La Plaza Market AKA La Cubana is a Latin market in the San Fernando Valley. My father shops there for Argentine meat cuts for their weekly asado, and they have a plethora of other products imported from all over Latin America. From Argentina they have several brands of cookies, dulce de leche, yerba mate, and even things such as flour (why?). It’s pretty cool and I recommend it to anyone in the Valley.
La Plaza Market
19239 Roscoe
Northridge, CA
818-701-5005
Year: 2005 (Page 7 of 13)
I got this already made flan at Casa Lucas. Heed my advise and stay away from it. This thing was vile. Even though sugar is its second ingredient after milk, it wasn’t very sweet at all. Mostly, however, it had a bitter, medicine-like taste that I can only imagine comes from the artificial vanilla extract. All I can say is “yucky”.
Casa Lucas Market (Number 2, the first one is in San Francisco) is a pretty cool Latin American market on East 14th in San Leandro. As you would expect they have a large selection of Mexican products, but they also carry an eclectic selection of other Latin American products. It’s a relatively small store, so their selection /is/ limited.
I usually go there to buy empanada shells (tapas para empanadas), they also have a nice selection of yerba mate (including in little bags) and a few canned jams and Savora mustard, for some reason. They only have small jars of dulce de leche, though. They did have Havana alfajores (no habannets, though), at $1.60 each they are expensive (about 3Xs what they cost in Argentina) but ooooh, so good.
Anyway, in today’s trip I was able to find cassava (manioc) flour which I need for my Bahian meal (they also have white & yellow corn flour, rice flour and even banana flour) and guaran
This weekend we went to two African restaurants. Friday night it was Finfin
I love the restaurant reviews of the East Bay Express. When I’m looking for a new place to try for dinner, I check the Express first. They review all sort of interesting restaurants (here is where I found The New Zealander, Old Weang Ping and Tropical Paradise) and the reviews are well written and fun to read. They also tend to be much more thorough than those of the Chronicle (which are utilitarian but boring). So if you’re looking for a place to eat in the East Bay, check it out!
eastbayexpress.com | Dining
The East Bay Express has reviewed Xenia!, the new restaurant opened by the Vatran clan in Alamo. The review is mixed, the place still seems to need work, but I still want to go! Maybe in a few weeks, when I recoup from eating out so much lately.
eastbayexpress.com | Vatran’s Flying Restaurant | 2005-04-27
http://celestialcoupon.whitehorse.com/
Expires May 18th.
I finally got to go to Fleur de Lys for my birthday. The food was wonderful though the dinner was badly balanced, the the first three courses were small and the cheese and dessert courses overwhelming. There was also a problem with the pacing of the dishes (too brisk) and the table were they first sat us frankly sucked – though they did move us when I expressed my disatisfaction to a better location. But again, the food was excellent, familiar yet innovative and delicious.
And yet… I left disatisfied. I think I have to admit that I’ve become jaded with nice restaurants. My expectations are now too high, I want perfection for my $300. I think I’m going to put off going to nice restaurants for some time – though I’ll probably take Mike to Manresa for his birthday as he said that’s where he wanted to go. And I may go back to Acquerello, where the warmth and quality of the service awed me.
Of course, if anyone can suggest a superlative dining experience in the Bay Area (or LA, for that matter), I’d love to hear about it.
When ready, my review of Fleur de Lys will be at http://www.marga.org/food/rest/fleur.html
For Mother’s Day Mike decided to get us lunch at Gregoire and have us had a pic-nic lunch at Muir Woods. It was a rainy day, however, so we decided to eat the food in the car instead. Fortunately most of it lent itself to it. It was all delicious.
I couldn’t really see the cheese or the mushrooms in the cheesteak sandwich ($7.50), but the chopped beef was bursting with flavor, it reminded me of the taste of steak in Argentina. The lamb in the roasted lamb sandwich ($7.75) was also very tasty and “lamby”. Sharing half of each sandwich kept them from getting boring. Once again we loved the potato puffs ($4.25) and were less thrilled by the potato gratin ($4.25). I think next time we should try the french fries. I liked the mango red pudding ($3.75), it had a fresh, satisfying mango taste, but it became easily overwhelmed by the tartness of the berry coulis. They just didn’t go well together. Mike liked the chocolate mousse ($3.75) but it reminded me of the chocolate mousse I used to make when I was a kid out of a children’s cooking book.
Gregoire’s menu changes monthly, so if you want to enjoy these sandwiches you’ll have to do so in May 🙂
My international cooking project has been on hold for several months. A difficult pregnancy and a small baby are not really conductive to entertainment. But I miss it, and I want to get through those damn “B”s so I’ve planned a couple of international dinners in the next few weeks (Bahian and Berber) and decided to make this “Bolivian” week at the Marga household. Rather than cook a whole Bolivian dinner for my family, however, I decided to try a different dish every other night or so. I started last night by making Picante de Pollo or Spicy chicken, an easy yet very typical dish. I’d been meaning to make it for quite a while, but finding yellow pepper (aj
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