Category: Food

There’s a new Mediterranean fast- casual* restaurant close to where we work, and we went there for lunch this week.  You choose falafels or a kebab, and then they add rice or lentils.  They have some unusual side salads as well, such as eggplant and beet and kale.

*From Wikipedia : A fast-casual restaurant is a type of restaurant that does not offer full table service, but promises a higher quality of food with fewer frozen or processed ingredients than a fast-food restaurant.

 

It’s Sunday night.  My bags are packed, and my peace made with what I could get to, for the weekend, and what I could not.   There will be another weekend soon, right?

Check out my grocery items from my stop at the Asian grocery store Uwajimaya on Saturday.  We are omnivores (most of us), and modern-day scavengers for food : food in the grocery store, that is, not the jungle or the savanna !

The little card is from the Starbucks across the street from the hotel here in Walnut Creek. Sulawesi is a large island that is part of Indonesia.  I found that out when I wanted to know where the ‘special reserve’ coffee from Starbucks came from.    The water painting art on the card must be a nod to the cave paintings found on the island.  In October 2014 it was announced that paintings in Maros had been dated as being about 40,000 years old – among the oldest anywhere on earth.

 

My friends and I went ten-pin bowling for the first time in years on Saturday night.  We did not do too badly, breaking a 100 for both the rounds.  (Yes, a long way from the perfect score of 300, but spare a thought for President Obama’s bowling disaster while on the 2008 campaign trail.  While attempting to woo blue collar voters in Pennsylvania, he bowled a 37.  Several balls into the gutter.  The late night comedians were relentless in making fun of it.)    Afterwards we went to Jack’s BBQ.  The owner (Jack, of course) that started the restaurant spent 12 years working at Microsoft and decided it was time to pursue his passion for making barbecue the way they do in Texas, and offering it to Seattle diners.   The brisket that I had was great, and I give the black-eyed-pea salad top marks as a very tasty side dish.

 

 

Here’s the Year of the Ram table advertisement for TsingTao beer (say ‘Ching-Dow’, advises the sign) at the Jade Garden (Chinese) restaurant where we had lunch today.   It was a wild day, and I may have looked a little like this ram at the end of it .. and just very happy to get out of the office and call it done !

We have three Chinese colleagues in our team, and therefore we ran out to the ‘Little Sheep Mongolian Hot Pot’* restaurant here in the city of Dublin on the east side of the Bay.  It is the start of the Lunar New Year 2015.

‘I love the arrival of the Lunar New Year’, I told my colleagues.  You just think the year is not new anymore, and then the celebrations of the Lunar New Year comes.

*As far as we could tell, it’s a coincidence that the name of the restaurant matches the Lunar New Year’s zodiac animal : the sheep.

I’m hardly ever home on Wednesdays, but tonight I was – and I could go out with my friends for a bite and a beer.  I had falafels with tabbouleh at the Elysian Pub tonight. Tabbouleh originated in Syria and Lebanon, and has become a popular ‘American ethnic food’, says Wikipedia.   The version of it that I had, had pita bread, falafel, cherry tomatoes, couscous, feta and cucumber.  It was very good !

We had burritos for lunch at a ‘High Tech’ Burrito close to the office.  The burritos were tasty enough, but certainly not high tech in and of themselves.  I suppose the clientele it hopes to attract are high tech workers .. or it’s simply a reference to Silicon Valley to the south of us.  The term Silicon Valley for the high-tech industry in the Santa Clara Valley area was first used in 1971 and already in widespread use by 1986.

And what was state-of-the-art technology back then?  No internet, and no cell phones of course – but Intel’s classic 80386 microprocessor appeared in 1986.   And that year IBM introduced its first ‘laptop’ computer : a flat, boxy machine that weighed a hefty 12 lbs, cost $1,995 ($4,200 in today’s dollars), and that had all of 256k bytes of random access memory (RAM).

These days we find food from all over the world in our grocery stores, but this Himalayan brick I spotted at my regular grocery store made me wonder : is it really from the Himalayas*?  Is it something like Turkish delight? (A pink confection made of a gel of starch and sugar). The answers : yes, it is from the Himalayas; it is a pure salt brick; no, it is not manufactured; it may in fact have been formed millions of years ago !  It needs to be tempered (warmed up) before its first use, and it can be re-used many times after that for serving up food such as sushi, or finely sliced meats.

*Am I putting my ignorance about food on display here?  I’m a pretty simple guy when it comes to food – but I would have the reader know my favorite kind of toast is one with Marmite and avocado, and my favorite veggies are Brussels sprouts and asparagus.

It’s ‘sugar season’ here in the United States around Christmas time, writes the New York Times (click for article), and most of us have a sugar addiction.  The average American consumes anywhere from a quarter to a half pound of sugar a day. Yikes. Stay away from soda, from concentrated juices, from packaged food (cookies and snacks), and take it easy with sugar in tea and coffee.

I walked down 12th Avenue to the new Starbucks Reserve Roastery and Tasting Room that opened here in Capitol Hill in Seattle on Friday.  The feel of the inside is somewhat like that of a microbrewery, with the industrial equipment in use and on display.  I’m sure it’s quite a treat to see the roasted coffee beans come out of the roaster, but I did not have time to wait for the next batch to come out.   I just did a quick walk-through and checked out the equipment on display.  The place was packed with people.

So how do you like your coffee?  I checked out Wikipedia’s entry for coffee roasting, and compiled this list –

22 °C (72 °F) Green Beans
165 °C (329 °F) Drying Phase
196 °C (385 °F) Cinnamon Roast
205 °C (401 °F) New England Roast
210 °C (410 °F) American Roast
219 °C (426 °F) City Roast
225 °C (437 °F) Full City Roast
230 °C (446 °F) Vienna Roast
240 °C (464 °F) French Roast
245 °C (473 °F) Italian Roast
250 °C (482 °F) Spanish Roast

We went out for a sandwich for lunch on Wednesday here in Walnut Creek.  The sandwich shop has a number of colorful vintage signs, some for Pepsi-Cola, and some for bread and bakery items.  Check out the dagwood (multi-layered) sandwich with olives from the Boge’s bread sign.

Dagwood sandwiches are named after Dagwood Bumstead, a central character in the comic strip Blondie (first drawn in 1936).

In the Sunday paper in South Africa, the comic strip was called ‘Pantoffelregering’ .. loosely translated as ‘slipper government’ to indicate that Dagwood was ruled by the person wearing the slippers in the house (Blondie).  Blondie at the time, was cast in the comic strip as the traditional housewife and homemaker, wearing slippers for the better part of the day.

Halloween was just a few weeks ago, and Thanksgiving is still approaching here in the USA.  So with a lot of pumpkin around, it finds its way into all kinds of products.  My pumpkin yogurt, part of my in-room dinner tonight, was not bad.  (But not as good as pumpkin pie). 

We ran out to our favorite sandwich shop here in Walnut Creek today at lunch time. I ordered a vegetarian one with ‘everything’ on : cream cheese, lettuce, bean sprouts, cheese, green pepper, cucumber, sunflower seeds and raspberry jam.

 

 

Hey! you’re in California, where 99% of the USA’s almonds are grown, I thought as I grabbed this almond milk in the grocery store tonight.  It is very tasty – but they’ve cheated of course, adding vanilla flavor to it.

A sandwich, a salad and the milk did it for me.  Not a fancy dinner but such a nice break from eating in the hotel restaurant downstairs and waiting for one’s food to eventually appear on the table!

 

 

I stopped by the grocery store to buy some rice.  I like to cook a quick dinner even on Sunday night before I travel early on Mondays .. or maybe expecially on Sunday night.  Once or twice I have ordered take-out food on a Sunday night, only to discover late at night or early in the morning it was too spicy or too rich.

So I settled for my usual white jasmine rice from Thailand.  Next time I will try the Northwest pilaf with the wolf and the wild rice.

Gray wolves once lived around Washington state, including the Olympic Peninsula.  They are currently listed as endangered under the Endangered Species Act.  A few packs of gray wolves have returned to Washington the last few years, though – filtering in across the borders from Idaho and British Columbia.

Here’s a graphic from TIME magazine with some trivia about sandwiches around the world. The 1.96 million is the number of Facebook ‘likes’ for the Abu Dhabi-based ‘Just Falafel’ franchise that sells sandwiches with falafel balls on them (ground chick peas, deep-fried). Also mentioned are toast with kaya, a Southeast Asian spread made of coconut and sugar, the German fischbrötchen (a herring sandwich), a Japanese yakisoba-pan (sandwich stuffed with noodles) and the Australian Vegemite on toast (Marmite for me, thank you very much).  Here in the USA we have the hoagie, a split roll that comes stuffed with meat, cheese and peppers.  It actually goes by as many as 13 other names, among them sub, hero and grinder.

I am in Denver again for the week.   My time of working on the project is coming to an end, though.  

Namaste is a very polite and respectful way of greeting people in Nepal, said the menu athe Sherpa House Restaurant here in Golden, Colorado.   (Golden is just north of Denver). The was a variety of Indian and Chinese dishes on the menu and we opted for a ‘house sampler’ that allowed us to try several of the foods with rice and with naan (Indian flat bread).  There was yak stew on the menu as well !   My Indian colleagues deemed the Indian dishes just ordinary but we all agreed the restaurant’s setting inside and the ambiance was great.

‘O-K !  I give up!’, I thought on Saturday when I saw TIME magazine’s cover story that said : ‘Eat butter : Scientists labeled fat the enemy.  Why they were wrong’.  And I went out to the store and bought some butter.  I love my toast with Marmite and avocado, and from now on I will put butter on it and not margarine of any kind.

TIME says ‘New research suggests that it’s the overconsumption of carbohydrates, sugar and sweeteners that is chiefly responsible for the epidemic of obesity and Type 2 diabetes’ .. but that ‘The war over fat is far from over. Consumer habits are deeply formed, and entire industries are based on demonizing fat.’

Paul, Thomas and I went for dinner at the Old Bamboo Vietnamese Restaurant in Seattle’s International District.  It’s the new incarnation of the Spring Garden Restaurant, but in our estimation not quite as good.  Afterwards we went to a bakery-cafe to pick up some dessert.  I picked the red bean mousse cake. It reminded me of the red bean-filled buns I used to buy at the 7-11 in Hong Kong.