Saturday, July 18, 2009

Warren, MI - I was first tipped off about Golden Harvest by a friend and also saw an article in the paper about how "authentic" this Chinese restaurant is. I rarely go to Chinese restaurants because the dishes are Americanized for our tastes. However, at Golden Harvest, there are menu items I have never seen before and would love to try out. This was the first one I saw that I have only seen on TV. This is Chinese Conch, a large salt water snail served in a very light soy sauce base with mushrooms. I loved that it was a dish I have never had before and how delicious it was. Since it is a large snail, it's hard to compare it to escargot, but it is slightly chewy, similar to calamari but softer. I highly recommend the restaurant to try something new and definitely the conch too. Enjoy!

Friday, July 03, 2009

Troy, MI - There is a very good Korean restaurant by my house called Shilla. I've always been very impressed with their food and this time I was hoping to get a Korean dish not on the menu. I asked, but unfortunately they didn't have it, but they did have another dish not on the menu called Seafood Basket. Since it's not on the menu and they make it, you know I have to try it. It has standard veggies like red and green pepper, broccoli, and celery. For meats, it has mussels, octopus, and shrimp. The shrimp were the best on the dish, prepared tempura style, but it then soaks up all the sauces and makes it a very flavorful batter around the shrimp. The sauce was very interesting, delicious, but very hard to describe. It was a brown sauce, but not really a soy sauce base, sweet, but I pretty much drank it, it was so delicious. Korean food also comes with lots of side dishes called banchan. The most common is kimchi, fermented cabbage mixed with garlic, chili spices, and lots of other spices. Kimchi is actually any vegetable that is fermented and rolled into the spices, etc... In this case, the banchan I had was cabbage kimchi, cucumber kimchi, bean curd, broccoli, potato and pickled radish. It's customary to take a little of the banchan with a little of the main entree and eat together. I'm not that big of a guy, but the dish was very good and everything you see here, it's gone. Enjoy!