Beer Cheese

We brought this to the Beer-themed Food Bloggers' Potluck and served it again at Han's birthday party last week and both times it seemed to go over really well. At Han's birthday specifically, the whole bowl was gone before all the guests had arrived, and at both events, I had people asking me for the recipe.

Here's a secret though: I'm not really a good cook, and so to have anyone compliment me on something I made... I didn't really know how to handle it so I'm pretty sure I just muttered something.

So with football season in full swing and Thanksgiving just around the corner, I thought it's be good to just post the recipe here, in plain-text un-muttered print.

Ingredients:

2 16-oz packages of cream cheese

1 packet ranch dressing mix

1/3 cup of dark or flavorful beer (I use Saint Arnold Lawnmower)

1 cup shredded cheese

Mix the cream cheese, ranch dressing, and beer together in a bowl. Once the cheese has softened and has mixed completely with the beer and cheese mix, mix in half of the shredded cheese,

(Optional: add some fresh rosemary or oregano for extra flavor, or add some crushed red pepper to make it a little spicier.)

Sprinkle the rest of the shredded cheese on top and serve!

This dip goes really well with mini pretzels, but we also discovered and recommend spreading it on a water cracker and top with a pepperoni.

Fortune Chinese Seafood

Located up in the North Lamar "Chinatown," Fortune Chinese Seafood has opened up to one of the bigger buzzes for an Austin-area Asian restaurant in recent memory.

We've gotten a couple of opportunities to check this place out, once for dinner and the other for dim sum. We liked what we had so far and will definitely be returning for further investigation.

Our first dinner trip followed a grocery trip to MT Supermarket. The Singapore Fried Vermicelli (yellow stir-fry rice noodles with onions and chicken) were pretty good, about as good as you'd expect from a decent Chinese restaurant. But the real rock star was the frog legs: a holy marriage between lemongrass and straight butter. Healthy eaters beware! You'll eat and eat these tender tasty morsels until all of a sudden you feel like you're sweating butter. And yes, they do taste like chicken.

We ended up also going back for a happy hour there where we got to try some of their dim sum dishes, which was also not a disappointment. I believe the dim sum restaurants should be rated like figure skating scores: you get a score for your fundamentals (dishes that all good dim sum restaurants should do and do well) and a score for your "style points" (more adventurous dishes that you would only find at a truly good dim sum restaurant).

The happy hour dim sum they served was an excellent showing of the restaurant's fundamentals: "shao mai" (pork and shrimp dumplings), "xia gou" or "ha gow" (shrimp wrapped in rice paper), and "cha shao bao" (BBQ pork buns). If you are a dim sum newbie, these are three popular dishes to order to get a good taste of what the concept is about.

And, perhaps the owners had a 6th sense for this, but they also served out egg custards, my favorite dim sum dessert from when I was a child. Also thumbs up.

We didn't get a chance to try any of their "style" dishes, but from the looks of their menu, there will be plenty to choose from the next time we go in. Among the ones I'm most looking forward to are the "xiao long bao" (soup-filled shrimp dumplings), chicken feet, and Han's favorite, the taro shrimp balls.

Not to be understated of all this, though, is that Fortune is a really nice restaurant inside with a full bar, and most of their dishes are $12.95 or under (unless you are ordering the shark fin soup), making them an excellent choice, especially if you are dining on a budget.

Fortune Chinese Seafood Restaurant

10901 N. Lamar Blvd, Suite A-1-501

fortuneaustin.com

Zoës Kitchen

Fresh off yet another exhausting ACL (the mud was only half of the issue for us...), we were happy that the folks from Zoë's Kitchen invited us for a preview of their food before the official grand opening.

This is the second member of the ever-expanding Washington corridor in Houston to make its way over to Austin (see Max's Wine Dive), but unlike Max's, Zoës Kitchen also has franchises all over the deep south.

The premise is pretty simple: inexpensive, "light" Mediterranean-style cooking in a casual setting. Will the Austin market ever be saturated with healthy restaurants with eco-friendly packaging? You guys tell us. But located up in the Arboretum, where the closest restaurant neighbors are T.G.I. Friday's and Macaroni Grill, I would say there's probably room for at least one more.

Out of what we had, we particularly enjoyed the Steak Roll-ups ($7.65, pictured left) which, by itself, was a bit like a quesadilla with steak and mushrooms, but is really put over the top with the dipping sauce that comes with it. Also delicious were the sides we had, especially the roasted vegetables and the pasta salad. In fact, if you truly wanted to eat inexpensively and healthy, ordering 3 side dishes ($1.99 per side) wouldn't be a bad way to go. The hummus was also incredibly fresh and tasty and heavily recommended ($4.45, pictured right, with the Greek salad). I only wish that the pita it came with tasted as fresh as the hummus.

We also had the Grilled Chicken Dinner ($8.95) which was also quite good, but wasn't necessarily unlike anything you would eat at home either. The Chicken and Orzo soup ($2.95 per bowl) was a savory, dressed-up version of a Campbell's chicken broth.

The only real downside to what we tried was the tomato bisque, which was far too salty for someone with high blood pressure like myself. Han ended up enjoying it more as condiment with the steak roll-ups.

The vibe is a little chain-y, but perfect for a healthy and inexpensive break from shopping, if you're in the area. It's also kid friendly, and in my opinion would be a great place to take a lunch date.

Zoës Kitchen
10000 Research Boulevard
www.zoeskitchen.com

Everything We Ate in Thailand

Has it seriously been over 2 months since our last update? Well I can safely say that for the first time since we moved here that the whirlwind of our lives is finally starting to die down, so hopefully we can finally start to be more consistent in our posting.

The wedding went fantastically and, almost immediately afterward, we left for Thailand for our 10-day honeymoon. I think we did about as much as humanly possible over that time, including riding an elephant through the jungle, snorkeling, getting massages, shopping, and of course eating!

Our trip went through three pretty diverse areas in Thailand-- Bangkok (the capital), Chiang Mai (the northern hill country), and Phuket (the southern beaches)-- which allowed us to get a taste of many of the different types of cuisines that Thailand has to offer. Like many of you, we were pretty familiar with what Thai food is like in America (pad thai, curry, maybe a little chuchee if feeling adventurous) so we were eager to see how it compares to what food is really like in Thailand. Here are some of the things we found:

Bangkok
We ate a lot of street food while in Bangkok. It was quick and easy (and cheap!) to get while we were out either shopping and looking at sights. Unsurprisingly, the most prominent street food concession was pad thai, and it was literally everywhere. This was no doubt to feed the hungry hordes of farang (foreigners) that were also everywhere. For 20 baht (about 60 cents) you got a cooked-to-order plate of noodles and egg and a pair of bamboo skewers to use as chopsticks. But in addition to the usual favorites (we also had plenty of satay sticks and banana pancakes - yum!), the street vendors also offered some other exotic fare as well, such as dried squid (pictured left). The street carts would have racks of whole squid for you to choose, and the cart owner would run the squid through a wringer to flatten it before grilling it over a charcoal grill.

Not to be outdone were all the fruit carts that also lined the streets of Bangkok. Our guide book warned us not to eat fruit that had already been cut, but we did have plenty of longans and ranbutans on our trip. The bananas in Thailand are smaller but sweeter than they are in America.

In Chinatown we had a meal of grilled river prawns (pictured right) which we thought were pretty impressive (until we got to Phuket anyways) but it was pretty delicious nonetheless.

Chiang Mai
Northern Thai food, as we understand is more influenced by the neighboring Laotian and Burmese cultures. Food here has less coconut milk and more spices, and everything is generally more sour, fermented, and dried.

We got a pretty good taste of it when we saw a kantoke show, which is a little bit like a Thai luau -- traditional northern Thai dinner with traditional northern Thai dancing. The dinner consisted of some curries, pickled vegetables, fried chicken (?), and something that tasted like pork rinds but looked like curly fries. Han asked if they were the pigs' tails. I told her no, but I'm not actually sure.

Chiang Mai was also where we got our first taste of som tam (pictured right). This is a dish that is very common in Thailand but seems to be less common in American Thai restaurants. It is a salad made with unripened papayas, carrots, and tomatoes. At first glance, it seems to be a cool refreshing pre-meal appetizer. In reality, it is hot as all hell, and one of the spiciest dishes you can order. We also tried a dish called larb, or lahb, which was ground pork that was also incredibly spicy. In the southern province, this dish is sometimes served in a hollowed out head of lettuce. At the place we ate it in Chiang Mai though, it just came accompanied by a side of sticky rice in a bamboo basket.

But the best part of Chiang Mai, and my favorite part about Thailand as a whole, was that we took a cooking class and learned how to cook some Thai dishes. It was a great experience and a lot of fun. We learned about all the different types of ingredients and how to pick them out. The dishes we learned to cook were: spring rolls, som tam, pad thai, tom yum soup, and green curry chicken. We were definitely surprised by how well they turned out and how good our dishes looked. Pictured to the left is Han displaying our spring rolls. Look how good they look! We'll hopefully have some posts up soon about the recipes we learned. They're not very difficult at all.

Phuket
Phuket was probably our least favorite place to visit (too commercialized and expensive!) but it was beautiful and was our favorite food location. Every dish we ordered had giant pieces of seafood pulled fresh from the ocean. And though it was expensive we saw some of the most exotic (and delicious) shellfish we had ever seen. Here were some of our favorite:


Mantis Shrimp




Tiger Prawn



Thai Lobster - we calculated the guy on the left to cost over $120, and someone actually ordered him (or her)!

But wait there's more!
Before we end this post, I did want to share pictures of our most... peculiar... eating experience in Thailand. At the Sunday Walking Street market in Chiang Mai, there was a stand selling stir-fried insects, including grasshoppers, cicadas, silk worms, and somethin called a mackerel. Han decided to buy a bag, and for as much as she complained about how gross it was, she ate the entire bag!

Keep Houston Tasty: A Guide for Travelling Austinites

Well summer is in full swing, and I wanted to do a post like this for any of our readers who might be planning a road trip through Houston some time. And also on a more personal note, we're coming up on Han and my one year anniversary on moving to Austin. I know I speak for Han when I say that we couldn't have been more welcomed by the Austin community, especially the food bloggers, and maybe this is our chance to share something back with all of you.

I think the biggest difference between the food scenes in Houston and Austin is really representative of the two cities themselves. Houston is really into the places with big name recognition and posh interiors. Austin meanwhile prides itself on the mom-and-pop operations with cult followings. But Houston, too, is full of hidden gems, they just aren't as well publicized as the big guys. Sure if you're in town, you want to see and be seen, and you've got a ton of money to blow, you can always go to Hugo's, Da Marco, Pesce, or Cafe Annie. But Austinites looking for good deals with great food and a fun atmosphere will want to check out a few of these places.

Laredo Taqueria (915 Snover, in the Heights)
Honestly, I haven't gotten a chance to explore East Austin much outside of Juan in a Million and El Chilito (Taco Journalism would be the real expert on the subject), but when I think of breakfast tacos, this is how I picture them. Toss the egg and bacon, give me some chorizo and straight barbacoa (but pack some extra napkins). And if you're really adventurous, try the nopales or the picadillo. And don't forget to ask for extra sauce. The real kicker though is watching the morning breakfast crowd. Pull up to this hole-in-the-wall any time during rush hour and you will find a line wrapped around the building of full of day workers, college kids, and men in business suits. They're all waiting in line because the tacos are that good, and it's quite a sight to see. I also want to mention El Rey Taqueria (910 Shepherd) because it is Han's absolute favorite place for tortilla soup. When I make business trips into Houston, I will usually make a point to stop by and pick some up to take back with me. Their rotisserie chicken is also incredible.

Hobbit Cafe (2243 Richmond)
If you're a vegetarian (or just a huge nerd -- Austin is full of both), I would give the Hobbit Cafe a try. I know what you might be thinking, and no, it's not just a name. This cafe is completely modeled after the characters in 'Lord of the Rings,' complete with decorations and memorabilia that date back as far as the original release of the novels, not just the Peter Jackson movies. I recommend this place for lunch, with a seat on the patio if the Houston humidty hasn't gotten to you yet. The sandwiches (which are named "the Gandalf" and "the Fatty Lumpkin" among others) are delicious, mostly vegetarian (with vegan options), and are HEFTY. I would definitely get the slim version of any sandwich, unless you literally have a hobbit-sized appetite. Veggies may also want to try out Baba Yega (2607 Grant St) for their amazing brunch. LOTR nerds may also want to check out Treebeards (315 Travis) although they have less to do with the series other than the name. Their southern food is still quite excellent though!

Lankford Grocery (88 Denis St)
It's not quite the trailer park that Austinites may be used to, but they're still high on tastiness and charm. Lankford Grocery used to be an actual grocery store way back in the day before the massive HEBs existed and when you would stop in to pick up some milk, bread, and eggs and stay for a bite to eat and a milkshake. Now the place is a full time restaurant but the name has been retained. The burgers here are what make the place famous. Some say they are overrated, but I really think it just depends on how greasy you like your burgers. The service doesn't seem to have changed from the original either: usually warm and friendly, but I can't say you won't get yelled at if you step out of line.

Just Dinner (915 Dunlavy)
For those looking for a classy dinner with a personal touch, look no further than Just Dinner. Owner Andrew Rebori operates the restaurant out of his house and greets each guest personally as they come through the door. The food is Italian/New American and made mainly with local ingredients, some of which come from Andrew's garden in the back yard (which he would be happy to show you after dinner). Pretty much all of the food is good, but for the hungry I definitely recommend the Pot Roast. Did I mention it's also BYOB? The place is small, so reservations are recommended. And if you're lucky enough to get seated in Lila's section, tell her we sent you and she will be sure to take excellent care of you.

Perla's Seafood and Oyster Bar

Taking over the Mars location on S. Congress, this new seafood bar has prime real estate. We went for brunch on a Saturday during their opening week. Our friend, Lindsay, was visiting from Houston, so we took her with us, despite her clear dislike for most fare from the sea. Fortunately, Perla's had limited, but delicious non-seafood offerings on their menu, that suited even Lindsay's picky tastes.

We started off with delicious morning cocktails. They had a wide variety to choose from, including one called "The Minderaser" which has Bacardi 151 in it. What a way to start your morning! We weren't quite so brave. Justin had a bloody mary, I had their frozen concoction of the day, called "Peach Passion" and Lindsay went with a mimosa. The bloody mary was delicious, as was the mimosa. My Peach Passion was incredibly strong, even for my lush tastes. It was more suited for a starter drink before a night out on 6th street than a recovery drink on a Saturday morning. If that's their run-of-the-mill frozen drink, I can't even imagine what the minderaser must be like! I'm never one to complain about strong drinks though, I sure got my money's worth, and it made our post-brunch SoCo shopping a lot more fun!

Justin and I started with a sampler of 6 oysters on the halfshell. We each tried 3 oysters from different Northeast regions. Although the price was steep, ($3 each) they are pretty typical for non-gulf oysters around here. I love eating large plump gulf oysters when I am in the mood for beer, crawfish, and quantity. But when it comes to quality, there's something to be said for the small, zinc-y, briney goodness that only New England oysters can provide. They have a rotating menu with different fresh catch options each day. In addition to oysters, they always have a clam option as well, usually littleneck or cherrystone.

For our main course, I went with the breakfast bouillabaise (I just looked at the menu again, and I guess they changed the name to breakfast cioppino, I never could tell the difference between those two anyway. I know bouillabaise is french and cioppino is italian, but they're both tomato based seafood stews. But I digress...) It is basically a half portion of the dinner option, with two soft poached eggs nestled on top, complete with a crisp toasted piece of baguette. I am such a sucker for soft egg yolks, and these were perfect. Not too runny, but soft enough to mix with the saffron tomato broth for a delicious combination. I love eating my eggs with ketchup, and this was basically a gourmet version. The stew was full of a variety of seafood, including chunks of whitefish, clams, mussels, and calamari. A hearty breakfast for seafood lovers. Justin went with the lobster coddled farm eggs. Lobster chunks mixed in with soft baked eggs. Another highly recommended and delicious option. There was a considerable amount of lobster meat in such a small dish. The egg yolks were also the perfect soft consistency as my poached eggs. It was topped with fresh herbs (tarragon?) that gave a crisp bite to the dish. Lindsay decided to go with the basic wheat toast with eggs over-medium, with a side of fruit. No complaints here. She was also eyeing the buttermilk pancakes, which sounded really yummy, topped with fresh blueberries, whipped cream, and vermont syrup. It was nice to see typical brunch options on the menu, which appease to those who want a more traditional breakfast.

Overall, Perla's is a suitable replacement for Mars. I will miss the cocktails at Mars, but I think Perla's strong drinks will do just fine. I loved the overall environment of the resaturant. The decor was nautical and beachy, with a breezy atmosphere. The waiters looked like they stepped out of a J.Crew catalog (pink or light blue button down, khaki pants). Am I in Nantucket?? My one complaint is that Perla's is going through the new restaurant growing pains. Even on Saturday brunch, the restaurant was far from capacity. The waiter was not very knowledgeable about the menu, and appeared obviously green to the industry. However, everyone was very friendly and eager to please, which will carry them far. I can't wait to revisit Perla's again in a few months, perhaps for dinner this time.

Perla's Seafood & Oyster Bar
1400 S. Congress Ave. Austin, TX 78704
512 291 7300

Max's Wine Dive

Max's Wine Dive was actually one of our favorite places to eat when we were living in Houston. I used to live about 5 minutes north of the Washington corridor where the original Max's still sits today. Needless to say I was delighted to find out that they were opening an Austin location. The tongue-in-cheek kitch of having an upscale "dive" bar will suit the Austin crowd just perfectly.

Named after the owner's six-year-old nephew, Max's Wine Dive prides itself on its unique pairing of fine wines and New American comfort food. (One of its many mottos is "Fried Chicken and Champagne?... why the hell not?") Most of the dishes are new takes of classic favorites such as pot roast (made with Kobe beef and braised in a red wine jus), a fried egg sandwich (tossed with truffle oil and served with organic gruyere), and ribs (with a glaze made from hoisin sauce).

I've had a good portion of the menu in my time. The hands-down favorite is the Kobe beef burger (you can add a side of kimchee or foie gras if you'd like) and the "haute" dog. I also really like their take on grilled cheese and tomato soup (served in a shot glass).

Of course the prices for this "dive" food are maybe the other half of the joke, but more on that later.

I was definitely pleased that the space in the Austin location is much more opened up. Whether you have single stamina and like working the room or you have couple's coma and are just looking to settle in with your ribs and shiraz, everyone here feels included. Max's Wine Dive also likes to push the party atmosphere -- at the Houston location there were often House DJ's spinning, even during dinner hours -- so don't go expecting a quiet dinner experience. The jukebox, I've heard, is pretty darn amazing.

And of course the other side of the coin is the bar's extensive wine selection. If you're like us and enjoy a good glass but have no idea how to pick one out, the bartenders are all very knowledgable and courteous.

Now if there's one thing to be aware of at Max's, it's that prices do add up. At most other bars, you'll order a few appetizers and a couple of drinks for you and your date and be just fine. At Max's if you aren't paying attention you could be walking out with a three digit bill easily. (And to be clear, their wine prices are actually quite reasonable, they just serve REALLY nice wine there.)

The good news is Max's features not only a happy hour from 4 to 7pm, but also the DOUBLY COOL "Reverse" happy hour from 12am to 2am on Fridays and Saturdays, with discounts on both food and wine.

All in all, I think the happy hours are going to be the time to go. Not just for the prices but for the atmosphere that really takes advantage of what Max's does best. Call it just a hunch, but I think Austin is going to have many a good time to come at Max's Wine Dive.

Max's Wine Dive
207 San Jacinto Blvd
http://www.maxswinedive.com/austin/index.php