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Papa Johns ( the best ever!!!)

April 14, 2012 / / 2 Comments

I am not Marga I am Mika her ten year old daughter and I think Papa Johns is amazing,  their crust is soft and fluffy, it has yummy cheese and wonderful sauce I have no idea why my mom would write such plain reviews on them I would give them a million stars if the rating chart went up that high. I can’t stop eating their pizza and the slightest whiff of it is mouth watering! Their pizza is sweet and savory at the very same time, I give them a thumbs up to building more and more pizzerias and over the entire pizza businesses in the worlds! I want pizza now!

Thanks and keep eating Papa Johns pizza!

Mika!!!

Buttermilk Corn Bread – Recipe

April 9, 2012 / / 1 Comment

I was invited to an Easter/Zombie Day brunch today, and I was supposed to bring something.  I don’t know why I thought of cornbread, but as it was one of the few things I had all the ingredients to make, it was a lucky thing.  I found this recipe in allrecipes.com and followed it to a T – though I used blue cornmeal as that’s the only kind I had at home.  The results were pretty good.  People raved and raved about it, and I liked it, but I wish it had been moister (it had plenty of fat, so it should have been).  Perhaps undercooking it by 5 minutes would help.

  • 1 cup butter
  • 1 1/3 cup sugar
  • 4 eggs
  • 2 cups buttermilk
  • 1 tsp. baking soda
  • 2 cups all-purpose flour
  • 2 cups cornmeal
  • 1 tsp. salt

Directions

Preheat oven to 375F.

Grease two 8″x8″ or one 13″x9″ baking pan(s).

Melt the butter over medium-high heat in a large skillet.  Turn off the oven and whisk in the sugar.  Whisk in the eggs, and blend until it’s all mixed in.  In a separate bowl, mix the buttermilk with the baking soda, and then combine with the mixture on the skillet.  Add the flour, cornmeal and salt and blend well.  Pour the batter into the prepared pan(s).

Bake 25 to 30 minutes or until it comes out dry in the middle.

Marga’s Best Recipes

 

Con Pane Rustic Breads & Cafe – San Diego

April 8, 2012 / / 0 Comments

We went to Con Pane last February (2012) when we visited San Diego for the Democratic Convention.  Our friend Ralph took us there for breakfast one morning – and we had enough bread leftover for lunch!  I got the Sweet Bread Baker’s Plate ($4), consisting of 3 enormous slices of fresh bread (your choice), served with butter, fruit preserves and creme cheese.  The bread was delicious.  Probably my favorite was the Pain au Levain, your basic country white bread – with butter and jam it was just heavenly.  The Kalamata Olive bread was probably my least favorite, but I’m not a huge olive fan.  I recommend that you get a bread plate to share – one slice is definitely enough.  We also shared a couple of pastries, but it was too long ago and I can’t recall what they were.  My recollection is that they were good, but not impressive.  Coffee was good, and the place quite nice.  All in all, I’d go back.

Con Pane
2750 Dewey Rd, #105
San Diego, CA
(619) 224-4344
M,T,Th,F 7 am – 6 pm
Sat 8 am – 6 pm
Sun 8 am – 4 pm

Marga’s Restaurant Reviews – Outside the Bay Area

Wing Fiesta

April 8, 2012 / / 0 Comments

Wings Fiesta is a local chain which serves, well, chicken wings.  They also have ribs, chicken tenders and fries, but their emphasis is on wings.  We went to the one on West Juana in downtown San Leandro.  They’d left a menu with “buy one, get one free coupons” and I figured that made it worth a try.  It was worth a try, but not really a repeat visit.

Wing Fiesta serves both “jumbo wings,” regular fried or baked bone-in wings, and “boneless wings”.  You can chose from a variety of sauces to accompany them.  The regular wings ($5 for 6) were pretty good, they had a crispy breading and were well seasoned.  The boneless wings ($4 for 7), however, were horrible – they tasted like frozen/microwaved chicken pieces.  It was hard to eat them, even with the sauce.  We tried the teriyaki and honey BBQ sauces, and they tasted pretty generic.

We didn’t try any of the sides, I asked if we could get a french fry to see if we liked them but they wouldn’t even give us one.  That wasn’t the only problem with the service, it was incredibly slow – I think it must have taken over half an hour to get our very simple order.  That said, all the staff are young and new so that may improve.

The one thing that might make it worth a visit is their $1 beers (with food purchase).  I’m not a big beer drinker, but for those who are, you can’t get a better deal in town.

Wing Fiesta
160 W. Juana Ave.
San Leandro, Ca
510-357-1099
http://www.wingfiesta.com/
M-F 5-11 PM
Sa-Su 11 AM – 11 PM

San Leandro Restaurant Reviews

Chain Restaurant Reviews

 

Back from the Library Sale

April 8, 2012 / / 0 Comments

I’m back from our semi-annual library sale.  That’s where I get most of my cookbooks (pretty much all on regional and international cuisines), but this year there were slim pickings.  I just got three, but might have scored with the first one:

– Claudia Roden’s The Good Food Of Italy: Region By Region has only one review at Amazon.com, but it’s a five-star one.  Used copies retail for over $11, which suggests people are in no hurry to get rid of them.  The book was published in 1990 but this copy is brand new, I doubt anyone even leafed through it.  I’m glad that I could get to it first, before the book sellers took it.

I have wanted a book on regional Italian cuisine for a while, and given that I’ve started to explore the “E’s” in my international cooking project, I’ll be cooking the food from Emilia-Romana very soon.

– Hungarian Cuisine: A Gourmet’s Guide looks also brand new, though its pages have started to yellow.  It’d be nice if I could reach the “Hs” this year.

– Swedish Smorgasbord and Hundreds of Favorite Recipes is a spiral-bound booklet published by the Friendship Evangelical Lutheran Church of Pittsburgh in 1949.  I’ll never get to the “Ss” and this book seems to have a lot of non-Swedish recipes, but it’s still cool to have it.

In other book news, I’m planning to get rid of A Taste of Florida: The Best of “Thought You’d Never Ask, because I didn’t find any recipe there that I wanted to make and most of them are not Floridian anyway (rather, recipes from all sorts of restaurants in Florida).  Clearly I’m not the only one unimpressed by the book as it retails used for 1-cent in Amazon.com (though with shipping it’s $4).  But if you are near San Leandro and you want it, you can come and get it.

 

New International Menus Up

April 5, 2012 / / 0 Comments

I’ve cooked quite a few international dishes in the last few months, but I haven’t actually updated this blog about the cuisines I’ve “finished”.  I actually have a few more to write up, but if I wait until I’m done with those, I’ll forget all about it.

So, the new cuisines I’ve done are those of:

– Ancient Persia – a nice khoresh and chilau made a great weekday meal.

– Dominica – included one of the best chicken dishes I’ve ever eaten

– Dominican Republic – wasn’t too successful with this one 🙁

– Holland – you have to try the pancakes!

– Dum Pukht – this is not a place but a style of cuisine that emerged during the Mogul empire in India.

Dalmatia and Denmark are also finished, but I have to write them up.  Hopefully I’ll get to it later today.

Raymundo’s Caramel Flan – Product Review

March 23, 2012 / / 2 Comments

I got this at Grocery Outlet last week.  The 21 oz package was on sale for about $2, I think.  Its first ingredients were milk and sugar so I thought it was worth trying.  It wasn’t bad but I wouldn’t but it again.

I found the flan both a bit insipid and too smooth for my taste.  I prefer flans that are a bit rougher, with air bubbles throughout.  I assume this is because this flan is made with whole eggs, but I imagine the fillers don’t help either.

 

Immaculate Baking Co. Ready-to-Bake Pie Crusts – Review

March 18, 2012 / / 1 Comment

I found these at Grocery Outlet (in San Leandro) for $1.50, and I figured they were worth a try.  I don’t think I’d buy them again.

The crusts are refrigerated, rather than frozen, but you still need to bring them to room temperature before unrolling – which takes about half an hour.  Otherwise, they’ll easily break.  Even fully room-temperature crusts don’t stay together that well. As they come rolled in, there is no pan included – so make sure you have your own.

My real problem with them, however, was the flavor.  Even though they are “all natural” they have this very unpleasant bitter taste that you feel at the back of your mouth.  It lingers. Not pleasant.

Whiting Fish: the Best bargain around?

March 13, 2012 / / 0 Comments

I came across this fish yesterday at Grocery Outlet.  I was a bit reluctant to buy it because it was only $4 for a 2lb bag – at least one third the cost of most fish I buy.  But it was the only fish I could find at that store that didn’t come from China or Vietnam (instead, it was wild caught in the US), so I figured it was worth the risk.  I think it was.

Pacific whiting, also known as Pacific hake, is a relative of the merluza I grew up eating in Argentina.  It’s a medium-sized fish, with relatively fragile flesh and a distinctive, somewhat sweet, flavor.  It has a greater oil concentration than other species, so it tastes fishier than most of the white fish I usually eat (catfish, cod, sole, tilapia, etc.).  This flavor was too strong for my daughter, and didn’t particularly thrill my husband either.  I liked it, but probably because it took me back to childhood.

That said, if I was cooking just for the adults I would definitely buy it again, specially at $2lb!

Goyette 2010 Sonoma County Cabernet Sauvignon – Yummy!

March 5, 2012 / / 0 Comments

Mike won this wine (along with a 2010 Goyette Pinot Noir) at a school auction Friday night (yay for Mike!).  I opened it last night for a small get together, and I was very, very pleased.  The wine was very smooth, with soft tannins but a deep body, perfectly balanced and just yummy.  It went great with the bread and Bavarian brie I served it with.  I haven’t found much about this wine online – most references are to the Napa Valley cab – so I don’t know how much it retails for, but it’s definitely a great wine if under $20.

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