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Friday, June 16, 2006

Roundup #5

Just got back from a weeklong trip to Utah where I found more Mexican restaurants than I was expecting (report coming soon), so before I get settled back in to my "normal life" I've got a couple pictures to show from when I met up with Omar from SqueezeOC's OC in the OC blog, his brother, Elmo from the Monster Munching blog, and Joy and Carter at Honda-Ya in Tustin. This was the first time I'd been to Honda-Ya. It is the sister restaurant to Kappo Honda in Fountain Valley which I've been to on a handful of occasions.

Honda-Ya Exterior

Honda-Ya Cooks

Honda-Ya Food

Honda-Ya Food #2

And here's a couple photos of food I've made for myself recently. First is some wild caught Copper River salmon topped with honeydew salsa, then some strawberry shortcake. I kept trying to think of how to put a Mexican spin on strawberry shortcake and never came up with anything. I garnished this dish with some Teddy Grahams and it seemed to work out fairly well. Man doth not live by Mexican food alone. Non-Mexican restaurants I've been to recently include the Disney Soda Fountain and Studio Store, Kabuki (again), Yoshinoya (the location at Harbor and Adams in Costa Mesa recently underwent a rather classy remodeling), Charlie Kabob, Panda Express, and First Class Pizza. Mexican restaurants I've visited recently and already reviewed, and may still review again, but didn't visit for review purposes include Taleo, Azteca's and Taco Rosa. I asked the co-worker who went with me to Taco Rosa if they deserved a five Speedy Gonzales rating and he said, "No, six." And Kantina is featured in the Marketplace section of today's Orange County Register. Also, just got back from a non-review visit to Wahoo's Fish Taco at the Irvine Spectrum with some co-workers.

Copper River Salmon

Strawberry Shortcake

After posting my report on the four or five Mexican restaurants I went to in Utah (I saw oh so many more though) I'll be hitting the trail here again. I've also got some technical issues to work out including the somewhat pesky, somewhat flattering fact that the number of visits to this blog have been overloading my server, and I'm a little bit closer to adding a Google Map feature to the site.

Was just contacted by one of the team members from a new site called OC Food Review. It has a very crisp, clean look to it and I can see it becoming the number one Orange County restaurant site on the web. They need people to contribute to their database so check it out.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

In the last Honda-Ya picture, you caught my favorite dish we had that night: the quail eggs. Mmmm, those were great! It would never have occurred to me to grill eggs, but now I wonder if I can do this with other kinds of eggs? Hm.

Hey - you did try one of your cool salsas on fish, like we'd been talking about earlier. It looks good; how did it taste?

I also would never have thought of garnishing a strawberry shortcake with Teddy Grahams. But you know, it looks pretty cute, and now that I think about it, I bet the taste works out pretty well too.

The real question is, how do you make your shortcake?

ChristianZ said...

Well, I forgot to add garbanzo beans to my salsa but it still worked well with the salmon.

The shortcake I used was actually some new Pillsbury Shortcake Biscuits you can get in one of those tubes. Baked them just like biscuits then took one and cut it in half. Put a scoop of vanilla ice cream on one half then topped both of them with strawberries then put some whipped cream on top of one of the biscuits.

Anonymous said...

That approach to shortcake sounds pretty good, and easy too. I didn't realize Pillsbury had that product.

I use Jiffy mix to make shortcake, but just use the "drop biscuit" method. I'm too lazy to roll the dough out and cut it into rounds.

What I don't like is the spongy cakes you buy premade at the grocers that people then call strawberry shortcake. It doesn't taste bad really, but it's not at all the same thing.

ChristianZ said...

Yeah, the shortcake biscuits by Pillsbury is a very new product.

elmomonster said...

Cool photos! I'm getting hungry for yakitori again! And it's 8:30 in the morning.