Walt Disney World Food!

So William signed us up for the Deluxe Disney Dining Plan, which means that we had 9 FULL meals (that's appetizer, entree, drink, dessert) to eat over 3 days. Needless to say, my New Year's Resolution to eat better went out the window for this weekend. Here are some of the highlights.

Via Napoli - Italian restaurant in the Italy part of Epcot, super popular place pretty yummy. We at this right after the Half Marathon.

They had 3 wood-fired ovens with interesting names!



Caprese salad appetizer & my artichoke pizza!



And gelato for dessert!


Le Cellier - Restaurant in Canada at Epcot, some people were making reservations exactly 6 months in advance, that's how hard it was to get in there! William got us in, of course :D Isn't it beautiful??


My appetizer of mussels with their famous pretzel bread (soo good, it tasted just like a hot pretzel!)


Main entree, filet mignon (hey, all dining points are equal so might as well make them count!) with risotto and mushroom sauce


The most delicious dessert, mandarin orange sorbet with whisky (left) and honey mandarin sorbet (right). I really liked the whisky one because it was initially really sweet (in a good way) and light, tasting of orange fruit, but finished bitter because of the whisky, almost like the pith of an orange. William really liked it as well and the waiter brought us a free one!!




Crystal Palace - Breakfast with my favorite characters, Pooh Bear & Eeyore (and Tigger & Piglet)!! I had so much fun at this breakfast, I turned into a little girl when the characters came around, gave them big hugs, and got their autographs. So terrific!! The food was your usual American buffet breakfast fare, but pretty delicious and I ate massive amounts of blackberries & raspberries with whipped cream! The bottom picture highlights my favorite items from the buffet :D



Cinderella's Castle - one of the most amazing dinners of my life. We had the best seat in the house, ate INside Cinderella's Castle, had to go up a stone spiral staircase to a medieval-style dining room, everyone was in old-style costumes... I felt like a princess. The food was also terrific.

My beef (with tomato hollandaise) with these amazing mashed potatoes (crispy on the outside!) and asparagus - that would be William's fork trying to steal some of my food.


View of the carousel from our main window. The center window.


William's fish with pasta (really good!)


The dining room:


Yes, that is where we ate dinner!! See the center window?? Our table was just inside. Absolutely incredible.


What a terrific trip. The rest of the pix will be on my facebook soon, this was just the major meals that we ate! So much fun, I'll remember it forever.

Nom Nom banh mih!

I'm sure you've heard of all the food trucks that are all over LA - since the start of the Kogi truck, they've featured really great specialty foods that you can get from their roaming trucks. The Nom Nom truck is a Vietnamese food truck that features Vietnamese sandwiches. They were on the Food Network's Great Food Truck Race and did fairly well (not sure if that was on when you were still in the US, Breadie!).

In any case, the Nom Nom truck was in Torrance over the weekend and even though I couldn't go, William went and picked it up for me! What a great boyfriend!

I got the tofu sandwich. It was simply delicious.


Strong flavors on everything, strong pickled veggies, well-seasoned fried tofu... mmmmm, so good!



Can't wait until they come back to Torrance!

Dinner with Aaron

We had dinner with Aaron last Friday and I had so much fun - I laughed so much! We had such a great time, I can't wait to have dinner with him again.

Here's the down low on what we ate at Roy's Hawaiian Fusion...

My macademia-nut crusted mahi mahi (in lobster sauce):


1988, a signature Hawaiian martini from Roy's (yup, that IS a lychee in the glass!)


Pineapple upside down cake:


All-time favorite, chocolate lava cake (actually does flow, not all of these kinds do this!):


Yummy dinner, great company, what a great Friday!

Bunco dinner!

Tonight was my night to host Bunco! Here's what I made:

Salad of black mission figs with roasted sweet peppers & shaved fennel (Thomas Keller)

Truffled filet of beef sandwiches with truffle butter, arugula, & shaved parmesean (Ina Garten)

Vegetarian option: sandwich with roasted peppers & tomatoes

Pumpkin roulade (the only thing I took a picture of - the last two pieces, kind of messy, but you get the idea :)

Red wine sangria

Overall, a very successful bunco night. I didn't win anything but everyone liked the food a lot and I had tons of fun :D I especially liked the truffle butter with the beef, that was soo yummy! I also have discovered that I really like arugula - it's got such a nice, spicy-bitter taste that I didn't realize I liked before.

Also, my traveling bunco prize (given to the person who got the last bunco of the night) was a Mr. Potato Head pumpkin kit, vampire style. I loved it and almost didn't want to give it up:

DQ's visit!

DQ visited us in LA this weekend - he's on rotations at UCSD. Good to see him! We went out to a Korean bar on Friday, this food item was the star of the show:

Corn cheese!! Omg it was so delicious. Fresh corn, good cheese. It sounded like such a strange idea, but I loved every sizzling bit of it. Koreans totally know what they're doing.

Here's DQ watching the Giants game. At another table. Far from us.


Today we met up again at Dave & Buster's (so DQ could watch another Giants game). Kevin's girlfriend went shopping while we were at D&B. She came back to say "hi" and drop off the bags with him. DQ & I had to take a picture:


I know it's not too food related, but seriously, had to include it.

Urth Caffe & some cute other things :D

First of all, I did some serious shopping last weekend at Target and saw these. I couldn't resist and bought one for my classroom...


I got Sheriff Pig, who collects 25 cents from every student who drops a calculator (mini scholarship for a senior at the end of the year :D). He now has a very happy home on my desk.


These are some pictures from a particularly delicious cafe in Santa Monica called Urth Caffe. It's super hipster, but the food and drinks are amazing. I don't know why I didn't try this place before. This is the Japanese maccha green tea latte!


And omg Breadie, the bread pudding was sooooo good! It's rarely this good. Not too sweet, nice ratio of custard:bread, nice crust, delicious, fresh flavor. I savored every single bite. I loved it.


I miss Breadie & hope we get to chat for reals soon!

discovery

let's see.... what's truly edible on a hot pot restaurant menu.



;D

new flavor!

a couple weeks ago, yena and i went to the supermarket to pick up some vanilla ice-cream for my mom, because she made a very old-school hong kong dessert, vanilla ice-cream with red bean sauce. BUT guess what we found in the ice-cream treasure chest???



uh HUH!! sweet potato pie ice-cream by haagen-dazs! as delicious as one could imagine.. i was, honestly, slightly disappointed. the haagen dazs azuki bean ice-cream was still champion of the best of the best flavors ever. don't know why they discontinued it. i felt like several thousand pieces of my taste buds weeped and sobbed when i found out that that flavor became a part of history. a delightful memory. *tear*


above . my mother's creation of vanilla ice cream with homemade red bean paste!

Ad hoc at Home

I bought the Thomas Keller "Ad Hoc at Home" book back in June and have since made two things from it:

Vegetable tartin (that's eggplant, zucchini, & tomato, with a base of sauteed sweet onions) that I made as a side dish for dinner at my parent's house.


And a lamb loin dish (seared & roasted) with artichoke, tomato, olive & caper vegetables. This was super yummy and Will commented that it didn't taste gamey at all (I know how Breadie doesn't like the gamey lamb!). I was impressed with myself, but mostly at Thomas Keller's ability to help make me into a better cook. Genius!

Maui Pineapple

Sooooo they used to grow tons of pineapple in Hawaii. Capital of the pineapple-growing world, brought in a huge portion of the Asian immigrants to the US through the pineapple plantations and search for work, etc. Then the pineapple companies discovered cheaper, un-unionized labor abroad and Dole left for third world countries. Pineapple fields in Hawaii slowly stopped growing pineapples until last December when the last pineapple company in the state of Hawaii finally left. Their fields lay un-harvested. Then Kapalua Adventures (ziplining+eco-tourism company) bought out the Maui Gold pineapple plantations to do the tours again (YAY!). They only produce enough to sell on the islands of Hawaii - not even California - so if you want an authentic, delicious Hawaiian pineapple, you have to go to Maui.

Luckily, we went to Maui :D

Here's me picking the pineapple on the Maui Gold Pineapple Tour:


William & I each got to take one home:


There was also all-you-can-eat on the fresh pineapple in the fields (you know Will loved this part). It was so sweet! The ones that were more green than yellow were still super sweet, juicy. The ones that were half green, half yellow were my favorite, tasting not only sweet and acidic, but also had a distinct pina colada taste that was really so unique and tasty in a beautiful pineapple fruit! All yellow were almost all sugar, no acid, tasted super sweet - not my favorite because it was so sweet and didn't really taste that pineapple-y. Anyways, I loved eating all the pineapple, with it's faint coconut sweetness, and ate until my mouth felt fuzzy.


Yay for pineapple!

sakura toast

well. . . since our names are both literally, from bread, i just have to show you these!!


so these are toasts that had a sukara flower stamped/ burned on them. beautiful, no? originally, these toasts were meant to be served with the teppanyaki beef/ steak, to soak up the grease, like this:


but then what you saw in the first pic, pay close attention, the chef was buttering the toasts! the chef said that because there were so many kids, who were not interested in any sort of teppanyaki fancy foods, one day, he decided to use grill a piece of the sakura toasts on the teppan, butter them and sprinkle sugar onto them, and made them extra crispy sweet toast for the children! since then, it has become a big hit amongst ALL the customers!

here, smell it! mmMMM!! glistening!


<3 breadie