Missing Mom's Grilled Fish

To make up for the yucky food we had last weekend, we decided and hoped to have better luck this weekend. I have been craving for grilled salted fish like my mom makes, so last night we went to Norikonoko in Berkeley again. We went there last year but haven't gone since. It's a Japanese place that serves homestyle cooking. So it serves robata style food, oden, and noodle soup dishes. No sushi chef there. It's pricey but really good. When you get there, you have to open a sliding door. Cool, huh? And when you go in, it's a little place and you feel like you walked into a Japanese family's home. It's cluttered with knickknacks all over the place. And the kitchen is not in the back somewhere, it's right there. You can even sit at the bar facing the kitchen. So, it's like a sushi bar, but without the sushi. It's a Japanese husband and wife team that does everything. When we got in, one of first thing I hear in Japanese from the husband chef is, "Have them sit there, that couple is about to leave," to the server. Right away, I remember that the husband is very tough on his servers. He is one of those strict Japanese guys. He's like Gordon Ramsay in Hell's Kitchen. He's always yelling at them. I had forgotten that about him, and the warm cozy feeling of eating food that my mom makes was then met with a feeling of awkwardness. Just hearing him constantly chiding the young servers made me feel bad for them. I felt like being there put them in that bad situation. But I was still excited to eat. My husband ordered the the maguro yamakake for appetizer and miso ramen with char-siu pork. The maguro was so good. The maguro was good - dark red color, firm, and fresh. I got the grilled salted sanma (pike fish) with daikon oroshi. I don't like daikon oroshi, but decided not to say anything about it when I ordered it. I was scared of the chef yelling at me for not eating his daikon or something. So for $15, the fish came with a bowl of rice, pickled veggies, miso soup, salad, orange slice, and two sidedishes. They were boiled spinach with ponzu sauce and nikujaga. I liked everything, but the nikujaga. I never liked nikujaga. Don't like it that it's sweet. The fish was so yummy. It was lightly salted and thankfully, it came with the daikon oroshi on the side. And a wedge of lemon! That's how I grew up eating it - with some lemon juice. It was very yummy until I noticed that they don't clean out the fish. So all fish meat that touched the innard part tasted bitter. I wasn't happy about that. My husband got a mini BBQ to use on our balcony, so I hope I can make this on my own when he has it all set up.Maguro Yamakake
Miso Ramen with Char-siu Pork

Untastiest Weekend

Last weekend, we had very bad food experiences. We went to International Blvd. in East Oakland to try a Vietnamese place my husband found on Yelp.com. It's called Cam Huong Cafe. We wanted the BBQ pork sandwich and it got good reviews there. Well, out of 26 reviewers, it got four out of five stars. When we arrived, we were met with a coughing homeless guy in front of the entrance. When we got inside, it looked hopeful when we saw a line in there. Thought that it was weird that a lot of the prepared food like the spring rolls, bento-like plates, and desserts were on a shelf without any refrigeration though... Well, we got in line and noticed that there were tables that were not cleared off yet. And that really put off my husband. So we decided to take it home. My husband got the grilled pork sandwich, and I got the BBQ pork sandwich. I also ordered the Thai ice tea which tasted standard. But my husband got a sugar cane juice. It was so yummy! It was sweet but it had a citrus taste to it that made it quite refreshing. Our sandwiches were... blech! My pork was the red char-siu pork. I was surprised that it didn't really have the bold flavor. The jalapeno slice gave it the spiciness. The bread was good - it had the crispiness. Oh, and the pickled veggies didn't have its pickle flavor that I love so much! My husband's tasted a lot better, but not good enough. He said that it tastes better than Lee's Sandwiches. I disagreed. I would much rather have Lee's. Ever since I had a fresh one at Pho 89 in Richmond, I compare all banh mi to it. The sandwiches my husband gets from SF are also very good. Anyways, we will not be going back there again even though the sandwiches were super-duper cheap.

We also tried Boran Thai Restaurant in Berkeley. We didn't know what to eat, so we drove around until something caught our eye. I saw a cozy looking place as we drove by this place, so we went. It looked very similar to another Thai place we've tried before, but after looking at the menu, I realized that it was a different place. Anyways, that's not the point. When we sat down, we were given a basket of those fried fat chips thingies (is that what it is?) with a side of sweet dipping sauce. The place is definitely homey. I liked that atmosphere. So, we ordered a calamari appetizer, a BBQ pork dish, and a dish that sounded like the fried tofu and eggplant dish we had at Thai Basil in Fullerton. While we waited, we got a soup of just chicken broth with chopped cabbage in it. It was so simple and very yummy. So I was very excited to get my food. When we did... Oh my... How can anyone mess up on Thai cuisine?! All the flavors of Thai cuisine are yummy and so boldly flavorful. You're using the best flavors!! And all the dishes we got came out super sweet. We didn't finish eating everything. Our server looked was this grandpa looking guy who was so smiley and sweet. This was the only time I was ever glad that when the server came to check on us, that my mouth was full. He asked if everything was okay, and I just gave a polite nod with, "Mm-hmm." Later when he asked if we were done, we asked for boxes. We didn't have the heart to tell him that we didn't want to take the leftover home. We then walked over to Andronico's and got salt and vinegar potato chips to balance the sweet taste in my mouth. We then left the leftovers by a trashcan in front of Walgreens where I know I've seen homeless people hang out before. As soon as we got home, we checked it out on Yelp.com, of course. I don't know why people like it. *sigh*

Sunset Magazine Nacho

My husband brought home a Sunset magazine from work. It had a recipe for nachos. I'm so weak when it comes to nachos or chips and salsa. We have nacho nights sometimes. They're fun. We usually get beer and sit at the coffee table in front of the TV. Well, I liked this recipe because it's different from the cheese, chili, guacamole, sour cream, etc. toppings on it. The meat sauce from the magazine used chile verde, Mexican chorizo, and minced steak. It's really supposed to be topped with black beans as well but I don't care for them so I didn't make it. I did top it with guacamole though. And I added chopped tomatoes on there to give it more color.

Oh, I made the lemongrass coconut soup like I said I would. I thought that it came out pretty good. Next time I will add more spiciness though. I didn't make the spicy noodle. A colleague from work lent me Anne of Green Gables and I just couldn't stop watching! It was so good! I love the speech Miss Stacy gives the class. If only teaching is as easy as taking the students out to look at a bird nest...

Thai Food!!

I have been craving for Thai food again. On Thursday, I made pad thai using the Thai Kitchen brand. I never used this brand before until I got a Thai cookbook (called Simply Thai) and wanted to make green curry. I was going all over the place looking for green curry paste. I always passed by the Thai Kitchen brand because it just looked cheesy... You know... Not authentic. But because of my craving, I bought it and made the green curry with eggplant. That's how they make it at one of my favorite Thai places: Saladang in Pasadena. Anyways, it was so good! I made it again another time; and again tonight. It turned out that my sister makes them, too. But she said that she makes it with chicken and potatoes. And she cooks all the ingredients first and then mixes it with the curry. So I tried that today. It came out pretty good. The color... Not so much. I think cooking the eggplant ahead of time may have been a bad idea because the dark purple color kinda made the curry unpleasantly dark. I like serving the curry in the fondue set. It makes it more special.
So what was I talking about? Oh, the pad thai. It came out pretty good. I think next time I need to drain out the juice from the shrimp and chicken that I added to the noodle. It make the noodle kinda mushy. Also, I would squeeze some lime juice on it and some extra spiciness. The Thai Kitchen pad thai sauce just needed that punch in flavor. I wish I took a photo of it!

Well, tomorrow, I'm going to use the leftover rice noodles and make Spicy Thai Noodles and the Chicken Coconut Soup from the Simply Thai cookbook. I'm hoping that by looking at the ingredients for the Spicy Thai Noodle that it is the recipe for pad kee mao. It's my husband's favorite Thai noodle dish. The best place that makes this is Thai Basil in Fullerton. It's our other favorite Thai place. We compare all Thai places in the Bay Area to this one. Each time we're in town, we try to go. It's always good there. The last time we went was for New Year's Eve. We tried a new dish with eggplant, tofu, and basil. It was so good!! We also had their coconut soup. It was very yummy. We have been really into the coconut soup. I love the lemongrass flavor in it. So that's why I'm going to make it tomorrow.

Thai Basil's Eggplant & Tofu with Basil - I can't remember what it's called. So yummy!!

The Pad Kee Mao with pork.

The Lemongrass Coconut Soup.

Long Time, No Blog

Oh my... I haven't blogged since September?! That's so bad. I've been taking photos of this and that to put up on here, but just never really had the time or got too lazy to. I even started a little crafty project for fun. I started making Christmas ornaments out of felt. Never finished them, but that's okay. I'll put them up on here another day.

I went back home for Thanksgiving. We had our usual family dinner with the traditional turkey and the fixings, plus the Japanese dishes. We always invite our family friends. It was weird because one of us "kids" actually had their first child. Anyways, I don't have any photos of the food we had that night. We always get too busy. But we were able to take a photo of our Black Friday Sushi and Tempura Dinner we had. It was my sister and her husband's idea. It was a lot of work. We were doing all we can until our mom came home to do her magic and get the dinner prepared and completed. It was a scary night for us. Not because of the amount of food, but because our dad got lymph-node infection during the middle of dinner. It looked like his left cheek fell down to his neck. He's fine. Just needed to take antibiotics.

Then, for Christmas, I actually went gambling at Pechanga with my parents. It was fun and weird at the same time. I was sitting in the back seat of the car with my parents driving. I felt like such a little girl. Anyways, we had our Christmas family dinner on the 29th because that's when everyone was able to get together. We did a tempura dinner that night. We all decided that tempura dinners aren't such a good idea because it got cold. It's better to do warm dishes with tempura as one of them. Not ALL tempura. We even tried tempura-ing (my sister's new word) avocados. Someone recommended it. It wasn't that great. We also bacon-wrapped some asparagus and tempura-ed those, too. Those were better. But I'm too lazy to do that again. Plus, the asparagus were expensive. Then, we did our Secret Santa thing. It was so much fun. My Secret Santa turned out to be my dad. He got me the water boiling thermos thingy. I still don't know what they're called. I love it. Makes me drink more tea instead of soda. It's healthier.

Ladybug Gift Decor

I got my friend a little gift for her "BIG THREE-OH". The store clerk put a ribbon on the box, but it just looked so plain. So I added a ladybug sitting on a leaf to the ribbon. I made it out of felt and added the line and spots on it with black embroidery floss. I'm quite proud of the antennae I added to the head. That's also made of the embroidery floss.

Quail Eggs

I went home during the Labor Day weekend and guess what I had? Yup, quail eggs. My family has an aviary with parakeets and four little Button Quails that my brother got my sister for her birthday. One male quail with three females. My sister named them Hugh Heffner, Holly, Bridget, and Kendra. Cute, huh? So, when I went home, I checked on Hugh and his girls. Hee hee! I love saying that. I took a photo of two of the girls. Anyways, we don't know which ones are laying the eggs, but they've been laying these really cute speckled brown and blue eggs. My mom boiled them and I had a few. Just tasted like regular eggs.