Stop 3: Bonchon Chicken

Our third stop was at the newish Bonchon Chicken..

We were all excited to try Korean fried chicken...

Return to Manna BBQ, Chula Vista

Thane and his family were in town for the holidays,

which meant a get together with our "coterie" once again...

Christmas Eve Desserts, Christmas lunch and the day after Dinner at Manna BBQ in Chula Vista with friends

This is what the parking lot looked like Christmas Eve (okay, late afternoon of Christmas Eve)...

It was crazier than normal with folks (myself included) buying last minute items...

You gotta love their version of the tree by placing Filipino foodstuffs as decor...

The reason I was here? To buy desserts for dinner...

Zion Food Court + Paris Baguette

Last weekend, we met up with Bert's oldest brother and his family. Instead of meeting up north in La Jolla (ugh), I made the (strong) suggestion that we meet in mid-San Diego for an early dinner...

More specifically, at the Zion Food Court which has a lot of choices plus some great desserts. I thought the teens would enjoy that more than a stuffy restaurant with shitty parking...

Lunch @ Zion

Sometime last week, I took some time off to do errands as well as have lunch here...

where I would meet up with the ever adventurous Cathy of mmm-yoso...

Noodle J-1 with Astroboi

Earlier this week, I met up with one of my favorite people, my childhood friend, Astroboi...

at the scene of our last outing, Zion Market. We thought we'd grab something at the food court then go food/snack shopping later on...

Stuff from Zion

Ever since the new Zion Market opened up in late May, we've been going at least once every two weeks. We'd be there more often if we lived closer.

I made the trip up to pick up a few items for dinner that night since my MIL was staying with us...

Jeong Won

This past Sunday was Bert's birthday. His stipulation was Korean food, so that is what we had...

In this strip mall, one of many on Convoy that have at least one or more Korean businesses and restaurants...

The new Zion Market

A few days ago, TC and I finally got to check out the new Zion Market...

which was formerly a Sears store on Clairemont Mesa Blvd.

This turned out to be a day where we hit up three different ethnic markets, but this would be the first stop...

Korean Kitchen Tofu & Galbi and Nuyo

Bert had the day off and we originally wanted to go to Spanish Landing to check out the building of the San Salvador, which will be a replica of the one used by Portuguese explore, Joao Rodrigues Cabrilho. Instead, we watched the new animated Dreamworks flick, "Rise of the Guardians" (ehhhh). The sun came out later that afternoon and we went for a late lunch...

at the Vons shopping center near Telegraph and the 805...

Last Lunch of 2012 - Return to Buga

Our last lunch of 2012 was spent with our good friends, our neighbors across the street.

They've never had Korean food so off to Buga we went!

Downtown Food Pod - Best Bulkogi Fusion

Our day was coming to an end...before heading back to our suite, we passed by the Jeld-Wen soccer field.

In a few nights, there would be a Timbers game, and OMFG, people here take soccer VERY seriously.

I want Portland to score so we can see Timber Joey slice off a huge log with his rip-roaring chainsaw!

But before that...we headed downtown to "czech" out one of the original food cart pods...

Chae Banh Korean Cuisine

This was the next leg of our trip. Can you believe D and I spent nearly 14 hours together without strangling each other?

As much good friends that we are, we've never spent that much time together for anything!  Luckily the radio station we were listening to was playing all 80's that weekend. D's charger for her iPod was broken, so the radio it was.

KyoChon Chicken - Cerritos

We are back to our regular scheduled programming of D and CC's food road trip.

After our brief foray into Little Saigon for Nem Nuong at Brodard's...

it was time to head up to the mall!

Young Dong Tofu

We were able to meet up with Wandering Chopsticks at the Harry Potter Tribute Art Exhibit at Gallery Nucleus. Prior to our trip, she made several suggestions as to where we would go for lunch. Would it be Muslim Chinese? Vietnamese? Middle Eastern/Egyptian? We finally settled on a Korean tofu house, Young Dong Tofu in San Gabriel, just a few miles down the road from the gallery.

WC had never been here before so it was also an opportunity for both of us to "photo document" our experience...

Toyose

After our visit to Thane's, our GPS guided us to the freeway and onto a street that passed through the Saint Francis Wood neighborhood in the City. These were some of the homes we saw off of Monterey Street as we made our way to the Outer Sunset District where my cousin lives.

Pho Hiep, Korean & Kalamansi

We recently had dinner at Pho Hiep on Telegraph Canyon Road near Vons. See a previous post here . It was just us, my parents, Bert's mom, brother and his brother's friend. It was stillpretty early for dinner, around 6 pm...We sat in the far corner towards the back wall. The owner Kevin was there making his rounds, greeting customers...
That's my dad's striped shirt you see...
I actually got something different today. Every time we go to Pho Hiep, I usually get the bun with char grilled shrimp with egg rolls or with char grilled beef. This time, I got the Vietnamese Chicken Salad I(see 2nd to last item on the menu below):
But first, we ordered fried eggrolls to share. Notice that they are pretty stingy with the mint? Just one sprig. Also, the lettuce was not in abundance like you would get if you were in Linda Vista or somewhere on Convoy.
We also got the fresh spring rolls (2 orders) since TC likes it so much. This is the one with just shrimp inside.
The garnishes for the pho:
Here's my Vietnamese Chicken Salad. Those big wafer things are fried shrimp chips (kind of like Indonesian krupuk but bigger). The chicken is mixed with shredded lettuce, onions, fried shallots, rau ram (a type of Vietnamese herb) in a lemon sauce, topped with peanuts and seasoned with black pepper. This was really good. I could have done without the chicken and eaten this vegetarian style. I just may order this again!
TC got the seafood soup with shrimp and fake crab, which she liked. I, on the other hand, am not a fan of the fake crab meat, especially in soup. I'd rather eat it in a cream cheese won ton.
My mom got the chicken soup...
Here's that super hot fried egg roll:
My mother in law got the broken rice with chicken. It was quite a bit of food and she ended up taking half home. I really like the marinade they use in the chicken. Very sweet but not overly sweet. Tastes good with the pickled vegetables (radish and carrot).
I forgot who ordered this - oh wait, it was my brother in law because I just recognized his Hawaiian shirt. It was the bun with chicken (or is that pork?).
This was my dad's order - Bun with grilled chicken and egg rolls. My dad likes to eat his bun not with the nuoc cham but with a bowl of broth (which they sometimes give to you at certain places, but you have to request it at Pho Hiep).
This was my bro-in-law's friend's food - Bun with Chicken. Yeah, I know, bun bun bun, blah blah blah.
Bert had the...wait for it...the Bun...with chicken and grilled shrimp.
Had enough of bun? I know those pictures were so exciting. Like throw your panties at Tom Jones exciting.

A few weeks later during Memorial Day weekend, we had a mini lunch with some friends. Their daughter is one of TC's classmates and very good friends. Her mom is one of my good friends and like me, is totally Robsessed! Ha ha. So, we hosted that day and had Korean food. After the Ethnic Food Fair at Balboa Park, we stopped by Zion to pick up stuff for the next day's lunch. This here is the Korean potato salad (they used apples this time instead of Asian pears) along with Chap Jae noodles...One package in $2.99. It works if you want noodles in a pinch instead of making it yourself because it's pretty time consuming to make (at least for me, and yes, I have made Chap Jae before).
We also got the Seaweed Salad, which we bought for the first time. I really liked it and would definitely get it again. I really like the seasoning and the texture of the different types of seaweed used in there. The clover shaped bowl held various panchan - seasoned beansprouts, spinach, and fern bracken (not so much a fan of that).
Man, everyone and their mother was in line waiting to get meat to grill at Zion. The bone in Kalbi ribs were on sale for $3.99 instead of $5.99. We got about $15 worth...Oh yeah...
Red Leaf lettuce was dirt cheap at Zion! They were going for 5 for .99! I just bought 2 heads of lettuce...
That same day, TC and her friend set out to do a chore for me. They were to squeeze the living life out of these kalamansi fruits, which were picked the night before from Robsessed friend's neighbor's tree. That neighbor has two trees, one in his back yard and on in the front. The night before, TC, her friend, and another friend had a good ole time straddling the fence (supervised, of course) and hand picking the fruits. They filled up a plastic bag with these native Philippine citrus fruits. The neighbor was an older Filipino man who said my friend was welcome to get the fruits any time. I prepped the kalamansis by washing them and halving them for the girls...
Then, in the back yard, I put some newspapers on our patio table. The girls squeezed the fruits over a strainer that was resting on a spouted bowl.
The strainer would catch the seeds. The girls did a really good job of extracting as much juice as possible...
Don't these fruits look mouthwatering? Oh my gosh, I love kalamansi juice so much! Tastes even better on pancit bihon!
Here are the rinds...
Look at that juice! I ended up using some of it to make some kalamansi cupcakes. Unfortunately, the flour I used was not so good and it had an off flavor, so I think I will make another batch with new flour.
The girls had so much doing this that they begged to do it again really soon. Hmmm, cheap child labor? Free fruits! I just might take them up on their offer!

Djerdan Burek, Do Hwa

I'm posting this and the other posts below on Saturday 9/20. The food for this post was last Monday 9/15, the day before I returned to San Diego. For lunch, I wanted to try this place that served Balkan cuisine. I had to look up Balkan. It refers to Southeastern Europe but is considered a bit of an outdated term. Anyways, it's across the street from the Brazilian bakery, the Chocolate Spoon. I wanted to try the Burek which I've had before at the International Food Festival from Balboa Park (courtesy of the House of Turkey, but they called it 'borek').

This was a pretty big slice of burek. I chose the meat version, which is ground beef with spices.

Really loved the flakiness of the pastry. I should have bought another one! It was that good! Actually, two pieces would be too much for me. This was quite a large piece.

Here are some other items on their menu. Unfortunately I don't know the exact country of origin of these dishes but it all sounds delicious to me!

I spent most of the day inside because it was so damn hot! I ended up watching "Forgetting Sarah Marshall" (yes, it's not out on DVD yet, but my friend's husband had it on his DVR). Oh my God - British comedian Russell Brand is HILARIOUS! He is so vulgar and funny! Even though the movie kind of dragged, it was funny to see all of the Judd Apatow regulars, including the star, Jason Segel, make appearances in this movie (Jonah Hill, Paul Rudd, Bill Hader, Carla Gallo). Russell Brand is the reason to see this movie folks, as Aldous Snow, lead singer of the band Infant Sorrow!!! He steals every scene that he's in.

I also ended up watching "Penelope" on the DVR. Why? Two words - James. McAvoy.

The movie itself was kind of lame. It was like a fairy tale, but I couldn't really get into it. Oh yeah, and Russell Brand is also in this movie, as the jazz club owner. And if I didn't already watch a lot of TV, I watched the second half of the cinematic masterpiece and Oscar worthy contender that is known as "Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay". Yes, folks I watched that flick! Put it this way, Neil Patrick Harris rules!

And lastly, back to food. For dinner, they had reservations at this Korean place near my friend's work. Her building by the way, houses this hair salon (below). Who is that? It's Nick Arrojo's salon, the guy who does the hair makeovers on TLC's "What Not to Wear". I peeked through the windows, he wasn't there. It probably costs about $300 for a cut there! Yikes!

Dinner was at Do Hwa, a Korean restaurant which seemed fairly new.

This is what we had:

I didn't use my flash here - kind of dark.

Watercress salad with sesame soy dressing. I didn't take a photo of the Chap Chae noodles.

This was really good - the seasfood scallion pepper pancake. It was crispy and light!

The soup - not so much. It was a salty miso based soup with mushrooms, tofu and zucchini.

The greens for our meat - Shiso (or Perilla) leaves and red leaf lettuce:

Their version of Bibimbop. No raw egg. The waitress mixed up the greens and sashimi pieces with some sort of chili sauce.

The braised yellow snapper, which I liked, but I only had a little bit because I really wanted to eat the meat. My friend doesn't eat beef or pork so the fish was mostly for her.

The panchan (cut off) was standard. I prefer the variety at Buga a lot better.

The meat was pork (left) and rib eye. There were no leftovers that night!

Dessert was an artfully sliced orange. By that time, I was too full to even eat the orange. In all, a great meal. It was fun to be out of San Diego for just a few days, although it was a bit lonely at times because I'm so used to having Bert and TC around. I got to hang out with my friends, check out some cool neighborhoods and eat some really fantastic food.