PB&J Cereal
t says: The other day I wanted lunch. But there was no food in the house. I spied some PB and J, so I figured that I’d make myself a sandwich. Unfortunately, I forgot about a critical ingredient – there was no food in the house … including no bread. Darn! I cursed my luck as I stared at the jars of PB and J sitting on the counter. Also on the counter was a box of Multigrain Cheerios (left out from earlier in the morning). And then it hit me. What if I had PB and Jelly cereal. Blasphemy, right? But why’s it song wrong? Cereal’s kind of like a grain! And it’s fortified! Maybe it’s even better than bread! So here’s what I did.
Ingredients:
__ 1 spoonful of PB
__ 1 spoonful of jelly/preserves (strawberry rules!)
__ a microwave-safe bowl
__ some cereal
__ some milk
Methods:
1) Put the PB into the bowl. Nuke for 30 seconds.
2) Mix the PB in the bowl so it’s nice and smooth (should be very soft). Add cereal and toss lightly until cereal is coated. It’s funky at first cuz it’ll seem like there’s not enough PB, but just keep on it and it should spread out.
3) Add the spoonful of jelly/preserves and toss – the jelly will end up thinly coating the cereal and hiding in some nooks and crannies – it’ll seem like there’s not enough – add more if you want, but try not to overdo it – it’ll be too sweet.
4) Add milk and enjoy!
Now, I know this doesn’t sound complicated. It’s not! It also doesn’t look pretty – but that’s ok!
PB and Jelly and Cereal
Who cares what it looks like? Eat it as you would cereal. I find that it adds some “oomph” to the cereal (i.e. it cuts down my AM cereal consumption from 2.5 bowls to 1) and is quite tasty. Give it a whirl once – chances are likely that you’ll more often have PB and J and cereal lying around than you will slices of bread!
Top Chef Masters kind of sucks …
t says: So g and I sidereeled Top Chef Masters, expecting to see some awesome cookery. Unfortunately, I’m not exactly convinced of these contestants’ awesomenesses. Actually, I think g summed it up best …
g says: These people aren’t good at playing Top Chef.
t says: It’s true! For the quickfire challenge, three people didn’t finish!! Have they never seen this show? Now I’m not saying I could do much better, however, these people are supposed to be the “masters”. And then that girl managed to win the quickfire with a dish that was TWO SALADS. I’m sure that the two salads tasted very good, but that is NOT a single dish – that’s TWO dishes!
g says: Padma would have set her straight … ‘m not sure I want to keep watching this show …
t says: But we do like the two Indian dudes …
Marabella’s Beefy Balls and Bread Pudding
t says: I was on my home today and decided to pick up lunch. Not feeling awesome (allergies are kicking my butt right now), I decided to go for something comforting and delicious rather than just heating up whatever was in the fridge. But what to do, what to do? All of Center City in front of me – where should I go? Well, it had to be new [to me], do takeout, and be warm. And then I happened to walk in front of Marabella Meatball Co – a place I had always wanted to try! kp tried it a while ago but wasn’t impressed despite the favorable reviews it had garnered. BUT – he hadn’t tasted the classic beef meatball. Obviously, this needed to be done … for the sake of the blog!
4/2011, Take-out, Party of Me. So I rolled up in there and ordered myself some beefy balls … and some rabe … and headed home. I assembled my sandwich, reserving a meatball and some bread for g (I ordered it unassembled). Here’s what it looked like.
Meatball sandwich with rabe!
Overall, it wasn’t bad! It definitely had a home-made feel to it – made me feel warm and squishy inside. The texture was good with some nice spring in the bite without being too hard. The taste was decidedly beefy – almost too beefy in the sense that you really didn’t get any other flavors. I wished they either cut it with some pork or added some more herbs or something. I guess I really shouldn’t expect Marabella to be as complex as Barbuzzo’s or as awesome as g’s … or maybe I should! Beef meatballs can have flavors beyond just beef! I will say however that the sauce, is better than Barbuzzo’s, which comes off as tangy/sweet to me; but Marabella’s was still not as good as g’s (I’ve become a gravy snob – gasp!). The roll was soft which I appreciated immensely (nothing ruins a meatball sandwich more than crappy bread), and it’d be a true champion if they somehow got a crusty outside like Tony Luke’s rolls. As for the rabe … not bad … not too different from what we can make at home (but we like it more garlicky).
For me, the Marabella star was the bread pudding. For $1, you get a tiny bit (about the size of two shot glasses) of bread pudding that is the most wonderful dessert you can find for $1. Now I don’t know if maybe I just happened to get a “good” one or what, but that bread pudding had texture and creaminess and just the right amount of sweet and cinnamon. I might have to pick up a second dose of it next time I’m passing through to confirm that it’s as good as it was today.
Would I go back for lunch? Sure – it tasted pretty good overall and the people behind the counter were super-nice. I also kind of like the vibe in there (they have BYO seating in case you want to stay). I can see my dad and I just grabbing a sandwich and eating it there. But would I go out of my way to go back for dinner? Probably not … it’s a good lunch, but not something I’d actively seek out for dinner if I was looking for a “dinner out”. Sorry Marabella. But if you came out with a beef-pork meatball, I’d be back to give it another go!
What’d g think? Well, she came home, and I told her I couldn’t tell her about the meatball until after she ate it – I didn’t want to bias her opinion. So she heated it up, ate the sandwich, and reported …
g says: I’d like it more if there was more “stuff” in the meatball, like onions, cheese, parsley. I’d say it’s one step up from a WaWa meatball sandwich. It’s good, but I wouldn’t be able to eat a lot of just the meatball, itself.
We missed out on Talula’s Garden pre-opening!
t says:
Had my name down on “the list”.
They called me back.
I missed the call.
And when I got back to them (3 hours later) they were booked.
Nooooooo! Woe are we!!
Monsu: A Great Brunch Hiding in Sabrina’s Shadow
t says: Our friends thought of going to brunch this past Sunday. And for once, I didn’t push going to Cochon … don’t get me wrong, I still love Cochon, but I think I have gone enough times so that I feel confident that I can go a weekend without it and not feel like I was “missing” something. This also has to do with a recent menu change – they removed the awesome Elvis French Toast and replaced it with PB&J French Toast, which is good, but not quite as off-the-hook as the original. The pancakes are still delightful, but no longer come doused in fruit, rather, crushed Oreos, which are good, but is definitely a lot of sugar. And they removed the hanger steak … so g and I have decided to branch out beyond Cochon for brunch (unbelievable, right?!).
So we originally planned to join our friends n, m, and kp at Cafe Estelle (k and cm are too busy traveling in Spain to come!). As we drove there we laughed at the crowd in front of Sabrina’s – ha! Silly people! Cochon is always line-less. And there was Monsu across the street! But wait a sec – there was Monsu across the street! As soon as g said, “we gotta try that place”, n reasoned, “well, Cafe Estelle will probably have a line, too – maybe we should try it out!” And shazam! We were being spontaneous! g is a spontaneity-junky, so she was totally in. I dropped off g, n, and kp at Monsu and found a parking spot (m was meeting us there – he had very important doctor stuff to do … I suspect someone had a runny nose or something at the hospital and m wanted an excuse to wear his hospital scrubs to brunch …).
April 2011, 11:30am Sunday, Party of 5. There were a lot of savory items on the menu at Monsu – maybe a French toast and like one other dish for sweet. At first I was nonplussed (O … M … G … I hate that word – just finished reading a memoir by an author who used it no less than 3 times in 200 pages … drb uses it every now and then, but whenever he uses it, I feel like he’s making fun of it, which is acceptable – it’s such a dumb word). But then I started eyeing these awesome t-esque dishes. Gnocchi, lasangna with cocoa, scrapple, and a whole lot more. Suddenly, I was no longer nonplussed – one might say I was plussed. Here are some shots of what kp and I ordered and shared.
The scrapple's playing hide-and-seek under some veggies!
The scrapple tasted good and had a nice internal consistency – it just needed more of a crust on the outside. Other than that it’s some mighty-fine meat! And the veggies had a nice sweet taste to them. g still refused to eat much more than a bite (but I love her anyway).
No gnocchi left behind!
The gnocchi were also quite good. Their texture was how I like my gnocchi: soft but with a bit of bite so you still feel like you’re chewing something (I know gnocchi texture is a very personal thing). The sauce reminded me a lot of a vodka cream sauce. I wish there was some kind of vegetal zing in there, like a parsley or a basil or something fresh just to cut through the cream.
The split personality lasagna ... hiding under an egg.
So the lasagna I believe deserves a special mention. It walked the line between savory and sweet, as there was a bit of cocoa and cinnamon (or at least, we think it was cinnamon) that had to play nicely with the cheese/meat/pasta. The result was a success! Topped with an egg, it was the perfect breakfast lasagna. I’m not so sure I’d eat it for dinner (it’s also on the dinner menu), but for brunch this is probably the best savory-sweet balance outside of pancakes-and-bacon that there is. Superb job Monsu! Also, the egg on top reminded me a bit of Modo Mio – it was a good idea then, it is still a good idea now.
g had Eggs Basildict, which is a very peculiar name, but she liked it a lot, claiming that perhaps she “won” with the best dish. I disagree, firmly believing the lasagna was superior, but I will say that hers had a more vibrant complement of flavors – it just wasn’t as unique as a sweet-savory lasagna. Sorry – no pics to show you g’s dish – she was too far away for my crappy iPhone camera to reach.
All in all, Monsu was a success for brunch. There were no lines and plenty of open tables. It completely boggles my mind that across the street at Sabrina’s, people want to wait for a spot. Simply put, Sabrina’s food is good (don’t get me wrong – if you put their food in front of me, I’ll eat it), but not worth waiting for. And now that Monsu is right there, I definitely see no reason to wait (unless you desperately want a cup of cream cheese shoved in your French Toast like Sabrina’s likes to do). I also see a lot of potential for Monsu for dinner – I feel an FTC meeting coming!
What are the drawbacks? Well, n did have an omelette that I think she regretted – it wasn’t bad, but I think she felt it was a little dull next to some of the other items on the table. I sampled a taste of m’s mpanada, which was pretty good – I wonder how he liked the dish in its entirety? I think one of the big drawbacks was, as I had mentioned earlier, that there really weren’t a lot of sweet on their brunch menu, so if you have a sweet tooth (like me), afterwards, you might still find yourself craving something “more”. Fortunately n and m had the right idea: Isgro’s is right down the street!
Foster Harris House B&B Raises the Bar
t says: On our trip to VA (which we made primarily to visit the Inn at Little Washington), g and I stayed at the Foster Harris House Bed and Breakfast. It was this cute little place run by a husband-wife team (and their son and dog) right down the street from the Inn. While one could have walked from the Inn to the B&B, there was very little even sidewalk, so we actually drove between the two (all 15 seconds). Had the weather been warmer, we would have walked it … but it ended up being a little chilly. As a matter of fact, it snowed the last night we were there – this is what we awoke to:
Disregard the screen in our window - the landscape is pretty!
As you can see, the backyard of the B&B looks out onto nearby mountains and fields. We actually sat and picnicked on those two chairs you see in the foreground the day before it snowed! It was like we had two seasons – spring and winter! It was such a beautiful area.
Aside from setting, Foster Harris House has a few other awesome benefits. g and I jumped on a Living Social deal, so we stayed in the bomb-diggity suite at like 60-70% off (which didn’t necessarily make it “cheap”, rather, “reasonable”). The place was spotlessly clean (g wasn’t afraid to use the bathrooms/shower/towels/sheets … and she has very high standards!), and furnished to give a warm, homely feeling throughout the room. We also had a little sitting “nook” which we sat and sipped wine in as it looked out over the landscape (that’s where I took the picture). As for the bathroom, it was tastefully adorned with marble and 6 shower heads (1 normal, 1 of those hand-held things, and 4 jets from the walls – 2 at shoulder height, 2 at waist height) – it made it very difficult to go back to “normal” showers when we returned home. And we read that another room has a jacuzzi!! The room also featured this fake electric “fireplace” that actually did spew heat, keeping us extra warm and cozy when it was snowing outside (it added a nice fire-like ambience – hoky but cute).
Finally, the owners also prided themselves on providing a dynamite breakfast in the mornings. John would cook these beautiful three-course meals for all the guests each morning at 9:30am. g normally feels that such forced socialization is stupid, but the food was pretty and tasty and the meal was low-key (and included in the room rate), so she survived (and then I’d get to talk about the other guests later on behind their backs … I’m mean like that – g refuses to partake in such character assassination). The meals consisted of a fruit-granola-yogurt first course with some frickin-delicious Talula’s-Table-esque scones, a protein-centric second course (e.g. eggs, meat, etc), and a small, sweeter carb-centric final course. I of course enjoyed the final courses on both days the most:
World's tiniest pancakes! ... out of focus!
Some fancy German pancake.
Now, there were other things we did on our trip, so we’ll share with you two of the funniest things we did. The first was a visit to a very famous winery …
Anybody watch Real Housewives of DC?
So anyone who’s watched the Real Housewives of DC (I actually haven’t, but g has a little) will know of the Oasis Vineyards, run by those people who crashed the White House parties. As you can see, they weren’t taking visitors that day …
Another one that we had visited was set up by an Indian man/family with a very compelling story – something about how his mom had sacrificed so much for him to study in the US that he opened this winery and dedicated it to her. He seemed like a very nice man, but unfortunately his wines were not much better than alcoholic fruit juice. Sorry – I tell it like it is. But what was funny is that they had tons of merchandising and also served Indian food!
Butter chicken and samosas with wine?
Unfortunately, like the wine, the food was unremarkable. Sorry kp. You better travel down to Narmada Winery and set them straight!
Overall, the trip to VA wine country was splendid. It really was as relaxing as our trip to Napa. The quality of the food and wine might not have been as high (with the exception of the Inn), but it it costs 90% less to travel there, and some of the sights are just as impressive, so it deserves some props. I hope we can visit again with some friends. I don’t know if we could all eat at the Inn or something, but it’d be a lot of fun to pack out an entire B&B and go vineyard-hopping!
P.S. We also have a cookbook from the Foster Harris House … and they have the recipe for their scones in there. It’s go-time!
GTC goes corkage (boo!) but makes a fine veggie sandwich (yay!)
t says: I wandered into GTC today to buy a sandwich. Wanting something lighter than my normal food choices, I opted for their veggie sandwich (the “jardiniere”). While I was there, I eavesdropped and found out that (and maybe it’s old news to everyone else) that Garces Trading Co. is now going to charge $10 corkage for bottles of wine after the first one. Bummer man! Sorry a!
AND, the lady behind the register told me that they are going to move the sandwich-making into the kitchen, move the bakery area to where the sandwiches are, and then put in a full bar where the current bakery is! Looks like things’ll be changing at GTC, and I’m not sure if it’s for the better (at least, for what I like GTC for … everyone else may disagree and like the change).
How was the sandwich? Awesome!! It had grilled radicchio and this thinly sliced zucchini and, most importantly, delicious bread (crusty outside, soft inside). I would venture to say that it’s the best of the sandwiches currently available (ever since they 86’d the lamb sandwich …). I would have taken a picture of it, but I had to choose between stopping eating it (for the pic) or continue making my mouth happy with grilled leaf chicory (that’s what radicchio is – I just found out) … and guess which one won!
v says: Nooooooo. Bad graces, bad!! Slap! slap!
after dinner sneeze 