Beef Stroganoff

This is the first recipe in what will hopefully become a regular series for me. Growing up, my mother frequently made beef stroganoff. It's easy, quick and delicious. Stroganoff is not a particularly attractive dish as the sauce is a bit like a thick gravy and some people may not like the taste and texture of egg noodles. But for me, it's comfort food, pure and simple, and I see no reason why vegetarians should refrain from comfort food now and then, especially as the weather starts to get a bit colder (well...cold for San Diego anyway).

Beef Stroganoff hails from Russia and was brought to America around the 1950s by way of Russian and Chinese immigrants (and to a lesser extent, US servicemen who were stationed in pre-Communist China). It has been modified quite a bit from it's original incarnation, but the basics facets still ring true: It's buttery, smooth, rich and warm. It's also a bit heavy, so those with health concerns might have trouble "lightening it up" but you can use light sour cream instead of the full fat stuff. All my recipe recommendations will be veggie friendly, and many of them will be meat dishes that I'll have you substitute some mock meat for the real meat.

For this dish, you'll want to look for Steak Strips from Morning Star Farms. Most of the major grocery stores out there carry them. Here in SoCal, you can find it most Vons and Albertsons. Ralphs are very hit and miss. Morning Star Farms is pretty aggressive about giving coupons upon check out, so if you buy one package now, you'll get a coupon for a discount on another one later.

Okay, here's the recipe:
http://www.recipezaar.com/73922

You'll follow the ingredients and preparation nearly verbatim. I usually prefer fresh mushrooms to canned (duh) and subbed in light sour cream to reduce the calories/fat. The wife is on Weight Watchers, so I love the nutritional info on recipezaar. I built a quick grease monkey script that displays the WW points for each dish (pre-substitution of course). If you'd like to use it, you'll need to use firefox. Download the grease monkey addon if you don't have it yet (and restart firefox). Then download my little weight watchers script (click the "install this script" button). Then go to any recipe page on recipezaar and you'll see a little red text next to the number of servings telling you how many WW points the dish is.

One other substitution you can make is the egg noodles. Vons, recently, has started carrying "yolk-less" egg noodles. The taste and texture is pretty darned similar to the regular noodles and they only cost a little more (and a bag of egg noodles goes a LONG way). Some variations also call for it to be served over rice, rather than noodles.

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Crispy Fried Chicken

This is a preview post as I haven't actually eaten here yet, but a friend of mine just tipped me off to this place and Yelp seems to confirm his recommendation. The name of this restaurant is actually "Crispy Fried Chicken" and, as my friend described it, it's in one of the sketchiest parts of town...but hey, good food makes me brave:

Crispy Fried Chicken
4919 El Cajon Boulevard
San Diego, CA 92115
(619) 582-3938

Obviously, I don't expect them to have much in the way of vegetarian food. My primary target will be the hush puppies. Maybe they'll have some slaw or other side dish that will be veggie friendly as well. Will report on my findings soon.

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Mozy Cafe

Mozy Cafe
698 N Coast Highway 101
Encinitas, CA 92024
(760) 944-916

After hitting up Ong Rare Fruit Nursery the wife and I went up to Carlsbad to pick up a wagon (like the Radio Flyer type) she found on craigslist. We came back down the Pacific Coast Highway as we usually do when we have time to kill on the weekend and we're up in North County. Along the way, we decided we had to find a place in Leucadia to eat. We had been through Leucadia plenty of times but never had time to find a place to eat since it seems we blow through it so quickly (it feels like you're holding up traffic if you try to take your time down the PCH). This time we really lucked out in our searching. On the corner of Daphne St. and the 101, we found a tiny, tiny place called Mozy Cafe touting a "healthy, vegetarian food" sign. Generally, that's a pretty good sign so long as the prices aren't too much.

Walking in the front door, there was reggae playing on this Sunday morning (big surprise) and the day's special written on a plate. In a corner there was a salsa bar with some amazing looking homemade salsa. I ordered the special (a burrito with tempeh, black beans, rice and plantains). The wife ordered the falafel burger with fries. Though there was a bit of miscommunication between the cashier and the cook (apparently there's a regular breakfast special and the cook made that for me instead of the special written on the plate). The menu is burrito-centric and definitely has a lot of influence from Cuban and Middle Eastern cuisine.

The falafel burger was nothing short of amazing. The wife and I are very particular about our falafel. Most falafel is dry, gritty and a bit beanier than it should be (in my opinion). This falafel was moist, a bit crumbly (which is standard) and not beany. The burger had hummus, lettuce, avacado and tomato on it. The falafel also had something in it that made it green (and smoother). The wife and I suspect avacado. The tempeh burrito was also very good. There were a ton of flavors going on between the black beans (which were cooked very well), the sweet plantains, the lemon and garlic on the tempeh marinade and the avacado. It didn't need any salsa...but I can't help myself when there's a salsa bar nearby. Their pica de gallo was delicious: a smoother, finer paste than the usually coarse salsa found in many Mexican restaurants. There's also a bright orange salsa...I think this one's a red pepper paste. Not a lot of flavor but a good spice factor. They also have Bragg aminos on the table as a condiment. For those not familiar with Bragg, it's like soy sauce but it contains the essential amino acids that are sometimes tricky for vegetarians (and especially vegans) to obtain through their normal diet.

The service (apart from the miscommunication) was very good and the staff seemed friendly (though several people on yelp seem to have had different staff or caught the staff on a grumpier day than I). The food was outstanding and it definitely warrants a second and third visit as there are so many vegetarian options on the menu. Other options included a mock chicken burrito and a vegetable tamale burrito. For those craving meat, we did see a tuna salad come out that was HUGE and looked very good and very fresh. As always, we can't really comment on the meat options but they definitely exist. If our food was any indication of quality and creativity, I should think the meat options are equally satisfying.

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Ong Rare Fruit Nursery

2528 Crandall Drive
San Diego, CA 92111
858-277-8167

This post will be the first of many that are a departure from my standard restaurant review. As a foodie, I want to share all thing food related with my readers. Of course restaurants are a big part of sampling new tastes and they are the easiest way most people have to experience foreign flavors and cuisines. However, I'm going to start sharing other things with you like markets and recipes. To begin this departure, I want to share a rare treat with you: Ong nursery.

Not far from K's Sandwiches in Linda Vista is a seemingly normal house with a few extra potted plants in the driveway. You'd never suspect the density of rare fruit being grown in the backyard. I was thrilled to learn that such a nursery existed in central San Diego. I thought all nurseries were out in Fallbrook and Vista. Upon walking up the drive way to the house I saw a few older people sitting inside the garage conversing. I figured one of them must be Quang Ong (the proprietor) but they told me to check around back. To my surprise, Quang was not a retired, hermetic old man but a livid, passionate younger man atop a ladder, hurriedly picking Chinese jujubes. Before I had a chance to introduce myself and shake his hand, he was handing me half a dozen jujubes to try.

Now, the Chinese jujube is about the size of a small crab apple and the tree looks rather plain, not nearly as exotic as some of his other specimens. The fruit has a mottled reddish/brownish skin (when it's ripe) with white meat. The most remarkable thing when you first bite into it is how crisp it is. It's crispier than an apple or Asian pear. It will seem a bit dry and fibrous, with a mild flavor, but it's not chalky or mealy like some apples are. It gets sweeter as you chew it a couple times. They're extremely snackable and Quang tells me that they are not nearly as crisp in the markets (I've never seen them in Ranch 99, but I'll look for them next time I go to compare).

Quang was still busy harvesting fruit so the wife and I wandered about the rest of his garden. There's barely any room to move between the plants in some places and he has many hanging plants above other plants (the ones that don't require a ton of sunlight I assume). He also has a koi pond and a makeshift greenhouse. He says he's been growing the nursery for about 18 years and it's difficult to believe he's done so much in such a relatively small amount of time (considering some of the plants are rather mature). Quang seems pretty young, so 18 years must be a very sizable chunk of his life.

After perusing the grounds a bit (I recognized pommelos, persimmons and pomegranates, but there were lots more I didn't recognize), Quang found us and offered us some dragon fruit. The fruit is simply impressive. It's bright pink and has a luster almost like a rose. He sliced it in half and handed the wife one half and me the other. The meat on this one is clear (like a coconut sauce) but Quang mentioned that many cultivars have a pink meat. There's hundred of edible black seeds embedded evenly in the fruit. The fruit was a little larger than a softball so half of this was very filling. When you bite into the fruit there's very little texture. It's practically made of juice, yet still pretty easy to eat. The meat pulls pretty neatly from the skin. It also seems to have a mild flavor but becomes noticeably sweeter if you hold it in your mouth.

We couldn't stay long, but I definitely plan to return to the nursery to purchase a plant or two for the new house we'll be moving into this week. I'll have a front yard with with good Southern exposure (and with no grass) so I plan to have a few gardening areas (container and raised bed) so I'll have the luxury of experimenting with more plants, beyond my tomato and herbs. Living in San Diego, we all have the luxury of tending to these exotic plants that we wouldn't dare raise outside of a greenhouse in any other part of the US. Many of these species are indigenous to rain forests and other subtropical areas that are constantly being pillaged in the name of development. So tending to exotics is one part love of their fruit and one part conservation.

If you'd like to taste some truly unique fruits, definitely stop by the Ong Nursery. They're generally open from 8am to 5pm Saturday and Sunday but it's a good idea to call (858-277-8167) or email (quang12@aol.com) beforehand. I think they're also available during the week after 5pm but perhaps only by appointment. San Diego is also fortunate enough to have a Rare Fruit Grower's Society (http://crfgsandiego.org/index.html). They meet in Balboa park once a month and often have fruit available for tasting. I believe there's a small membership fee to attend the meeting but if you pay once, you're good for the rest of the year. I haven't attended one of their meetings yet but it's high on my to-do list.

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Why I don't post pics of food on my blog

So originally, when I first started this blog, I had every intention of producing a quality San Diego food blog, modeled off the fine mmm-yoso blog. They have a very prolific blog with a ton of pictures and generally do a great job with their reviews. I feel like I have two big things keeping me from being that kind of blog: infrequent posts and no pictures. Until recently, I considered them two things I needed to strive to get better at. I think we can all agree that there's no excuse for my slacking off on the posts. I need to be posting more often. With your encouragement (thanks to all who have left comments for me) and a little Firefox plugin called ScribeFire, I pledge to become a more frequent contributor to the San Diego food scene.

However, the wife and I had a discussion recently that changed my perspective on the photos issue. I've actually taken a number of pictures of food, but for whatever reason, they haven't made it onto any of my posts. I think one of the biggest problems for me was I couldn't figure out how to work them into the post in a natural way (especially those that I had taken after I wrote and posted the text). It's sort of like "oh and btw, here's a bunch of pics that have no tie-in to the text at all! My wife's comment was that she actually preferred to read a post without so many pictures because, she said, if there were pictures of the food, she wouldn't be paying attention to the text. Pictures have a funny way of turning us into lazy readers. I hadn't even considered that, but I tend to agree. When I'm on mmm-yoso I generally look at the pictures and then MAYBE read a bit of text if the pictures look good. The is especially tricky for eaters who are new to cuisines like Thai, Indian, Ethiopian, etc. where many of the dishes consist of stews or otherwise "goopy" looking dishes. That can be a big turn off for people. I can get someone's mouth watering more easily explaining the flavors rather than showing them pictures of the dish.

I think if I ever switch my position, I'll post very small pictures (compared to page real estate for text) that pop up larger versions. But for the time being, and especially since I want to get better about making more regular posts, I'll continue to avoid pictures of the food altogether.

Do you have any feedback for me? I'm interested to hear your thoughts on the pictures thing as well as any other pointers or generally wishes you have for my blog. In case you haven't gathered this yet, I try to focus on vegetarian dishes and places that have good, cheap food. Cheap is very important to me because I think good food should be accessible to everyone and I think we should be able to eat out regularly. I also try to tailor my posts on ethnic food to the newbie, easing them into trying it for the first time (or giving it a second chance if they've had a bad experience in the past).

That pretty much sums up my approach I think. Do I spend too much time on one thing and not enough on another? I'd love to hear your thoughts. By the way, I'm going to start posting about recipes as well. I'm deep in a love affair with Recipezaar and I'll be sharing some of my favorite dishes, many of which have meat in them, but I'll be giving you a guide on how to use mock meats or other substitutes with them.

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Sicilian Thing Pizzeria

So all you fellow foodies out there probably know about the standard great pizzerias in San Diego. They all are in or around dowtown:

Bronx Pizzeria (Hillcrest/Mission Hills)
Pros: great, huge NY pies for as little as $13.50
Cons: gets very crowded, parking is tricky and you get a bit of authentic Bronx attitude to go with your pizza, limited options (they can be cheap because they do volume and keep it simple)

Pizzeria Luigi (Golden Hill)
I'm told this is a spin-off of one of the Bronx staff.
Pros: much easier parking, larger area, more seating, great pizza, still pretty affordable
Cons: a bit loud if you want to dine-in and still a bit crowded

Lefty's (North Park)
Chicago style pizza
Pros: pretty good pie (but I prefer Regents for chicago style, although it's all the way up in UTC area), more sports-centric
Cons: very very small shop, parking can be a little tricky, pizza is a bit overrated

There's also a couple decnt chains like BJs and Oggis (but they're a bit pricey and we foodies prefer non-chains if we can help it).

Enter Sicilian Thing. I'm told that this is yet another Bronx spin-off (they don't mention it on the website, so maybe I got that wrong...but it's not the sort of thing you'd publish). Nothing special right? Well if they only offered NY style, I'd say that there was no more room in North Park for yet another NY pizzeria. Even if the food was great, they'd be hard pressed to compete with all the other shops. Lucky for them, they have a great differentiator: Sicilian style deep dish pizza. If you've had deep dish before and been turned off by its cakey, doughy crust, I have to tell you to give it another try. Sicilian Thing does a fantastic job of offering up real deep dish pizza that's not cakey or doughy, but crunchy, light, buttery and delicious. They offer a great selection of toppings, but I have to advocate keeping it simple. The crust is the star of this play, so just get a plain cheese pizza or maybe some black olives or tomato slices. Further, the owner, Paul, is the nicest guy you've ever met. Bronx Pizza has earned a reputation for being loud and abrupt with its customers and some people love that, but there's some of us that still appreciate friendly customer service, even if it doesn't provide the Bronx cliche of NY "attitude."

Prices for a whole pizza start at $14 for either the thick-crusted, square Sicilian style or the NY round, thin style. These pizzas are massive. The thick crust can fill a hungry person up with two pieces. There's 9 squares in the Sicilian style, so you do the math. My wife and I ate it for a week and it reheats REALLY well in the toaster oven. They also offer up cannolies and some other items you wouldn't normally expect at a pizza joint. I'd be very interested to know what portion of their pizza sold is Sicilian vs. NY style. I'd like to think that there's a market for a place that only sells Sicilian.

I seriously fear that once the word gets out about this place, it will suffer from the crowds that many other great pizzeria's suffer from. Their place is small, so there's a definite risk of overcrowding. The moral here is that you should get in there and order pizza soon...and don't tell your friends about it ;^)

Sicilian Thing Pizza
4046 30th St.
San Diego, CA
619-282-3000

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