place. Or maybe, my expectations were too high.

Their desserts taste more like sorbets and aren’t super creamy. I prefer the vegan ice creams at Earnest and Rain or Shine because they are richer and creamier. But if you like sorbets, you would like this place!

Meh…

Nuba

January 15, 2015

Hi everyone!

This is a really late post and has been in my drafts folder since September. Oops! But better late than never right? =) Enjoy the post!

I have heard really great things about Nuba from a number of different people. I’ve passed this restaurant quite often, as the bus I normally take to downtown drives by it. Each time I pass Nuba, I wonder when I am able to finally try this seemingly delicious place. I finally got the opportunity to last week, when my company was holding a company welcome lunch for myself and the other co-op student (I wrote this post back in September… oops)!

To start, my coworker and I decided to split the roasted potato and garlic soup, which was their special that day. It came drizzled with olive oil, which we stirred into the soup. The soup had a mild spiciness to it, and a strong garlic taste. There wasn’t any potato chunks in the soup, I think it was pureed into the soup because it had a thicker consistency. In addition, there was an abundant flavour of spices which went well with the garlic taste. To all the health conscious folks out there, their daily soup is always vegan and gluten free!

I ordered the chicken tawook with hummus. It came with a side salad, chickpeas, pita bread, and choice of roasted potatoes or brown rice. All of our pita bread came in the same bowl. The pita was a thinner than I was used to, but perhaps that is the style?

I wanted to eat it with tzatziki sauce, but it came at a surcharge so I decided not to. Judging from the menu, I was not expecting the chicken to be on skewers, but it was tasty and savoury nonetheless! There was a slight grilled taste on the chicken, and it was very juicy and flavourful. The chicken was marinated in paprika, lemon, thyme, and garlic. Apart from the chicken, I regretted ordering the brown rice as my side rather than the roasted potatoes.

The brown rice was a bit hard and undercooked for my personal taste, but that’s just the Asian inside me speaking, we love our rice really well cooked and soft 🙂 I was also told that the roasted potatoes were really good and one of their specialty dishes. I think the dish came to around $15-17, which seemed a bit overpriced for what was received although the chicken was really good.

Another dish that was ordered that day; I forgot if it was the lamb kafta or lamb kibbeh. Sorry! I didn’t try this so I can’t give much of an opinion on it, so a picture will have to do 🙂

At the end of our scrumptious meal, my coworker ordered a Turkish coffee. I thought that the presentation of it was very cool and unique! I didn’t try any because I have extremely high sensitivity to caffeine (once, I drank a Pepsi Lime at dinner and couldn’t sleep until 3am. Or had milk tea at 10am and slept the next morning at 6am…), but I was told that there was a strong chai flavour to it. So a mix of chai tea and coffee!

For dessert, we all split two dessert plates. I’m not too sure of what each pastry was called since I wasn’t the one that ordered it, but I did enjoy the taste of all of them. In particular, I enjoyed the almond nougat type pastry, but I’m pretty sure there is a specific Lebanese name for it.

All the pastries were really sweet. The two next to the center pastry had some sort of carmelized sugar on top, and was a flaky pastry. The one in the center had the same idea, but with a custard-type topping.

-Carmen

Dream Sushi

March 6, 2014

Hi everyone,

The boyfriend, his little brother, and I were in the neighborhood last week and were craving some sushi, so we decided to check out Dream Sushi after reading some positive reviews on Urbanspoon.

I’ve been here once a few years ago, but I don’t remember anything from my visit. However, we had a pleasant and satisfying visit at Dream Sushi and would probably come back here again if we were in the area!
So, with all the crappy and rainy weather we had recently, I didn’t get a chance to take a decent picture. Here is one I found of Google with credit to Sherman’s Food Adventures (http://www.shermansfoodadventures.com/).

It is pretty small inside, even though it’s cozy. Their walls are filled with different comments from customers on brightly coloured paper, which I thought looked pretty cool since I’ve never seen a restaurant completely fill up their walls like that.

This place is also Chinese-owned, I’m assuming with all the Cantonese I heard from all the staff.
The first thing we ordered was the salmon sashimi ($9.50). It tasted really fresh and juicy. As you can tell from the picture, the slices were pretty thick and decent too.

It came under a bed of shredded daikon. I would definitely order this again, with how fresh it tasted!
This was the paparazzi roll ($8.95), which was comprised of spicy tuna, cucumber, avocado, fried yam crisps (? I think, not too sure but it was crispy) with seared tuna tataki, spicy mayo, onions, and sesame on top. This was AMAZING.

I loved how all the ingredients tasted so perfectly with each other. This roll was made with a lot of care, quality, and detail as you can tell with the garnishing on top. It also tasted really fresh, and there was a slight crunch inside. The sashimi in this dish was also very fresh tasting as well. I would highly recommend trying this dish! YUM!
Last but not least, we ordered some regular rolls. I’ll start with the california roll ($3.50). This tasted like a regular california roll, but the avocado was really fresh.

Most restaurants either add cucumber OR avocado, but they included both in their roll. I also liked how there was sesame on top, it was a great addition to detail and made a somewhat-boring roll look more interesting. Look at those sesame seeds!
The other roll we ordered was the negitoro roll ($2.75). Nothing special about this roll, we all enjoyed it and didn’t really have any complaints. We also ordered a chopped scallop roll ($3.75). Again, nothing too special about this roll either. The last roll was the smoked salmon roll ($3.75). We were a bit disappointed with this roll because we thought it would taste better than it actually did, but maybe we had high expectations due to the other dishes.

In conclusion, we enjoyed our visit to Dream Sushi. All of their sashimi is extremely fresh, and they prepare all their rolls with detail and quality. Service was attentive as well. They weren’t overly friendly or anything, but they made our visit pleasant and were quick to come to our table, and refilled our drinks without asking.

TRADER JOES MINI HAUL – PART ONE!

February 21, 2014

Hi everyone!

Trader Joes is like a little country that welcomes you with open arms and smiling faces. The reason why I say this is because everything in store is produced and manufactured by themselves. Their staff are really friendly, and their interior design gives me a modern day cottage with a laid back feel to it.

Apart from that, most of TJ’s products are super healthy – organic, no preservatives, low fat, gluten free, no artificial flavours, but you get my point! I love that most ingredients that you read on the package are actually recognizable, meaning that they are all natural and do not contain artificial preservatives or things ending in -oxide -xide -acid, etc.

The best part though, is that even though all their products are super great quality and healthy, it’s extremely affordable. Usually, the trade off when buying healthy products is the cost that’s attached.

I took the liberty of taking a few pictures of the store shelves, just to give you guys an idea. The shelves are jam packed with yummy products, and as I mentioned before, their signage is really cute. I also love the packaging of their products. Kudos to the design team!

On their website, the coconut cranberry granola sounded really delicious, as did the triple berry o’s I laid my eyes upon on their shelves. However, these two did not live up to my expectations, especially the triple berry o’s. At first taste, they tasted no different than honey nut cheerios, which was disappointing to me.. Secondly, the dried berries inside the cereal looked really unappetizing, and tasted really unappetizing since they were super, super dry.

The blueberries were the worst part. To me, it tasted like cardboard and they were also really shriveled up even after I waited for it to absorb the milk.

On the other hand, the coconut cranberry granola was not bad, I just didn’t really like the taste of it that much. I felt that it tasted like regular granola that you can get at Walmart, and there weren’t that many cranberries inside. I also didn’t really taste much of the coconut flakes, although I could see a generous amount.
These caught my attention because of the nutritious and healthy ingredients in it. It’s also a good source of omega 3 and fiber among other nutrients, not to mention that it’s not fattening. I’ve also tried their other quinoa chips, so I decided to give this one a shot too.

I was glad I did because I liked these ones better. These chips had a fair amount of seasoning to it, bringing it away from the bland flavour tortilla chips usually have. I also liked how there were different chip varieties in there – carrot tomato, spinach garlic, and red beet onion. My favourite was spinach and garlic, although the other ones weren’t bad also. The variety in the chips kept it somewhat exciting. They were also pretty crunchy and had a thick texture to it too!
Saved the best for last! I was randomly walking by the frozen dessert section, not really aiming to buy anything but this caught my eye. Chocolate non-dairy frozen dessert made with coconut milk. I was really intrigued by this, so I decided to give it a shot. Am I ever glad I did!

There is a rich and creamy chocolate taste, but also a hint of coconut too. I honestly can’t tell the difference between this and real dairy cream, which is a great thing since this is much healthier for you. Eating this gave me less guilt as it is lower in fat and calories than regular ice cream.

The ingredients in this are also more familiar than ones in ice cream, which is always a plus! I will most definitely be buying this tub of goodness again.

I hope you guys enjoyed reading this! I have several more products I bought that weekend, so expect another haul sometime. Happy grocery shopping and remember to be aware of what you’re putting in your body!

Thanks for reading!

-Carmen

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