I went to an offsite company meeting last week in California with my whole company. This was for the most part a very satisfactory experience (except for the whole food poisoning situation, which has been proven to be completely unrelated to the trip), but on our first night there, we all had dinner at a vegetarian restaurant that had been billed to us as just completely fabulous, really great, fantastic food, eat there all the time. (We have a California office, and this place was down the street from it.)
I was trying to keep an open mind, even though I’d checked the internet and figured out it was a chinese-style place specializing in fake meat, which to me is a VERY BAD SIGN since there is a place like that in Boston that is just horrid. Bear in mind though that there is also a chinese-style vegan place in Boston (Allston actually) that is unexpectedly terrific, if a bit low in protein — we have dined there happily with vegetarian friends, on dishes that treat vegetables well and make them the stars. So I am not anti-vegetarian, I am anti-bad-food. And that’s what we got for dinner out in San Mateo: Really Bad Food.
The spring roll was the one exception — it was full of nice fresh cabbage and was quite tasty and well fried. Everything else ranged from mediocre to truly nasty. The actual vegetables themselves were pretty good, cooked crisp-tender, but the sauces were pretty lame, and the faux meat was generally icky. The mushroom-based not-beef was the best of the lot, tasting fairly okay if you were expecting mushroom taste rather than meat taste. And the potstickers were just a travesty: thick bready dough filled with nasty things claiming to be vegetables. Just wrong.
Compounding an already bad situation was the fact that there were four of us at the table, all women, all carnivorous, all ravenous from a long flight from Chicago, and all by this time very very cranky. By the time the entrees had arrived we’d already resolved to take matters into our own hands and go out later to the In-N-Out Burger we’d seen next to the freeway on our way from the airport. And so we did, and at last all was right with the world.
american chips are lame
This is the same label that makes the completely fabulous UK chips that come in flavors like lamb+mint, roast chicken, thai sweet curry, etc. But here in America, all we get is ranch, tarted up as if it’s something interesting. Arrrgh!
(in googling for a link to the UK chips – sorry, crisps – i found this. Chippie knows where it’s at, yo.)
health update – bummer
Turns out it wasn’t salmonella that I’ve been suffering from — it’s campylobacter.
C read my post and immediately called to ask how I knew it was salmonella, at which point of course I told him I didn’t, I actually had no idea, and that was when the last part of the puzzle fell into place. Turns out he’s been just as sick for just as long, and his doctor did the tests and figured out he had a campylobacter infection. We both got sick Thursday night/Friday morning, and have had identical symptoms — his big victory today was eating some toast and marmalade.
Which, unfortunately, means that we got food poisoning when we were eating together — which was the absolutely delightful meal we had at HB last week. God damn. We really liked our food and the atmosphere there, and had every intention of going back, but at this point i’d have to say there’s no fucking way. Individual cases of campylobacter infection are caused primarily by uncooked poultry, and since well-fried chicken livers are as close as we got to poultry in that meal, that means the culprit is bad kitchen habits: cross-contamination. Bummer.
We are sad. For so many reasons.
picture of the wines C brought
the pinot noir was delightful
green poo
This is fairly grody, but it’s so hilarious it had to be shared. I never wondered, but now I know: drinking large amounts of purple gatorade makes your poo BRIGHT GREEN. Like leaves on plants green. I laughed so hard I cried when I saw the green there in the bowl.
Apparently it’s the vast amount of Blue #1 dye they use to make it purple — passes right through your system and combines with the yellow tones in poo to make green.
pear tart tatin, an end to suffering
it’s been a while since I posted. Sorry about that — came down with a lovely case of salmonella whilst in California for a company meeting. This is day 6 of the horror, and the first day I’ve had any appetite at all. Honestly, the gorier aspects of salmonella are bad enough, but being in San Francisco with no appetite is truly wretchedness. Now that I’m home, I’ve got a fridge full of cheese and a bowl of lovely fruit I’ve been utterly uninterested in eating for days. Awful. Truly awful.
Last night, when I started to think about what could be done about the new roommate’s overripe pears, I knew I was on the road to recovery. Tonight, when I made — and eventually even ATE, yay me! — this pear tart tatin, I knew things were well on their way back to sanity.
The new roommate (TNR?) can’t eat white sugar, so this was a maple syrup based tart, and I have to say, I recommend it to everyone. A bit of cornstarch thickens it up the last little bit, and the maple adds a terrific depth of flavor to the caramel. Yumminess.
it’s the sauce
My coworker JG got some lunch today at Hecky’s and its delightful aroma wafted into my cube and I was forced to investigate. She had a half chicken there nestled in the foil and styrofoam, covered and glistening in a red coat of bbq sauce. She ate all the dark meat and licked off her fingers, and told me she usually got too full to eat the white meat, which she didn’t like anyway, so she threw it out. I gave her The Look, whereupon she said she’d put it in the fridge for me. 🙂 She’s awesome that way.
And just now, after a really irritating bout of data cleanup for a client that should have done it themselves, weeks ago, I went and got that chicken breast and ate it and was happy. “it’s the sauce” is what it says on the menu from Hecky’s. The chicken’s fine, moist enough and so on, but the sauce really does make the difference.
I’ve never had a sauce like this, fragrant and frankly quite sweet — which usually I don’t like, but this is tempered by a strong vinegar tang and spicy heat that seems like a combination of a solid dose of Louisiana style hot sauce and cayenne powder. It’s fantastic stuff, worth licking off all your digits and eating with a spoon if you get the chance. Yum.
now departing gate G14, hell in a handbasket
Photos from O’Hare Airport: Exhibits A & B proving that our culture is criminally, tragically fucked up.
Borinquen
I was oot and aboot yesterday in Humboldt Park, riding my bike, when I grew peckish. I came upon a likely-looking place that said Jibaritos and Lechon Asado in big letters in the window, and when I peeked in, the place was mobbed, which I took to be a good sign. There’s takeout in the front, so at first I thought I had to wait in line, but there are two dining rooms, one to the left and one to the back, and I got a table right away. It’s a little divey, but homey and full of families and young people and old people — lots of people, eating lots of food, speaking lots of languages (or at least spanish and english). This is Borinquen Restaurant.
There are some cool looking appetizers — i saw a skewer of meat and a big fried ball of something (plantain I’d guess) going to another table — and mixed plates, but I got the headline dish, the jibarito with lechon asado. I’d had a jibarito at Rudy’s Taste, which I found hard to eat and ultimately disappointing, so the fabulousness that arrived on the plate here was truly heartwarming.
Imagine some nice flavorful roast pork, in a sandwich with lettuce and tomato, glued together with a bit of cheese whiz and a generous dollop of mayo. Now imagine that instead of bread, there are two toothsome slabs of plantain, smashed flat and fried crisp in — wait for it, this where it gets really good — hot oil with so much garlic in it that globs of garlic stick to the outside of the sandwich. The garlicky goodness wafted up to me immediately, and I started thinking happy thoughts about the world and everyone in it (those of you who know me know how uncharacteristic that is). I am so grateful for all of the different kinds of people in the world, each of whom figures out these amazing and wonderful new things for me to eat. I mean, who thought this thing up? It’s brilliant.
It comes with a big pile of yellow rice, studded with beans and bits of ham and chorizo. Usually the rice in these situations is pretty dull stuff, just there to fill space, but this was really delicious. Happily, there’s a recipe for it on the website of the restaurant. 🙂 And they have Hawaiian Punch, for which I have a soft spot a mile wide, and I have to say, it goes really, really well with a savory treat like this jibarito.
It’s not on Metromix, which strikes me as bizarre, but that’s ok — we don’t want too many more people to find it, or we won’t be able to get a table.
yummy treat from austria #2
B also brought back an exquisite little miniature Sacher torte, nestled in its wooden box straight from the Hotel Sacher itself, which we shared at a gathering of friends while I was back in Boston recently. I miss all my friends there, and I wish I could just pack them all up and bring them here with me, so they can enjoy what I’m enjoying and always be close at hand. Alas, it is not possible, and so we drowned our sorrow in dark chocolaty apricot goodness.
yummy treat from austria #1
my dear friend B took a trip to vienna recently, and apparently ate nothing but pork and strudels. Not really. But almost, and wouldn’t that have been fun?
And then he brought me back this little bottle of joy.
Apparently this is a great Austrian specialty: the oil of toasted pumpkin seeds. It’s all dark brown and nutty, with that interesting bite of acridity that pumpkin seeds have. Lovely drizzled on roasted winter squash, and I can’t wait to put some into a squash soup or a celeriac soup. Yummy! Thanks, B!