Chill Out @ Ruby Tuesday

My first Ruby Tuesday experience was extravagant. My Scottish friend, Sophie took me there during my trip to London. Sophie would go to Ruby Tuesday for birthday parties. The place was like a cosy home restaurant with cute decorations. I think we ordered pasta... I just remembered we couldn't resist the desserts, which contributed to a huge bill. I can't remember it but I think I ordered cheesecake or something. I would go back to my journals or photo albums but I am too lazy. Let me talk about the desserts I had with Jade the other day at Ruby Tuesday in Times Square.

The plate in the back is double-chocolate cake. It was like a chocolate volcano. You get a scoop of chocolate cake with melting chocolate in the hole. I am going to make it one day.
The plate in the front is blonde brownie. It was tasty as well but I kinda got sick of it after a half of it... The cake tasted good with ice cream and the caramel sauce.

Jade is a big fan of hot chocolate. Making hot chocolate is the first thing she does at work. She had two cups of it that night. She gave me the whipped cream for my coffee.

Happy Brunch

Good day starts with good brunch. My roommates and I prepared another brunch together. The menu is sunny-side up eggs, bacon, French toasts, broccolis, and earl grey. Having relaxed brunch is one of my favorite things in life. You just start a day talking about stuff with nice people. The French toasts made of Cocoya's home-made bread were incredible. I just learned how to fully cook the york for sunny-side up eggs. You just need to add in some water on the side when the white is cooked. What else would be good for brunch? Hmm... this is making me hungry.

Kihachi!!

Tonight a friend and I went to a Japanese restaurant that another friend recommended to me. It was awesome! I am very excited to finally have had food worth talking about! This place was in a strip mall, but once you're inside it feels like a regular restarant. There were the regular tables, the bar, and tatami rooms. Because there were two of us, and I think the tatami rooms were reserved anyway, we opted for the counter. The menu was all in Japanese with english translations, except for the teeshouku menu which was entirely in Japanese. Instead of full meals, we decided to stick to the small single dishes and got a few to share.

We started with sauteed lotus root. I have never had lotus root before, but Mameco talking about it in an earlier post made me want to try it! It was very good! Then we had BBQ eel. I was almost avoiding this one because while I love eel, it is definitely something I've had before. But Jun also told me that she loves eel, so two eel lovers together means we had to have eel! The eel was made to perfection!


Second courses, we had octopus in vinegar sauce. There were so many things in this that I couldn't identify lol. Yet I tried it all! I am not a big octopus fan, the only time I've had octopus before was on sushi. Really for sushi I like the meats to be more tender, both octopus and squid I think are too tough for sushi. However this made me like octopus, it still had some toughness to it, but since it wasn't on sushi I think it was fine. For the second dish we had fried pork tenderloin. These came on a stick and had a mixture of sea salt and grilled sesame seeds to dip it in. These were great and reminded me of when my mom makes fried pork chops at home.



Then we had dessert! I chose to try the sake-soaked persimmon, it had been soaked in sake for a week, and then cooked to remove the alcohol. My friend loves mochi and picked the colored mochi in red bean paste.





All in all it was a great food night. And the price came to much less than I had originally worried about. Mameco! We should go. Like now. Get your butt over here :P.

Good bread

So many things with food are so basic that they are overlooked very easily, but replacing them can make a huge difference! At my parents' house, they got a pepper mill last year. Ever since I had fresh ground pepper, I think pre-ground is very bland. And being able to adjust the coarseness makes it even better! Now I am looking for another basic. I want bread.

Recently I have been trying to discover good bread. I mean REALLY good bread. I bought a loaf of sandwich bread from the bakery at Kroger, just because it seemed fancy. I didn't expect it to be amazing or anything, just better than usual. Really the bakery bread was worse than the normal brand name breads. I kind of expected since it was baked fresh in the store or that it was from a bakery instead of a factory that it would be better. I was wrong. So now I am on a quest. A quest to find delicious bread!

Who knows! Maybe I will end up making it myself.

Tea House in NY

Cha-an is a Japanese tea house located in the lower east side of Manhattan. If you know Zen-cha, just think of it as a more traditional version of Zen-cha. I went there with my roommates and friend for lunch. It was small and packed but the interior design made the cafe look like Kyoto, like Akk said. They have a little section of tatami for people to have a real tea ceremony I suppose. I didn't get to see anything going on in there but I saw a guy in kimono, normally considered appropriate for a tea ceremony. A few seats were set up underneath this bamboo made roof. It looked very photogenic. Too bad we didn't sit there. If you are going there for tea, go for it!
Cha-an has a thick menu mostly concentrated on tea. I am not sure how it is like at night but when we were there, they only had about 5 full-meal dishes and other appertisers and desserts to eat.
I decided to order "chagayu" or a A-set meal. It is consisted of one bowl of 5-grains-added rice porridge, 5 toppings, grilled fish, tea of your choice and a dessert. I picked this Uji Fukamushi green tea. It looked fresh green and smelled very good. The taste is light and easy to drink. The rice porridge was quite plain so I ate it with the toppings. One of the topping was seaweed paste. It was less salty and sweet than what I normally eat and I liked it. Fish was good though I still don't know what kind of fish it was, lol. I also tried Takashi's unagi egg bowl, which was quite appertising. It is kinda tricky but they have a rule that says you can refill rice but not rice porridge. I strongly recommend them to let us refill the porridge too, lol. 3 kinds of desserts came to our table. Akk took the green tea ice cream, Naoya took the creme brulee with black sesami ice cream and I got the chocolate roll cake. Green tea ice cream and creme brulee came with fashionably curled sweet black sesami seed crackers. I enjoyed the food but I don't think their food or sweets are that good...