Mariscos Jalisco (Los Angeles, CA) – Avocados, Galore!

May 9, 2012

My coworker once told me, “I love California. They put avocados on EVERYTHING.” (He must have visited Mariscos Jalisco when he was there.)

(That IS a lot of avocado.)

The ceviche tostadas are a great deal. Fresh fish, citrus juice and, obviously, tons of avocado for $2.50. The fried tortilla on the bottom gets soggy from the ceviche’s juices if you don’t eat immediately; therefore, eat it immediately.

Although the tostadas are good, the tacos de camaron (i.e. fried shrimp tacos) are THE THING to get. They’re the reason why Mariscos Jalisco tied for 1st in LA Taco’s Taco Madness 2012! Shrimp stuffed in a crispy shell, topped with salsa and more avocado. Order as many as you want; they’re only $1.75 a piece. It will get messy (seeing how the salsa is just poured on top), so be sure to grab napkins.

Mariscos Jalisco
3040 E. Olympic Blvd
Los Angeles, CA 90023
(323) 528-6701
Twitter: @mariscosjalisco

The 2012 Foodie Photo Scavenger Hunt – #foodiephotohunt

May 7, 2012

Those that have been following me on Twitter this weekend are probably familiar with (and maybe completely sick of) the following phrase: #foodiephotohunt.

(Note: If you DON’T follow me… *cough* Shameless plug! *cough* Top right corner of blog! *cough*)

Yes, this past weekend was Amateur Gourmet’s 2012 Foodie Photo Scavenger Hunt, sponsored by the Culinary Institute of America. It’s a relatively simple contest: take a picture with something on his list, post the picture on the internet, get points. The team with the most number of points wins a four-day course at the CIA.

When the details of the hunt first came out, Jenn and I threw around the idea of participating but, to be honest, I don’t think either one of us seriously considered competing. As two 20-something year-olds living in NYC, our social weekend was already scheduled well in advance. A whiskey tasting and birthday party put Jenn out of commission to compete on Friday night and Saturday morning. I had a knife skills class early Saturday afternoon. We both had the LuckyRice Night Market Festival and yet another party on Saturday night. Then, to top it all off, I had a birthday brunch to attend on Sunday afternoon. Realistically, we wouldn’t get to the majority of our hunting until 3PM on Sunday (at the very earliest) and the submissions needed to be in by midnight of that night. How many points could we possibly get in 8 hours?

Turns out, quite a lot of them. 205 of them, by our count. There’s a huge advantage of being in a city that is both ethnically diverse and completely compact – you can find anything if you just wander down a street. Therefore, 8 hours, 12 miles (according to my pedometer) and 1 freakout session later (more on that to come), I bring you some highlights and behind the scenes stories about our first Foodie Photo Scavenger Hunt.

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First off, I’ve discovered people are EXTREMELY nice to you if you start off by saying, “This might be the most random question you’ll get today but I’m participating in a food-related photo scavenger hunt and I’m looking for _____.”

Example #1: I went through the entire list with Eataly’s information lady and, not only did she point us towards the aged balsamic vinegar (10 points) and bottarga (10 points), but she also recommended we visit Kalustyan’s (where we picked up another 25 points for pomegranate molasses, date molasses and aleppo peppers).

Example #2: The wine guys at Morton William’s Wine and Spirits didn’t have a bottle of Greystone Cellars wine (5 points). However, they used their computer to find us a wine shop (conveniently up the street) that did!

All the people we interacted with during the hunt were so nice and really went out of their way to help…we couldn’t thank them enough.

Secondly, I’ve learned that the road to scavenger hunt success definitely involves a bit of luck.

A friend of ours (when looking over the list) had warned us geoduck would be hard to find since it was out of season, and I definitely noticed its absence when wandering the stalls of Chinatown. However, in that last seafood shop, the one on the other side of the subway stop that  I didn’t want to go to because my legs were tired, was geoduck (15 points). (I’m glad we decided to make ONE LAST STOP.)

(I was so giddy to see a geoduck, the shopkeeper started laughing at me.)

On the flip side, along with luck, timing is key as well. There were so many points lost because we couldn’t “come back tomorrow”. We missed out on the compost center (10 points) at the farmer’s market because of our late start (it closes at 1PM, we showed up at 3:30PM). No latte art (10 points) either because it was getting late and we had to go home and cook onions (40 points). We didn’t realize the Mexican market closes early on Sundays so there went our pequin pepper and huitlacoche points (10 and 15 points, respectively). And, we lost 25 Top Chef points, not because we couldn’t find a Top Chef contestant (we saw one – Carla Hall was at LuckyRice) but because we didn’t have anything to write “Top Chef” on our shirts with.

Losing the Modernist Cuisine points (all 20 of them) was especially painful because it slipped through our hands not once but TWICE. The nearby Williams Sonoma (which usually has one on display) sold their copy only a couple days prior and The Stand had a copy in their rare book section…but we arrived an hour after they locked that room up. (*sigh*)

None of those lost points caused me to spazz out though – that freak out session goes to something much larger. Like I mentioned earlier, we had to submit our pictures by midnight in order to be qualified to win the grand prize. Because of our tight time crunch, we didn’t start uploading until 11:45PM. Of course, what happens? The internet in my apartment decides at that very moment to crap out. (Thanks a lot, Time Warner Cable.) I restarted the computer, tried plugging the cables directly into my laptop instead of using wi-fi, everything…nothing. I think Jenn said it best:

…We finally upload our full submission at 12:12PM.

Adam of Amateur Gourmet is still tallying up the points so not sure if our late submission will come back to bite us in the butt (results are supposed to be posted later today so keep your fingers crossed for us). Either way, this was such a blast! I’m already thinking about next year…If we place with only 8 hours to work with, think about how many we could have gotten if we had an entire weekend!

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RESULTS UPDATE!

We didn’t win. *wah waaaaah* Well so…Congrats to the teams that did!

An Overdue Conversation

May 4, 2012

“Hello, Felicia.”

*Felicia turns around*

“Oh! Oh. Oh my god. Hey… YOU…”

“You seem surprised to see me. Forgot about your good ole blog, The Food Ledger, already?”

“NO! I mean, no. No… I just… I just haven’t seen you for a while, that’s all. I’m sorry about that by the way. I’ve been… busy…”

“Yeah. BUSY. That’s what it is. Listen, I wouldn’t normally gang up on you like this but we have a problem.”

“…We do?”

“Yes. We do. I saw you reaching into your purse for those fancy Food Ledger personal business cards. You weren’t actually planning on handing those out, were you? Especially to that cute PR guy? ‘Cause honey, you haven’t touched me for MONTHS.”

“I was, but… I mean, I know but… But the email address is still good… ?”

“Listen, I’m going to be straight with you. We both know this isn’t working out the way we hoped it would. Writing is not your forte. There’s a reason you only work with numbers for a living. The painfully long intros, the just average explanations, the crappy attempts at conclusions…THEY’RE NOT WORKING. And honestly, I don’t know if anyone cares.”

*Felicia looks down at feet*

“…I know. You’re right.”

“Of course I’m right. I’M YOUR BLOG. Now, I’m going to make you a proposition: I’ll let you hand out those business cards with no remorse. You paid for them, they’re pretty and they should be shared. But in return, I want posts. LOTS of posts.”

“But how?! You can’t expect me to write!”

“I don’t expect you to write, I expect you to POST. You have the pictures – they’ve all been edited, they’re just sitting on your drive – just throw them up on the internet! Literally toss in one sentence. (Two if you’re feeling generous.) Wham, bam, thank you ma’am.”

“I…I think I can do that.”

“You WILL. Oh, and last thing? Those posts? You start IMMEDIATELY.”

*Felicia hangs head*

“…Fine. You’ve got yourself a deal.”

“Good. I’m glad we had this conversation. I hope to see you more often, Felicia.”

*The Food Ledger walks away*

“I’ll see you soon too, Food Ledger…”

King 5 Noodle House (Queens, NY) – A Taiwanese Breakfast Like Home

February 1, 2012

Everyone has meals that remind them of home; one of mine is a Taiwanese breakfast.

The family and I don’t dine out for breakfast very often but, when we do, we almost always go a Taiwanese restaurant called Yung Ho in the San Gabriel Valley, known for their soymilk and other Taiwanese breakfast eats. We only go maybe once or twice every year, at no particular time and for no particular reason, but I consider our inevitable yearly trip an unofficial family tradition.

Even though I now live far from the family, I like the idea of carrying on tradition (even if only with myself) so I found King 5 Noodle House in Flushing – a Taiwanese breakfast place to call my own.

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If you’ve never had a Taiwanese breakfast, let me give you the lowdown: Of all the things on the menu, I feel like there’s only one thing that you have to get, and that’s a bowl of hot soymilk.

When I was a kid, I actually hated soymilk. (I drank a lot of regular cows’ milk at the time so soymilk tasted funny in comparison.) I obviously learned to love it but, even now, I still prefer the sweet soymilk over the savory. Sweet soymilk is simply fresh soymilk sweetened with sugar while the savory soymilk is filled with bits of fried dough, shredded dried pork, pickled veggies and all sorts of other things. To this day, I’m still not fond of the savory version – the saltiness just doesn’t appeal to me.

Other than the soymilk, there’s a variety of foods you can order. My personal favorites are the following:

Fried Cruller (“you tiao”)

Literally just a long piece of fried dough, you can either eat it as is or get it sandwiched within a sesame pancake. I like giving them a quick dunk in the soymilk, just enough to get some flavor but not so much that they dough becomes soggy. (If you get the savory soymilk, pieces of it are already chopped up in the soymilk to begin with.)

Rice  Roll (“fan tuan”)

The rice rolls also come in both a sweet and savory variety; I only order the savory. It’s essentially a fried cruller wrapped in shredded dried pork and sticky rice, and sometimes includes pickled greens as well. It’s been so long since I’ve had a sweet one that I’ve forgotten what they’re even stuffed with! (Sugar? Red bean paste? Sesame? Honestly, I have no idea.)

Egg Roll (“dan bing”)

The last thing I always get is an egg roll – a soft green scallion pancake with a egg fried on it.

Besides the dishes shown above, you can also order for breakfast anything from sesame pancakes stuffed with beef to pork and/or  vegetable dumplings and buns to beef noodle soup. As you might have noticed though, most Taiwanese breakfast foods are heavy in carbs; therefore, as long as you don’t let your eyes order for your stomach, you’ll be good to go!

King 5 Noodle House
39-07 Prince St.
Queens, NY 11354
(718) 888-1268

Best of 2011

January 11, 2012

If anything was made apparent to me in 2011, it was this: I am supposed to be in New York.

I may have only lived here for 14 months but I already feel like NYC is turning into home. I may have been born and raised in LA but, every time I went back to visit this past year, I became bored and antsy and only wanted to be back in the city. There’s something about New York that makes me feel so alive; here, I feel like I’m slowly becoming the person I’ve always wanted to be.

My best of 2011 list reflects a similar perspective as my life; as I created a home for myself in NYC, I immersed myself in food that reminded me of home. It’s surprising how many places I didn’t eat at in 2011: I only had one fine dining meal (Del Posto, for my birthday). I missed out on most (if not all) of the big name restaurant openings. For a girl who prides herself in trying new restaurants, this year was definitely not the norm.

Even though I may not have indulged in my typical extravagant fooding adventures, I feel like my time this past year was spent wisely. I discovered casual eateries and hole-in-the-walls and reignited my love of comfort food. I found some of my favorite restaurants in the entire city this past year – places that I will go to over and over again, no matter the season or occasion. So what if this year’s list may be a bit tame compared to years past – I have all of 2012 to eat!

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The Food Ledger’s Best of 2011

(If you’re not aware of my “Best of” policy, this list only includes restaurants I ate at for the first time in 2011. Carryovers from prior years not allowed.)

I Can’t Live Without

(I’m somewhat obsessed with knife cut noodles at the moment.)

1. King 5 Noodle House (NYC) – If I’m headed to Flushing, there’s a very good chance I’m going so I can eat here. The only place I know of that serves an authentic Taiwanese breakfast, King 5 Noodle House reminds me of the restaurant the parents used to take me on Sunday mornings.
2. Tasty Handpulled Noodles (NYC) – When I think “Chinese comfort food”, I can’t help but think of beef noodle soup. I was at the edge of death (or maybe just severely hungover) the first time I came here but by the time I was done with my bowl, I was feeling almost 100%. I’ve been coming back here ever since.
3. Rockaway Taco (NYC) – I love fish tacos. I NEED fish tacos. I found a fish taco place in NYC that actually compares to LA fish tacos. ‘Nuff said.

One Bite and I’m Yours

(It’s a fig cupcake with prosciutto and a balsamic reduction. These are the cupcakes of your dreams.)

1. Robicelli’s (NYC) – I am not a cupcake person but I will travel long distances for a Robicelli’s cupcake. Once, I traveled from Manhattan to Brooklyn, just to eat ONE of their cupcakes. That’s right – I rode the train there, bought one cupcake, ate the cupcake, then rode the train back. Their flavors are unique, inspiring and absolutely incomparable.
2. Dough (NYC) – Dough’s light, fluffly pillows of fried dough haunt my dreams. Forget those other doughnut shops (*cough* Doughnut Plant *cough*), none of them have the airiness of Dough’s.
3. Del Posto (NYC) – My goat cheese, celery and fig dessert was easily the best formal dessert of 2011.

2011′s Favorite Restaurant Group

(Sadly, Totto Ramen doesn’t count for this year’s list since I first tried it in 2010. Luckily, its sister restaurants are just as good!)

1. Yakatori Totto (NYC) – Two words: Chicken liver. I have never had chicken livers as creamy as the ones at Yakatori Totto. Order more than one skewer – you’re going to want as many as you can get.
2. Soba Totto (NYC) – Soba Totto is like the best of both Totto worlds. Their yakatori is of the same quality as Yakatori Totto’s and their soba noodles in broth is as comforting as a bowl of ramen fromTotto Ramen. This is my go-to restaurant on the east side.

One Step Closer to a True New Yorker

(See that pizza on the counter? That was MY pizza.)

1. Di Fara Pizza (NYC) – Everything they say is true. The waits will be long. The crowds will be impatient. The pizza is worth it.

Almost…But Not Quite

(A ceviche tostada for less than $5. You can’t get anything like this in NYC.)

1. Marisco Jalisco (LA) – One delicious fried shrimp taco covered in slices of avocado – less than $2. That would have easily cost me $5+ in NYC. (NYC Mexican food just cannot compare to LA Mexican food.)
2. M. Wells (NYC) – Brunch at M. Wells was amazing. Sadly, it closed too soon to try anything else on the menu.
3. Shopsins (NYC) – Order the Mo’ Jemima: poached eggs, bacon and mac and cheese pancakes. Yes, macaroni and cheese pancakes. This is epic breakfast food.
4. Neptune Oyster (Boston) – The best lobster rolls I’ve had to date. If you go, just remember – butter is better!
5. Tia Pol (NYC) – Their tapas are delicious and affordable but their fried chickpeas are easily the most addicting thing on their menu.

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…Well, look at that. I’ve been so busy reminiscing about 2011 that I’m almost two weeks into 2012! Into the new year we go!

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