Just a few midweek odds and ends, and other stuff….
Just An Observation
I was having lunch at Pho Hoa Hiep recently, when I gave my Com Tam dish (Com Tam Bi Cha Suon Nuong – $5.80) a "break" and came up for air.
As I gazed across the restaurant, I noticed something. Two-thirds of the customers were non-Vietnamese! During a meal a few days later, I noticed the same thing. I recall that when I first started eating here, almost all the customers were Vietnamese. I couldn’t help but smile…… You see, sometimes when I read that the "Best Chinese Restaurant" in San Diego is PF Chang’s(Pick up Stix is #4!), the "Best Japanese" is Benihana (Todai is #6!), sheesh…. This mild change in demographics tells me that San Diego’s tastes are changing, albeit slowly, and people are trying new things.
I think it’s a wonderful thing….
BTW, the Com Tam was pretty good, the pork chop was moist and tender, if a bit shy in flavor, shredded pork is tricky, this version was soft and moist, not the dry and tough stringy stuff. Not bad at all.
Rice Is Nice!
I don’t know what it is….perhaps withdrawals from doing Plate Lunch Week. But I’ve been craving rice. My rice intake had been seriously cut down since moving to San Diego, but recently…I dunno. I’ve been making stuff like Kimchee Fried Rice.
No recipe, I just use whatever’s on hand. The required ingredients are Kimchee(of course!), onions, Gochujang, and another one of those magical "four letter word" ingredients,(others being stuff like L-a-r-d and P-o-r-k) Spam®! I also like garlic in my Kimchee Fried Rice.
It could have been worse, remember my Spam® Katsu Curry?
Which led me to make stuff like this…..
Just an omelet…..
A fried rice omelet. Some left over Portuguese Sausage Fried Rice as filler……
Marukai Coming to San Diego
Check out this building on the corner of Balboa and Mercury.
No big deal, huh? Maybe a closer look….
There it is….Marukai. This looks like a 99-cent store operation, but all the buildings in the complex are being worked on. Daiso is a large Japan based "100-yen" store operation.
I’d been waiting for Marukai to open up since we moved to San Diego. I sent Marukai Corporation an email, and here’s the response:
Dear Valued Customer,
Thank you for contacting us.
We are planning to open San Diego store.
Hopefully non-food section will be open in August 2007 and food section will be in late this year.
We will put our upcoming store information at www.marukai.com.
Again, thank you for contacting us.
We hope see you at our new store soon."
Regards,
Marukai Corporation
Tel: 310-660-6300
Fax: 310-660-6301
So there it is…..
Some other posts on Marukai can be found here, here, and here.
Passionate Eater….
Like I’ve said before, I truly feel blessed to have gotten to know some of the wonderful fellow bloggers and readers of our little blog. It seems like mmm-yoso just started a short time ago, so I was a bit startled when Jay, the Proprietor of the Linkery graciously called me "The dean of San Diego food bloggers", kinda makes me feel really old……. But come to think about it, my San Diego Food Blogs typelist has really been growing, with excellent new blogs starting up all the time. I hope you give them a try.
I haven’t been able to meet one of my favorite fellow bloggers, Passionate Eater, but ‘PE’ as we call her, has always filled her wonderful posts with humor, and Her comments have always been so kind and positive. So when PE broke the news that she was leaving San Francisco, I knew that I needed to do something a bit special. This is not bad news per se, PE will be taking on exciting new challenges in New Orleans(another great food city!). Since PE was the one who requested, nay demanded that Sammy and Frankie have their own photo album, I thought this appropriate:
Good Luck PE!!!
"oh-oh, did I do that?"