Animal Grossology

This weekend we checked out this exhibit at the Reuben H. Fleet Science Center:

Luckily, we had a 2 for 1 coupon (for us adults), but we had to pay the kid's price for TC. At least we saved some bucks. This exhibit is similar to the Grossology one we saw earlier last year. We have the book for this too. Although the exhibit opened this Saturday and we went the very next day, one of the exhibits (the Dung Beetle ball) was already 'broken'. WTF? There were about 16 exhibits there - most of them quite educational...especially if you want to learn about flies, dung leeches, ticks, saliva, animal poo, urine, and vomit.
One exhibit had samples of owl pellets that you could look at with a magnifying glass. The samples included bird skulls, tiny mouse skeletons, and fur. Lovely. This exhibit (seen below) had different types of animals (only 3 are shown in the photo) and their corresponding fecal matter. There was a game that featured a device that you looked through to hone in on the poo, then you had to shift the device and push a button to point it to the corresponding animal. Actually, I didn't play it, hence, my rather poor explanation of the game! Another exhibit talked about different animals that gave off slime. Did you know that a hagfish is slimier than a snail?

This was a placard near the broken Dung Beetle ball. One exhibit that kids seemed to really love was this submarine that had a real working periscope. In fact, TC used it to "spy" on us. Inside the submarine were TV windows that showed different scenes of creatures and informational placards about their gross properties. Plus, there was a mini tunnel inside that kids could climb up on and then slide out.
Here's a recipe you can bring to the next school bake sale:

The olfactory exhibit was pretty gnarly. Almost worse than the corresponding one they had for Grossology. In this exhibit, there are four stations, each with a small rounded tube with a hole. Underneath, you squeeze a hose which releases an odor through the hole. You are supposed to guess which odor it is. For the regular Grossology one, the scents were Armpit Mouth, Foot, and Anus! For the Animal Grossology, the scents were Cockroach (this was actually the best one - it smelled like Cherry - it's a certain cockroach that emits this cherry like scent), Musk, followed by Urine, and the last was Skunk. Even after knowing the cherry odor came from a certain species of roach, I'd gladly sniff that again instead of the musk and urine ones! Pheeeew!!! The last one was especially gag inducing.

As Yoda would say, "Educational this was."

We didn't just go for this exhibit though. We did see the rest of the Science Center, which is in need of a major overhaul. It is stuck in the 70's and the exhibits need freshening up! The Science Center in LA kicks major ass on San Diego's - three floors worth of exciting and modern looking exhibits...

Marukai

Last week, my daughter and I went to Marukai. We were planning to have lunch somewhere else, but ended up buying our lunch at Marukai Grocery. Yeah, a grocery store. We were going to eat at Mitsuwa originally, but at Maruakai, they have a section where you can buy prepared food. This was the fried oyster bento, which came with pickled vegetables, spaghetti with sliced hot dogs (eww) and rice with a pickled plum in the middle. Next to the fried oysters is a fried piece of chicken. This was for TC (she shared some with me). The ume (pickled plum) was way to sour for TC. She tried it but didn't like it. For our drink, we had a wanna be Ramune that came in a can, rather than a glass bottle with the marble in it.

I like Mitsuwa's fried oysters, but these were bigger and came in a bento so I decided to try it.

I also bought a small tray of soba noodles with shredded nori on top. Not pictured is a tray of California roll that I bought for us to share. I wanted to get a cold dish since it was hot that day. The soba noodles were refreshing, especially with the wasabe. I wasn't sure where we were going to eat this food, but I noticed that there were tables with chairs right outside of the store, so we ate our lunch there with the traffic on Balboa Avenue and Mercury as our view. Lovely. Inhale those gas fumes.After our lunch, we went to Mitsuwa to get a few snacks. But before going to Mitsuwa, we went to the newly opened (temporary, I'm sure) Halloween store in the same complex. We ended up buying her a magic wand for her Halloween costume. This was a Harry Potter wand because she is going to be a Gryffindor student this year (Gryffindor - one of the four houses at the Hogwarts School of Wizardry and Witchcraft - from 'Harry Potter'). I already got her gray uniform skirt, Gryffindor tie and robe. So, now she is all set! She's been reading the books, albeit slowly. There's a lot of difficult vocabulary in the books. She is now on book 6, "The Half-Blood Prince". Unfortunately, the movie of the same name which was slated to open on November 21 has been pushed back to July 2009. The good news is that the movie adaptation of 'Twilight' will take it's place!

This was a new Pocky flavor I hadn't seen before. Of course, that meant I had to try it. It seems more appetizing that Octopus flavor (which I've tried before). There was another type of Chocolate Pocky that I bought (not pictured). It looked like the regular Pocky but with a different box. What I found was that the pocky sticks are skinnier than normal. It was just skinny Pocky.

They should make a Jackfruit flavored pocky. Or how about Ube?

Sadaf, Pinkberry

I'm finally getting around to posting this one week later! So, one week after Ranas, my same friend and I went downtown to the Gaslamp to try out Sadaf, a Persian restaurant. It's on 5th Avenue, on the opposite side of Bandar, another Persian place. Both of us had never been to Sadaf so that's why we decided to try it out. It was mid-week and the streets and restaurant was, thankfully, bereft of tourists.
The lavash (Flatbread) which you eat with butter. At another Persian place I've been to, they also give you a cut up onion. No onion breath today.

Their menu:

We had a small bowl of a complimentary soup appetizer. I'm not much of a soup person, but this soup was pretty good. It had carrots, lentils, onions and some other grain (I want to say barley, but I'm not sure it's barley). In any case, the soup was a good starter.

I ordered the Koobideh Kabob which are 2 "juicy charbroiled skewers of seasoned choice Lean Ground Beef" (description from the menu) which is served with yellow and white basmati rice, onions, and a charbroiled tomato. Man, this was a lot of food. I ate 1 and 1/4 of the meat and barely made a dent with the rice.

Beef kabob...

My friend ordered the Ghiemeh Bademjana, which is a "savory Stew of Italian Eggplant, Yellow Split Peas and a special Tomato Base, lightly spiced to perfection . Sauteed and seasoned chunks of Veal Shank are added with each serving". I didn't realize until after I cut and pasted the description that her entree had veal in it. I thought it was beef.

The veal (what I thought was beef):

We liked our entrees at the Persian place. The food is pretty much the same at Bandar but maybe just slightly more expensive. There's another Persian place I want to try out. One of my students recommended it to me, Parsian Market Place, on Convoy. It's a family run eatery and market. She even gave me a menu - she told me the portions are pretty big and the prices are good too. Plus, the added bonus is that it's in a market so you can buy those types of spices and ingredients if you wanted to replicate your meal. So, after our lunch (we ended up getting doggy bags for our leftovers), my friend called up her son to meet us for yogurt at the new Pinkberry at the Hard RockHotel (total rich Tourist trap). He works downtown at a law firm and made the trek down to the end of 5th Avenue. I know there's a Pinkberry in Hillcrest, but since we were downtown, my friend wanted to try this place out. I'd heard about Pinkberry and how it's popular and all, but I'm not really a fan of tart yogurt, but decided to give it a try.

There's only three flavors at Pinkberry. Depending on the flavor and the size, you can get toppings for .95 extra or if you upgrade to larger sizes, you can get up to 3 toppings which are included in the price. Here's the first flavor - Green Tea. This is my friend's. This is a Medium which is $4.50 (fk!) and you can get up to 3 toppings with this size. It was $3.50 for a small, but if she wanted 3 toppings, it would've cost more than $6! Damn marketing ploy to get you to order the larger size. Her toppings were the relatively healthy fruit trio of kiwi, mango, and blueberry. My friend didn't really like hers because she wasn't expecting the green tea to be so tart.

Her son (you can see his corporate outfit here) ordered his favorite flavor, or non flavor, as it was the Plain. I think he got the medium size with the 3 toppings (strawberry, blueberry and granola). He actually finished his. Neither my friend nor I finished ours.

The last flavor they offer in this overly hyped yogurt shack is coffee. But the difference is that this coffee flavor is TART. This is a size small with one topping, which happened to be almonds. I wasn't expecting sliced almonds; I thought it would be chopped. The texture is a bit different I think when it's chopped pieces as opposed to thin sliced. The coffee flavor was not really pronounced. Rather, it was a 'hint' of coffee flavor which tasted strange to me because I don't equate coffee with being tart, but rather bitter (I like bitter!).

The seating is minimal at the downtown Pinkberry. There are only 3 tables with three chairs each. It's nice and bright inside and there are shelves filled with cute contraptions like ice cream scoopers and such. Not that I'd buy them. The servers were all young teenagers. I wasn't sure where to order because a group of young girls was ahead of me vaccillating on their orders and kind of stretching the patience of one of the servers. I asked the kid behind the counter if he could take my order and he said, "No". He didn't even give me an explanation (well, at least I expected one) of where to order or that I needed to wait. I didn't see him or the other girl behind the counter as being helpful, or productive. They could have taken our order while the group ahead of us was deciding.

Anyhow, I know they probably only get paid minimum wage and don't give a toss, but as representatives of this "upscale" yogurt place, you'd think they'd have more courtesty or customer service. But that wasn't the case. I still like the yogurt place near us. You can control your portion and the toppings (.38 an ounce too). Nuyo (formerly Pure) also has 10 flavors to choose from - regular ones as well as tart ones. I like having choice. I remember reading somewhere that Pinkberry only had 2 choices, so I was leery of just the Green Tea and Plain (don't like either). But the tart coffee? Bleh.

Ranas

I'm posting this about a week an a half later (9/30). Today I met one of my good friends for lunch at Ranas, located off the Kenwood/94 exit (next to the new Fresh & Easy).

She works at a year round school so she was on vacation. I haven't eaten here since last year and I really liked their flor de calabasas (squash flower blossom) quesadillas. My friend knows the owner and his wife and they were there that day. Although it was hot, we chose to eat outside because no one else was sitting on their empty patio (which has recently been added on). That way, we could talk about whatever we wanted without people hearing us. Also, because we cuss a lot. Okay, becaue I cuss a lot. Here's a board of their specials:
Somewhat blurry pics of the menu. Click if you want to see it larger.

Ranas may look like a regular Mexican place, but their food is a notch higher than your typical 'Bertos joint. The prices are reasonable also. Not like (cough) Frida's. Also, don't expect to get chips and salsa here. Ranas don't play that.

This was my friend's dish. She ordered one of the specials, the Chicken in Pecan Sauce which is served with rice and beans. The owner's wife said the sauce had pecans and almonds in them (most likely ground up). She's had their peanut butter chicken before so she wanted to try something different. I tried a little bit of hers and that sauce was quite creamy which probably also equals rich and fattening.

Because I've never tried this before, I got the Shrimp in Poblano Sauce which is also served with rice & beans and your choice of either flour or corn tortillas. Initially, the waitress gave me Chicken in Poblano Sauce so I had to take it back. The owner was apologetic and whipped up the proper dish in no time. There was more than a dozen shrimp in there! I couldn't even finish half of the shrimps.

I also really liked my dish's sauce. It was creamy and had strips of poblano chile in there. By the way, they do not give spoons. We asked for spoons so we could really enjoy the sauce on our rice. I really liked this because you coudl really taste the sauce! There was a bit of heat, but not too much to overwhelm you.

Halfway through our lunch, I realized that I didn't even order what I had been wanting to eat at Ranas - the Squash flower quesadillas. Dammit. I was already full and I didn't want to order it to go because it wouldn't taste as good cold. I'll have to get it next time, and soon! It'll give my an excuse to come out here again!

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.

Chocolate Spoon, Kampuchea, Il Laboratorio del Gelato

For breakfast, my friend and I walked over to the Chocolate Spoon bakery in the neighborhood. It's a Brazilian place, believe it or not. She wanted to get Brazilian cheese break to eat with her coffee. I ended up getting a fresh-out-of-the-oven ham and cheese pastry.

Here's the cheese bread. It looks like a lumpy biscuit.

But inside, there is a white cheese that just melts away in your mouth. Quite tasty!Not sure what kind of cheese it is though. Bad foodie.

This time, N and I went out to the city while L stayed home with their dogs. We passed by the San Gennaro Festival in Little Italy (it's a week long).

Since I didn't really have an agenda, we just walked around. Since we were in Little Italy, N wanted to buy some pecorino cheese at this place, Di Palo's.

Once you step in, you take a number. Hers was 93. They were on 78, but the lind seemed to be moving quickly. I believe this place was on some program about NYC on the Food Network because it seemed familiar to me. There are all kinds of dried/cured meats hanging from the ceiling. Ham, sausage...you name it. The shop is quite small and it was very crowded. I looked up this place on yahoo later that night and found out that DiPalo's is family run and owned and is known for their excellent customer service. Even if the line is out the door, the employees treat you like you are the only one in the store. They really do pay attention to you and you alone.

My friend wanted to get some pecorino cheese. The guy brought out two different types and explained, in great detail, the difference between the cheeses. He also gave her some samples as well as for me too. I was hanging out behind her trying to be inconspicuous, but I was impressed that he offered me some cheese as well. The first cheese we tried was really good - but the second cheese was even better. He explained that there was a grainy texture because the curds are chopped up during the cheese making process. My friend bought a little of both. Sold!

We were on our way to the Lower East Side but had to pass through a section of Chinatown, where we saw this Durian stand.

The vendor was cutting a piece out for a customer. I wasn't close enough to smell it. I still have bad memories of the time I tasted a durian popsicle ($1.99 for a box of 4 at Ranch 99). I wanted to scrape my tongue with sandpaper after that briefly horrific taste. Mind you, the durian popsicle flavor probably was a watered down version of what it really tasted like too. To me, it tasted like rotten onions. Shudder.

After some wandering in the Lower East Side, we chanced upon this place...

Kampuchea is a fairly new Cambodian restaurant. The decor was bar height dark wooden tables with tall square stools.

The menu was very short, sweet, and to the point. They serve small plates style here.

My friend ordered the Cambodian Savory Crepe. The filling was catfish, ground peppercorn, ground sesame seed and tofu. It came with a side of lettuce and cilantro along with a dipping sauce with peanuts reminiscent of nuoc cham.

I, on the other hand, ordered the Chilled Flat Noodle which was served with seared chili tiger shrimp, crispy pork belly (there's that pork again), chives, cucumber, lettuce hearts, mint, sliced red onions, and hoisin sauce. The sauce was pooled on the sides (you can see it at the bottom) of the bowl. The toppings covered the medium width rice noodles. It reminded me of bun but without the chopped vegetables on the bottom of the bowl. This was a refreshing dish, especially since it was a super hot day (heatwave!). We shared our dishes. I really liked how my shrimp was seasoned and my friend's catfish wasn't so bad either. I'm not really a big fan of catfish but this time, it didn't taste like mud! The portions were also just right. Not so overwhelming but not insubstantial either.

I was determined to go to at least one place on my list of "must eat" places. I was kind of bummed the other day when Lombardi's was too crowded, but my disappointment was short lived because of that awesome street pizza. So...we headed over to Il Laboratorio del Gelato which is on Orchard Street, and also, right next to a museum dedicated to the history of the tenements of this particular neighborhood. Okay, this gelato place had a long ass line. In fact, we waited 30 minutes in this line! Lotus recommended this place in one of her blog posts and Robyn from "The Girl Who Ate Everything" blog raves about this place...

Former tenements across the street from Il Lab...

There really is a lab in there. It's a tiny store front but there is some serious gelato making in the back! With this place, you can't really see the list of flavors until you get right up to the window. I think it would be better if there was a posted list outside so people could make up their minds ahead of time what flavor they want.

Sucky picture...but here's the gelato and sorbet bins beckoning me:

My friend had the Espresso and Green Tea. One cone with two flavors $3.25.

My cone was Blackberry and Pear. All four flavors were awesome! Especially my pear! You could see and taste real pear flecks in it. Although it was so damn hot and the wait seemed interminable, it was worth it!!!