Asia, food so convenient

Tropical smoothies in plastic bags made by little Asian women every day for cheap. With extra condensed milk.

Fried Dough (The South cont'd)

Yes, the illusive and infamous French doughnuts I like to refer to as fried dough, aka beignets, at the well-known establishment, Cafe Du Monde. I'm sure you all know the drill here: sit down at a small table under the terrace, put in an order of beignets (comes in 3), and receive fresh, piping-hot beignets in a matter of minutes. How do they do it so well and so effortlessly - serving soft, chewy, and perfectly deep fried pieces of dough 24 hours a day?

I was hoping to find someone back there in Cafe Du Monde's kitchen who had been making beignets since they were 5 years old, carrying on the tradition, and knowing exactly how to prepare the yeasted dough without even thinking about it. Today, it is more reminiscent of a fast-food joint-- various ethnic minority workers (sorry) hustling to take orders for numerous groups of tourists. For all I know, there might be someone hiding in back holding all of Cafe Du Monde's secrets, but I think what Cafe Du Monde has done rather successfully is carry on their technique of making delicious beignets into a life-long establishment that would otherwise be a shell of its former self (not that I have any idea as to what Cafe Du Monde looked like in 1862). My point is that although there isn't the charm of some mom and pop smiling, graciously receiving my presence and artfully preparing my beignets from their own hands, the beignets are still fucking good -- so good in fact that we went back 3 times that day.

Behold: beignet factory

Brings tears to my eyes thinking about these delicious morsels in my mouth

Texas Pit Stops

After a few days in Austin and noticing claims of real Elgin sausage at every bar and restaurant we popped into (and there were many), we knew we had to stop in Elgin on the way to New Orleans, even if it meant eating juicy, hot, fatty sausages at 9am. WHATEVS.

Pit Stop #1: Elgin hot sausage, Elgin, TX

enough said

mandatory butcher paper with oil seeping through and hot sauce

Pit stop #2: HAMBURGERS, Houston TX

After doing some research by way of Robb Walsh, aka Houston hamburger extraordinaire, who very thoughtfully outlined three types of burgers: grocery store burgers (where they first originated), soul food burgers, and burger joint burgers--we whole heartedly knew we had to have some soul food burgers. Whats the south without soul food? Lockwood Malt Shop, "perfection on a buttered bun" or so we read, along with the words "look for the seemingly abandoned red building..." was, to our disappointment, no longer seemingly abandoned but really abandoned!

We relied on plan b (how familiar!), Lankford Grocery Co., a former grocery store turned restaurant known for their old-fashioned hamburgers. We walked through what looked like sliding glass doors of someone's backyard into their grandma's home with rickety chairs and tables on uneven linoleum, knick-knacks failing to let go of walls, and pastel-colored bunnies screaming sweet Jesus cluttering every surface top (clearly prepared for Easter) and and, thats it. We ordered two cheeseburgers (still recovering from pit stop #1) and a side of tatertotts. Although the burger was not as plump (aka not a 1/2 or 5/8-lb-er) as we imagined Lockwood's would have been, we could still tell the burger was made with love... or "soul" as they call it in the south.

Old-fashioned hamburgers, see?

Easter was really around the corner though

Damn that looks tasty, not the hamburger, I mean... sorry

Oh, and as I was taking a picture of an American flag hung outside, a man sitting on the long picnic table positioned on Lankford's driveway asked me why I was taking a picture of an American flag. Of course I immediately exclaimed, "because we're in America!" which to my surprise, he responded, "but aren't you from America?" WHAT??? I thought y'all thought we were from China or the Orient.

Texas Bar-B-Que, Beefier than it's Porky Eastern Cousins

The audit train had only a few days in Austin during an epic trip to the South, but insisted on enjoying some of the local Texas barbecue at least more than once. Austinites told us that the best barbecue is always at least half an hour outside of the city, and based on our two TX bar-b-que experiences, plus the help of some generalization, we kind of confirmed this.


1. Reppin' inner-city Austin- Mann's Smokehouse Bar-B-Que

The jumbo sweet tea sign may have contributed to luring us in




Inside: very charming

Pork ribs, brisket, cole slaw and turnip greens (the latter two of which consistently served as our only source of vegetables during the trip-- I am undecided on whether or not to divulge my resulting digestive adventures in conjuction with this food blogging.)

Mann's was pretty good. Definitely better than the barbecue in California, but unfortunately, we ate it after Cooper's (see below) and it didn't compare. Tonight, I have that Vanessa Williams song stuck in my head, something about saving the best for last.

2. An hour outside of Austin and into hill country - Cooper's Pit Bar-B-Que, Llano, TX

I can't get over how fake the words "Old Time" look in this photo. But they are totally real.

Pit boss; he asked for Jenn's digits

Succulent pork loin, tasty (but slightly chewy) beef ribs, and brisket like I'd never had before in my life. Sides: wait, who cares

There are a several things that made Cooper's mind-blowing:

The hour drive through hill country was beautiful. The first thing we saw was that amazing sign, and then we saw the pit. Of course, before all this, we had smelled all that hot smoky meat as we stepped out of the car and our mouths had already been watering for a good minute.

The dudes at the pit asked us what we wanted and then schlopped it directly onto a plastic cafeteria tray. They handed us the tray and pointed us inside, through a short hallway of hooded buffet carts that contained a paltry selection of room temperature sides (obviously not the main event here) from which we unattentively chose. By this time, we were foaming at the mouths, our minds on the meat laying sexy and bare on the cafeteria tray we clutched. The dudes behind the carts wrapped our meats in butcher paper, weighed it, and slapped a price sticker on it, as if it was deli ham or something. Whatever, by this time, we already knew that presentation didn't matter. The total was forty some dollars (for three people), a good deal for this much meat.


We anxiously dispensed ourselves sweet tea and spooned free baked beans and barbecue sauce into variously sized styrofoam vessels. We floated to our indoor picnic tables, which were lined with loaves of store-bought sliced white bread still in their plastic, French's yellow mustard, pickled whole jalapenos, hot sauce, and most importantly, paper towels. We hazily unwrapped the butcher paper, and ate, ate for-fucking-ever.

I will probably never have brisket anywhere near like that again, unless I go back to Cooper's. It was entirely unlike any brisket I've had at other barbecue places. Rather than sliced, it seemed roughly chopped, similar to some Jewish briskets I've had, this being more likely a result of it being cut into bigger slabs but being so tender that it just had to fall apart (how dare it!). The pork loin was peppery and goddamned juicy. The beef ribs were a bit tough, but it didn't matter much because they could be saved with the barbecue sauce, which was tangy, rightfully thin, not really sweet at all, and obviously not from a bottle.

Of course all the white people were staring at us three Chinese girls stuffing our faces with dead animal. Maybe they thought it was bizarre, but probably not, because they were all eating the same stuff that we were and knew how good it was.

Does Bobby Flay know Tex Mex?

...maybe chipotilay sauce or pwoblano chiles but Austin knows where its at.

Flavorful shredded beef barbacoa

South Austin Trailer Park Eatery (Austin loves food served out of trailers)

Tex-Mex breakfast!

Migas (a Tex-Mex version of chilaquiles) - eggs scrambled with corn tortillas, diced onions, chile peppers, cheese, i.e. salty mush heaven


Tamale House, Austin, TX

el Mercat de la Boqueria

I was recently in Barcelona and made a stop at this world-famous market in Las Ramblas, la Boqueria. It is tempting, colorful, and odiferous. The merchants were all pretty friendly at 8 am (we went early to avoid the crowds). From what I could tell, shoppers include restauranteurs, residents, and tourists. I'll never forget the image of a butcher throwing an entire pig leg, toes and hairs akimbo, on the scale for someone to buy.

After a big of oggling and sniffing and poking around, I found the magic phrase that would make vendors happily chat up their products and eventually offer me a taste of the goods: "Tiene algo tipico de Barcelona?" (do you have something characteristic of Barcelona?)

The highlight for me was tasting this cured Spanish ham that I can't find the name of (due to my poor Spanish skills and lazy googling efforts)... it was shaved off a huge thigh, deep red in color, and super duper chewy. The butcher instructed me to eat it by pulling it apart into little shreds with my teeth. The taste was heavenly -- meaty, not too salty, a little oily.

The produce was enormous but coming from California (and spoiled by the selection of Berkeley Bowl and Alemany Farmers Market, and the perfect displays of Whole Foods), I wasn't all that impressed. The dried fruit was pretty good, all super sugary. They even had dried strawberries (fresas) which were strangely moist for dried fruit, but good!

Hares and chickens and pheasants, oh my!

Oink.

Enormous emu eggs

More meat stands than you can shake a stick at

Row of squirming sea creatures. The critters next to the lobsters (and approx. the same size!) were enormous prawns famous in Barcelona. The women working the seafood stand were so bad-ass. Cold as ice.

I want to live in this candy hill.

Some "especial" cheese that tasted like cheddar, dragon fruit that tasted like nothing, and some pretty good bread.

Huge ass pear

Veggie Pot Pie 2008

Ever since our coming-to-manhood trip to Europe, porkbelly and I have shared a pre-New Years Eve tradition of recreating a great dish that our host/friend Joris made for us one hazy night. JB joined us this year for Joris' Veggie Pot Pie '08. It was yummy, even though I made the poor executive decision to sub fillo dough for puff pastry (Whole Foods only had bougie puff pastry from La Boulange for a disgusting price! Damn you, Whole Foods! -- oh yea, blog about that place coming soon).

Anyways, this is great stoner comfort food to keep you warm and full during the holidays. Anything you have on hand vis-a-vis vegetables, cheese, and spices will work. Just make sure you have cream cheese and puff pastry (note: the Pepperidge Farm version will only set you back like $3). I scribbled down the recipe the second time I stayed with our dear host Joris, but it is packed away somewhere in my unpacked moving boxes, so we do what we can...

Ingredients:

• one block cream cheese
• any other cheeses (we used cheddar, feta, parmesean)
  
• one zucchini
• one cup mushrooms, sliced or wedges
  
• 2 medium roma tomatoes, sliced
  
• 3 garlic cloves
  
• 1 bell pepper (did you know that in Holland they call it "paprika"?)
• one box frozen puff pastry
• sriracha sauc
• 1 egg
• a tablespoon of crushed nuts (cashews work well)
• dash of basil and oregano
  

Recipe:

• Defrost puff pastry and pre-heat oven to whatever time the puff pastry box demands.
  
• Stir-fry the vegetables (minus tomatoes) in oil and sriracha sauce.
• Flatten a couple sheets of puff pastry with a rolling pin or your hands
  
• Lay out the puff pastry on the bottom of a casserole dish or Dutch oven. Let the edges hang over the side, they will eventually fold over to make a top
  
• Throw an egg on it and spread it around
• Throw some of veggies on it
  
• Spread cream cheese throughout, add other cheeses to taste
• Add rest of veggies
• Add crushed nuts for crunch
  
• Slice tomatoes and add on top
• Sprinkle basil, oregano, salt and pepper
• Add grated parmesan cheese
  
• Pull the puff pastry edges over to cover
• Bake until the pastry puffs and starts to brown
• Cool a bit, then dig in!
  
  
  

Previous year's crispy puff pastry version

This year's fillo dough no-no

It's not the most photogenic dish, but a wonderful food memory to relive every year nonetheless. You know you love me. XoXo, Gossip Girl

Cheap-Ass Lunches in Taiwan

One of the best things about Asia is the abundance of restaurants and vendors serving tasty, cheap-ass food. These places are especially good to hit up for lunch because they serve the food quickly and earnestly, wasting no time on social pleasantries or the rattling-off of daily specials. Usually, each vendor specializes in dishes focusing around a main ingredient (i.e. beef noodle soup, roasted duck, etc). If only more restaurants with the same business plan existed for us here in the US.

From the wet market:

Ba wan: kind of like a savory mochi filled with ground pork, ginger, mushrooms, and topped with gravy

From a noodle soup place:
Beef noodle soup with tendon. The noodles were handmade and thus had marvelous toothfeel, the Taiwanese word for which is "kiu."


From a pork restaurant:


Top to bottom: homemade Chinese sausage (xiang chang); stewed ground pork (kou rou); pork chop and rice with pickled greens (pai gu fan)


From a duck vendor:

Top to bottom: duck soup with Chinese herbs; sauteed duck intestines with bean sprouts and scallion

Taiwanese Breakfast

We should never ignore the breakfasts of great food cultures. Breakfast usually consists of simple, starchy, easy to digest items and can be an excellent look into what a culture considers "comfort foods," things best eaten when suffering from heartbreak, rejection, fever, hangover (all part of a consistent state of being in your early 20s).

Breakfast is kind of a big deal in Taiwan. From my childhood visits to Taipei, I have wonderful memories of mornings walking down to the breakfast shop next to my grandmother's apartment to fill up a tin can with sweet, steaming hot soymilk and carrying it back with a plastic bag full of greasy delights to be enjoyed at the kitchen table. So, during my recent return to the motherland after more than 10 years, I was insistent on eating authentic Taiwanese breakfast every goddamned day.

The most popular breakfast items in Taiwan are dou jiang (soymilk), and a number of savory starchy items: you tiao (fried dough sticks: light, crispy, and savory, can be dipped into the soymilk), shao bing you tiao (you tiao wrapped in thin, flaky sesame bread), fan tuan (glutinous rice stuffed with you tiao, pork sung, and minced pickles), dan bing (egg pancake), luo buo gao (savory daikon cake, usually includes some ground pork for additional flavor), and man tou/ hua juan (steamed buns in various shapes and sizes).

Top left, clockwise: dan bing, shao bing you tiao, fan tuan

The most important item is the soymilk, which can be sweet or savory. The sweet version is smooth and creamy, and can be enjoyed hot (served in a bowl with a spoon), or cold (out of a cup with a straw). The savory version is always served hot, curdled with vinegar, and includes minced pickles and chopped you tiao.

Savory soymilk

I'm not sure if this stuff is so irresistable to me because of my partial Taiwanese roots, but I'm pretty sure it's just because it's damn good.

More Taiwan posts to come...

Spain...On the Road Again and Asleep the Whole Time

KQED and KCSM started airing the first episode of "Spain... On the Road Again" in the Bay Area last week. The idea of two respected foodie personalities, Mark Bittman of the NY Times and Mario-need-I-say-more-Batali traveling the hottest food paradise in Europe right now, is, in theory, irresistable. I imagined the two men making countless visits to colorful outdoor markets and tapas bars, learning how to create vivid and mouthwatering dishes from Spanish cooks in their kitchens, and plenty of informative, witty banter about food. Alas, the first episode failed to bring its audience deep into the world of Spanish food, bringing us, instead, deep into comatose.

Where the show really mucks up is the addition of Gwyneth Paltrow and lesser known, but also pretty, Spanish actress Claudia Bassols. Although Gwynie may be somewhat of a foodie, her prissy comments about only eating birds that grew up in the wild and that were slaughtered naturally, and how she's going to gain 10 kilos on the trip were totally irrelevant. I'm not sure why the producers thought it would be a good idea to split Mark and Mario up for most of the episode, forcing each to participate in vapid chit-chat with one of the actresses while driving around the Spanish countryside in Mercedes convertibles. Neither actress had any opinions of value to contribute and watching either of them try to eat is quite painful. The two minutes Mario and Mark did get to spend alone together at a seafood market was unjustly cut short; I found myself grasping for more M&M time. All of this, topped by the constant musical interlude of Willie Nelson's "On the Road Again" (an absolutely inappropriate soundtrack for a Spanish vacation), in places where it seems they just couldn't find enough interesting dialogue to keep audio busy, made watching this show an utter chore.

Eating Hanoi

The other day, Allison introduced me to this blog, flooded with pictures that make you want to sell your children to move to Asia to eat. The images reminded me of my recent travels to Beijing and through parts of Southeast Asia (Vietnam, Thailand, Cambodia, and Laos). Although my trip was a brief (and first) experience in Southeast Asia, no where near EatingAsia's scope of the local food, I will attempt to recount some of the eating highlights of my visit. This might be a three part post, but I'll save you the pain and start with the country I had the most food pictures/amateur knowledge of: Hanoi. Hanoi's food supposedly pales in comparison to the food in Saigon (which I didn't visit), but...I likee.

A friend who grew up in Hanoi emailed me a list of Vietnamese dishes she insisted I HAD to try while I was there. I printed the email, held it close to my heart and prayed to it at night. Rarely did I find a foreigner eating at any of the street food shops, maybe because of the little stools? Don't be fooled! Normal sized people can sit on them too and not fall.

The streets in Hanoi are small and are specialized in such a way that an entire street of stores sell more or less the same item, which made finding the places listed fairly easy. I only wish I had googled some of the items to figure out what they were beforehand so I wouldn't regret having not tried them!

THE HANOI BIBLE:
- Pho (Pho Suong, ngo Trung Yen, Dinh Liet st; or Pho Cuong, Hang Muoi st, or Bat Dan st, or Pho Hang Giay st). Dont go to fancy restaurants for Pho!!!
- Nem chua ran (Fried fermented pork) ngo Tam Thuong, Hang Bong st. or Hang Chai, near Thanh Quan junior high school. They also have delicious corn and fish
- Cha ca La Vong (Grilled fish), Cha ca st
- Pho cuon, Pho xao - Fried Pho and Pho spring rolls (West lake, Nguyen Khac Hieu st)
- Bun cha - noodles with grilled pork (Hang Manh st)
- Bun oc - noodles with snails (Ngo Cho Dong Xuan)
- Lau ga - Chicken hot pot (18 ngo Hang Chi, Hang Hom st)
- Lau bo - Beef hot pot (Phung Hung st)
- Lau de - Goat hot pot and grilled goat - Dung Rau restaurant, Lang Ha st
- Xoi xeo (sticky rice) - Xoi Yen - Nguyen Huu Huan st
- Doner Kebap - Hang Bac st
- Fried birds - I think its right next to the street Dinh Liet - just ask people around, i cant remember the name of the street
- Banh cuon - this is the perfect breakfast for me - Bao Khanh st
- Bun thang - Hang Hanh st
- Hoa qua dam (mixed fruits) - To Tich st
- Kem Trang Tien (special ice cream of Hanoi) - Trang Tien st
- O Mai (check this out Hang Duong st - Hong Lam shop, u'll love it)
- Banh com ( Hang Than st)
- Snake meat - Le Mat village, Gia Lam

Onto some pictures...

Cha Ca La Vong

Pho cuon

Pho cuon, Pho xao

Bun Cha (photo courtesy of gastronomyblog)

Xoi Xeo (photo courtesy of gastronomyblog)

Banh Cuon (photo courtesy of unemployed-at-last)

Bun with Fried Tofu (Tam Thuong St)

Hoa qua dam (mixed fruits w/ condensed milk)

Che

Rice balls with black sesame filling in ginger syrup

Kem Trang Tien (special Hanoi ice cream)

I want to go back. Now.