Restaurant Review: World Gourmet

World Gourmet Chinese Buffet - lunch on September 1, 2013

World Gourmet is a Chinese buffet restaurant. When they first opened, their price point was a little high but I think they realized that when business didn't take off.  Since then, they've lowered lunch to something like $10.99 for adults with a 10-15% discount for seniors.  The only reason I don't know the exact price is I only come here with my parents and my dad always pays :). They also send out coupons in the local mailers so we usually come here then.

The interior

It's not that it's a bad place to go but I can't say any particular dish is striking or something I would make a special effort to come here for. It's just simply a buffet and they offer a wide variety of dishes like most buffet places.

The cold dishes on ice

From seafood, soups, and fried foods to typical Chinese dishes and a few dim sum offerings to sushi and Mongolian BBQ, there's a little something for everyone, including fresh fruit, an ice cream machine, cookies and egg custards for dessert.

The fried stuff

Despite all the variety, I have to admit I usually stick with a few tried and true things and call it a day. If I'm low carbing, this is a viable choice since I can get chicken a couple of different ways plus some beef stir fries and the baked fish. I just skip my normal siu mai, gyoza and General Tso's Chicken.

Soups and other entrees

But the hard (First World problem) part for me at buffets is I usually can't eat that much in one sitting.  Yes, there have been exceptions to that but in general, unless I've just come for a 5-6-mile run or longer instead of an hour of sitting down at church, I don't get my (or my dad's) money's worth at a buffet.  There's some element of it being a food trough that goes against the grain for me.  I like to eat but I'd rather have a reasonable portion of really good food than a lot of mediocre food.

Rice, noodles and stir fries

What it is good for though is if you have a large group or if you want to throw a party here.  They have several sections of the restaurant that can be leveraged for large parties and you pay a per-person fee and get a room to yourselves (depending on how many people you have) and your guests can help themselves to all the food.  It's handy when you have to account for a variety of tastes and preferences plus want someone else to do the cleanup.

Crab and clams

 Otherwise, honestly, I say the food is just "okay".

The fresh fruit section

Dim Sum

Sushi

Mongolian Hot Pot

Meats for Mongolian Hot Pot

Orange Bundt Cake

Orange Cake - made October 26, 2013 from Adventure's Heart

I would consider this more of a summer picnic cake so if it's already cold where you live, this might bring back a taste of warmer days if you long for higher temps. I myself enjoy cold weather but live in a mild climate so, as I like to torment my friends on the East Coast and in the Midwest, recently switched from sleeveless tops to short sleeves. It's also been "chilly" enough where I live that I even occasionally bring a jacket to work.  I don't usually wear it but I do bring it.

This recipe makes a smaller amount of batter than a typical Bundt cake so I used a smaller ring pan for it but you can bake it in a regular Bundt cake without any problems.  I made the rare, rare mistake of overbaking this cake, not because a smaller pan needs less baking time and I misjudged but because I was trying to be really good about not underbaking that I overcompensated the other way and talked myself out of taking the pan out of the oven when I first wanted to.  Sigh.

Most people would probably still like it and perhaps not even consider it overbaked but just right.  Not me.  It helped that this has a nice, orange glaze to keep it moist but my picky taste buds just know this would've been better had I taken it out even 2 minutes earlier.  2 minutes.  Yes, I'm that picky.

3 eggs

1 cup sugar

1 teaspoon vanilla

zest from 1 orange

1/4 cup oil

3 tablespoons sour cream or yogurt

2 cups flour

3 teaspoons baking powder

juice of one orange

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees.
2. Whisk together eggs, sugar, vanilla, orange zest, oil and sour cream or yogurt.
3. Combine flour and baking powder and add to egg-sugar mixture, alternating with orange juice.
4. Pour into greased and floured Bundt pan. Bake for 25-40 minutes (start checking with a toothpick at 20 minutes and in 5-minute increments after that).
5. Remove from oven and let cool in pan 5-10 minutes.  Unmold and let cool completely or to lukewarm.  Glaze with half the glaze and let set.  Pour remaining glaze over cake and serve.

Orange glaze (optional)
Zest from 1 orange
1 1/2 cups to 2 cups powdered sugar, sifted
juice from 1 orange

1. Combine orange zest and sifted powdered sugar.  Add orange juice, one tablespoon at a time, whisking smooth, until glaze is desired consistency.  Use immediately or re-whisk if it sets before you use it.

Crash Hot Sweet Potatoes

Crash Hot Sweet Potatoes - made October 22, 2013 from The Creekside Cook

The original blog where I got this recipe from has a note that the recipes and pictures on her site are copyrighted so I'm not posting it here but you can click on the blog title to go directly to the recipe.

Essentially you slice sweet potatoes into thick rounds, parboil them for 10-15 minutes until they're slightly soft, dry them off, crush them with the bottom of a glass, brush with melted butter and olive oil, sprinkle with a spice rub on both sides and bake, turning them over so each side can brown. It's important for the boiled slices to be dried off or they won't get crunchy, according to The Creekside Cook and I proved that to be true.  I don't think mine were completely dry as they didn't get very crisp on the outside. But they were still good.

Japanese sweet potato - red/purple skin

For  this recipe, I experimented and made it with 1 regular sweet potato and 1 Japanese sweet potato.  I had never heard of a Japanese sweet potato until my coworker told me about them and very nicely brought me 2 she had gotten from the farmers' market.  Apparently they're only available there and sometimes at Whole Foods. A google search also says they're typically available just during fall so now would be the time to stock up on them.

Japanese sweet potato - white inside like regular potatoes but tastes like a sweet potato

It's a little startling to see the white inside of a sweet potato which makes it look like a regular white potato but it really does taste like a sweet potato.  As a matter of fact, after I made this recipe with both kinds of potatoes, I found myself liking the Japanese sweet potato better.  It didn't get as mushy as the regular sweet potato and it tasted just as good.

The cooked Japanese sweet potato

And remember I mentioned I had the best sweet potatoes ever in China? One thing I failed to mention is although they told us at the time that they were sweet potatoes, they too were white on the inside so I thought at first they were regular potatoes and they were referring to them as "sweet" because of the caramelized outside.  But they really did taste like sweet potatoes.  Well, problem solved - they must have used Japanese sweet potatoes.

Regular sweet potato

This was a good way to make sweet potatoes, the Japanese or regular kind.  Make sure you slice them into thick rounds as you do crush them with the bottom of a glass which would flatten them even more so you don't want them too thin or they'll bake more like chips than slabs.  I think I might've boiled the regular sweet potato a little too much as they got mushy and hard to smash properly. If you're already planning your Thanksgiving menu, this might be a nice change from the usual sweet potato casserole.

Regular sweet potato

Restaurant Review: Sundance the Steakhouse

Sundance the Steakhouse - dinner on October 18, 2013, 3.5-star rating on yelp

This is the kind of restaurant I seek out when I'm meeting friends for dinner - not because it's a steakhouse (although that doesn't hurt) but because it's small, local and family-owned.  It's also been open for years but this was my first time there, despite it being located just outside the Stanford campus and I lived near there for a couple of years. The downside is the parking lot is really small and during the dinner rush, you'll more than likely have to find street parking.  I'm legendary for my inability to parallel park so street parking is not something for me to look forward to and I was already running late due to traffic.  But I made it and it didn't take hardly more than 2-3 tries before I could get my car decently parallel parked.  Honest.

Seared Ahi Tuna Sashimi

Although Sundance offers a variety of entrees, not just steaks, including the Ahi Tuna Sashimi above that one of my friends ordered, since it was my first time there, I had to get a steak they were known for.  According to their menu, that was their prime rib.  I got the petite cut (8 ounces) and added some prawns to the mix. Our waiter (or the menu, I forget) said they slow roast their prime rib for 8 hours.  I know nothing about roasting meats but whatever they did to it made it fabulous.  Just about fork-tender, juicy and tasty.  I don't like my steaks too bloody (i.e. no, I don't want it still twitching on my plate) and always ask for them to be cooked medium.  Some places overcook "medium", some places undercook it.  Sundance did it perfectly.  I enjoyed the shrimp too although the sauce it came in was a trifle sweet for me but I think that was just in contrast to the savory nature of the prime rib.

Slow Roasted Prime Rib (petite cut), Garlic Mashed Potatoes and Jumbo White Gulf Prawns

And of course, dessert.  There were three of us for dinner and that meant we split three desserts.  I know how to pick the right friends.  I ordered the apple pie a la mode - it being autumn, it's a good time to order anything with apples since they're in season and apple pie with ice cream is good anytime.

Apple Pie a la mode

One of my friends got the mud pie since Sundance's menu calls it their "famous" mud pie.  I don't know how famous it is but I like a good mud pie as much as anyone.  What I liked about Sundance's is they made it with coffee ice cream which I prefer in a mud pie over vanilla, especially paired with hot fudge. 

Mud Pie

Our third dessert was the Butterscotch Creme Brulee.  I thought it was good but I have to give the nod to Lion & Compass' butterscotch pot de creme as being creamier and richer.  Still, three good desserts after a great prime rib dinner - life is good.

Butterscotch Creme Brulee

Chocolate Butterscotch Bars

Chocolate Butterscotch Bars - made October 18, 2013, modified from Chocolate Ecstasy by Christine France

Um, can we say "fail" on this one?  I've had this recipe for awhile and kept wanting to make it but putting it off because I always forgot to buy hazelnuts which is what the original recipe called for. I finally got tired of procrastinating and substituted macadamia nuts for the hazelnuts so I could go ahead with it.

The crust was easy enough although it never really formed a dough but remained dry crumbles, like a shortbread crust for my usual lemon bar recipe.  Undaunted, I patted it into a tart layer anyway and went with it. Then I got started on the topping and that's pretty much where the baking gods decided to forsake me and throw me into the failure pile.  For one thing, the directions were a bit sparse in terms of how long to cook the topping to get to "golden".  For another, when your topping ingredients are all pretty pale in color to start with (butter, granulated sugar, LIGHT corn syrup and condensed milk), yeah, golden is subjective.

So you can imagine what happened next.  I'm cooking it over the stove top, whisking away, waiting for that perfect golden moment.  It never happened.  Or if it did, it shot straight from "golden" to "butter separating out, haha, nothing you can do about it" in the blink of an eye.  Butter separating out in a mixture like this means I had the heat too high and I cooked the mixture for too long.  It can usually be fixed by lowering the heat, adding a little cream and whisking to emulsify the butter back into the mixture.  Except I didn't have any cream at the time and adding milk didn't work because by then, I think the butter had decided it was all or nothing in heading for the failure pile and gave me the finger. 

Plan B: throw away the topping failure, melt an 11-ounce bag of caramel bits with a little milk, add the macadamia nuts, pour over the tart crust and forge ahead.  Which is what I did.  So I was able to salvage this so it wasn't a total lost cause but it's not going onto my Baking Hall of Fame wall either. The crust wasn't sweet enough to eat on its own and ironically, paired well with the caramel layer because of it. The dark chocolate topping was also a good complement to the caramel.  So taken all together, this was a decent cookie, especially if you don't have much of a sweet tooth and prefer dark chocolate over sugar.  I don't so it's not something I'd make again....even if I could make the original topping properly.

2 cups all-purpose flour
½ teaspoon baking powder
½ cup unsalted butter
1/3 cup light brown sugar
5 ounces unsweetened chocolate, melted
2 tablespoons ground almonds

Topping
¾ cup unsalted butter
½ cup superfine sugar
2 tablespoons light corn syrup
¾ cup condensed milk
1 ¼ cups toasted whole macadamia nuts
8 ounces semisweet chocolate, broken into squares

1. Preheat the oven to 325°F. Lightly grease a shallow 12 x 8” baking pan. Sift the flour and baking powder into a large bowl.
2. Rub in the butter until the mixture resembles coarse bread crumbs, then stir in the sugar. Work in the melted chocolate and almonds to make a light dough.
3. Press the dough evenly into the prepared pan, prick the surface with a fork and bake for 25-30 minutes until firm. Leave to cool in the pan.
4. Make the topping: Mix the butter, sugar, corn syrup and condensed milk in a pan. Heat gently, stirring, until the butter and sugar have melted. Simmer, stirring occasionally, until golden, then stir in the toasted hazelnuts.
5. Pour the topping over the base and set aside.
6. Melt the chocolate in heatproof bowl over hot water. Spread evenly over the butterscotch layer, then let cool again before cutting into bars to serve.

Rolo Fudge Cookies

Rolo Fudge Cookies - made October 19, 2013 from Roxana's Home Baking

Around this time of year is usually when I'm making things that use up Halloween candy.  Either what you fish out of your kids' Halloween spoils or what you can buy on sale post-October 31.  If you've got some extra Rolos hanging around after tonight's candy gathering, here's one use for them: make a chocolate cookie dough and wrap it around a Rolo.  Then bake into a caramel fudge cookie.

With the ingredients in this recipe, i.e. a relatively high amount of chocolate chips and a low amount of flour, I expected the dough for this would be soft. Since the chocolate comes from chocolate chips, it stands to reason that after it melts and cools, it'll set close to its original solid form, even with the addition of butter, sugar and eggs.  So I wasn't too concerned after I mixed the ingredients that the dough was more like a batter.  I chilled it briefly but I was a little short on time so I probably made the dough balls a little too soon.  The dough was still really soft so it was a little hard to handle neatly and wrap around a Rolo.

My original plan was to form the dough around one Rolo per cookie and in an ideal cookie-baking world, the chocolate cookie wouldn't flatten too much and the Rolo would remain perfectly in the middle so when you bit into it, there would be free-flowing caramel amidst a fudgy cookie.  In the real world, because the dough was still too soft when I incorporated the Rolos into it, in some cookies, the Rolos were really off-center once the cookies baked.  Fortunately, the taste was still the same.  The cookies did flatten a little more than I wanted but they had a good fudgy texture and flavor.

If you read the original recipe below, you'll notice it calls for using chopped up Rolos and caramels and simply adding them to the finished batter then scooping them out.  No need to do any wrapping around whole Rolos.  That would probably be the easier and better way to go.

8 oz (224 grams) chocolate chips
3 tbsp (42 grams) butter
1/2 cup (100 grams) brown sugar
2 eggs
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1/3 cup (40 grams) all purpose flour
1/4 tsp baking powder
pinch of salt
1 cup chopped rolos and caramels (I just used the regular-size whole Rolos but minis or chopped Rolos might've been better)

1. Heat the oven to 350F. Line two baking sheets with parchment paper.
2. In a microwave safe bowl add the chocolate chips and butter and heat until melted (about 1 minutes) stirring to combined and smooth. You can also melt the chocolate and butter in a heatproof bowl set over a pot of simmering water.
3. In a mixing bowl beat the eggs and sugar until start to thicken and they have a pale color.
4. With the paddle attachment on, at low-to-medium speed, pour the melted chocolate over the sweetened eggs. It's important to keep mixing while you add the chocolate to prevent the eggs from cooking. Add vanilla extract and mix.
5. Add the flour, baking powder and salt. Stir until combined.
6. With a spatula, fold in the chocolate caramels.
7. Chill the dough for 1 hour or until hard enough to handle.
8. With a small scoop, place balls of cookie dough on the prepared baking sheets.
9. Bake in preheated oven for about 11 minutes.
10. Let cool for about 10 minutes on baking sheets before transferring them to cookie racks to cool completely.

Restaurant Review: Birk's

Birk's - lunch on October 9, 2013, dinner on October 21, 2013

Birk's is a bit oddly located in that it's literally on the ground floor of an office building in an office park.  According to its website, it's been open since 1989 so it definitely has staying power in a restaurant industry known for its high failure rate.  But Birk's seems to have found itself a good niche.  Not surprisingly because of its location, it seems to cater mostly to a business crowd and business travelers to the Silicon Valley.

It's a good place to go for a work lunch and/or team dinner as it has a variety of entrees and the slightly higher price points are still within travel expense guidelines for most companies. You can get steak, chops, seafood, and even a vegetarian dish or two which makes it a logical choice when you're dining with a group and everyone has different tastes.

I took a coworker there who had never been before and we went for lunch.  One of the cheapest items on Birk's lunch menu is their Wood-Grilled Burger with cole slaw and fries for $12 (extra if you want cheese, mushrooms, crab, lobster, avocado, etc). But beyond the value, it's also a really good burger and the portion is pretty sizable.  I opted out of the cole slaw which means they piled on the fries because there was room on the plate.  It was food-coma inducing but really good.  Sadly though, it meant neither of us had room for dessert.

By coincidence however, shortly after, one of my work groups went there for a team dinner so I got to dine at Birk's for a second time in a month after not having been there in over a year. No complaints here.

Carpaccio Filet Mignon

Fried Calamari

I'll let the pictures speak for themselves but we enjoyed a few appetizers that were all nicely plated and rather tasty.  I don't eat calamari so I skipped that but enjoyed the shrimp a lot.  That cute little bundle wrapped in white netting below and tied with a green ribbon is half a lemon, packaged up so you could squeeze the juice over the shrimp without seeds falling or worrying the lemon will squirt someone in the eye.  Clever.

Olive Oil Poached Shrimp

For dinner, I choose the Angus steak with truffle fries.  In case you were wondering, they had me at "fries". The steak was good although not as tender as others I've had. But still tasty.

New York Angus Steak with Truffle Fries

And of course there was dessert.  We ordered 2 dessert samplers for the table to share. The dessert sampler included White Chocolate Cheesecake, Chocolate Espresso Fudge Cake, Vanilla Creme Brulee and sorbet of the day.  I tried a bite of the fudge cake and a small spoonful of the creme brulee but had no interest in (or room for) the cheesecake or sorbet.

Dessert Sampler

But does it come as any surprise that I also ordered my own dessert of Pumpkin Bread Pudding?  It was a seasonal special and I offered it to the others to share (really!) although I probably made the most headway into it.  It was delicious. I like pumpkin but I don't necessarily love it and I'm okay with eating it mostly in the fall when it seems to be the season for it. But I love bread pudding and this was no exception.  They had some fancy chocolate decoration on top of it and I tried a bit but it didn't hold my interest against the pumpkin bread pudding.  It was perfectly made and although I probably could've done without the chocolate sauce on it, it was still good.  I couldn't finish it (too full by then) but I did my best and came close.

Pumpkin Bread Pudding