Day of Tripe and Kimchi

I've been eating plenty, that's not the issue. I've yet to tally how many hundreds of dollars I spent during Restaurant Week, but it was more than one. I went to both a ladies and a co-ed dinner party this past weekend, in fact, and have savored boar, rice pudding, and grilled octopus. But I just haven't sat down to write up the glory. But today was different. Today was Asian. It's much easier to write on a theme, so I regret the reverse chronological order. But a girl can't eat tripe and not immediately write it up.

After laying in bed this morning watching funnyordie.com and going to church (the Catholic one down the street and I'll boldly admit that Vatican II rendered one slightly more satisfying than another), I had to get in my car and go somewhere. The Washingtonian's Cheap Eats suggested Pho 75 in Falls Church. It's all business there: you sit at one of perhaps seven long rows of tables and have a waiter at your side after about a minute in your chair.

I got two waters (the waiters were prescient) and a small bowl of pho, a delicious soup that's perfect for winter and for ministering to most variations of a weary soul. It's a robust broth, delicate but meaty and this had a hint of cinnamon. I ordered pho with brisket, some other type of normal beef, then soft tendon and bible tripe. Thankfully, the soft tendon looked like a less-opaque onion slice but the bible tripe had the qualities I like of be-suckered octopus, but had the limp, blanched consistency of... offal from the most interior part of some animal's intestines. Since it looked like a really texturized noodle, I could easily hide it in noodle batches without knowing the difference...sort of..

In case you want to know what type of offal (to remind, that I ate today) includes the words "reticulorumen orifice," "mucosa," and "volatile fatty acids" in its description and what it looks like in profile, see a photo of bible tripe from Wikipedia below.

Anyway, lunch was delicious. I ate all the meat, all the noodles, as many onions as I could grab with my chopsticks and would have devoured the remaining broth, if the spoonful of it I took didn't make me tear up and have to dab my eyes because of the copious Sriracha I put in. I coughed like a smoker the rest of the afternoon.


Eating pho in my eyes should be following up by eating something sweet. Like a mung bean paste dessert, clearly. I'd rather not know what a mung bean is, but I know mung bean cakes are delicious. At weekend dinner party number two last night, I received a recommendation to go to Super H Mart, an Asian grocery store of which there are handful in the city. I love Asian grocery stores. I fell in love with Super Cao Nguyen in Oklahoma City, a huge Vietnamese market (super really means super), that has the energy, colors, and smells of a fair. Sometimes these smells include fish, sometimes fresh, sometimes not, which is often concurrently thrilling and reviling.

This one was pretty awesome, but full of a variety of international customers who each were operating on their home countries' rules of driving, which were almost always at odds with everyone elses. Hands, arms, carts, children, and vegetables were in constant movement. Things improved beyond the produce section, thankfully. But despite the taxing commotion, it was still beautiful.

There were serpentine Chinese eggplants...

Intimidating durians..

And very cheap chicken hearts...

A major highlight was the amount of women actively hawking samples. They competed for attention from other hawking women, distributing free cups of hot curry, rice dumpling balls, fried chicken, a sweet vinegar drink, tofu with gravy, and bulgogi beef. I tried all of those. The fish strip soup was as bad as it looks:

Note the shrink-wrapped fish below. Awesome.

I also found my mung bean paste pastry. It was individually wrapped and made it as far as the parking lot before it was devoured.

Super H has it's fair share of prepared foods, too. I picked up some kimchi, but a different sort than I've had before, with refreshingly crisp cucumbers mixed in. A few bites were enough (seemed to have as much garlic as cabbage), but it was tasty until ceased to be so.

The unidate went well.. the candles and Bordeaux wine were a nice touch. The mini pork buns squarely squirted juice on my shirt and the kimchi, after about five bites, ceased to be appealing. I love myself some Korean food, but if I am going to be involved in its production rather than solely its consumption, I'd rather just aisle shop...

Back

The preceding culinary period has been a long stream of pop tarts, corn dogs, criminally uniform ravioli, and turkey sandwiches. Less turkey sandwiches than I should have eaten, as I forayed too often into the aforementioned realm of over salted/sugared/deep-fried foods, but I finished. I lived to tell the tale. I escaped with my desire for fine foods intact. The terrorists haven't won this round.

So, Christmas, needless to say, has been an equally steady stream of fine items: chevre, well-crafted fishes, aerated wines, (non-fried, non-canned, non-peaked colored, non-limp) vegetables, and good Oklahoma meat products. It's been a delight to taste and then recall memories of good food, past recollections meeting present culinary tastes and aromas, in a cosmic uniting of..really, acceptable, non-offensive foods.

Christmas has also delivered that stark reminder that four months of not writing about food or men makes an already amateur food/men critic more amateur. We'll call this a growing post, to be followed subsequently by wittier culinary/social commentary. I will note, however, trip food highlights included a male dining companion at Pizza Hut. However, critiqueing food in places like that is like criticizing a kindergartner's coloring skills... it's just kinda..mean.

Let us begin by what I missed the most: American food. From the grill out back or from the fancy chef. Eaten in bed or on oddly-shaped modern plates or in a grease-reeked diner or on wobbly checked-tablecloth-decked tables or in plastic baskets. It really hasn't mattered.

Christmas (as the holiday on the 25th of December) sort of went on without me this year. My Christmas lunch was at the Atlanta airport:

It was both some of the worst Chinese I've ever eaten, as well as the Chinese meal I have eaten the most quickly (to keep from missing my flight back to a destination I just came from because of the weather).

Dinner was better, which is saying little. When you know you are going to miss Christmas and have neither car nor cable, you pay $17 for a veggie pizza.

And you eat it in bed.

And act Miss Haversham like, but without the wedding dress. But the same sort of despondency, but with microbrewed beer. Patiently attending you on your nightstand.

Then you snap out of it, your parents thoughtfully buy you a business class seat home when the weather clears so you don't despondently continue eating bad food in bed, and you have Christmas. Hours after you land. Then you start enjoying America's culinary fruits.

One of the top fruits in Oklahoma is Chelino's. We are such dedicated patrons that my father purchased my mother and I Chelino's aprons for Christmas. It's not American food, but it's Tex Mex and thus American by extension. And they very ably make Tex Mex food without slathering everything with cheese; there is a remarkable amount of non-orange/brown color on their plates.

Chelino's coctel de camaron, with avocado, onions, citrus juice (orange?), and shrimp

Chelino's array of chip baths: salsa, queso, relish and their "special salsa" (free, not on the menu, and spicy)

Then we began the process of new-restaurant-sampling. My dad is very good with spotting new restaurants and taking me there when I'm in town. We ventured to Sage, an innovative little cafe in the Deep Deuce area of OKC. The menu is slightly pricey, pretentious enough to attract a crowd that will keep them in business, but with a solidly varied menu to encourage multiple visits. The service was slow and the soup was lukewarm but I got chocolate cake bigger than my head.

Ground turkey noodle soup (with fancy grilled, buttered bread)

My double-entree topped salad with shrimp and portabello mushroom, with chevre and tomatoes over spinach (with balsamic vinaigrette)

It's not just big because it's in the foreground.

After hydrating after airplane flights, I got a flight: of Belgian beers at McNellie's in downtown OKC, which included Chimay, Maredsous, Hoegaarden, Lindeman’s Framboise, Triple Karmeleit. The last two were a bit sweet, but look how beautiful they are in their little glasses.

I also got fish and chips, but if I don't photograph unhealthy food, it's like the calories don't count.

Then, I got my first home-cooked meal: fish from the grill on a bitterly frigid night (from what I heard, I lazily drank my beer inside). My dad talentedly made:

Salmon on a cedar board with carmelized pecans

...and swordfish with lime. And some barbecued shrimps.

Satisfied with our American culinary forays, we ventured to a new Mediterranean restaurant, Camilya's on May Avenue. Camilya needs a website, but that's it. One man ably cooked for us and served us delightful lunches. Tabbouleh is our constant: we judge the quality of a Mediterranean place by the proportions of parsley to bulghar wheat and oil to lemon juice. Tabbouleh construction is indicative of a restaurant's broader ability to make anything.

My dad's perfect, photogenic taboulleh

An inviting cornucopia of kafta meat

...And my lunch, tabbouleh and hashwa (rice cooked with black angus ground beef, pine nuts and almonds, served with cucumber/yogurt sauce)

Mere hours later, we celebrated a New Years vespers dinner (in early anticipation of the new year) at Paseo Grill. Just thinking about dinner has caused me to readjust my typing position to a more serious (combative) posture. I joke about restaurant pretension, but in a restaurant, I'm paying to be served. And, I'm the boss. To myself pretentiously be self-referential, this same experience has happened before. I admire a restaurant's effort to keep on-schedule for timely table turnover. I don't appreciate when a cheeky waitress calmly explains to discerning adults that the new tenants of our table have arrived and we can get our dessert to -go, implying that eating cheesecake from a Styrofoam box in the parking lot will soften the blow of spending $150-plus dollars to be unceremoniously kicked out of your feed trough for the next herd to come in.

I was already a little perturbed that I left my driver's license in my gym jacket. This, in turn, caused me to be a bit humiliated that I had to pull out four types of identification, piecing together analytically that my voter registration card, judging by its date of issuance, suggested I was at least 21 now. I even pointed out I had wrinkles. My mom ordered my cocktail, let me sneak the four sips I got out of it, kindly ordered my chardonnay for me, and played waitress/manager look-out so I could enjoy it without being arrested. I'll demur on criticizing America's liquor laws now, and focus my attention instead squarely on Paseo Grill's unsophisticated and offensive efforts to kick out guests 89 minutes after they are seated, to make room for the next set of fools to move in and blow on the same New Year's noisemakers. I sort of wish I had made a scene; they couldn't have blamed it on the alcohol.

Dinner was tasty though: blackened trout with avocado kiwi salsa, a side of orzo and pine nut pilaf, and a small up of a hearts of palm and artichoke medley salad. It would have been a hell of a lot better if the wine were in front of me instead of by my mother, to be spirited away when no ridiculous wait staff were watching.

My dad had the ribeye...

My mom had the filet...

And I got the last laugh because I get to write nasty things about the Paseo Grill on my blog prolifically read in the Oklahoma restaurant community.

And we got Christmas-lights viewing instead of dessert.

New Year's Day brought football and pastitsio/dolmathes eating. As well as some pretty sweet baconful black-eyed peas, plus a visit from Yiayia.


New Year's resolutions took us to Ron's Hamburgers, home of the $16.95 burger (not inflated DC burger prices because of the ridiculous addition of truffle oil), the "Who's Your Daddy," two patties of beef, seven slices of cheese, with fried and raw onions. My burger was $3, so imagine the beef- to-dollars extrapolation. And check out the fried okra: perfectly crisp and Kermit-green on the inside.

Below, my dad's cheeseburger steak.

After extricating ourselves from the grease-induced euphoria, we took advantage of OKC's Museum of Art. There's no food link here, but the photos are too good. Plus, I went on a date here way back in the last decade, so there's a man link. But he lingered way too long in the modern art wing and I think I had to buy our lunch, so we'll just keep this excursion non-blog-germane. The museum has a great collection of glass from eccentric artist Dale Chihuly.


The glass tower is 55 ft. tall.. it's delicate and majestic and made by a guy (non-pirate) with an eye-patch.

Sans eye patches.

While it's a convenient segueway to call BBQ art, we all agreed pre-blog-writing today that Leo's BBQ's banana cake is art. Call it performance, edible, or 3D art, it's genius.

I got a mangled piece, but liked the linearity of the barbecue sauces ("red is hot, white is not"). But admire this:

And at a coy-ish banana cake angle:

If you've read this far, I thank you. Bon appetit.