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!