Best of the Week #99

Hallelujah it’s Friday and I’m exhausted. To-do this weekend: SLEEP.

Why so tired you may wonder? Well there were a lot of things going on this week!

On Tuesday night I met up with a friend for dinner at Hogo, a new-ish tiki bar/pop-up restaurant near the Convention Center in DC. The kitchen features a different type of cuisine every month, and since we went on April 2, we wandered in with no idea what to expect.

We sat down at the back counter overlooking the kitchen, chatted with the chefs, and learned that this month’s menu is Gypsy Soul. I’m still unclear on exactly what that means, but I do know that it was delicious! We got pimento cheese with spelt lavash, oysters over brioche with chard, artichoke, and bubbles (? – so says the menu), and an apple hand pie with bacon-vidalia onion ice cream and salted caramel.

The good news is that it was all really good and the chefs were fun…the only bad news is that the “big eats” (our oysters) were still pretty tiny. And onion ice cream – who would have expected it to be that delicious!?!

Then on Wednesday I went to a super-amazing concert at The Birchmere in Alexandria. I know I’ve mentioned my love of the Carolina Chocolate Drops, and OMG GUYS, LIVE THEY ARE AMAZING. They all sing – the lead singer is so impressive, but they’re all legitimately good – and play many many instruments (banjo, fiddle, guitar, harmonica, snare drum, quills, bones, jug, and kazoo).


And they just seemed to be having so much fun up on stage! There was a song in Haitian, as well as one in Gaelic. Fun times. And the venue has a bear…because…ummm, I have no idea. (Ok one more -- this is my favorite song of theirs...go bones!)

SpeedyKate: "Make a bear face!!!"

Anywho, that’s enough chatter for now. On to some Best of the Week links! My most popular post this week was my Girl Scout Cookie Upside Down Cake, which was also featured on the Christian Science Monitor’s cooking blog.

Awwwww. This dog looks like an alien, but I like it. "Boy and French Bulldog are Best Friends (Picture Gallery)."

Impromptu sax battle in NY subway. EXCELLENT, let’s go to New York! (source)


Totally random, but WHAT this is horrifying. "Doctor killed 300 patients? Doctor felt 'all powerful,' say prosecutors."

• "I want to clear the intensive care unit. It's making me itch," she said in one recording released to Brazilian media. "Unfortunately, our mission is to be go-betweens on the springboard to the next life," she added in the same phone call.

"Inta Munu"

• (Juba Arabic) 'Inta Munu' - 'You are who?' - A tumblr seeking to capture the identity of South Sudan 

Haha ooh Twitter. @1890'sProblems

On Instagram: Dronestagram: A Drone's-Eye View.

• These are the names of places. They are towns, villages, junctions and roads. They are the names of places where people live and work, where there are families and schools. They are the names of places in Afghanistan and Yemen, which are linked by one thing: they have each been the location of drone strikes in the past couple of months. (The latest was in the early hours of November 7th, the night of the US election.)
• They are the names of places most of us will never see. We do not know these landscapes and we cannot visit them.
• For a few weeks now, I have been posting images of the locations of drone strikes to the photo-sharing site Instagram as they occur (there’s more on the methodology below). Making these locations just a little bit more visible, a little closer. A little more real.

Nerd alert! "The Elements of Style Rap."

Ok so this is a pretty short Best of the Week...what can I say, I was too busy to real the interwebs! What I'm excited about this weekend (among other things...I swear I have fun plans too...):

Have a great weekend!

Weekend Report: Jess & Ethiopian Coffee & Thai X-ing & Inauguration & Movies!

Jess visited from Boston this weekend, and per usual, we walked a million miles, talked a mile a minute, baked something delicious, worked out separately together, and ate aaaaamazing food.

Saturday was gorgeous, so we walked from Eastern Market, down the Mall to see the Inauguration set-up, to Georgetown, and back. Late in the afternoon we baked Cookie Butter Crumb Cake Bars that both smelled and tasted fantastic (recipe to come). Those bars were soon on the way to my friend The Marathoner’s apartment for a The Princess Bride viewing party. Somehow I was born in the 80s and have managed to never see The Princess Bride all the way through – Inconceivable! (But I have read the book so that’s got to count for something?)

At 2 pm on Sunday, Jess and I headed up to Sidamo, an Ethiopian coffee shop on H Street, where they do a traditional coffee ceremony every weekend. The owner welcomed us in, but apparently it starts before 2 because they’d already done the roasting part. We ordered coffee and he sat us down in front of a woman boiling coffee, testing it, and pouring it into little cups.

He explained that in Ethiopia, a light roast is better because it means you’re rich enough that you don’t need to stretch your coffee supply (as in, poor people roast their beans dark, so it makes “more” coffee to pass around, but it’s really just colored water). The coffee itself tasted different, a lot more earthy and beany, if that makes sense. The owner told me to come back next weekend so he can teach me how to roast coffee beans myself so I can have real Ethiopian coffee at home…maybe I will!

Sunday night was our weekend’s main event – dinner at Thai X-ing!

If you recall, I’ve done this before, and the second time was just as good as the first. It’s family style traditional Thai food in a little rowhouse/restaurant: 8 courses, Sundays are vegetarian, and they just keep bringing you food!

Sweet and Sour Tofu Soup

There was a sweet and sour tofu soup, spicy papaya salad, pumpkin curry (the BEST THING EVER), something delicious with tofu, something delicious with veggies and curry, something delicious with pineapple, the best rice/beans ever (I am kind of obsessed with this rice), pad see ew (fat noodles) with tofu, and of course mango coconut sticky rice for dessert.

Rice and Beans, aka YUMMMMMM.

All present were distance runners of the intense eating variety, so of course we consumed it all! And more actually – we told them how much we loved the pumpkin curry and they brought us seconds!

Mango Coconut Sticky Rice

SpeedyKate and I drove Jess to the airport Monday morning, then returned home to see what this whole Inauguration thing was all about. People were walking down our street towards the Mall starting at 4:30 am!

For a while there we resigned ourselves to experiencing Inauguration
next to the Department of Agriculture...

I am nowhere near that ambitious, but as this is my first Inauguration living in DC, I thought I should go see what there was to be seen. We left our apartment at 10 am and started walking. The streets are weird and re-routed in all kinds of ways, so to get to the Mall we pretty much walked to the Mall, then walked a 3-mile loop down through Southwest to get up to the “non-ticketed” area.

We were in the overflow by the Monument and could kind of sort of see and hear Obama’s speech on a big screen. I feel like I experienced Inauguration enough to count that as a win! DC gets crazy for this weekend – getting home was another insanely loopy walk, involving army men and tank-ish trucks, but eventually we made it.

Monday night I went to see Silver Linings Playbook, which I’ve been wanting to see since before Christmas. I’m not sure how to categorize it – I guess it’s a romantic comedy, but a very depressing one…it's also a lot about football (I guess that's where the "playbook" part comes in?). It was good but I think my expectations were a little too high. I LOVE Jennifer Lawrence and Bradley Cooper though! The scenes with them together are the best.

Hope you had a good weekend too!

Weekend Report: Boy Bands and Pitch Perfect and Himalayan Food

Oh this weekend. I’m not entirely sure where it went, and yet I’m sad it’s gone.

Friday night I was looking forward to a dance party at the 930 Club: Lady Gaga v. Madonna v. Boy Bands. Clearly I was there for the boy bands and when it started with Everybody (Backstreet’s Back) I was just as excited as any self-respecting fan-girl would be.

The ever-important question: Which one is your favorite???

Unfortunately the venue got really crowed really quickly, so I can’t give the evening a full two thumbs up. Also, apparently the DJ’s definition of boy bands is more broad than mine -- really I just wanted her to play N’Sync and Backstreet Boys’ first couple CDs (or tapes, as it were...oh 1996), and maybe some 98 Degrees thrown in there for good measure. (So my ideal Friday night is a 6th grade dance? Maybe.) Any so-called “boy bands” before or after that are beyond my scope of silly music knowledge.

[Sidenote: My elementary school was really small and didn’t have a gym, so when it was raining out, we had “indoor recess.” In 5th and 6th grade that meant that all the cool kids played our favorite CDs (the aforementioned boy bands, Spice Girls, Aqua, etc…oh dear) on the classroom boom box and knew all the dances. Our teachers must have thought we were insane. Please tell me you did this too?]

Woah big news: some preliminary googling tells me that
98 Degrees is reuniting and going on tour!

Just to brighten your Monday, go ahead and listen to all these songs and try not to dance at your desk.

Saturday I baked a cake (recipe to come), to bring to a Pitch Perfect viewing party. The movie is like a cross between Bring it On, Mean Girls, and Bridesmaids, i.e. hilarious. Rebel Wilson is SO funny.


My Sunday was pretty lazy. I went for a long run in the pool (2 HOURS, aka omg kill us all now), and then lounged on the couch watching Nashville and some football (Redskins fans, I'm sorry for your loss) until dinnertime.

Dinner was a “Global Dinner.” As you probably know/assume, I’m an adventurous eater and have tried almost every cuisine DC has to offer. Therefore I’m always shocked (shocked!) when I learn that not everyone does this. Way back in August, my coworker/climbing friend invited me to Ethiopian food with a group of her friends, because they’d never had it before, which is a travesty that needed fixing asap. At that first dinner it soon became clear that most of them wanted to expand their culinary horizons, but were not entirely confident in doing so; therefore we decided to meet for regular food adventures.

So anywho, this is a long way to explain that I went to Himalayan last night and it was delicious, obviously.  Indian is in my top-3 cuisines (Mexican, Indian, Mediterranean), and Himalayan food is pretty much Indian with some Nepalese mixed in.  The food wasn’t as spicy as I expected(/hoped) but it was very good. And the naan – OOH THE NAAN. I love naan.

We ordered pretty safely/conservatively -- I split palak paneer (spinach and cheese – my go-to), chicken curry, and Chicken Biryani (Indian fried rice). The nice thing about Himalayan Heritage is that naan comes with the entrees. Yummmm. We didn't order momos (dumplings), but awww momos remind me of my trip to Manali, India!

And that is that. Hope you had a good weekend too, and happy Monday!

Toki Underground

One of my friends has been talking up Toki Underground for months, and last night we finally went. (The delay was much more my fault than his – I am seriously dissuaded by the prospect of a loooong wait when I’m hungry for dinner.)

On a Monday night, however, the wait for this 25-seat very popular restaurant was “only” 45 minutes, and I’m happy to report that it was a meal worth waiting for.

Toki Underground (which, ironically, is not underground) is famous for its Taiwanese-style ramen, but this isn’t your cup o’noodles sort of ramen noodles. Usually I’m not much of a noodles and broth person (when it comes to Asian, I prefer a rice base), but this broth is like a meal in and of itself. It’s made with pork bones and various other mystery ingredients (maybe peaches?), takes over 24 hours to cook, and is rich and delicious.

We split two orders of dumplings – chicken (deep-fried), and seafood (steamed). I preferred the seafood steamed, but honestly, LLC’s dumplings are better. But Toki's are definitely good, and the teriyaki sauce they comes with is great.

As a Toki newbie, I went with the Toki Hakata Classic ramen with no add-ons. The ramen comes with the aforementioned delicious broth, noodles (obviously), pork loin (like a pulled pork), some sort of greens, a sheet of nori (seaweed), scallions, and a soft-boiled egg (which is very soft – if runny egg isn’t your jam then ask for ramen sans egg or give yours to a friend). Also, I highly recommend the “endorphin sauce,” which is like the awesomest sriracha ever. I poured all of mine into my ramen which I do not regret at all, but know that it is hot.

I was warned that the portions would be so big that I couldn’t possibly finish it all, but Umm hello have you met me? Obviously I did. I mean, it’s a big bowl of mostly delicious broth, so actually I left satisfied but not overly full, and very well-hydrated.

At $10 a bowl this is the cheapest delicious meal ever. I will be braving the long wait to return because I want to try all of the things!

Weekend Report: Pizzeria Orso and Thai X-ing

I did things this weekend – ya know, the usual seeing the friends, going to the places, doing the vatious endurance exercises and outdoorsy activities. Any regular Eat Run Reader knows the drill. But it’s not every weekend that I hit the culinary jackpot and eat at two amazing restaurants – so this is a Weekend Report of food: Pizzeria Orso and Thai X-ing to be exact!

I’m pretty sure I consumed more in two nights than I did in the entire preceding week, and I have absolutely no regrets because every bite was so worth it.

The food adventures started on Saturday with a post-rock climbing excursion to Pizzeria Orso. We left the Great Falls rocks (i.e. the aforementioned outdoorsy activity) as it began to rain and made our way to Falls Chruch, VA (a bit outside of my normal neighborhoods, but totally worth a return trip). We expected good pizza, but sweet monkey pumpkins! the pizza was delish but I hardly had tummy-room for one piece due to the preceding assortment of small plates we tasted (read: inhaled).

(BLT Gnocchi and Fried Calamari)

The restaurant is casual and from the outside looks like nothing particularly special. But once inside you watch the pizzas go in and out of the wood-fired oven and smell the everything-awesome-about-Italian-food and swoon. Executive Chef Will Artley might be my new favorite person.

So what did we eat that was so good? WELL LET ME TELL YOU.

BLT Gnocchi - spinach gnocchi, truffled-cream, applewood-smoked bacon, tomato
Sophie’s Meatballs with Creamy Polenta
Fried Calamari - basil aioli or marinara sauce

Artley described the the BLT gnocchi as mac and cheese crack, saying that diners come in and order plates and plates of it. The sauce was rich and cheesy, but the gnocchi itself was incredibly light. Yummmm. So yes, it was good, but I think my “crack” of the afternoon was the meatballs and polenta. The polenta especially – I don’t know what he does to make it so creamy but holy meatballs it was far and away the best polenta I’ve ever had. And the basil aioil with the calamari. Sigh. I need more of that in my life.

Pizza-wise we got three – the Orso (mozzarella, pecorino Tuscano, fontina, grana, ricotta, garlic, prosciutto), the Orso Bianco (mozzarella, pecorino Tuscano, fontina, grana, ricotta, garlic, prosciutto), and the Verdure (tomato, basil, eggplant, sweet peppers, onion, capers, mushrooms, mozzarella). Mine was the Verdure, which was good for people (i.e. me) who prefer pizza with less cheese and more veggies. But for cheese-lovers I think the Orso Bianco was the best.

Epic food excursion #2 occurred on Saturday. Thai X-ing is the best Thai food I've ever had ever and I cannot stop thinking about how delicious it all was. For the uninitiated, Thai X-ing is a DC legend. It's super-tiny (accommodates 25 diners total) in a row house and you have to call weeks in advance for reservations. LOTR-Emily's boyfriend did just that, and invited her best friends along for a birthday surprise!

"Does it feel as though you're entering a Thai speak-easy? It should...There's always a whiff of confusion in the air, not unlike the dinner party where you show up earlier than the host expected." (WaPo review).

The menu is prix-fixe and it's all chef's choice. It's BYOB, and Sundays are vegetarian night. Just sit down, relax, and expect the servers to bring you a Thai  feast of deliciously epic proportions. 

Since there's no menu I can't tell you exactly what we ate, but it definitely started with Chef Vigsittaboot's signature appetizer: Green Papaya Salad (green papaya, julienned tropical fruit, halved cherry tomatoes, crisp green beans and crushed peanuts), and ended with the even more famous Mango Sticky Coconut Rice. 

\

For six people we had four huge entrees, and as a non-vegetarian, I can promise you that you won't miss the meat. Everything was spicy in a wonderfully flavorful way, and the hottest dishes were balanced out with cooling cucumbers or bits of fruit. 

My favorite dish was probably the most simple -- pumpkin in creamy red curry. 

Our other entrees included a spicy string bean stir-fry, pad see ew (i.e. thick noodles), and some sort of sweet and sour tofu with soybean sprouts and fried garlic and peppers. 

Even the rice on the table was special -- it was a mix of earthy beans and redish-brownish rice (does anyone know what this is? I need it in my kitchen). So. Good. 

To quote LLC:  I want it all again. A million times.

Chobani Greek Yogurt Dinner at The Federalist

I received an unexpected surprise in my inbox a couple weeks ago – an invitation to a dinner at The Federalist with dishes specially prepared with Chobani Greek Yogurt. Umm hello yes please! It was scheduled for our moving day, so SpeedyKate came along for the ride, and what a ride it was. We arrived at a very fancy restaurant in The Madison Hotel, a place I often walk past but have never been inside.

The décor is really cool – and by that I mean, our private room was lined with red built-in bookshelves!!! Swoon. (Further inspection determined that the old artistic-looking books were in Swedish, so that’s weird.)

Anywho, I met an assortment of DC food bloggers (8 of us total) and spent a lovely evening chatting about blogging, cooking, the DC food scene, and Greek yogurt of course! Chobani worked with the chef to develop a menu that incorporated Greek yogurt in every dish and wow it was fancy and delicious. 

We started with a cornbread basket that contained the best cornbread I’ve ever had. Cornbread is often dry and requires a lot of butter, but this was suuuuuper moist just the right amount of corny sweetness. 

Next came the soup, which I think was the most creative and most delicious course. Our menus described it as White Gazpacho: Poached Laughing Bird Shrimp, Minted Yogurt. That nebulous description does not do it justice. It was thick and creamy (but the waiter said no cream) and the top was speckled with sliced green grapes, slivered almonds, tiny croutons, olive oil, and a dollop of Greek yogurt. 

Every course the chef presented was accompanied by a flurry of shameless food photography - gotta love food bloggers! (I was the only one without a fancy camera...maybe someday I'll invest? But for now you'll just have to compromise with my point-and-shoot images, eloquent descriptions, and your own foodie imagination.)

For my entrée I chose the Yogurt Poached Alaskan Halibut: Rose Finn Potatoes, Fava Beans, Globe Artichokes, Yogurt Emulsion. Clearly I was drawn to all the extra stuff. The fish itself was ok but not amazing, I think poaching is not my favorite way to cook things – it results in a one-note texture that is fine but not extraordinary. I think the artichokes and potatoes were the best part. 

SpeedyKate got the Slow Cooked Spring Lamb: Gin Soaked Cucumber, Spring Herb Salad, Espelette-Yogurt Emulsion that was prepared two ways and was allegedly fantastic. (Fyi, Google tells me that espelette is a variety of chili pepper.)

They also brought us two yogurt-less sides for the table: Fricassee of Wild Mushrooms, and Roasted Heirloom Cauliflower. Both were good, probably because I suspect they were marinated, roasted, and subsequently drenched in olive oil.

And dessert, oh dessert! It was a Greek Yogurt Panna Cotta: Strawberry Preserves, Shortbread Cookie, Long Pepper Syrup. I realize this is an excessively gushy post, and I apologize for that, but every part of the dessert was divine. Panna Cotta is almost like cheesecake, the cookie was just the right amount of crumbly and almost a little salty. The contrast of the sweet strawberry sauce and peppery syrup was super-sweet but balanced everything out quite well. 

My brand-new roommate and I called it a night around 10:30, bellies full, tastebuds happy, and generally post-move exhausted. What a win! 

And Emily and Lindsey, the Chobani representatives, said they would send around the recipes the chef developed…so White Gazpacho and Greek Yogurt Panna Cotta are very real possibilities in my future! 

(Though I don't think I'll ever be able to make it look this pretty...maybe? Fancy dinner party in the new apartment?)