iLike Food

It's freezing cold outside and I've run out of things to clean. So, I thought I do a post of all my current favourite food-related things.

Food

Simple Thai Broth
By my sister, Kimi, who has an amazing food blog. My sister, Shannon, has been recommending it to me since she drank it a few weeks ago to sooth her throat before singing at a Christmas Eve service. I decided to try the recipe last night. It was love at first taste. The recipe yields more than six cups and I drank all of it in less than twelve hours. It's warm, and soothing, and garlicky, and gingery, and amazing. If you're fighting any winter ills I'd especially recommend it. It's so good.

ShopHouse SouthEast Asian Kitchen
This is Chipotle's new Southeast Asian style restaurant chain and it is awesome. There are a couple of them in the DC and LA and a new one 15 minutes away from our house. Andrew and I were meeting up for lunch yesterday and decided to try it.

 The food is great; it reminds me a lot of a Vietnamese noodle bowl that I love getting at Pho Van. It's very flavourful and does a good job of really melding different flavours and textures. They're still ironing out some of the kinks in things, like portion sizes, but I imagine it will end up being a matter of knowing the best way to order so you can maximize the amount you get; much like at Chipotle. It's also gluten and dairy free. Tips: The sign says you can choose only one vegetable, sauce, topping, etc. but you can ask to go half and half. Also, the meatballs are amazing; Andrew hates meatballs but he loved ShopHouse's.

Kitchen

Utensil Pot Clip
I've never really been into little kitchen gadgets, probably because they tend to be over-hyped as solutions to all of life's problems and typically end up just being an extra thing to store 364 days out of the year. This utensil clip thingy, however, is my new best friend because it enables me to be lazier. I hate using spoon rests because if you use them once you have to wash them (otherwise they look vile) and washing dishes is one of my least favourite things in the world. This clip spares me the extra dish because it hangs the spoon over whatever you're cooking and contains the mess in the area that the mess already is. I am contemplating throwing away my spoon rest. Hooray.

The Griddler
Andrew and I dislike clutter a lot (you can probably attribute it to growing up in large families). It's lucky that we agreed to strive for minimalism in our home because our apartment is quite limited in storage space. I come from a house with a lot of cabinet space but my new kitchen is tiny, poorly designed spatially, and has a number of cabinets that require the use of a step ladder.

We had to be really be strategic about what was going to be realistic appliance-wise, which was hard for me because I love to cook and didn't want to have to say "well, I guess we'll just wait till we own a house to make waffles." That's why the griddler is awesome; we use it for grilling, making paninis, toasting bread, and as an extra two skillets. It also has a waffle plate attachment which makes some killer Belgian waffles. If you're short on space this is a really great option.