Boo!!

Here is a quick round of food related Halloween projects for all you slackers!!

Shrunken Apple Heads - I used to make these all the time - they look really really creepy - but you need to add the long hair to hang them by for the best effect!!
Body Parts - Come on bakers! Let's get creative...I am sure we can make up some zombie parts...
Fake Blood - A Halloween staple
Bloody Eyeball Martinis - After all the rugrats have gone back to the family dens, this will sound like a good idea...
Cockroach Cake - Hey, if this doesn't take you back to your college days...nothing will!!
Pumpkin Chocolates - It is not a celebration without chocolate
Sugar Skulls - Day of the Dead standards can now be the hit of your celebration
and lastly
Big Mac - the scariest thing of all....

some people talk about doing...

the rest us just get it done! That is where I am at right now...working my butt off...

I have pictures...I have recipes...just keep your pants on dammit!

In the meantime - here is something from Not Martha to keep you occupied!

Whore!

Yup! I am a whore for chocolate!


Remember a while back I posted that Nestle was pimping out free chocolate? Well, I was wrong and I was right...

Turns out their attempt at guerilla marketing flopped when they had an overwhelming response...

um..duh...

Starbucks recently has a similar snafu - somehow the powers that be over at the coffee giant were so naive that they figured that people would be honest?!

Well Nestle just wasn't ready for all the people who would be clicking away for free chocolate...and they want to kiss up and play nice. They promise to honor their free chocolate coupons - kinda. Hey, if I get one bag of free chocolate, I will consider myself ahead of the game.

So when their new product hits the shelves - give it a try...

and if you wanna read some really cranky posts - sign up for their marketing team and read the forum...boy howdy! they are madder than wet hens....

The Spice is Right VII: That’s some spicy lovin’!

I have a confession.

I have to say that I was shocked when the realization hit me…

I am a closet redneck.

There are no cars up on blocks in my front yard…

I don’t live in a double wide…

and my hubby is not related to me in any way other than by marriage…

but all my comfort foods go right back to my mother’s Appalachian roots – mashed taters, fried taters, fried chops, meatloaf, fried chicken, greens, corn on the cob, apple pie…straight “we love W.!” American fare that is guaranteed to stick to your ribs…

All this time I thought I was gonna grow up and leave all that pedestrian food behind- become a woman of the world, eat stuff like squid and pho and sauces for pasta that don’t involve tomatoes…

So what do I make for dinner tonight?

Fried pork chops, greens, corn and buttered rice.

And apple cobbler for dessert.

And I loved it.

Every bite.

My secret ingredient? The spice mix that my mother used in her cooking that mine tastes wrong without?



Lowry’s Seasoned Salt – with the addition of cayenne and black pepper.

It’s in the greens and on the chops…

I put it on my fried potatoes and in my meatloaf…

My comfort food isn’t the same without it. Trust me. I’ve tried.

So if any of you have an issue with that... IF ANY OF YOU FEEL FROGGY ABOUT IT – JUMP! I'll kill you, bitch! (pulls out knife)

I mean…if you take offense...please drop me a line…

(PS. Thanks to Danielle for hosting this month's Spice is Right)

Wine Wine Wine

For all of those who like to drink...and are too cheap to spend any real money on your buzz...

check out the new Woot! for wine .

If you don't know about Woot! then you do not do enough websurfing. Or you have a life.

Woot! offers one special per day - starting at midnight CST. When it sells out - it's gone.

What do they sell?

What ever the hell they want.

Check out their blog entries for past products.

And get a buzz on..it's gonna be a long wait til midnight...

Who knows what evil lurks in the heart of the consumer....

Me! That’s who!

Oh yes – to the lady who hung up on me rudely yesterday –Kiss my grits baby! Pucker up and plant one on my ample backside. Just because you have an emergency (i.e. you procrastinated) does not mean I don’t have other work that needs to get done first. Just wait – my minions are lurking in the dark waiting for their moment. Car run out of gas? That was me. Cat puke on your $150 silk blouse? That was me! I’ll get my pound of flesh…karma’s a bitch and so are you!

There…all better now…

So work has been sucking lately…go figure…it’s called “work”, not “let’s go out, drink a few drinks and dance like idiots”. There has been way too much work and not enough hours in the day – so lots and lots of overtime. Which means lots and lots of extra funds even though I have very little time to spend it. Thank god for the internet! Instant gratification!

I have been canning though…so those posts will be coming along soon…

The tale of the pork chops that weren’t pork chops…

I’ve gotten the hubby to admit he has a truce with eggplant – who he has hated for years…

And a shopping note:

I get the annoying Food Network newsletter – I love junk mail. And they were touting the new line of Niegella Lawson products – because God knows it is more important to know what type of products she endorses than the kind of food she cooks…

The good news is – they are having a fire sale on Tony Bourdain’s books and since he is not the huge product whore that the rest of them are – there are only books. In particular, the Las Halles cookbook is marked down to $19.95 plus shipping. It’s a great book and now you have no excuse not to buy it.

The definition of a whore product? The Paula Dean’s bagel and egg toaster appliance thingy . WTF? Like I need an appliance that poaches eggs – PA-leeeeeze. I got a sauce pan and cooking chops baby – I don’t need no hybrid freak toaster!

I also wanted to say “Congratulations” to Barbara over at Strawberries and Tiger on the birth of her new addition, Kat. Barabara - That smile – it’s just gas. At least that is what my mom claimed – and who am I to argue with her wisdom?

SWEET!!

It makes me want to get married all over again!!

Uber-geek Wedding Cake

The Wayback Machine

Come on, you old folks! Sing along!

Vagaries and Jam

Since starting this blog, I have really been looking back at my “eating” history. It’s made me all nostalgic and wistful. I have been craving foods I haven’t had since I was a little kid and my mom still cooked dinner every night and put up all types of amazing preserves and pickles. Specifically, I have been craving tomato preserves.

“Tomato Preserves?” you ask. Stop being a sissy. Yes, sweets made out of tomatoes. When I told Gail, Debbie and my assistant manager, Lori, that I was making sweets with tomatoes – well you can imagine the skeptical reactions. Even Tony, the adventurous eater, was more than a little wary of something this strange.

I have my mom’s recipe for tomato preserves. Here is a scan of it – written in her own hand. (I laughed out loud when I saw “Tomatoe”. My mom used to be the person who busted my chops for not being able to spell!) Not really much of a recipe. It is really more of a note.



I have quite a few of these culinary “notes” including this one for my grandmother’s Date Cake.



And the even more vague Dutch Cake.


Ummmm..thanks Mom. I should be grateful I even have this much to go from. I suppose that back when most women knew how to cook, a few bits of “shorthand” was enough to get by.

Time to play recipe detective! Off to the web we go!

There are lots of variations on tomato preserves. Lots of them use green tomatoes. I can see that. Anyone who has ever had a large garden know about left over green tomatoes at the end of the season…along with all the other half grown produce you just can’t let go to waste.

However – I have a lot of RIPE tomatoes to use. So onward!

Here is an interesting entry from 1855. Not what we are looking for – but the site was damn interesting. I was distracted and lost a whole 30 minutes.

Finally, I found an entry that said “Tomato Preserves – also known as Tomato Marmalade”. It’s true! This recipe relies on the pectin in the citrus to thicken it up – just like a traditional marmalade. Google – here we come!

BINGO!

On the University of Wisconsin Extension site, I found a recipe that seemed to be vary similar to my mother’s note – however – they cluttered up the flavors with cinnamon and cloves. How dare they! Isn’t the clean taste of citrus and tomato enough?! Harrumph!

Time to look in real live books it seems. I pulled out my copy of the Wise Encyclopedia of Cookery published in the late 40’s and took a look. A very similar recipe to my mother’s except it used a knob of fresh ginger as the only additional flavor.

My conclusions:

1. Use the UWEX recipe as the baseline. It includes everything spelled out in clear terms and even talks about the necessary procession times.


2. Dump the spices and just add the knob of ginger from the Encyclopedia.


3. I wished I had been able to ask my mom about her chow chow recipe for she died so I don’t have to do this for that recipe as well.

So with lots chopping, peelings and stirring-and more stirring- and even more stirring by Annie – I came up with a nice version of my mom’s tomatoe (sic) preserves. It tastes pretty much as my hazy memory remembers. I spread some on toast and took it in to Tony. He looked at it. He sniffed it. Then he took a bite. “WOW! It doesn't suck! It's even good!”

I gave a jar of it to Gail, Debbie and Lori for a final taste test. Lori came back the next day and said, “I ate a half loaf of bread for dinner last night because of this…thanks for sabotaging my diet!” Debbie said that she loved how you could smell the tomatoes in it the moment you opened the jar. She ate a half loaf of bread too. Gail and her hubby Jim, however, have not tried it to date. I think Jim is just an old scaredie cat – it won’t hurt ya Jim! Eat it already!

So here it is - a reconstruction of a childhood memory. And a damn fine way to have a little bit of summer all year long.

Tomato Preserves

3 quarts ripe tomatoes (about 5 ½ pounds tomatoes)
3 oranges
2 lemons
A piece of fresh ginger about 1 inch wide by 2 inches long
6 cups sugar
1 teaspoon salt

Yield: About 9 half-pint jars

Procedure:

To Prepare Fruit and Spices – Peel tomatoes; cut tomatoes in small pieces. Drain. Slice oranges and lemons very thin; quarter the slices. Tie ginger in a cheesecloth bag.

To Make Marmalade – Sterilize canning jars. Place tomato pieces in a large kettle. Add sugar and salt; stir until dissolved. Add oranges, lemons and spice bag. Bring to a boil, stirring constantly. Continue to boil rapidly, stirring constantly, until thick and clear (about 50 minutes). (To test thickness, use the cold plate test: Remove all the jam from the heat and pour a small amount of boiling jam on a cold plate. Put the plate in the freezing compartment of a refrigerator for a few minutes. If the liquid gels, it is thick enough.) Remove from heat; skim off foam. Fill hot marmalade into hot jars, leaving ¼ inch headspace. Wipe rims of jars with a dampened clean paper towel; adjust two-piece metal canning lids. Process in a Boiling Water Canner.

mooooooooooooooooooooooooo

I was at the farmer’s market the other day and a woman walked up the booth where I was browsing. The folks at the booth had bags of basil for sale. She wanted to know –“So what can I do with this?” So the farmer and I started talking about pesto – and how you could freeze it. She said – that sounds like too much trouble. Too much trouble?! You throw the ingredients in the food processor and turn it on! Lazy cow. The fresh basil is too good for you anyway. Why don’t you go down to Giant Eagle and pick up some readymade for your pasta. Leave the good stuff to those of us who appreciate it.

That's a mighty fine ass you have there...

I love cranky...this guy is wonderfully cranky

He is The FoodAss.

Read his rant on baked chips.

Freakin' awsome.

P.S. He looks like Alton Brown's love child. Poor man.

Another Item to Waste Payroll With....

Since it is Monday Morning - I decided that you needed to see this.

If you haven't seen Instructables before - now is the time to look at all the inventive crazy stuff others are willing to share.

My favorite this morning - The Giant Fractal Pecan Pie.

Damn - that looks good.

Five Things You Gotta Eat Before Buying the Farm

Glenna over at a Fridge Full of Food…tagged me with “the five foods people should eat before they die” meme started by Melissa at the Traveler’s Lunchbox.

Of course, as with any list, it took me a while to narrow everything down to just five. Sometimes, food is such an ah-ha! kind of experience, much like the rest of life…when you taste certain things, it can change what you eat forever.

The first item on my list is Homemade Peach Ice Cream. (Actually, any flavor homemade ice cream.) I had a serious Ah-ha moment at my aunt and uncle’s house in Southern Ohio when I was about ten years old. We were the only kids at a family get-together and my uncle appeared with one of the old hand churned ice cream makers and set us to work (aka keeping us out of trouble). What seemed like days later, out came the most heavenly combination of freshly churned cream and dead ripe peaches. One bite, and the Dairy Queen soft serve that I had loved so much became a pale ghost of the REAL DEAL.

Second on the list is Fresh Sweet Corn right out of the field. Once you have the opportunity to get corn that has walked from stalk to pot in a few minutes, you will never buy another ear of plastic wrapped starch bundles ever again. Just can’t do it…and make sure you put a ton of fresh butter on it too with a little salt. None of those silly ass flavored butters… I wanna taste corn dammit, not chili-lime-rancid yak butter spread. Blech!

Third – I grew up calling them Sugar Waffles, but they have a ton of different names. The confections I speak of are deep fried pastries covered with that annoying powered sugar. The method of production is thus - dip a shaped iron into a batter then into hot fat. The batter expands, floats free of the iron, then gets pulled out and covered in enough powered sugar to choke a horse. The texture is almost like that of a potato chip. Totally addictive. They are usually found at fairs and carnivals - and occasionally in the kitchens of braver people than I.

Next – hmmmm – it’s getting harder – a really good made-from-scratch cake. Most people either buy from a bakery or pull out a Duncan Hines cake mix these days – it is so easy to bow to convenience instead of taking the time to measure and mix from scratch. Even my mom, who used to make everything from tried and true recipes, switched to box mixes later on. It was too easy not too. A not too sweet cake with an even crumb and homemade icing is a joy to eat – just ask my friend Gail. She made us the most fantastic cake for our 10th anniversary party six years back. I still drool when thinking about it. It was a yellow cake covered in the most incredible apricot butter cream icing. If you are having a special occasion – bribe her to make it for you. You won’t regret it!

Lastly – (is that a real word?) – We bloggers have been talking about all the great food that everyone should try. How it will change your life to eat a certain great dish from here or there, but how can you tell good from bad without a reference point? Ying and yang, folks. Tomorrow, if you are a parent, I want you to go to your kid’s school, get in the lunch line and buy the Hot School Lunch. It will give you a new perspective on the term “Badly Cooked Food.” Take a look at the menu for your local school. They are usually listed on the school websites. Frozen breaded chicken patties, canned soups, frozen pizza, Uncrustables - Uncrustables?! You mean frozen peanut butter and jelly sandwiches that have the crust cut off? Damn. Now that’s bad. Maybe that’s why Annie wants to pack her lunch all the time…

So that’s it for me, boys and girls –

I am tagging
Lisa over at Restaurant Widow
and
Anthony at Bachelor Cooking

Bring out your dead!

Well – it’s over. Our local grocer, Jubilee Foods, closed it doors today. I was kinda sad to see them go. I’ve been shopping there for twelve years now.

I didn’t do the majority of my shopping there, but they were my go-to place for odd items like microbrew quarts of beer or if I needed a loaf of French bread and a gallon of milk for dinner. On the other hand, there are a large number of older folks who lived within walking distance of the store who shopped there every week like clockwork. For me, it’s like a distant relation passing. I imagine for some of the regular shoppers, it’s like loosing a member of the immediate family.

That said – I have to admit I hovered over their dying corpse like a vulture, picking up deals as they put all their items on clearance. I picked up a lot of items that I would never have purchased at full price, like organic canned tomatoes, but when marked 70% off the original price, who can resist? Not I! And not my fellow vultures who lurked beside me the last two weeks.

Like so many other businesses in the country, Jubilee struggled because we vote with our wallets. The little shops have to compete every day with the big guy down the street – and we as consumers are always looking for the best deal. Would I buy my meat from Jubilee? No. They did not have a butcher onsite. I literally drive 30 minutes one way once every three months just to get good custom cut meat at a reasonable price. What does that mean to Jubilee? Another nail in the coffin.

So much of my time as the household chef is spent trying to get the most for the least. The best quality – at the best price. It is one of the reasons why I can’t justify the cost of grocery store organics. Are they really better? Do the benefits really outweigh the higher cost? I believe a lot of people think the same way. If you are on food stamps and limited to $400 a month for a family of four, are you going to spend that extra dollar a pound for organic tomatoes? Right now, organics and other specialty products are the province of those that can afford it. The rest have to squeeze Mr. Lincoln until he cries uncle.

So while I am sorry that Jubilee is gone - I really did enjoy getting those jalapeno stuffed olives at 70% off. Hmmmm...maybe there is a Sam’s Club being badly managed somewhere …Hey! A girl can dream, can’t she?

Hang in there baby!

The first week back from vacation was absolute hell. All my regular customers found out when I was coming back from vacation, then decended like locusts. And me in the middle of a serious canning jag as well. I have lots to talk about - but its gonna have to wait until my live slows to a managable pace - whee!!

In the meantime, sign up here for some free chocolate from Nestle.

It's free. It's chocolate. How can you go wrong?

Here I am!!!

I bet you’ve been wondering where I’ve been. At least I hope you’ve been wondering - I would hate to think I hadn’t been missed…

To tell you the truth, I’ve been bad…I snuck off to St. Louis and attended the 50th annual Midwest Magic Jubilee. Tony lectured and I helped host the hospitality suite. So what is a party full of magicians like? Well, you really have to be into two things 1) drinking and 2) magic. There is going to be plenty of both. We went through about six cases of beer, a couple bottles of wine, too many fifths of liquor to accurately count and tons of pop. All these liquids only served to lubricate throats and fuel discussions, gossip and tall tales. Magic parties tend to be pretty tame. Of course there was that one time when the German biker gang showed up…



Here is Whit Haydn. Whit is an old fashioned southern gentleman – some would call him a scoundrel, others would call him amusing…I fall into the later category. If you get a chance to see his show at the Magic Castle in LA, do it! For those of you who can’t get to the West Coast, here are some video clips from his website to tide you over.



Here is my souvenir from the convention: a donut.



It was sneezed from the nose of this man – Oscar Munoz. . I laughed every time he made a donut come out of his nose. Does that call into question my maturity level? Oscar hails from Texas and most of his performances are motivational shows aimed at elementary age kids. If your kid goes to school in Texas, there is a good chance Oscar has been to your school



And here are some of the members of the inner circle – those in the “know” so to speak.
From l to r: Mike Powers (a retired physics lecturer who now does magic professionally), Eric Grossman (bassist for K’s Choice), Jason Dean (a full time professional magician who tours with rock bands and performs in their green rooms), some pain in the butt kid who kept sneaking in, and my hubby Tony.

So what did I eat while I was away? Usually, I try to get out and eat at someplace new every time we visit a different city, but this time we were too busy. We stopped by our favorite Mexican place – Las Palmas. The food was great as always, and the service impeccable. I cannot say the same for the hotel restaurant (Hilton St. Louis Airport). The food was mediocre at best and the service was some of the worst I have ever received. I can only hope the convention organizers decide to change hotels next year.

On the way back, we stopped at the Blue Springs Café. It is a family style restaurant that specializes in “foot high pies”. While we were waiting on our lunch, two guys stopped in on their way to Chicago to pick up four pies to take back to the office. That made me really excited. The pies must be really good to make a special stop just for them.


The lunch menu has some good choices. I ordered meatloaf. It was nice – plentiful and moist, but fairly bland. The green beans were straight from a can without much flavor and the mashed potatoes and gravy were tasty but nothing special. I ate through the main course with the quickness so I could get to dessert: coconut meringue pie! I love coconut pie. A lot. I had seen the pies cooling on the counter as we came in, and all I could think about was pie. The pie came to the table…it was tall…it had height…it was a lot of meringue…over a pretty boring filling. I was crushed. The filling was just vanilla cream with a little coconut tossed in for texture. It was a tad too sweet when pared with an already sweet topping. The crust was a frozen food service crust – acceptable but not superlative. The search for the perfect pie goes on…

Once we got home, I had to see to the garden. When I left, it was being ravaged by disease and critters. Tate, my garden partner, had purchased a humane trap to try and capture our annoying neighbor, the groundhog. It has not worked. I am still finding half eaten tomatoes all over the yard. Bad groundhog! I’ll get you yet! As far as the diseases, they took out the monster zucchini and it is now starting in on my cucumbers. I pulled up the dying plants and had them carted away as biohazards.



On a more positive note, the hot peppers have been immune to any and all problems - boy, have they paid off in a big way.



I spent this afternoon making Agent Orange hot sauce from the 60 + habaneras that I picked this morning. The recipe came from this site run by Michael Stines. It was good – real good. It was hot – real hot. It made my nose run. It made the hubby hiccup. Then we went back for more. Yum!

So that’s it…it is not that I don’t love you all…but sometimes a gal just has to party!

Happy Birthday Julia!

In 1962, a woman walked onto the set of a WGBH interview with an omelet pan, a whisk, an apron, eggs and a hotplate. So began Julia Child’s career as a TV personality and guiding culinary light.

Personally, I remember watching Julia’s show as a kid – mesmerized by the different foods and cooking equipment that I never saw in my own home. Her passion, her personality made a whole foreign cuisine accessible to millions of people who kept a date with her every week. It was start of something exciting – the globalization of home cooking.

True, James Beard was the first TV celebrity chef, having starred in I Love To Eat back in 1946, but Julia, with her crazy hair, wobbly voice and wonky charm is the person that most people credit with being their TV cooking muse. I’ve mentioned before that Julia was definitely a “not ready for prime time” personality. There were no Hollywood good looks or family connections to get her started on the small screen – just Julia and her love of cooking. I like to think that if she were still here, she would be blogging with us too…

It was really difficult deciding what to make for Julia’s Birthday – my hubby was lobbying for either a) recreating Julia’s show with the giant lobster or b) pate. (He lobbies for pate on a regular basis, but until I work up some confidence, he is gonna have to settle for store bought!) I poured over her books, looked at my fridge and pantry – what the hell could I do that would be a fitting birthday present for one of the most influential people in my culinary experience?

Chocolate? Nah – Glenna over at A Fridge Full of Food already did that…plus I didn’t need any influence to love chocolate.
Salad Niçoise? Nah – did salad compose in an earlier blog…
Hollandaise? no….that wasn’t right either…
Finally it hit me! Julia was all about fresh food cooked correctly. I happened to have some very fresh eggs, a good pan and a hubby willing to eat anything for breakfast. Problem solved.

Here is my tribute: a simple omelet made according to the proper method. It was great. Moist and perfect. Another successful dish thanks to Julia.



Happy birthday, Julia. Thank you so much.

(For those of you who wish to make a Julia omelet, her handling is in Mastering the Art of French Cooking and also in The Way to Cook. The Way to Cook has great photos showing how everything should look as you proceed with the recipe. Check it out!)

Hongshuai Soy Sauce is people!!

Ok...take a gander at this!

Nasty!

Damn heat!

I have always been fairly lame when it comes to being a warm weather cook. When our side of the planet tilts away from the sun, I am at my best. Stews, soups, casseroles – if it sticks to your ribs, I can cook it! Summertime - I tend to stick to certain dishes – mostly grilled meats and corn on the cob. While I could eat corn on the cob every night of the week, the repetition gets boring for the rest of the family.

So in an effort to eat more veggies (i.e. use up the produce from the garden and the farmers' market before it goes bad), I decided to make a tuna salad. Not the mayo based, pickle relish containing, white bread filling of our child hood, but a composed salad, something fresh with a vinaigrette. I would say it was kind of like a salad nicoise but without potatoes and hard boiled eggs. Boiling potatoes and eggs would have meant turning on the stove in an already sweltering kitchen. This girl was just not into that!!

Twenty minutes of sweating and chopping later, voila! Rosie’s Salade Composée. I served this with bread and lemonade. After a few bites, I was a cool and composed as my salad. Sweet! Another summer triumph!


Rosie’s Salade Composée

6 cups of washed mixed greens (I used romaine and some spicy greens)
3 cucumbers, peeled, large dice
12 green onions, chopped
4 baby zucchini, sliced
1 banana pepper, cleaned and slivered
8-10 oil cured black olives, pitted and roughly chopped
2 medium tomatoes, large dice
1 large can of good quality tuna, drained
salt and pepper to taste

Dressing:

1 t Dijon mustard
3 T white wine vinegar (you can use tarragon infused vinegar if you like.)
¼ cup extra virgin olive oil
1 small clove of garlic, finely minced or squished through a press
Salt and pepper to taste


Wash, clean and chop according to your preferences. Arrange the ingredients on chilled plates, lettuce first, then however strikes your fancy with the tuna on top.

To make the dressing: Squish garlic into a bowl, add the vinegar and mustard to the garlic. Whisk in oil slowly until emulsified. Drizzle over salad. You could top with some fresh chopped herbs if you like – tarragon and parsley are nice.






A side note: God as my witness, once we buy our own place, I am going to set up an outdoor kitchen where I can cook and not heat up the entire house. We have no AC in this apartment, so it kills us to do any advanced cooking indoors. Summer kitchens go back a long way, but when we invented AC, people didn’t need to worry about the heat generated, so we no longer saw any need for having a separate kitchen to do our cooking during the summer. Plus, the amount of food processing the average household does has been reduced to a minimum. I mean, how many people actually can 50+ quarts of tomatoes every summer?

I started thinking about an outdoor kitchen when my brother looked into buying a house built in 1865. It still had the original outbuilding that was used as the summer kitchen. So not only are we getting back in touch with an ancient tradition, we would be conserving energy at the same time. Maybe summer kitchens are an idea that deserves to be resurrected?

Turn up the lights...it's dim sum

It’s Saturday Morning. The offspring is gone to Kings Island for the day. The parental units rejoice. It means coffee and a newspaper in bed. It means Tony running around the house in his undies. And it means I can make wolf whistles without hearing the word “gross!!” from the peanut gallery.

Best of all, it mean that we get to go out for lunch and eat what ever we want. I had a hankering for dim sum. Lil’ bites of Chinese goodness. Tony and I used to eat dim sum every weekend (pre-baby) at a little restaurant down on Campus, but it has been long closed. A couple other places here in town claim to serve it, but generally it is frozen dumplings that are thawed and held until ordered. They are nasty, sticky and wholly unappetizing.



I love the internet though. I did a little search and came upon a review for Lee Garden Restaurant. The review was about three years old, but it promised dim sum seven days a week, until 1:30 am in the morning. So I gave the restaurant a ringy-dingy and sure enough – dim sum every day, but only until midnight. I guess you can’t ask for everything.

Located near Sawmill and 161, the restaurant is hidden around the side of a large strip mall. I had been driving by it for years and never known it was there. The inside was quite and dim, with several two and four tops filled and a large table twelve sitting in the middle of the dining room. Everyone seemed to really be enjoying their selves. Another point: everyone there except us was Asian. I guess it’s kinda like the rule about truckers eating at the good diners…

We were asked which menus we wanted to look at. It seems there are two or three specialty menus, including the dim sum menu, a Korean noodle menu, plus something else I can’t remember (Yeah, yeah I forgot to take notes. Sue me!) While the noodle menu looked good, the dim sum was what we came for.

Lee Garden does not have little carts that get wheeled around like some of the dim sum houses in the larger cities. Here in the sticks, you get to mark your choices on a badly copied paper menu and your dishes come out straight from the kitchen.

The first items to catch our attention were the chicken feet. Yes, I said chicken feet. Black Bean Chicken Feet, to be precise. Our waitress was impressed that we wanted to order the chicken feet. I think we shocked her by asking for them first. She asked incredulously “You like chicken feet?” For those of you who have never eaten the foot of a chicken, it is damn tasty. (Too good for any bird to walk on!) That’s about all it is though. It is salty, garlicky and has a gelatinous quality that makes you mouth happy as you eat it. Here is Tony proudly displaying his chopstick skills for your viewing pleasure. See? Doesn’t that look good?


My next favorite was boa. What’s a boa? No, it’s not something that showgirls wear around their neck. It is yeast raised bread that is stuffed with Chinese bbq pork and steamed. It makes the bread soft and moist, with a sweet/savory filling. See? They look like ‘lil white clouds in their steamer. Savory pillows of lusciousness. Isn’t that sweet?

Tony also ordered some black bean spare ribs. They are prepared in the same manner as the chicken feet: smother in a garlic black bean sauce and steamed. However, they are cut into tiny one inch pieces so they cook quickly. They are still chewy though, so it makes you work for your dinner.



Then we moved onto the stuffed dumplings: crystal buns, shiu mai, pork and shrimp dumplings and shrimp and scallop dumplings. All of these dished have finely minced fillings that are then wrapped in dough and steamed. Most are based on a wheat dough like those used to wrap egg rolls. However, the crystal buns and the shrimp and scallop dumplings are wrapped in rice dough that goes translucent when steamed. They almost seem gemlike with the pink and white of the seafood showing though their skins. That doesn’t stop me from sending them down the hatch however.



Now you can’t go to a new restaurant and just order the safe food you always order every place else you go. You have to ask your wait staff what they recommend. Having passed the chicken foot test, she started recommending items for us. Her chief recommendation was the Golden Shrimp Ball. At $3.95, it was one of the most expensive items on the dim sum menu. We said, “Bring it on!!” They looked weird. They were big and golden brown and um…messing looking. But being brave souls, we dived it. It was great. The coated turned out to be rice noodles that had been wrapped around a minced shrimp mixture and then deep fried. And the price was totally reasonable for the three balls that we got. Tony made some jokes about emasculated jumbo shrimp while we ate them.



I also ordered taro dumplings. The online review had recommended them. So I jumped in. They were weird. And not in a pleasant way. The filled was minced pork that had been coated in a taro paste and then deep fried. The outside was kinda crunchy and oily and the inside was slimy from the taro paste. Blech! I should have taken heed when the waitress asked, “you want taro dumplings?” with an odd look on her face.

So that’s it! Our dim sum adventure. We are definitely going back. It might even become a weekend ritual: ditching the kid for an adult feast once a month. However, once she reads this and finds out we know where to get chicken feet, I think the jig will be up!

Lee Garden Restaurant
2685 Federated Blvd
Columbus, OH 43235(614) 764-1525