Table For Two

Everyone knows that English originated in England and after some exploration and generations, the language took a U-turn to form the basic English we speak here in the states -with some leeway considering that not all people call a water fountain a bubbler, or a shopping cart a buggy, things like that.

As a matter of fact, I’m part English from my great-grandmother. She probably had different names for some things in her fridge. Some names might have come from being next-door neighbors to European countries, like calling an eggplant an aubergine. That’s French. Most things just come from what they do or look like for example cling film is plastic wrap.

I have an idea for a game. See if you can guess what these things are in the US from their UK names. If you can’t tell by the word alone, I’ll give you a clue.

Broad Beans-            These are usually pale green and come in a can.

Black Treacle-          This is a sticky sweet goop that’s popular down south, and in Harry Potter’s favorite dessert.

Chips-                       They don’t come in a bag. More like on the side with dipping sauce.

Fairy Cake-              If it’s for a fairy, it must be small.

Courgette-               Long, green and full of seeds

Coriander-              Not the Indian spice! Think Spanish herb.

Gammon                 This looks like the French word “Jambon”

Powdered               Like a POWDERED doughnut.

Maize                      Spanish word again. Direct translation

Marrow                  It’s kind of round and colorful vegetables

Muesli                     Usually it’s in cereal.

Pilchards                The fish that squish close together in a tin.

Kippers                    Smoked gray other kind of fish, associated with Jews.

Rasher                    Usually cooked in strips

Runner Beans       Long skinny beans

Sarnie/Butty          Filled with jam, or maybe cold-cuts lettuce etc.

Squash                    This one you don’t actually eat, so grab a glass.

Most of the answers are HERE

Tell us how you did. Tell us any other names for food that you know. It’s handy to build up your vocab for when you crack open a new culture’s cookbook. Some say that words are fun

With all of the hot humid summer days we had in July, we knew it was a perfect time to pick some fruit from this little gem in the capital area NY, Bohman’s Orchard. We were brought down by trolley from raspberries to blueberries to peaches. It really is a treat to go pick your own produce right off of the plant. You never have a big enough container for all that you see and want to eat. Licking the juice off of your fingers, crawling under branches and bushes and reaching up for that one on the tree just out of reach are things you will never do in a typical grocery store.

How do you share a bag of peaches among friends evenly before they rot? Make a peach cobbler! We found a recipe online and decided to give it a try.

We didn’t exactly follow ALL of the directions to a T. We lowered the sugar down by half. Come on, butter cookies take less sugar than that and peaches have natural sugar to them too! Why so much? The recipe we found called for two whole cups of sugar!!! I know for baking you need to follow the directions almost to a T, but I couldn’t quite abide by this. Peaches have a lot of sugar in them anyways.

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

We piled up a cup of chopped peaches and folded in some blueberries. While we let the peaches and sugar stew in a pot (the recipe called for the peaches to be softened by boiling them – I added some extra water to help it along) we made the batter. This was very similar to your standard cake batter. This is kind of where we noticed something seemed off. Normally a cobbler doesn’t come out with THAT MUCH to it. While it tasted good (I mean come on, you put in that much sugar, and it will taste good a-priori) there just seemed to be tooooo much for that teeny tiny amount of fruit that they called for.

You need some serious grease on these pans to keep things from sticking around here! I have messed this up several times (and almost ruined a few breakfasts at that). The key is to make sure you grease the pan, no skimping here. We added the stewed peaches and the blueberries and poured the batter on top. Then it was plopped into an oven preheated to 375 degrees Fahrenheit for roughly 40 minutes.

Our batter came out pretty nicely if I do say so myself for a first time. I felt like a little southern belle putting in my 2 cents here and there helping him spread and pour from flour to 2% milk. I noticed as it was cooking that the batter seemed to seep underneath and immerse the fruit while baking. It seemed to come out very cake like, and not so much like a cobbler… Next time, I think we cut down the batter or use a different recipe altogether. But I suppose that is how we learn, eh?

To be honest, we’ve never even had a taste of peach cobbler before, so we need some talk about how to improve the recipe. Doesn’t he look handsome over a hot pot of stewing peaches?

I love you too, darling!

 

 

 

The shortfin mako shark or Isurus oxyrinchus is truly a marvel. Clocking in at 35-80 kilometers per hour, these guys are sharp predators with a heat-exchange system and a high metabolism to keep warm underwater where the males grow to be 3.2 meters long, and the females at 3.8 meters long.  These are the fastest and largest pelagic sharks in the world! We got a chance to try some at home from the same monger who showed us the blowfish. Remember?

Hunting these creatures is a toss up. Sharks like this one are dangerous to humans. It’s what organizations like the National Marine Fisheries Service call “Managed” in the Atlantic and Gulf waters. They don’t reproduce quick at all. Not all sharks are edible, but Mako is the one most hunted. It’s more popular eating shark in Australia, but the shark here are endangered. CITES even have new laws protecting Mako sharks from trade, unless it’s proven that trade will not harm their chances at survival. The juicy details are all in this article describing the meeting in Geneva. HERE

This is a BIG no-no for pregnant women! Fish have mercury naturally, then get eaten by bigger fish so on and so forth until they are eaten by sharks. Thus, sharks sometimes have insane amounts of mercury in them. If mercury poisoning is detrimental to non-pregnant people, it’s twice as bad if you’re an expecting mother.

As for cooking a piece of Mako shark, you treat it the same as a steak. You may want to use a rub and set it down in a puddle of oil on the stove-top, or try your hand at the grill. We haven’t tried grilling yet, so we can’t give any advice on that yet. I like to use the pan because it’s easy to clean while we listen for the oil to warm up and give us a roaring applause as we set the meat down. 

*CRUCIAL TIP: SHARKS PEE THROUGH THEIR SKIN, SO PLEASE SOAK THE MEAT FIRST!*

I may have loved Shark Week as a kid, but this shark didn’t leave a good feel in my mouth once it got onto the plate. It was mealy to me kind of like swordfish. I’m not a typical fan of that unless it’s cooked PERFECT.  Shark was more like cornbread than meat, so the texture was an unwelcome surprise. I don’t take points of for flavor, but this consistency scored a big fat 0 in my book. Needless to say, I won’t be eating shark again.

I thought the same way about the consistency, but I would compare it to chewed up oatmeal. I kind of liked the fish-flavor, but the thing we didn’t include is a good sauce. A thick sauce instead of a thin salsa is just what this dish needed. Alton Brown suggests using a salsa verde or a remoulade on his new edition of “Good Eats”. You can find it on the Food Network. He’s fast, but accurate and goes over every last important detail in full about how and why to do things a certain way, with science.

When all is said and done,  I won’t order a shark dish either. I have conservation guilt and would fret over how they’re going to serve it. You can eat at an expensive place, but if it isn’t worth bragging, it isn’t worth your money. I mean, this one wasn’t even worth taking pictures, so you KNOW it’s not up to our standards. Here’s an informational video about Mako shark instead…https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fd8AlQvsOTY

Kale craze is the new avocado palooza. Medical News Today has an article HERE where they list a few bullet points about fiber, potassium and a few paragraphs in relation to diabetes, heart disease and cancer. As far as we’re concerned, we’re just happy we can make it taste less like eating palm tree leaves. We bought our kale from a couple of ladies at the weekly Saratoga Farmer’s Market. She suggested baking it, blending it into healthy shakes and perhaps ripping it up into anything with spinach.

My weak point when it comes to eating healthy is a bunch of rolled over potato chips, tortilla chips and a handful of crackers. First things first, let’s go to a video of a potato chip factory to see how professionals do it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L09bMsShfY4 

This is our first attempt at making kale chips. My father tried to make these a few times but couldn’t quite figure out the secret to keeping them crispy. There’s something in the humidity that re-hydrates kale all over. That crispy texture only stays for about a half-hour. We baked our kale at 375 degrees,  Fahrenheit for 7 minutes. Any longer than that in a regular bake oven and they’ll burn to black and brown flakes.

Salty, spicy, cheesy and cinnamon churro seemed like 4 good test flavors.

Salty is your basic brand-name original flavor. Not much to it, but it provides a control one needs in all scientific endeavors. It was worth it to see how much seasoning we needed for each flavor. This proved it was possible. They were a little browner than we had liked and we needed a test to see how long they needed to bake. All and all, it was worth it.

Spicy is the hot chip that everybody eats a bunch on a dare or stains their fingers and has to suck it off holding back tears. That one’s fun!! These took second place for us. My only wish is that I held back on the cumin and smoked paprika. A little flavor, a little heat, a little too much on each chip, but we did a good job on this batch.

Every kind of snack food on the market has some kind of cheese flavor unless it’s fruity. This is essential in other words because if there’s no garlic ranch or sour cream flavor combo, my favorite tends to be the cheese coated one. Usually cheddar or Parmesan. Unfortunately, the cheese we grated on top oozed a bit and the inner moisture got into the leaves and we didn’t even take a picture these were so bad. We ate them just to get rid of them. No, we’re never grating cheese on top of kale again. We needed to find some dried out cheese if this one was going anywhere. Oh well. Better luck next time.

My mother is an autumn person. So is Jeremy. This is the sweet toothed sugary snack chip that people either love or hate. Cinnamon can be considered a spice after all. It’s easily blended in with brown sugar. You know my favorite chef Anne line: “BROWN FOOD TASTES GOOD!” But this just reminded me of a churro from Mexico. This was the all around favorite. It was crispy, VERY sweet and didn’t get a grainy texture at all. It was the most like store-bought potato chips out of all 4 batches.

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

 

 

 

So, I was coming home from work late one night and boy, was I hungry. So Jeremy came to see me on my way out and we kind of morphed my mother’s 5-can casserole into a midnight macaroni. Her recipe is a can of cream of mushroom soup, a can of peas, a can of tuna, a can of cheddar soup and another can of crispy onion bits for the top. But when it’s late at night, you don’t have the time or will to bake up a whole casserole. You want fast food sans guilt. If it was a hard day, you need a soft landing. This is why we have comfort food.

First of all, in our opinion, the ULTIMATE comfort food is macaroni and cheese. It’s an easy one pot dinner almost if you synchronize everything just right. We’re not there yet, so Lauren boiled the macaroni. Shells are a nice vessel for the cheese. The bigger the better, but small ones work well too, as do elbows, rigatoni, or whatever shape suits your fancy. I mean, just LOOK at this gallery of shapes…Voila!

We wanted to be healthy and since I can’t go 2 days without fish, (Sorry Bruce, but fish are friends ’til they’re dead. Then they’re food!) we used a can of tuna fish, not the pre-seasoned packages because you can just as easily play with the seasonings on any plain fish. Combinations can range from sweet to spicy, seasonal, herbal, citrus…Anything you want. The spice pantry is a great place to use your imagination, make mistakes and experiment like a true culinary scientist. Really, try it out! It’s fun! If you aren’t a tuna person, you can find a bag of tiny shrimp in the frozen section, or calamari, mussels out of the shells or even scrap the fish and add chicken. It’s your meal, so you decide what protein goes into it, even leftover bean mix if you want.

Remember that bechamel from a few weeks ago? We added some velveeta cheese to it and gave it a cheesy twist. The tricky part for me is the issue of lumping. When I add the flour first at an estimated lump, (1 cup turns the milk into glue and patties.) I find more lumps than a case of Hidradenitis. My best secret is to pour in your milk first, add the flour gradually and then melt in the cheese. You REALLY want to have as much control as you can over this part in the process. Some say it’s 1:1 ratio, but that’s not always right as far as we’ve seen. Besides, some people prefer imperfect too thin or too thick sauces compared to what the books say.

I am a huge connoisseur of spice. I’ve tried everything I can get my hands on from mild salsa to this one little bottle in the Pepper Palace called “The End”. (We’ll discuss that when we go to Quincy Market. It’s a tad embarrassing.) But anyway, I saw some jalapenos in the vegetable stands and thought, “why not?”. It would wake us up a little. We weren’t scared of the capsaicin because dairy products like cheese sauces have fat which takes the heat down a notch more effectively than water.

Vegetables and accents are yours to decide. We chopped up and threw in some vitamin B rich broccoli crowns nice and tiny. When they cook through, they aren’t as hard but it’s so stocky they never become soggy, a notorious disappointment with zucchini. We piled on some minced mushrooms for the top. My mother likes to use crunchy onion bits. Sometime soon, we’ll show you Lauren’s new rice cooker and try out the cute little steamer basket that comes with it. Nobody said you can’t steam your vegetables on the side and fold in gently. We decorated ours with minced mushrooms all over the top.

Overall, this dish is a total artist’s canvas for any and all kinds of flavors and textures. I can clearly see this working on “Worst Cooks in America” as a base-line challenge as a 1st time creative assignment. We love this dish and will gladly keep it in our repertoire.

There is however one thing that we didn’t do that REALLY would have tied it all together for movie-buffs like us, <sigh> but we’re not alcohol drinkers.

Do you mean…

Yup, Midnight Margaritas! https://youtu.be/FarMiGXytwo?t=12

Anyone who has lived in Louisiana, been to a southern style restaurant or seen one of my favorite Disney princess movies, “The Princess and the Frog” , has heard about gumbo. It’s a spicy southern rice soup full of andouille sausage, vegetables, rice, and sometimes shrimp. African gumbo adds okra as a thickening agent. Beef and pork are not to be found. It’s usually on the side or a kick-in-the-pants topper for rice.

Some say that it can take up to a full day, (kind of like my grandma’s Christmas Eve sauce recipe) but SpicesInc has figured out how to cut that time to only an hour or so.  Their recipe is HERE as well as a comparison to the closely related same-pan main event, jambalaya.

This is the recipe we used from Delish. One thing we found was that out of all we saw about gumbo, we kept seeing the holy trinity. Now let us make it clear: THIS IS NOT RELIGIOUS! The holy trinity of cooking is just onions, peppers and celery. These are a few basic components used in Cajun cooking. They add a pinch of heat and that hearty vegetable crunch. If you want to crank up the spice meter, try a New Mexican green pepper, or jalapeno. Be sure to check out this list before experimenting. Above all, DON’T RUB THE OIL ON YOURSELF, ANY CUTS OR IN YOUR EYES! If it happens by mistake, wash it out with soap and water.    ~You’re welcome!

The roux was for sure the hardest part. Everything else was a simple step one- step two -step three and so on until step. This one wanted the roux to be super dark. 3/5 of the Famous Five French mother sauces: Bechamel, Veloute, and Espagnole use this method all the time. Usually, it relies on a 1:1 ratio of fat to flour. For Bechamel: Butter, a splash of milk and a quick whisk just to get rid of the flour taste if you’re going French style, Oil and/or lard  for Cajun where you fry the flour and let it brown nice and dark in the milk to embrace the nuttiness of it. Veloute is more stock and oil. The Sun King’s court came up with the idea. As they said in the movie, “Perfect Sense” that’s the essence of it all, fat and flour. When Flour meets water, it clumps. The fat acts as a smooth buffer for the molecules to slide around nicely instead of bumping and clumping. You’ve all heard about oil and water, right?

As for the taste after we sauted and combined everything. As for the end result,  we felt this was aces. Bold flavors, salty sausage and a nice pepper blend. The onions had a great caramelization to them. I’d gladly cook this one up again.

 

Geia Sas! That’s Greek for Hello! We’re continuing our GREEK chapter with a bit of night-life. This is a great recipe for when you want to serve something…eclectic, shall we say?

Riddle Me This:  What has 8 limbs, and tastes like chewing gum without the sugar? 

YUM!! I mean Yup, you guessed it…  OCTOPUS! 

 

Don’t be alarmed. It’s already dead. We made octopus soup 3 weeks ago from our big blue Greek cookbook. Not exactly the best idea on a hot day, but better to do a test-run before we get into the colder seasons of capital-area New York. Besides, seafood is best caught in the summer months anyhow.

We wanted to cut down on the salt and sodium, so we opted for 6 bottles of store-bought clam juice instead of fish/seafood stock. It seemed risky, but was well worth it to cut down the tang of that dry red wine we found. 

For those of you who don’t know, wine is either  dry, semi-dry or sweet. This just refers to how much sugar was burned off or not in the fermentation process. Ours was a dry red, which means red grapes were used and all of the sugar was burned off. The wood and the grape skins give a bitter taste of tannin. This happens mostly in red wines, tea, cinnamon, and acai berries.

We also have a disclosure to make: We don’t drink anything alcoholic, so my mom’s rule of broomstick was a bit hard for us. The rule states; one must taste the wine and like it before adding it into any sort of cooking or baking because the taste will stick around in the finished product, even if it won’t get you buzzed. We didn’t like the wine we chose at all. Red was the smart choice for color and goes well with octopus in terms of flavor profile, but I felt if we had gone with something sweeter-but not too sweet, it would have made a difference in first tastings. This is why after we tried some of our finished soup, we added a small palm’s worth of sugar to the pot. (It’s a Sicilian thing. You see it in the movie “Moonstruck” with Cher. I’m an eighth Sicilian through my paternal grandfather’s side.)

We wanted to try something new and healthy. In the produce section, we spotted a couple containers of zoodles.

You remember that pasta maker contraption where you stuck vegetables in the middle of it and cranked it like spaghetti. They claim that people don’t know the difference, but that underestimates human intelligence. Noodles made from zucchini never taste like typical egg and flour noodles. The zucchini noodles we found were firm enough to hold in the broth, but I wouldn’t use them again. They added no flavor at all to it. Maybe the beet or carrot zoodles would have been a better option, that way we wouldn’t have to add the extra carrots in for sweetness. We still decided to add in some fettuccine alongside. This really added some fullness to the soup unlike the other vegetables while also acting as a vehicle to carry the flavor. 

All and all, we would say this one needs improvement, but that’s how we learn everything about cooking if it isn’t textbook. Maybe we could find something that tastes less Italian and more GREEK. Lemon, feta and other pungent flavors covered in olive oil. Nice oregano, but this tasted much more like Mediterranean in general. In my opinion, it needs to scream louder, give a bigger bite, like something was inexplicably missing. It matters some about origin, (That’s how you get fusion cooking) but flavor is what wins me over every time. For me at least, we’re learning about what we like, we’re getting better at making elements, but we need to work on our complex pieces.

This one wasn’t too hard per say, but for us this was a first. We have the formula down, BS: Boil & Simmer. As we get on, I’m sure we’ll get better. But for now, it’s a good start. 

Hi everybody! I Jeremy, am a mix of Italian, German-Austrian, English, Egyptian, and a hint of Greek. When people think of Greece, they think of scenic islands, surf and turf dinner and “My Big Fat Greek Wedding” 1 and 2. (We liked the sequal better, but that’s not the point.)

We went to Greek Fest in Troy NY: (Attach video 1, Video 2, Video 3) and found a cookbook, “The foods of the Greek Islands” by Aglaia Kremezi next to the miniature structures of the Parthanon. There were a couple recipes that we wanted to try. Good thing we both love cheeses.

We started out with the Ticanopita Me Feta, an egg and cheese pancake made in the oven with a very loose batter full of black pepper and oregano. You can use other herbs and even honey according to my investigation. Just don’t forget to GREECE the pan before it goes in. Get it?         Please excuse that, he thinks he’s funny…I am!    Not.

Eggs are a must. This one took __. That’s about % of a dozen. It’s something to keep in mind when grocery shopping. Suddenly those 4-packs look REALLY skimpy. We go through eggs very quickly in my family. 2 per person is 8 gone. Then Jeremy darling c came into my life 3 years ago. 2 more eggs come into account at breakfast. 12-8 becomes 12-10, thus only 1 dozen is simply not enough.

This may be classified as a “pancake”, but clearly this is more like a 4-6 person breakfast cake since we had to bake it in the oven and slice it with a knife. The most important thing about using oven recipes is to grease your pans heavily. We once tried to bake popovers, and we didn’t use enough grease, so it stuck to the bottom and we had to scrape i.e. scratch a perfectly good baking tin. Not exactly our brightest moment. Good thing it was off-camera.

Our favorite part was by far the ample amounts of feta cheese. It can be very chalky if it’s made cheaply, skimping out on good quality. We find the Athenos brand to be very solid, cheesy, and has next to no salt added. I’d describe it as being like mozzarella, but without the stretch and more of a crumble. It breaks apart super easily. 

If you don’t have feta laying around, goat cheese will suffice. It’s creamier than most cheeses, isn’t chalky at all and usually has great body to it. A farmer’s market vendor sold us a few ounces of goat, sheep and cow cheese blend for our Arabian night a month ago. 

Once we finished baking and started eating, we were treated to real Greek comfort food. I swear it was like a square of baked macaroni and cheese! Yes, it took us a while to cook, about 40 minutes, but for some things like this, it’s worth the wait.

Everyone who knows about “Spongebob Squarepants” has heard of Krabby Patties. These are a derivative, crab cakes. It sounds like a dessert, but it’s pretty much a staple in the summer sect of the sandwich family. I personally love mine with a creamy tartar sauce.

Not me. I prefer to spice things up with a few drops of hot sauce. There’s a reason they give you a tiny bottle of Tabasco sauce at oyster bars. Not so you can make a jewelry out of it! (Though I loved the triquetra bracelet you made for our 3rd year of dating.)

We grabbed some claw meat and some regular both out of the bagged section of the seafood department so we could have a nice blend of the meatier and shredded pieces as if we had gone out to the Ortley beach bay area in Seaside Heights near Lucky Leo’s and caught them ourselves like when I was a little girl. I’ve known how to catch blue crabs since I was 3 years old.

My best advice to anyone hooking a piece of frozen fish on a string tied to a boat one at a time: Tails work the best as bait because it makes it look like it’s swimming away, then the head because it has that dead smell that . Take it up slowly when you have a nibble so as to not scare the poor thing away. Bring a net and a bucket just like you’re fishing and don’t forget your hat, sunglasses and sunscreen.

After catching, you’ll have to clean them out. Just pop the shell in the back and clear out the gray, brown and orange bits with tools or your hands. Those shells can be sharp, so you might want to wear Nitrile gloves. At least these guys won’t bleed on you like a fish. Are you confused? CLICK HERE for a video on cleaning crabs.

We diced up a red onion, celery and a mix of yellow and red bell pepper to obtain a crunchy texture and fresh sweet and tangy flavor thanks to the recipe on Food Network.com

 

Capers are green-gray pearly bliss. They’re the buds from caper plants called capparis inermis, while caperberries are the fruit. The ones we eat are pickled like cucumbers in vinegar or some other kind of brine, hence they stay preserved for long periods of time and have that distinct sour taste. Usually these go with salmon, lemon and Mediterranean puttanesca. (Puttanesca comes from “puttanada” meaning, “A bit of nothing”, so Klaus missed the ball slightly in the movie “A Series of Unfortunate Events”.) The biggest ones come from Greek rocky crags, some of them are as big as small figs. Mostly us North Americans use them as toppings on bagels, pizza, salads and deviled eggs. The Spruce Eats has all the details. I’ve come to enjoy these little suckers very much.

 

Now, we mix it all up, crab meat vggies and spices, you know the usual: salt, black pepper and a mess of garlic. 

 Now we mix in our bread crumbs and voila, patty batter! We cut them up into circles and laid them on the indoor grill top until they had a good crust on each side. After that, you can eat them on a bun, or as they are now. It makes most sense to me to eat them sandwich style and add on like a true Krabby Patty. I like fork and knife if I want to cut out the extra bread, dip it in sauce on the side, mix it with something else like a side dish or just look high class. All and all, you can eat these the way you want! Enjoy this video of some of Spongebob’s best Krabby Patty moments and comment your suggestions! We’ll be glad to listen and try them out. Bye!

 

As we go out, we get the chance from time to time to explore some Indian restaurants. I guess I still have some nostalgia from last week’s Arabian Night. We have a ranking  of the 4 we’ve tried in the capital area thus far. Our criteria is simple: Quality of food, Price, and other parameters like distance, atmosphere, etc. The best one is on the top. The worst is on the bottom.

1. At the top of our chart we have Karavalli. Their website is here. The variety of food is pretty broad as they cater from different regions of India. I for one love it because it’s inclusive and sorted by meal and dessert. On the dinner menu, we could easily see which entrees were at which spice levels. It’s by far the fanciest place on our list since they just got remodeled. When we ordered for dinner, we found out the hard way it was family style. We had a lunch leftover for the next day. This would be a great place for large or small groups to relax and truly share a meal. Easily a perfect 5 spoons raised! The prices were also fair too, while not the cheapest place of all the restaurants we have been to, it was reasonably priced. And it is only about a 10 to 20 minute drive from our house, so all the better. The staff are also friendly too, which are a big plus. Make sure to make reservations, as this place tends to be crowed around lunch and dinner.
2. Shalimar- This one is right near Sake Bon and Market 32. My friend Jared used to work there briefly. The folks there are alright and the food is of limited variety, but all of it satisfying. They make the best chicken marsala I’ve ever tasted. Remember that time we did it with tofu? They have a really cheap lunch buffet, all you can eat for roughly $12.00. Not bad, and the quality of the food for that price is excellent. However, while not bad, the atmosphere leaves a little to be desired. The decor seemed a little run down, and it could use a dusting in the corners and chandlers. This is their website.
3. Chatpata- We went there last Valentine’s Day for the low-cost lunch buffet. Everything is delicious from the spice selection to the, but the sauces left my lips red and tingling for a few minutes. We were  satisfied with the vegetables – I loved the curry flour breading – but the goat was very greasy and the other meat that wasn’t cut off was mostly bones. We went to their Facebook website. Similar to entry #2, but even cheaper. The decor was a little worse, and it seemed not as frequented as #2 although they have decent Google reviews. The quality of the food wasn’t as good either, as Darling had already mentioned. I felt like the food was lost in the spices and sauces, and the chicken tandoori was burnt to a crisp, I mostly got charcoal bits.
4. Curry House- Everything there is so spicy, it may as well be from a joke shop. No-frills is an understatement. It seemed like the building was yawning from the bland walls, but not as bad as trying to find a space to park the car. I’m talking near invisibility. There wasn’t much value driving all the way out just to get burned. Give me some of that cheese naan, basmati rice and a pitcher of water to get this down! Don’t be skimpy with the ice, please, I’m begging you! The naan may be flavored, but that’s the only pizzazz available. The delivery may be free, but they only go 5 miles taking the same amount of time to deliver as it takes to make it yourself. Their website is here. As you can see on their website: HERE The menu is HUGE, which some say isn’t always a good sign. At least it’s easy to place your order. So we’re clear, I am not familiar with this location. I haven’t spent much time driving around in this area. That being said, I  am a decent driver and navigator. I had passed this place by several times before we were able to spot it (the sign for the place was not well placed) and parking was horrendous.

Any places you think should be on the list? We’ll be more than happy to tell about any place we go.

So, what are you waiting for? Start commenting,

Facebook messaging, emailing,

and posting. “Sharing is caring” more than applies here.