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Today I had a BBQ and made this marinade from an epicurious.com recipe. I thought it was quite yummy and somewhat reminiscent of chimichurri. I'd make it again.
Put thyme, oregano, salt and garlic is a mini-chopper. Process until garlic is finely chopped. Add lemon juice and process until well mixed. Repeat with olive oil.
Marinade tri-tip in the sauce for at least 2 hours.
I made this recipe for cheesecake a few weeks ago for a wine and dessert party at a friend's house. Everyone raved about it. I am partial to NY cheesecakes because they are plain, I think plain cheesecakes are much tastier than those with added flavors. This cheesecake was also incredibly easy to make.
As usual I made some changes, in some cases following the advise of the epicurious.com reviewers. The recipe below is the one I made
New York Cheesecake
Instructions
Preheat oven to 475F
Make the crust by mixing the cookie crumbs with the butter, sugar and salt. Grease a 9" springform pan. Press crumb mixture onto the bottom of the pan and 1" up the sides. Pun the pan on a shallow baking sheet and set aside.
In an electric mixer, mix together the cream cheese, sugar and flour using high to maximum speed. Add eggs and yolks, one by one, mixing at low speed. Mix until they are fully incorporated, scraping the sides as necessary.
Pour the filling into the crust. Place the baking sheet and pan in the middle of the oven and bake for 10 minutes. Reduce the temperature to 200F and bake for one hour, or until the cake is mostly firm.
Cool on a rack and then refrigerate for at least 6 hours. A half hour before serving, carefully separate the cake from the pan using a knife, if necessary, and open the springform pan. Transfer the cake to a serving plate. Let rest at room temperature for about half an hour and serve.
I think that with my finishing of this Cypriot Menu I'm off the Mediterranean for a while - though I still have to make desserts from the Baleares to finish off the area. I ate a lot of Mediterranean food in May and June: Balearic, Cretan, Cypriot, Corsican, Caprese and Catalan. Though Mediterranean food is great, I can't say that I'm sorry to leave this region to explore others.
I just received the following e-mail which is clearly a scam. In the e-mail a purported company wants to make reservations at "your" restaurant. They ask for a set menu and offer to provide their credit card details for full payment.
Now, I'm not sure *how* this scam works exactly* - but I know it's a scam because of several "clues":
-The letter is written in the ultra-formal/non-idiomatic/contrived English that Nigerian/African scammers usually use.
-It purports to come from a representative of the company, but it uses a yahoo.com reply-to address. It's sent, however, from a bluehost.com server.
-It does not name the restaurant where they are making the reservations, just calling it "your restaurant". Same with the location of the restaurant, "your area".
-There is no info online on "Exxon Energy Plc.", and a search of the address or phone number lead nowhere.
If you know how this scam works, please comment here. If you do have a restaurant and receive this - PLEASE BEWARE!
Date: Mon, 03 Aug 2009 09:05:36 -0600
To: marga@lacabe.com
Subject: Enquiry.
From: Stewart Graham
Hello,
I am Stewart Graham, Public Relations Officer (P.R.O) of Exxon Energy Plc. United Kingdom. Your restaurant has been approved by my company for dinner reservations for my workers visiting your area for a project, so i therefore want to book dinner for this group of workers.
They will all come for dinner in your place as from AUGUST 18th, 19th and 20th, 2009 by 8:00pm each day. They are fifteen (15) in number.
**NOTE THAT IT WILL BE THE SAME 15 GUESTS EACH NIGHT**.
We will appreciate if you prepare a 3 course menu for my group for the dinner. No special dietary. Also your suggestion will be appreciated since this is our first dinner in your restaurant.
Kindly provide the total cost of the dinner for the 15 persons for the 3 nights dinner so as to provide my credit card details for full payment confirmation if there is availability in your restaurant.
Your swift response will be appreciated.
Regards,
Stewart Graham
40 Lothian Road
EH3 9BY,
Edinburgh,
SCOTLAND.
Phone number:+44(0)7024014792
Grocery Outlet had these cookies for sale last week in a variety of flavors. Some of the no-name products have actually turned out to be quite good, so I decided to give the chocolate walnut cookies a try. Well, they were so bad that my 7-year old daughter, not the pickiest of gourmands, stated that these "must be the worst cookies ever". Mike also commented as to how bad they are.
Alas, I have to agree, they have no chocolate flavor whatsoever and nothing that could be identified as a walnut. They just suck. Perhaps other flavors are better, but I wouldn't hold my breath.
While looking for a picture of Royale Center Cut Naturally Smoked Bacon, or at least a link to the manufacturer's website, I came across bacon tasting from the SF Chronicle in which Royale Bacon came at the bottom. The bottom bottom, getting only 24 out of 100 points. The winner, Tyson (really, Tyson), got 80 points.
I have to say that I don't agree with the tasters. Royale may not have the best bacon, but I actually think it's pretty good. It has a slightly sweet flavor that I like. Is it the best bacon I've ever had? Probably not, but it's great in my spaghetti carbonara.
I bought it at Grocery Outlet, which carries several Tyson products, so I will look for the Tyson bacon and give it a try.
Someone must have brought this wine to my wine-and-cheese birthday party a few months back, because I don't remember buying it. I did put it in the fridge, however, and it came out this weekend when I threw a very small BBQ. I'm glad it did, because it's a very good wine and one that I'd definitely want to have again.
This Chardonnay comes from the Central Coast and does not fulfill the stereotype of California Chardonnays as being very heavy and oaky. It's crisp, with a nice balance of sweet to tart, and bare hints of fruit and butter. It's easy to drink, but complex and layered enough to stand up to food. I had it with a marinated tri-tip and it went quite well with it. The leftovers kept well in the refrigerator for a few days.
In all, a very good wine, specially for its $12 retail price. The only problem is that I don't know where to buy it.
Golden Tea Garden is by far my favorite tea house in the East Bay. Today I visited it for the fourth time in four months and once again I had a great experience.
This time I tried the Margaret's Hope tea (after researching and finding out it is, indeed, black) - and I liked it more than the English Breakfast or Earl Gray. It's a Darjeeling, but one that can stand up to milk and sugar. It's particularly good if you let it seep for a while. Mika (my 7-year old daughter and companion) once again had the caramel tea which she loved.
Golden Tea Garden now offers a "wee tea" for children 10 and younger ($7). It consists of a small pot of tea and a little plate of goodies. Today they consisted of a bite-size brownie, a petit four, two mini-sandwiches (the chicken salad one was quite good), two slices of green apple and a bag of gummy bears. Mika was happy with the petit four and gummy bears, but declined to try the rest. Instead, she went for the cakes in my "Tea Garden sampler" ($13), which consists of a large pot of tea and 3 desserts. Every time I've gone so far, the 3 desserts are three huge slices of cake - definitely enough to share (or to take one slice back home). Today there was a peach one that I really liked, a pink champagne one that Mika loved, and the perpetual red velvet cake that is a favorite of both of us. Yes, we both ended up in sugar coma.
Service, once again, was wonderful - and once again Mika got to be a princess with a complimentary jewelry set. She also loved trying the hats in a big box by the entrance.
My only concern with this tea house is that it's so empty on Sundays. I really, really like it, and I really want it to survive - so go!
Feb. 2010 update. I returned to the Golden Tea Garden with my friends Vienna and Lotty a couple of weeks ago and once again we had an amazing experience. The food was excellent, the service first class and the little touches as cute as always. Vienna had the tea with sandwiches this time, a newish option, and she raved about everyone one of them - the chicken salad was a particular favorite. Lotty had the scones, which were also first rate, and I had my usual "garden sampler" which includes 3 huge slices of cakes. This time they featured a no-sugar-added chocolate cake which I found a bit dry and not very chocolaty. Vienna and Lotty really liked it, though, they appreciated it being less sweet than the usual kind. We also tasted their new gluten-free raspberry cream cake which is absolutely delicious.
Of course, Mika was jealous that she didn't get to go - so I'll be taking her there soon, I'm sure.
The Kids' Tea
The Dessert Sampler
The Golden Tea Garden
22630 Main Street
Hayward, CA
(510) 538-4832
http://www.buylocalcampaign.com/teaGarden/
Th-Su 12 - 8 PM
Over the years I have come across recipes that called for smoking whatever you were grilling by putting wood chips in the BBQ grill's smoker box. I have a very simple gas BBQ grill, so of course it does not have a smoker box - so I usually just ignored those recipes. But a week or two ago, I came across a smoker box at Grocery Outlet and I figured, why not give it a try? The box is a rectangular metal box with a metal lid that has holes in it. You put it on top of the burning element, under the grill.
I first tried it last week when I made Smoked Tri Tip with Sicilian Herb Sauce for a small BBQ that I threw. Alas, the sauce (which I used as a marinade) was too strong to let the smoke flavor come out. Today, however, I "smoked" two cheap Safeway NY steaks, and I can't believe just how good the meat was. Even Mike was surprised.
I was also quite happy about how easy the whole process was. I'll be experimenting with other meats in the future.
Just got them today because they were on sale for $3 for 12. They were in the bakery section in a plastic box. They are *delicious*.
Sweet Fingers is San Leandro's only Caribbean restaurant. Located on East 14th, near the Oakland border, it's relatively inconspicuous. From the outside it looks like a bar, from the inside, like a third-world restaurant. The tables are cheap, the light is dim and the bar quite prominent. It's the kind of place you go to hang out, listen to some reggae or just have some great Jamaican/Caribbean food. That's what we did last night, when we had our monthly informal SLCAN meeting at the place.
Everything we ordered was a winner: B. loved the jerked tofu, T. became a fun of the shrimp curry and D. enjoyed his oxtail stew. R. and I had had dinner earlier and weren't planning to eat, but we had to order the fabulous friend plantains ($4). After we enjoyed them, the waitress was nice enough to bring us a plate of jerk chicken to share. It was dark and moist and nicely spiced - I'm always afraid that jerk chicken will be too strong for my taste but that is not a worry here. In all, I regretted not having gone back to Sweet Fingers since my first review a couple of years ago. Service, as you can imagine, was really good.
The prices, however, are a little high - most entrees are in the mid-teens. However, you can usually buy a $25 gift certificate to Sweet Fingers for $10 at restaurant.com (just do a search for restaurants within a mile of 94577). There is a $35 minimum food purchase. Once in a while restaurant.com has specials which allow you to buy said gift certificate for $2 or $3 - keep an eye on dealdetectives.com.
Sweet Fingers is very friendly to vegetarians - their new menu features 11 vegetarian entrees. With over 15 meat and fish entrees, it's also pretty friendly to carnivores.
Sweet Fingers will be celebrating the launch of a new menu this Sunday (the 16th) at 3 PM. Everyone is invited to come and party with them. They will have food, music and they'll be selling tickets to the Monterey Bay Reggae festival which will take place during labor day weekend. Sister Alice, Sweet Fingers' chef and own reggae artist, will be catering the event.
The new menu keeps many favorites such as the jerk chicken, but adds new dishes such as brown stew goat ($16), braised blue mountain lamb ($18) and ginger orange chicken ($16). Some of the dishes are daily specials.
Sweet fingers is also increasing its musical offerings. They will have music every day but Monday from 10 PM to 2 AM. There will be live music every Sunday.
They will have a happy hour from 3-6 PM with half-price appetizers.
I'm unlikely to go for the music or the happy hour, but I'll definitely return for the food.
Sweet Fingers
464 E. 14th St.
San Leandro ,CA
510.553.9869
http://www.sweetfingersrestaurant.com/
Sonoma restaurant, on McArthur in San Leandro, has closed for good. I'm not surprised - while the concept was good, it failed on execution: the food just wasn't that good. I gave it several tries, but it just underwhelmed me.
I'd be sorry to see it go, but the rumor is that Mike Wiesner of Paradiso is taking over the space and opening a (gourmet?) burger joint. He will also serve breakfast. The food at Paradiso is pretty good (if also overpriced), and I think that San Leandro could really use a good burger place. There are several, but since the closure of Joplins, the only one that does a good burger is Vila Cereja (though I haven't been there for quite a while).
Anyway, I'm looking forward to trying the new place.
Zocalo Coffeehouse, my favorite cafe in San Leandro, has revamped its website to make it more interactive. The Zocalo website lists events happening at the coffeehouse - but also some news and events in other parts of San Leandro. You can also subscribe to Zocalo's newsletter and keep abreast of what's going on.
A couple of week ago I got a Bella Cucina Rocket Blender at Macy's. It was on sale for $20 and they had a $10 rebate - so, if when I get the rebate check, I'd only have paid $12 - I bought it at the store so there were no shipping charges. I've only used it a few times, so I'm not going to review it yet. It's working fine, but I've read that it doesn't have much on the way of longevity - at least for regular smoothie makers, which I'm not.
Anyway, now that I have the little thing I'm motivated to make smoothies - at least once in a while. The first few recipes I tried underwhelmed me, but this recipe from allrecipes.com was great. I did increase the amount of strawberries it called for, but I think how many you use will be very dependent on the size of your strawberries. Similarly, how much sugar you use will depend on the sweetness of your strawberries. The ones I used were medium to small (and super sweet). Here's my adapted recipe:
Crush the ice. Add the rest of the ingredients and blend until it's all combined.
Note: If you are using a smoothie maker like mine, all the ingredients will fill the large mixing glass to the top. I still was able to get them blended, but if you are concerned, you can mix it in two batches (just divide the recipe above by 2).
I ran out of strawberries, but got a lot of blueberries at Safeway for $5 - so I decided to make blueberry smoothies for dessert. Everyone agreed it was a good idea. I made them using the recipe for strawberry smoothies I made the other day, modifying it a little. The results (of my second batch) were quite good, though not as good as the strawberry smoothies. The blueberry flavor was also more subtle - if you want it stronger, use more blueberries.
Ingredients
Blend everything together until your smoothie is smooth - pun intended :-)
Update. Mika, my 7yo, made this blueberry smoothie today again, all by herself, and it was really good.
Yesterday and today I made grilled/smoked steaks for dinner, served with a very nice mustard-basil sauce. I got the recipe at epicurious.com, my favorite recipe site, and it was surprisingly good. When I just made it I thought it tasted too much of mustard, so much thought that it'd overwhelm the meat, but it mellowed down when it cooled and the basil took over, not really tasting like basil, but giving a nice fresh tasting to the meat.
Here is the recipe, which I copy because it's so easy.
Ingredients
Directions
Mix all the ingredients in a mini-chopper and chop/grind until it becomes a smooth paste. Put the bowl in the freezer for 5 minutes. Remove and scoop the butter into a clean cutting board, shape in a cylinder shape and cover with plastic wrap. Freeze or refrigerate until solid.
Meanwhile grill your choice of meat, serve a pat of the solid butter on top of the meat.
I usually get my olive oil at Trader Joe's (though I wonder if it's real olive oil), but I was out of it a couple of weeks ago and I was at Costco and decided to get their house brand: Cost Kirkland Filippo Berio Organic Extra Virgin Olive Oil. Bad call. The olive oil has a very nice olive oil scent, fresh and vibrant. But it has a bitter edge to it, it probably doesn't matter for cooking, but it's not too pleasant to eat with bread. I won't buy it again.
Last night I made Reeses peanut butter cup ice cream, from the Ben & Jerry's Homemade Ice Cream & Dessert Book
So here is the recipe. I used an egg beater to whisk everything, easier than a whisk and it gave it the right consistency. I used slightly less than the 3/4 cup of sugar, regular whipping cream, 1% milk and organic salted smooth peanut butter.
Whisk the eggs until light and frothy. Add the sugar slowly, whisking constantly to incorporate. Add the whipping cream and milk and whisk until smooth. Pour 1 cup of the mixture into a separate bowl and add the peanut butter to that bowl. Mix well and pour peanut butter mixture into the cream mixture. Whisk in until fully incorporated.
Freeze mixture in your ice cream maker as per the manufacturer's instructions. Two minutes before the ice cream is due to be done add the peanut butter cup pieces.
Pour into a tupperware or similar container and freeze until hard (it should take about 5-6 hours).
My food website now has a new section: Granny's and Gladys' Recipe Book. This new section will consist of the typed-up recipes from the notebook that my paternal grandmother and aunt left me when they passed away. I tasted some of these recipes as a child, and some never at all, but I will try to make them all at some point. There aren't that many. To start, I've typed up this recipe for Apple Sauce Cake a la Lacabe that my sister has been asking me for. I guess I'll have to make it as well :-)
Last night the kids were at a sleepover and Mike and I went to see Julie & Julia. I had read great things about the "Julia" part of the movie, and I was vaguely interested in the "Julie" part, as my friend Lola had followed the blog way back then and really enjoyed it. Alas, like everyone else said, that part of the movie was pretty "blah". Julie looks for a gimmick for getting rich/famous as a writer, lucks into a good one, gets rich/famous as a writer while spouting some nonsense about being saved by Julia or becoming a better person through Julia. A pretty weak dramatic arch, if you ask me, and one that the actual Julia Childs does not seem to have bought into. Indeed, she seemed to think, correctly IMHO, that it was just a stunt. But hey, more power to Julie, right? Too bad she didn't wait until Julia was at least dead so as to not mock her on her face. But as Julie herself acknowledged in the movie, she is quite the egocentric person.
The Julia part, as everyone said, was wonderful - and yes, I hated not seeing Meryl Streep/Julia, more on the screen. I thought that Mery Streep was great in mimicking Julia's accent and joie de vive, though I'd like to have seen more complexity to the character - which I'm sure could have been shown if they'd cut the Julie story out of it.
In all it was a sweet movie, nothing if not fluffy, but enjoyable enough. I did not get out of it wanting to cook or eat French food (the way you drool over Mexican food in Tortilla Soup), though that duck at the end seemed like a fun challenge.
You've heard it over and over, from both expert cooks and people who have barely stepped into a kitchen: "never cook with a wine you wouldn't drink". I think few commands have frightened people off the kitchen, or at least off cooking with wine, than this one. While there are many drinkable wines under $5-10, it's hard to predict whether the one you chose will be one of them, so if you follow this mantra chances are you'll end up spending much more money on the wine that you'd otherwise want to. And all for nothing, because the truth is, cheap wine makes GREAT cooking wine.
I've been cooking with 2-bucks-chuck pretty much since it came out. I won't drink it unless I have to, but I find it perfectly fine to flavor sauces, braises, stews and marinades. I very seriously doubt that anyone would be able to tell the difference between a dish cooked with a $20 award winning wine and one with chuck - once you heat them up and combine them with other flavors, cheap wine improves magnificently. Indeed, that's what NY Time food writer Julia Moskin found out, when she decided to test the premise by making identical dishes both with good wine and cheap wine - she couldn't tell the difference in the finished dishes.
And it's not only cheap wine that makes great cooking wine - old wine is also good for food. I pretty much never finish a bottle of wine when I open it - so I keep the leftovers in the fridge for when the muse inspires me to cook. In my experience, wine will still be good for at least two weeks after you open the bottle. Just make sure to put the cork back before you put it in the fridge.
A factor I didn't consider when I made my menu plans for the week (I'll be cooking Colombian and Costan Rican food, and trying to make desserts from the Baleares, Bordeaux and Croatia). Fortunately Ramadan lasts a whole month, so I have time to get in the spirit of the season :-)
I'll be cooking a Chinese Muslim dish next week, the only one I could find, and then I'll look for some typical Ramadan food. I remember that when I was in Morocco (over fifteen years ago), the iftar menu was pretty standard. It had some lentil soup, a hard boiled egg and a very sweet pastry - I don't remember if anything else. I'll look it up and try it.
If you know traditional Ramadan food from any other country, please let me know.
I bought this wine at Grocery Outlet a few weeks back, mostly because it was Argentinian. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's not a big enough reason to try a wine, but I'd been wanting to give Grocery Outlet wines a chance for a while. Baaaaad Idea. I've drank a lot of bad wine in my life, but this one seemed to be spoiled. It tasted sour and well, spoiled. I don't know if Grocery Outlet will take it back (I'll check next time I go), but I will take this as a warning against buying wines at Grocery Outlet.
London Broil is the name given to top round in California. It's a very lean, very tough cut of meat. I used to use it to make a tomato-sauce based stew, that cooks just for under an hour, and it was quite good for that. But I've always been weary about grilling it because of its toughness.
Still, the times are tough and, like everyone else, I want to save money. And London broil is ridiculously cheap right now - last week it was under $2 lb - so I wanted to cook it. I found this recipe at epicurious.com which got raves. Alas, thinking back, given all the ingredients for the marinade, the final dish is not necessarily cheap, but other than the beef, I had everything else saved for the lemons.
In any case, the meat was VERY yummy, I loved the tangy flavor given by the marinade. I'd use it with london broil again. The key is to marinade the meat OVERNIGHT, any less and it won't get enough flavor.
Note that I'm writing the quantities needed to make HALF of the quantity that the original recipe makes - the original recipe says to keep half to serve as a sauce, but I found the sauce too tangy to go with either the beef or the couscous I served with it. I'd just skip it. The quantities below should be enough to marinate a 2lbs (or even bigger) chunk of meat. You can use flank, tri-tip or other similar cuts in addition to top round.
Ingredients
Juice the lemon and then chop the rind. Put in a medium size bowl and add the rest of the ingredients. Mix well.
Put the meat your are using in a large, sealable plastic bag and pour in the marinade. Marinade overnight, turning from time to time.
I've never been to Eccolo, the restaurant that replaced Ginger Island on 4th Street in Berkeley. Though it was started by former Chez Panisse sous chef Christopher Lee, but its reviews were always mixed, making some people happy and other furious. With very limited restaurant money, I never was too tempted to take the chance and try it.
I just found out that it recently closed through a very interesting article by Eccolo sous chef Samin Nosrat on the Food section of today's San Francisco Chronicle (another business that is likely to fail in the near future). Nosrat explains how the business went under - basically, the economy put them in a position of either significantly downgrading their ingredients or significantly increasing their clientele. Despite a series of gimmicks (happy hour, more comfort food, etc.), they were not able to do the latter and they refused to do the former further, so their only choice was to close down. I'm sure that most restaurants nowadays are facing similar issues, and I wonder how many are choosing to downgrade their ingredients to stay alive.
The impact may be particularly bad for "nice" restaurants in the high end of the price scale (i.e. with entrees in the twenties). Even people who can still afford to go out to eat semi-regularly seem to be downgrading their restaurant choices. Indeed, many of the new restaurants that are arising (and yes, new restaurants are still opening in this economy) are pricing their dishes in the teens. The question is whether they can survive on that.
All this said, I've always thought that foreign/ethnic cuisines (Indian, Thai, Vietnamese, Ethiopian) often offer tastier dishes than Californian restaurants at significantly lower prices (of course, we rather not think much as to the quality of the ingredients they use), so hopefully they'll do better.
But all in all, I think/hope that the restaurants that will survive are those that offer good food and have consistent good reviews.
Yesterday we had a BBQ in honor of Mike's birthday. I didn't make anything new, but IMHO what I made was quite good and would recommend it for your (or my) next BBQ. Lola brought the salad, and I served chips with salsa and guacamole and my great potato salad, but otherwise all there was was protein (and birthday cake):
-Hot dogs
-BBQ chicken
-Thyme marinated tri-tip
-Tofu Satay
I trimmed and coated the tri-tip with coarse salt before marinating it, and it came out perfectly.
I served the tofu satay plain (without peanut sauce), but my vegetarian (and non-vegetarian) friends loved it - so much so that they took the leftovers to grill at home :-) I didn't have Madeira wine for the recipe this time, so I used port instead.
Today and until it runs out, they have Ben & Jerry's chubby hubby (one of my favorites), strawberry cheesecake and ginger snap ice cream for $1.50 for the regular-size package.
Mike just pointed me to a new (for me) San Leandro food blog: San Leandro Cooking Examiner. It mostly includes recipes, so it's not that San Leandro specific, but it's nice to see another San Leandran with a blog.
This page contains all entries posted to Marga's Foodblog in August 2009. They are listed from oldest to newest.
July 2009 is the previous archive.
September 2009 is the next archive.
Many more can be found on the main index page or by looking through the archives.