Back to the Beach

I take you back to the beach to witness the start of swimming season.



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E5nMV4IyU38&hl=en

Samurai Sam's Bozeman

You are hungry, but don't have much time. You want to make healthier choices, but there are few tasty, fast, affordable options. Samurai Sam's is your choice! Samurai Sam's Teriyaki Grill skewers the fast food competition with its sheer simplicity; healthy cuisine prepared chop-chop. Our lean menu sizzles with Japanese favorites, such as our famous, freshly prepared teriyaki bowls served over steamed rice and grilled vegetables with plenty of our mouth watering Teriyaki Sauce. Or our wildly popular Yaki Soba Bowls with crisp vegetables, wok-stirred noodles, and mild or spicy Teriyaki Sauce. These tasty items along with our Grilled Egg Rolls, Teriyaki Wraps, and Garden Fresh Salads are just a few of the reasons why people are talking about Samurai Sam's Teriyaki Grill.



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N9jhbAf-ZJ4&hl=en

Food Trucks Doin' Time in The LBC

This past Saturday, the 9th of October, there was an invasion of sorts in Long Beach. It was the LB Street Food Fest, which featured 28 of Southern California's top Gourmet Food Trucks. Aside from the uncharacteristic heat for an October day, it was AWESOME! I had invited a few of my friends down to join in on the fun and hang with my girl and I. We even got a chance to spend some time with Lou & Sue (dad & step-mom), and there was a guest appearance by my niece. Friends, family and food, what could be better? Yes, I'm sure we could all think of a few things, but that was a rhetorical question...

There was some lively music, and a buzz in the crowd. I could overhear conversations about what was the best and which lines were the longest (The Grilled Cheese Truck, by far the longest), where to get cold adult beverages, and what a cool event to be having in our own backyard. The kinds of conversations that are brought about by the combination of people that love food and love the newest craze- The Food Trucks. I don't know if it's really considered "new," but it is catching a huge groundswell and following right now. And from where this dude sits, it doesn't look like it's going to die down anytime soon, either. Which brings me to the food. By the way, if you think I am going to name all of the trucks that were there... I might or not?

I started off with some really delicious Chili-Cheese Fries from The Munchies Machine. Hand cut fries cooked perfectly with an some pretty damn good chili and super melty, tangy cheddar. For you burger enthusiasts,
it reminded me of Tommy's chili, delicious. Then it was on to the Yakisoba Dog from Dogzilla- what a combination of flavors. Spicy with a hint of sweetness and just salty enough. The yakisoba noodles, okonomi sauce and crunch of the slaw were outstanding, and the dog itself had great flavor, and yes, the snap! Which leads me to believe that if you have a great dog to begin with, anything you add is icing on the cake.

The last two dogs I've had have been a couple of the best I've ever had, both equally great in their own right- The Greasy Wiener & Dogzilla. I would be hard pressed to say if one was better than the other, because they were both completely different ends of the spectrum. So I will say that I was wearing my Greasy Wiener T-shirt while eating my Dogzilla Yakisoba Dog and asking if I could buy one of their shirts. That should say it all.

After the fries and the dog, we decided on making a visit to Bool Korean BBQ Tacos. I, like another Matt(MattBites), like just about anything in a tortilla. Hell, I've made Corned Beef Tacos with horseradish mayo, pico de gallo and cabbage in one of my places. So when you tell me Korean BBQ Short rib in the form of a taco, I'm all in! Simple "street style" tacos with a little kim-chi and you have something that I could eat all day long. Big Lou went for the burrito and it went over just as good. Bool got the thumbs up from all in our crowd and by the looks of things the crowds at the festival agreed. After that a few of our friends started becoming overwhelmed by the day and decided to tap out.

I on the other hand waltzed over to The Place and had a Pastrami Melt. So take a grilled cheese with white American and slamming it together into a double decker with perfectly cooked, peppery pastrami and mustard and you've got one hell of a sandwich. The last couple of bites we had were from Ahn Joo Korean Pub Grub. While a couple of friends went for the Bacon Wrapped Rice Cylinders, we opted for the Grilled Japanese Eggplant and Tofu Skewers- wonderful! And the report back on the bacon and rice was equally as promising. I think that was where I started feeling the sleepy feeling of the food coma coming on...

So we ended the afternoon walking from truck to truck wanting to say hi to the new friends we've made- Slice Truck, Fresh Fries and The Greasy Wiener. We stopped by the Save the Food Trucks and Saturday Night Foodies booth and chatted for a few minutes, getting further info on different events that will be upcoming in OC, South Bay and of course, LA. So, stuffed and sated from the samplings of the day, sufficiently drained from the sun we decided to call it a day. My only regret is that we didn't get to all of the trucks, but I'm sure that I will be venturing and adventuring out to find them more and more as time goes on. Oh yeah, and I didn't get my white whale, The Grilled Cheese Truck!

Char Siu - The Charm Of Chinese Barbecue

Char siu, the other name for Chinese Barbecued pork is in fact Cantonese-style barbecued pork. The primary requirement for cooking up this delicacy is a long stretch of boneless pork mainly taken from the shoulder. Char siu is characteristic in its own type due to its coating of seasonings which makes the meat look dark red. The seasoning ingredients of this red devil include red food coloring, sugar or honey, sherry or rice wine and five-spice powder.

How the dish is prepared and served

This BBQ variety involves a conventional cooking process. Forks are used to hold the meat within covered oven or barely over the fire. This Chinese barbecued pork is never eaten alone. It is in fact a form of accompaniment to other food preparations like Cha Siu Baau. Here the barbecued pork is stuffed in buns with Char Siu rice and is deliciously served.

However, its list of accompaniments does not end over here. Char siew can be eaten with other cookeries like salted duck egg, chicken with Soy sauce and sliced steamed chicken, roasted duck and roasted pork. Not only rice, noodles such as Lai fun, Shahe fen, and Wonton noodles too seem great with Char Siu. In Singapore, Char Siew looks brilliant with Hainanese chicken rice.

Cantonese-speaking people including Southern China, Malaysia and Singapore enjoy this dish full-flegedly and whole-heartedly. This BBQ specialty also makes its appearance in Chinese restaurants and several notable food markets of the world. Japan has however specialized in this art of barbecuing, which is known as Chashu without the red sugar and five-spice preparation but obviously with sweet honey and soy sauce coating.

The art of cooking Char Siu

The preparation of this barbecue is a unique combination of mixing, marinating and roasting. After the mixing has been properly done, sliced pork of about 2 inches in width and 5 inches in length are applied to the marinade and kept in the condition from two hours till overnight. The oven should gain a heat of 425 degree and the rack should be added to the roasting pan before it is filled with water in order to make the rack lower down.

The excess marinate from the pork should be wiped off and made to stand in a line in the roasting pan. The roasting should go on for ten minutes. Now the next step would be to reduce the heat to 325 degree and allow the pork to be roasted for another thirty to forty minutes. As you turn the meat from side to side with sesame oil, peanut oil and marinade, the finishing is provided with a dash of honey for ten minutes. Then it is time for you to cut the pork into bite size pieces to make others enjoy each munch with fun and contentment.

Though the seed of Char Siu was sowed in China but the flavor of its harvest has spread to various parts of Asia. In fact, this dish of Chinese barbecued pork is tastefully striking enough to gain universal appreciation.

Lobster Ravioli Recipe

Lobster is a wonderful seafood and although still quite pricey, has become more readily available in recent years. Although you can buy them ready cooked, it is best to get a live lobster and cook it yourself. If you are at all worried about killing a live lobster, the best way is to put it into a plastic bag and put it in the freezer for a couple of hours or so. This will make the lobster unconscious and you can then put it straight into boiling water to cook. It will know nothing! For many recipes, such as a lobster ravioli recipe, you will be starting off with a lobster which has been blanched in boiling water for a minute and then had the meat removed.

If you are looking for a lobster ravioli recipe, you will probably find that you are spoilt for choice. Although the basic lobster and ravioli ingredients will remain constant, everything else will probably vary. This is due to the fact that it is not a definitive traditional recipe and each chef has come up with his own version. The sauce that is served will range from a crabmeat sauce to a vanilla butter sauce, depending on whose recipe book you are looking at.

Often a lobster ravioli recipe will include some other main ingredient in the mix. These could include minced mushrooms, ricotta cheese or perhaps another seafood such as crabmeat, langoustine or shrimps. There really does seem to be an endless list of varieties. As lobster is a fairly expensive meat, it is a good idea to use another ingredient alongside it to fill it out. This is not to say that the other ingredient will not add to the flavour and you should chose something that will work well with the lobster and compliment the flavour rather than something bland just to make the fish go further.

Another variable in the dish will be the sauce. A traditional ravioli will probably be served with a tomato based sauce and in the some cases this has been adopted in the lobster ravioli recipe. Other recipes, however, are more exotic and they may use a crabmeat sauce. This is good if you are using crab as the extra ingredient in your parcels. One recipe uses a shellfish bisque as a sauce. Making a bisque is quite a complex process and requires quite a lot of time and attention but the finished result is a lovely sauce for ravioli and not at all like the thick tomato sauce that we are used to with the better known dish.

Any lobster ravioli recipe is going to be quite tricky and time consuming. You will have to blanche the lobster and make the pasta. Then prepare the filling. Make the parcels and cook them at the same time as making the sauce. All in all there are quite a lot of steps to reach the end result. However, some things are worth both waiting for and working to achieve... lobster ravioli is just one of those things.

Winter Festivals In Japan: Things To Do When The Snow Piles Up

When you think of snowy winter festivals, Japan probably isn't the first thing that comes to mind. You probably imagine Scandinavia or Canada. But, if you're interested in snow and ice sculptures, you probably know that Japan boasts some of the world's most interesting and unique winter festivals. In the winter in Japan, up in the snowy north, there are winter festivals every year that draw great crowds and offer lots of attractions for everybody.

The big one is the Sapporo Snow Festival, also called "Yuki Matsuri." It is held every year in February on Japan's snow covered northern island, Hokkaido. The Sapporo Snow Festival was the first of its kind held in Japan, and it is still the biggest.

Every year, 2 million snow lovers flock to Sapporo, the biggest city in Hokkaido, to enjoy the Snow Festival in the first 2 weeks of February. At the Festival, there are hundreds of snow sculptures made by artists from all over the world. Some are a couple of building stories high and weigh tons. There are ice sculptures too, and ice bars where you can go inside and have a frosty beer.

The Sapporo Snow Festival was starting in the 1950's by a group of high school kids. Bored and shut-in by the harsh winter, they began to have competetion making snow sculptures. Every year, more kids joined in, and now the festival draws snow artists from 15 different countries.

There are also musical performances, light shows, snow slides and massive snowball fights.

The second biggest city in Hokkaido, Asahikawa, has its own Asahikawa Winter Festival in early February. It's not as big as the Sapporo Snow Festival, but it's good for snow lovers who want a quieter and less crowded winter festival. They have huge ice sculptures and night time illumination. At the Asahikawa Snow Festival, restaurants serve Asahikawa ramen, a type of ramen that is famous all over Japan. The noodles and warm soup are a special winter treat, and visitors from all over Japan go there to taste it.

The northern part of Japan's main island, Honshu, gets dumped on in the winter too. Every major area has its own snow festival. One of the most popular is the Iwate Snow Festival. It's held in the small town of Shizukuishi in early or mid-February. Iwate Snow Festival has giant snow statues, restaurants and bars in igloos, snow slides, and a giant snow maze that's slightly different every year. Iwate is also famous for its yearly fireworks displays, where festival-goers can watch the colors reflect off the snow.

Iwate is a great winter festival for those who want to see a more traditional celebration. The modern snow festival is mixed with traditional yearly festivals that are hundreds of years old. In Iwate, you can see traditional Japanese musicians and dancers perform on floats.

There are snow festivals held all over northern Japan. Even in the smallest villages in Hokkaido, residents have some kind of celebration when the snow piles up. Northern Honshu also has snow festivals in all the major cities. The northern prefectures, like Aomori, are good places to go if you don't want to leave the main island.

If you want a truly unique winter festival experience, northern Japan is a great place to go. Just make sure you're bundled up!

Saffron, Dear Saffron

Dormivit in sacco croci (He has slept in a bed of saffron) is a Latin expression meaning, "He has a very light heart", a reference to the enlivening effect of this most precious of spices. One early writer even warned against ingesting too much saffron lest one should "die of excessive joy!"

Saffron is expensive because it requires up to 400,000 of the orange-red stigmas of the Crocus sativus to make a mere one-kilogram of the spice. Each flower has only three stigmas, which must be handpicked at dawn during a brief two-week blossoming period in late October.

The saffron crocus grows from five to nine inches tall, with long thin leaves and lilac colored flowers. It is a perennial in zones 6-10 and today is cultivated commercially on a large scale only in India and in seven of Spain's 52 provinces. If wintered indoors in a cool place the saffron crocus is easy to grow, even in Canada. It takes about six plants to generate enough stigmas for one recipe. Harvest them early in the morning and dry by simply placing the stigmas on paper towels and storing them in a warm, dry place for a few days until they are brittle. They will keep in a small, sealed glass jar for up to five years.

The flowers of the saffron crocus do not close at night and the stigmas protrude beyond the petals. These features distinguish it from the highly poisonous Colchicum autumnale or Autumn Crocus.

The word saffron is from the Arabic, assfar or zafaran, meaning yellow. The botanical name, sativus, is Latin for cultivated.

Drinking saffron tea will allegedly induce clairvoyance. Also in the magical realm saffron is supposed to be lust provoking and was often added to love sachets. The Roman aristocracy perfumed their homes and baths with it. In Greek myth, the gods wore robes dyed with the spice. The red pigment of the stigmas supposedly developed when Hermes, the messenger god of ancient Greece, felt remorseful after accidentally killing his friend, Crocus. As his blood spilled on to the ground, Hermes turned the drops into the saffron crocus.

Medicinally, saffron has fallen out of favor as cheaper and more effective herbs have become available. During the Middle Ages however, saffron was popular as a treatment for period pain and uterine bleeding and to bring on menstruation. Pregnant women should be wary of ingesting saffron beyond small culinary amounts as in large doses the spice may induce abortion. Saffron has been used to treat indigestion and is still used in Chinese herbal medicine to relieve abdominal pain. Some herbalists do recommend saffron to treat high blood pressure as it contains a blood pressure-lowering agent called crocetin. There is a statistical low incidence of heart disease in Spain, which some people attribute to the nation's high consumption of the spice.

Saffron is used in Arabic, Indian and especially in Mediterranean cuisine. It particularly complements fish and seafood and is an essential ingredient in French bouillabaisse and Spanish paella. It also goes well with mild cheeses, eggs, rice and other meat dishes. Powdered saffron is considerably stronger than saffron threads, but the powdered variety is frequently adulterated, so purists stick to the threads. Whether using the threads or the powder, avoid using too much of the spice as this will result in a medicinal taste. Steep the spice in a little hot water before adding to the food, and then add both the saffron and the water.

To accompany Indian food, try the following Saffron Rice:

· 1 cup Basmati rice

· 2 cups of water

· 1 Tbsp. butter

· ¼ tsp. saffron threads (or one eighth tsp. of powdered saffron)

· 3 inches of broken cinnamon sticks (pieces should be large enough to facilitate easy removal prior to serving)

· 3 whole cloves

· ½ an onion, chopped

· 4 whole cardamom seeds

· ½ tsp. salt (or more to taste)

Pour about 2 Tbsp. of boiling water on the saffron and allow to infuse for 10 minutes. Melt the butter in a pan and add the cinnamon, cloves and onions. Sauté until the onions are translucent. Add the rice, water, cardamom, salt, saffron and its water. Bring to the boil then cover and simmer for about 25 minutes - about 45 minutes if you use long grain brown rice.

In France, rabbit is often cooked with mustard. Following is a variation of a traditional French rabbit recipe using saffron as the spice with a resultant agreeable color and flavour.

Rabbit with Sherry, Cream & Saffron

· 1 rabbit, cut into six or eight pieces

· ¾ cup of heavy cream

· ¼ cup medium dry sherry

· 1-2 cloves of garlic

· 4 Tbsp. Dijon mustard

· 1 tsp. salt (or more to taste)

· Pinch of cayenne

· ¼ tsp. saffron threads (or 1/8 tsp. saffron powder).

Pour about 2 Tbsp. of boiling water over the saffron in a small dish and allow this to infuse for 10 minutes. Place the rabbit in a reasonably tight fitting, ovenproof, lidded casserole. Place all the other ingredients into a blender - including the saffron and water after infusion - and blend well. Pour over rabbit. Cook in preheated oven at 350F for about 60 minutes until well done. Check for doneness before serving. Rabbit can take a deceivingly long time to cook. Overcooked rabbit done in a sauce is perfectly acceptable. Undercooked rabbit is not. Serve with rice.