I love milanesas. They’re not very healthy and they’re a bit of a pain to make (or rather, to clean up after), but they are soooo good.
Last night I made them with some very thin meat from Safeway I didn’t even need to beat up. The empanadas were extremely tender and wonderful in thin slices of sourdough bread with lemon juice, tomato slices and baby spinach. Yummmm.
Recipe
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We just made another trip to Trader Joe’s so I figure I’ll write a few words about new products we’d bought. I’ll keep adding more items to this posting as we try them.
–Corinthians Chocolate Cream Wafers. These are very long cylinders filled with dark chocolate cream. They are very brittle and most of them seemed to have broken at least in two even before we open the can. They are good and addictive but not as good as others I’ve had. I probably shouldn’t buy them again.
–Think Thin Sugar Free Sour Citrus Slices. These are little soft candies in sour flavors. Mike bought then and didn’t like them as they weren’t very sweet, though he says they are growing on him.
–Piccolo Limone Italiano. This pre-squeezed lemon juice comes in a little plastic bottle in the shape of a lemon. Unlike other commercial lemon juice, it’s neither lemon juice from concentrate, or pure-lemon juice. Instead it’s a mixture of water, lemon juice, citric acid and lemon oil. It does need to be refrigerated after opening it. It was quite good, it had a distinctive lemon-oil flavor that I actually found quite pleasant on top of last nights milanesas. Of course, fresh lemon is better – but if you don’t have your own lemon tree it can be quite expensive.
–Kettle Corn. Though obviously not as freshly made as the kettle corn from the farmers market, it tasted quite fresh. It was very good, but much sweeter than the farmer’s market stuff. That’s not bad in itself, though a concern if you’re watching your sugar intake.
–Orange Chicken. This is a frozen product that has to be heated by baking or sauteeing (in 1/2 cup vegetable oil!). I was VERY dissapointed. The chicken was pretty tasteless without the sauce, and the sauce was too runny and not very good. It didn’t really taste much like orange and not at all like the sauces you get at Chinese restaurants. Given how much time it takes to make this dish, and how it’s not microwabable, it’s certainly not worth it. It probably wouldn’t be worth it either if it was microwabable.
–Chicken Curry. This is a frozen entree under TJ’s label. It was very disappointing, much worse than the other frozen Indian entrees that TJ sells under a different label. The “basmati rice” was long-grain and may have been basmati, but it was completely tasteless. The curry had very few pieces of chicken and the spicy sauce tasted mostly of cinnamon. It was edible but not enjoyable.
I’m ashamed to say it but I love Stouffers lasagna. The small ones are OK, but they can’t compete with the large party-tray size. For some reason, maybe the long, slow baking, it tastes much better.
I don’t even want to look at the list of ingredients as I’m sure I’d be apalled. But it tastes sooo good, it’s such the perfect comfort food. Plus, if you bake a tray you’ll have dinner/lunch for at least a couple of days.
Pastel de Carne, or Meat Pie, has been one of my favorite dishes since I was a little girl. It’s rich and hearty, perfect for a cold winter day – and to satisfy those pregnancy cravings.
A pastel de carne is very simple and quite reminiscent of an Irish Sheperd’s pie. It’s consists of a layer of mashed potatoes, a layer of cooked ground beef and another layer of mashed potatoes baked in an oven-safe pan. I use the same filling I use for the empanadas (a modify version of which I also use for spaghetti sauce). It contains many more spices than my mom’s simple Argentinian basis, but I like it more.
To make it you need
-6 cups mashed potatoes (I often use boxed ones, but if you want to make them yourself this recipe is great
-1 tbsp. olive oil
-1 onion, chopped
-2 cloves garlic, minced
-1 lb ground beef
-salt & pepper to taste
-2 tsp. garlic powder
-2 tsp. oregano
-2 tsp. paprika
-1/2 tsp. curry powder
-1/2 tsp. coriander
-1/2 tsp. cumin
-1/2 tsp. chili powder
-1/4 tsp. allspice
-1/2 cup pasta sauce (optional)
-1/8 cup red wine
-1/2 cup raisins
-Shredded and/or parmessan cheese to taste
Sautee the chopped onion in the olive oil over medium-high heat in a deep skillet. When soft, add the garlic and sautee for a couple of minutes. Add the ground meat and brown. Add the spices and stir. Add the pasta sauce and the red wine, stir and cook until the meat is well cooked. Remove from heat and stir in the raisins.
In a oven-safe deep pot, layer half the mashed potatoes, cover with the ground beef and top with another layer of mashed potatoes. Sprinkle cheese on top. Bake until the cheese on top melts or browns.
I just posted some more restaurant reviews. In addition to reviews for Pasta Pelican, Stacey’s and the Montclair Egg Shop that I’d mentioned earlier, I put reviews for The Ice Creamery in Castro Valley and Ploughman’s in San Leandro.
Michaela and I have fallen in love with Trader Joe’s frozen gnocchi. Both their Gnocchi alla Sorrentina, with a tomato sauce and mozarella cheese and their Gnocchi al Gorgonzola are great. We specially like the gorgonzola one, though it’s terribly caloric. One 1lb. package has almost 1,000 calories and while it’s supposed to be four servings, that would only be if you served them as a side dish. Mika and I had no problem devouring one whole package for dinner last night, and she was even hungry enough to have some more gnocchi from my mom’s plate.
The gnocci alla sorrentina is much healthier, with 510 calories for the 1lb package. Of course it’s not as yummy, but it’s quite good nonetheless.
You can make them with less sauce for less calories and less mess.
They are made in Italy, without any artificial ingredients, though the gorgonzola gnocchi has margarine in addition to butter. You can heat them on the microwave or in a frying pan (7 minutes). In all, it’s a delicious and quick meal.
I just tried the flan from costco. AFAIK it’s a new item and was in the cakes section (next to a fruit cake and a cheesecake). It’s delicious. It tastes just like great flan, but it’s incredibly smooth and creamy. I actually missed the rough texture I get when I make flan, but my mom loved the smoothness. It’s also very, very rich. Yummm.
Of course it has some ingredients I don’t like (like corn syrup), and at $13 for the 3 lbs flan it’s not exactly cheap. Plus it’s very flat so I wouldn’t serve it to guests. But lord, is it good!
Yesterday we drove I-5 to LA and in our neverending quest to find something descent to eat on the road, we stopped at Cazuelas, a Mexican restaurant in Coalinga. We’d never been there before, so we had hope. It was slowly dispelled.
The restaurant actually looks better from the outside than the inside. The architecture of it is fine enough, but the twiching fluorescent lights and ugly vinyl chairs and formica tables gave it a definite dive look, though most of its customers were Mexican families.
There were only a few tables occupied when we got there, but service, still, was very slow. It took over five minutes for us to get seated, and we waited for a long time to get our food, the bill, etc.
Still, our culinary experience started well. The tortilla chips and salsa were actually good. The chips were crispy and only slightly salty, and not in the least oily. The salsa had the right note of spice and lime.
The menu featured standard Tex-Mex items (no cazuelas) at average prices (~$10). Mike decided on that night’s special, a tostada combo ($6) while I went for a carne asada torta (sandwich) with french fries ($8). My sandwich was OK. It would have been much better if the meat had not been oversalted. A slice of avocado and chopped tomato helped with this, however. It wasn’t very substantial, however, and I expected more for $8. The accompanying french fries were quite good, though a little on the soft-side for Mike’s taste.
Mike’s tostada was a whole different deal. To begin with it was a small shell with a tiny bit of chicken, some cheese and a whole lot of shredded lettuce. It came served with tasteless rice and watery, thin refried beans. He could not have been more disapointed on his dish. Unfortunately, it was very memorable. He woke up the next day with a bad case of food poisoning. As I’m pregnant, I’m extremely thanksful that I didn’t eat any of his food.
Our drinks were OK. I had a fountain coke and it was mostly flat but it tasted OK.
In all, we’ll be avoiding Cazuelas in the future as the plague, which it may just be 🙂
Cazuelas Restaurant
179 W Polk St
Coalinga, CA
(559) 934-0751
We ordered Lake Chabot Pizza after getting a couple of door-flyers for it. Apparently it’s under new management but we’d never try it before.
We decided on ther 2-medium, 2-topping pizzas for $17 (includes a free soda) deal.
I was happy to see that Lake Chabot pizza hasn’t downsized their pizzas like so many other pizza joints in the area have. A small pizza is 12″, a medium 14″ and a large 16″ (they also have 8″ personal pizzas, and 18″ extra-large pizzas).
The pizza arrived within half an hour.
We didn’t really like the pizza. The problem was mostly on the pizza dough, it was too thick and not very flavorful. I actually like thick-crust pizza, but only when the crust tastes good. The sauce was also too mild to impart any flavor on the pizza. The toppings (extra-cheese & pineapple for mine, sausage & pepperoni for Mike’s) were fine, but they couldn’t compensate for the crust (that was specially the case with mine).
We probably won’t be ordering from here again.
Last night we went to see the Boca-America game at SBC Park (Boca destroyed America 3-1) and we had “dinner” there. We sat at the club level and got food from McGraw’s Derby Grill. The food was OK.
Mike has a chili-dog which he thought was quite good. He thought the same of the chicken-apple-sausage sandwich he got for Mika ($5). Michaela actually ate the whole sausage (leaving the bread), which means it must have either been very good or she must have been really hungry.
I was much more unlucky with my cheeseburger ($6.25). The plain burger had been sitting under a heat lamp and was very dry. It was school-cafeteria quality (i.e. McDonalds would have been an improvement) and it came plain. You could add onions and other condiments in theory, but the cheese had fused the burger with the bread to the point that they were unseparatable. In other words, don’t order burgers here.
We has an order of fries (~$3) which was fine, and a churro ($3.50) which was disappointing. It was worm but kind of soggy.
Fountain sodas (~$3 for a small) were a little weird-tasting but strill drinkable.
In the same level there was a full bar, a stand selling quesadillas and other bad-looking Mexican food, and a stand selling pizza.
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