Greg Sanders

Restaurant Review: East Moon in Columbia MD

East Moon Asian Bistro is a local chain serving a mix of Japanese, Chinese, Thai, and Vietnamese food. We've been to the Columbia location twice and were pleased with our meals both times, as were family and friends that went separately. I particularly liked the way they handled their modernist décor, a neat mix of art with a colorful theme and only a moderate visual distraction if you're facing in the direction of the bar and thus a few televisions.

The first time we went for entrees, the second sushi. I'd say the entrees seem to be their strong point; I had pad se lew and Kate had the lemon grass chicken. Quite tasty and substantial for prices in the low teens. Tonight, the sushi was reasonable, we both left satisfied and I particularly liked their Tokyo roll. However, if you're dining in Howard county you have a rather wide selection of sushi restaurants and we're likely to stick with Hanamura or Yama Sushi as our default traditional and fancy place respectively. For the record, East Moon is more in the fancy camp and does a good job with the appearance of their platters.

So if you want an affordable restaurant that provides a mix of Asian cuisines, I'd say East Moon fits the bill. I'm not sure how well they handle larger groups, but from a price perspective you really can't go wrong if you bring more people and split a smaller number of their big dishes.

[Updated to add photo.]

Review: Great Sage Restaurant in Clarksville Maryland

Eating twice at the Great Sage restaurant hasn't resulted in any vegan super powers, but it has gotten us two tasty meals. I'm not a vegan and despite a mix of voluntary and digestive tract-driven food restrictions I'd have a hard time seeing myself become one. However, the meals we've had there, particularly the  adult mac & 'cheese' and the zen udon bowl both showcased that gourmet cuisine is quite possible even with restricted ingredients. Unsurprisingly, the dishes can get at the appeal of the non-vegan version of a meal but they seem to prioritize flavor over simulation.

Both the udon, with its homemade pasta, and the macaroni, with its spice and mix of vegetables, were specifically recommended by our servers. So if you aren't really familiar with the details of vegan cooking, it can be quite rewarding to ask. They take pride in their food but were neither preachy nor condescending to non-vegans which helps explain why there seems to consistently be a wait to get a table at peak hours. On the whole I'd say the atmosphere has a pointedly natural vibe combined with elegance via well chosen wall pieces (how well chosen? I'd love to grab them for my house if I thought I could afford them).

Finally, the desserts we tried were quite refreshing and may be a boon for the lactose-averse who still get cravings. The coconut milk-based mint oreo shake was fantastic and I'm really not sure how they pulled it off. It's probably too much to hope that it was any more healthful than a non-vegan shake, but it was good enough that I didn't care either way.

Source: Kate saw their write-up in the Baltimore Sun and/or HowChow.

2011-04-18 Visiting the home continent of rooftop restaurants

Wrapping up our first trip west of Luxor, we had lunch at the El Nakhil hotel and restaurant. I don't know if rooftop restaurants really originate in Africa, but the main one I go to around home is Ethiopian and that's good enough for a humorous assertion. The food in this place was a fairly standard Egyptian buffet style, but the rotisserie chicken was succulent and had a great blend of spices.

Traveling the Egyptian countryside was quite an experience and did feel quite distinct from my time in anywhere in rural America or in the Chinese countryside. I think I'll just need to see more of the developing world to better understand what difference can be attributed to culture distinctions versus climate versus ways things are made attractive for tourists.

Lunch in downtown Cairo [2011-04-17]

Hands down, my favorite part of Egyptian cuisine has the various dips and sauces that accompany the bread. There's both more variety and a mix of stronger and more sophisticated flavors than I've gotten at Middle Eastern restaurants back home. The pepper mixes and garlic dip were particularly tasty, which is good as the chicken I got for the entrée was fairly bland. Subsequent meals have had quite flavorful grilled chicken, so don't take that as a knock against Egyptian meats in general.

Fruit, typically citrus and bananas, are a common Egyptian dessert. The most distinctive other treat are variation on shredded wheat pastries or bars. In this case, they came with cottage cheese so I just sampled but subsequent encounters have been consistently positive. Honey is a major ingredient and I'm sure their loaded with calories, but the taste combines familiar ingredients in unfamiliar but pleasing ways.

Epcot 2011-01-23 Between the Land and the rest of the world

At the completion of our greenhouse tour, we went on to see Soarin' using our earlier acquired fast passes. The approach was a reasonable length walk, which is probably for the best give the popularity of the ride. After a Patrick Warburton-led flight safety video you're guided into a dark room with loose hanging rows of seats. The attraction involves being lifted above a screen in a hang gliding simulation over California. It was a lot of fun, even for Kate who normally isn't one for that sort of ride.

We had an excellent lunch in the food court of the Land pavilion. As you'd expect, many of the ingredients came from the hydroponic gardens and fish farms we visited. The prices were fairly reasonable and the portions ample. Afterwards we went to see the new attraction of the oceans: Crash's Turtle Talk. The attraction seats a small theater in front of a screen with an interactive computer-generated figure and a live human handling the voice. This worked pretty well; Crash had a range of behaviors, took questions from the audience, and whoever was handling the voice did a pretty good impression and did a good job working with kids.

We then proceeded through the classics of the topical Epcot exhibits, starting with the new Figment ride at Imagination! with Eric Idle. They haven't quite worked out how they want to handle that one. I'd recommend greatly increasing the level of surrealism; Idle should be capable of it. Afterwards, we wandered through some of the corporate exhibits in a classic world's fair setup on the way to the Spaceship Earth ride. The history of technology was enjoyable and Kate particularly enjoyed the 70s scientist lady near the end.

Afterwards Kate proceeded on to the World Exhibition and Mom and I went through the Mission to Mars centrifuge. The simulated G-forces were a lot of fun for me and we were amused by the slight interactive element. Each person had a role in the mission, but the role just involved pressing two buttons at an appropriate time.We were actually missing a commander, but through strategic reaching to an adjacent console, we were able to pull  together anyhow.

Increasing productivity in the kitchen

Matt Yglesias made an argument on food that seems to have ticked off many of his commenters (Hat tip, Chicago David Chen)”

If over time people were getting poorer, but the number of hours in the day was getting longer, and gender norms were shifting toward the idea that women should get married young and drop out of the workforce in order to do unpaid domestic work, then obviously people would start cooking more. But that’s not what’s happening. Compared to people in 1959, people in 2009 have more money, less time, and less ability to call on socially sanctioned unpaid domestic labor. So obviously they’re going to cook less. Or to look at it another way, there are lots of things you can do in 2009 that you couldn’t do in 1959—read a blog, download an MP3, get a movie from Netflix on Demand. There are also a lot of things you can do in 2009 that were prohibitively expensively in 1959—fly cross-country, make a long-distance phone call to your sister. But there’s no more time in the day. Which implies that people need to spend less time doing the things that you could do in 1959. Sometimes we can get out of this box by finding technological innovations that let us do things more quickly, but you can’t really speed up cooking from scratch… [emphasis mine]

And maybe someone could do it. The world’s purveyors of processed foods have noted a real market demand for healthier products. Consequently, they’re poured a lot of time and energy into creating things that at least seem healthier. And so we really have a lot of healthy-seeming options. But they’ve never, as best I can tell, poured all that much effort into trying to create things that are actually healthier. But someone could. Jamie Oliver could do it. Mark Bittman could do it. Michael Pollan could do it. And it would be more likely to succeed than an endless procession of NYT Magazine articles hectoring people about how they should cook more.

Apparently Oliver did work to improve school lunches, so good on him for that.  In any event, given some recent disappointing results from NYC food labeling, I’m going to focus more on the home production side.  Yglesias is correct that you can’t really speed up cooking from scratch, but that is quite different than saying you can’t speed up cooking in the home.  There’s a reason microwaves are everywhere, they’re fast, cheap, and make things hot.  There’s downsides to this of course, I think first and foremost the weakness is that they dehydrate the food, but I could be wrong on the cooking science there.

Anyhow, I’ll be doing a home cooked meal for my wife’s birthday today.  Which is cool, I enjoy cooking and since I follow the federal holiday schedule I’ve got the day off.  However, most days if I’m cooking something it has to be within 30 minutes.  Happily, my Mark Bittman cookbook does have a 30 minute index which I find very helpful, although I often don’t have the necessary ingredients on hand.  What I could really use is not a cookbook so much as a home economics book.  Lay out weeks worth of recipes at a time, tell what you need to buy, what you need to cook ahead on the weekend, and estimate the time and price investment.  Also, perhaps put the maximum efficiency recipe in with all the shortcuts and then layout where time can be added and what the benefits are.  E.g. go with fresh veggies rather than canned to improve nutrition and taste; do pure oven baking rather than a mix of oven and microwave for juicier chicken but at the cost of 15 minutes.  That sort of thing.  This does seem like an area where software could help, particularly in combination with grocery delivery services like peapod.  However, the software solution might not be useful for the people who most need to have productive kitchen options.

I think a lot of the trouble here is that the tradeoffs of restaurant cooking are rather different than the tradeoffs of home cooking.  Cooking does scale nicely, but learning to exploit those economics of scale is not an easy task, particularly in a small household.  In any event, how do we get to more home economics books?  Perhaps by marketing it to men.  While I was no Don Juan in my single days, I did find even low level cooking skill consistently drew positive comments from women and similarly enabled parties.  I won’t rehash the whole ‘nice guy’ discussion here, but generally speaking there’s no real reason to believe that being ‘nice’ or even just being genuinely kind is a particularly efficient signaling mechanism for your fitness as a romantic partner.  The ability to cook seems to be, and it also has the advantage of being a skill that raises your general fitness rather than just tries to invest a lot of effort in a single relationship with a person that isn’t interested in you.  I would love to see the foodie coaches capture the marketshare of the pickup lunches coaches.

Tour of the Guinness Store House 2009-07-16

We're down to our last four trip entries!  Two of them will be from Greg, and two are from me (wife of Greg, for those of you just joining in).

For our last full day in Dublin, we started off with a tour of the Guinness Storehouse.  Be warned that there are lots of pictures in the slideshow.  While neither of us is that much of a beer drinker (you can see a picture of me staring rather dubiously at a pint), my dad is quite the connoisseur and I figured he'd really enjoy the tour via photos.

The building was actually used as a storehouse until the late 1980's; after a while (I don't remember exactly when) it was converted over to the tour center.  It's quite nifty inside as you start at the lowest level and work your way up to the seventh floor where there's a bar where you can have a pint and look out over the entire city.

The tour begins with the fact that all Guinness is divided into four ingredients: water, hops, yeast, and barley.  It then takes you through the steps of the brewing process and lets you sample a bit from a fresh batch.  The next parts deal with transportation and advertising; there's lots of cool stuff to see in both.  Greg was particularly enamored of the small trains used to transport things around the brewery complex.  After that is a brief history exhibit, a place to pour your own pint, and a temporary exhibit space that was currently being used to showcase the artwork of the cartoonist who drew the most famous ads, such as the various zoo animals who always manage to steal their keeper's brew.

We had fun at the topmost floor bar.  I love places with excellent panoramic views.  The windows had a few of the more notable locations marked.  After we gazed and sipped and relaxed, we headed back down to the gift shop, and then on to our next stop, the Barracks Museum.