Weight Watchers recipe cards, circa 1974 are something that you just need to experience on your own.
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04Aug
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04Aug
The chef at Belga Cafe is pretty accomplished. Lots of noteworthy “palmares” to use a cycling term. It’s advertised as a Belgian restaurant complete with a proper Vlaamse chef. Having spent some time living in that part of the world, I am always anxious to eat at a place that is properly European. They offered a limited selection for Restaurant Week (RW):
Lunch
Red & Green—Tomato confit stuffed with baby grey shrimps and Salade Roulade with goat cheese and fresh herbs
Mussels—Mussels with Rodenbach beer, asparagus and bacon
or
Steak—Grilled hanger steak with béarnaise-beer sauce, farm vegetables and Belgian fries
Red Fruit Soup—Cherry and peach beer soup with fresh berry’s, home made vanilla ice cream
Dinner
Tomato, Sushi & Cigaar—Tomato gelee with seafood and curry-creme, a Chinese salad with Belga’s Cigaar and ‘Belgian Endive Sushi’
Rabbit and Crawfish—Rabbit fillet and sausage with sautéed Girolle mushrooms and crawfish tails, accompanied by a lobster and béarnaise sauce
The Belga Dessert Sampler—Belgian chocolate, summer fruit, home-made ice cream and Belgian Waffle
Nothing particularly struck a fancy with me, plus I wanted some good Belgian mussels, so I forewent the RW menu and went straight for the normal menu. I had:
Lauwe Aspargesalade: a baked asparagus salad with frisee tossed in a simple vinegarette topped with slightly cooked pieces of salmon. I have to note here that they totally forgot I ordered this. As I reminded them after one of my dining companions had already finished her salad and they were setting down the flatware for the next course, they finally brought it to me. Time was about 40 minutes after we sat down at the table. I’ll revisit this issue later. The salad itself was perfectly done otherwise. The salmon was fresh and just the right combination of seared on the outside and pretty much raw on the inside.
Mussels with Rodenbach Ale, bacon, and asparagus: Nothing really to say except this was exactly what I was looking for. Served with Vlaamse frites, this really hit the spot. Not a bad thing to say about this and you get exactly what you think it is. The mussels themselves were perfectly done.
Ice cream with waffles and chocolate sauce: Simple, exactly what the name of it is. The waffles were soft and tasty, the chocolate sauce was the consistency of Nutella, but good nonetheless. It reminded me of getting waffles at this corner pastry shop on the Leidsestraat in Amsterdam. Not Belgian, I know, but they were good waffles.
So I have to mention that the service was flat out bad. Between them forgetting my salad, LONG delays in service, I was really ready to hate this place. I really wanted to hate the aspargesalade but, damn, it was good. I just couldn’t get myself to do it. The place was packed, and we even had to wait quite a while to get our seat even though we had a reservation. The staff was trying though, and I think RW just really pushed the limits of the small space and the small staff. I’m not quite sure I could hold that against them in good conscience. I definitely would like to go back when it’s not RW and see how different things are then. I’m definitely going back for the mussels.
Belga Cafe
514 8th St SE
Washington, DC 20003
(202) 544-0100 -
04Aug
Yeah, yeah, DcFud has done its share of talking about Ceiba, but we feel it’s a moral imperative for us to share any and all of our Restaurant Week experiences, so we feel we’re on at least moderately solid ground here.
The popular restaurant from the Ten Penh, DC Coast family doesn’t skimp when it comes to Restaurant Week. Though appetizers and dessert selections are partially limited (offering only one of their famous ceviches along with all their soups or salad, and three dessert choices), the restaurant allows patrons to choose any entree off the restaurant’s extensive menu for the $30.05 deal (there’s a justifiable $7 surcharge for the Ribeye steak).
My best decision for the evening: the golden tomato gazpacho, served over a crab ceviche with a tomato gourmet. This was a delightful surprise; I’d ordered it after wavering between this and the ceviche, and seeking our friendly waiter’s advice. The delicate flakes of crab added a richness to the cool broth, and the real treat was the sorbet – tomato sounds like a less than appealing flavor, but it added a lovely sweetness to the dish.
For dinner, it was crab two ways – a crabcake over avocado, and a lightly-fried softshell crab over a shredded jicama salad. The salad wasn’t my favorite part of the meal, though I enjoyed the crisp jicama, but the crabcake was hearty and tasty. This was my first softshell experience, and I’m sure it won’t be my last.
Not much of a dessert person, none of the three selections interested me too much. I went with the key lime panna cotta, served with what was either papaya or mango. The overall effect was too sweet for my palate, though I enjoyed the dish’s creaminess.
With dinner, inspired by a recent Dcist post, I had a Spanish rose, which was an appropriately light accompaniment (I couldn’t tell you the label, though, and it seems inaccessible on the website). A friend had less success with her choice of a Riesling.
Companions were pleased with halibut, black bean soup and scallops, though a friend’s salmon dish had a strangely sour purple-colored sauce that none of us found particularly impressive.
Sure, we ate at 9 p.m., but the restaurant still deserves credit for giving us attentive, unrushed service during this busy time. As we were celebrating a birthday, they added nice touches like personalized menus and a candle in the birthday girl’s dessert. We also were given a beautiful table near the window.
Our incessant promotion aside, Ceiba’s a great bargain when RW comes around. -
03Aug
For those of you who don’t know me, I’m a control freak. I do need to do things MY way. This ends up being true with recipes. I change them to fit my quirks and idiosyncrasies all the time.
So one night, some of J’s co-workers are coming over for dinner. They are bringing a fabulous salad and we’ll be tossing some homemade pesto (that I made and froze) with some pasta. Salad and entrée done. I simply cannot have a dinner party (such that it is) without dessert.
I look for a cobbler recipe since they are fairly easy to assemble. Being the control freak I am, I don’t want just any old cobbler, I want the cakey kind. There are two kinds of cobbler, the biscuit kind that has what is essentially a scone dough floating on top of the fruit, and the cakey kind where the cakelike batter oozes down into the fruit and marries it into a fruit cakey mess of goodness. I find the following recipe on Epicurious.
For filling
1 stick butter
1 teaspoon lemon juice
4 cups fresh blueberries, rinsed and drained
1 cup sugar
For topping
1 cup self-rising flour
1 cup sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla flavoring
1/2 cup of milk
Accompaniment: Fresh whipped cream or vanilla ice cream
To prepare the filling:
Preheat oven to 375°F. Place the butter in an 8 x 8-inch square glass baking dish (no substitutes), and melt the butter in the microwave. In a mixing bowl, combine lemon juice and blueberries. Add the sugar and mix well. Add the blueberry mixture to the baking dish with the melted butter. Do not stir.
Make topping:
Combine all of the topping ingredients in a small bowl. Pour this mixture over the blueberries and bake 45 minutes, or until brown. This recipe is also good for apples, blackberries, and peaches.
A STICK of butter? A CUP of sugar in the fruit? The poor fruit will be doing the backstroke in a pool of sugary butter? I promptly cut the amount of butter and sugar in the fruit by half and cut the sugar in the topping by a third. Along with the lemon juice in the filling, I add a dash of REAL vanilla. I also add a half a teaspoon of cinnamon in the topping batter for added flavor.
I crossed my fingers about this because I changed the recipe fairly radically. It turned out wonderfully. Tasting a piece of the topping without the fruit, I actually thought I could have cut the amount of sugar in half, not just by a third. While it’s not always advisable to play with recipes when it comes to baking, my control freak mind can’t help but tinker with a recipe. -
03Aug
When people claim to be self-taught on a certain subject, most often they actually mean one of two things: 1) ‘Yeah, I went to school for it but it doesn’t count ‘cause they didn’t really teach me anything; or 2) ‘I have huge gaps in my knowledge base.’ Zaf is guilty of both answers, and with her current hand-to-mouth-ism she isn’t getting to the culinary institute of NY any time soon. There was only one thing to do- learn it on the cheap in Vietnam.
This is a roundabout way of saying that a few weeks ago found me cruising around the provincial village of Hoi An, about five hours south from the DMZ. I was looking for one of the fabled cooking schools, but finding one was tougher than getting a Ha Noi bookseller
to give correct change. Why? Because every single store was pushing cheap silk knockoffs of last years J Crew catalog, made while you wait. So when I say ‘finding one was tough’, what I actually mean was ‘I deeply regret that I was forced to stop and buy a silk shirt every five feet.’
So it was through blind luck that I finally found a small sign in Hai Scout Cafe where I stopped for a bowl of the local noodle dish, Cao lau. The Red Bridge Cooking School: a full half day’s lesson in traditional Central Vietnamese food was 14 dollars US and it was still the most I’d spent on anything, including hotels, since I’d arrived in the country.
The next morning started with the required walk-through of the local market. We established the medicinal uses of turmeric (stick it on zits), how to choose a good squid (flesh should be white and stiff) and what’s up with all that unripe papaya they eat (you have to use a special peeler-thing).
All the while getting pushed, cursed at, and stepped on by tiny ladies with yolks of soup and peanuts slung over their shoulders and baskets of lettuces and fish and kids stacked high on their heads.
Then we all scooted onto a boat and put-putted towards the school, up the muddy stream that flows through the village. A whole bunch of fisherman in wooden canoes and conical hats were throwing their nets into the water, and further up there were huge nets the size of tennis courts lining both banks on bamboo poles. Apparently at night they shine a light in the center and then scoop out all the stuff that it attracts. Like tourists.
The school turned out to be a restaurant with an extra big gazebo out in front overhanging the river. For Vietnam, land of the impromptu and jerry-rigged, it was surprisingly well done. We each had our own stove, all utensils were provided, and there was no lack of demonstrators, dish washers, people to make sure we didn’t light ourselves on fire, and a translator to explain it all.
The menu was a warm squid salad, roasted fish, eggplant stew in clay pots, yellow vegetable pancakes, and finally, homemade rice wrappers to use for spring rolls. These last things were so damn hard that not a single one of us got the bamboo flippy-motion the first time around; mess ups and waste water were thrown directly into river.
Anyway, I only found out later that the Red Bridge School is the most famous cooking school for English-speakers in Vietnam, with a recent cover article in the NY Times. Who knew. I’d just stopped for a bowl of noodles. -
02Aug
Thank god some folks are such serious gluttons for punishment. Otherwise, we wouldn’t be able to present you with our new DCFud writers. We’ve roped them in with offers of fame and fortune and now their culinary writing will be ours, all ours!Patrick (PKG)
PKG has got our restaurant reviews and recipes covered. He also plans to write about the joys and thrills of outdoor charcoal grilling, since he’s threatening to buy a sophisticated infrared thermometer just so he can measure grill temperature as a function of number of Kingsford briquettes.Avram (SouperAvram)
SouperAvram’s not much of a cook, or even much of a writer, but DCFud’s unofficial Free Food Offer Correspondent is known for going to great lengths to NOT pay for food, from hounding corporate offices to standing in line for hours at a time just to get a decent deal.
Chunae (CZ)Chunae is on a Socratic quest for the best food and is determined to find it. He’s not sure at what point he turned into a foodie, but he thinks the advent of FoodTV had something to do with it.
Jenn (JEB)JEB is a lover of food and drink, and even though she has taken several classes about wine, she believes that there is no better way to learn than to taste.
TC Duong (TDC)
With no professional “cred” at all, TCD continues to find new venues to spout off about cooking and dining because he does both all the damn time. He and his partner J run the DCFood Blog. Their wedding was described as a Quaker, social justice, feminist, anti-racist, Southern barbecue, pan Asian fusion, and scent free wedding.
