Heidi has a review of Bombay Olive. Bombay Olive is one of the newest Indian Restaurants in West Hartford. I pretty much agree with her entire review, so go give it a read.

Heidi and I had dinner with friends Amy & Kyle tonight at Firebox in Hartford. Firebox is located at 539 Broad St in a very cool building with lots of exposed brick and intriguing decor. The food at Firebox focuses on using locally grown ingredients whenever possible. The food is contemporary American cuisine. The menu includes a prix fixe selection that features CT grown ingredients. It’s the hook for Firebox.

I loved the building. The bar area is beautiful, with cool wrap-around booths and lots of exposed wood and bricks. I almost wish the dining room was in the bar area because the decor there is much simpler.

As for the menu, there’s not much for vegetarians. Just a few salads, a risotto dish, and a chef’s vegetarian special (the only entree that’s vegetarian). Beyond that, it’s a pretty typical menu for a higher end dining experience: a reasonable number of choices, an interesting cocktail list, and what is supposed to be a good wine list. We didn’t order any wine, so I can’t really comment on that.

Overall, I liked our meal and the experience there. There was one snafu with our orders, where Amy, who also ordered the vegetarian entree, got it prepared the way I needed (without mushrooms) rather than as described on the menu. Beyond that, the service was unremarkable but timely. I really liked the food I ordered, even devouring the broccoli (and I hate broccoli normally). The portions were enough to sate our hunger, but the consensus seems to be that they were a bit smaller than ideal (Kyle’s salmon was the only exception, I think).

We did have a shock at the end of the meal when we got the final bill. With no wine or drinks at all, the bill was well north of $100 for the four of us. In that light, the meal didn’t measure up. It was good, don’t get me wrong, but not that good. Because of the price and limited choices, I don’t know if I’d go back there. It’s certainly good food, but I like the food at Bricco better if I’m going to be spending that kind of money.

(PS. it’s been really hard to not type Firefox instead of Firebox this whole time)

After seeing Avenue Q, we hung out with my sister then headed off to dinner. Just by coincidence our car was up on 56th, so we ended up walking around there for dinner. We ended up at Topaz, a Thai restaurant on W. 56th St. I don’t have much to say, except that both entrees we tried were excellent. It’s been a while since I’ve had great Thai food, probably since I left Boston. This was great. The decor was alright, the service was very good, and they had a good selection of entrees. Heidi had the Massaman curry, which she loved, and I had the Tofu Pad Basil, which I devoured. If you’re in the neighborhood, it’s worth swinging by.

Most people are somewhat aware that the Indian food you get at restaurants represents just a subset of Indian cuisine. Like China or the U.S., different regions of India have different foods. On top of all of that, the food that Indian restaurants serve doesn’t really represent the normal, everyday meals. You probably wouldn’t find meatloaf or fried bread at an American restaurant in India, either. Restaurant Indian food is generally Punjabi (north-central India), southern Indian, and Marathi (around Mumbai) food.

My family comes from Gujarat, a state in northwestern India. While we do actually eat a lot of the same food you find in Indian restaurants, there’s little actual Gujarati food in Indian restaurants. That makes it hard to show Heidi what types of food my mom might make, and it makes for a convenient excuse to go visit Mom for some good food.

My sister may have found a better reason to go visit her in New York: she’s found a restaurant that specializes in Gujarati food. Vatan is an all Gujarati restaurant offering an all-you-can eat prix fixe menu. It is an amazing find with great food, great ambiance, and an excellent staff that makes it very easy to dive in. It’s so good, I’ve been there twice within four days and would happily go again.

The prix fixe setup makes it very easy to find a meal you can enjoy. This is not a buffet, but rather a three course meal that comes in thalis (a platter) for each individual. The thalis consist of a small portion of a number of different dishes. Adventurous eaters can try everything but you should be warned… this is a LOT of food. The selection of appetizers is so good that it’s a test of willpower not to ask for seconds of everything right there.

You can find a menu of all of the dishes on their web site. The most remarkable thing was khichdi and kadhi, a weekly meal growing up for my family. I usually only get that at home, and rarely at that because my mom usually makes something “special” instead. The dal and rice is also very traditional, and a common meal growing up. The menu is entirely vegetarian, by the way, representing the more typical Gujarati diet.

If the food weren’t reason enough to go, they’ve also worked very hard on the decor and ambiance. The restaurant recreates a small village setting inside with fake trees and foliage and a mural complete with a well in the restaurant.

It also has unique seating. At my uncle’s house in India, we used to sit on the floor in the kitchen to eat meals. At Vatan, they’ve created raised booths that simulate sitting on the floor with a slightly raised table. Shoes are left on a small shelf that runs along the outside of the booth. They do have a few tables with more Western style seating.

The only negative aspect of Vatan is the price. The prix fixe menu doesn’t come cheap, running about $24 per person. That price does not include any drinks aside from water. Even with that in mind, Vatan is worth it. You will not leave hungry, and the experience is unique, and the food is amazingly good. It’s not your typical Indian food and it’s not your typical Indian restaurant. That alone makes it a must-try for anyone that loves Indian food.

Almost at the bottom of a box of Trader Joes Chocolate Covered Soy Nuts. Man, I miss having them around.

The Cheesy Gordita Crunch is the world’s perfect food. It is unfair for you to offer such temptation to a hugely pregnant woman who is so unable to resist that she had a dream about eating one last night. Please cease and desist all advertising of this deliciously evil concoction.

Thank you.

Sincerely,

Hugely Pregnant Woman

PS – Your so-called Fire Sauce does not live up to its name. Can you fix that too please?

Have any of you tried the new Coke, Coke Zero? I just bought some today from the cafeteria. It’s, um, interesting. It tastes more like regular Coke, but in a weird way. Not sure if I like it quite yet. The bottle is quite striking though, with the all black appearance. I wonder if the soda is actually darker than normal Coke or if it’s simply a function of the rest of the labeling being black.

Sujal, I almost thought this was your secret blog for a second
Folks who live in boston, this is one guys “burrito blog” where I guess he just comments on all the burritos that he tries throughout the city. Pretty amusing.

Due to popular demand (Heidi!), I am finally getting around to posting about my trip to Oaxaca. About a month ago I joined my friend Ami in Mexico, and spent three nights and three days eating as much as possible and walking around Oaxaca and some ruins. Just a little history, Oaxaca is the land of the Mole, which is a really great spicy sauce you can put on everything for those who have not had the pleasure. It can be green, red, or black, and is in my opinion really tasty. Ami was down there to research a story she is writing on cooking in Oaxaca, and to help her out I took a huge sacrifice and came down to help her enjoy the restaurants and take a cooking class.
To tell my story better, I will include some pics

Ah resting at the zocalo, a very cute plaza that is right in the center of Oaxaca. My first evening in Oaxaca!!!

Mmmmmm coconut flann… The first restaurant was fantastic, mole negro for Ami, mole verde for me.

We then took a pretty frightening bus trip out to the ruins of Monte Alban. The road was extremely narrow, very curvy, and the bus driver went as fast as possible. I think we were convinced it was going to go over at certain points, especially when there was a bus coming the other way…

The climb up the stairs was really tough…

Us looking cool!

My cookling class. The bed and breakfast was wonderfull, that is Pilar (the woman who taught the class) setting the table. The kitchen was like most of the houses, in the middle and open out to the sky in the middle. Really lovely. Our class taught us: mole verde, tamarindo juice, mango sorbet, quesidillas with mushrooms and peppers complimented by this tomatillo quacamole (my fav!)

And Last but not Least! I call this “Ami, and the sunset”

…and so is the party. If you know what I am talking about, then you must be there. And I mean all of you. Feb 6th, usual place, 4:30 to 10 (or earlier if you really want). If you aren’t coming, you best explain why. I’m coming from Detroit, so you better come too, especially if you are local.

There will be a revised menu this year, so you never know what you might get, but it will be in the usual style. Rumor has it that there is a large flaming device and the potential for liquid nitrogen.

Make sure your freezer is at 0 degress. Otherwise you get soup…Oh and don’t forget to add the cream after your custard has cooled..
Just an FYI for everyone out there.

Ok, going back to our roots of fatmixx (no, not hotmix!). I just found the most amazing thing ever… there is this site for twinkies, and they have recipes!!!!
Twinkie sushi!!!!!!!

Tried something especially cool this past weekend: Chocolate Jalapeno Gelato. I had this at Tisane on Saturday night. It was so good… it essentially tasted like chocolate Gelato with a surprise kick as an aftertaste. Basically when your tastebuds unfreeze from the the ice cream, you can taste the little bits of Jalapeno in the gelato. Amazing idea, having a spicy desert.

I really hate these new fangled terms and isms. But i do know people this describes. Can You Be a Vegetarian and Still Eat Meat?
What do you think? Can people still call themselves *vegetarian* if they eat meat?

Great news. Chocolate is good for your heart. Not just your metaphorical, Valentine’s Day heart (stop snuggling, you two!) but my single, lonely heart as well. With discoveries like these, who needs pizzagra? I plan to spend this weekend making my heart as healthy as I can.

How does pizza with artichoke, asparagus, ginger, garlic, onions, chocolate and banana sound to you? A U.K. supermarket chain intends to introduce just such a concoction under the mark “Pizzagra,” claiming it to be a frozen pizza that will “set pulses racing and libidos leaping.” Sounds more like a prescription for really bad halitosis (and maybe a few other malodorous conditions) than romance to me.

I just sent out an email to my friends and family asking them for their favorite recipes. Since I have recently turned 30, I’m getting this weird urge to collect recipes. Partly I want to get as many of my family recipes as I can. Partly, I want as many good recipes as I can find anywhere (Polish or non). So, if you have any good recipes, post away! Thanks. I’m not the best cook in the world, and I’d like to learn to be better, but I do love hosting little get-togethers. So if you send me a really good recipe, maybe I’ll invite you to my bake-off. Tee-hee.

I thought that few people actually believed in this diet, but I guess I’m very wrong. The Atkins diet is becoming popular enough that several major restaurants are now advertising Atkins approved menu items. Over the weekend, I saw TV spots for Subway’s new Atkins approved items and this morning I caught an ad for TGI Friday’s new Atkins approved menu on ESPN.com. And when they say Atkins approved, they mean it… items are endorsed and approved by Atkins Nutritionals, Inc..

I guess it’s easier for these companies to hop onto a fad diet program (especially one which seems so easy to follow… “Eat all the fat you want!”) than to encourage moderation which would, of course, hurt profits. The menu choices for the Atkins items are pretty amusing, too… Subway gets rid of their signature bread (remember those ads about fresh-baked in the restaurant bread?) and turns to wraps instead. TGI Fridays turns instead to, well, common sense by removing the side of French Fries in their approved items. They replaced it with broccoli, though, which means they just lost George H W Bush as a customer. It just makes me wonder why people don’t just cut the french fries out, period (or at least only have em once a week or something) and just eat a moderation of bread?

Here is the “recipe” for one of my favorite quick meals:

5 or 6 Morningstar Farms Veggie Sausage Links
4 or 5 spoonfuls of hummus
2 or 3 spoonfuls of Mrs. Renfro’s Habanero Salsa (the Green Salsa works well, as does Trader Joe’s Hot Fresh Salsa).

Basically prepare the sausage links as you normally would and mix the hummus and salsa together. Use it as a dip.

Yummmmy!

I sent out an email to folks at work asking for restaurant recommendations in or around Bristol, West Hartford, etc. I got a pretty good list of responses that I’ve put up on my web site. I’ll update it as I get more info and actually try it out.

Is it a fringe concept or something? Now and again I run across something that is just almost repulsive in terms of misrepresentation. I had an Uncle Ben’s Pasta Bowl for lunch the other day, specifically the Garden Vegetable Lasagna. While the dish was heating up, I looked at the front of the box and thought about the history of Uncle Ben, pictured as a kindly, old black man dressed as a plantation butler. That’s something for another post, though.

What’s relevant for this post is a little graphic on the front proclaiming that the dish was “98% Fat Free.” Now, I wasn’t expecting this to be healthy or anything (it’s a microwave meal in a bowl, after all), so I was mildly surprised. I flip over the box and look at the ingredients and see the following:

It’s not terrible, but I’m looking at the fat totals and it’s clearly not fat free or even nearly fat free. Generally, I would expect the fat totals to be near zero for that definition. Now I’m intrigued because I’m trying to figure out how they get 98% Fat Free from the numbers on the box.

Eventually, it dawns on me. The entire meal is is 340 grams of food. There are 7 grams of fat in the 340 grams of food, meaning that the food is only 2.06% fat or 97.94% not fat. Technically, I guess they’re telling the truth.

I have to say that this is misleading in such a subtle way to be almost evil. I mean, even that psychotic hungry man breakfast we posted a while back would sound healthy by this method. That meal, with it’s 64 grams of fat (a mere 98% of your daily value) and 231% of your RDA of cholesterol is 86% Fat Free!

I shudder to think about what meal could be less than 80% fat free.

A more honest method would be to create a ratio between the total calories and the calories from fat, since they together indicate what you’re actually going to consume. In this case, the bowl shows up as about 21% of the calories coming from fat, which is pretty good according to the FDA (we should keep fat intake down under 30% of all calories consumed). That crazy Hungry Man breakfast offers 55% of it’s calories from fat. Not so good, and that doesn’t even take into account that their breakfast puts the average person at 50% of their total calorie intake for the day.

Pizzahh cuts cancer risk?? Who knew. All I know is I am heading off to NYPizza (on tremont or mass ave) as often as possible now!
read story here

Yahoo News says:

ROME (Reuters) – Gorging pizza could help reduce the risk of certain forms of cancer — Italian scientists say.

In a twist to the accepted medical wisdom that food you really enjoy tends to be bad for you, researchers at a Milan pharmacology center found that eating one or more pizzas a week dramatically reduced the incidence of some types of cancer.

A study of 8,000 Italians found that regular pizza-eaters were 59 percent less likely to contract cancer of the esophagus, while the risk of developing cancer of the colon fell by 26 percent.

“We knew that tomato sauce was protective against certain tumors, but we certainly didn’t expect that pizza as a whole would provide such strong protection,” researcher Silvano Gallus told Sunday’s La Repubblica newspaper.

Who knew this was a good idea?
Sujal, I think you need this for you new place. What is it you say? Why, it is OctoDog! (hopefully works with tofu dogs as well)

So I finally had a Krispy Kreme from the wakefield store (one of my coworkers was kind enough to bring some in for the group). I have one glaring complaint:
How in the world are you supposed to tell what is inside these donuts. I took a gamble between a delicious jelly (or maybe strawberry cream cheese?) and a yucky lemon creame. Of course I chose the wrong one and ending up just eating around the lemon stuff. I don’t get it, if the stuff is not highly visable, how do you tell.
Anyhow, the donut was ok, I hate the lemon, but I enjoyed the outer “glazed” part…
one day maybe I will see the light…

Looks like that oreo lawsuit might have worked. Apparently people are acutally afraid of a lawsuit. I guess this is good, since I think that we pack way too much “crap” into these cookies, and anything done to fight obesity is a good idea. However I think that we as americans have never learned the lesson of moderation, and my fear is if oreos are deemed “heathier” then people will take this as an excuse to pig out even more on them. At least I know I will (ie evil snackwell’s vanilla creame cookies that force me to eat them).

Slashdot is running a poll about favorite hot sauces. The poll discussion is great if you’re looking to expand your hot sauce horizons. For example, I didn’t know that there were actually official ratings for how hot peppers are. Neat links:

• About the Scoville scale
• Dremann’s Pepper Hotness Scale
• Lots of folks mentioned Dave’s Insanity Sauce as one of the best… it’s made from pepper extract, so one drop is enough for most foods

So, who’s going to try this? Heidi?

PS. My vote was for Habanero Specifically, I love Mrs. Renfro’s Habanero Sauce on nachos when I want some kick. For regular salsa, though, I live on Trader Joe’s Fresh Hot Salsa. I go through like 4 containers each week.

Apparently California “public interest” lawyer Stephen Joseph has just learned that trans-fats are bad for you, and that they’re present in Oreo cookies. So he’s suing Nabisco, seeking a ban on Oreo cookies. Joseph alleges that this case differs from the suits against Big Tobacco and McDonalds, since people know tobacco and fast food are bad for you, whereas “very few people know” trans-fats are bad for you. Apparently, Joseph has had his head in the sand for the past 20 years, and has never figured out that Oreos aren’t exactly the most healthy of snack foods available and THAT’S WHY WE LIKE THEM. Sheesh.

One of my friends just sent me this link. This has to be one of the funniest things i have read in a while. This person found some old weight watchers “recipe cards” and put them up on the site for all to see. If it were the recipes alone, would be sort of weird, but the commentary, oh the commentary! Snippet (in reference to a recipe entitled “Mackerel Pudding”:

Once upon a time the world was young and the words “mackerel” and “pudding” existed far, far away from one another. One day, that all changed. And then, whoever was responsible somehow thought the word fluffy would help.
Oh, and eggs, too

Sural once again gets credit for this “review” of the new Hungry Man breakfast. Scary, scary stuff. And, really funny in a sick way.

Here’s a teaser: 231% Daily Value. And they ain’t talking about Vitamin C.