Lasting Long

Yeah, I do other shit besides eat. Check out www.sugarmonk.com.

Cous Gous All Up In Your Face

I made a bad-ass cous gous yesterday. Check this out:

Derum Wheat Semolina cous gous

ginger

baby tomatoes

carrots

red pepper

bok choy

big portobello mushrooms

All the veggies were marinated lightly in a spicy thai peanut sauce and soy sauce.





All I need is some raisins in there to sweeten it up. Imagine if I cleaned up some giant bok choy leaves, and you could eat the dish with your hands just by scooping it up with firm bok choy? Imagine that!

Ice Cream Tempura

Fried green tea ice cream aka ice cream tempura is a real treat if you know where to get it. East Village Sushi Park makes it pretty well. I had one there in February or March that was so good, I had to get to get two. But since then, they haven't been up to the same calibur.

Here's a secret: green tea ice cream and maple syrup go amazing together. It's true. Now, you can either pour the syrup over the ice cream and then fry it, or fry it first and then drip the syrup over the tempura. Either way, the two variations of sweet flavor combine like dynamite.

The only way you can fuck this up is by making the tempura batter too thick and soft, where it's like chewing an unwanted layer of thin paper with dessert. If the ice cream is cold, the tempura batter is hot and crisp and crunchy, and the maple syrup is just marinating and doing it's thing... damn!





I bought Merlin one before we saw Dave Chappelle's Block Party, just to prove it to him. Go, Merlin! Eat that, boyeee!

Yum Cha aka Dim Sum aka "Drink Tea" aka Chinese Brunch

I've never been too keen on standard pancake/omelette/mimosa brunches. Normally I prefer eating something crazier if I'm going to drag myself into some clothes and out of my apartment on a Sunday morning. I was taken to Golden Bridge for dim sum this morning, and thoroughly got my stomach packed with funky goodness. It's served glutton-style, where little old Chinese ladies push carts around the entire restaurant (which is a gigantic banquet hall), and you simply wave, point to what you want, and they find room for it on the table. Generally, the portion sizes are equivalent to a standard restaurant appetizer, but it costs somewhere between $2 and $4 dollars.

We started out with some shumai and spare ribs.



I've never seen spare ribs diced into bite size pieces and prepared without the usual savory, sweet sauce. It's wierd looking around the restaurant and seeing women spitting pieces of bone onto their plate like it's nothing.

Then we got some shrimp shumai and some sort of dish where you had two pieces of shrimp sandwiched between some big pieces of chow fun noodle.



This morning I learned that my friend Di loves the lining of cow intestines.



I guess I must have eaten tripe before, because it tasted very familiar. Seriously, though, it tastes exactly how you imagine the intestines of a cow to taste, which actually isn't that dissimilar from how a wet dog smells. It looks like octopus tentacles. I wouldn't go as far as to say that I'm a tripe fan, but, yeah, I ate more than a couple pieces.

At this point in the meal, I felt a slight tingle in the back of my head. Apparently, my Jew-senses were picking up a signal. I saw a cart of General Tso's chicken go by, and I flagged the waitress over.



To be honest, this tasted vey sweet and light, more like a sesame chicken, but who am I to argue with the Chinese?

Finally, we got a small colony of fried shrimp that had not been de-headed. We get the pleasure to decapitate them ourselves to fully interact with our food.



Every shrimp head still has the eyes still in it, which literally appear as two giant black circles peering out through a transluscent layer of fried head. It's a wierd sight, like something out of a Tim Burton movie.

At some point between the chicken and the shrimp, we got a dish of breaded pastries, topped with more chow fun. The combination of soft, sweet bread wih slimy noodles certainly is a trip. Chow fun, apparently, is a very accomodating food. I would never top off a loaf of cinnamon bread with rigatoni. But at dim sum, it works.