I'd bought some frozen mahi mahi at Trader Joe's, and I wanted a child-friendly recipe to use them up. I found one for Mahi Cutlet with Meyer Lemons and Capers at the Food Network, which got very good reviews. I, of course, made it with regular lemons (you can read my rant about lemons here). The results were mixed. I liked the fish itself, the breading was crispy and stayed on the fish, but it was bland. Next time I'll add salt to the eggs.

The sauce, OTOH, was a complete waste of expensive ingredients. It was bitter, too sour, and had a weird off-taste. I think the fish would be better with just lemon juice added.

Camila really liked the fish - and this is a child that has a "it's yucky" attitude to everything I make. She called it fish nuggets, and I guess that was enough for her to eat it. Mika wasn't hear for that dinner, but I think she may try it next time.

Of course, fried fish is not ideal for anyone, but I'm hoping that if they start eating fish this way, they'll accept it in other permutations later.

Last night I made a heart clogging pasta carbonara from this Fettucini Carbonara recipe at allrecipes.com. I've made other pasta carbonara recipes, and I'd been disappointed with them. This one, on the other hand, was absolutely delicious, beyond restaurant quality, by far the best carbonara recipe I've ever made. What's interesting it's that it didn't differ much from other carbonaras, so I'm not sure what made it that good. It might have been the center-cut bacon, which was an unknown-to-me brand from Grocery Outlet - but who knows?

Here is the recipe:

Pasta Carbonara

Ingredients

The following is a message I got about a restaurant on the road between SF & LA. I haven't been there - but after that recommendation, I'll definitely try it.

My wife and I stop at the Planeta Rojas Café in Button Willow each time we travel to L.A. and return.…it is down the way from the Taste of India…in back of the Shell Gas Station.

While you have to push past that they prepare their food out in front in a portable “Taco Coach” and you order inside the red building…the food is excellent. I am a Mexican Food lover and connoisseur…I grew up in L.A….spend a lot of time in Mexico..and know the best places in the Bay Area. Nobody, not any restaurant from Mexico City to any place in the Bay area….touches their Chile Relleno…it is all made fresh…this is not fast food…but, they serve it quickly. Try the Chicken Tostada if you’re on a diet. The prices are cheap…and a complete lunch for 2 is $13 to $20…including a soda.

One other thing…you might think the owners are just arrived from Mexico…a married couple…they’re not, both hard working & very friendly and proud parents of a new U.S. Marine stationed in San Diego…just joined and doing his boot camp. He joined for 6 years to become an Military Police. You won’t be disappointed.

Mike Emley

Marga's Road Restaurant Reviews

Ana Rosa's occupies the space previously occupied by El Novillo, also a Mexican restaurant. It's only a few yards away from my house, so I was hoping it'd be great - or at least good. Alas, I'd qualify it as simply "OK".

I went last night, with Mika and Camila, to "celebrate" Cinco de Mayo. I was too lazy to walk all the way to Los Pericos, my favorite taquería in town and too unprepared to make something at home either. So Ana Rosa's it was.

I ordered a beef quesadilla ($7), while Mika had a regular chicken burrito ($5) and Camila had a small plain cheese quesadilla ($5). The menu did list the plain quesadilla at $5 - but when the waitress asked me if I wanted a large or small quesadilla, I assumed that the small one would be less. My bad, I paid $5 for a tiny tortilla filled with a little bit of cheese. Outrageous.

My beef quesadilla was larger - it consisted of an oversize flour tortilla, filled with cheese and diced beef, folded in half and toasted. It was served with a scoop of guacamole (the thin, runny type), sour cream, lettuce and a slice of tomato. Personally, I don't really like toasted tortillas. I much prefer the method used at Los Pericos in which a large flour tortilla is steamed, filled with the beef, cheese, salsa, guacamole and sour cream (and lettuce, if you want), and then rolled as a burrito - but that's why Los Pericos is my favorite taqueria. This quesadilla tasted just fine, the flavor of the meat was overwhelmed by the toastiness of the tortilla, but there wasn't anything disagreeable - or particularly agreeable - about it. I just didn't dig it.

Finally, Mika's burrito was quite large, filled mostly with rice. Mika didn't like it, or at least didn't eat it, so Mike had it for dinner later on. He found it to be completely bland, he says that he's liked every other burrito he's had more - there was just nothing to this one.

As for the restaurant, Ana Rosa's has a very small dining room - but it was full when we went on a Tuesday around 5:30 PM. They have sit-down service, and the lone waitress amazingly managed to serve the whole dining room and calculate the checks by herself. She was very pleasant and the service was good. As for the place, there is no atmosphere to it - just a place to go and have a quick bite to eat, not to linger.

All in all, I'm sad to repeat that Ana Rosa's fails as a taqueria that I would frequent. I can imagine I'll go again, but just because it's so close to my house. But even then, I can't imagine it'll be anytime soon. I'll get off my butt and go to Los Perico's.

Ana Rosa's Mexican Restaurant
2089 E 14th St # C @ Estabrook
San Leandro, CA
(510) 357-3022

San Leandro Restaurant Reviews

Now that I have Grocery Outlet so close, I figured I'd start making a list of what I /can/ and /cannot/ find there - for my reference as well as yours. As more items come to sight and mind, I'll add them to this post.

Not Available

Whipping cream
Fresh herbs
Spaghetti
Fresh bread
Sugar
Meat I'd want to eat
Fish sticks
Any soft toilet paper
Name brand cleaners
Natural peanut butter

Available

Grapes
Avocados ($1.50!!!!)
Melons
Off-brand bacon that was actually good
Tyson chicken (which I don't want to eat)
Stouffer meat lasagna party size for $10
Frozen bagels stuffed with cream cheese (it could be worse)
$3 bottles of wine
Martinelli's sparkling apple cider
Sliced bread
Analgesics
Nescafe/Tasters' Choice Instant Coffee
Lemons (I think 25c each)
Jiffy peanut butter

The downtown San Leandro farmers' market is back again for the summer season. It opened yesterday with some band playing that fortunately wasn't as loud as bands last year. We found most of the same food stands from last year, in addition to a new prepared foods stand: Casbah Exotic Food. They serve a short, but eclectic, list of dishes - if I well remember Moroccan chicken, curry chicken, gyros (I think beef) and a steak sandwich. I'm pretty sure they had another item as well. I think all the plate were $5.

I had the Moroccan chicken plate, which really was a chicken gyro. It consisted of a pita bread covered with lettuce & some tomato, and some pieces of pretty bland chicken. I ate it but did not enjoy it, and I was hungry afterwards. Mike had a slightly better experience with his gyro. He liked the marinated beef, but thought that the portion was also too small. $5 is not much, but I rather pay a dollar or two more and be satisfied.

Fortunately Meyers BBQ is back with their chicken teriyaki and huge hot dogs.

It's unlikely you'll find anything if you look for "Hart Authentic Orange Chicken" online - at least I didn't find anything when I looked. It seems that this frozen entree is made by Hart Food Products from Lakewood, CA. I bought it at Grocery Outlet, and I imagine they are their only distributor. Actually, given Hart's pathetic website, it's difficult to believe they are any sort of serious company. Which really tells you something about where Grocery Outlet sources its products. And indeed, orange chicken seems to be one of only three or four products Hart offers (at least it looks that way from this picture at their website).

Anyway, I was in Grocery Outlet yesterday and thought I'd take a look at the frozen stuff they had, as I've been feeling less and less like cooking lately. This orange chicken product didn't seem too bad - at least in comparison to the brand-name frozen food products. Yeah, it has a lot of salt, corn syrup and a myriad of preservatives, but so do all the brand name products. At least it had chicken as its main ingredient :-)

It's not obvious from the picture in the package, but this is really popcorn chicken - which is annoying as that means it has much more breading than you would like. It's uncooked so you need to bake it for 20 minutes, pan fry it for 10 to 15 minutes, or deep fry it for 6 minutes. Then you mix it with the orange sauce which comes in 3 packages. You can't microwave it.

As for the taste, it met our very low expectations. Mike found it too bland, while I thought the chicken had a subtle "off" flavor. The sauce was OK, somewhat orangee and not too sweet.

I'm unlikely to buy it again.

Mika made pancakes all by herself this morning! It's the second time she makes them, but last time she wasn't very clear about directions/proportions. She didn't relize that 1/4 cup of sugar was different from 4 cups of sugar :-)

This time we took out all the ingredients together (good thing, because I put something in a jar that looks very much like coarse sugar - I don't know what it is, but I suspect a dangerous chemical), and we went over the proportions (what is a cup, what is a tablespoon and what is a teaspoon). The result was that she did very well - she even remembered that we needed to include sugar, which I'd left out when I copied the recipe!

The pancakes came out great, very fluffy and great tasting! We didn't have any maple syrup (a visit to TJ's is in order), but we ate them with a strawberry sauce and whipped cream. The strawberry sauce was great, all I did was put a bunch of washed, cut strawberries in the blender, add a little bit of water and some sugar. How much of each will depend on your strawberries (how sweet they are) and blender. Mika really liked the sauce (I did too)! By itself, is also healthier than maple syrup - and cheaper! I learned the "recipe" in a cooking class on sauces I took at the Castro Valley Adult School.

This time I actually cooked the pancakes myself, I'm a little weary of letting her cook by herself now. She's still a bit too short to comfortable see and handle pans on top of the stove and, like her mom, she can be a little clutzy.

She wants us to have a tradition of Saturday morning pancakes. I know that traditions are really important for kids, and our lives are pretty disorganized, so that may be a nice thing to do.

The Castro Valley Adult School will be offering several cooking classes this summer. These include Cake Decorating, Doughnuts making, BBQing and Mexican & Southern cuisine. Castro Valley has classroom with 3 kitchens in it, so the classes are very hand-on.

The San Leandro Adult School does not have a kitchen-classroom but it has offered cooking classes in the past. Their class catalog/schedule for the summer is not yet in their website, and I haven't seen a paper copy - so I don't know if they'll have them this summer.

Note: Biggies has closed.

Biggies BBQ has been opened for a couple of months already, but I didn't find out about it until the San Leandro Times did a story on it last Thursday. Of course I had to go - not just because it's my moral imperative to review each and every restaurant in San Leandro (except for those that are obviously bad), but also because I like Brazilian food. I will note that while Brazilians love meat and their espetos corridos are legendary, their meat is unfortunately not as good as that from Argentina. Then again, nobody's is.

Biggies BBQ is a very most restaurant located in the Marina Faire shopping center in San Leandro. It looks like a shopping mall restaurant, it has no decorations or ambiance and the tables/chairs are the cheapy kind. But that in itself is an advantage, as it suggests cheaper food. We went there for dinner the Friday night after the article about them came out, and while the place was pretty empty when we got there, it really filled up by 7 PM or so. Alas, they weren't prepared for this - the lone waitress could barely keep up with the needs of every table, and every table in the restaurant was occupied. The kitchen seemed to have the same problem, while our appetizers came right away, we had to wait over one hour for our entree. And believe me, an hour with hungry/antsy kids is just not fun.

Biggies' menu needs to be redone. As it is it lists appetizers, drinks, daily lunch specials, weekend specials and desserts. No, it doesn't list entrees, which makes it quite disconcerting. Apparently this is because they have different offerings each night (though only a couple of these), though they have the Brazilian BBQ plate ($13) every day. Many of the offerings, furthermore, are listed by their Portuguese name, and the menu doesn't explain what they are. This all means that the waitress needs to spend some time explaining the menu to each table - which, of course, makes service even slower.

We started with two pasteles, which turned out to be large, square, fried empanadas-like pastries filled with minimum seasoned ground beef ($3 each). Despite the lack of meat I really liked them, the dough was both crispy and doughy and had a nice flavor, the meat was also nicely seasoned (not in the least spicy). The kids liked them too.

We followed by what I thought was the esfirra ($3 each) but, looking online, might have been a joelho (not in the menu), a baked sweet bun filled with cheese and tomato (I think, though the waitress said it was ham). This was also very good.

After an hour or so we had the Brazilian BBQ which consisted of two chunks of beef, a tiny Brazilian sausage and a small chicken leg. The meat was a little tough and overdone (medium rather than the medium rare I'd requested), but it had a great flavor. The intense marinade brought up, rather than hid, the gamy taste of the beef and I loved it. The only problem was that the marinade was too salty. The same can be said about the sausage and the chicken. The latter had a very crispy skin and moist meat. The meats were served with a large quantity of rice and (refried?) beans (which Camila liked).

In all, I was very happy with the food, but Mike and I thought that it was a tad expensive - HOWEVER, I just realized that you can buy gift certificates for the restaurant (dinner only) at restaurant.com - a $25 gift certificate usually costs $10, so you'd save $15, but sometimes you can get them for as cheap as $2 (keep an eye on dealdetectives.com. That would be a savings of $23!!! I wish I had thought about checking restaurant.com yesterday! I don't know how they can make any money at those prices, which worries me a little (I want them to stick around!).

I will definitely go to Biggies BBQ again - though in several weeks, when it becomes less busy :-)

Biggies BBQ
13700 Doolittle Drive #110
San Leandro, CA
(510) 352-2371

San Leandro Restaurant Reviews

Bay Area Restaurant Reviews

Ben and Jerry's line of organic ice cream flavors (introduced in 2003), has not been doing very well. I haven't really seen them in supermarkets, and this week they made an appearance at my neighborhood's Grocery Outlet - for $1.50 each! I tried their organic vanilla and organic strawberry and they were both fine, not spectacular. These are not flavors I usually get, so I can't say how they compare to the originals.

It's another matter with Chocolate Fudge Brownie ice cream, which is one of my favorite B&J's flavors. Alas, I'll have to continue eating the regular version (usually $3 on sale at Safeway), as the organic version just doesn't do it. The problem starts with the flavor of the ice cream, the chocolate is just not deep enough, it lacks that almost bitter richness of the original. In a blind test, I would not guess it was Ben & Jerry's. The lack of flavor continues in the brownie - which is also dry (how do they manage to make a brownie that is sitting in ice cream dry?) and non-chewy. Not a brownie you'd pay to eat. In other words - there is a reason why this ice cream is being sold at Grocery Outlet.