Category: Food Finds

Let’s just get this out of the way up front: li hing mui is really a borderline revolting food.
I had heard so much about it, how people crave it, how it is the most awesomest flavor since chocolate. And I was hell-bent to try some once I got to Hawaii.
I started out with a passionfruit margarita with li hing mui powder sprinkled in and coated onto the rim with the salt. This was absolutely delightful, and only jet lag and monstrous fatigue kept me from ordering about 5 in a row. For starters, passionfruit + tequila + salt = most perfect cocktail foodnerd can imagine. And the li hing mui gave it a little smoky-tangy kick. I licked the whole rim clean, and loved the whole thiing.
So i had high hopes for the little packets of li hing mui plums, and other things like ginger and mango with li hing flavoring, that I kept scooping up at Longs and at the supermarkets, etc. as gifts for friends back home. Then i figured maybe i better try the damn things before I got too carried away, so I had a little bite of a plum in the airport on the way from Kauai to the Big Island. EEEEW! YUK! I ingested maybe a microgram-sized bite, and it was awful, completely overwhelming, and fake tasting. (I noticed after this that absolutely every single li hing mui product involves aspartame, which i am still befuddled by.)
I scaled it back after that. But i did have a packet of seedless li hing mui plums for spleen and littlelee, and we busted those out a few nights ago. These were slightly less horrible than the seeded ones, but still, spleen made the most appalling faces and ran for the kitchen to spit it out. Littlelee and I could find some pleasure in it, but still that one plum we’d nibbled at got chucked into the trash. I had some li hing ginger for my mom, who loves all ginger things, and she thought it was pretty bad.
So what gives? Why does a tiny bit of the powder do fantastical things for my cocktail, but yet the smallest bites of the dried-fruit forms make even the hardest-core foodnerds run gagging? Are we just Yankee lame-asses? WTF with the aspartame?
I have a packet of the powder, and I will be doing some cocktail experiments as the opportunity arises. But those fruits are all getting the boot, sadly.

we were at the 88 market last night acquiring ingredients for our next social-cooking adventure, and my eye was caught by a package of fresh winter mushrooms. These look just like the common dried chinese brown mushroom, with cushiony tops with lots of pale cracks, and they smelled nice, so i bought them to see what they were like.
They are intoxicating. I’ve not even opened the cellophane of the package, but they are perfuming my whole kitchen with the most incredible rich, savory smell. I keep getting up from the computer just to go downstairs and sniff them again. I want to roll around in that scent, to wallow in it and become one with it, it is so delightful.

I have an email out to the mother-in-law to see if there are any special recipes for these treasures, as it seems somehow wrong to treat them the same way as their dried brethren. If any of you have any suggestions, please do let me know before Friday, when they will be cooked one way or another. I may have to go buy another package, to tie them up in a mesh bag and hang them in my office or my clothes closet so i can smell them every day.

just a quick note to recommend this product from Rick Bayless:
Rustic Guajillo Salsa, available at your local Whole Foods if nowhere else
It’s delicious. Great the first time as a dip for chips, great several more times as i used up the jar as a cooking ingredient, either alone with a bit of chicken broth to finish off a thick pork chop, or mixed in with onions and other stuff i forget what to make a thicker more complex stewy dish. Stands on its own, plays well with others, keeps months in the fridge, tastes great. Yummy. Bayless continues to rule.

Not that this is SO crazy, but at least it is DIFFERENT:
Doritos Collisions: Hot Wings & Blue Cheese flavored chips, together in one bag.
They’re quite good. The Hot Wings are like regular Doritos with a bit more spice and a whiff of vinegar. The blue cheese are actually blue-cheesy, which is totally awesome.

OK, so there’s a bar in Cambridge, just outside Harvard Square heading toward Central, called the Cellar. It’s been there forever, it’s always been awesome. I’ve not been there in some time, since a) busy as all hell and b) moved away for 2 years.
However, we went there this week for the tallasiandude’s birthday, and discovered that they have added on some gastropub goodness. Foremost among which are some top-notch french fries: perfectly crisp and golden, scented with rosemary and black truffle. Holy mackerel, those are good.
(They also have homemade tater tots (chunky mashed potatoes coated in panko and fried) and what some consider to be very good cheeseburgers. For me those burgers are way too thick — they ARE delicious, but stylistically not my thing. Plus they fill me up and so i cannot eat so many french fries, another point against them.)

hi – sorry for the massive backlog and no posting… there is a TON of good eating that’s been going on, but we are only just back from the “honeymoon” travel-thon and then i was sick for a week. That sucked, but i am feeling normal now for the first time in months, so i should be able to start in on the posts shortly.
however.
in the meantime, we were walking down Moody Street this weekend, and stopped into Patel Brothers, and checked out their ice cream selection, and holy moly. Saffron-pistachio. At least 3 distinct varieties of kulfi. Cashew-raisin. And lots more, including some Latin-tropical fruit flavors that appear to be locally produced, if not entirely handmade in someone’s kitchen. We couldn’t buy any right then, but we are totally going back sometime this week. YUM.
UPDATE: Sadly, ALL of the ice creams we tried were no good. Boo hoo hoo! The saffron pistachio was the best of the lot, and it had so much saffron in it that it tasted like gasoline. Drat. All of them were afflicted with textural problems, as if they’d been melting and refreezing every day for a month, and some of them augmented their ice crystals with a sketchy chalky sort of feeling in the mouth. We tried an Alphonso Mango flavor in the gorgeous fancy packaging, same as the Saffron Pistachio, and even that was strangely flat, which may be the creamier variety of mango (versus the tart kind Americans are used to), but even so it wasn’t worth eating again because of the texture issue. The rose flavor in the less-fancy brand was just plain bad and we threw it out on the spot (the others got a reprieve of a few days in the freezer during which we felt no desire to eat them again, whereupon they got the boot as well).
Sadness. Despair. Oh well — i suppose one can always go to Toscanini’s and get perfectly lovely kulfi ice cream, and i bet they would do a saffron-pistachio special order if you were to ask them nicely….

maybe i am just having a craving, but DAMN the parsnip chips from Trader Joe’s are really good. Nutty, crispy, salty, and faintly sweet. Nummy. I just ate way too much of the bag i just opened, they were so good.

I’d heard that Sal’s, a sandwich shop/diner on Main St in Waltham, was kind of not so good, but they’ve got a sign in the window that says their American Chop Suey is the best. And as it happens, Sal’s is right next to the bus stop, and so spleen & littlelee were loitering in the area and became intrigued by this sign, spleen more than most because as an individual of German birth, she’d not actually ever had any such dish and wasn’t entirely clear on its contents.
So we had some for lunch.
And they’re not kidding — it’s delicious. Five bucks gets you a big plate of thoroughly cooked elbow macaroni in a generous amount of well-flavored tomato meat sauce, and a basket of scali bread & butter. You can make two servings out of it if you’re not a glutton, or walk out of there stuffed to the ears with a hot plate of lunch. Can’t speak for the rest of the menu, but the American Chop Suey’s worth the trip.
Sal’s the Family Restaurant
470 Main St
Waltham, MA 02452
(781) 893-8993

trying to hit a deadline at work, so can’t write much, and didn’t even take a picture of it, but last night’s dinner at WuChon yielded a new favorite: Kim Chee Man Du Jun Gol, which is a gas-fired hot pot for two full of daikon, kimchi, wood ears, pork, floppy meat-filled mandu dumplings, scallions, carrot, zucchini, glass noodles and tofu bubbling away in the most gorgeous spicy savory red broth you could ever want on a sleety rainy April night.
It will never take the place in our heart occupied by the even more wonderful tofu kimchi bokum, but it will be ordered again and again and again, because it was deeee-licious.

These SWAD brand “micro curry” pouch meals are astonishingly tasty. I picked a couple up at Patel Brothers in Chicago, on a whim, because they were cheap (less than $2) and hope springs eternal that convenience food won’t taste like complete shite. http://www.bqfoods.com/readytoeat2.html
Turns out they are awesome. I’ve had the Baingan Bharta and the Methi Mutter Malai, and when combined with rice you can get two light meals (or one hearty one) out of the packet. Who knows what poisons you get from microwaving food in a plastic packet, but if it’s only once in a while I guess it probably isn’t the worst thing ever. Because I tell ya, for 2 bucks and 2 minutes and some leftover rice, you can’t really beat these.
Appear to be available at the Waltham (Moody St) Patel Brothers store also, and presumably at other Indian groceries elsewhere.