Cooking: Pasta with Fresh Herbs

My friend Timmys recently moved back to the bay area to his house which has a beautiful garden on the side. I helped him dig up the soil and plant herbs, tomatoes and other things. It was hard work, but well worth it. On Friday, I went over to his house to visit and utilize the bounty of herbs that have been growing like crazy weeds! I looked up a simple marinara sauce on allrecipes.com and changed a couple things to make it my own. I added bacon, rosemary, thyme and basil and ground beef to it. I also deglazed with a bottle of white wine, added a couple cans of stewed tomatoes and a couple dallops of tomato paste. I the final sauce with some fusilli pasta and served with fresh grated parmesan cheese and torn basil. I was kind of self conscious since everyone had half to one plate while I had two helpings of it. It was fun cooking in another kitchen and having fresh herbs at my disposal.

Here's a picture of the garden:

Dinner:

X-13D?

What's that about?

Yesterday, I went to Albertson's with Justyn to pick up groceries for the MotoGP race today. Let's see, we got hot dogs, potato salad, beer and chips. Justyn wanted chips and salsa and something mysterious caught my eye. A black bag of chips with no flavor listed. WTF? A bag of Doritos that said X-13D. I'm intrigued. I like Doritos. My current favorite flavor is nacho cheese. So, I grabbed a bag of it.

Today we opened it and took a taste. What the hell was this? I tasted blue cheese.

"Is this blue cheese?" I said.

"I don't know." said Justyn.

"Wait, I taste something else. Ketchup?"

"Is this cheeseburger flavored?"

"Holy crap, I think so."

So, I'm about to go online to figure out if we're right. Let's see...

OK that site didn't give any information. I guess it's up to the population to name these chips. I didn't participate but I'm sure it's gotta be cheeseburger. Let's see what Donoho says. He thinks it's some sort of chili or some Mexican dish. Justyn thinks it's cheeseburger or all the flavors combined. Yuck... These chips aren't very good, but it's fun to try and guess what it is.

Review: Godavari Indian Restaurant (formerly Sue's)

I'm part of an online motorcycle community called BARF (bayarearidersforum.com) and there are some avid foodies on there that like to try new restaurants. Coincidentally, we also work near each other in the Mountain View/Sunnyvale area. I haven't tried Sue's Indian Restaurant so I posted up a lunch meet for Wednesday. I did some research on yahoo.com and yelp.com for reviews and the restaurant seemed to meet the approval of fellow foodies.

I had a group of 12 that wanted in on lunch so I called about half an hour ahead and the host was able to accomodate. We arrived at the restaurant around 11:30am and we were the second group to be seated. That had me a little worried even if it was early. If it was a good restaurant, it should have been a little busier. Oh well, let's give the food a try. Everyone was sat down and remained seated until a couple of us got up to get food. I was slightly put off by the lack of selection. Their buffet was small compared to other Indian restaurants. I don't even remember everything I put on my plate but here's my guess. Chicken biriyani (sp?), lamb curry, shrimp curry, green beans and the fried veggie stuff. Everything except for the green beans and veggies had a nice spicy bite to them which was a nice surprise. It was packed full of different flavors and textures. Oh and the best part! The naan. Most Indian buffets put their naan under the heat lamp which makes it limp and yucky-like. This place brings their naan out to the table. Fresh. Hot. Crispy!

As we sat and ate and ate and ate and chatted, someone pointed out that the paintings on that decorated the interior of the restaurant were all done by Sue, the owner. Cool! The owner actually changed the name of the restaurant to Godavari and proudly displayed that fact on the outside of the restaurant. Normally when a restaurant changes their name, it signifies change of ownership.

Eventually everyone was full. It turned out to be about $16 per person drink and tip included. Not bad for unlimited food and drink. Overall the restaurant was very accomodating for such a small space and the food was better than I expected.

Now pictures for your enjoyment!

Godavari Indian Restaurant (formerly Sue's)

216 Castro St.

Mountain View, CA 94041

Phone: 650-969-1112

Review: Chef Liu Restaurant

On Monday for lunch we decided to go to Chef Liu Restaurant which was recommended by Donoho and Jason. After a week of traveling, I was ready to hit up Castro St. for some really good food. As usual, we arrived before the busy lunch crowd and were immediately seated. The restaurant itself is modest with this icky yellow painted walls that Justyn thought was weird.

The waitress was an older lady which I could only assume was one of the owners. She brought us some waters. The lunch menu was already at the table when we sat down. I have a recipe clipping from a newspaper a while back for Dan Dan Noodles which I haven't tried yet. The menu listed something similar called Tan Tan Noodles, so I ordered that. Justyn got the walnut prawns with rice. We also ordered some tea which never came, but whatever.

The portion size for the noodles was huge so I was glad that they provided bowls for the both of us. Justyn's walnut prawns were really good. I wouldn't say they're the best I've had, but they were damn close to it. The Tan Tan Noodles at first glance appeared to be really peanut buttery, but once I tasted it, it had good balance of savory flavor to go with the peanuty texture.

Overall, I was impressed with the restaurant. It seemed authentic enough for a second visit. Until next time....

Chef Liu
236 Castro St.

Mountain View, CA 94041

Cooking: Onigiri (Rice Balls)

Recently, we visited Tanto Restaurant on El Camino which as I previous stated, is supposed to be like a pub like eatery. In particular, one dish stuck out in Justyn's mind and those were the toasted rice balls topped with fish egg and scallion. The day before yesterday, he excitedly pointed out that there was a recipe on how to make these rice balls in one of the cook books that his mom had bought for me. I said that I'd make them for him since we had all the ingrediants at home. We stopped off at Trader Joes to get some 2BC and went home.

I immediately wanted to cook the rice since that would take the longest, however when I poured the rice into the cooker, I realized that I didn't have enough. I ended up having to go to Albertson's to get more rice. Since I was there, I also bought some scallions for garnish.

Now armed with enough rice, I washed it and fired the cooker up. 20 minutes later, we had sticky rice to have fun with. Before that, we had to let the rice cool down a bit.



The next step was wetting our hands so the rice wouldn't stick to them while we shaped them. We found that the easiest shape to form was a flat circle. I believe I was successful in making a triangular shaped one too. We stuffed them with some canned salmon and scallion. Together we made 7 rice balls. Justyn was hungry so with some of the leftover rice, he dumped a bunch of furikake (rice seasoning), spread some seaweed jelly, topped with salmon and green onion and tried to form a rice ball out of all of that. Yeah, that didn't work out too well. The whole thing fell apart while he ate it. I tried a bite and it was yummy though.







Three of the rice balls went into the oven for toasting and the others would be consumed as is. While we waited for the rice balls to toast, I took the opportunity to snap some pictures of the ones that I made. One is coated in furikake and the other is the triangular one with a piece of seaweed wrapped around it. I made some sauce out of grated ginger, soy sauce, rice wine vinegar and a dash of sesame oil.





Justyn let me have one the toasted rice balls so I could smear some red miso. The cookbook featured different ways to enjoy onigiri, and one was with the miso. Since I had some leftover in the fridge, I smeared it onto the half toasted rice ball. It went back into the oven to finish toasting. Unfortunately, we didn't check them often enough and the miso burned. It wasn't exactly ruined, so I still ate it. The toasted rice balls weren't my favorite, but I think the rice should be flavored before toasting. I felt it was a little too bland even with the dipping sauce and the miso on top was bitter and salty. Blech...

I didn't want the whole dinner to be mostly carbs, so I served some salad dressed with our favorite dressing, Angelo Pietro Shoyu. Mmm.. this stuff is seriously good and has so many different applications. I served the salad in my new monkey bowl.



Anyway, you don't realize how much rice is actually in these little rice balls. I think I started out with 3 cups of rice which yielded 7 onigiri. I could only finish 1.75 and Justyn happily finished the rest. It was somewhat of a success, but next time I want to try using rice molds to make different shapes and use different toppings for more variety.

Review: Nijiya Market

At the beginning of this month, Justyn took me to Nijiya Market where they have a variety of bento boxes to choose from. Last time we went to this place, I got pork cutlet with some rice and tako yaki balls. I wanted to try something different this time so I got soba noodles with two types of sushi and a SPAM onigiri. Justyn got some fried stuff (I don't know what it was) with onigiri (rice balls). Instead of taking it back to my work to eat, he suprised me and drove to a near by park. We sat down at a picnic table and dove into our lunch. For pre-made bento boxes, this stuff isn't bad. It's a quick and easy option to have instead of going to an actual Japanese restaurant. The quality obviously isn't as good, it's damn tasty for a market.



Nijiya Market
143 E. El Camino Real
Mountain View, CA 94040
www.nijiya.com

Mother's Day Review: Tanto Restaurant

Today, Justyn went out on another ride while I slept in. For lunch I had the lion's head stew and relaxed at home catching up on TV shows that I had missed while in Westford, MA.

He gave me a call around 1:45pm letting me know that he was at High Five pizza which is right near our house. I met up with him and the group he rode with to hang out. I had a couple glasses of wine and pizza. I'm proud to say that this was the first time I was able to eat pizza since our New Years Day food poisoning fiasco. As always the pizza was good at tihs place.

After lunch, we came home and relaxed for a while before going to Mother's Day dinner. A couple weeks ago, we decided on going to Tanto Restaurant. We had been there once before and remembered it as being a good place with good food. The restaurant is set up to be an after work pub for Japanese business men. We sat on pillows at a small table for 6 (my parents, my sister, Justyn, his mom and I). I don't remember exactly what we ordered and because I'm tired, I'll just show you what we ate. It was all very good and I highly recommend the ochazuke (sp?) and peach calipico (cow piss haha I know.. funny name).