ishte, posts by tag: food - LiveJournal

Antojitos Criollos (pronounced it: /ahn'•toe•hee'•tose kree•yoh'•yose/)

A friend of mine took me and my daughter out for dinner this evening.  We had decided that Mexican food sounded good, There has been little hole-in-the-wall Mexican place on Linden for many years, but none of us had ever eaten there.   We like adventure, so we decided to try it out.  We arrived at Antojitos Criollos thinking it was the Mexican Restaurant.  When we received our menus, we realized that it was not.  The cuisine was Puerto Rican, and most of the dishes were not familiar to us at all. We decided to stay and just give it a try. After all, we like adventure, and none of us are afraid to try something new.  I wrote this review on Yelp.com, but I just wanted to share it for anyone who comes into Dayton, or who might be in Dayton and want to try something different and at the same time support a local small business rather than some boring national chain. I did give the restaurant 4 out of  5 stars.

Service:
Excellent.  Since it was our first time, our waiter spent time with us, explaining dishes in detail. He really made us feel comfortable ordering from a menu that did not have any illustrations.  He also checked back with us shortly after each dish was served to make to see how we were enjoying it.  This is so so important and they definitely did not miss this point. (including after our drinks were served since we were ordering drinks that were not standard fare American soda pop)

Food:
Exemplary.  We ordered a sampler of different things and some pork chunks.  Both were very good, and filled three people up before we ever got to the entrées. We did order entrées though (and took most home) just so we could try something else too. We also finished up with a slice of flan to split three ways, just so we could discover how it would differ from the flan served in a Mexican restaurant.  First, there were two choices of Flan. We ordered the coconut (sorry,  I don't remember what the second choice was... maybe pineapple?). This had to have been the absolute best flan I have ever had.  I'll never look at flan the same way again.

Price:
We found the pricing to be quite reasonable.  Some may look at the menu and balk at the price, but the amount of our serving was quite a lot.  We spent $20 on our two appetizers, and that alone was enough to fill three adults up. We did get entrée's but took most of it home and left so stuffed that 4 hours later we still had no need for snacks. This is not cheap Mexican food served out of a Taqueria. We did find the price points to be quite reasonable for the amount served.  Most of the bigger dishes are probably enough that two adults could split it and a small appetizer, leave full and still spend less than $20 plus the tip.

Presentation:
This is an area which I gather from an review I saw from right after Antojitos Criollos first opened, where much improvement has been made since those first days. We did find that there is still some room for improvement, however it is more in the finer details. The restaurant is lovely, and we really like the color choices for the walls a lush avocado above the chair rail coupled with a wonderful bright reddish orange intended to match the color of flamboyan tree blossoms. It seems like an unlikely match, but it worked very well.  The chair rails were natural wood, and that might do better to be finished.  Nice quality Linen Table cloths also in a nice avocado really made for a pleasant environment as well.  Nicer dining chairs would be a great improvement. Right now there are really simplistic old school dining chairs, but we recognize that nice dining chairs are expensive, so I can cut some slack there.  The presentation of the food was also largely very good.  It was beautifully plated, with real artistry.   The drinks were served in glasses, made of... you know.. GLASS which for me is a big plus. I do not like being served in plastic or paper cups. It's just not classy. So nice clean clear glasses  was a real plus.  The only real flaw to the presentation of the food was that when we were served our pork chunks, we are also served a large box of toothpicks.  We do find it acceptable to be provided toothpicks for this type of food on a shared place. However, the presentation of the picks could be improved in two ways. 1) get some nice sandwich picks with decorative ends 2) provide several of them presented in a little flat sauce dish or tray.

Overall:
We had a very good experience and will definitely be going back.  Full points for food, service, and price. So presentation is where my points come off. However, I do want to mention that this is a new restaurant, only 2 months in business with a young entrepreneur who is still learning his way with his first business.  The points of presentation are really minor things now that, as he progresses, I am sure will improve with time. Definitely a place to try. I will absolutely eat here again.

Start of Operation: 1630 hrs
Operation Complete: 2149 hrs
Basic Report:

• Entreés
• 8 Beany Burger Muck
• 4 Not Really Beef Stroganoff
• 4 Honey Mustard Chicken
• 4 Ranch Chicken
• 3 Tilapia in Plum Wine
• 4 Tilapia in Saké and Soya
• 9 Pork Loin in Mushroom Sauce
• Vegetables
• 4 Stir Fried Egg Plant
• 8 Steamed Broccoli
• 8 Steamed Cauliflower
• 7 Steamed Brussels Sprouts
• 4 Zucchini in Garlic Sauce
• 4 Steamed Carrot Slices
• 4 Steamed Carrot Sticks
• Other
• 1 Vat Triple Stock Chicken Soup
• 1 Gallon Bag Omelet Mix (half full)

Detailed Report: ( Collapse )

Is made of WIN.



And I want to eat a similar one on my birthday this year.  I hope that the yarn balls are actually cake balls with yarn frosting rather than all fondant and frosting.  I hope that mine will have crochet hooks and not knitting needles.  I wonder if there is a way to make candy crochet hooks for it. that would be very cool.

Today's activity was Multicooking.  Four hours of it. I'm really exhausted now. For those of you not in the know, multicooking is when I cook about 10 different dishes at once (or in one afternoon) and split it into individual servings to freeze so I can just grab what I want individually and stick it in the microwave.

My end result? I have in my freezer:

14 Spaghetti and Meat Sauce
11 Baked Spaghetti Squash
10 bowls of Chicken Soup (one vat)
7 Baked Sweet Potatoes
5 Steamed Carrots
4 Home Fries
4 Beef Stroganoff
4 Steamed Broccoli
4 Steamed Zucchini
2 Fried Eggplant

I will not have to cook my lunch for quite some time now. I am very tired.

I have completed my first multicook in I don't know how long.  Now I have lots of things prepared and ready to go. all I have to do is grab them out of the fridge or freezer and pop 'em in the nukulator, (or bento box for lunch the next day). On the menu:

Tilapia in garlic butter
Honey Mustard Chicken
Ranch Chicken
Chicken soup. (I should have made some rice to go in it)
Butternut squash with maple syrup
Glazed Carrots
Zucchini and Summer Squash stir fried in butter and garlic
hmm... seems like there was some more stuff... but I can't remember now.  Too busy watching DNAngel (and eating) to go look.

Homemade Pumpkin Pie is in the oven... the second half of the batch awaits the outcome of the first. I used the simple recipe on the can, but must say that even unbaked it actually does smell quite good. We shall see. I have high hopes.

My pie might actually have a special ingredient though. See... I bought the cloves and found that they were in fact WHOLE and I needed ground... so um... I wiped it out and stuck them in the coffee grinder which has only been used to grind delicious hazelnut coffee to date. so there may be a slight residue from that on the cloves. I'm not sure what that will do to the coffee, so I think I'll wash it now.

Breyer's no added sugar ice cream is pretty good. However, compare to Pierre's, it's nothing. Pierre's no added sugar moose tracks is just so far to the superior that there is just no comparison. I feel sorry for people who can't get Pierre's ice cream. Seriously.

Just saying.

Here's mine. A lot of people have this idea that watching your weight has to be so ugly and extreme. Why do people thing that? because of the stereotypical diet plate. you see the cartoon guy whose wife has put two peas, one carrot stick and a couple of green beans on his plate and that's his meal.

My mom has a diet. here's what she says: "I hate diets. I think you should eat what you want, and just not eat as much of it." This is after fighting with her weight most of her adult life, trying this diet or that diet, special foods and yo-yoing up and down until she finally just gave up and stayed fat. Then she lost about 100 pounds. Now granted some of this was because Dad was sick and one of the things they enjoyed doing together was... eating. So they ate and they overate. No dinner conversation... too busy eating. When Dad got sick, his appetite went and he didn't feel much like eating. So mom didn't eat as much either. And she lost weight. Plenty of it. Now she's not much bigger than me, and I'm only really about 10 pounds over my ideal. We wear the same size bra, which is something I thought would never happen.

Anyway, my point here is that a diet doesn't have to be painful. It's not a diet. It's what you eat. You should enjoy it. But enjoying something doesn't mean you have to have seconds and thirds. It doesn't mean you have to have a huge portion. Speaking of portions, most Americans have a very warped sense of what a proper portion is of anything. For most vegetables it's half a cup. HALF a cup. For most meats it's 4 oz. Yes *4* ounces, not 8 oz... not *16* oz. So if you buy a lovely 16 oz steak, fine. Cut it into nicely proportioned quarters. It's lovely. Cut it into smaller pieces when you are ready to eat it. It will fill up your plate. Don't get out some giant platter to eat off of either. You don't need a bigger plate. You need to eat slower, eat less and it helps if the plate is smaller because it looks like more. I go to restaurants and ask to be served with a box. When my giant plate of at least two meals comes, I section out half of each thing, and put it in the box, close the box and it's out of sight out of mind. I rearrange my plate, and then because I can see I have less, I eat more slowly so it will last. Usually by the time I'm finished, I'm feeling just as full, but not uncomfortably full. If it's all out on the plate, I feel obliged to eat it... or at the very least will continue to pick at it through the after dinner conversation instead of just sipping tea or coffee.

For a long time I used to post my dinner plates here with the instructions, but I haven't for a long time. What I want to demonstrate here is that the people who though my choice was so extreme when I decided to do Atkins... so I'm not doing Atkins any more. It doesn't work so well once a woman enters perimenopause, which I clearly have given my body's stupidity here lately. But in all honesty, my diet hasn't changed that much. the most radical change is that now I 1) eat breakfast and 2) usually it's cereal which was verboten by Atkins. But my dinner? No... really not so much change. Look here.

Here is my picture:


Here's how you make it:
Cut broccoli and peeled sweet potato. Put Veggies in steamer. Forget them other than to make sure the water doesn't boil away. Pour a couple tablespoons of soy sauce in a little skillet, heat on medium low. Add a half a teaspoon of fresh garlic. (I get mine out of a jar rather than crush it myself, btw and find it just as good as when I used to use fresh cloves.) add a handful of green onion sliced thin. (I usually take one onion, and slice it two mm wide, and keep going well up into the green stalk. When I add it to the pan, I retain a few.) a few slivers of carrot should be held with the uncooked onion. (I often have a carrot end in the fridge just for this purpose.) Put the Tilapia in the pan, dash with seasoning salt and paprika and turn over immediately *don't worry about some of the onions coming with it. that's ok. Dash with seasoning salt again and paprika. Just let it fry for a few minutes while you slice your strawberries. I use a diagonal slice on the strawberries. I cut off the top, then slice it in half on a diagonal.. the bottom is the bigger half, and then slice that bottom half into two pieces. The idea is to get it about in thirds. I cut about 4 berries, and then added maybe 10 of these little blueberries for some variety. Sprinkled them with Splenda though that's not really necessary, they're already sweet. Ok flip the Tilapia over now. Set up your plate and bowl, put the berries in the bowl, serve the veggies and spray with Parkay Spray. Get the Tilapia out, put it on the plate and sit down to eat. I sided it with a few little olives too, because I like them. You can serve this with a little wine if you like.

Yes I do. Finally nice and warm today. It was wonderful. Since we did NOT have summer most of the summer, I vote that we continue to have it until October 15. Then we can have fall.

Now... here is my summer recipe.

Take corn on the cob.
Cut cobs in half.
Put them in the steamer
Steam high for ten minutes...
Spray with 0 calorie butter spray (I recommend parkay)
lightly salt
Eat.

Yummy... word to the wise... portion control. ½ a cob is one serving. For weight watchers that's one point. But it's yummy.

This entire plum only has 30 calories. That's just awesome. Giant purple cherries rock so much. SO juicy and yummy. Mmmmmmmm.