Happy 2010! Hope this year you're able to do everything you always planned on--take a trip, get that degree, earn millions, be healthy, stay healthy, eat at the restaurant you always wanted to, laugh a lot, laugh everyday, write that book, be patient, sing that song, cook for friends, make new friends, keep old friends, be nice everyday, fight nice when you need to...you know all the things you wanted to do and be but life and time got in the way...yes, those things.
We took this break to hang out in San Diego and decided to go to our favorite soup haunt. It's a Mongolian hotpot restaurant. No, don't groan. It isn't a large cast-iron skillet noisy joint with all-you-can-eat veggies and meat. That's a Mongolian all-you-can-eat place. (Just because you heard Mongolian, huh? Shame on you!) This is soup and fun stuff like that, cooked on a burner right at your table, and you get to choose your own soup broth (vegetarian, beef, half and half, pretty neat). The restaurant is called Little Sheep Hot Pot and I'll wait till you stop laughing. We did the same when we heard of this place. What does little sheep have to do with soup unless they're in it (yikes!)? And we're dealing with a vegetarian spouse here, so, that wouldn't have worked. But Little Sheep has a wonderfully flavorful all vegetarian soup broth as well as non-vegetarian options. It's apparently quite popular in China, and there's reason why. The spices are so interesting--gojiberries, galangal, chinese ginger, star anise, four types of pepper, a hundred berries I don't have a clue what they are, mushrooms, I mean...it's really fun if it's slightly cold and you're in the mood for soup.
Little Sheep in San Diego's located in a strip mall in Clairemont Mesa Boulevard, and you could easily miss it. But inside, the restaurant is impressively huge, and mostly and usually filled with families who are serious about soup. Man, no one even looks up from their plates, it's that good.
So we went. Sanjay, who was fighting a cold, and being the manly man that he is, told the server, "We would like extra spices in our vegetarian soup broth". The server nodded, no expression. I should have known. (You know where this is going, right?). Anyway, here's how our soup looked when it showed up:
You have to admit, it's pretty. Look at the spring onions, the mushrooms, the berries...and we were planning on adding tofu, watercress and more mushrooms to this. It was supposed to be fun. Well, we then fished out the red chilies that Sanjay obviously had expressly requested. This is the proof:
And we fished out even more as the soup boiled in chilies slowly releasing their chiliness (that's a new word you learned in 2010). At least a hundred fiery red chilies waving hello at us. Oy.
Chicken that I am, I tried one bowl and gave up. And believe me, it's my favorite soup place! But I don't give up that easily, so I moved to their salad, an order that I placed (no spiciness requests were allowed this time!).
They have a very interesting wood fungus salad that's infused with seasme oil, tons of garlic (yeah, maybe not a first date kind of salad if that's what you're worried about, but garlic's good for you!). It goes really well with soup, especially the 'non-spicy' kind.
I had two orders of the same while Sanjay, the manly man, had the soup to himself (maybe that was his plan all along...hmmm, didn't think of it that way!).
Anyway, here's Little Sheep HotPot's salad:
The celery and baked tofu along with the wood fungus is really flavorful and a fun dish with their green tea.
I've made my own twisted version of the same. So, here it is:
Twisted Wood Fungus Salad
Ingredients
1 packet dried wood fungus
Tofu (half a packet, cubed, optional)
4 large garlic cloves, grated
4 tbsp spring onions, chopped
1/2 cup diced carrots (optional)
2 tbsp sesame oil
1 tsp chili hot oil
2 tbsp lemon juice
salt to taste
Recipe
Boil the wood fungus for about 5 minutes in salt water, drain, cool
Mix the wood fungus with garlic, tofu, spring onions Toss in more tofu, carrots if need be
Add chili and sesame oil and mix the salad
Add salt to taste
Squirt lemon juice and mix again
Chill for about an hour in the fridge (not you, the salad, silly!)
Serve with soup or as an appetizer
See, it's simple, isn't it? All you need to do is go to any Vietnamese or Chinese store and ask them for the dried fungus. You can even get dried shitake mushrooms that you could soak in water for about an hour or so and toss that in too. This is what mine looked like:
So that was our greatly spicy start, and hope you enjoy the new year with new, exciting and fun foods, good health, and fun times!
More in a bit, till then, enjoy!
