A New Restaurant Review And More Recipes

Hello again! :) I had a blast with my friends last night, the sun's shining, the scent of orange pound cake baking is wafting from the kitchen, it's going to be a beautiful weekend here and I'm going to the home and garden show tomorrow. Ah, life's good.

In continuance from my last post, the Mexican Chocolate Cake got raving reviews - Even more than my cookies. For the first time ever, I actually got asked for the recipe. It really is a fantastic cake for being vegan and it's very economical as well because of that fact. I'd recommend this to anyone who needs a quick and easy cake recipe. I'll also add that it was very pretty when I got the glaze on it. I sprinkled some of those little rainbow-ball sprinkles over it once it had semi-hardened and it looked very cheery and pretty for such little effort being needed. And because half of that's gone already and I thought it was rather fitting for such nice weather, I decided to look up a nice light and citrusy recipe to make. After a bit of web-rummaging, I decided on this one - http://www.chow.com/recipes/10377. I wrote it down in my recipe book and after getting to the kitchen and looking for the ingredients, I discovered that I couldn't find my lemons. I know that they're laying around somewhere but I didn't feel like scouring the house for them at the moment so I just decided on substituting orange zest instead. So now I'll have orange pound cake instead - We'll see how it turns out. :)

And now for the review. I've been going up to St. Cloud (it's about an hour drive north from here) for the last two days to do some shopping and yesterday I decided to stop for lunch at the only Japanese restaurant I know of there, Pok Sakura. I already posted a review for them on Chow so I'll just repost that here but I'll give you a hint - I was amazed at just how much I had been missing by going to Panera's every time I was in town. Here it is:

I had been to this restaurant years ago... But at that time I had not yet obtained my serious interest in and love of food. So, I went there today for lunch with vague and faded memories of so-so food and pretty low expectations.

I was blown away.

The restaurant itself is very small and very easy to miss - I'm sure that it's not very well known unless you have a love of Japanese food (like me) or you're a local. When I entered, I was greeted by what appeared to be the only two (very busy) employees in the place at the time. I was told to sit wherever I want and I was handed a menu before the waiter (and sushi chef) went dashing off to finish his orders.

I ordered the Veggie Sukiyaki with Miso soup. The soup was very good, at least on par with MSP's Origami's. It had a few slim strips of onion and mushrooms in it along with a few small squares of tofu (which I haven't seen elsewhere) and the flavor was perfect in my opinion. The miso came out just right - It wasn't drowned by other flavors or watery like I've seen elsewhere.

Then came my Sukiyaki. The bowl was huge. The presentation for all of the dishes thus far had been nice but this made my mouth water just looking at it. It had mushrooms, bean sprouts, what I think was napa and onions in it from what I could see, along with more squares of tofu. It tasted incredible. The broth was very rich but oh so good, the sweet and salty flavours meshed perfectly. The yam noodles in it were very good too, they blended in with the veggies just right.

For the price (the Sukiyaki was $6.99), this is a great deal in my opinion. I think I've found myself a new favorite lunch spot.

Yes, it really was that amazing.And yes, I'm pretty sure I will be going back there every time I'm in St Cloud from here on out. But I think I hear my timer beeping at me to go take my pound cake out so I'll be back to let you guys know how it is and give you my review for wherever we stop for lunch in the cities tomorrow.

Ja ne!

Baking Matters

Thus far this week (after prodding from various people telling me all of my brownies had been eaten and I needed to make something else), I've had time to bake two goodies. One of them I made yesterday - David Lebovitz's Nonfat Gingersnap Cookies (http://www.davidlebovitz.com/archives/2009/01/nonfat_gingersnaps.html). My god, they're amazing. And his recipes is one of the first cookie types that I've been able to complete without disastrous results. Cookies do not like me. I've tried to make cookies on various other occasions but they always end up too runny and they're difficult to make substitutions in to lower the fat content. IE: Applesauce for oil and things such as that. That said, I would be grateful if anyone who might come across this post and point me in the right direction towards some good either lowfat or no-fail cookie recipes. :D But anyways, enough of my babbling. As I said before, the cookies turned out great. They were crispy on the outside and nice and chewy on the inside. Because I didn't have time to make the crystalized ginger, I substituted chopped dates for that (more nutrition, woo!) and it didn't seem to make any difference in the taste at all. The recipe also doesn't include that you have to press the cookie-dough balls down onto the sheet before popping them in the oven so I took them out and did that about half-way through the baking time. They've gotten really good reviews from everyone who has tried them thus far except for one person (who I know has a very big sweet-tooth) who said that the ginger bite was too much at the end. Making them took a bit of work but it was well worth it in the end in my opinion. I highly recommend this recipe to anyone who wants to give it a try. :)

My second goodie is currently in the oven as I write this. I found this Mexican Chocolate Cake recipe (http://www.seriouseats.com/recipes/2010/02/healthy-delicious-mexican-chocolate-cake-recipe-from-real-simple-magazine.html) last week on one of my favorite foodie websites, serious eats, and I knew I had to try it after reading the reviews. Because it's eggless, I had to force myself not to lick the bowl clean but I admit I did sneak a few tastes of the batter before I washed the bowl and it was delicious. When I find some time to blog again I'll let you guys know how it turns out.

Last Week

So, last week didn't turn out at all as I expected (but does it ever?). It ended up being far more hectic than I had expected and I ended up having far more tests and papers due than I expected, which is really my fault for taking 18 credits but oh well. I enjoy my classes so it's worth it. :)

But because of how busy I was, I really didn't have much time to delve into the internet to find recipes or experiment on my own so I ended up having oatmeal and slightly modified soups for the rest of the week. I did make a discovery though - A regular 99 cent can of cambells tomato soup doesn't have to suck. I coursely chopping some carrots, onions and mushrooms, added some garli-gini and caramelized them on the bottom of my saucepan and created a nice base. I then added the soup and waited until it simmered. I'm sure that this combination alone would have tasted so much better than a regular can of soup but because at this point my tongue had swelled up and was hurting much worse than earlier, I had to blend it instead and it actually tasted pretty damn good.

This became one of my staples in that week along with the afore mentioned oatmeal and applesauce and by Saturday, thankfully, I had returned to eating real food. Which was just in time because on Saturday I actually convinced someone to go to the Art Institute Museum with me in the cities so I didn't feel like a loser going by myself which I'm sure will still become a common trend - I loved it there. It was an amazingly all encompassing place for being completely free and I only got through about half of one floor in the hour I had to spend there before lunch. Ah, food. That's another bonus of going there; It gives me a perfectly good excuse to be in one of the best places in MN to get awesome and cheap food. I have a feeling that this excursion to the cities will become a common weekend routine for me whether I go alone or not so I'll probably be posting a restaurant review on here at least once a week from this point onward.

On this particular Saturday, I was craving Asian food. Specifically, Japanese. Now, this is also a pretty common craving of mine (read my intro. post) so don't be surprised if more than half of the reviews I post are on Asian restaurants. After reading the current MPLS magazine, I found a section with 99 eats under $10 and nestled within that article was a dish from Midori's Floating Cafe. After researching this restaurant a bit on Friday night, (also common with me) I found that they are extremely well known for their wonderful vegan menu and vegetarian meals as well as creating food that actually tastes authentically Japanese. That made up my mind - I was going there. So after our hour at the museum, we navigated through the crowded streets of MPLS to find this little corner cafe nestled on a relatively busy intersection.

We appeared to be the first lunch guests of the restaurants and the atmosphere within the small restaurant was very welcoming and almost "tranquil" if that's what you want to call it. They had nice music (some sort of jazzy stuff) and we were immediately told to have a seat wherever we would like. We were given both the lunch and sushi menu by a very friendly waitress and then, after a short time scanning the menus (we both pretty much so knew what we wanted beforehand), we ordered. Contrary to other reviews I've read, we had rather speedy service. The salad that they serve before most of their lunch items wasn't all that fantastic - I would say that Origami's is much, much better. However, the shiso onigiri that I ordered to go along with the meal was absolutely amazing. It was slightly salty with the subtlest hint of mint and because we had gotten there so early, it was still warm. My main dish, the Kombu Soba, was decent but once again not anything special. Then after finishing our meal, I had to order dessert. I knew that I shouldn't (I'd already had a scone at the Museum's cafe earlier) but I had read that Midori's daifuku was incredible and, being a huge fan of daifuku, I had to give it a shot. Surely enough, it was just as good as I was expecting it to be. The soft slightly sweet mochi, and the azuki paste within it, were obviously home made and both tasted amazing. It was a fantastic closer to an equally fantastic day. All in all, I think I may be making return trips to Midori's in the future.

Intro

So, I'm currently sitting at my community college in between class and I'm incredibly bored. I decided (after staring into space for like five minutes) that I would try to find something creative and productive to do and I stumbled across this.
I figured hey, I have a decently interesting life and plenty of thoughts to go around so even if no one reads this, it'll give me something to do on those days like this when I'm sitting around with absolutely nothing to do.

And because I named this entry intro, I suppose I'd better get to introducing myself and some of the things that this blog might someday end up containing. I currently live in a tiny town that's situated in the middle of Minnesota. I'm a full time college student who suffers greatly from indecisiveness and therefore I am nowhere near choosing a field of study as of yet. I love a variety of things (all of which I will probably write about here at some point. These include:

• Anime and Japan
  
• Cooking (more often than not healthy)
  
• Traveling
• And all sorts of risk taking

The second on that list in particular is something that I am completely obsessed with. I absolutely love cooking and food and anything related to the two. I'll probably end up posting loads of recipes here simply for my personal use but anyone is free to try them out if they would like to. But alas, I've got to run to class soon so I shall be back at some point in the future with another post.