Nom Nom Nom

As much as I love cooking and baking, I love eating as well! I got to eat some scrumptious and not-so tasty food in the last couple of months (especially when finals were coming around the corner and I had to turn to take-out or frozen food… shudder). Lately, a lot of food trucks have been parking around USC. So far I’ve been a repeating customer for The Boba Truck and Wake N Bake (I’ll do a review on Wake N Bake soon. But seriously, a breakfast-food food truck is an awesome idea). But those two lovely trucks aren’t being featured today. No, today we are going to talk about Cheer Burger. I should have checked Yelp before buying anything, but it looked like the most legit truck that night and the pictures looked so good… what a fool I was. I got a salmon burger with garlic fries, which sounds good… right? I even paid more for salmon ‘cause I thought I needed my omega fatty acids. First of all, the price is too high. I think I paid about $12! And the sad thing is that I WAS TRICKED. So I thought fries came with the meal, but I wanted to double check. The man on the truck told me yes, so I decided I’d upgrade a bit to garlic fries (girl loves her garlic)—just a dollar more. Little did I know that fries were an extra two bucks more, plus one dollar more for garlic ones! After paying (I decided to just go with it… hoping I’d be blown away by my meal), I took my baggy home to eat. Unraveling the meal I saw fries that were covered in garlic powder and a sad looking salmon mush burger. I was super disappointed in the fries! I expected fresh minced garlic! Not this salty power stuff! And the salmon was ground up and couldn’t hold itself together. It was not a tasty burger. I ate the whole thing out of starvation (which by the way is suppose to make a meal taste even better… so that says a lot about this meal) and ‘cause I didn’t want to waste $12 “worth” of food. Sad day. If you want to taste awesome garlic fries, I highly recommend Red Robin. Their garlic Parmesan fries are delicious and hot, and… brace yourself… BOTTOMLESS.

 Moving onto to better food, have you ever been to Bossa Nova? It’s in Hollywood and close to Reality LA (an awesome church I go to). I got to go with my sister recently and try their banana special pizza. Did you read that right? Yes you did. Banana on a pizza. I went to Bossa Nova last year with some friends, and saw my friend munching away at this bizarre sweet pizza. Basically, it’s a pizza with no sauce, but has mozzarella, cinnamon, and bananas. And I have to say… it’s gooooooooood. Nothing tastes weird or out of the ordinary. All the flavors work well together and the mozzarella doesn’t take away from the pizza, but enhances it. My sister got the pesto verde pizza, which is has a pesto sauce (we love pesto!) and it was delicious as well. Oh, and the bread they give you before the meal is so fluffy and tasty! If you can’t tell already, I highly recommend this restaurant. Their pasta is also nom-worthy (I had it last year and remember scarfing down the whole thing, no shame).

 

 

Have you had the best ramen in the world? ‘Cause I have! Okay, that might be a tad dramatic, but the ramen at Daikokuya is the best I’ve tasted so far. They only have one ramen dish: Daikoku Ramen. Now, you can get it either with the noodles in the soup or not (I opted for the noodles already in the soup while Christina—the lovely lady in the picture—chose the other), but it’s the same thing. All that’s in it is noodles, a boiled egg, bamboo shoots, bean sprouts, green onions, pork, and soup. It’s so simple, but oh-so good. The pork literally melted in my mouth. The wait was a little long, but it’s understandable why so many people wanted to eat there. I found out about this through my trusty eat.shop los angeles book. And what made this meal even better was that I got to share it with Christina. We got to catch up and the conversation was wonderful. After all, having a meal should be an experience, which includes the company you keep.

Last, but not least, J.Wok. Now, I’ll just tease you with these pictures ‘cause I plan on filming (that’s right… FILMING! I finally got my Canon EOS 7D and am ready to shoot!) at J.Wok. The vlog will include an interview with the owner, a critique of the food (not just mine, but other people as well), as well as mouth-watering footage. So until then, feast your eyes on this!

The Holiday Jolly Jiggle

Oh my goodness. I want to kill blogspot right now. So I've had all my entries all typed up and ready to post, but blospot keeps having these photo upload problems. I take the time to create these food collages, but certain ones can only be uploaded. It's bizarre. I was hoping blogspot would fix this in the last few days, but nothing... so I'm forced to upload all these huge images and, thus, have these ridiculously long entries. Also, this entry was meant to be posted before the New Year. My apologies!
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Oh how I love the holidays! Not only does it mean vacations, spending time with family and friends, but FOOD (and thus, food comas and more fat—jiggle jiggle). C’mon. You should have expected it! It’s a food blog after all… With that being said, I cooked and baked quite a bit this year. Let’s start with Thanksgiving! So the weekend before going home for Thanksgiving break, some lovely people threw a Thanksgiving dinner at a friend’s house. I volunteered to make dessert and automatically went on Punchfork for inspiration. One of the top rated desserts were peanut butter s’more turnovers. You know what a s’more is (in case you don’t, it consists of a roasted marshmallow and chocolate sandwiched between graham crackers), but what is this peanut butter an turnover business? Basically, you add a dollop of peanut butter on a s’more (minus the marshmallow, which will be added to the top later) and wrap the whole thing in puff pastry! AH! Not knowing how many people were going to show up, I made 48 servings. Yes. FORTY-EIGHT. I was like a machine. Thankfully, this recipe is really easy and everything is practically pre-made. I got a pretty good response from diners (one girl took some to go! That make me especially happy!), but I wasn’t a fan of them. It’s a heavy dessert and the portion is quite big. Very filling.

Onward to the next Thanksgiving dish… or rather MEAL! My sister and I were crazy this year and decided we’d make Thanksgiving dinner. Now, I won’t go into detail about every dish, but I’ll list what we did make: green bean casserole, mashed potatoes, onions stuffed with stuffing, cranberry sauce, lemon-thyme turkey, and banana bread. Just looking at these pictures makes me full. I think the dish I want to highlight in this meal is the onions stuffed with stuffing. First of all, they’re gorgeous (especially the red onions). My sister and I spent like half and hour hollowing out these massive onions and were bawling as a result. Oh, and my hands smelled like onions for the next few days. Lovely. However, the stuffing in the onions was a bit of a disappointment. It wasn’t moist and flavorful enough. We did forget to bring the bacon fat (we prepped the night before in LA and drove all the way to San Diego for the actual dinner), so that played a huge role in the resulting dish. The onions were a bit too thick as well. Despite what it says online, I recommend only one layer of onion for the casing. It’ll be a bit difficult to get it that thin without breaking the whole thing, but it’s definitely possible. Oh, and the mashed potatoes—my favorite dish—were so creamy and delicious. Lots of butter and cream cheese, folks. 

And finally, strawberry crumb bars. I made these scrumptious bars for a Christmas party and they’re quite popular with my friends. Now I’ve mentioned this lovely dessert before, but I always forget to take a picture of them! So here they are! Now, the original recipe calls for blueberries, but I go according to the season (or rather, what’s cheaper). Because strawberries are so big, I sliced half of them up and then blended the rest to create this strawberry concoction. Also, I add a good helping of brown sugar on top to create a more crunchy sweet crust. If you serve this dessert hot, it’s like cobbler! But if you want to serve it as crumb bars, I suggest refrigerating it overnight. This dessert is pretty easy to make and just has enough sweetness and tang.

With all that said and done, I think I—along with everyone around me—gained several pounds this year. Oh boy. Well, the New Year’s is coming up and that means the oh-so popular resolution of losing the weight… But for the time being, enjoy that extra jiggle you got and Happy Holidays!