— whollyKao

chiu on this

Toronto. Well, Markham, to be more exact – home of the vending machines that sell the cute little goombas and domokuns (above) for a shiny 2$ coin. Why Markham? My cousin Justin was getting married. To Karen. And that’s where they live. Well, how did the Chiu side of the family celebrate? By eating, of course.

Prior to the trip, we had predicted we’d be gnoshing on a hefty dose of Cantonese food during our trip, especially on stuff we can’t get here in the States. And…we were right. It was almost a bonding activity, even if it was overwhelming.

I wish I had pics to post of all the things we got to eat. All I have is this shot of a hamburger cake we found at the TNT grocery store:

But trust me: if you’d like your fill on Chinese food, go check out Markham. It’s a suburb of Toronto that is located about a 30 minute drive from the city. And once you get there, you’ll see that its like Chinatown, x10. Just be aware that driving there might be a bit trying, because drivers in Toronto…well…they’re crazy. Just go there, and you’ll see what I’m talking about.

The wedding was awesome. Karen is a designer and you could see that she had meticulously made sure the wedding was personal to her and Justin. The fact that they called each other ‘honey,’ and therefore had little jars of honey & the thingy that dips the honey out as favors. At the reception, their photographer, Claudia Hung, snapped some great candid photobooth shots in black and white. I really liked them, so I composited a couple together. But go check out her site, because she’s got teriffic work.

To go with the theme of ‘eating in Toronto,’ we made the newlyweds a Chinese cookbook. It was an idea that Smoosh and I hatched together. We figured that newlyweds could always use a cookbook, and we wanted one that was truly from our family to them. Smoosh has been perfecting her culinary skills in Cantonese cooking, and had a slew of tried and true recipes. Those, coupled with a couple from my grandma and my Dad’s stash, gave us the content for this cookbook.

My job? To put it all together. The original thought had been to make an actual book. But I got excited about making recipe cards (which were modeled off instruction cards that had been made for Nita’s bridal shower by artsy Monica).

I had a lot of fun planning out all the details for this. Here’s the play-by-play:
1. Draw little pics for each recipe.

2. Lay out the text and images.
3. Print.

It was a bit of a hassle to get the paper, but I ended up getting what I needed from Clampitt Paper here in Dallas. For you paper whores out there, check out Clampitt’s Creative Centeroff Ambassador Row (down the street from their store). It’s a magic room of 3000K+ sheets of paper of all brands/weights/colors/finishes. And best of all, they let you take free samples.

So back to the cookbook.
4. Trim the cards down to size. (I had gotten this awesome green box at the Paper Source, home of lots of things you wish you could but shouldn’t buy. The box comes in various colors and sizes ).

5. Use a corner rounder to make each card look nicer.

6. Create the cover image. I had left this till last, mainly because I was struggling to come up with a name for this. It was hard to come up with something personal to Justin and Karen, but pointed out that the recipes were Chinese. So I thought: Justin and Karen…Justin and Karen…Justin Chiu. Chiu sounds like ‘chew.’ Ok, that’s it! Chiu on This: Chinese Cookbook. Done and done. Jeff thought it was funny.

So the final product no the outside:

Here’s what it looked like on the inside (complete with table of contents):