Mushroom Heaven

Cooking is an art, a form of self expression, which feeds both the body and the soul.  One of my favorite hobbies is cobbling together bits and pieces of different recipes into something better than any of the originals.  Following the jump is one such astounding success.

It takes a good 2 1/2 hours to make this beast, but it feeds me for a week and tastes like I'm eating at a 5 star restaurant.  I think I've died and gone to heaven just about now.

This can be turned vegetarian by using vegetable stock instead of chicken broth and using extra fresh mushrooms and eggplant in place of the chicken.  To go full vegan you'd need to find some sort of alternative to cream.  I'm not sure what in particular that would be, though.

Booyah Shed & Grill

My mother's side of the family has always nurtured a love of food.  Growing it. Cooking it.  Eating it.  It's as much a part of what the Nitkas are as football is a part of Green Bay.  I remember one of my three uncles for the huge gardens he's always kept.  I remember another of them for the bees he keeps and the amazing wonders of raw honey.  But neither of these is the one that I'll now have to start calling Chef.  That would be the third and final brother, the entrepreneur of the family, Uncle Dan.

This January I had the pleasure of visiting his brand new restaurant up in Wisconsin.  So strap yourselves in and come for a ride!  There will even be pictures.

The Week of Yummy Asian Food in the International District

It's not very often weeks can be given titles, but if you were to assign a title to this last week of mine, that's what it would be.

Last Saturday some friends and I had the great pleasure of wandering the streets of the international district for the Dragon Festival. No, not the GW event that happened the weekend before, but an actual real life Dragon Festival.

Many of the local restaurants put $2 taster options on their menu for the weekend, and if you tried out any 4 of them you'd get entered into a drawing for something or other. With a group of people it turned into quite the adventure. Everyone got a small taste of the $2 sample, and we got to try a ton of different stuff.

It was like a scavenger hunt, but for food. It was glorious.

My favorite ended up being the shrimp dim sum from the Dim Sum King and the pu-erh tea from the New Century Tea Gallery. They had a ton of pu-erh varieties, so I'd actually have to look up which was the one we liked so much. Many of them were aged. I'd never heard of aging tea before, but apparently wine and cheese aren't the only things that get better with time.

The Oasis tea shop, while not really having tea to write home about, had a really nice vibe going on and provided its not always that loud and busy I'd love to just hang out there sometime. You don't often find a tea place with a pool table. Overall I really liked the feeling of the International district. It had a lot of character. I don't know if I'd be brave enough to live there right now, but its certainly tempting to keep in mind.

Later in the week I was back in the area for a tour at my friend's company (which was awesome), and we stopped for lunch first at the Canton Noodle House. I really enjoyed their wonton soup. It was quite reasonably priced too, so if I find myself in the area and in need of lunch again, I'll definitely be stopping back in.