Restaurant Review 360: Jasmine and The first SFBA

Two very exciting and cool events coming up here on the blog. First off, I’m hosting the May Restaurant Review 360 event. First hosted last month on Herbivoracious, this means that a whole slew of us Seattle area food bloggers all review the same restaurant, then I’ll round them up and post an overview of the reviews. I’m very excited to take on the event, and have chosen Jasmine Provincial Vietnamese Restaurant. It is relatively new and has recieved complimentary reviews, so I think it fits as a candidate.

Bloggers: All you’ve got to do is review this restaurant by May 20th and link back to this post and I’ll get you included on the event. If you have any questions, you can leave a comment or find my info under “about”.

The First SFBA: What? You don’t know about the SFBA?? Ha! That’s because I just invented it! No, seriously I was thinking of all the great Seattle food blogs I read and how I wish there was a way to honor the best posts and bloggers who are really doing great work for the local food blog community. It is the Seattle Food Blogger Award. I had previously commented that Keren over at Frantic Foodie does great work with her food blogger dinners and the folks over at MSG150 are doing with their round up of the ID. So now I’ve instituted a new monthly feature here, and I’m kicking it off a day early so it coincides with the Restaurant Review 360. Why? Because the first award is going to Herbivoracious for the starting of the Restaurant Review 360.

Thanks, Herbivoracious, for providing Seattle food bloggers a way to connect with each other and get to know each others’ views of the same stuff, all on their own schedule. It is fun, informative and very cool. The very first Seattle Food Blogger Award goes to you!

(I’m working on designing a widget for you!)

Thoughts on Eating Locally

Eating local is something that is on the tip of everyone’s tongue these days–you’ve heard it–look at labels, shop at farmers’ markets, etc, etc. I agree, I would rather have my food come from nearby than shipped halfway across the country where it had to be picked before ripening so it could hold up to the shipping process. I do shop at farmers’ markets, a fair amount, though mostly for the cheap stuff, since I can’t often afford $14/lb lamb and the such.

Where my issue with this is comes from who I’m supporting. I love the idea of supporting my local farmers’ over the huge coporate stores, but I don’t often shop in those, so when I am shopping at the farmers’ market, it is the mom and pop asian markets that are losing my business. I used to feel guilty when I went to the asian market, I don’t know how my duck was raised, I don’t know where my greens were grown. I know the tofu comes from the factory down the street, so that is nice (though it is 50 cents cheaper at the factory). For a while I had felt guilty buying at the asian mart, supporting the wrong people, not getting local produce. Then today I realized I am eating locally, a different kind of locally.

When I say I eat locally, I want it to mean I support my community. Whether this means that my greens are grown in Carnation or it means that I’m supporting the immigrant couple that run the Ethiopian store down the street (Piassa Market), I know that my money is staying here in Seattle. Maybe my lentils aren’t grown nearby, but the money I’m paying for them is paying for my neighborhood to remain diverse. Perhaps my bok choy comes from California, but the money I pay for it is going to pay to raise children here in Seattle. I may not know where my mango comes from, but I know that by eating locally that no company in Minnesota or Boston is hording my milk money.

I’m going to a dinner entitled “Eat Local” tonight. I’m interested in where the organizers feel these options lie on the spectrum of locality.

Know Your Limits

There is a reticence I feel when writing about screwing up a dish. Nobody wants to read about bad food, why would they read articles by someone who makes the same mistakes they could? So after a failure this weekend, I was hesitant to write this morning. Never-mind that I successfully made ice cream twice this weekend, my first two times (caramel and sea salt and honey-rosemary). That is not what I think about as I sit down to inform my readers out there in internet land. I can think only of my screw ups this weekend.

I’ve long known that baking is not for me. I don’t like measuring and I hate recipes, baking is an exact science, these are necessities. With cooking I can toss and taste and fix and play, but with baking everything must be done as told. Last fall I posted about a messed up pumpkin pie. Today it was meringues. I had 10 leftover egg whites from making ice cream with the yolk and, of course, plenty of baker’s sugar. So the thing that came to mind was meringues. They didn’t work. An hour and a half, three tired pairs of arms and one wussy one armed mixer later, we gave up. It only went on this long because I have great friends who helped and tried to encourage me to keep trying, helping to whip while I prepared the salmon for dinner. But in the end, it was a failure.

So what comes out of this? I think the lesson is that I’ve learned my limits. I just won’t follow a recipe, so why should I try? Yes, it would make me a more well rounded cook, but it is just painful when it happens, and let’s be honest, I don’t really like sweet stuff anyways (except caramel and sea salt ice cream!). So I will continue to perfect my ability to cook delicious savory items and if you ever come to dinner, expect your only dessert to be ice cream!

A Thai Treat

On the street that I work, like so many in Seattle, there are multiple Thai restaurants. I happen to prefer Samui over Jamjuree, but my boss and the controller disagree. So when we take the occaissonal lunch outside of the office, it is usually to Jamjuree, as was the case today.  It was the usual fare, nothing out of the ordinary, fairly Americanized Thai fare. What stood out to me was not the food, nor the service (which was actually a cut above, friendly, prompt and overly curteous).

Everything on the menu, in classic Asian lunch special fashion came with rice, except for the noodle meals, which made it difficult for me to order anything. It is, you see, Passover, the Jewish holiday during which I am forbidden to eat anything with wheat or grains, basically. No rice, no noodles. I ordered the Tom Yum noodle soup, a seafood soup (yes, I eat shrimp, yes, I see the irony), but with out the noodles. When it came, lo and behold, there were no noodles, which in and of itself was impressive.

As I began eating I noticed a ton of bean sprouts. You know, the kind that they give you too many of on bad phad thai. But instead of annoyingly being in the way of my noodles, here they were amazing. I looked over at J’s soup, as he had ordered the same thing, but with the noodles. Nope, no bean sprouts. The restaurant had kindly realized that my soup would be lacking without the noodles and replaced them with the nearest noodle like vegetable. My heart was warmed. So was my mouth, but that was more due to the amount of hot sauce I added.

Doing Things Twice: Mango Salad and Duck Prosciutto

Some parents have to ask their kids “if Jimmy jumped off a bridge would you” because their kids are liable to follow. Not me. My parents had to be out in front, pulling dangerous objects (electrical sockets, sharp knives) out of my path, hoping that I did not get the idea to jump off a bridge. I never feared trying things once, and I certainly didn’t need a friend to do it first. No, my problem is with doing things a second time.

This continues to be true with my cooking. I have a lot of mangoes and duck prosciutto, I’ll make a daringly spicy salad. That’s easy. What’s harder for me is to go back and try it a second time. To make those improvements. As you can see on my blog (and all of my elementary school teachers knew) I don’t like to go back, to check my work, to re-do anything. But this is my big area for improvement. Instead of just making things once, I will make them a second time. And you know what? My mango salad was better the second time! The picture above is from the first time, we discovered the prosciutto imparts more taste when it is chopped up in small pieces where they coat and stick to the mango chunks. I chose this picture, though, because it is prettier with the swoosh of prosciutto running through.

This makes enough for 8-10 people as a side dish or appetizer:

2 Mangos, diced

1/2 red onion, diced

Juice of 2 limes

1 Tablespoon Sambal Oelek (Sriracha aka rooster sauce should work too)

1 Teaspoon of Soy Sauce

1 Teaspoon sesame oil

7 thin slices of duck prosciutto, chopped

Mix the soy, oil, lime juice and sambal together, mix the onion and mango together. Pour the dressing over the onion and mango and toss to coat. This was an important order to do things, because it really helped adhere the small pieces of prosciutto to the mango instead of letting them fall to the bottom of the bowl. Toss in the prosciutto and mix well, serve immediately or chill up to 2 hours in the fridge, then return to room temperature to serve.
 

Bush Garden

Today I was invited to join the MSG150 crew. I had seen that their previous post was Ocean City, and given that they have a planned out route, was hopeful that this would mean I would get to eat next door at Shanghai Garden. We used to call Shanghai Garden “chinese crack” because of our addiction to the hand shaved green noodles. But alas, when the call came in, it was a different garden that I got to eat at–Bush Garden. I arrived a bit ahead of the others and peeked into half of the dining room. Booths were so tall you couldn’t see over the top, allowing for the ultimate in privacy along one wall. The other half was an enormously long sushi bar. The size of the sushi bar gave me a little bit of hope in regards to the food.

Let me back up. Bush Garden is not a place where I had high expectations for the food. Mostly known for being a karaoke lounge, I was a little surprised it even bothered being open for lunch. In fact, there were quite a few people milling about and eating lunch. The entrance way has a small bamboo seating place and an indoor garden area that looks like it come out of a miniature golf course. We were taken back to the karaoke lounge area. I ordered, full of confidence from the size of the sushi bar, a sushi special.

For $6.95 I was served a miso soup, a small salad, 5 nigiri sushi and 2 hand rolls. That is dirt cheap, my friends. For $6.95 you get the pieces of square shaped half frozen tuna maki at the grocery store. And this was definitely better than store sushi. It was clearly made on the spot, the rice was made that day, though not too recently. The fish quality was definitely not top notch. It was cut into odd shapes and was slightly grainy. It tasted fresh though, not old, and they did not skimp on it. My 5 nigiri were ahi and albacore tuna, salmon, shrimp and a white fish that I didn’t identify and can’t remember. One hand roll was cucumber and the other was spicy tuna, a favorite of mine.

Overall, I have to admit I was pretty impressed at the amount and quality of sushi I got for 6.95, though I’m not sure I wouldn’t just rather get cheap food elsewhere and save sushi for the splurges!

 

Homemade Duck Prosciutto

It is done! Finally. Well, maybe it was done before, I think I should have taken it down just a touch earlier. Here is the final product:

Sigh. So beautiful. The reason I think I should have taken it down earlier is that there is a little sliver at the bottom that is just a touch harder than prosciutto should be. But the rest has that unctous, melt in your mouth texture. I only sliced a few tastes so I can have our executive chef slice me the rest on a real slicer. I’m already dreaming up the many things I can do with it too. A quick briefing on how to make your own duck prosciutto:

Buy duck or duck breasts. I just used joe average $8 duck from Dong Hing, but if you live somewhere where you can’t buy a cheap entire duck at the local market, just get the breasts, that all you need. Bury the breasts in salt in the fridge for 24 hours. Mine came out very salty, I think because I didn’t rinse well enough at this next step. Rinse well and pat dry. Wrap in 1 layer of cheese cloth and hang in a cool dry space. I used an extra bedroom that we don’t keep heated, with the window cracked for ventilation, in a closet for shielding excessive light. I took mine down after 9 days. 7 or 8 probably would have been optimal.

And there you have it, the infamous duck is finished!

Homemade Cheese and Gnudi

Last week, while waiting for my duck to cure (yes, it is like watching a pot boil), I made cheese. I made a whole milk cheese, using organic milk and breaking it with lemon juice (slowly bring milk to a rolling boil, add lemon juice, strain with cheesecloth) and a goat cheese. The goat cheese was far tastier. I broke that with rice vinegar (because the only vinegars I had were that and balsamic), to add a sweetness to the goat-y stink, but the sweetness wasn’t really present. The goat cheese was delightfully light and faintly goatish, and was perfect for spreading on toast or baguettes. The milk cheese was less so. It was a little chalky in texture, and not very flavorful. I chose not to salt it because it was already so chalky, but then it was also bland.

The only thing I had come up with for it was that it was quite tasty replacing the mozzarella in a caprese salad, especially since the dry cheese absorbed so much balsamic dressing. Then it hit me, I could make little gnudi-gnocchi things! And I did!

Here they are, sauteed with salt, pepper and rosemary in brown butter.

I have no real recipe for these, I went by feel. I used what was left of the cheese (probably 2/3 of the original output of a carton of milk) added one egg, then added flour until it had a pasta dough like texture.

I broke off small pieces from this, rolling them out the way you made a snake out of playdough back in the day, then cutting that up into gnocchi size pieces. Then I dropped them all into boiling water, pulling them out as they floated to the top. That was it. It was so quick, so easy and amazingly delicious.

A Duck Update

I was going to do the teaser photo last week and this week supply you with photos of the finished products, but the products are not yet finished. Well, the duck stock is, but it is a little less photogenic. The Duck Confit is also finished, however, it is in the fridge submerged in duck fat (and lard!), and thus is not pretty, so when I figure out how to use it, I promise to show it off. And last but not least, my darling duck prosciuttos are still hanging. They are still a little soft in the center so I’m reluctant to take them down. In the meantime, to keep myself from playing with the duck I have made 2 kinds of cheese and planted 4 herbs! But I still can’t help but watch my prosciuttos incessently!

Getting Choosy at Txori

Did you see how I did that, made it easy to pronounce Txori while also making a little pun? Ahh, that is why I love writing. This is my entry for the Seattle Restaurant Review 360 over at Herbivoracious.

We didn’t come to Txori with a plan. I had heard it was true tapas portions, and had warned B that a back up plan for dinner would be necessary. Looking at the menu online he insisted that we at least give it the opportunity to be a dinner. I arrived after B, I’m not sure by how much, but he was already seated. It turned out there was a family style dinner going on as well, which he decided we did not want to do, as that would be a different review. However, it sounded like a cool thing $35/person on the first monday of every month. We were at the restaurant for almost 45 minutes, though, and they just finally were recieving soup, the first food we saw go to them.

This slowness on the family style table was also present at our own meal. I sat down and soon grew frustrated as I was not greeted, nor offered a drink for some time. Finally with much effort, I was able to flag down a waitress and order my Kalimotxo. “And your beer will be coming soon, sir” she said to Brett. What? I couldn’t believe there had been a beer on order this whole time as well. I was shocked that it was so slow. My drink, the Kalimotxo is one that I have known and loved before–red wine and coke with a hint of orange. People tend to turn their nose up, but it is basically like a very simple sangria. The sweetness of the fruit is replaced by that of the coke, with the added fizziness. The waitress, who, aside from having been quite slow, was extremely sweet, replied “you know what you are doing!” when I ordered the Kalimotxo. Damn straight I do.

We moved on to ordering food. The service got much better here, each tapa was perfectly timed to come out one at a time, allowing us to savor them. The first one was ensalada de pato confit, or duck confit and a slice of orange over a bit of lettuce. It fit entirely into an asian spoon, to help you with the size. This I had expected and didn’t mind, but I think this got B understanding just how small these were. The salad was tasty, if unremarkable. Next up was the calamares en su tinta. Squid in its own ink is one of those foods that just work so well, as they should. It was served over a large slice of baguette with a smear of mayonaise. This was a touch larger, and for me more of an ideal tapa size. I found this delicious, possibly even better than the version I had at Txori’s sister restaurant, Harvest Vine. Finally we got the Rabo de Toro, a braised oxtail over potatos. It was tasty, though much larger than the other bites, possibly to me, even seeming larger than a tapa should be, more like a small plate size. The oxtail was perfectly cooked to a velvety texture and a deep beefy flavor. It was served over thinly sliced though still slightly undercooked potatos. The potatos lacked the element of soaking up the sauce that you would normally desire with a braised oxtail (see the gnocchi at Quinns, for example).

Following these three we decided to pack up shop and head to our local Sichuan restaurant to continue our meal. The meal, to me, fulfilled exactly what a tapas place is truly supposed to. We enjoyed a drink, we munched a little, we hung out. As long as Txori is not entered with an attitude expecting a perfect meal–like at Harvest Vine–I think it fills its niche well. I would certainly grab a drink and a nibble here again. For two drink and 3 nibbles, we got out for a total of about $25 including tax and tip, so very reasonable.