Fish Shrimp Chicken

What a busy weekend. Here I am over the weekend thinking why I am doing this again, when Friday night Nikki says you should start a food blog. Both my wife and I laughed at the same time. Ok, fine twist my arm I'll get one going. So where to start and what to recap.

Well originally we were supposed to got to the Napa Rose for a belated V-day dinner. So usually I don't have problems booking for a place a week in advance, but apparently EVERYWHERE was booked early this year. I'd also looked at Marche Moderne, as I've yet to actually eat at a "french" restaurant and recently the J/J blog has me all sorts of interested in french food. Which has me thinking that they need to make more movies based on cooking or cookbooks or the like. So apparently everything was booked for the whole weekend last week and so dinner got postponed to the following weekend. However needless to say, we'd spent a bit much the previous week and were not able to go to the Napa Rose, this has been postponed for her birthday. Instead we ended up going to King's Fish House, which I was a bit surprised as my wife does not like seafood (sans lobster, shrimp, & fish n chips). The evening was fine till a moment of financial nagging which put a damper on the meal at the start, but cooler heads prevailed and did not escalate into WW III. After which we cruised over to the LBC to chill with the Creeps for a bit, guided them to the nearest JITB* as the hotel they were at the kitchen had closed. Watched the last 20 minutes of Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle (mmmmmm.. love me some White Castle - not the frozen stuff but the real deal) then went home.

Saturday was running around doing returns of items from the overspending weekend before. Part of this included a stop at a restaurant supply store in Anaheim on Ball & Anaheim Blvd, it's on Anaheim Blvd North of Ball on the left hand side past the gas station. Not a bad little shop, looked like it mostly catered to the Mom & Pop type restaurants, though they had a nice assortment of just about everything (except for a nice mandolin slicer). They had the institutional sized cook ware and things for the home as well, quality ranged from ehn to nice. I did not see any brand name items (i.e. All Clad, Cuisinart, Kitchen-aide/Hobart, etc) though seeing as I have never worked in a profession kitchen I am not all that familiar with ALL professional brand names. There is a restaurant supply place in Fountain Valley that is on the to do list, you can see it off the 405 freeway near Euclid. So after the the errands were done we stopped by one of the local Korean Markets near the house, Freshia on Beach and Garden Grove Blvd.

This place is a trap... I love asian food, and Korean is near the top of the list. I could eat it everyday, something about the pickled spicy vegetable dishes and the BBQ always has me wanting more. So the planned dinner for the evening was shrimp tacos/burritos and nine times outta ten i can get better shrimp at a cheaper price by going to the ethnic markets. I'll have another rant about mainstream markets at a later date, but bottom line is you don't have to pay top dollar for quality, the ethnic markets generally have better quality at cheaper prices. So I grabbed a few pounds of shrimp ($4 a lb and these were the med/lrg ones), grabbed some produce as it is pretty cheap here as well. Cleaning the shrimp included removing shells and tails, rinsing and cutting up to about the size of gumdrops, they are easier to manage in the tortillas this way. One thing I noticed is this time around cleaning shrimp is that if I removed the tails first the cleaning process went a bit faster and I had a good number of shrimp to clean. Now some may get a bit weirded out on this but I did not do a FULL clean process of the shrimp.... I left that one item intact.... yes, the intestinal tract. I just did not care that much and said whatever. It really is a mental thing... and one of those things that I think we as a AMERICAN society allow ourselves to become more and more "disinfected" as the generations go by. A little shrimp shit ain't gonna kill ya...

So dinner was garlic shrimp burritos/tacos with chipotle mayo (or not) with fresh salsa. Damn this salsa rocked! Despite the complaint of "it's not hot enough", as it was not supposed to be. Dinner rocked and I was really surprised, not in that it rocked, but that you could feed a family of 4 for 20 bucks and it was seafood!

Now Sunday was a different story and I have to remind myself that INFERNO spicy is not always a good thing, but that was lunch on Friday and not dinner on Sunday. Though lunch on Friday was the inspiration for Sunday dinner, Thai Yellow Chicken Curry. This was a hit and miss and seeing as I had never made it before will definitely try again. It was a bit too lemony/limey. Oi!

Friday I had Thai, but it was not yellow curry, it was beef with flat noodle Rad Nee or something to that affect with way too many red peppers. Needless to say I was hating life later that evening. On a side note I hate getting older, I love spicy food and generally with Thai or Indian I like to have it on the INFERNO hot side, though my insides would disagree. Now I found this recipe for making the yellow curry on the Thai About Food site. Overall I'd say they have the recipe down pat, but it's one that I need to mess around with. I need to find that right consistency of liquid creaminess viscosity as it was a bit on the thin side when I pulled it out. Now this is another relatively cheap dish to make, there are a few key items and I would say there are items that you MUST NOT substitute despite the original recipe from the site. A key ingredient for this would be GALANGAL or white ginger as I came to find out, this is one of those essential Thai ingredients. It really is different from plain ol' ginger. Additionally looking for lime leaves (kaffir lime leaves), proved to be a pain in the ass. This was the second time that I attempted to located these buggers and I "think" I found them, and there was a noticeable difference in aroma between these and the lime leaves I have in my garden. Both the galangal and the lime leaves were found at the Ranch 99 in Anaheim. Ranch 99 is a Chinese store and one of my favorites as they offer live seafood and a larger than average meat department, including goat. BTW, galangal is very otherworldly looking as it is a tuber/root. It reminded me of the Jerusalem Crickets we have around the house and it was a tad pricey. I'd say about "tree fitty" for something about the size of a king size Snickers. Consequently I'm attempting to use this piece to grow my own. I like Thai but don't see me cooking much except on the weekends. All in all the dish felt/tasted Thai though I think the combination was off, I'm thinking more coconut milk, less lemongrass (which can be purchased fresh or frozen at Ranch 99, they fresh at Freshia, not sure about frozen).

Now I have to figure out what to have for this weekend, plus some additional one offs on Kings and the individual dinners this past weekend.

*JITB - Jack In The Box (I wish they would bring back that Ham and Turkey Melt they had back in the 80's).