Hobbit Cafe

One of the first things we did for summer vacation with the boys' was re-watch The Lord of the Rings trilogy. (I had forgotten how much I loved those movies, they really are so great.) We planned to commemorate it by having brunch at The Hobbit Cafe. When we got there, we thought it must have closed down, because all we could see was an empty building next to the sign. A few weeks later, we found out that it was still there, just in a different building and sort of hidden. 

Apparently the sword on this sign was an arrow. I thought it was just a sword:

The restaurant, which looks like it was made from a small converted house, had so much potential to be charming, being so old and so themed. But it was just way too dingy and dirty-looking (The floor in our dining room was carpeted!), and needed a good scrub and fresh coat of paint to say the least. Everywhere there was worthless garage-sale hobbit-themed art, mixed with movie posters, mixed with some interesting pieces like a carved wood and fur chair or a really life-like statue of Gollum:

I was excited about the menu because there were a decent number of vegetarian options (apparently it was a vegetarian restaurant when starting out in 1972).

I ended up ordering the Valinor, a very large platter of half black beans, half brown rice, topped with cauliflower and broccoli. This plate was at least 12" in diameter, and piled really high:

It was a fun experience, especially with the kids, but I doubt I would ever go back. The food would have to be seriously great for me to sit in that cluttered, dirty space for another meal. In the meantime, when I want a hobbit fix, I can look at this toy we bought from the lego store:

Awesome, right? I can't look at it without cracking up.

best sushi in Houston

Over the last few months, we’ve tried and tried to find our perfect sushi joint. There are literally hundreds of sushi places in Houston, which makes the chances of good sushi being out there higher, but finding the best places harder. Here are a few of the best that we’ve found; I can vouch for the quality of the vegetarian sushi and hubby for the meat-eating.

For date nights: Kata Robata is our favorite (so far) of the higher end-sushi restaurants, perfect for a date night or special lunch. It has a good atmosphere, delicious and beautifully presented food. It’s pretty limited in the vegetarian selection, but the choices are all great enough to eat over and over. Dessert is a must! 

Vegetable medley (tofu skin, avocado, mushroom, and pepper sushi) and deconstructed strawberry shortcake.

Seaweed salad, hubby’s Caribbean roll (fried lobster and mango!), and fried green tomatoes and green beans.

For everyday lunch: Nabi is a great little neighborhood sushi joint, but still a bit trendy. Hubby and I go for lunch quite often, they have $1 sushi, $2 rolls, and $3 appetizers like salads and miso soup. Also a great rice bowl or balanced plate with salad, roll, rice, veggies, and your choice of protein. Their crunchy tofu is outstanding.

Crunchy tofu bowl with sautéed vegetables and rice.

Small rolls and sushi (my favorites are cucumber, and avocado).

Down and dirty: I have a love/hate relationship with Aka Sushi House. I love their vegetarian’s paradise bento box; I hate that it looks like they never clean. It’s more than a bit on the dirty side. (Whenever I go to the restroom there, I decide never to go back.) It’s relatively cheap, good food, decent portions, and not at all trendy or pretentious. If you’re not squeamish, then go for it.

Vegetarian’s paradise (fried tofu, vegetable tempura, seaweed salad, sautéed vegetables, picked vegetables, and half an orange).

At home: We always cook frozen edamame in the pods, and even the little packets of miso soup for a quick snack, but here’s another little thing we picked up because it sounded intriguing at the grocers: Edamame bites! I expected them to be gross, but I was wrong. They are a great quick snack, a bit high-calorie, but also decent protein and fiber.

 

best chinese food ever

For some reason, my husband and I don't do Chinese food very often, like maybe twice a year. Then we found Hunan Village, and have already ordered delivery twice this month. They have like 50 vegetarian dishes, and the Vegetarian General Tsao's Chicken is not only the best fake meat I've ever tasted, it's the best Chinese food period.

Rosario's

On our last night in San Antonio, we walked over to Rosario's for some of the best margaritas in the city.

If you are in the mood for some light Mexican food, try their Enchiladas Mexicanas! (They're vegetarian too.)

Loving Hut

I think it's great that more and more vegan and vegetarian-only restaurants are popping up (there's even one in San Antonio). The problem I have with most of them is that they simply replace all the normal meat protein of a meal with fake meat or texturized soy. That was certainly the case with Loving Hut in Palo Alto.

I had the an avocado BLT with tempeh in the place of bacon. It was ok, but the tempeh was kind of meh and the bread was super hard.

Hubby had the spring rolls and hummus, which you can't really go wrong with, although again, instead of just your normal vegetable spring roll, they stuck in some texturized soy protein.

I hadn't had bubble tea in many, many years, so I tried it again.

Either this stuff was particularly bad, or, I don't what I used to see in it. Yuk.

I think I say this every time I fly

I woke up at 4:00 am, ya'll!

An airplane is like a tiny capsule of the spectrum of human personalities. You see, and are trapped in a small space with, many people, all with different lives, and different reasons for being there, from business to pleasure. Everyone's a little stressed, probably tired, and in a hurry, and a little out of their normal routine, surrounded by strangers. I think it must be like being drunk, flying distills your true personality and allows it to become really obvious. It's always sad to me that the people who are just completely rude and selfish completely outnumber the people with normal social consciousness.

Hubs and I watched season 7 of Entourage on my laptop, which greatly helped to pass the time. (I love our headphone splitter!)

Anyway, Menlo Park is a bit different than LA, or even the rest of San Francisco. It's sort of a place to work, I guess, rather than a place to live or visit. There is a Tesla dealership:

(I saw a Tesla on the road once, in Palo Alto. I only noticed because people were taking pictures of it.)

There is also a place where I ate the biggest breakfast sandwich I've ever seen in my life:

It had bacon, ham (you need both!), avocado, tomato, cheese, and three eggs, on an English Muffin, served open-faced, also sour cream (which I scraped off, yuk.) and chives. I wondered briefly when reading the description how three scrambled eggs would fit on an English Muffin. Now I know. If I were to recreate this at home, I would choose either the ham or bacon (probably the bacon, let's be real), half the eggs, and leave out the cheese, sour cream and chives.

I did not take a photo, but since you can find anything on the internet, apparently, including the breakfast sandwich you forgot to take a photo of, here it is:

Photo by/from Less of Mimi blog, somehow she made it look much smaller than it actually was.

Also, I love the weather here! If I lived here, I would spend all my time riding around with the windows down. Or standing in the shade and marveling at how cool it is compared to in the sun.

best grilled cheese sandwich ever

This is one of our New York traditions. Cheap beer (relatively) and sandwiches for dinner.

Yum!

We went to Boston for hubby's work conference, which means schmoozing/taking people out to dinner. Which means we get to go to some pretty fancy places sometimes (which this time in Boston included Menton (teeny tiny macaroons!), Erbaluce, and Sensing (watermelon daiquiris with cayenne pepper!). Oh, and Coppa which wasn't as fancy but made me feel like I was back in Rome.). But this was the absolute best meal I had all week:

Mmmmm.... lobster roll with such fresh lobster! With a Sam Adams Light from a waterfront shack place called The Barking Crab.

The best! I also found a new favorite drink: Blue Moon Pumpkin Ale from an irish-ish bar called Clarkes. They gave us Cinnamon Sugar to sprinkle on it.

weekends

It's not quite summer time, there's still a really nice breeze at night that makes it bearable to be outdoors, and we've gotten new chairs for our shared patio, and so the weekends have been full of sitting out with a beer or glass of wine and hanging out with whatever neighbors happen to be around and hanging out. It's so nice to actually have friends around, people you don't mind running into and actually like socializing with. I haven't been this un-hermit-y in a long, long time.

A couple weekends ago my sister-in-law came to visit and it was the best, most relaxing weekend in a long time, full of drinking and talking and listening to music, and most of all, eating! Some of the highlights, eating wise:

Mexican appetizer plates:

White bean nachos, jalepeno poppers, fried mushrooms:

I love the ground here, it is covered in bottle caps:

BBQ brisket and coleslaw:

Fried meatballs.

Other weekend highlights: church converted to bar, margaritas at the riverwalk, meeting wine-bearing new neighbors, crazy-detailed Mexican folk art:

(Of course, I didn't take enough pictures, so the stolen ones are linked back to where they came from.)

meat eater

Here I am outside of Morton's Steakhouse, waiting to see if I actually like steak or if it was just that once.

My entire life I've hated steak, I'd try it occasionally just to see what everyone else was talking about, and just never liked the taste or texture of it. I finally gave up even trying it in steak places since I knew I would hate it. Until one night last October when I ate an entire steak at Fleming's in San Diego. I thought it may be a one time thing, so I tried again last week (two weeks ago?) when we were in San Francisco. Turns out I like steak now! Morton's was definitely not as good as Fleming's, but it wasn't bad either.

(restaurant light is always too dim to use an iPhone for pictures of your food)

nowhere to go

Still haven't found decent Italian food in San Antonio. And I'm not even comparing it to the awesome hole-in-the-wall eateries everywhere in downtown Gloucester anymore, now if it's as good as the Olive Garden, it'll be the best so far in San Antonio. (When we first moved here, we saw Olive Garden voted as one of the best Italian restaurants in San Antonio. We laughed then, but not anymore.)

Last week, we stopped into La Focaccia Italian Grill. It was so bad that I wouldn't even be writing about it, except I actually remembered to take pictures of all the food and stuff and it would be a waste.

It looked promising, hole-in-the-wall-y, but still nice:

Bread and olive oil came fast, all the service was fast:

The oysters rockafeller tasted more like my granny's mustard greens than oysters rockafeller, because of a surplus of smokey bacon overwhelming the dish:

Hubby got clams and linguini with white sauce, which was horrible. I couldn't place the spice used, but there was way too much of it...

And I knew I was ordering too ambitiously, but I couldn't resist my favorite: Stuffed Flounder - "filled with crab, scallops, and snapper served in a lemon butter sauce"!

It was really bad, the whole thing just tasted bland and wet, and there was rice mixed into the stuffing. Partly my fault, I should've ordered chicken parmesan or meatballs and spaghetti or something, but hey, it was on the menu... Note to self: Next time you find a bug in your water before ordering, just go ahead and leave.

Azuca Nuevo Latino

A few days ago, we went over to Azuca, a sort of Latin fusion slash steak and seafood restaurant. The atmosphere and decor were great:

Most of the pieces looked like they came from Garcia Art Glass (located pretty much just behind the restaurant). The chandeliers were gorgeous.

The service was also great, and the food was decent, except this is definitely someplace to split meals. I ordered pork tenderloins and received a platter-sized dinner plate with enough food for at least three meals on it. I think there were a pound of green beans as the side. Here's a picture of something similar from the web site, although my plate was easily triple full compared to this photo:

(I keep saying I'm going to start taking pictures of my food, but always forget. All these food pictures came from the restaurant's web site)

Their cornbread is the best; even after we were stuffed of the entrees we couldn't stop eating it!

There are enough better fusion-ish restaurants at this price point in San Antonio - Acenar comes to mind - that I probably wouldn't go back to Azuca again for dinner (although if you're into quantity this is the place to go). I will definitely check them out again for lunch or just drinks and appetizers; hub and I both agreed that their appetizers were great. Mine was a goat cheese spinach salad with strawberries and toasted pumpkin seeds:

It was so good! And I really don't like mojitos, but I'll admit theirs was pretty good.

snowballs

Here is one of my absolute favorite things about south Louisiana: Snowballs! I'm sorry, but there is no way to imagine the greatness if you haven't had one, nothing to compare it to.

I miss these like crazy in the summer. There's at least one snowball stand every few miles in New Orleans, but in I haven't seen one anywhere else in the country (except one in Bourne, Texas that is now closed down).

Snowball stands are essentially little shacks that open in summer and close down in winter:

A snowball is not a sno-cone or shaved ice or anything like that. It is completely it's own thing. Their are tons of flavors and endless combinations, and choosing one is always the hardest although I usually end up getting strawberry cheesecake flavor topped in condensed milk and whipped cream (they were out of whipped cream yesterday). The next best flavor for snowballs is cotton candy, or ice cream, or amaretto, or wild strawberry, or wedding cake. Or even chocolate.