Buon Apetito and Heaven Sent Desserts (3x)

Photos from our dinner at Buon Apetito in Little Italy with Lotus and Shogon on 10/28.

This is Shogun's favorite...the gnocchi with quattro formaggio and pancetta. This was really good! The gnocchi was very soft, the saucy so creamy and the pancetta giving that extra kick (mmm...pork fat).

Lotus had the penne with marinara sauce and I forget which cheese that was. I'm guessing it was parmesan but I could be wrong. I was looking on their menu. It could be aged ricotta.
I had the Linguine Boscomare ($14.95) Shrimp, bay scallops, sun-dried tomatoes and asparagus in a brandy pink sauce. This was really good. The shrimp were huge! I really liked the bay scallops. I couldn't taste the brandy in the sauce. There were a few bits of pancetta in mine as well. The picture of Bert's dish didn't come out well, so I didn't post it, but he had gnocchi too, but with marinara sauce. TC just shared our dinner. When we left, it was already dark. Here's an exterior shot (the 'B' was covered)
Afterwards, we went to Heaven Sent Desserts on University and 30th.
Decorated for Halloween...
The bones of some Hollywood starlet...
Instead of numbers, they give you books in which you can inscribe a witty quote or perhaps a compliment or two about the place. I, however, chose to write "Del Sol" and "CVC". Ha ha, cholo graffit.
Bert's latte. Big-ass cups they have, eh.
Shogun and Lotus's dessert which they shared. This was the Coffee Pecan Fudge Bar ($5.00): a pecan shortbread crust covered with a rich chocolate brownie blended with coffee liquer & ice in coffee buttercream! Whew! (I took that description from their menu) I'd seen so many awesome pictures of macarons on "The Girl Who Ate Everything" food blog, so when I saw these, I went for it. It was $3.50 for five pieces. The light colored one had cinammon in it so I didn't really like it. The pink was raspberry. The brown was chocolate espresso. The light brown one (I forgot already since I'm writing this on 11/9) - The green one was minty, that's all I remember. I really liked these tiny bite size bits of chewy . The glutton in me was thinking, "Man, I could eat five more of these!" and "They should make these BIGGER!". Find out more about macarons here . Here's a demolished macaron...the one which flavor I can't remember. Ugh, my hands are dry and gross.

Pig's head delight...

Every party needs one of these... Mmmm...lechon. The skin roasted to a perfect golden brown and crackling with good ole crispness along with a layer of fat and meat underneath.

Wilbur we hardly knew ye, but you tasted so good.

new posts on J'ai Faim

New posts on J'aim Faim food recipe blog...

Mulysa's Carrot Cake and my Pork Ribs Sinigang...

check it out here .

Plus food pix posted for the first time on that blog!

India Asia Buffet and Ker Market

[Update - Closed]

Pix from 10/15 during our second visit to India-Asia buffet in Mira Mesa, which opened last month in the Little India shopping mall on Camino Ruiz. I was too embarassed to take photos at the buffet station because there were too many customers. So, here is my plate. I had a couple of samosas and a bit of everything (I forget the names), but spinach was one of them, plus garbanzo beans, some sort of curry, two kinds of rice, and one type of creamy-sauced chicken. I know it sounds so lame to describe Indian food so inarticulately... Their naan was NOT good. Burnt and devoid of flavor. Other places I've gone to have garlic and/or cilantro on it.
After our lunch, we decided to check out Ker Market next door, which is next to Gateway to India, a banquet facility.
It's a big warehouse type of store with rows and rows of all kinds of Indian products, like lentils, spices, prepared foods, and snacks.
More snacks...They like their snacks super hot! I don't know what spices they use, but they will seriously scorch your mouth. It's a different hot, not like Mexican food hot, but dangerous and pungent hot!
This was an endcap of miscellaneous items. Looks dissheveled.
Ah yesss...the makeshift toilet paper holder in their public bathroom. TC had to go, so off we went. Nice bit of MacGuyvering there, eh. They had a table of sweets set out by the cash register. These looked so cool - quite colorful and I'm sure they taste wonderful. They were packaged quite nicely for the upcoming (at the time) Indian holiday, Diwali Festival of Lights).
There was also a small stand with assorted fruits and vegetables. These are tiny little eggplants - oh so cute!!! You can also see fresh okra in the upper right corner.
Here are some gnarly looking bittermelon! They look like they have VD!
It was a nice foray, a cultural plunge if you will, into Ker Market. We bought a few snack items and sweets. The sweets were quite buttery (they use ghee, a clarified butter) and the snacks hot as hell! I love going to different ethnic markets. It's always exciting to try out new foods and snacks.

Old pix...Filipino food

These pix are from several weeks ago, Sunday, October 8 to be exact. TC had a performance with the other children in the dance troup at St. Mary's Church in National City. The church was celebrating it's 50th anniversary. The majority of the festival-goers were Filipino and Mexican. There were food booths, entertainment and game booths for the teens and young kids. When we arrived, there was a steel drum band playing current hits. It was interesting to hear Blink 182's "All the Small Things" in steel drum fashion! Here was a booth selling Filipino food & desserts. Cheap prices too!
Goto/arroz caldo is a rice porridge with tripe. I like it without tripe but with chicken and ginger.
Okoy - Fried shrimp and squash fritters, sometimes made with bean sprouts.
Pancit Malabon - is a type of pancit that originated in Malabon City, in the Philippines. It has a yellow-orange color due to a sauce that includes patis (fish sauce) and bagoong (shrimp paste). Its toppings draw heavily from the fresh seafood that is available in the area and may include fresh shrimp, squid, oysters, and hard-boiled duck or hen eggs, as well as pork. (this food entry courtesy of Wikipedia)
Pancit Palabok - Pancit Palabok and Pancit Luglug are essentially the same dish, the difference being primarily in the composition of the sauce used. Both types use a round rice noodle (often specifically labelled for pancit luglug or palabok) smothered with a thick, golden shrimp sauce or other flavored sauce, and topped with:
Shrimp, (the size and shell-on or shell-off depending on preference)
Crushed or ground pork rind (chicharron) for toppings
Hard-boiled egg ( sliced into disc or quartered lengthwise or chopped)
freshly minced green onion (this entry courtesy of Wikipedia also)
Lumpia - the ubiquitous Filipino finger food. Erroneously called 'spring rolls' or 'egg rolls'.
Ginatan (should be spelled 'ginataan')/halo-halo - Ginataan is a sweet, soupy dessert. I personally don't like it. Halo-Halo is a dessert in which sweet/savory ingredients mixed together in a tall glass and eaten with crushed ice, evaporated milk and ice cream. It literally means "mix-mix".
Puto bumbong - This is one of my favorites. It's steamed purple rice cakes served with fresh grated coconut and brown sugar. The rice is traditionally supposed to be put into a thin bamboo mold (bumbong - means 'from the bamboo'), hence the long skinny shape. The photo I've posted looks like it was just rolled up by hand. By the way, in Spanish, "puto" means "male prostitute" or "f---ker", but in Filipino, it's just a rice cake. Our Mexican friends always had a laugh whenever they heard of "puto".
Turon - fried banana fritter, sometimes with a piece of langka (jackfruit) and sometimes coated with caramelized sugar. Yumm!
Dinuguan - The infamous "chocolate meat", aka BLOOD STEW with hot peppers. If you're not Filipino, this is what Filipinos will try to get you to eat. I like it!!!
Suman sa ligia with latik - Suman is steamed sweet rice wrapped in a banana leaf. I don't know what 'ligia' is, but 'latik' is the residue of young coconut.

Here's the Puto Bumbong that I got:
And here's a random shot of days old french bread that was lying around in the church auditorium, which the kids used as their dressing room and dance practice room. I thinking that Vons or Albertsons donated the old bread to the church so they could distribute it to the needy?

489?

Enough with Def Leppard!

Hey, who the hell reads this boring ass blog? My profile views are now up to 489 (it was 470 for the longest time).

Upcoming posts:

On J'ai Faim - recipe and pix for Pork Ribs Sinigang. It's ironic that the last post there was for Spinach Salad. How about E.Coli salad?

For this blog: food pix from Indian Asian buffet, Ker Indian market, Phuong Trang and more...

Def Leppard - Photograph video

Here's the Def Leppard video...I still loooove this song!

Unfortunately, after this album, Def Leppard became way too popular and ended up turning too "soft" and radio friendly (although this song was radio friendly, but still had that rock sound). Their post- "Pyromania" albums were mainly totally soul-less and void like Bon Jovi, Winger, and their ilk.

"Hysteria" their huge followup album in 1987, also produced by Robert John "Mutt" Lange (aka Mr. Shania Twain) had seven monster hit singles, all of which sucked big hairy balls (c'mon, "Love Bites", "Armageddon It" "Animal", "Women" and that classic stripper fave, "Pour Some Sugar on Me", etc.?) What ever happened to the raw power of their rockin' debut LP, "On Through the Night" (1980) and their masterfully kickass sophomore effort "High 'N Dry" (1981), one of my all time favorite albums. I'm sure I'm boring all of you non rock fans, but Def Leppard provided the soundtrack of my youth along with AC/DC, Van Halen, Boston, Queen, and early Ozzy.

Back to the reason why I posted this video. Check out Joe Elliott's outfit...that was me last night. Next year, I'm going to be Angus Young of AC/DC (Hands up! do the horned salute!)

By the way, this is the American version of the video. The British version had a knife flashing a few times in the very beginning. American TV felt it was too "violent" so it was replaced by a black cat and an extra shot of Joe Elliott leaping off the stage. Damn censors. Wimps.

Halloween themed party food...for kids

Hmmm...when I uploaded this, I thought I would get the whole photo in...for some reason it's chopped off! Plus some of the photos have a lot of blank space underneath. I can't figure it out.
Damn html! (update on 10/15/06 - hey, it mysteriously fixed itself! the donut hole spider photo is now WHOLE instead of half! what the hell! )

Last night, we went to a Halloween themed birthday party for one of my friend's kids. He's a good friend of TC. His costume was Captain Hook from Peter Pan. TC was Super Girl (again), but in a newer version of the costume. My friend went all out , getting all of her ideas from this holiday themed book for kid's party food. These are "Spiders", which are chocolate donut holes with chow mein noodle legs and frosting eyes.This isn't really Halloween themed food, other than the plastic snakes and spiders and the cute bowl it's in. It's spinach dip in a bread bowl surrounded by crackers. I think they're Waverly wafers. In the background, you can see the "Eyeballs", which are really deviled eggs.
These are Bagel Bites mini pizzas with olives for eyes and slices of red bell pepper for the mouth. Most of the kids ended up flicking off the olives and peppers. All of that painstaking placement of the facial features, only to be ignored by vegetable hating kids and adults.
Pumpkin bread...Here are the deviled egg "Eyeballs" again. They have stuffed olives for the pupils and there were bloodshot veins as well, but the hot sauce kind of dissipated into the egg yolk mixture. These are pretty good. I had two of them. Oink oink.
Can't have a party without lumpia....
These were "Mummies", which consisted of hot dogs "wrapped" in refrigerated biscuit dough with black frosting for the eyes. Unfortunately, mine was cold and it tasted gross after the first bite. Thanks Upton Sinclair.
Ahhh...the "Eyeball punch"....complete with dry ice effects. Last year, my friend's husband made a cool volcano with dry ice inside. Those things floating in there are these gummy candy eyeballs that she bought from Costco. The dumb thing is, the "pupil" portion of the candy eyeball weighs down the eyeball, so they float pupil-side down, so you can't even see the design. Bert thought that perhaps a jutting optic nerve would provide a fine counter balance to this age old problem.
Mmmm...waxy nubs...

It was a fun party because they hired a "Mad Scientist" to come over and they did cool experiments, such as dropping a lit match into a glass flask, which created a vacuum and sucked a hard boiled egg (peeled, of course) into the flask, making their own colorful "slime" with glitter, and popping out a cork from a flask filled with dry ice, and a few others that I can't remember. It was pretty damn cold in their backyard so I ended up hanging out inside their house (the party was 5 - 8 pm).

The other little kids were dressed up as Captain Jack from Pirates of the Caribbean, there were two Snow Whites, one Cinderella, one Padre baseball player, one Cowboy (who looked like he was riding a horse, quite creative), Supergirl (TC), a cheerleader, and tiny pumpkin. The birthday boy's mom and grandmother were dressed as witches, while his dad was the Cryptkeeper, but I thought he was Quasimodo. Bert Wolfe, in classic comic fashion, was Matt Murdock, which is Dare Devil's civilian alter ego. Since Matt Murdock is a lawyer, he just wore his work clothes---a nice dress shirt, opened up to reveal the red DD logo shirt, slacks, and nice shoes. Aaaaaand, because Matt Murdock is blind, Bert wore his shades and used a PVC pipe with red tape at the tip to serve as his blind man's cane...Nice bit of MacGuyvering there.

I, on the other hand, was dressed as Joe Elliott (lead singer) of Def Leppard, circa 1983 from the "Photograph" video (hit song from their smash album, "Pyromania"). It was funny (to me), but I'm sure the joke was lost on a lot of the people present there, except for my friend's rocker brother and husband.

What was my costume? Well, if you remember the video, Joe Elliott wears the classic sleeveless Union Jack shirt (which I have my original one from 1983----bought for $15 at the Navy Exchange), black leather pants, red leg warmers, a red wristband, white shoes, a white bandanna, a black rock 'n roll belt, and a mullet.

I didn't wear black leather pants, but wore skinny legged black jeans (bought for $20 onsale at Express, damn, I have to wear those pants more than once to get my money's worth). Instead of a fringed white bandanna, I resorted to using a torn bed sheet. Did you know it's fkn' hard to find leg warmers? Last weekend, I went on a mission to find those damn things. I ended up going to 5+ stores, finally finding it at Claire's in Chula Vista. I had to endure the shame of going into Hot Topics to buy a red wristband, and this one wasn't plain. It has a rose with crossbones. I felt so out of place there!!! My rock 'n roll belt was procured at Target. Actually, I will wear that belt more than once.

Alas, I won't post a photo and embarass myself, but I will post the video so you can see the outfit...

Bumper sticker

My thoughts exactly....

Dinner at Habana

[Update - Habana closed maybe a year after this post. It is now The Riviera Supperclub as of 2013]

These posts are a little out of order. I'm finally getting to them tonight...Last Saturday (9/30), before attending the PASACAT Extravaganza at the Joan Kroc Center in La Mesa, we had dinner at Habana, located on 7777 University Ave, which was a few blocks west. This photo was actually taken on Father's Day, where TC and I took Bert. This is a fairly new Cuban restaurant. One of the wrought iron wall hangings...(this photo also from June '06)
We ordered mango nectar (Goya brand). Man, this can had 40+ grams of sugar! Yikes!
I didn't want to eat an actual entree, so I ordered several appetizers to eat with my Habana salad. These are the croquetas, which are deep fried mashed potatos with ground beef and peas inside.
The appetizers came with a trio of sauces. The red one was supposed to be really spicy, but it wasn't. The one at the top of the triangle formation was a light citrus sauce, and in the 4 o'clock position was a mango salsa.
Here are the tostones, which are mashed green plantain rounds which are fried, not once, but twice! The tostones were served with mojo de ajo (garlic sauce).
Ahhh...empanadas. The half moon shaped one was filled with spiced beef, potatoes and peas. The mutant looking one next to it was a three cheese variation. What the hell happened when they formed that one? Unfortunately because of the spinach problem, they weren't serving their spinach/mushroom variety. These were nice and crispy and best of all, FRIED.
This was my Habana salad, which I ordered plain. The dressing actually did come on the side, but I touched it not. Rather plain looking. I wonder what made this particular salad Cuban? The avocados? Perhaps the dressing that I shunned?
Empanada innards....mmmmm
Bert Wolfe ordered the bistek palomillo, which is pan fried steak marinated with garlic, lime juice, salt and pepper. Fried onions are served atop this meaty delight. He selected the arroz con gandules (yellow rice with pigeon peas) and a small side of sweet yams with a crunchy pecan topping (actually, this seemed like American southern cooking). The white rice on his plate came from TC's food because she wanted some of his yellow rice. They did a trade of sorts. We took half of the steak home and it was devoured the next day. Another view of the steak...

Healthy picnic

Yesterday, we had a picnic on the grass at Balboa Park, where we met our worm friend. But before we headed over to the park, we went to Whole Foods on University Avenue in good old Hillcrest. As we headed east on 6th Ave, we noticed rows upon rows of blue porta potties and tents galore. Apparently the AIDS walk was yesterday from 8 am - 1 pm. It must have finished early because 6th Ave was reopened by the time we drove by at 12:30 pm .

TC wanted these horrible wannabe cheese puffs. Let's put it this way...Cheetos kicks ass on this! The photo below is Bert's BBQ Chicken Salad ($5.99).
Here are a few items I chose from the hot deli selection ($6.99 a lb) : garlic roasted potato wedges (I only got 3) and 2 vegetarian samosas (these were baked).
Here is my salad, the Goji Berry vegetarian salad (also $5.99). It came with a citrus dressing which I gave to Bert because I like my salads dry. There was spring mix (sans spinach, of course), cherry tomatoes, a lot of pine nuts, strips of tofu, and goji berries , which come from Tibet. They look like dried red raisins.
Here is the patch of lawn where we sat.
You can see the little International Cottages in the distance. The one in the back is the International gift store. There was an event happening that day for House of China because they were celebrating Moon Festival, which celebrates the moon and summer harvest.
Aah...beautiful San Diego...and our crap laid before us...

We also bought these toasted rice cracker rounds with hazelnuts and ate those with red pepper hummus. TC also wanted a homemade peanut butter and Nutella sandwich, of which she only ate half.

Mmmm....Valrhona dark chocolate batons...these didn't last long!