We want to save the sauce and dip our fries in it.

Repeat that five times and that’s what our wait for dinner was like last weekend.

I felt like I had lived two days in one on Saturday. Chew and I started our day at 8am with an ambitious 38km bike across the city. Then we met another one of our best friends for a burger feast at an awesome vegetarian restaurant. Dessert is never a question so we walked 22 blocks to a local ice cream shop, then walked some more and somehow ended up sitting and chatting until dusk in a wooden bench disguised as a giant bird’s nest.

My quads are no where near as prepared as Chew’s so the first stretch of the ride they were telling my brain “Retreat!” We cycled down, sometimes up (ugh), quiet streets, over bridges and along the Richmond dyke. We had a pit stop at the “1 million dollar” playground and pretty much had the entire park to ourselves; who else would be weird enough to be at an outdoor playground on a rainy Saturday morning at 9am? The kiddie zipline was delightful, especially when a strong friend gives you a push at the beginning so you have enough momentum to do a big pendulum swing at the end. Two adult thumbs up for that structure! Since we had so much time on our hands, we also took turns climbing to the top of a tall swirly slide (bad flashbacks from high ropes at camp) and personally drying the swings with our thighs (to whoever went on the swings after us, you’re welcome).

We arrived at our most southern point by 10am and decided we wanted to pay a visit to the airport shopping outlet. Having spontaneous days like this is really refreshing. Thank goodness the city of Richmond is flatter than flat or I may not have had the strength to pedal over yet another bridge and exit a highway, even if I was going at like 1km per hour. It was evident that people don’t usually cycle to the outlets as we had troubles trying to find a bike rack. So we locked our bikes to a lamp post in the middle of the outlet and wandered into an active wear and a chocolate store. Sums up our lives pretty accurately. We left with a bag full of chocolate truffles and chocolate bars, yaaaaas.

By then I think Chew had caught on that I would never be able to pedal back home from the airport and agreed to take the train back north. Thanks for not making me bike back up Cambie. We took the scenic route home along the seawall and stopped at Granville Island to wander around, hoping to see our friend working at one of the gelato shops. No luck there, but we did treat ourselves to a picnic of king-sized blueberries, spinach bagel, and tofu stuffed pastry. Paired with live music, it was a truly wonderful afternoon.

That was just part 1 of Saturday. Part 2 was just as fun, and thankfully not as physically strenuous.

There is a considerably new vegetarian joint called Meet on Main and the two of us have had it on our restaurant bucket list since it opened. We decided Saturday was the day and called up another bestie to gobble up burgers and fries together. The name caused a hilarious confusion as she kept asking what the restaurant’s name was but thought I was only giving her directions on where to meet us. Being able to eat everything on the menu is very exciting so it was hard to pick exactly what we wanted. Dinner started off with sweet chili cauliflower ‘wings’. The sauce was so good we decided to keep the plate and dip our fries into it later. The first time our waitress came to clear our plates, we awkwardly stuttered that we wanted to keep the sauce. It was one of those moments where your friend starts the talking but gets all tongue tied so another person steps in to try and finish the sentence but doesn’t help much and the waitress kind of gets the gist and leaves you to be. We resume our usual random conversations, the ones where strangers probably think we’re crazy ladies, and soon enough another waitress tries to take our plate of sauce away and we have to explain that we’re saving it for the fries. Between the time we cleared the cauliflower wings to the time our burgers finally arrived, we had to protect our precious sweet chili sauce from a total of 5 hard-working waitresses. We joked about writing “saving this sauce” on a note or something so we could stop repeating our awkward selves.

Soon our table was covered in plates of towering burgers and hot-from-the-fryer fries. It was an epic dinner of mac ‘n cheeze and onion ring-stuffed burgers and wiping up all the saved sauce with our mountain of fries. The fries tasted even better when it was first dipped into chili sauce and then dunked into the chipotle aioli. You could tell Chew liked that combination the most because her condiment cup was a swirl of red and orange by the end of the night. Three happy girls left the restaurant and Chew already decided she’d celebrate her birthday there. We thought it’d be a good idea to walk off some of the burger and fries before filling our dessert stomach with ice cream. After all, it was only 22 blocks away. Friends always help time fly, so a few back scratches and walking right through a red light later, we arrived at the ice cream shop and got ourselves some vegan cookies and cream ice cream. While licking our not-as-good-as-we-remembered-it-to-be scoops, we laughed at how colour coordinated our outfits were, despite not have planned it in advance. We were so full of food we plopped ourselves in a cool wooden bird’s nest bench to watch the cotton candy sunset and reminisce about past summer vacations and plan upcoming ones. As sweaty, sticky, and tired as I was, I didn’t want such a fun day to end.

Now that you’ve read over 1000 words about our eventful Saturday, I’ll say a few about these fries. They’re the vegan copy cat of an item off In-N-Out’s famous secret menu (well that’s quite the oxymoron). As demonstrated by the sweet chili-chipotle sauce combo at our dinner, fries are elevated by their sauce-y pairings. Protect your plates of leftover “secret” and cheeze sauce because you’ll want a second helping of fries to mop that up. And these home baked fries are real crispy. I won’t blame you for getting aggressive over this fries platter. This is finger food and finger-licking good food so prepare to get messy!

The instructions on how to make the “cheeze” can be found in our Loaded Vegan Chili Cheeze Nachos post. Make 1/4 of the amount written.