Category: food

One of our guidebooks claimed that while Coca-cola was ever present, Berliners drink their own local soft drinks. We haven’t found that to be the case; it seems only Coke products are here. Of course there are minor differences: regular Coke is made with sugar, Diet Coke (called “Coke light” here) has saccharine. Then there’s the stuff you can’t get back home (outside of World of Coke), such as “Mezzo Mix” which is essentially Coke with orange. I found this one, “The Spirit of Georgia” our first day here. Despite many years living in Georgia, I was not quite sure what our collective spirit was, but now I know it is yellow-tinted Sprite.

Finally, kosher Coke is back!

I suppose it’s a bit bourgeois to go to really expensive restaurants while the economy is crashing down around us. But Angeline’s birthday arrived last week, and it has been hard to resist the siren song of Komi from all the positive things we’ve heard. So off we went to Johnny Monis’ fancy greek restaurant last Friday night.

As we tend to do in the high end places, we went with the degustazione, the tasting menu. Angeline ordered a crisp glass of white wine, and I signed up for the three glass pairing. (Not being a wine connoisseur, I couldn’t really say whether the pairing was good or bad. The sommelier didn’t spend a lot of time explaining the choices, and there was nothing revelatory about the choices from my point of view. At any rate, that hardly put a damper on the meal.) The tasting menu begins with an almost unending parade of small plates, they call mezzethakia (actually if you google “mezzethakia,” you’ll get much better reviews of Komi right off the bat). Initial courses were primarily seafood: sashimi ahi in olive oil with salt and chives, sea urchin and oyster in a fruity gel, a salad with baby octopus tentacles, a really nice ceviche with sweet pine nuts (I forget the fish, salmon perhaps?), and scallop carpaccio with truffle mayonnaise. A steak tartare with white truffle ice cream soon followed. And finally, on a plate with tiny foie gras sandwiches, handmade animal crackers, and goat cheese smores, was a date stuffed with mascarpone cheese, sprinkled with fluer de sel. It may not sound like much, but this last, one of the most talked-about items from his restaurant, was excellent and well worth the hype.

For pasta, I had a tagliatelle, I think, while Ange had pumpkin ravioli that were amazing. Then they brought the “salad” course: a one inch crouton, deep fried with a caesar salad puree inside. Very imaginative, and it did taste just like a tiny caesar salad.

The small portions gave way for a massive katsikaki (slow roasted goat shoulder). This was very good: coated in artisanal salt, the outside was crisp and flavorful, a bit like roasted chicken skin, while the inside was fork tender, like a less-fatty pork barbecue. It was served with an array of home-made condiments. Dessert included various chocolate presentations (a mousse and a small cake, if I recall correctly) and some tasty greek donuts. The bill came with home-made almond lollipops, presumably to distract from the number of digits in the total.

Bottom line: definitely top three restaurants I’ve been to, top one or two in DC. Well worth eating PB&J for a month to save up the cash.

I tried making sandwich bread this weekend since we forgot to buy it from the grocery store. With a stand mixer, this was not hard at all, and it rocks our socks. Oh, the BLTs I am going to make with this!

As long as I’ve known about kosher for Passover Coke, I’ve needed it. Coca-cola made with sugar, they said, the way it used to be. I wasn’t sure I believed it existed, but I was hopeful. Last year, I dropped by the KosherMart around Seder time looking for this mythical cola, but all they had was Dr. Brown’s and kosher Diet Coke. “WTF?” I asked the clerk, but he was still unable to help me.

Then, last night I spotted a crate of yellow-capped 2-liters at Giant. “w00t!” I exclaimed, as I snagged a few. Finally, I would be able to answer that age old question: is KFP Coke really better than normal Coke? (I seem to remember from last year that the company line was, “no, you are imagining things. Please go back to enjoying your corn syrup.”)

I’m all about the science, so I had my lovely assistant decant equal amounts of regular and KFP coke into glasses while I was in the other room. Not knowing which was which, I took a sip of each, and selected my favorite.

And the winner is: KFP, easily. They do taste similar enough, but the big difference is in finish. Sucrose has a clean, smooth finish, while HFCS has quite a harsh aftertaste — not Splenda harsh, mind you, but definitely noticeable if you have something to compare it against.

I approve of this religious tradition!

I made a promise to myself when Cook’s Illustrated began arriving in my mailbox: each month, I have to make at least one recipe from the latest issue. The Jan/Feb issue has an insanely simple bread recipe based on a no-knead recipe from Mark Bittman. I have used his French baguette recipe from How to Cook Everything with much success, but with this recipe, I may just leave the stand mixer in the cupboard from now on.

2 hour cooling time? Ugh! I can’t wait to eat this.

Frommer’s and Let’s Go! were our guide books to the foodie destinations on the islands. By the way, I hate that term, foodie. Anyway, we tried to hit some of the nicer restaurants as well as experience some local flavor. We also tried to take pictures of all of the food, though people looked at us funny.

In the latter category, saimin (similar to ramen noodles) was highly recommended by both guides. Hamura’s in Lihu’e, was definitely a locals spot; we stuck out like a pair of sore sunburned thumbs. The bowls come with a piece of fish, an egg, some random bits of greenery, and a couple of wontons. The food was great as these things go, though I prefer dry food to wet. I added a pair of satays to the mix that were excellent. Also a local Lihu’e haunt, The Deli and Bread Connection served up some mighty fine sandwiches. This was the only place we visited twice, so that says something.

On the pricier side, there was Ciao Mein, the strange mix of Asian and Italian food that had us eating risotto with chopsticks. Best word to describe this is “Wha?” They did sauce a decent chicken though.

Keo’s is a Thai restaurant in Waikiki. Here I had perhaps the best pork chop I’ve ever had. The more typical Asian fare looked good as well.
Our two best meals were actually at a chain restaurant. Sorry local establishments, but McDonald’s just knows how to make awesome fries. Ok, scratch that — they were actually at Roy’s Restaurant, which declares itself a practitioner of “Hawaiian fusion cuisine,” whatever that is. But they can cook the hell out of a fish. And steak. And BBQ ribs. The Waikiki location was so good we had to try the Poipu one too. Which wasn’t quite as good, but it still beat the pants off of a lot of the resort restaurants.

And we ate lots and lots of ahi. Raw, seared, maki rolls, nut crusted, peppercorn crusted… any way that it could be prepared, I think we ate it.

I officially opened the 10 month grill season last weekend. The only thing worse than doing the propane exchange rigamarole at Home Depot: doing the exchange at Home Depot, getting handed an empty tank, looking at the guy funny but assuming he knows what he’s doing (after all that’s his job), going home to verify that yes, the new tank is empty, and going back to try to find someone who cares so you can finally take the new tank home and cook with it because it’s now 4pm and you haven’t had lunch yet.

One nice thing about amateur home cooking is that you can create that which you cannot find in a restaurant. In my case: I made fajitas with one of the several filet mignons in my freezer. You may say that is silly to use such an expensive cut of meat in place of a $3 flank steak in a cooking application where toughness really doesn’t matter, and you may be right, but that doesn’t change the fact that the “file-tas” were damn good. Now I just need to figure out how to work bacon into that equation…

Angeline and I took our first cooking class last Saturday, despite her having the worst case of pink eye I’ve ever seen (we tried to find a stand-in for her prepaid slot unsuccessfully). Anyway, the class was on basic Chinese cooking, and an area chef supplied us with recipes and went over some basic techniques. I can’t say that I learned much that I didn’t already know, apart from the Mandarin words approximately meaning ‘slice’ and ‘shred’ (and ‘death’), but this was a nice format for a class (that is, much wine was consumed).

We’ll see how it goes when I remake all of these dishes in my own kitchen, which is coming because Ange was unable to taste anything we prepared. I had to describe it in my uninformed-food-critic vocabulary: “hmm, I guess it is salty and grassy.”

WTF is up with prizes from Cracker Jacks lately? I remember in my youth the prizes would sometimes suck, like you’d get a sticker or a temporary tattoo or something like that, but nowhere near the suckage of recent times. Last week I bought a huge bag of the sticky, not-enough-peanuts-having treat while at a Caps game. I thought the prize couldn’t be worse than my last one from several years ago, a “notepad” — that is, a tiny square of paper with four lines on it and a picture of an Octopus — but I was wrong. Instead, I got a piece of paper that informed me historical facts about Susan B. Anthony with an unflattering drawing of same. Who the hell would want this? CJ, if you have decided your mission is to help mankind by educating kids, how about educating them that this bag of caramel corn has 8000 calories inside it and eating it will make one enormous. And the kernels will somehow get stuck to all of your clothes and people will laugh at you and say, “hey look, it’s the guy with the popcorn stuck to his pants” and you will cry.

Moose munch is way better.