I got Dolcetto Tuscan Crisps at World Market ($5), and seldom I’ve been more disappointed on a World Market find. Granted, it’s my fault for not having closely examined the ingredients before I bought them. If I had, I’d noticed that far from having an “Italian cheese blend,” they had practically no cheese at all. Indeed, “natural cheese flavor” is listed as an ingredient after salt, and “cheese” is the next to last ingredient.
The result is that they don’t taste like cheese. They are mildly salty, but they don’t really taste like anything. They might be a good conduit for actual cheese – I haven’t tried them with any yet – but on their own, they are just insipid.
I’ve been late to the Dubai chocolate craze. Indeed, my first encounter with Dubai chocolates didn’t come until last week, when my husband gave me one of the Nutty Fruitty Dubai chocolate bars he had bought at Costco ($17 at Costco).
The bag came with 15 individually packaged square chocolates, approximately 1 1/2″ x 1 1/2″). The chocolates basically consist of pistachio butter in a milk chocolate coating. They are pretty good, quite tasty but I found them too sweet. As I’ve found pretty much every confectionary I’ve tasted in the last few weeks “too sweet,” I have to conclude that’s a me problem.
My husband liked them as well, but he was a little annoyed at the fact that they are not really chocolate, the chocolate covering is there as a wrapper, rather than to contribute much to the flavor. I’m not sure if that’s true with other Dubai chocolates, I’ll probably give another one a try at some point.
I love international snack boxes, but they are usually a bit too expensive for my pocketbook. Alas, I found this box of Universal Yums Germany snacks at World Market on clearance for $9, or 55% off its regular price, as they were near expiration, and decided to give them a go. Most of the snacks expired in December, so the box wasn’t really appropriate as a gift, but there is nothing wrong with gifting yourself.
The box comes with a little booklet describing the snacks, that includes some trivia about German food and even a recipe. There is also a sheet for rating your snacks.
The first snack I tried was this package of Waffelz cheesecake flavored wafers ($3.10 at Universal Yums). This seems to be a relatively new brand of wafers of an old German baking company, and I was somewhat surprised the whole packaging was in English – which suggests it’s manufactured for export. The wafers were just OK. They weren’t as crispy as we prefer – whether this was because they were near expiration or their style, it’s hard to stay – but the main issue was the flavor. It basically tasted like a sour version of a regular vanilla wafer. It didn’t taste of cheesecake, however. I wouldn’t buy them.
Second, I tried the Lorenz Pomsticks, in sour cream (geschmack) flavor. These are very crispy, thin and short potato sticks seasoned with onion powder, parsley and yeast extract, as well as buttermilk powder and sour cream. They don’t have the very strong sour flavor of American sour cream and onion chips; rather, it’s more subtle. They are also less salty than their American equivalent. They are just as addictive, however, and I had eaten half the 2.5 oz package before I realized what I was doing. All in all, I preferred it to American chips, both because of just how crispy they were and how mild the flavor was.
While the chips are made in Germany, this particular bag seems to have been imported to either the Philippines, Malaysia or Singapore before making its way to the US. They were sold out at Universal Yum (previously $3.70), but they are available from other German food stores in the US.
The third and fourth treat I tried was this yum bag which came with five Kuhbonbon salted caramel candies (I ate one before the photo) and four or five unbranded candies. I felt that Universal Yums was rather deceitful about counting this bag of small candies as two treats, particularly as even put together they don’t amount to a full size bag of candy! This con would make me reluctant to buy a box at full price.
Fortunately, both candies were pretty good. The Kuhbonbon candies had a very strong caramel flavor, which was almost too intense. They were a bit crumbly, perhaps because they weren’t very fresh. The unbranded little candies – which came in green apple, grapefruit and passion fruit flavors – provided intense bursts of delicious flavor. Sure, they had only a passing relationship with the flavor of the actual fruits, but they were delicious anyway. Unfortunately, they are very small.
The fifth treat were Halloren O’s fudge in “Brownie” flavor ($5.50 at Universal Yums). The package came with a dozen bite size bombons with a soft center and a chocolate cover.
I was very disappointed in these brownies. They had no chocolate flavor whatsoever and instead they were just super sweet. It was also a weird sweetness, probably because, in addition to sugar, they are sweetened with “wheat glucose syrup,” which I’m going to guess is even sweeter than sugar. I struggled to finish one, and I’m going to leave the rest for low-sugar episodes, where flavor doesn’t matter. Update: they worked exceptionally well for that.
The sixth treat was a nice-sized bar of Böhme Pfefferminz Creme-Schokolade ($3.60 at Universal yums). This was one of two treats that actually had German-language packaging. This is a chocolate bar with a creamy mint filling. I’m not a huge fan of mint chocolates, and I particularly disliked this one (you guessed it, too sweet), but my husband liked it very much.
The last treat was a full size bar of Porta amarena kirsche ($5.50 at Universal Yums), chocolate with cherry flavored filling. None of us in the house are fans of cherries, so I think it will take a while before anyone tries it.
Guardian investigation finds “dangerous labour conditions, antibiotic overuse and ecological harm” in production of salmon in Chile
A new article in The Guardian exposes just how problematic salmon raised in Chile is. The salmon industry regularly violates safety regulations causing a high number of injuries and deaths among salmon farm workers. “Those who eat Chilean salmon cannot imagine how much human blood it carries with it,” quotes The Guardian.
Moreover, the fish are pumped with antibiotics, a recognition that they are kept in filthy, unhealthy conditions. The antibiotics not only help create antibiotic resistant bacteria, but they and other chemicals used by the industry, break havoc with the environment.
Chile is the largest exporter of salmon to the US – over 50% of the salmon Americans consume comes from Chile. While supermarkets don’t label Chilean salmon as such, you can safely assume that most of the farmed salmon (labeled as Atlantic salmon, the name of the species, not the locale) comes from Chile – so your best bet is to avoid all farmed salmon unless you know for a fact it has a different origin. Wild salmon is somewhat more expensive, but it’s also higher quality.
My daughter picked up this tiny jar of Luscioux Pistachio Spreadable Cream at World Market, and we all liked it. It had a strong and pleasant flavor of pistachios, though it was a little on the sweet side. I don’t have much experience with pistachio butters, though I know they are all the rage now because of the popularity of Dubai chocolate. Still, I preferred this one to the one we’d bought before.
At over $10 for a 7oz jar, it’s rather expensive – twice the price than in Europe (thank Trump’s tariffs), but still cheaper than most of the pistachio spreads you can buy on Amazon. As other spreadable, sweetened and emulsified nut butters, this product contains vegetable oils – sunflower and cocoa butter in this case. It is about 45% pistachios – which is much lower than the 90% nuts required to be called a “butter” here in the US (until Trump changes these regulations), thus the name “spread”. It’s till higher than the 13% hazelnuts Nutella has and it doesn’t have palm oil. Other ingredients in the label include powdered milk and whey (so it’s not vegan), olive oil, soy lecithin and “flavors”.
In all, I enjoyed it on top of a crumpet but it’s too sweet for me at my age, and I wouldn’t buy it again. My daughter might, however.
Disappointing fare at this once SF Valley favorite
A Thai restaurant has been operating in the strip mall on Topanga Canyon and Lassen, in Chatsworth, for over a quarter of a century. I’ve never noticed the change of names and ownership of said restaurants, but I’ve frequented them all as they are very close to my parents’ home. Alas, it’s the end of an era. Not only because life and death means we won’t be visiting the area for much longer, but because our last visit to the restaurant in the space, now named Amazing Siam Thai Restaurant, was less than amazing to say the least. Given the quality of Thai restaurants in the San Fernando Valley, I can’t imagine Amazing Siam has long for this world.
The restaurant itself looks as it’s always looked: it’s a rectangular space with booths on one side, some next to the window, and a wall bench on the other with tables and chairs facing it. It’s decore is muted, which has been the trend for Thai restaurants for at least a decade or two now. It’s a nice, casual place to stop by. The menu is pretty standard and prices are on the affordable side, with most dishes in the high teens – low for 2025.
We started with the beef satay ($14), five little skewers of pounded and marinated beef served with toast, peanut sauce and salad. I love beef satay, but it’s practically impossible to find it in the Bay Area – it’s a staple of LA Thai restaurants, however. This one was just competent. The meat wasn’t particularly tender and while it was nicely flavored, it needed a bit more salt. Indeed, that was my complaint about all the dishes at Amazing Siam. I liked the peanut sauce, though it was very sweet. Diabetics might want to stay away. The toasted bread was just that: toasted sliced white bread, but it worked for soaking up the leftover peanut sauce.
As my entree, I had the Golden Curry with beef ($19), and here is where things went completely awry. The curry consisted of slices of beef and large chunks of potatoes and carrots. It tasted as if each ingredient was cooked independently, unseasoned, and then just added to the curry. That meant that none of the food was able to actually soak up the flavor of the curry, and instead every bite was insipid. The curry itself wasn’t great either. It neither looked or tasted like a yellow curry, rather it resembled a watered down panang curry. There was no depth of flavor and while it was somewhat spicy, it was very underseasoned. There was no salt at the table to help it out either.
Mike ordered the Pra Ram chicken ($16). Here again, the chicken and spinach had been cooked on their own, unseasoned, and served with the peanut sauce. Once again, the peanut sauce was tasty, if very sweet, while the chicken was insipid – though as the sauce was thicker, it was a better conduit for it than the beef in the yellow curry had been.
The one highlight of the meal was the Pad Thai ($15), which my daughter ordered with tofu. The noodles were well cooked and the sauce was as delicious as one could expect, hinting also toward sweetness (which is not a bad thing unless you are avoiding sugars). If I went back to the restaurant, this is what I’d order.
Service was unremarkable, though the kitchen sent dishes when they were ready, which means the appetizer came after the curries (I’m guessing because the beef satay had to be cooked rather than just plated).
I received a disturbing report from a teacher friend. The head chef of Zaytoona restaurant in Hanford, Alex Kent Ryan, has been stalking her. Alex Kent Ryan appears to be your typical white supremacist, genocide supporting, misogynist, child-sexual-abuse accepting, hateful Trumpster and he seems to object to my friend speaking up for equality and human rights for all. He has been threatening her, stalking her and he even called her job trying to get her fired – a move we’ve seen many Charlie Kirk supporters do in the last month.
Women, people of color, and people of conscience in general may not feel comfortable eating at restaurant where the person preparing your food is a vindictive, hateful, right-winger.
Dearth of good deals means no FOMO if you skip it.
San Leandro Restaurant Week is upon us and, if possible, it’s even lamer than last year. There are very few deals that will make me want to try a new restaurant or revisit an old one.
Here are the best ones, which I might try:
– Paradiso has a $45 prix-fix menu available daily from 4 to 5 PM. During restaurant week, you can order it all day.
– Nella’s Place, a Southern food place, offers half off a second dinner, so $9 to $11 off the price of two dinners. I haven’t tried it, and this seems like a good opportunity.
– Scend offers several promos with small discounts, for example you can save $1 on a 2-wing/fries/soda lunch deal, buy one dessert get another for 1/2 off. It might be a good opportunity to try their oxtails, though, as they do offer a small order of 2 oxtails over rice for $17, and usually you need to get a full order for over $40.
The offers from the other nicer restaurants in town leave much to be desired.
– Horatio’s has a 2-course menu with only 4 choices of entrees for $33 – which saves you an average of $5 over regular menu prices, depending on what you order and whether you go for dinner or lunch.
– Moussaka gives you a free babaganoush or hummus ($8) with purchase of an entree
– Top Hatters gives you a free order of lemon ricotta doughnuts ($10) but only for lunch for a party of at least two people.
Some restaurants are adding cheap freebies
– Elio’s will give you a free cup of tapioca pudding or scoop of ice-cream if you order their daily-special dinner.
– Leisure Cafe offers a free ice tea or milk (~$5) if you buy its baked pork chop or black pepper spaghetti.
– Tequila Grill has a 3-course menu for $25, featuring half-entrees, which basically means that by ordering the very limited choices for appetizer and entre, you get a free flan.
– Tsuru Sushi offers 3 orders of chicken teriyaki for the price of 2 or a free California roll if you buy ramen. The latter is not bad, but who wants three orders of chicken teriyaki?
Discounts at other restaurants are pretty paltry:
You can save $3 at 21st Amendment brewery, but only if you want to eat fish tacos with an El Sully beer.
Fieldwork Brewing is offering an appetizer + pizza for $30, usually $27 to $41 (assuming all items are included in the promo).
Sushi Delight offers its 9-piece sashimi dinner for $22 or $6 off its regular price and its “tempura & teriyaki” dinner for $19, or $2 off its regular price.
You can save 15% on the dish-of-the-day at Habibi’s Birria. And then some restaurants don’t offer any savings whatsoever.
Pistahan is offering its same weekend buffet at its regular price.
Josephine Southern Cuisine is opening a pop-up on July 18th & 19th from 11 am to 4 pm only, at E14th Eatery and Kitchen and serving their fried chicken with mac & cheese and collard greens for $25, which seems like their regular price.
There are also a few bars/drink places with offerings, but as I’m not someone who goes out to drink I didn’t analyze them.
A quarter-plus of a century after initiating my international food project I’ve finally finished cooking “L” cuisines. Except that I really didn’t. In order to speed this project and have a hope of finishing it before I die, I decided to concentrate on national cuisines, and leave regional, ethnic and historical cuisines for later. Of course, as later will never come, I’m still cooking some of these other cuisines here and there – but I’m not focusing on them as much. While they stay in the backburner, I will move on to “M” national cuisines.
For this part of the project I cooked the following national cuisines:
Lao: the ubiquitous larb, grilled chicken and grilled beef Latvian: meatballs, cheesy cutlets and a killer mushroom sauce Lebanese: kebabs, lambchops and a cake Liberian: delicious spaghetti and chicken and a molasses cake Libyan: soup, pasta and a cream cheese baklava Liechtensteiner: cornmeal and spaetzle Lithuanian: fried bread, potato pudding and pancakes Luxembourger: chicken pastry cups, chicken with Riesling, dumplings and a plum tart
I also touched on two cuisines I skipped earlier in the project, by making a very tasty Aymara meat and potato stew and a pleasant Bihari chicken curry.
I’m moving on to “M” national cuisines, and given how many of these there are, I anticipate I’ll be cooking them well into 2026.
I’m a relatively new convert to mayonnaise. As a kid and young adult I always avoided it. At some point, however, probably around the time I became a fan of Nation’s, which smothers its burgers in mayo, I started to dig it. But I would have been a much earlier and greater fan of mayo if I had tasted Duke’s Real Mayonnaise before. Simply, this is the best mayo I’ve ever had and it elevates mayo to previously unimagined heights.
That’s a wild thing to say about a product that is not only over a hundred years old, but apparently wildly popular in a large part of the country (the South). Still, I had never heard of it, not even in passing or while cooking any of the southern cuisines I explored.
This mayo has a very intense flavor that won’t be easily hidden behind others. It’s made with soybean oil and egg yolks, and gains its sour notes from distilled and apple vinegar. They almost, but not quite, fooled me into thinking it was lemon juice. It doesn’t have added sugar, which apparently detracts rather than enhance the natural flavor of the mayonnaise. I think it would be great to dip French fries in or for chicken salads.
Once only sold in the South, Duke’s is now available nationwide and even internationally. I found it at my neighborhood Safeway on sale for $4 for the 30oz jar (normally $8).
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