Filed under: Places to Eat | Tags: California, food, foodtruck, korean, Los Angeles, Mexican
That’s right. Your eyes aren’t playing tricks on you. It’s a taco with queso fresco, grilled asparagus, salsa verde and a fried egg. It’s the spring special I ordered at LA’s famous Kogi Korean Mexican Street Truck. It believe @kogibbq was one of the first street food trucks to tweet it’s whereabouts, but I’m too tuckered out to research that further. So basically, I’m way behind the times on this one. However, I consider it a momentous personal food triumph to try out the Kogi BBQ truck out myself.
Also, I heard today (via http://masarevolution.com) that while Chicago fights to join the food truck world, LA is also undergoing new food truck politics as the health department begins to rate food trucks the same way they do for standard restaurants. This legitimizes food trucks in a way that rent-paying, static, brick and mortar restaurants don’t want to see happen.
Since being in LA I’ve also eaten tons of citrus (pomelos! grapefruit! mandarins! blood oranges!), and I’ve discovered KCRW’s Good Food podcast!
Filed under: Places to Drink, Places to Eat | Tags: bars, best, favorites, food, love, New York City, restaurants
New York and Food. Two loves that will never be separated. Last week, New York was nearly too cold to be enjoyable, but I ducked into many a food/coffee/drinking establishment to warm up. Highlights below.
Filed under: Places to Eat, Travel | Tags: farms, food, Garden City, Kansas, restaurants, Travel
Looking at the map route from Colorado Springs to Wichita on Hwy 50, Garden City was our only choice for a lunch break. Luckily my boss (who knows where to eat on any roadtrip-I hope I am her apprentice) knew that Garden City was home to many recent Mexican and Vietnamese transplants, meaning fresh tortillas and pho were on my mind all through eastern CO. We felt really lucky to be on track to arrive an hour before the Vietnamese restaurant we found online (Pho Hoa One) closed, yet the door was locked! Tragically, we hadn’t accounted for the change from Mountain to Central time, and therefore we had just missed lunch. We asked for recommendations at a tortilleria and were pointed to El Conquistador. It was solid, not exceptional, but that alone was completely unexpected in a long drive through Kansas.
Filed under: Cook it | Tags: autumn, dinner, eggs, food, squash, veggies, Wichita
Autumn in Wichita has meant corn mazes, pumpkin patches, and a multitude of squash dinners. One night we ate this Spaghetti Squash and Chard Gratin recipe as written (switching out the chard for kale). It was yummy, and because it was a casserole it felt very midwest, which is very fitting.
Another evening Nina and Sara roasted a whole chicken and acorn squash. They filled the chicken with a lemon, sage, and s+p and rubbed butter, garlic, and sage on the skin. Then, into a baking pan went yams, red potatoes, onions, apples, vegetable broth and the chicken. This they roasted for approximately 1 1/2 hr. The squash was halved and roasted in tinfoil with some water for 40 mins. They then filled the middles with butter and brown sugar and roasted for another 10 mins. Devine.
However, for me, the epitome of autumn food is the butternut squash. And if you’re eating butternut squash, you should most definitely be eating it with sage, caramelized onions, some delightful soft cheese (goat, gorgonzola), and maybe some pear or walnuts. That go-to combination can work in pasta, on a whole wheat pizza or on its glorious lonesome. We made it into a scramble. It was the best scramble I’ve ever had, and I don’t take eggs lightly. This is definitely going to be an autumnal special at my future breakfast cafe. Recipe below. Sara whipped up a side salad of spinach, dried cranberries, pears, and pistachio nuts (with a dressing of balsamic, olive oil, mustard, and maple syrup). And Nina whipped up some oatmeal cookies for dessert!
Scramble recipe follows
I love cooking dinner over wine with friends…obviously. But I love doing it most with Olga. Olga has a bajillion cookbooks reaped from the sale table at Borders and has stacks and stacks of Food & Wine magazine. I’m visiting Olga in DC whom I haven’t seen for one whole year! And as she knows me very well, she went grocery shopping for the occasion. Olga is my food partner in crime. I often hear her saying “everything in moderation” as she orders sinful desserts. She travels even more than I do, and I’d choose cooking, drinking, dancing, and chatting with her over a night on the town any day! And staying with her is better than being at home (if I had one).
In DC, we hit up some yummy restaurants (Hank’s Oyster Bar, Mama Ayeshas), but spent most of the time cooking.
One evening, we made vanilla sweet potatoes, portabello mushroom sandwiches, and watermelon salad. I wanted to use this recipe for sweet potatoes, but made some alterations. Firstly, I changed the sweet potato recipe because whole milk was $1 cheaper than heavy cream, and I thought it would serve just as well (it did). AND as Trader Joe’s only had bourbon vanilla extract (boohoo), we went with that. Autumn is delicious.
As for the portobello burgers, we sliced the mushrooms (no longer burgers) and sauteed them till soft. We placed them on the soft and chewy ciabatta (good DC bakery anyone?) along with sliced tomatoes and a yummy mixture of one avocado smushed with some TJ wasabi mayonnaise.
The watermelon salad was simply chunks of watermelon, chopped basil, and goat cheese.
We finished everything, including the wine (TJ’s $5 Nero D’Avola, introduced by Anna) and all was delicious. The best part was the company.
Filed under: Places to Eat, Travel | Tags: food, pie, restaurants, south, Virginia
For my mom’s birthday, it was imperative that the weekend was filled with food my mom loves and rarely eats. This basically meant a lot of salty southern food. Thanks to the Surry House Restaurant in Surry, VA (who received a frantic phone call from me asking for a large pick up order at exactly 3pm) we feasted on fantastic southern fried chicken, stewed tomatoes, collard greens, hush puppies, salad, and peanut pie.
