Last night I made Crema Catalana, a Catalan custard similar to creme brulee. That meant I had a lot of egg whites leftover, so I figured I'd make meringues.

Both my mother and my grandmother Granny used to make meringues from time to time. Granny made them white and crunchy. My mother insisted on putting food coloring on them, and they always ended up being soggy. I much preferred Granny's. In Argentina, meringue "sandwiches", with a dulce de leche filling, are pretty common. Tiny ones are presented as masas finas, and huge ones make a diabetes-inducing snack.

Still, in my many years as a home cook I'd never made meringues - I guess I thought they were too hard. Nothing could be further from the truth. It must be the easiest thing I ever made. Basically all you do is beat egg whites until they form stiff peaks, add sugar (1/4 cup per egg white - I told you they were sinful) and beat until the peaks form again. Then you put them in a 200F pre-heated oven for an hour, turn off the heat and leave them in the oven for another hour. The ones I made last night turned out beautiful, even though the girls (7 & 4 yo) were the ones to put them on the cookie sheets (make sure to oil/flour them well).

Will I make them again? Perhaps if I have too many egg whites to get rid off, but really, they are so sugary that I feel bad giving them to my children.

We had a library sale at the San Leandro Public Library this morning, and I can't believe how badly I fared cookbook wise. There were barely any good cookbooks, and pretty much nothing ethnic/international. What I ended up buying was:

China Moon Cookbook

Modern Chinese cuisine from a now-defunct San Francisco restaurant

Ghirardelli Original Chocolate Cookbook

The Ghirardelli Factori Store is close to our home and we shop there all the time. I've seen this cookbook there and have been tempted to buy it - now I got it for less than $1 :-)

A Feast of Scotland

I hesitated in buying this cookbook as it'll be many years before I get to the "S" cuisines, but you never know when I'll want to celebrate some Scottish festival.

and a non-cookbook

Feeding a Yen: Savoring Local Specialties, from Kansas City to Cuzco

I'm not particularly big on food writing, but I thought I'd give this one a try, specially as it could give me ideas of dishes to try.

Last night, to celebrate Mika's 7th birthday (which we are celebrating again today, and celebrated before on Wednesday), I made my grandmother's sponge cake. It has been over 25 years since I've had it, but I think what I made was pretty close to the original. The cake, perhaps, wasn't as light - and the lemon curd was too creamy-looking (I remember my grandmother's as being more translucent). But it tasted quite close to what my grandmother made, and it was very yummy.

At first I thought the recipe she used came from the Better Homes & Gardens New Cookbook that she used, but then I found a recipe typed up into my aunt Gladys' recipe notebook, so that's the one I made. Here is the recipe.

Granny's Sponge Cake

-2 cups sifted flour -2 tsp. baking powder -1/2 tsp. salt -4 eggs, separated -1 cup cold water -2 tsp. lemon rind, grated -1 3/4 cups sugar -2 tsp. lemon juice

Preheat oven to 350F

Mix sifted flour with the baking powder and the salt. Sift three additional times. Set aside.

Beat together 4 yolks with the cold water and lemon rind until light and frothy. Gradually add 1 1/2 cups sugar and then the flour. Set aside.

In a clean bowl, beat the egg whites until frothy. Add the sugar and lemon juice and beat until it has stiff peaks.

Fold the egg whites into the flour mixture. Pour into ungreased 8" baking pans. Bake for 25 minutes. Cool, unmold and frost.

Granny's Lemon Frosting

-2 cups sugar -1/2 cup + 2 Tbsp flour -2 eggs, lightly beaten -2/3 cup lemon juice -1 1/3 cup water -4 tsp. butter -2 tsp. lemon rind -2 cups whipped cream

Combine the sugar, flour, eggs, lemon juice, water and butter in a medium pot. Put pot on top of a double boiler, or directly under a very low heat, and cook stirring constantly until it thickens, about 10 minutes. Remove and cool completely.

Fold in the lemon rind and 1/2 cup of whipped cream. Spread between cake layers. Fold in the remaining 1 1/2 cups whipped cream, and frost top and sides of cake.

Granny's and Gladys' Recipe Book

I made lamb chops from this epicurious.com recipe last night for the adults, given the lamb chops were on sale at Lucky's for 50% off. I followed the recipe exactly, with the exception of using unfiltered apple /juice/ rather than /cider/ - because I could either get filtered cider or unfiltered juice. The results were quite good, but not spectacular. I'm not sure that there is a spectacular way of preparing lamb chops, though :-) Still, next time I'll try something else.

I've just finished cooking and writing up my Catalan and Corsican menus.

I'd specially recommend the Catalan Civet de Porc and the Corsican cheese & mint beignets.

Next on the agenda, Baleares (I'd skipped it before), Chilean & Cretan food.

I just saw this video in Salon.com and I cannot get over the shock of seeing Padma Lakshmi, of Top Chef fame selling herself in this commercial for Carl's Junior (or another burger company, I can't imagine anyone paying attention to what the product actually is). If you are a guy, you'll probably think the video is really hot. As a woman I find it repulsive. Doesn't she make enough money on Top Chef, modeling and writing cookbooks, that she also needs to cheapen herself in a commercial like this?

I also just heard that she is Salman Rushdie's ex-wife - which doesn't surprise me, the guy may be a great writer, but he's also a publicity whore.

As Mike (my husband) reports in San Leandro Bytes, his blog about all the goings on in San Leandro, Grocery Outlet, a discounter of mostly canned/boxed food, is coming to San Leandro. The store, which is almost finished, is located on East 14th, near Estabrook Street - a stone throw away from my house. It occupies the lot previously occupied by the Salvation Army. An affordable housing unit for seniors is being built next door.

It's been quite a while since I've been to a Grocery Outlet - but I'm hoping this one will be cleaner and neater than others of its kind. I'm also hoping it will not add a lot to the traffic on Estabrook St. - which is already congested at rush time.

That said, I'm happy that we'll have a grocery store so close to our house. Though we don't buy much in the way of packaged food, it'll be useful for emergencies.

In other news, the Starbucks downtown, near Safeway, is going out of business. Starbucks is shutting many of its stores, so it's not a huge surprise. The Starbucks which is /at/ Safeway seems to be safe for now.

Saigon 2, a Vietnamese restaurant, has opened in San Leandro. I haven't been there yet, so I can't report on it, but it's getting mostly postive reviews at Yelp.

That said, do we really need a new Vietnamese restaurant in San Leandro. As far as I know, we already have 5: Vo's, Le Soleil (my favorite), Pho Anh Ha, Tu Tai (where I haven't been) and Halan (is that the one near K-Mart?). There might be others (if so, let me know). Now, in a town with just one Thai Restaurant, with no Indian, no Ethiopian, no French, no South American and no Middle Eastern restaurants - do we need six Vietnamese restaurants? How about some variety!!!!

Anyway, I may or may not give it a try. If you do - please let me know what you think of it. It's located at 2113 Marina Blvd (between Menlo St & Doolittle Dr) and there is a 10% off coupon in last week's San Leandro Times.

I also saw in the San Leandro Times an add asking for waiters/staff for a new restaurant in Manor Square. The restaurant is called Double B Bar & Grill and I know absolutely nothing about it. They don't have a phone number in the ad, so I can't even call and ask. Again, if you know something about it, comment here or e-mail me.

Note: My complete review of the Golden Tea Garden is now available here.

I'm planning to write a full review of the Golden Tea Garden, a new and fabulous tea house in Hayward. But as the editing of my restaurant reviews is soooooooooooooooo slow, I figured I'd write about it here first.

I went there last Sunday with my friends Charlotte and Vienna and we had the best time. The little place is darling and very relaxing - they have harp music & a running fountain. The food (mostly sweets) was delicious and moderately priced and the service was out of this world. Indeed, at this point I'd say it's one of the two best tea houses in the Bay Area (the other one being Lovejoy's). I am planning to return this weekend with my daughter (they don't have teas for children, but Mika likes fruit teas) - and then in May with another group of friends.

Golden Tea Garden
22630 Main Street,
Hayward, CA
(510) 538-4832

Tea Houses Reviews

Harvest time is approaching (and in some cases, it never goes away), and we often have more veggies and fruits that we know what to do with. Why not exchange them with neighbors for their surplus veggies & fruits?

If you are interested, please join the blog at http://growinggroup.posterous.com/

These are some postable items:

- What you have to giveaway or barter
- If you have seeds, compost or plants to giveaway or swap
- If you need help harvesting
- If you need help in caring for or identifying your fruits, vegetables, hens, etc... (We might be able to help you!)
- If you're interested hosting a harvesting party (i.e. marmalade, ketchup, jam-making party)
- Need to borrow gardening tools
- Would like food donations for a local charity

Personally, I'm interested in getting lemons (so expensive at the market), herbs of all kinds, and flowers that you can use for cosmetics. I'll have persimmons and green figs to give away in the fall. I also have roses - but I haven't pruned them yet, so I don't have very many.

Finally, if someone is willing to help me set up a vegetable garden in our backyard (I know NOTHING about gardening), I'd be more than willing to share the produce with them.

Last night I forgot to cook. Really. Earlier in the day I baked a cake to eat after dinner - but the thought of actually cooking dinner did not occur to me until it was too late. I had bought the ingredients to make lime and coriander chicken, but I had to marinate it for 3 hours and had not done so.

Safeway had advertised meatloaf for $5 for Friday only, so I thought I'd give it a try. Lord, was that the wrong decision - the meatloaf was horrible. It has no flavor of meat, actually, it had no flavor a all, and it had an unpleasant, gritty texture. The sauce on top was disgustingly sweet - but you had to mix it in with the meatloaf, to make it edible at all. In other words, don't buy it.

How can lemons cost $1-$1.25 at Safeway, and only 30 cents at the Mexican market a couple of blocks away? How can Safeway get away with fleecing people that way? I really wish there were alternatives to Safeway. Well, Grocery Outlet is opening in a couple of days - hopefully they'll sell lemons at a reasonable price.

What am I doing here "reviewing" a cookbook that is over a decade old? Well, this is not really a review but a recommendation. Casas’Delicioso! The Regional Cooking of Spain is one of my favorite cookbooks - in part because I cook a lot of regional cuisines, including Spanish regional cuisines, and in part because, in general, the recipes in the cookbook are not only genuine but also quite good. The book contains a variety of tapas recipes - and then chapters on the cuisine of individual regions of Spain. There is abundant information about what characterizes each regional cuisine, as well as several recipes. Many of them originate in regional restaurants, but have been adapted for the home cook.

In all, one of my favorite cookbooks.

Today was the (unofficial) opening of the new Grocery Outlet "supermarket", located a stone throw away from my house. I was a little dubious at first about what the store would do for the neighborhood (and clearly, this is not a posh neighborhood by any stretch of the imagination), but once I looked at it from the point of view of how this would ease my grocery shopping, I welcomed it with open arms. Indeed, I think I may have been responsible for suggesting this location. I remember distinctively talking to the manager-to-be of Grocery Outlet a couple of years ago, when they wanted to place it in the old-Albertsons building downtown (which we fought), and suggesting that the lot by my house would be a better location.

Of course, being that it opened today, we had to check it out today - and we were pretty impressed. Bear in mind that the store is brand-new (well, the building itself was vacated by the Salvation Army, but it's been cleaned and painted so that it's now unrecognizable), so you would expect it to look nice - and it did, the aisles were wide, the light, functional, and the colors, soothing. It wasn't as faux-quaint as Trader Joe's, but not as austere as your regular supermarket either. Everything was nice and neat (again, as you would expect), I can only hope it stays like that.

Now, for what matters, what does Grocery Outlet carry? Well, clearly they are attempting to be like a real supermarket and they carry a little bit of everything, specially vis a vis packaged stuff. Most of their products seem to be overstock - things that didn't sell that well at other markets. I think that will mean that what's available will change frequently. Today, for example, they had Haagen Daz sticky toffee pudding ice cream - a flavor introduced in 2006, that seems to no longer be on the market (at least it's not listed in their website). No choice, but it was just $1.50 - about half the supermarket on-sale price. They also had off-brand stuff, but much less than what they use to sell when I frequented the Berkeley location. I'm not sure if that's a good or bad thing, some of that off-brand stuff (I remember the frozen baked Alaskas) was pretty good. As you can expect there are lots of canned stuff.

Prices are generally low, but not everything is a bargain. Haas avocados were $1.50 - three times as much as what Smart & Final and Mi Tierra supermarket has them for this week. Suave shampoo was $1.50, about the same price as the Safeway's. But Nestcafe coffee was about $3 less than it's at Safeway.

They had a surprisingly large wine selection - mostly of cheap wines, of course. I'm thrilled, as this will mean that when I need wine for a dish and don't have any 2-buck-chuck at home, I can just go across the street and get something.

In all, I don't anticipate doing my shopping per se at Grocery Outlet, but rather use it as a place where to either get specific things that I know they have them for less - or to go and get something I realize at the last minute I'm out of (darn! I didn't check if they had flour).

I will, however, write from time to time about special bargains that they have, or interesting items. This time I bought a slice of cheese that I plan to serve blind to my guests on Saturday. Let's see if anyone can identify it :-)

Next Day. I went to Grocery Outlet to see if I could get something for dinner. The answer is, unfortunately, no. They have Tyson chicken, but I think that was the company investigated for disgusting chicken practices. They had a few different cuts of pork and very little beef. But I feel uneasy about the quality and origin of the meat they sell. I did notice that they do have a small produce section, I didn't study it, though.

One thing they don't have are enough carts or any baskets - making buying just a few things a hassle.

As for dinner, I decided to make spaghetti carbonara and thought I had everything I needed at home. Of course, once I got here I realized I didn't have enough bacon :-(

Finally, Grocery Outlet is having its Ribbon Cutting on Thursday, May 7th at 5:30 PM. They'll have sandwiches or something like that. The Grand Opening is on Saturday, May 9th, starting with Coffee and Treats at 8 AM. They'll have raffles, samples, etc. - kind of like the BBQ they had a couple of years ago, when they wanted to get public support for converting the downtown Albertson's building into a Grocery Outlet.