🏷️ eating out

That Coconut oil is 92% saturated fat - around 30% more than butter. It has 6% monounsaturated fat and just 2% polyunsaturated fat. In the US, it is consumed in large amounts in nondairy coffee creamers on a regular basis by most of the population.

Anyone who thought that they were cutting out the risk of fattening substances by using non-dairy coffee creamers and didn't know this fact are in for a shock.

Coconut oil can be heated to 177 degree C (that is 77 degree C more than the boiling point of water) before it starts to smoke - this is very convenient for mass scale cooking industry use. You would be hard-pressed to find commercial mass-produced baked goods or confectionary here that doesn't have coconut oil used as a shortening agent.

It is however, one of the best skin moisturisers on the planet.

@heidi and I went out to dinner at the Tokyo Shanghai Bistro yesterday. It was a nice outing to wipe out a bunch of disappointments and catch up. Thank you, Heidi! :)

The food was great, the service was courteous, the prices were very reasonable and the ambience was perfect. I would certainly recommend this place for a nice dinner.

A bunch of people asked me to describe the menu and since my head is filled with snot, aches and gloom today, I am taking the easy way out:










We ordered the Agedashi Tofu and the Yaki Nasu - an eggplant dish.

The Eggplant dish was very rich, coated in sesame oil and I think, some soy based sauce and slightly sweet but delicious.

The "deep fried" Agedashi tofu was very lightly fried. It looked to me like freshly made tofu so the deep frying didn't leave much of a crust. It had a very soft rather than chewy texture. I liked it with the sauce it was served with; Heidi, not so much. The tofu could have used a nice dash of pepper or red-chillie sauce on top.

















We ordered vegetable egg rolls and the vegetable soup to go. I just had the soup for lunch - it was amazing. I am inspired to make it at home. Any food that makes me want to make it in my kitchen definitely makes the cut of "really delicious" in my kictionary. ;-)



We also ordered the Vegetable Mei Fun and Sesame Tofu - both of which were pretty good.

The Mei Fun was very noodle-heavy and could have been better with a few more vegetables - so I can't say it was entirely my kind of fun. Those who avoid veggies like the plague might have had a field day with this dish. We asked our waitress to make it spicy - but the spice was well below the mildest I have eaten. So I guess you could confidently spike that spice level up and still end up with a tolerable "American" spice level.

The Sesame Tofu was actually sweet but tasty - with a strong sesame flavour. It was served with broccoli and somewhat oily rice.











Overall, everything was a trifle too oily for comfort but fairly good with reasonable prices. Our waitress was very accomodating and pleasant. Since the Tokyo Shanghai Bistro is very roomy inside, it didn't seem crowded even if a constant stream of people came to check it out and have dinner. I would definitely go again to try other things on their gazillion-item menu. You should too. :)

I had a fun-taste-tick time at the Taste of Buffalo. It was pouring in the morning but it cleared up beautifully by around four.


I sampled a good variety of really appetizing stuff, learnt how to make a fairly complicated Turkish dessert, came home and made an inspired crunchy stir-fry.


The Turkish Cultural Centre of Buffalo demonstrated the art of making traditional Turkish Baklava and a savoury little appetizer called Borek. It was quite interesting. The culinary stage was too high for me get direct shots of their cooking. I had to instead resort to somewhat blurry shots of the broadcasting TV screens.

Baklava starts with layers of "filo" dough.


Twenty layers of filo dough are stacked atop each other with a generous brushing of clarified butter between each layer.


Then comes a layer of grated walnuts and sugar, followed by twenty more layers of butter-sandwiched filo dough layers. At this point, I was consciously wondering what the rates of cardiovascular diseases in Turkey were. I think they must have got through 75% of that box of butter.


The Baklava came out of the oven looking heavenly. They brushed it with a sugar-lemon glaze and topped it with grated pistachios. It started raining and I was probably their only non-Turkish audience. They let me take this shot from inside the stage trailer.


It was delicious enough to make me forget that probably a week's worth of calories were packed into this small triangle.


The Turks also demonstrated Borek - a savoury deep fried savoury pastry roll filled with feta cheese, mozzarella cheese and parsley.

The rich flaky pastries were accompanied by slow-brewed Turkish tea. They put this traditional turkish kettle on when they started their show. It brewed for a complete 40 minutes before they handed out a deeply burgundy-golden coloured tea. It was strong, bitter and completely refreshing in the rain.


The "Cina-Monkees" - a vegan dessert from Craftsmen cafe, was interesting and went pretty well with the Turkish tea.


The previously publicized dark chocolate covered funana was fun. :)


Got to hear a couple bands in transit.


The White Chocolates were egged on by a completely smashed undergraduate crowd in the beer tent. They played a string of MJ hits. Random people within hearing range launched into personal versions of the MJ dances. It was weirdly hilarious.


Jon Seiger and the All Stars played some awesome jazz tunes. Some talented couples from the crowd broke out into ballroom jazz dances in front of the stage. It was a curious contrast to the MJ fever simultaneously razing another part of the festival.

I also sampled a salad from the Polish stall, fruit juice samples, a bruschetta pizza from one of the Italian restaurant stalls (I forget which one. There were so many of them!), a mango smoothie and some chips with salsa.

Overall, quite a well-spent and enjoyable food experience. :)

@heidi and I went to Merge on Wednesday night and LOVED the whole experience. I recommend this restaurant most enthusiastically.


The food is wonderful and so is the entertainment. Heidi and I must have laughed non-stop for around 2.5 hours after we finished eating. A really funny improv show troupe performed at the restaurant.

Merge has a very friendly art-and-show friendly atmosphere.


Some very interesting sculpture and art on walls keep you busy while you wait for your order.


And the wait is not too long either. We wanted to sample a good range of their food (I intentionally had a light lunch earlier that day) and ordered quite a variety.


The polenta dish came first. I have never had polenta before and this was my introduction. I thought it was a bit bland on the inside. But then, I am not really a bland food person. I get through red onions and chillies by the tonload every week. @heidi and I agreed that the blandness of the polenta was more than made up for by the tomato sauce and onions accompanying the dish. We were so hungry that we finished most of the polenta before we realized that we had not taken any photos of it! So this was a photo of the last piece. :)


If I were making this polenta, I would probably season it with hmmm... jalapenos or dried red chillies before making the exact dish.

Our waitress was really sweet and never once stopped smiling. She made our dining experience extremely pleasant! She told us that her mom, Katie used to make these for lunch they were little. The panini is called the Katie. It is made with some really nice strong cheese, jicama slices and granny smith apple slices! It was served piping hot and was the most perfect comfort food I have ever eaten.


@heidi made an excellent choice in the Kale salad that came with the Katie. The Kale was (I think) very lightly sauteed (olive oil?) to a crispy crunchy texture and delicately flavoured with pine nuts and dried cranberries.


We also got the vegetarian lasagna with broccoli and greens.


The lasagna had a sharp sourish cheese in it. I thought the taste was pretty unique and liked it. The tomato sauce complemented the taste.


I have to say that this was the BEST broccoli and greens I have ever had. The broccoli was steamed to crunchy perfection and flavoured with a delicate an almost-soy sauce.


We found out from our delightful waitress (I wish I had asked her name!) that it was flavoured with this cool sauce available at wegmans. She even brought out the bottle and showed it to us. It was such a pleasant change from restaurants that won't tell you anything and leave you guessing. I think I would go back to Merge just because they have such a nice staff! Thank you, Katie's daughter, you made our evening perfect! (Hahaha, that reminds me of Cold Comfort Farm and whole Robert Poste's Child bit. )


I ordered the rice and beans as a side. It was a bit on the bland side but tasty. I would season this with cumin and red chillie powder.


We were not quite full and were ready for dessert. @heidi and I both ordered chocolate. It was served in a generous sized comfort cup.


I asked for a shot of espresso in mine and stirred it in. It was some wonderful lightly sweet chocolate. When I reached the end, I realized that they had used real chocolate bits to make it - not chocolate powder.


We topped our meal with two really special desserts. A delicious cheesecake with lemony hints and (I think) raspberry sauce?


And an apple pie served warm with rich cream on the side.


I loved this pie, the apples were tart and the pie crust was crumbly and had a hint of cinnamon.


We weren't very sure whether these guys were a rock band or improv artists because I thought I saw an electric guitar earlier.

But it turned out that they were members of the Francis Bacon Improv' troupe.

We were relishing our dessert when this cheerful little stage came to life with really colourful lighting effects. They went through the entire rainbow before they decided on this one...


The improv skits were SO utterly hilarious that we stayed till the very end. I think you need to catch the Francis Bacon improv troupe if you get a chance. They has us in splits the entire time!

Overall, I loved the restaurant. I don't think I have ever reviewed a restaurant in this much detail before. I really want to thank @heidi for coming out with me and having a rocking time (even though she had an important "hazing" oral argument examination the next day @tinypliny #48207). It was an extremely fun 4 hours. :) We also ran into @enknot at the very end. I wish he had been there before!

It's time you all Merge'd. You won't repent it! :)

---

PS: We took all the pics on @heidi's phone! I shamelessly stole them from @heidi's picasa and tweaked them with explicit permission. Thanks @heidi!

PPS: Our bill came to ~$43.03 (+tip). It was really worth it!! @heidi, I owe you $2.00. I miscalculated the tip.

PPPS: @heidi, its been SO SO SO VERY LONG since I have had a 100% unalloyed fun with anyone. I attribute this all to YOU. I am SO looking forward to our next outing already!!

Hi @kookcity2000,

I remember you telling me that there is a Woodlands at Loehmann's Plaza now. I checked out Rocwiki and experiences seem pretty chequered. What do you think? How does it stack up against the palace of dosas?

I have got around 3/4th of a month to pick a decent "ethnic" place to eat. "Abyssinia" and/or "King and I" are always my backups but I would really like to hear your impression of this new place at the plaza.

Thanks!
TP

I know I am mixing up punch lines and writing a blasphemously laudatory post about a fast-food place, but Subway deserves my respect in so many ways! I am not being paid an obscene amount of money for an ad campaign or miraculously losing bucketloads of adipose tissue by eating here but this chain has rescued me from many a day of hypoglycemia and certainly prevented me from turning cannibalistic. In due recognition of its consistent and gastronomically positive contributions to my life, I am going to do a @drew-style 10 things I like about Subway here:

1. It's the most healthful food you could eat if you are without access to your kitchen or in a tearing hurry or just poor.

2. If you wisely pick your sandwich (and yes, I do mean the veggie sandwich. I don't care what all you carnivores out there think. The veggie sub rocks your socks off!) you get a very balanced meal.

3. They have a superlative item on their menu that I can easily zone in on (the creatively but wrongly spelled Veggie Delite Sandwich, what else??!!). This eliminates my aimless-vacillation-time (AVT). AVT is the eternity that I spend making food decisions while people's heads around me explode with pent-up frustration at my indecision.

4. You get UNLIMITED veggies for a fraction of the money that you might spend for a similarly loaded meal elsewhere in the whole city. I regularly test out if the "unlimited" part of the veggie deal is true and almost invariably the place passes my exacting standards of veggie greed with flying colours. The Chippewa Subway also has BABY SPINACH! 'Nuff said.

5. The bread choices are delicious. And most of them are super healthful. The honey-oat bread is a gustatory dream with its chewy delicious texture and is an awesome boost to your daily fibre intake.

6. If you say the magic (and secret no more) word "double toast", you can get your bread of choice toasted *twice* to a glorious rich golden brown delicious scrunchy heavenly colour. I am running out of elaborate adjectives to describe how perfect the double toasted bread is. Everything tastes about a million times better with a double toast!

7. You could get cheese on your sandwich and not only benefit from all the amazing proteins and calcium, but also make your sub 10x tastier.

8. The wait time between your order and the first morsel reaching your mouth is ridiculously low. Since you can watch your sub being built, it's even shorter and livelier. It's almost sandwich-making-by-proxy; calming and fun! You don't have to sit at a table and wonder whether the kitchen ran out of tomatoes and are as a result raising them from the ground or direct a contemplative and lifeless stare at at your companion's hand with the eminent possibility of chewing it off in a demented fit of hunger.

8. The sub arrives and it's time to pay the bill. The price is so reasonable that it blows your mind. After aeons of being overcharged at every single place that is half as comparable to the Subway, you cannot believe that the fabulous piece of divine contentment you hold in your hands only costs $2.49 for a six incher and $5 for a footlong! If you have foupons, the cost is cut by a further $0.50 to $1.

9. There is no presumption or discrimination at a subway. It's the only place you feel equally at ease chatting up the stressed businessman who has dropped by for a quick bite or the bag-lady from the greyhound station who wants to stretch her last dollar for a substantial lunch. The subway is an oasis of socialism even within a capitalistic framework.

10. You could ask that your sub be loaded up with a truckload of Jalapenos and not have the person serving you give you the look of death or a disgusted stare.

On July 04, 2008, to me, the subway chain represents one of the many facets of freedom that this country lavishes on its residents - citizens or not.

I went for a walk through Buffalo's breath-takingly beautiful and sunny downtown today and spotted a delightful new chocolate coffee shop - Chow Chocolat. It opened this week. Their floor is so beautiful, that you want to dance on it. Romantic/classical period piano was wafting through the store.

The chef was at the counter and told me that they were waiting for their espresso machine. Come next week, Chow Chocolat will have delicious espresso, tasty salads, rich veggie (and other) sandwiches as well as signature spinach creations. I checked online and Buffalo Rising seems to have done a feature on this shop:


I know they will have tasty food because the chef described the salads and sandwiches to me in detail, and his eyes lit up and danced while he was talking about them. I think anyone who is so passionate about food and cooking cannot go wrong.

I admit I may have been a bit distracted because the chef is a splitting image of Johnny Depp (In movies: Chocolat + Blow + Pirates of the Caribbean). He gave me chocolate samples and I couldn't quite think straight after that. I didn't even check out the prices, as I usually do! I had to force myself not to get coffee and sit there gazing at him. Lucky is the girl (or guy) who has him. He has the world's most charming smile, long luxurious locks, plus he cooks and works at a chocolate store! How good can it possibly get?? :)

Chef Johnny Depp: The bloke in the tie in the picture. From:


On afterthought, I think employing him might have been intentional; or at least making him do the whole Johnny Depp look. After all, if you are named Chow Chocolat, who better to employ than the hot chocolaty Johnny Depp. Hmmm... I wonder if the counter will be manned by Juliette Binoche when Johhny is cooking in the kitchen...

I can't wait to go back! :)

I ate out at this restaurant on Hertel and Norwood yesterday and let me just say that their basil flavoured chillie sauce with the stir fried vegetables is probably the best I have ever had in my life. Its superlative. When this restaurant says "vegetables" in its menu, it means business. I counted no less than 8 different veggies in the stir-fry - all of them crisp and cooked JUST the right amount.

But let me not wander away from topic of THE SAUCE. The waitress asked me how I wanted it and I gave my usual answer, "EXTREMELY HOT", with enthusiastic and desperate stress placed over the entire span of the phrase. I have been told that my eyes go cranky and my eyebrows knit when I say this but I think it just magnifies the earnestness with which I mean this preference.

I want them to get the impression that I want to BURN UP the minute I eat a mouthful of their dish because I LOVE IT. I yearn for my eyes to water, my nose to run and my cheeks to turn up a shade of bloody red when I am enjoying the deeper flavours within the dish It's like getting a tattoo for your tongue after being dosed with a hallucinogenic agent. You know that the burning sensation is just your tongue paining like crazy but you are able to convince yourself that it is a taste and so mentally enjoy the experience. The trick is to do this without resorting to the wimpy measure of drinking water or diluting the pain by mixing in the rice/bread. That is just cheating.

The waitress patiently heard out my theatrically presented favourite phrase. I think the red tasteful walls of this restaurant perfectly accented the emotion that went into my request.

Ah, but I was talking about the sauce, friends, romans and countrymen (and not so countrymen/women to be politically all correct and not to be perceived as insular). The sauce came in an ellipsoid platter adorned with the representatives from the veggie kingdom. I dug in, and to my surprise didn't encounter the requested heat and the pain. Instead, I was met with a deceptively and might I add, an almost honeyed taste of the sauce complemented by the fresh tones of basil. Just as I was concluding that I might possibly need to scowl ferociously henceforth whilst asking for the dish to be liberally sprinkled with capsaicin, the heat struck, as a pleasant afterthought that strikes you when you realize that you have left your pencil on the desk of that person whom you have a crush on. You were unable to ask them out at the first instance, but the forgotten pencil has quite unexpectedly opened up another vista of opportunity!

I did not really have the eye-watering snot-streaming experience I had been hoping for but I enjoyed this sauce based stir-fry immensely. It was delicious and beautifully woven together in terms of taste and flavour. I admit I am a fussy character when it comes to liking food, but this restaurant finally got this sauce-stir-fry dish right.

Its so good that it has stood the test of being put in the refrigerator as a leftover. It is still incredibly delicious. That is something which is extraordinary to me when it comes to restaurant food. It tells me that they put their heart into this sauce and licked their fingers when they finished. That might strike you as slightly grotesque in a practical sense, but expressed as a sentiment , its a serious compliment. I strongly recommend the stir-fry basil chillie sauce veggie dish at the Taste of Thai. Try it, and take a sworn enemy with you. Chances are you will wipe all your hostilities clean and share mutual admiration for the sauce when you are done eating here.

Let me just say, I LOVED this little breakfast place. It was perfect, from start to finish. The endless cups of coffee were heart-warming and the waiters and waitresses at this place were cheerful, generous and went out of their way to make us feel totally happy!

I got the tofu-potato-caramelized onion hash with bean-chili and cornbread. It was gorgeous to look at and absolutely delicious. It may not have been a standard breakfast but was surprisingly very light and also satisfying at the same time. The cornbread had green peppers and spices in it!! It was delightful!

My friend got the 3 egg omlette with caramelized onions, feta, spinach and potatoes. I tasted some of it and even though I am not a big fan of the eggy smell, the omlette did seem tasty.

My cup of coffee was refilled nearly 4 times and they kept asking me if I was sure I didn't want one more cup!

The whole place looks cheerful because of the bright bold colours. The people working in the place make it even better with their happy chatter and personal attention to the customers. The prices are just right - not too cheap and not overpriced. You could get a good breakfast and coffee for about $10 (without tip)

Maybe this place shot up my expectations early in the day and Trattoria Aroma couldn't live up to it? I can't say.

I would HIGHLY recommend this place for a very happy and well-put-together tasty breakfast. :)

I went to Trattoria Aroma with my friend yesterday and we ordered some fancy-named pizzas. Mine was a white one with olives, spinach, onions and cheese and her's was the one with cherry tomatoes, onions, mushrooms and cheese. Unfortunately, I can't seem to remember what they were called on the menu.

Overall, it was okay, but I think I am not super overjoyed with this place. I would still recommend Panaro's over any pizza place I have ever been to. Some points which turned me off were:

- Our waitress had this godawful snobby expression on her face - as if it was an arduous chore for her to deal with us. She practically grimaced when I asked her to replace the meat on the pizza with mushrooms. I could have easily attributed this to tiredness or having generally a bad day if it were not painfully obvious that she was bending over backwards accomodating orders and grinning ear to ear at the customers who were at the next two tables.

-My pizza had so many olives on it, I couldn't taste anything else anymore. It was thin crust and all, but it was not balanced at all.

- The place (inside) has flies! We were constantly swatting away the flies, it was most annoying.

- The restroom had 2 stalls, one of them had no toilet paper and the other didn't lock at all.

I think the place has an upscale feel about it, but I don't think that justifies anyone making customers feel out of place - especially when you are not really making any huge demands or complaining about anything! I particularly resent waitresses who are ultra snobby and condescending.

Prices of pizzas range from $12 and upwards. The pizza sizes are generous and you should think twice before ordering two.

I know people have had good experiences at this place, but unfortunately I cannot recommend it. :(