Saturday, February 27, 2010

Mojave Grille

We stayed in NJ for the weekend for a change, but we still managed to make it out of the house to do some exploring. We tried a new restaurant in Westfield called Mojave Grille, a Mexican-fusion type of restaurant (which, as Phil puts it, basically just means Americanized Mexican food).

We tried their Fire Roasted Tomato Soup, which I thought was pretty good. A little strange though that this was the only soup on their menu...


Phil ordered the Southwestern Chicken Quesadilla. It had some kind of hummus-like sauce that came with it. The avocado dip definitely tasted better.


I ordered the Grilled Artichoke Quesadilla off of the appetizer menu. It was basically the same size as the regular quesadilla minus the salad. Artichoke may sound like an odd ingredient to put in a quesadilla, but it was surprisingly good.
I look really sleepy in this picture for some reason...


Overall the restaurant was OK. Not sure if I would go back again though...

Saturday, February 20, 2010

Stuffed Cannolis and Bao Haus

Phil's cousin Lea came to visit from North Carolina, so it was another trip into the city back to Congee Village for lunch. Congee Village appears to have grown in popularity among the cousins. We had the standard sweet donuts, garlic chicken, fried tofu and noodle dishes.




This time around we also ordered the pineapple fried rice. Served in an actual pineapple shell.


Here's the group (me, Lucia, Winnie, Phil's dad, Phil's mom, Aunt Chan, Kevin, Lea, and Uncle Chan).

After lunch we did a little exploring of some local eateries - as if we didn't have tons of food at Congee Village, but there's always room for something sweet!

Our first stop was a cannoli place on the lower east side called Stuffed Artisan Cannolis. Lucia and Kevin were jumping with excitement outside the store in anticipation of cannoli goodness.

This cannoli place has tons of different flavors from chocolate to pumpkin pie and PB&J.

They even have a giant cannoli you can order. They make it to order so the shell doesn't get soggy. Imagine how many people it would take to eat a cannoli that big...

We ordered the bacon chocolate, mint chocolate chip and spicy chocolate mini-cannolis.

We also ordered a smores cannoli, topped with graham cracker pieces and 2 marshmallows, which the guy actually lit on fire to get the toasted marshmallow effect.


After satisfying our sweet tooth craving we made our way to the next stop. Along the way we passed a little mini-market that had a window display devoted to Pop-Tarts. Who knew Pop-Tarts had so many flavors?! I mean S'mores, Blueberry and Chocolate Chip I've heard of, but Wild Grape, Strawberry and Vanilla Milkshake, and Hot Fudge Sundae? Are we eating breakfast food or dessert?

Our next food stop was a Taiwanese pork bun place, also in the lower east side, called BaoHaus. This place opened very recently by a first generation Taiwanese-American and he makes traditional Taiwanese pork buns with some new twists.

Someone apparently made a big order earlier that morning, so we waited outside while reading the menu.

The cousins started to get a little restless as the wait continued. Kevin looks hungry.

While I didn't get a chance to test the owner on his Taiwanese, we did finally get a chance to snag some food. We ordered one of each of their baos - the Haus Bao (skirt steak bao), the Chairman Bao (pork belly fat bao), and the Uncle Jesse (fried tofu vegetarian bao).

We also ordered sweet bao fries (fried slices of bao with sweet sesame sauce), which I thought were surprisingly tasty - despite the slightly creepy looking black sauce.


We were also going to order the Taiwanese roasted peanuts, but unfortunately they were all out. I may have to drag Phil back there to give those a try. ^__~

Overall not bad aside from the wait.

Sunday, February 14, 2010

Chinese New Year Dim Sum

On New Year's day we went to dim sum with Phil's family, his aunt and his grandma. I guess since New Year's day was on Sunday my last post should have been Chinese New Year Eve...oh well...

Here is Phil's grandma, his aunt and Phil's mom.



While we were eating, a dragon boating group doing lion dance for the new year actually came into the restaurant (drums and all), which was no small feat considering you have to go up 2 flights of stairs. There were 2 lions and they danced in between tables collecting lucky red envelopes and letting little kids pet the lion heads. We didn't give any luck money, so I guess no good luck for us this year (-__-)


The rest of the performers were crowded by the door playing the drum.

Me and Phil for our first picture of the new year. You can see the 2 lion heads in the background.

Peter and Winnie.

Dim sum food comes and goes pretty quickly so I didn't get a lot of pictures of the food, but I did grab a few.

One of my favorite dishes was the powdered donuts, because really who doesn't like powdered donuts?

Phil's dad ordered 2 orders of the coconut jelly (left) because he was worried they would run out. We also experimented with a new mochi type dessert wrapped in banana leaves, which none of us had before. It was filled with a sweet peanut filling. It was delicious! ^__^

Chinese New Year this year happened to fall on the same day as Valentine's Day, but this was as much celebrating as we did. Although Phil did buy me a very sweet Valentine's Day card. Who says all the romance is gone after marriage ^__~

Saturday, February 13, 2010

Chinese New Year

Happy New Year! This year in the Chinese calendar it is the year of the tiger - more specifically the white tiger. And you can't have a Chinese New Year without celebrating with the family.

We had to split the celebrations between both families, so first we headed over to my mom's house for New Year's lunch. My mom bought a roast duck from Chinatown for the occasion. Apparently she had to go to 5 stores to get one because they were all sold out. But check out how tasty the duck looks.




Tam undertook the task of figuring out how to cut the duck. I think next time we should just get the pre-cut roast duck...

Mom made shark fin soup. Shark fin is very expensive, so this is only for special occasions.

The full lunch spread included the Peking Duck, some steamed fish and tsao mi fun (stir-fried rice noodles).

Family picture time!

After lunch at mom's we drove into the city for dinner at Phil's parent's house. His mom prepared a full spread including steamed chicken, tofu skin soup, stir-fried rice noodles, bean sprouts, roast pork, cabbage and abalone, and a few other dishes.

His mom also made some kind of rice cake type of dessert, although we never actually ate it...It looked good though...

The actual dessert that we had was a lemon merengue pie and an almond amaretto cake that Winnie's boyfriend, Peter, bought from Whole Food's. The almond amaretto cake was pretty good, though I didn't eat too much of it, and the lemon meringue pie was nice and tart.


Family and lots of food - what better way is there to spend New Years? ^__^

Friday, February 12, 2010

Macaroni Grill

Friday night, after picking my mom up from the train station, we headed out to Macaroni Grill for dinner. Phil and I haven't been since we were still in Ohio, and this was my mom's first time in over a decade!

Here I am with my mom waiting for our food to arrive. The decor in the restaurant is very nice with the mural of Italy on the walls.


As an appetizer we ordered the crab stuffed mushrooms, which were pretty good.

I ordered the Sausage Salentino - pasta with italian sausage and "broccoflowers"...still not quite sure what a broccoflower is, but it looked like a green cauliflower. The pasta was a little too undercooked for my taste.

Phil and my mom both ordered Pollo Limone Rustica - spinach and chicken with penne pasta. This one was actually pretty good, but too bad the bowl was deceivingly shallow and there wasn't really much food.

Phil swears the portions were bigger in Ohio. I guess we'll have to test that theory out the next time we go back to Ohio.

Wednesday, February 10, 2010

Snow Storm

We got hit by the major snowstorm that went up the east coast - 24 hours of straight snow fall with over a foot of accumulation! We were trapped inside the whole day (although that's not that different than most days for me...). Phil even had to work from home. We just watched the snow keep piling higher and higher as the day went on.

The view from our living room window:


Look at the poor guy outside walking his dog in the blizzard. Good luck trying to convince Phil to get a dog after seeing that!


All the houses behind us are just as buried under the snow. Phil braved the cold for 5 hours to attempt to clear some of the snow before it got piled too high.


The next day, after the snow finally stopped falling, before heading off to work Phil managed to clear out the couple of inches off the driveway that had accumulated after the last time he shoveled the day before. That left me to clean off the car...it's somewhere hidden beneath all of that snow...
Luckily the sun was out so after I got through the top foot or so of snow the rest melted off nicely.


We even have some huge icicles hanging from the trees in our front yard. The icicles are so big I'm surprised the branches haven't snapped off the tree yet...


Gotta love the snow...

Saturday, February 6, 2010

A Cappella Quarterfinals at Rutgers University

After spending the morning/afternoon in the city we made the drive home and met up with my sister and brother-in-law for dinner at a restaurant called Main Street Trattoria. It's a little Italian restaurant in our town's downtown main street.

I had the Bowtie pasta with fresh pesto cream and pinenuts. Phil's not really a fan of pinenuts so he didn't think it was that good, but I thought it was delicious.


Phil ordered the Chili Rubbed Pork Loin.


And my sister ordered a Mozzarella Salad.



After dinner Phil headed home and I hopped in the car with Mandy and Tam to check out an A Cappella contest at Rutgers University. A Cappella is basically a vocal singing group that sings without any instruments. There are a lot of college a cappella groups that sing anything from 80s to current rock or pop music. There's a contest called the ICCA (International Championship of Collegiate A Cappella) that holds a competition for college a cappella groups across the states that was holding one of its quarterfinals at Rutgers University.

Some of the groups were really good. The hosts, Deep Treble from Rutgers U., were my favorite, but unfortunately they weren't competing. The winners of the competition ended up being a co-ed group called the Orphan Sporks, also from Rutgers U. Second place went to a group called the Melismatics from Lehigh U., and third place went to the Trentones from Trenton, NJ (picture below).


If you've never heard a cappella I definitely recommend it.