Restaurant Reviews: The Palm and The Thai Restaurant

As much as I love to cook, I love to eat out too and get ideas for myself. And in this past month, before I had my full-sized kitchen in my apartment, I ate out quite a bit. The restaurants I will review today feature a variety of cuisines -- both Italian and Thai.


The Palm 


The food was delicious, this is true. The prices were slightly higher than I would usually pay for a regular dinner. However, if you want to go to a nice restaurant with a date, or with several friends, and don't mind paying upwards of $40 for a 9 oz. filet mignon, then this is the place for you!

The ambiance was lovely (although it was a little bit hot in our part of the restaurant), our waiters were very attentive, and the food was great. And if you go here, the house specialties are lobster and filet mignon, so at least I got one of their best meals!

Here is the food I had with a rating between 1 and 10, with 10 being the max:
- mashed potatoes (8.0)
- potatoes au gratin (8.4)
- filet mignon (8.8)
- mushrooms (9.6)
- chocolate cake (9.3)
- creme brulee (9.8)
- cheesecake (8.2)

By far, hands down, best creme brulee I have ever tasted. It has inspired me to go make my own!


The Thai Restaurant


Although the name of the restaurant lacks in creativity, I did not expect the food to also be bland. Maybe I chose the wrong thing on the menu (although can you really go wrong by ordering chicken dishes?), but I was not too impressed with my first Thai experience. I don't think I'll give up on eating Thai just yet, but I will obviously need more suggestions on what dishes to choose. Or perhaps I'll convince people to go try different Thai restaurants around town... Yes?

Anyhow, my meal was under ten dollars (before tax), but I feel that it was overpriced based on quality and taste. In fact, I feel as though all they gave me was plain rice, steamed broccoli and chicken. Why would I pay that much again for something I could prepare for half the price, you know?

Where shall I go next in my take-out adventures? ... stay tuned to find out!

Workin' my 9-5... and a little bit of Quiche!

I know I promised a blog by the end of last week, and we're already half-way through this one but my job has literally taken over my life. I wake up at 7ish and come back LATE late. Meaning Monday I left work at 9 pm, Tuesday I left at 9:30 pm, and today it was 10:50 pm. Why so late??

But anyhow, I made a quiche last week and it was delish! So at work, it was my turn to bring breakfast on Thursday morning, so I woke up extra early, went grocery shopping and here is the result!

So to make it...

I mixed fresh spinach with sour cream and put it at the bottom of the pie dish. I then fried some bacon, and after it cooled down, I crumpled it and put it aside. At the same time, I sauteed some onions and oven roasted golden classic chicken (from the deli, sliced on 10, diced). I mixed in the bacon and put the mixture on top of the spinach. Next, I put lots and lots of parmesan and mixed cheddar/American cheese on top. I beat some eggs, mixed them with half and half and poured that on top of the pie dish and put it in the oven. And voila! It really wasn't hard, but the preparation took longer than expected. 

Sorry for the short blog post, but I have to go sleep now... seeing as how I have to be back at work in less than 8 hours. 

Until next time, wish me luck bartering to get my living room furniture for cheaper than listed on craigslist! :)

It's Been a Long, Long Time...

So I've been on hiatus for the last three weeks, mostly because my life has quasi turned upside down since my last entry. In a good way, though, no worries!

Drumroll please....

I now work for The Man! I started working in Corporate America three weeks ago and so far... it's not that bad. :)

But now that I'm in a new city and have started my grown-up life, I had to go around and get all settled in. Between my 6-hour, 12-apartment complex, 29-floor plan apartment hunt and three-week legal paperwork wait for my car titles, I've found that there's a lot to consider and do when starting over. Advice for the future: get a ThankYou Rewards credit card before you go around buying expensive mattresses and furniture and stuff left and right. It will help and it's like free money! (Yes, I know there's no such thing as a free lunch...) Anyways, I just now discovered that there's an AT&T Universal Card that would get me 10% off all my AT&T purchases for the first year, and 5% after that... so it seems like a good deal... right? :) I mean considering I just signed up for cable, internet and a phone plan all through AT&T.

So, on to the more important things: Fish Tacos!

I know I promised in my last post (forever and a half ago) that I would talk about Fish Tacos and the time has come! I forget everything I was going to originally tell you guys about the tacos, but I DO remember that my whole family loved them and they were really healthy! But I did remember to take pictures... :)

Just in case the picture doesn't come out perfectly clear or anything, the plates in the picture above are like this (clockwise starting top right):
1) Lettuce
2) Sauteed onions
3) Sauteed red bell peppers and avocado
4) Grilled salmon
5) Tortillas!

It wasn't too difficult to make. The only thing I had a little bit of trouble with was grilling the salmon (which was marinated in this yummy sauce I made with lemons and garlic and pepper and I forget what else), but I only had issues with it because I've never before grilled fish in my life. But overall, I would say the fish tacos were a success.

Random question of the day: should I get a Starbucks Reward Card? I tried signing up for one a few days ago and for some reason Starbucks' website didn't recognize my card as valid so I took it as a sign to reconsider my sign-up.

Anyhow, this blog hardly seemed organized and for that I apologize. I actually had a very nice blog typed up yesterday and then I walked away from my computer and I guess it had one of those automatic updates that it does every two weeks and it restarted... without saving my work. Oh well... Look forward to a blog about quiche by the end of the week!

Love is in the Air

... or at least it's in my cookies.

Since today is officially the beginning of Valentine's Day Week (I just made that up, so don't try to verify it anywhere online), I thought I should start making themed cookies. Of course, chocolate had to be an ingredient (not only because of it's fabulous taste, but also because it's pretty much tied in to Valentine's Day -- at least as advertised by Hallmark). They weren't exceptionally hard to make,  but the decorating took a little longer than expected.

The actual cookies are coconut shortbread cookies, covered in chocolate ganache (which, due to my frequent use of it, I'll give y'all the recipe for it in a little bit), and decorated with pink chocolate. I've had two so far (because otherwise all my cookies wouldn't have fit nicely on the tray), and I thought they were delicious. We'll see the reviews the cookies get at school when I take them up there.

My advice for y'all: if you haven't baked before, or you're not overly confident in the kitchen but still want to start baking more, take baby steps. You could, for example, buy ready-made cookies and then cover them yourself in chocolate ganache. Or, so the final product isn't too sweet, you could just buy English tea biscuits and cover them in ganache and proceed. When I first started making cupcakes, I often just used cake mix and then, slowly, as I got more confident, I started actually making everything from scratch. Now, I've moved on to not even following recipes all the time, but making my own up. Remember, a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.

So here is the result of today's culinary adventure:

As you can see, I had a little bit of trouble with the decorating and not all my designs look perfect. But it's the imperfections that make these cookies so special. After all, Valentine's Day is based on being able to look past the imperfections, right?

Anyhow, here is the chocolate ganache recipe I promised:

3/4 cup semisweet chocolate chips

3/4 cup milk chocolate chips

1/3 cup whipping cream

Heat up the whipping cream until it's boiling, then pour it on top of the chocolate chips. Stir. It will go from looking like poorly mixed chocolate milk to a nice creamy, chocolate-y goodness. Just keep stirring until it's homogeneous in texture. It is delicious. Also, try to use it as quickly as possible, so it doesn't harden in the bowl instead of on top of your cookies. You can store it in the fridge, too, if you have leftovers. 

Good luck in your baking adventures, everyone.

Next time... Fish Tacos!

Hey there, Puddin'

In keeping with my own advice from the last post, I went into my kitchen willing to try something I had never tasted before, something I had never heard of before, something I thought was a completely original dessert: blueberry mocha pudding.

Technically, berries taste good with chocolate. Chocolate tastes good with coffee. So, shouldn't berries taste good with chocolate and coffee? The suspense of that answer was motivation enough for me to venture to attempt the combination.

After doing a quick inventory of what I had in the kitchen, I chose blueberries (the only kind of berry we had, albeit frozen, not fresh). Luckily, we had cappuccino mix and my parents didn't finish their pot of coffee from the morning, making it an obvious invitation for me to use the leftover coffee.

Since I did not want to experiment with the texture of pudding, I thought it would be best to not put in whole blueberries. But since the berries were frozen, all I had to do to get a lot of their juices out was just thaw them. Of course, with my patience being unusually short when it comes to trying a new dessert, I put them directly in the microwave and it worked just the same. After squeezing and pressing all the juice out of them, I was ready.

I made regular vanilla pudding and regular chocolate pudding. Except the chocolate pudding wasn't completely "regular" per se. Instead of using just milk, as the recipe asked, I substituted some of the cappuccino and coffee to bring out the flavor. The result: mocha pudding! Upon initial tasting, the coffee taste was overpowering, but when mixed with the overly sweet vanilla pudding, they complemented each other perfectly!

After mixing the two puddings, my sister artistically poured the blueberry juice on top and voila: blueberry mocha puddin' for all! And it tasted fantastic, too. ;)

P.S. Stay tuned for more sweets soon, since the chemical engineering kids have requested some tasty treats from me this weekend!

Quesadillas and Merlot

Although I've lived in Texas for the last 11.5 years, I have never made a Mexican dish. I've eaten it plenty of times, but I've not ventured into the kitchen once with the intent of making my own Mexican concoction. And so, on my trip to visit Sweta, I thought: "why not try it now?"

 

And so, our adventure began. First, we had to choose what exactly we wanted to make. Not wanting to try something too intricate, we decided to stick with quesadillas. Yes, they're usually served as an appetizer in restaurants, and no, they're not very hard to make... or so one would think. Turns out, our quesadilla dinner turned into a supper by the time we got all the ingredients and mastered the art of making them (successfully).

 

Not wanting to make quesadillas that were completely uninspired in terms of ingredients, we decided to include all the healthy goodness we could. So our shopping list included:

• tortillas
• cheese (note to anyone else who didn't know: you can ask to sample cheeses at the deli counter; also, through my many years of making friends with deli workers, my advice is to get your meats sliced on 1 for sandwiches and 2 for cheeses; and although not all deli places advertise the cutting sizes for their meats and cheeses like HEB does, the sizes I gave you are pretty universal)
• oven roasted chicken breast (sliced on 7 -- perfect size for grilling and putting into salads.. and quesadillas, too)
• corn
• red bell pepper
• green bell pepper
• onion
• spinach
• avocado (which we forgot to add in by the end... oops)
• pineapple (as a healthy dessert... or in our case, healthy brunch the next day)

After cleaning up in the kitchen and preparing our work area, we began our adventure. Lessons learned in the kitchen that night:

• If you don't put oil or Pam in a pan before throwing a tortilla on there, it will blacken and smoke will come from the kitchen area.
• You need to turn the tortilla over on both sides while making quesadillas to ensure excellent taste.
• Sometimes the tortillas will rise up. I haven't figured out why this happens, but we stabbed the air bubbles that formed with a knife.
• Cheese is a the main ingredient in quesadillas. Make sure you add plenty, especially if you want to actually close the quesadillas on the edges.
• Drinking Merlot while making quesadillas will make all of the above lessons much more fun.

 

And here are the pictures...

 

Here is the very first quesadilla. Notice the charcoal appearance. Sweta said it was delicious, though.

 

And then, by the time we made the fourth one, there was great improvement, as the picture shows! Huge learning curve, if I may say so myself... Biggest lesson of the night: Don't be afraid to try something new.

Can't stop thinking about it...

I've come to the realization that I am obsessed with baking. It's not even a secret any more. The slightly overwhelming part of this is that my brain is almost always thinking of something new to bake. Someone will be talking to me, and if I get slightly bored or uninterested and my brain starts wandering, it inevitably ends up with a new concoction in the kitchen. I was especially productive in making mental lists of things I wanted to try in my long drives to Houston. There's raspberry chocolate pudding, apple banana vanilla pudding, mocha coffee bean pudding, double chocolate chunk strawberry cookies... The possibilities are endless!

And then... I've also become fascinated with shakes. I did this program where I entered in what I eat every day to see what I need to cut back on. Not surprisingly, the one part of my daily intake that I fulfilled (and quite often surpassed) first every day was my sugar intake. Apparently, I'm only allowed to eat 24 grams of sugar daily. So I've become overly careful to look at the labels before I eat. And here's the fun fact of the day (that relates to milkshakes): unless you buy unsweetened soy milk, you're usually taking in as much as 12 grams of sugar per glass of milk. But, using yogurt instead of milk saves you up to 6 grams per cup.

So my first milkshake experiment was a vegetable one: cucumber, dill, and yogurt. Sounds slightly weird, but it's quite healthy! And tasty, too!