Thursday, May 27, 2010

"Lost" marathon

D and I have been watching "Lost" since the beginning. For the past few seasons, we've been watching it with a small group of friends, waiting three or four weeks between viewings and then blowing through all of the saved episodes in one night.

We knew the finale was coming up on Sunday night, but due to various scheduling conflicts, our group was still four episodes behind. I was afraid we'd get spoiled if we didn't watch the finale immediately, so I talked our friend into hosting a Lost marathon, starting at 3pm, interspersed with some board games and BBQ (mmm, rack of lamb), and ending with the finale.

There was a minor catch in the plan; we were planning to watch in Sunnyvale (near Wolfe & 280), and I'd promised a friend that I'd pick him up at SFO around 8pm. Since we were watching the show by downloading the episodes rather than with a DVR, our choices were to watch the finale in real-time, or to wait until the East Coast feed was done and then hope that a copy got uploaded really quickly.

The flight that I was waiting for landed at 7:27pm, seven minutes late. At that time, we were wrapping up the fourth saved episode. We finished it about ten minutes later, and I was out the door and onto 280 by a little after 7:45pm. The pickup at SFO went smoothly; my friend beat me to the international arrivals area by five minutes, and from there I took him back to his place in Redwood Shores. Unfortunately that meant that I had to come back down 101, which was a bit more congested, but by the time I hit the 85 interchange I realized I had a good chance of getting back in time for the start of the 9:00pm finale. After merging onto 280, I called my friends to let them know we should go with the real-time plan, and a few minutes later, I walked in the door at 9:03pm. 80 miles in 75 minutes = fun. Whee!

The only downside was that it turned out that watching the finale in real-time was excruciating, due to the frequent and lengthy commercial breaks. I'm not used to watching commercials at all, let alone 45 minutes of them.

Sunday, May 23, 2010

b2b++

Last Sunday, D and I ran our second Bay to Breakers. (Actually, I ran my second, he ran his third.)

Last year we stayed Saturday night with a friend who lives less than a mile from the starting line. This year, our best overnight option was to stay about two miles from the start. I asked D if he was okay walking/jogging two miles before the race; he thought that it would be a great warm-up, so the plan was set. We were out the door by 7am, with the only hitch being the 50-degree weather. I decided at the last minute to start the run wearing a fleece, because I was pretty sure I would freeze in my sleeveless dry-fit shirt otherwise.

We started the race with two friends, but D was in Corral A and the rest of us were in Corral B. Then, the three of us lost track of each other as we were weaving our way past the crowds of slow joggers and walkers during the first mile. I'm really not sure why there were so many people who were obviously NOT 10-minute milers in our corral. Next time, I'm going to sign up for Corral A; I'm definitely not capable of running 8-minute miles but apparently no one else observes the rules, so now I don't feel obliged to, either.

Anyway, by the end of the first mile, the crowds had thinned out a bit, and I was on a pretty good sub-10 pace. This was the first time I'd tried running an event while wearing my heart rate monitor, and I must say, I'm a big fan. First of all, it was useful to know at each mile marker how fast I was running. Secondly, it was really easy for me to determine if my pace was too fast or too slow; all I had to do was maintain a constant heart rate. I spent most of the race between 165 and 170 bpm, except at the Hayes Street Hill and in the last mile and a half, where I was consciously ignoring the monitor.

Just before I started up the hill, I took off my fleece and tied it around my waist; it was still cold but I figured I'd be warmer soon enough. I ran the rest of the race like that, but in the end I was glad I'd brought the fleece; it got really cold after the end as we were walking back.

Last year I got frustrated at the top of the hill because there's a part where it flattens out for a few meters and then starts going up for another block. Unfortunately, you don't know this until you get to the flat part, and then you realize you're not done yet. This year I knew what was coming, and paced myself properly so I didn't have to stop for water at the top. Nevertheless, I went into the third mile at around 18:40 but didn't hit the fourth mile marker until nearly 30:00.

It was pretty uneventful running the fourth and fifth miles through the park. I managed to make up a little ground time-wise, but it still took me until almost 49:00 to finish the fifth mile. Luckily the last few miles are mostly downhill, and I was able to gain some ground there. I'm really not sure about the right technique for running downhill, but I was basically running faster with longer strides in order to maintain my heart rate.

In the end, I managed to finish in 1:11:12, which was well under my goal of improving on my 1:15:38 last year. That's a 9:33/mile pace, which I think is the fastest I've run a "longer" (over 5k) race since I was twelve. D also achieved his goal, which was to run the race in under an hour. He finished at 59:43 (vs 1:02:53 last year), which is an 8:00/mile pace. We were both quite happy with our times.

This year, I'd also decided to wear my phone while running, so I could use My Tracks to track my run. I put it in a little zippered pocket on the back of my running shorts, which was annoying for the first few minutes, but after awhile I got used to it. I'm glad I did; the program collected a bunch of interesting stats, and generated graphs for both elevation and speed. Unfortunately the speed graph seems to only be available on the phone and not on the exported map.

I started the track during our warmup, so the stats cover more than the race itself, but apparently we went a total distance of 11.4 miles, and my average speed was 6.3 mph. I also extracted some data from the heart rate monitor; my average heart rate was 154 beats per minute (including the warm-up), and my max was 194.

After finishing and meeting up with D and the others, we went to pick up our T-shirts and then we started walking backwards along the course. We'd figured out last year that it was a good idea not to pick up the T-shirts until the day of the race, because then we could change out of our sweaty gross shirts and into the new shirts before walking back. Along the way we saw lots of interesting costumes, including a N'avi couple, as well as a couple of centipedes. Honestly, after awhile I was too tired and hungry to care much about watching the runners, so after about three miles of walking, we headed to Park Chow for brunch.

I think we beat most of the race crowd there; we only had to wait maybe ten minutes for our table for four. I think took a little longer to get our food, but maybe we were just so hungry that it felt like a long time. I ordered the Marion's Pancakes, D had the Chicken Sausage Scramble, and both of us had polished our plates in short order. From there we took the Muni (bus, then metro) back to the ballpark, and then walked another mile to get back to where we started.

Overall, we walked, jogged, and ran about 14 miles around San Francisco that day. Unfortunately, the Friday before the race, I'd switched to a standing desk at work. I'd been warned that it takes awhile to adjust, but after Friday I was feeling good about my ability to stand all day. Monday was a different story, but I made it through the day, and even went to my regular 6pm kickboxing class. That probably delayed my recovery; it wasn't until Tuesday evening that my legs (and shoulders, strangely enough) stopped being sore.

Anyway, I'm looking forward to next year; it'll be the 100th Bay to Breakers!

Friday, May 21, 2010

Chicago wrap-up

During this last trip, I was only in Chicago for four days, and two of them were work days. (As an aside, our Chicago engineering office has a lovely view and really nice engineers.)

Thursday night was the dinner at Topolobampo, and then Friday night we ate at Harry Caray's with some family friends. Despite all the other delicious food that we had that weekend, the dry-aged bone-in ribeye we had there was still a highlight. It was a pretty nice ambiance too; a kind of old-timey sports bar vibe.

On Saturday, we meant to go for a morning run, but by the time we actually got up, it was nearly noon. We decided to do go anyway, and ran over six miles along the lakeshore and then to Navy Pier. The lakeshore was tranquil and scenic, but the air was extremely cold (high 40s), at least by my Californian standards. Afterwards we walked around the Navy Pier area, the Magnificent Mile, and then back to my brother's apartment to shower and change.

At that point it was about 3:30pm and we had yet to eat. Since we were going to Moto for dinner, we didn't want to eat very much, so we decided to try to make it to Hot Doug's before their 4pm closing time, for their super fancy hot dogs. Unfortunately, due to a Google Maps snafu, we didn't make it in time, so we settled for Jim's instead. After that we had just enough time to look around Grant Park/Millennium Park and check out "the bean" before heading back again to change for dinner.

Some of the photos we took in the park:





On the way back, we stopped at More to buy some cupcakes. My brother said that bacon maple and the house special were his favorites, but as it was nearly closing time, they were out of both. We bought some cupcakes anyway, and took them home to save for Sunday's breakfast.

As I already mentioned, the dinner at Moto took six hours! We got home well after 2am and then hung out watching Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs until we all fell asleep.

We had an afternoon flight on Sunday, which meant we could still fit in a leisurely brunch before heading to O'Hare. My brother had wanted to take us to Table Fifty-Two, Art Smith's restaurant, but wasn't sure if they served lunch. On Saturday, I called them to check, and they said they would be open, but were fully booked due to Mother's Day. On Sunday morning, as headed out on our way to try our luck at another brunch spot, I idly suggested we stop by anyway to see if they had any cancellations. Amazingly, the bar facing the kitchen was free (I guess no one wants to sit at a bar on Mother's Day?) and we were soon seated and happily perusing the menu. Later we learned that they are only open for brunch a few times a year, so we were doubly lucky that day!

Anyway, we ended up ordering chicken and waffles, shrimp and grits, and mac 'n' cheese. The chicken and waffles were definitely the best (it was a good thing we ordered two plates of it), but the other dishes were good too. We were told the mac 'n' cheese was made with about a pound of cheese, which sounded about right; since we were sitting right in front of the wood oven, we got to watch many times as giant mounds of cheese melted into bowls of macaroni. It was a fitting end to a very satisfying weekend.

six hours of Moto (part 2)

The second half of our meal started out with this course, which was listed as "Coffee Break" on the menu but was referred to as "Shabu-ccino" by the servers. In any case it was a cute idea; a "cappuccino" made with veal stock, fermented black garlic, and soy sauce "coffee", with potato bisque "creamer" and a truffle oil "sugar" cube. The stock was accompanied by thinly sliced kobe beef, edamame, carrot and potato. Both the potato bisque and truffle cube were delicious by themselves, but eventually I threw them both into the broth to try to dilute its saltiness. I was only partially successful.



Next up was "Duck & Mole". The duck was braised and served lime sour cream inside a cannoli shell. On the plate was the mole sauce, freeze dried corn powder, white jalapeno powder, and crunchy pepitas. I actually quite liked this dish except that the mole was too sweet compared to the awesomeness that was Rick Bayless' black mole sauce.


"Crepes that are Cheese" consisted of two servings of "cheese" made from crepe batter mousse, and one serving of "crepe" made of cheese. The pink "cheese" was encrusted by a raspberry puree "wax" and the blue "cheese" was made with caramel and blueberry puree. The "crepe" was a smoked gouda served with grand marnier and apricot chutney. I think I was only moderately satisfied with the textures of this course (the mousse was too pasty, and the cheese "crepe" was a bit waxy) but the flavors were fun and I really liked the apricot "crepe filling".


The parade of desserts started with this "Pina Colada", which was among my favorites. The bowl initially contained rice and dehydrated pineapple flakes in rum-infused coconut milk, and then the server poured in a fair amount of liquid nitrogen, to keep the flakes crunchy. The experience of eating the flakes in coconut milk reminded me of eating cereal, and the overall taste was light, mildly sweet, and very refreshing.


This strangely named "Rainbow Sprinkles" course was barely a dessert. The cupcake was a real cupcake, but the batter was made with foie gras fat, and the filling was a creamy foie gras mousse. The "sprinkles" were made from pistachios and lentils, dyed with beets to give them color. There was also a more traditional preparation of foie gras, served with blueberry gastrique. The cupcake was interesting and I enjoyed it, but I let D have most of my foie.


I'm not sure this course really resembled a "Snow Ball" but it was yummy anyway. The orange liquid is a carrot cake puree with hints of ginger and cinnamon. Inside the "ball" is more of the same puree, on a base of cream cheese, and then encased in solid white chocolate. The pink topping is cherry flavored coconut. When I broke through the white chocolate with my spoon, the carrot cake puree actually squirted out at me. Luckily I didn't make a mess. There were also bits of orange, apple, and walnut in the bowl. I liked the combination quite a bit; the puree was subtle and mostly savory, which offset the white chocolate well, so the whole dish was pretty low on the sweetness scale.


Our "Banana Split" courses were served to us on giant "battleship" plates. The bowl was filled with banana sorbet "ramen noodles", banana custard, roasted cocoa nibs, roasted almonds, and bits of maraschino cherry. The pipettes were filled with syrups: chocolate, caramel, and cherry. The syrups themselves were a little sweeter than I would have liked, but it was super fun sucking them out of the pipettes. I mostly ate the banana part by itself.



This "Acme Bomb" was the smallest but also one of the best courses we had that evening. The "bomb" has a chocolate exterior, a liquid graham cracker interior, and a marshmallow "fuse". After setting down the plates, our server lit the "fuse" which caused the marshmallow to cook. The entire thing had to be eaten in one bite, which tasted very much like a campfire-toasted smore. Yum.


The following course was listed as "Chocolate Truffles" but we figured there must be a catch. Of course, there was. The other name for the dish was "Truffles that are truffles", and although it looked like we were being served a gigantic raw truffle, the overall taste was much more like chocolate truffles. Beet mousse and black truffle mousse were coated with cocoa nibs and cocoa powder, and served with hazelnuts, freeze-dried beets, and chocolate ice cream. Again, great balance of sweet and savory.


The very last course was a "Root Beer Float". The root beer was homemade but unremarkable; the interesting part was that it was served with a vanilla "packing peanut". It really did look exactly like a packing peanut! We were warned to eat it quickly before it started to collapse (I waited the longest because I was taking photos, and towards the end, it really did start to shrink.)


As you can see, dinner was really fun despite taking almost six hours. We'd been warned by a friend that the full tasting menu would likely be a bit of an "ordeal" and there were times when we started to tire, but there were enough "wow!" moments to keep us engaged pretty much throughout the evening. I told someone afterwards that it was like being served a constant stream of little works of art that happened to be edible.

After the meal, as we were looking for a place to take a group photo, one of the servers suggested we go downstairs to visit "the lab"!

He showed us around a bit; apparently they use it as both a TV set and as a private dining area. Then, he answered some of our questions about the food we'd just eaten, and asked us about our favorite and least favorite courses. We told him we loved the Onion & Gruyere, Yellow Snow, Cigar & Ashtray, the Pina Colada, and the Acme Bomb, but were less fond of the Red Bull Paella and the Phunnel Cake. It was a fun chat, but as a result, we got out the door just before 2am. Craziness.

Tuesday, May 18, 2010

six hours of Moto (part 1)

Because obviously we hadn't gorged ourselves enough at Topolobampo, two days later we were headed to Moto.

(Okay fine, in reality I had booked both reservations weeks in advance.)

That morning, we prepped for what we knew would be a marathon eating session by running over six miles in sub-50 degree weather. Then, we starved ourselves all day, with the exception of a hot dog apiece from Jim's Original Hot Dog.

We arrived at Moto promptly at 8pm, and were seated in sparse, modern room. The table was quite large for four, and I thought at first that maybe there would be a lot of dishes at the same time, but that turned out not to be the case.

Soon after sitting down, we were served the menu. The actual words were printed with edible ink on rice paper, and that paper was attached to both sides of a piece of crunchy pita. (One side was the "gtm" aka grand tasting menu, while the other was the abbreviated "ten".) It was served with pickled ramps and a slice of artichoke. The pita itself was pretty good and certainly did not taste like a menu, but it was a rather large piece and I didn't try to finish it. The ramps and artichoke were well-prepared, but hard to eat with the small fork that we'd been given. For me, the menu was more of a novelty than anything else. Oh, and the side with the "ten" tasting menu encouraged customers to live-tweet their dining experiences. Hrm.


We of course went for the whole shebang, so we were soon served the first course. Each dish had a clever but not very-descriptive title; this one was "Cotton Candy", and it consisted of gin-soaked grapefruit, tobiko, and escolar (a fish). It was hard for me to judge this one as I didn't eat the fish, but I think we all agreed it was kind of hard to see why the different components were paired together, and how the name related to the actual food.


I liked the next course much, much better. It was entitled "Onion & Gruyere", and it was well-plated, creative, and delicious. Rich onion broth (with almost no water added) was served with caramelized onions, dehydrated onion, and bruleed gruyere cheese. The cheese was especially addictive; I was practically licking the bowl.


The next dish was one of the least impressive of the evening. Before it arrived, we speculated quite a bit on what "Red Bull Paella" would look like. The server brought out plates of skate wing with puffed rice, and then popped open a small can of Red Bull, from which she poured out a creamy chorizo sauce. I hear the skate itself was good, and the puffed rice was fun to eat, but I wasn't sure how it fit with everything else. I did enjoy the saffron beads, but felt they were better eaten alone as the sauce tended to drown out their flavor.


Next up, the "Phunnel Cake" turned out to be pheasant cooked two ways: a small piece of breast, served with emulsified pheasant stock, and then a bit of pheasant cooked into a "phunnel cake" shape. I found the "cake" preparation crunchy and yummy, although slightly salty, but was not as fond of the breast.


This was one dish that I wish had been larger. Moto's "Loaded Fries" were a puree of potato and sharp cheddar, accompanied by thin strips of crispy potato skin, as well as jalapeno and bacon bits. The cheddar taste was quite strong but the texture was not cheesy, and the crispy bits added some crunch. I thought it was a pretty good take on comfort food.


I expected to either love or hate "Yellow Snow", and as it turns out, I loved it. The "snow" was made of shaved meringue, and the yellow color was achieved with curry and lemon curd. The flavors were well-balanced and it was fun piling the meringue bits into the indentation in the middle of the plate where the curd was.


The "Cigar & Ashtray" may have been my favorite course of the evening. The presentation was superb: the cigar was composed of smoked pulled pork and red pepper coulis, wrapped in braised collard greens, with crushed sesame seed "ash". To complete the illusion, the "cigar" was wrapped into authentic cigar paper.


Next up was the "Forrest Roll", which was a sushi roll that was "all forest and no sea". The "fish" was actually rabbit tenderloin colored with beet juice, and the "seaweed" was mushroom paper. Arborio rice and brussel sprouts completed the roll, which was served with crushed sweet pea "wasabi", sliced radish "ginger", and allspice aioli. It was a little disturbing at first to be eating what looked like sushi but tasted completely different, but the sensation grew on me, and I quite enjoyed it. My only complaint was that the aioli was perhaps a bit too heavy.


I liked the mushroom part of the "Maitake and Pork Belly" dish much more than the pork belly. The pork was very tender, but was prepared with a surprisingly rich garlic, ginger, and lemongrass reduction, which I found a bit syrupy. In contrast, the mushrooms and vegetables (gailan greens and Chinese broccoli) were more subtle; they were simply sauteed with mushroom puree.


We were curious about the standing "mushroom", so our server explained that it was constructed by aerating mushroom consomme, which was then dehydrated into a mushroom shape, no mold necessary.


This "Deli-Style Pasta" dish was supposed to come next, but somehow it got skipped, so we notified the waitstaff and they brought it out a few courses later. It was a Reuben "sandwich" with bread made of caraway seed pasta. The filling contained corned beef brisket, sauerkraut, and Swiss cheese. The sandwich was served with thousand island dressing, fresh dill, and a dill potato chip. I liked the caraway taste but thought the pasta texture was too mushy. The chip was a bit sour (which I liked) but the sauerkraut seemed not sour enough.


At this point we were only halfway done with the meal! I'm going to save the other ten dishes for a future post, but wanted to make a few general observations.

The courses were only described on the menu with cutesy names such as "Cigar & Ashtray", but the servers would give lengthy descriptions while serving them. Consequently, one of my dining companions ended up whipping out her trusty Blackberry early in the meal. Whenever a dish was served, the four of us would all listen diligently to the description, and then after the server left, we'd try our best to regurgitate all the details. It would probably have been better to have brought a voice recorder, but we did manage to retain a surprising amount of information.

I was responsible for the photography side. As a result, I was probably less useful for remembering descriptions, as I would often be shooting continuously trying to get action shots of broths being poured or flames being lighted (still to come). Luckily, the others yielded to me the seat with the best lighting, so I did manage to get most of the shots I wanted.

Since we had run so much that morning, I was extremely thirsty, so I kept drinking water, and kept excusing myself to use the bathroom. After awhile I started to wonder if the waiters thought I was bulimic. Anyway, it was lucky the bathroom was close by and hardly ever occupied.

(To be continued...)

Sunday, May 16, 2010

Topolobampo (with Rick Bayless sighting!)

A few days after we got back from Asia, we were off to Chicago. D had a business trip, and I seized the opportunity to visit my brother and work out of our Chicago engineering office. As always, I was very impressed by Chicago's tall buildings, clean streets, and excellent public transportation (San Francisco, I'm looking at you!). I also had many opportunities to be impressed with Chicago cuisine, starting with our dinner at Topolobampo on the very first night.

Rick Bayless (aka winner of Top Chef Masters 2009) has three restaurants in Chicago, all Mexican-themed, and all adjacent to each other. Topolobampo is the most high-end, but also the only one that takes reservations, so I booked it almost immediately after finalizing our Chicago plans.

We got there just on time, but unfortunately we were forced to wait over twenty minutes before we were seated. Luckily there was a display of books, sauces, and other goodies for sale, so we didn't get too cranky while waiting. As an apology, our waitress brought us two ceviches for free! Each martini glass was generously filled with shrimp, king crab, jicama, and cucumber, with a creamy lime-serrano dressing. I actually liked this ceviche better than any of the ones we ordered later.


In addition to the ceviches, we had this complimentary guacamole with jicama and cucumber chips. I don't like avocado much so I didn't try the guac, but the jicama was fresh and sweet and tasty.


Once we got the menus, we discovered that there were three tasting menus available, in addition to the a la carte menu. I'm a sucker for tasting menus, so we ordered all three (to share between the four of us), and supplemented with a trio of ceviches.

As I said before, I liked the free ceviche the best. However, the trio was also quite good. On the left is a hamachi ceviche, with avocado-tomatillo guacamole and mango-grapefruit salsa. It was good, but quite sweet, so it was not my favorite. The middle one paired shrimp and calamari with lime and orange juices, habanero, avocado, jicama, and cilantro. This one was too avocado-y for my taste. Finally, on the right is a marlin ceviche, with tomatoes, olives, cilantro, jicama, and green chile; it was my favorite of the three.


On to the tasting menus!

First we were served trout in escabeche. We'd had escabeche-style fish in Peru, and although I didn't try the fish itself, this sauce was similar in flavor. I liked the accompaniments: shiitake mushroom, puffed wild rice, and napa cabbage.


The next dish was also fish, but luckily it was uncooked. I couldn't tell what type of fish it was exactly, but the menu said "sashimi-grade Hawaiian day-boat catch". It was served with salsa and pineapple, but the fish itself had a fair amount of flavor already.


This course confused me a bit. The waitress described it as "enchiladas" made of jicama "tortillas", with crispy chicken and roasted vegetables. I felt like both the enchiladas and the chicken were overly fried for my taste.


I liked the subsequent dish much better; it was a red chile soup (very smoky and flavorful) with beef shortrib, "chayote" (a vegetable), and corn flour dumplings. I actually liked the soup itself more than anything in it.


Next up, seared pork belly with roasted tomato-habanero sauce, served with slow-poached egg and black beans. The pork belly itself was good but not stunning. I avoided the egg, but other people thought it was nicely done.


These pork carnitas were quite good, although I'm not sure if it was the meat that I liked so much as the delicious tomatillo salsa. The morel mushrooms were also yummy, as always.


Here we had another pork dish; this one had both carnitas and pork belly, confit-style. Bayless seems very fond of both jicama and tomatillo; again we had a fresh green tomatillo sauce, and again it was very good. The "homemade tortilla" didn't taste that different from a regular tortilla.


I didn't have this Alaskan black cod, but I ate plenty of the accompanying black barley (satisfyingly crunchy) and the sweet peas were also good. D liked the fried bits of blue crab roe, but I think I prefer my fish eggs raw.


Lots of fish that day; this one was a walleye with chile-peanut salsa. I liked the salsa very much, so I kept picking it off the top. The yellow stuff is an "uchepo crumble" which was kind of interesting, and there were also some beets and onions on the side, which I used to scoop up lots of the yummy roasted tomato-guajillo sauce.


This was one of my favorite dishes; the waitress explained that it was supposed to resemble a seashore, with "sand" made of yuca and "sea" made of chile, epazote (a spice), and tomato sauce. It was supposed to taste something like a seafood stew, but much lighter. All of the seafood was fresh and delicious, and it was really fun eating the "sand" with the "sea". Yum.


The next dish was highly anticipated; perhaps too much so. It was a lamb ribeye in black mole sauce, with seared lamb belly, huazontles (a vegetable), and black bean "tamalon" (the striped pastry-looking things). The mole sauce itself was very good, but the lamb was only above average. The tamalon were a bit disappointing; I thought they were too doughy, but I'm not sure what they're supposed to taste like.


Last of the entree dishes, this was rabbit cooked "barbacoa" (slow-cooked over open fire) with rabbit chorizo, mashed potatoes, and guacamole. Both preparations of rabbit were tasty, although the chorizo was a bit salty.


With three tasting menus came three desserts! The "lightest" one was a coconut rice pudding with creamy black "sapote nieve" (not sure what that is but it was yummy). On top was a toasted rice pastry, orange cream, and puffed rice. It was very good and I would have eaten more of it except that I liked the next dessert so much.


This was my favorite of the three; it was a fudgey chocolate ganache cake with espresso pudding, bittersweet chocolate ice cream, and crunchy cookie bits. Yum.


The last dessert sounded really interesting and was quite good, but I think it got outshone by the other two. It was called "Fruto de Cacao" and paired Mexican chocolate cake and milk chocolate ice cream with a foam made of cacao fruit. Unfortunately, the cacao fruit seemed not to have a very strong flavor.


In addition to the desserts that we'd ordered, we got two freebies. Because it was my brother's birthday, they brought him a passionfruit sorbet (very tart, very delicious). Also, we all got some mignardises: chocolates and gelees.


Amazingly, I've yet to mention the best part of the meal. Just as we were starting on our desserts, we noticed some other customers excitedly gesturing and whispering towards the kitchen. We became convinced that Rick Bayless was "in the house" and D asked if we could meet him. After some time, our waitress asked D to "quietly" follow her to the back of the restaurant. Since I knew that D barely knew who Bayless was, and my brother was a huge fan, I quickly told my brother to go instead, and I followed him with my camera. As a result, my brother had his photo taken with Rick Bayless, got to chat with him for a few minutes (he was super nice), and eventually we were even presented with an autographed menu. It being his birthday and all, I also bought my brother an autographed copy of one of Bayless' books. I'm such a nice sister. (Of course, this had nothing to do with me having been too lazy, tired, and/or forgetful to acknowledge my brother's birthday all through my college years...)

Anyway, it was a fantastic experience, and I highly recommend Topolobampo to anyone visiting Chicago. I'd be surprised to find another chef anywhere in the country that executes upscale Mexican food as well as Rick Bayless does.

Friday, May 14, 2010

tourists in Taiwan, part 4: Kenting

The last part of our trip took us to the southernmost tip of Taiwan. We left Kaohsiung after lunch and it took almost two hours to get to Kenting, so we didn't have time to do much that day except check-in and eat dinner.

Luckily, the streets of Kenting are filled with restaurants and food stands. After walking up and down the main street a few times (too many Western and Thai restaurants!) we found an authentic Taiwanese place, where we had sticky rice in bamboo, pork over rice, a very interesting vegetable that I hadn't eaten before (local specialty) which tasted a bit like the outsides of sweet peas, and some other goodies.


After dinner, we wandered the streets looking for snacks and desserts. We ended up eating green tea frozen yogurt, fried milk, grilled squid, "sausage wrapped in sausage", and more.



Bright and early the next day, we were off to Kenting National Park (墾丁國家公園). There are lots of beautiful trees, ferns, and other plants inside.



The land that is now Kenting was once underwater, and many of the rock formations in the area are actually comprised of ancient coral reefs. As a result, there are some impressive ravines and such.


Last year at the Taiwanese-American Cultural Festival, I learned that nearly 60% of the world's supply of orchids originate from Taiwan. Inside the park, we found a greenhouse full of orchids and other tropical flowers, which my mom enjoyed very much.


We wound up our visit at the new(-ish) National Museum of Marine Biology & Aquarium. We've been to really nice aquariums in Dubai (UAE), Valencia (Spain), and near home in Monterey (California), and I was pretty impressed with this one. They have a giant coral reef exhibit that has three separate tubes inside which give visitors great views of all the sea life. They have a whale shark (we watched the feeding, which was fun), two beluga whales, lots of manta rays, and other cool-looking creatures that I couldn't identify. They also have a some Gentoo penguins, which might have impressed me a few years ago, but not after having seen the Magellanic Penguin colony in Argentina and the Little Penguins on Phillips Island.




We left Kenting at around 5:15pm, and were on an express train bound for Taipei by 7:06pm. We arrived exactly ninety-six minutes later (love the high-speed rail), and grabbed a late wonton soup dinner before heading to bed.

Overall, it was an awesome trip, and I look forward to being a tourist in Taiwan again soon. Next time: Hualien, Taroko Gorge, and Sun Moon Lake!

 

This is my personal blog. The views expressed on these pages are mine alone and not that of my employer.