An Effing Foodie

Super-Expressive Foods: Hawt Pocket of Despair

It's hard not to feel like a smug, lucky duck on a plane to (or from) Hawaii.

That is, until they park this puppy in your face:
 
Behold, the Pulled BBQ Chicken Hawt Pocket of Despair. Crying into a tiny wastebasket of ranch.

I Heart Food Idioms: Spilled Milk

How often does one actually come across spilled milk? 

I think the universe was trying to tell me not to sweat the small stuff.

Eat These Nuts!

Ya gotta love it when food marketing reads like ED spam.

Super-Expressive Foods: Manapua Monster, Mango Custard Malasada

Where've I been?

Well...'twas time to go to the Motherland, wherein I was greeted with beautiful weather, great friends, and a bevvy of mui-expressive foods of the pastry-kind.  Chekkit!

BLARGH!  Manapua Monster menacing hapless Half-Moons!

Manapua Monster was the quintessential Hawaiian char siu bao: HUGE, and crammed with BBQ pork of the leaner, shredded variety (think less saucy, more red-pulled-porkish).  He and the Half-Moons (stretchy-glutinous skinned, filled with minced water chestnuts, pork and dried shrimp) play out their ancient battle every day at the Island Manapua Factory.

Yepyup, I like Char Hung Sut better, too--but we were on our way to Manoa Falls, so convenience won out over dimsum particularity.

No visit home is complete without a (few) visit(s) to Leonard's.  Call me old-fashioned (go ahead, it's not something you'll be able to say very often!) but I don't really care for the baroque new malasadas, with the addition of cinnamon sugar, stuffings of various custards, etc.  A fresh, just-fried-HOT Portuguese doughnut tumbled in sugar is an untinkered thing of beauty, and no one does them as well as Leonard's.

That said, lovely BFF Alli has always been one to try new things, so she bravely sampled some of the newer malasadas--one filled with pina colada custard, and another with mango custard.

>MMMfph<  Mango HORK!

"Tastes like sunscreen," sayeth Alli (of the pina colada one).  As for the mango?  "Tastes like...mango sunscreen."

No worries, we had standard malasadas at the ready for her, just in case.

It's Fusion*! It's Metaphor! It's Toad in the Hole con Curry!

Like anyone else, I’m kinda given to cooking ruts.  My inclination is to slap steaks, chops, pasta, and variations of green beans and tomato salad in front of peeps, and nobody complains, so I rarely deviate.  But it makes for FN boring cooking (and FN boring reading about cooking, natch).

So when I blew up my router vacuuming (don’t ask), and a trusted friend of mine popped in remotely and fixed it lickety-split, I figured I owed the man some eats, and told him to name his dish.

We were chatting online, so I couldn’t see him, but I could practically hear the smile spread across his face.  “Toad in the Hole,” he said. “Con Curry.”

A little background on this guy--Japanese-style curry is his lube/eats-cornerstone of choice.  For Curry Fiend, there is no food that can’t be improved with a cloak of spicy brown, and there is no meal he’d prefer over a steaming plate of katsu curry.

His request was not as strangely fusion-disastrous as it sounds...Toad in the Hole is browned sausages enveloped in Yorkshire pudding, generally served with squishy peas, mashed potatoes and onion gravy.  Topping it with curry and pairing it with rice seemed a bare half-step from its Brit comfort food origins, and given the rapidly apparent fall chill, it felt totally seasonally appropo.

Super-Expressive Foods: ChikaLicious Dessert Club's Espresso Ice Shot

I'd like to think I'm slowly getting better at taking appetizing piccies of eats, to ultimately provoke the lot of you into mid-day, mid-cubicle hunger.

But I still end up with 'lil beauties...

<====like this fella.

BEHOLD, the Many-Eyed Affogato Monster! BLAUGH!!!

Be kind.

He's a little misunderstood...and apparently, as curious about you as you are of him!

More importantly, he's darned tasty! Billed as "Espresso Ice Shot", Many-Eyed Affogato Monster is a caffeine-bathed balm on your summer-sapped senses--vanilla bean soft serve, chocolate-coated crispies, and a shot of espresso.

He's a bit heavy on the soft serve to be affogato proper, but if you want less ice cream, I'm sure the affable (if overwhelmed) purveyor of sweets would be happy to oblige.

You'll find him at the ChikaLicious Dessert Club (right across the street from the original ChikaLicous Dessert Bar on E 10th St) in the company of some good-lookin' cupcakes (including an INSANE toasted-marshmallow-topped s'mores specimen), cookies, puddings, smoothies, and a rotating sorbet.

Super-Expressive Foods: Joe's Shanghai Soup Dumplings

Smile big for the camera!

"I think I've soiled myself. Don't look at me. DON'T LOOK AT ME!!!!"

Skulking in a pack of the dumpling-curious, I finally visited the famed Joe's Shanghai, NYC's soup dumpling temple on Pell Street.  I was psyched, but a little worried about all the hype; in NYC, hype seems to be the worst thing that can happen to true-blue Chinese food.