Yummy Sugoi Garlic Sauce
Everyone loves contests. Heck, who doesn’t enjoy an opportunity to win free stuff? Especially when it’s awesome, free, yummy, food stuff?
You may remember almost a month ago, when I raved about Sugoi’s garlic chicken. Since they sell the sauce online, we knew we would be ordering some when we got home. Since we were ordering some for ourselves anyways we figured, why not reward our awesome readers with a giveaway?
This sauce has many different potential uses – drench fried chicken with it, use it as a marinade, it can even be mixed with mayonnaise and used as a dip or dressing. It’s entirely up to your imagination!
So here’s your chance: just leave a comment on this post by midnight PST on Friday, October 24. Make sure to leave your name and email address, so I can contact you if you win. I will randomly pick two commenters, and announce the winners next Monday. Good luck!
Note: Because of shipping costs and restrictions, I’m limiting winners to those in North America. So sorry to the rest of the world, but one of these days I promise I’ll have a contest you can participate in as well.
Garlic chicken from Sugoi… yum!
Orange-Pecan Biscotti Dipped in Chocolate
As always, on Tuesdays, it’s time to post the Tuesdays with Dorie pictures. This week, Canela y Comino chose biscotti. Normally, I am not a huge biscotti fan. I find that it’s too hard to bite into, and in general, not very enjoyable for me. My mother, however… she’s on the other end of the spectrum. She loves biscotti. So my first thought when I heard that this week’s TWD recipe was biscotti was… mom?
Since my mother would be the one eating most of the biscotti, I decided that it would be best to call her and determine what flavor combination she would prefer. Let me just say, my mother is a genius. The substitutions she picked resulted in some amazing biscotti.
Instead of almond extract, I used orange, and replaced the almond slivers with chopped pecans. Once the biscotti were twice-baked and cooled, I dipped them in melted semi-sweet chocolate – a perfect finishing touch. I brought them to a family gathering, and everyone loved them. Want to make them yourself? You can buy the cookbook here!
Such delicious biscotti!
Tanto Izakaya
Every now and then, Son has to travel up to Sunnyvale for work. Now that I’ve graduated and am no longer required to be in Southern California all the time, I travel along with him. When we are in Sunnyvale, we will often go to dinner with his co-workers. This week we visited a Thai restaurant and a Chinese restaurant, neither of which I’m going to review. However, we also went to a Japanese Izakaya – Tanto.
For those unfamiliar with this type of restaurant, an izakaya is like the Japanese version of a tapas restaurant. Many small dishes are served, and meant to be shared by the entire table rather than as individual meals. However we instead decided to order dishes individually, instead of to share as a table.
Son and I ordered several dishes to share between the two of us. The first to arrive was the edamame. This was, well, meh. Nothing special. It wasn’t bad, but it definitely could have used more salt.
Edamame
As we always do when offered, we ordered a sashimi dish. Since we like to try new types of sashimi when given the opportunity, we decided to try the white tuna. This was alright, not something I’d order again though. Whoever sliced the sashimi did a poor job – they looked like chunks of meat rather than expertly sliced sashimi. The taste was… interesting. Much meatier than other types of fish, and while it wasn’t going bad, it didn’t have the same sort of fresh, clean taste that most types of sashimi have.
White Tuna Sashimi
Son’s favorite dish was the Hotate Butter Uni Nose. This was a sauté of mushrooms and scallops in butter, topped with uni and ikura. He thought that the scallops were perfectly cooked, and the uni reminded him of eating crab eggs. He really enjoyed the salty uni, and easily ate most of the dish by himself. (I only got one scallop!)
Hotate Butter Uni Nose
My favorite dish was the anago tempura. This consisted of a fillet of anago (eel) coated in tempura batter, then fried and sliced into inch-wide slices. Delicious. I have never had eel prepared in this fashion, but my goodness, it is delicious! The crunchy fried tempura batter complements the meaty, soft anago flesh. Incredibly good. I would get this again, and even make it at home if given the opportunity!
Anago Tempura
Although no one would admit to it, someone ordered sashimi spring rolls. Since the dish went unclaimed, everyone tried a piece of the spring roll. Son enjoyed it, although in my opinion it was just alright. The sashimi was very chewy which made the rolls difficult to eat, and I wasn’t blown away by the combination of sashimi and vegetables they used in the roll.
Sashimi Spring Rolls
Although we didn’t get pictures of most of the other dishes at the table, we did sneak a photo of the tempura dish next to us. The typical sweet potato, green bean, and other vegetables were present, but there were also a few types of tempura I had never seen – lotus root tempura and shiso tempura. Definitely out of the ordinary, but the person who ordered it didn’t complain, so they must have been good.
Vegetable Tempura
At the end of the meal, several people at the table decided to order fried bananas with vanilla ice cream. Like most of the dishes here, I found this to be just okay. The ice cream was pretty much regular vanilla ice cream topped with a drizzle of chocolate sauce, and the banana was like any other fried banana I’ve had. This is definitely not something I’d order again… I could make it better and for less money at home.
Fried Banana with Vanilla Ice Cream
Note: I know there have been a lot of restaurant reviews lately, but I promise I’ll be back to recipe posts soon. I’ve been traveling for two of the last three weeks, and when I was home I barely had time to make two TWD recipes, never mind trying to cook other foods!
Caramel-Peanut-Topped Brownie Cake?
Welcome to week two of Allison screws up the Tuesdays with Dorie recipe! Last week, the crème brûlée had all it’s parts, tasted delicious, but just wasn’t very pretty. This week, however… oh dear. The recipe was for Caramel-Peanut-Topped Brownie Cake – sounds simple, right? Well, that which *should* have gone wrong turned out fine, while that which should have been easy-peasy failed miserably.
I do not own a springform pan. I did not have time to go out and buy a springform pan. The recipe says to use a springform pan. Um… oops? Instead, I used an 8″ circular cake pan. You know I breathed a sigh of relief when the cake turned out beautifully. I don’t think anything was lost by using a different pan! *whew* Thank goodness I at least got the base of the recipe right!
Caramel Chocolate-Peanut-Topped Brownie Cake
Well, let’s see. If I got the cake right, what else could I possibly mess up? That’s right, the topping. I was *supposed* to make a caramel topping for the cake. Should have been pretty simple, right? Or not. The recipe said to cook the caramel 5-10 min before putting the heavy cream and butter in. I cooked it 20 minutes, and it still wasn’t darkening much, so I put the dairy in. Crudmonkeys. Bad idea. The topping turned out to be a soupy mess, and cooking it longer in hopes that it might caramelize only turned it into a *stinky* soupy mess. Dang.
Normally, I would have tossed it and tried again. But, um, that was the last of my heavy cream. And I didn’t have time to go to the store, because I had to leave on *another* trip. Shoot. After a few moments of panic (what the heck am I going to top this cake with?!?!), I called my mother in hopes that she had a frosting/glaze recipe that was easy and that I wouldn’t have to buy extra ingredients for. My mother is a lifesaver. She has a chocolate glaze recipe that she uses quite often that worked wonderfully with the cake. And I managed not to screw it up. Yay!
Although I’ll bet the caramel topping would have been wonderful, I thoroughly enjoyed the cake with the chocolate glaze, garnished with peanut halves. Yum.
Delicious and chocolate-y!
The original recipe for the Caramel-Peanut-Topped Brownie Cake can be found on Wee Treats By Tammy. I give to you the recipe for the chocolate glaze:
Ingredients
- 1 oz unsweetened chocolate
- 1 tbsp butter
- 2 tbsp hot water
- 1 cup sifted powdered sugar
Cooking Directions
- In a small saucepan, melt the chocolate and butter together.
- Add the hot water.
- Quickly stir in the powdered sugar.
- Pour the glaze over the cake, let cool.
Waiola Shave Ice
One of the places we were told that we must visit in Honolulu was Waiola Shaved Ice. (The other place was Mana Bu’s, but we unfortunately never got to try it – the day we stopped by, they had closed just an hour after opening, so we missed it.) On our very last day, the day where it just happened to pour rain all day, we stopped by after checking out of our hotel.
We decided to get the ice cream bowl and the azuki bowl with mochi balls. Two bowls was a bit much for us to finish, but they were still delicious. We got rainbow flavorings and condensed milk on the ice cream bowl – a few scoops of ice cream, topped with shaved ice. The azuki bowl consisted of shaved ice, topped with azuki beans and condensed milk, and surrounded with pink and white mochi balls.
Ice Cream Bowl
Son loved the ice cream bowl. While I found the flavorings (particularly red – cherry?) reminded me of medicine, Son absolutely loved the varied flavors. It went very well with the ice cream, and the bowl even came with a straw to drink the melted shaved ice! Quite enjoyable.
The flavors sink into the middle, but still yummy!
I, on the other hand, preferred the azuki bowl. I love the flavors of the azuki beans, and although these weren’t quite as sweet as I would have liked, they were still delicious. I especially enjoyed the mochi balls. As we all know, I can never get enough mochi. The only thing I disliked about the bowl was the shaved ice – it was just ice. No flavoring, no nothing. The azuki beans and mochi would have been immensely more enjoyable with ice cream, since that would at least add some sweetness. Nevertheless, I did enjoy the bowl.
Azuki Bowl with Mochi Balls
We were glad to have been able to try Waiola Shave Ice, with one reservation – we wish we had chosen a hotter day to go!
