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San Leandro Bites: Mai Thai

March 11, 2025 / marga / 0 Comments

For fifteen years, this has been our default Thai restaurant

For the last fifteen years, since it opened, Mai Thai has been our “default” Thai restaurant in San Leandro. The food is good standard Thai-restaurant-in-America faire, the prices are reasonable and it’s close enough to our house. Since the pandemic, we usually get take out from there but last Sunday night we decided to go there for a quick date before watching White Lotus on TV – this season the series is based in Thailand.

Mai Thai has been remodeled since our last visit, and I can’t say I like the new format. It now has a long bar, which I guess allows for alcohol sales and more casual dining, but the restaurant altogether has a more casual look.

The decore now looks pretty generic and not really Thai, though I did like having flowers at the table.

I also liked the table setting, even if came with paper napkins.

Still, I’m not sure I feel a compelling reason to go to eat there versus getting take out.

Though we have explored much of Mai Thai’s menu, we tend to go back to our usuals, and we did so this time as well. To start with, we shared the roti with yellow curry ($13). I discovered this dish at Mai Thai and the restaurant continues to have my favorite version of it. Roti is a multi-layered flat bread, rich with oil, that is absolutely delicious – dipped in a good yellow curry, it’s just heavenly. I don’t really understand why this dish is so expensive, but it’s invariably so no matter where you order it. On the plus side, it’s so rich that you can’t eat that much of it.

I had the massaman curry with beef ($19) and, unfortunately, this recipe has changed a little. It was spicier than usual and I could taste the bitter flavor of the pepper. The curry also didn’t feel as deep and delicious as usual. It did continue to suffer from having undercooked potatoes, but this is a problem with every massaman curry I’ve had everywhere.

Mai Thai uses sliced beef which I think they add at to the curry after cooking it, rather than cubed beef cooked in the curry itself. This makes sense practically, as they can then offer your choice of multiple proteins with each curry, but it means that the meats are tougher and less flavorful.

Mike had the panang chicken ($19), which we both felt was better. It tasted just as it usually does, though it was less spicy than usual. Still, he enjoyed it. Like with the massaman curry, the sliced chicken seems to be cooked separately and is therefore not as succulent and tasty as it otherwise could be.

Rice was an additional $3.50 for a single but generous portion and a soda was $3. Service was friendly and competent.

Read my original reviews of Mai Thai.

Mai Thai
13700 Doolittle Dr #110
San Leandro, CA 
510-351-9898

Tate’s Walnut Chocolate Chip Cookies review

March 11, 2025 / marga / 0 Comments

Not bad, but too sweet

Tate’s cookies were on sale at Safeway, and while I’m not usually a cookie buyer, I was curious to give these a try. They looked pretty fancy and the regular price was quite high. I thought they were good for a commercial cookie, but not something to write home about.

The cookies are smaller than similar ones – those from Pepperidge Farms, for example – which is not a bad thing for those who want an occasional sweet treat and can limit themselves to just one. They are crispy, which I enjoyed, though they also sell “soft” cookies. Flavor wise there were hints that reminded me of the homemade cookies my aunt used to make, but just hints. Mostly, they were sweet. They didn’t have enough walnuts – or large enough pieces of walnuts – for either their flavor or texture to push through.

I did like that the cookies have mostly natural ingredients: unbleached flour, semi-sweet chocolate chips, butter, white and brown sugar, walnuts, eggs, salt and baking soda. It does have added “natural flavor,” whatever that is, and I think it probably takes away rather than add to the quality of the cookie. There is a lingering sour/metallic taste that I don’t quite like (it could be from too much baking soda too).

I appreciate that they come in an easily resealable package so that they can stay fresh. Each portion of 2 cookies has 150 calories, 16 grams of carbohydrates, 11 grams of sugar (21% of daily value!) and 9 grams of fat.

Signature Select French Toast Sticks Review

March 10, 2025 / marga / 0 Comments

Terrible in every sense – except for taste

I shouldn’t have bought these French Toast Sticks at Safeway. I was planning to get plain old frozen waffles to have as a snack mid-morning, when hunger finally hits me but I feel it’s too early to actually have lunch. But then I saw these and I was curious. Curiosity killed the cat.

These French Toast sticks are bad nutritionally. The serving of 4 sticks – equivalent to a single thick slice of bread, has 310 calories and 40 grams of carbs – and that’s before you dip them in maple syrup. They don’t seem to contain any egg. As far I can tell, they are made by dipping bread slices in soybean oil and then dusting them with a batter made of flour, sugar, water and other ingredients with caramel and turmeric for coloring. They are probably then fried once more. And they are expensive if you compare them with the cost of making French toast at home, even if you use now-expensive eggs and milk. The package of 12 sticks, equivalent to 3 thick slices of bread, is $4. And you can’t cook them in the toaster. When I got them, I thought I’d be able to cook them just like frozen waffles, but these have to be cooked in the oven, toaster oven, air fryer or microwave.

My first time, I tried them in the air fryer and God, were they good! They were crispy outside and melt-in-your-mouth soft inside. The perfect texture. Dipped in maple syrup (and you don’t need much of it, given how much sugar they have to begin with), they were just delicious. Alas, because they are mostly carbs I was left hungry not too long after. In all, I don’t think I’ll buy them again, but I enjoyed them when I had them.

Harry & David Pop! Cinnamon Caramel Popcorn Review

March 10, 2025 / marga / 0 Comments

My husband picked up a package of Harry & David Pop! Cinnamon Caramel Popcorn at Grocery Outlet and finally decided to open it today. I had been avoiding it as I don’t take to like cinnamon in commercial products – it’s often fake and tastes horribly. But I tried them and they are pretty good. Not great. I won’t be scarfing them down or encouraging him to buy another package, but they weren’t bad.

First, the cinnamon flavor, which comes from “cinnamon powder,” is pretty subtle. It’s there but it’s not on your face in an offensive way. It mostly just tastes of corn syrup, the ingredient they used to create the “caramel”. And that’s a problem because it doesn’t have those toasty caramel notes you want from caramel. The popcorn is just sweet, overwhelmingly so.

Harry & David introduced their Pop! line of popcorn in 2022, but I don’t see them being sold at the Harry & David website or mainstream retailers anymore, which suggests it’s been discontinued as a brand.

Guolis Conitos Review

March 6, 2025 / marga / 0 Comments

Are these conitos better than Havanettes?

Once upon a time, conitos – or as we then knew them, Havannets – were my favorite treat. These are small cone-shaped sweet with a thin cookie base, and dulce de leche coated with chocolate. If you like dulce de leche, you’ll like them.

While for decades, conitos were the exclusive province of Havanna and maybe Balcarce – the two posh brands of alfajores Argentina had -, as new brands of gourmet alfajores exploded in the 90’s, so did conitos. They are now available from a large variety of brands, at least in Argentina.

Guolis is one of the brands having a moment right now. My cousin Adriana brought me a box of them when we saw her in Washington DC. She told us they had become popular as they are overstuffed with dulce de leche.

Indeed, they are, but otherwise they didn’t seem very different to me than Havannets. I don’t think I could tell them apart in a blind taste. They were very good and I enjoyed them, but not more or less than an Havannets. I’d buy them if they were available for sale – as long as they cost the same or less than Havannets.

By the way, I buy my Argentine treats through Pampa Direct (this is a referral code that if used will give both of us a $5 off coupon).

Meal Kit Reviews: EveryPlate is Pretty Good for the Price

March 6, 2025 / marga / 0 Comments

Updated on March, 2025

After years of not using meal kits, I’m open to trying them again. I started with EveryPlate because it’s cheap. I’m updating my 2019 review.

EveryPlate is a budget meal kit brand launched by HelloFresh. It offers simpler meals than its parent company, without fancy ingredients.

The Food

EveryPlate now offers a choice of over 30 meals a week, including several “premium” ones that have an additional cost, a few “oven ready” meals that come in a tray ready to be put in the oven and others that can prepared ahead and cooked quickly. They include several vegetarian meals, and several meals allow you to switch to a different protein for a small additional cost.

The meals are usually uncomplicated American favorites, things such as grilled cheese sandwich with tomato sauce, burgers, baked pastas and the now-popular “bowls”. Most meals include pork, chicken or sausages – though you might be able to switch to beef for an additional cost.

Even though they have expanded their menu, I still struggled to find enough recipes that sounded like things I wanted to eat.

The ingredients, in general, are of good quality. The meats are tasty and at least as good as supermarket meats. I particularly liked the ranch steak. The produce is hit and miss. Some items are not exactly what’s mentioned in the recipe (different types of onions or peppers), some seem overripe and some under. I’ve gotten old garlic and limes. The meats are vacuum sealed and are good for a week after receiving them.

While some meal kits include all the ingredients you’ll need, save for salt, pepper and cooking oil – EveryPlate is more stingy. They require you to use (and have!) your own butter, milk, sugar, flour and ketchup, for example. As not everyone has a stocked pantry, make sure you read what each recipe calls for before ordering it.

The Shipping & Delivery

EveryPlate now delivers their boxes six days a week. My box was delivered in the morning and I got a text altering me to it.

The Packaging

The ingredients come in a cardboard box with a cushioned liner. Some of these are recyclable and other aren’t, so you need to check before you dispose of them. The meats are sandwiched at the bottom of the box between two freezer packs and the rest of the ingredients come in their own little cardboard box. I usually just transfer the whole box into the fridge, though some ingredients (like dry pasta) don’t need refrigeration.

The Plans

EveryPlate allows you get 3 to 5 meals a week for 2, 4 or 6 people each. The basic plan of 3 meals a week for 2 costs $50 ($39 for the meals and $11 for shipping), or $17 per meal / $8.50 per portion. If you order more meals, the cost per meal goes down.

You can usually find discounts online that are good for at least the first week. You can get $15 off by using this link, but there are probably better deals elsewhere.

EveryPlate’s reduced costs are achieved by offering meals with few ingredients, reducing assembly time by not separating ingredients by recipe in the box and by not including some ingredients their recipes call for (e.g. butter, milk, flour & ketchup).

The Meals

These are the Every Plate meals I made in 2025 – I didn’t take photos of the first three.

Beef Bolognese over Linguine
Simple and perfectly acceptable. Also, relatively quick to make.

Molto Mozzarella Beef Burgers with Creamy Marinara & Potato Wedges
I only made the burger, it was pretty good. I didn’t use the marinara sauce and instead used my own ketchup and garlic aioli.

Crispy Caesar Chicken with Roasted Carrots & Garlic Mashed Potatoes

The chicken was simple but pretty tasty. The caesar dressing helped keep it moist. I roasted the potatoes instead of mashing them and tossed them with olive oil, chopped garlic and Italian seasoning. They were quite yummy.

Creamy Tomato & Pork Sausage Linguine with Garlic Bread

This was also pretty good, but pretty heavy and I don’t think worth the calories or carbs. I added my own Parmesan to both the garlic bread and the pasta – it needed it. I cooked the garlic bread in the air fryer for 5 minutes at 350F. No need to preheat.

Back in 2019, I made these ones:

	Carne Asada Fajitas with Pickled Onions and Lime cream This dish was just OK
	Steak Tagliata with Tomato Jam, Creamy Kale and Garlic Bread A surprisingly enjoyable dish with good quality beef.
	BBQ Pork Sloppy Joes with Pickled Onions and Sweet Potato Wedges I made a mess of this, but the pork was still tasty

All in all, I was happy with them. They were relatively easy to make, quicker than other meal kits, and they were tasty. The portions were also OK – though in some cases this was because of the empty carbs (just look at the size of that garlic bread in comparison to the beef!).

I also made a meal based on an EveryPlate recipe, and might make more in the future:

Garlic-Rosemary Chicken with Roasted Root Veggies

A very decent meal to put together with stuff I had at home.

Cancelling the service was also very easy – just do it online – and reactivation is a breeze as well.

Cuisine Adventures Butter Chicken Naan Bites Review

March 4, 2025 / marga / 0 Comments

I’m not a huge appetizer eater, but when I saw that Costco was carrying these butter chicken nan bites I was curious. I love nan bread, I love butter chicken, and combining the two in a bite seems to make a lot of sense.

The 25 oz package comes with 2 bags of nan bites, each with 18 pieces. They can be baked in the oven or cooked in the air fryer. I did the later, preheating it at 350F for 5 minutes, then cooking the bites for 4 minutes, tossing them and then cooking them for an additional 3 minutes. Even though I let them rest for another 3 minutes they were extremely hot when I bit into one. I’d advise to let them sit for at least 5 or 6 minutes before attempting to bite into them.

They were pretty good. They look little samosas but the shells are a little puzzling. They were crispy on the outside and rather thin, but pleasantly chewy.

The filling was tasty, though it was closer to a generic chicken curry than to butter chicken in particular. It had none of the complexity and yuminess of the latter. There was also not enough chicken. Moreover, the sauce spurts all over when you bite into them, particularly when hot. They were a bit on the oily side, however.

All in all, I don’t think I’ll buy them again but I will likely finish the package.

Update: I ate some more dipped in honey mustard dressing and they were absolutely delicious. Of course, most everything with honey mustard dressing rocks, but these went particularly well. They are still too greasy for me to buy again, but I am enjoying those I have left.

Cuisine Adventures is a brand of frozen products made by Plats du Chef, a once Canadian company now owned by a private American company.

Junior’s Mini Cheesecakes – Review

March 4, 2025 / marga / 0 Comments

A nice treat

Last year, when we went to New York City, our first gastronomic stop was at Junior’s – the famed coffeeshop that was credited with serving the best cheesecake in town. We liked it, so when I heard that Costco might be carrying their cheesecakes I directed Mike, my husband, to get one. It turned out that what they are actually carrying is a package of mini-cheesecakes, and that what he finally got for us a few days ago.

The package comes with 24 frozen cheesecakes and costs around $21. I say around because Costco actually forgot to charge us for it – and charged us for an extra of another item instead. Unlike the regular cheesecake, these ones don’t come with a cake or cookie base, they are all cheese. Indeed, the ingredient list is very simple: cream cheese, sugar, heavy cream, eggs and milk. You are supposed to keep them frozen and let thaw at room temperature for an hour before serving, but I thawed them in the fridge to no ill effect (so far).

The box comes with three flavors of cheesecakes: “original” (plain), strawberry and chocolate. The original cheesecake was pretty good, but not as good as the cheesecake we remembered from Junior’s. That one had a rustic flavor which made us think of a farmer’s cheese. This one just tasted like regular cheesecake, albeit a less sweet version. Indeed, while it was still a tad too sweet for my taste, I did appreciate that it wasn’t as sweet as most cheesecakes are. And I didn’t miss the cake base layer at all.

The strawberry cheesecakes have a swirl of strawberry sweep on top and what seems like a thin layer of strawberry syrup in the middle. The syrup tasted “real,” like what you get when you cook strawberries with sugar and then puree. It was pretty good, and gave bright, fresh hints to what is otherwise a very uniform experience, but I wish there had been more of it.

I had a similar thought with the chocolate cheesecakes. These ones had a swirl of chocolate cheesecake – rather than chocolate syrup – a bit deeper than the strawberry one. The flavor of the chocolate cheesecake was very good, but there just wasn’t enough of it to reach every bite.

In all, these are a good dessert both to serve to others and to practice portion control – particularly if you thaw one at the time.

San Leandro Bites: Roti Indian Cuisine

March 2, 2025 / marga / 0 Comments

A new Indian restaurant takes over Kismat’s space

San Leandro has a new Indian restaurant. Sort of. In reality, Kismat, an Indian restaurant that had opened near Bayfair Mall during the pandemic, has rebranded as Roti Indian Cuisine. I’m not sure whether it’s also under new ownership or management, but I can tell that it has a new chef. I personally liked Kismat’s food the couple of times I got take out from there – but my family had found the dishes too sweet. The new chef seems to be sinning in the opposite direction.

We got take out from Roti Indian Cuisine last week and overall we liked the food – it’s pretty solid. However, I didn’t enjoy it as much as that from other nearby Indian restaurants. On the other hand, it was cheaper.

I got the lamb korma ($17), my usual. It was pretty good, the lamb was tender and not too fatty and he curry was developed, but it lacked the slight sweetness I want to taste in this dish. I probably wouldn’t get it again, but wouldn’t mind eating it.

Mike got the butter chicken ($16) and this was probably the biggest disappointment. Once again, the sauce did taste developed, but it just wasn’t as compelling as butter chicken usually is. The chicken itself was fine, but the sauce was ultimately flat. We’d definitely skip this one.

Much better was the paneer tikka masala ($15). This sauce was everything the butter chicken sauce was not. Bright, intense and just yummy.

The curries come with rice, which was also disappointing. It was a low quality white rice which tasted boiled.

Fortunately, we also got nan which was much better. We shared plain nan ($2.50), onion nan ($3), garlic nan ($3) and kabuli nan ($4) and they were all pretty standard – nothing to write home about, but nothing to complain about either.

Though we were doing take out, service was an issue. The restaurant was completely empty when my husband went to pick up the food. There was a server behind the counter looking at her phone and she did not lift up her eyes once to acknowledge my husband – until, of course, he spoke to her.

In all, I don’t think we’ll be rushing back here.

Roti Indian Cuisine
15099 Hesperian Blvd Suite A
San Leandro, CA 
(510) 460-9280

Dining in DC: Notes from a Week in the Capital

February 21, 2025 / marga / 0 Comments

Some months ago, my cousin Adriana mentioned that she’d be visiting New York and Washington DC for her family’s annual vacation this year. Mike and I had been in New York earlier that year, but I thought that a visit to Washington DC might be warranted. I hadn’t been there since my oldest was a baby, and I enjoy spending time with Adriana a lot – she is one of the most positive people I know.

Dining out and exploring local cuisines is one of the great pleasures of traveling, but unlike New York and New Orleans, there isn’t actually a Washingtonian cuisine. People come to Washington from all over the country and the world, so there are all sorts of restaurants and I think competition and fat expense accounts do make this a foodie town, but there is nothing particularly unique about the cuisine. Thus, rather than try to hit specific cultural culinary experiences as we did in the other two cities, we just went for what was convenient and well reviewed.

We got to DC at the tail end of winter restaurant week, so for our first two meals we got to enjoy restaurants that might otherwise have been out of budget.

We had an exciting dinner at Imperfecto in Foggy Bottom
And a nice brunch at Balos Estiatorio in Dupont Circle

Also in Foggy Bottom, we got take out twice from Charm Thai and had a nice Italian dinner at Matera.

There aren’t too many choices near the National Mall but we had a very tasty lunch at Sweet Home Café in the African American History and Culture Museum, a much more common place one at Ocean Terrace Café at the Natura History Museum and a funnel cake at Refreshment Kiosk @ The National Mall.

After visiting the outside of the White House, we had a wonderful lunch at The Hamilton.

And while visiting the Capitol, we had breakfast at the Capitol Cafe and an unforgettable lunch with my favorite Congressmember at the The Members Dining Room Restaurant. We also got snacks while enjoying Live! at the Library of Congress.

Finally, we convinced Adriana to try Ethiopian food and had a great meal at Ethiopic.

We then left DC for Virginia and had lunch at Brookside Restaurant in Luray after visiting Shenandoah National Park.

We finished our trip visiting my friend Lavinia and enjoyed several great meals with her. We had wonderful Indian food at Curry Mantra in Fairfax and amazing Ethiopian, plus a cultural experience to boot, in JD Bar & Restaurant in Annandale. Finally, our last day, we started with a comforting breakfast at The Original Pancake House in Falls Church.

As great as the food was, the best part of the trip was seeing Adriana and her family, Lavinia and hers and my favorite Congressman!.

Marga's Food Blog

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San Leandro Bites: Mai Thai

For fifteen years, this has been our default Thai restaurant