It might not be as good as Belgian, but I love Japanese chocolate. Meiji is my favorite brand, but Lotte is pretty good, too. And after trying this particular Lotte bar, I like them even better. And I was wary of this one, because of a previous bad experience with pear-flavored chocolate (the taste lingered for hours and it was not a good one).
First of all, the Lotte packaging is gorgeous, elegant, and eye-catching. The chocolate itself is also lovely, a little bit brighter than the matcha green. There was a definite pear/fruity aroma, but not too powerful. The taste was even milder, only the end notes were pear. I can't say I minded, because stronger might have been gross, in the same way that my Pear Blossom Wallflower air "freshener" smelled rotten after an hour.
My favorite aspect by far was the texture - smooth chocolate with a grittiness that reminded me of pear skin and cookie dough at the same time, if you can imagine. Also, unlike the last pear flavored chocolate I tried, no terrible lingering aftertaste, just satisfaction.
Guess where I've been Monday nights for the past month? Indian cooking classes at Palace at the Ben in Philly!
If there's one cuisine that intimidates me (cooking, not eating), it's Indian cuisine. Indian food is just so darn good, I was sure that there was no way I could even come close to an approximation in my own kitchen. Not any more!
Thanks to whipping up a handful of dishes over the course of four Monday evenings at Palace at the Ben's first ever cooking class, I have confidence that I can make great Indian food at home.
Honestly, it's really easy. Just like any cooking, it helps to see it done, and then do it yourself. Oh, and they teach you the master gravy that is the trick to all Indian curries!
Seeing, doing, master gravy; that's why you should attend Palace at the Ben's cooking class.Sauce for Chicken Tikka
The classes were conducted in the dining area of the restaurant with about eleven students sitting at linen topped tables (I spilled ingredients every time --sorry, linen washer) lined with ingredients and spices for the dishes on the lesson plan for the evening (you get to take the spices home with you at the end of the night!). Chef Subhash cooked at the head table, and walked around to sample and advise on the dishes we made at our tables on portable burners.As a vegetarian, I really appreciate that they had vegetarian dishes each night. We cooked two or three dishes each evening, usually one meat and the other two vegetarian. There are so many cooking classes that I would attend, but don't because either they don't cook any vegetarian dishes, or cook so few vegetarian dishes that it's not worth my money to attend.
Here's a sample of what we made:Top, left to right: Aloo Tikki and Chicken Tikka; Spinach Pakora before being shaped and fried. Bottom, left to right: Mutter Panir before being cooked down; Aloo Sukhi Bhaji.
Everyone involved with the teaching of the cooking class at Palace at the Ben was accommodating, warm, and just plain wonderful. Co-owner Nick was the gentle father figure, Chef Subhash was always smiling, and Manager Ryan was the charismatic leader. Have a question; they'll answer it. Ask about a dish not on the syllabus; they'll run to the back and type up the recipe. They even offered to let me sit in on the class I missed due to vacation the next time they hold a session.
This was Palace at the Ben's first cooking class, and you could tell they were excited and a bit nervous. I think they did a great job with their first class, and the other classes can only get better now that they know what to expect.
Palace at the Ben had a great response to the cooking class, and plan on offering the same intro class again, as well as other advanced classes in the future. Keep your eyes peeled and ears up if you're interested.
Palace at the Ben 834 Chestnut St., Philadelphia, PA 19107 267-232-5600
Ready for the most mind-blowingly awesome thing ever? Get this...sweet tea flavored vodka!!!
Firefly Vodka, a small distillery on Wadmalaw Island about thirty miles south of Charleston, South Carolina, has been making vodka out of the Southern native muscadine grape and infusing it with American tea from the Charleston Tea Plantation. Firefly Sweet Tea Vodka has only been on the market for a few months and is already the number one selling flavored vodka in South Carolina.
When I tasted the half vodka, half water, twist of lemon cocktail on the rocks for the first time, all I could say was, "Oh my god. Oh my god. It tastes just like tea. Oh, wow!" for about five minutes. Long Island Iced Tea tastes nothing like iced tea; Firefly Sweet Tea Vodka does.
This drink is scary good. Good because it tastes just like sweet tea (keep the vodka proportion half or less, and you cannot detect the alcohol). Scary because the 70 proof vodka goes down just like sweet tea; fast and smooth.
Firefly Sweet Tea Vodka is currently available in South Carolina, Nevada, New York, and Colorado, but will soon be rolled out in more states. I have absolutely no hope that the fascist Pennsylvania Liquor Control Board will make this vodka available, but keep your fingers crossed in Delaware and New Jersey.
We flew back with four bottles of the stuff. It's that good. And, no, you can't have any. Ok, I might give you a taste, but then go get your own bottle(s).
Thanks to cooking with my Nanny (grandmother, not sitter) when I was young, banana pudding is one of my top favorite desserts. She made banana pudding by making pudding on the stove top first, and then pouring the pudding over layers of Nilla Wafers and sliced bananas. The homemade pudding is the key!
I rarely find banana pudding on dessert menus, and I only make banana pudding about once a year, so when I do find banana pudding, I'm all over it.
I ran into banana pudding at a bbq joint, a restaurant, and a grocery store while in Charleston, SC. Styles and tastes ran the gamut. Who won?A quick stop into Bessinger's Bar-B-Q on Hwy 17 to pick up some mustard bbq sauce, and I couldn't resist a container of banana pudding from their cooler. I enjoyed the dessert on the beach, because...what? pudding isn't a beach snack?
The banana flavored Jell-0-esque pudding is not ideal (the only banana flavoring in banana pudding should come from the bananas), but fills that cheap, junk food craving. Fat Hen restaurant on John's Island has really good food...and a good wait to get in the door. There aren't a lot of veggie options, but what I did have was awesome. I quized our server on the banana pudding prep. Pudding homemade? Not banana flavored? Yup. Yup.
Awesome!! Just like homemade. I can't believe it didn't come in a larger mason jar (isn't that cute), and I had to share it with three other people. I hate sharing. What's that? Banana pudding in the cooler at Piggly Wiggly? Got it. Lets go! You'd be suprised at how nice Piggly Wiggly is now a days. The ghetto Piggly Wiggly we shopped at for the first eleven years of my life was just that -- ghetto.
The pudding is Jell-O pudding-like. But it's not banana flavored, which is a big up. They also do this little trick of layering a bunch of wafers on the bottom so not all of the wafers get super soggy. Some one was thinking! Piggly Wiggly has a really good fast food version of banana pudding.
Recap: Bessinger's - Not really Fat Hen - Hells yes Piggly Wiggly - Yes
Woo, buddy! I'm back and feelin' great. There's nothing a week-long pimento cheese and wine cleanse won't cure!
I'm doing my Charleston, SC vacation in three installments:
Restaurant Food Porn
Banana Pudding Smack Down
The Most Mind-Blowingly Best Thing Ever
Let's start with the restaurant food porn, since it's the longest post. (Yeah, I'm making you wait for the freakin' fantastic deliciousness, because I'm afraid to tell you about it before I drop the goods into my safety deposit box.)
I ate out, on average, only about once a day, and, of course, that doesn't even scratch the surface of the good food available in and around Charleston. When not dining out, I thrived on pimento cheese sandwiches and leftover potato salad and coleslaw from the Fourth of July cookout. I ain't complainin'.
The Glass Onion, a new soul food restaurant in West Ashley, was our first stop after landing. The term soul food always gets me. To me, what people call soul food its just simple Southern food, and that's what I'd say The Glass Onion serves in their casual, order-at-the-counter restaurant.
If every bar and restaurant in Philly would add deviled eggs to their appetizer menu, I'd die and go to heaven. Of course, then I couldn't order them. At 75 cents apiece, I was tempted to order a dozen, but the two I did order were filled with perfectly tangy devilish-ness.
The Glass Onion's homemade, inch-thick, bread and butter pickles are amazing. So much so, that the counter person recommended them first when we asked for help with ordering a side.
Grilled Pimento Cheese sandwich with a side of homemade pickles. Gooey from the grilling, their pimento cheese is good, but a tad salty for me. Take away a pinch of salt, add a pinch of sugar, and call it good.
Boy ordered the mustard fried catfish po-boy. Good stuff.
Out of all the places we ate, you'd find me back at the Glass Onion first. It's my style of restaurant - my comfort food done well at a reasonable price in a relaxed atmosphere.
Next up is Al di La, a Northern Italian restaurant and bar in West Ashley. It was dark inside, so I didn't take pics of the beet salad, portabello pizza, and butter bean linguine that the three of us shared. The butter bean and handmade linguine ordered without the pancetta might have been the best thing I ate the entire trip.
I did snap a picture of our toast to the butter bean -- a most amazing, creamy little bean that is difficult to find outside of the South and, apparently, the UK. The boy had some butter beans in London and is in love. We somehow forgot to smuggle a bag of butter beans on to the plane, so if anyone out there knows where butter beans are hiding in Philly, let me know.
Since the bean-lovin' boy had never heard B-52's song Butter Bean, an ode to the buttery little bean, we played it for him. He doesn't get the B-52's, but it's still great.
I had lunch on the porch of Cru Cafe in downtown Charleston because my sister mentioned that they had the best macaroni and cheese. I'm there!
The menu only has a couple of veggie options. I got the butter lettuce salad with candied pears, walnuts, Gorgonzola, and honey sherry dressing salad. I was surprised to see it all shredded and already dressed. Shredded is kind of fun, but there was too much of the dressing that didn't quite jive with the other ingredients.
A couple of days after eating Cru Cafe's four cheese mac and cheese (Fontina, Parmesan, Mozzarella, and Pepper Jack), I saw their mac and cheese highlighted in an article about, I don't know, I think it was something like "The 50 Best Foodie Finds in Charleston." My verdict -- Not!
Is it good? Yes, you'll love it! My sister loves it, and she's a food snob. But this is what I call restaurant mac and cheese - a crock of baked shells (not macaroni! Cru used orecchietti) swimming in a cheese sauce (I like mine without sauce).
Next is Fleet Landing, a touristy seafood restaurant that sits on the water in downtown Charleston. Somehow, this makes my second trip to this restaurant in two years, but we went on the Fourth with a friend's family and their small children for the sole purpose of watching fireworks from the prime viewing location.
Fleet Landing does not have many veggie options, and their kitchen is not flexible. On a previous visit they refused to take an ingredient out of the dish that could have easily been taken out. This visit, they refused to deliver a bunless hot dog to one of the children, and the waiter reported that the kitchen yelled at him for asking about vegetarian accommodations. Like I said, we were there for the kids and the fireworks.
Pimento Cheese and crackers. Again, too salty.
Lettuce wedge with blue cheese dressing. It's hard to mess this up. Simple and nice.
The wood in the lower left corner is the edge of our bar table at Vickery's. Nice view!
Vickery's in Mt. Pleasant is another touristy restaurant and bar, but you can't beat the view while dining! And the food is actually not that bad.
I had the fried green tomato tower. This was really good with the salty feta cheese and tangy tomato sauce with basil.
The artichoke dip, pimento cheese, and tomato and feta topped bruschetta at Vickery's were good, too. When you hear bruschetta, you don't normally think artichoke dip and pimento cheese, but if you live in the South you'll get used to these bastardizations. The pimento cheese was very mayonnaise-y.
Our last lunch was at Boulevard Diner, a Southern foods diner in Mt. Pleasant. I went for the vegetable plate of sides, but be careful! Like most Southern restaurants serving up veggies, they're often seasoned with meat. Collards and most beans (green, butter, black eye, etc.) will usually have meat in them. Our server assured me that the stewed okra and tomatoes didn't have meat, but they did!
The squash and onions were right on! (If anyone know where to get yellow crookneck squash in Philly, let me know. The straight neck yellow zucchini-like squash around here is not the same!) The fried okra was good, but I really prefer okra stewed and slimy. The coleslaw and cornbread were decent, but nothing to write home about. On the whole, classic Southern sides done well.
The boy got a grouper cake with sides of sweet mashed potatoes (awesome! should have ordered that), fried okra, and cornbread.
Cupcake in downtown Charleston makes cute cupcakes like this red velvet cupper, but they're impossible to eat. Pretty, but not functional. I suggest you peel off the wrapper, grab all of the icing with the wrapper, then slather icing on cupcake as needed. Or how about icing the cupcake traditionally so it can be eaten normally?
For the past two months I've been so tired that I've begun to think that there is something wrong with me. Maybe I have Lyme disease lite? Chronic fatigue syndrome?
The Spring rush at work in the gardens just flowed right into Summer, and I don't really see any reprieve in the near future. I'd love an afternoon nap, but crashing on someones lawn is not an option. At home, I can't sit down for two minutes before I jump up and do some little chore that pops into my head. And it's impossible for me to not wake up at 6:00 a.m -- even on the weekend!
I hope to relax a little in the coming week when I'm at my sister's in Charleston, SC for her annual Forth of July bbq. Can't wait for the beach (where the water is actually warm), fireworks (it's legal there, as the right to brand your face with sparklers should be), good food ('nuf said), hanging with my best friend from high school (yearly visits aren't enough), trimming my sister's tree (get to break out my arborist gear -- I'm so getting my bags checked by TSA), and a chance to stock up on Duke's mayo and mustard bbq sauce (condiment smuggling).
I'm too tired to write posts ahead of time and future-date them for publishing, so you get nothing this next week. Sorry.
Philly's Famous Fourth Street Deli, a New York-style Jewish deli just off of South Street, is famous for their large portions, not necessarily the quality of their food. Americans love large portions, so the monstrous sandwiches and other sides fit for the famished at Famous Fourth tend to make the masses happy and greedy-eyed.
This is not my first trip to Famous Fourth; I seem to find myself there about once a year. These yearly visits happen mostly out of laziness and lack of inspiration of where to go. Philly digs were once a block from Famous Fourth, and are currently about seven blocks south of the deli, so it's not uncommon that I find myself wandering the neighborhood.
This last visit occurred after being awake for 24 hours, which caused me to be cranky (lunch inspiration was not flowing) and perpetually hungry (a huge sandwich would solve that problem).
Sandwiches can be ordered regular or zaftig. Regular is large. Zaftig is a joke. If you can tackle a sandwich that is six or more inches tall, go ahead and order the zaftig.
Sandwiches aren't the only thing large at the deli. The salad is large enough to be set on a Thanksgiving buffet table, and a single serving of kugel will sink a ship. Large is Famous Fourth's schtick. I ordered the regular egg salad sandwich with a side of cucumber and onion salad. I pushed half of the faintly dill spiced, but otherwise bland egg salad along with all but one tomato slice and one leaf of lettuce out of the sandwich so that I could wrap my lips around that mother. I then adorned the sandwich with the slightly sweet and tangy cucumber salad for flavor. The rye bread the sandwich came on was very good - soft and not too heavy on rye.My partner ordered the cheese omelet, which came with potato pancake, and a bagel with cream cheese. The omelet was huge; fine, but the bland cheese inside was nothing special. The potato pancakes are much crispier than latkes I'm used too. The potato pancakes sort of remind me of smooshed, overcooked Tater Tots. He's a bagel snob, and liked the bagels just fine. He also ordered the lox.
Half of his brunch went home with him. I passed on the doggie bag of bland egg salad sandwich innards left on my plate.
I admit, I like large portions when I'm famished. And when I'm not, I don't mind taking home leftovers. But a half pound of leftover cold cuts, or in my case egg salad, does not make the most anticipated leftovers the next morning. I'd be better served with a smaller sandwich at a cheaper price (most regular-size sandwiches will run you about $12). With your check you get two small chocolate chip cookies. Don't ask me how they were, because I was too stuffed to eat them. For those strongly in one camp or the other on cookie texture, they felt like crunchy cookies, not soft.
Famous Fourth Deli did the trick of stuffing my indifferent, hungover, cranky stomach, but it was not entirely pleasurable. I'm sure I'll see the inside of the deli next year under a similar uninspired situation.
Famous Fourth Street Deli 700 S. 4th St., Philadelphia, PA, 19147 215-922-3274
