Happy belated Moon Festival! Did everybody get their moon cakes?


I know absolutely jack about wine, but I do know about delicious food and how to be a yuppie, so Napa was great!

During the Labor Day holiday weekend, I went to the Bay Area.  (Do people outside of California know where I am referring to if I say Bay Area?)

Thanks are in order for: my parents for putting me up, to my traveling companion Chris, and thanks to myself for semi-planning and researching restaurants.

Posts:
1. Rubicon Estate
2. Mongolian Hot Pot/yelp
3. SPQR
4. Fish Tacos/Inn-N-Out
5. Yabbies

I got lucky this weekend!

I'm not the kind of girl to be embarrassed when I orgasm in public at a restaurant. Usually I have an inkling of the mischief I'll get into, but on Saturday night, the soft-shelled tempura crab at Sushi-Ko seduced me into a "quickie" on the sushi bar counter!  It got a little messy - and this may sound sick, but was in fact delicious - the best bite that induced this mouth orgasm was the squishy innards of the crab.



The outside was fried to perfection, giving the perfect crispy "bite" to the dish without any lingering oil tastes. The meat was sweet and brought out by the soy+vinegar dipping sauce that accompanied the dish.  (Maybe I'm biased because vinegar+crab is Asian? and I'm Asian?) I wasn't even listening to bf talking while eating this dish because I was devising a way to cancel some sushi roll orders and get more freakin' soft shelled crab. In the end there was no way to bring it up to the waitress without seeming like a nut case.

But that was okay - because by the time i recovered from the "Mmmmmmm" convulsions - there was sushi in front of me!  The rock shrimp, cilantro, and jalepeno roll is what keeps me coming back to Sushi-ko. Seriously, that one roll alone. The last 3 times we've been to sushi-ko, rock shrimp were out of season and I was sad.  I also had a very fatty tuno roll that was excellent and very delicate spot prawn nigiri. I wonder if you can eat lobster raw because raw shrimp are delicious and isn't a lobster like a bigger, more delicate shrimp?

A quick google search found:
Lobster carpaccio with vanilla ginger
lobster carpaccio with olive oil and caviar, fragrant stuffed tomatoes or strawberries scented with hibiscus petals.

YUM.

On to more weekend eats:

I continually surprise myself with how lucky I am.  BF even said this weekend over brunch, "we are lucky to be able to eat at all these great places."  I think i've contributed to his food obsession. Now he's almost thinking about ingredients, farmers markets, seafood seasons, and gardening as I am!

Weekend Eats:
Saturday snack: Mr. Yogato
Saturday din din: Sushi-Ko!
Sunday brunch: Montmarte
Sunday night dinner: (i cooked!) Arugula sprinkled on top crispy pan friend whole rockfish over mashed potatoes.
I love the Yogato - I am convinced that the owner is a stoner - froyo is not THAT funny! I wanted to suggest  lychee fruit as a topping so I could get 5% discount for life, but the guy told me he had just tested out that topping the same morning. Still - I had a delicious shot of original tangy with pineapple.

Montmarte on Sunday at 1:30 pm was less crowded than usual. I've been noticing this all over DC - which I'm sure is related to the dog days of August.  I have always seen Montmarte as a hearty&rich winter dining place. 

The scene in my head: The wind is blistering cold, you walk past the patio to the front door of Montmarte and hang your coat on the hooks that line the wall...a pinot noir sounds good as does escargot and calf liver and onions. The dishes are hot and steamy with garlic and onion aromas floating up.

Anyways - back to reality - I tried a new dish, roasted duck salad with warm apples, that I wouldn't have necessarily ordered had I known the duck was going to be roasted to a crunchy consistency.  It was perfectly seasoned and the crunchy-ness actually went well with the dressing-drenched semi-soggy salad leaves. 

But I do have a question about portion sizes.  Maybe I'm confused about how the French eat pate.  One order of pate comes with 1 inch thick, 4 inches by 4 inches slice of pate, one 6 inch piece of toast, 4 cornichons, and a pinch of sliced red onions, tomatoes, and green scallions. 

Well, why is there so much pate and so little everything else?

The cornichons are salty/sour things to cut through the fatty pate taste, right? The bread is used as a blank canvas for the pate to sit on right? How bout add more toasted bread and cornichons (and even sliced onions) - but cut less pate?

Anyways - Montmarte was delicious.

We walked across the street for some groceries.  I dragged bf up and down the stalls - even though I know which stalls have the best this or that. I just have this insane compulsion to check the products and prices at every stall before I can make a purchase - it drives me up the wall, i'm sure it's testing his last nerves. 

We got a 1.5 pound whole rockfish - which I made for dinner.  Fresh whole fish has better meat texture than even filleted fresh fish - i'm not sure why.  But the fishmonger (who I recognize, eastern market has all the same people working there year after year) did not cut off the head and tail. What the hell, fishmonger? I asked for it to be scaled, gutted, and the head/tail removed! It was scaled and gutted, but not chopped...you suck! You, sir, are on notice.

Because the head and tail were not chopped off, I couldn't fit the fish into my biggest pan. Grr....i really wanted to fry this fish until the skin was really crispy and tasty.  Before throwing the fish in the pan, I tried to chop off the head and tail with no success, but fortunately was able to snap the head off half way through the time on the stove. I thought it was almost as good as a restaurant dish - which is hard when trying to fry things!  There wasn't too much of a fish fry smell in the apartment, so i'll take that as a sign to try again.

Other than that - I haven't been up to much food-wise.

I'm working on a thought though - I'm trying to figure out when I had the first bite of something and it tasted like nature.  I know this sounds odd - but have you ever experienced taking a bite out of fruit and been able to taste the rainy spring or golden summer sunshine?  Have you tasted shad roe and could taste the ocean's low and high tides? Maybe I'm just an emphathetic eater - but I want to know when I had that first bite and realized food is not just an ammalgamation of chemicals, or "calories" that come in forms of different shapes and colors, but these foods we eat are a result of history, timing, and preparation.  Can I taste those things? Yes.