This Week's Menu: Cajun Egg Scramble and Swedish Meatballs

Your Sunday menu relies on ground and chopped meat this week.  Dinner is an IKEA favorite, done homemade with brown rice instead of pasta. Breakfast is a hearty bayou inspired dish.

Recipes at the links below.

BREAKFAST: Cajun Egg Scramble

DINNER: Swedish Meatballs over Brown Rice

Darryl
Copyright 2016 - Darryl Musick
All Rights Reserved

BREAKFAST: Cajun Scramble

This one is super hearty and tasty. Pretty easy, too. Just cut up half a Cajun sausage (or linguica makes a good substitute). Fry it up in a pan, and pour some scrambled egg mixture on it.

INGREDIENTS:
1/2 Cajun or linguica sausage
4 eggs
1 teaspoon half and half
1/4 teaspoon salt
1/2 ounce shredded cheese
1/2 tablespoon olive oil

Heat up olive oil in pan. Slice up sausage. Cook in oil on pan.

Prepare eggs using our Basic Scramble Egg recipe. Pour over sausage and cook.

Sprinkle cheese over eggs when cooking.

Darryl
Copyright 2016 - Darryl Musick
All Rights Reserved

Ethnic Food of the San Gabriel Valley: From the Tense Mid-East to the Bucolic Pyranees

Cuisines covered in previous posts: Mexican, Cajun, Nepalese

Middle East cultures are well represented here in the San Gabriel Valley. This week, we'll focus on Lebanese Food. 

While you can find serviceable Lebanese pretty much anywhere north of the 10 Freeway, we'll focus on one of our legendary little fast food chains, Zankou Chicken. 

You can find outlets of this quarrelsome family's stores throughout the L.A. area but their SGV location is on Colorado Boulevard, just east of Hill and Pasadena City College.

The family that runs the place has a history of feuding going from arguing and never speaking to each other again to outright murder.

Don't let that history put you off, though, just think of it as spice to their one-of-a-kind rotisserie chicken that comes out mouth-wateringly juicy and delicious. Served with warm pita bread and hummus, it's a special treat right there.  

But wait, there's more!

Be sure to get their super-secret formula garlic sauce on the side to dip your chicken in.  It takes what is a wonderful, flavorful bite of chicken into eating Heaven's manna.

For far less than $10, you can stuff yourself silly on this feast.

Asian cuisine is very big here and there's a large variety. I don't think there's a city in the valley without an outlet dispensing Thai Food.

From the kid-friendly skewers of satai to the more familiar entrees of pad Thai, the food representing Thailand here is very good.  

We've visited Thai restaurants from San Dimas to Arcadia and everywhere in between but have yet to find a better Thai restaurant than the tiny little Thai City on Huntington Drive, just east of Mt. Olive in the city of Duarte.

While it's all good, my favorite is the nutty pad Thai they serve, while my wife likes the savory, brothy flavors of the pad see ew with many of the sea's creatures throw in for goodness.

When she's feeling sick, she'll send me over there to get their hot and sour chicken soup made with lemon grass to help her feel better.

We'll finish this week with a word about Basque Food here in the SGV. The Basque come from the border region where Spain and France meet. Many immigrated to America where they became shepherds and brought their own ethnic identity with them.

A Basque meal is legendary. Like being at your aunt Ethel's house, everything is shared. Big bowls of hearty soup, salad, loaves of bread, jugs of wine...and that's still a couple of courses before  the main entree...you'll be waddling out of the restaurant more than walking.

The valley features two Basque restaurant. Le Basque Chalet in La Puente which, while the food is good seems like you're dining in the parlor of the Munsters, and the Continental in Glendora, which the less said about the better.

The closest really good Basque restaurant is a bit beyond the borders of the SGV in the dairy town of Chino. Centro Basco is the go-to place around here for Basque food (good enough that we booked it for Tim's college graduation party). Beyond that, it's a drive over the mountains to Bakersfield to get some more really good Basque food.

Darryl
Copyright 2013 - Darryl Musick
All Rights Reserved

Ethnic Food of The San Gabriel Valley: From South of the Border to the Top of The World

We've counted almost 40 different kinds of ethnic foods in our home of the San Gabriel Valley, just east of Los Angeles, and we're going to highlight a few here each week.

The grandaddy of them all has to be Mexican food. They say there's a Starbucks on every corner. Here, there seems to be a Mexican restaurant on every corner, plus a couple more in the middle of the block.

While you can find Mexican restaurants in every city in the county, here in the valley you can find them in the biggest numbers in the neighborhoods that have a high concentration of Mexican families like El Monte, Baldwin Park, La Puente, Bassett, and Azusa.

There are sit down restaurants that cater to more gringo tastes like El Torito and there are those who go for a more authentic palate like the goat stew called Birria at La Barca in El Monte.

You can get tacos made from almost any part of the animal...guts (a particular favorite of mine), brains, cheeks, tongues...and from nice places with waiters & margaritas, to hole-in-the-walls, to taco trucks on a late night corner. Most of it very reasonable in price, too.

Beware that there are many mediocre and lousy places but some of our favorites include Max's (in Azusa and Monrovia) and Rudy's in Monrovia for nice sit-down dinners (Rudy likes to break out the more exotic authentic fare on Friday nights) and drinks; La Barca and Guacamoles in El Monte and Mariscos Uruapan in Irwindale for a more boisterous, diner-like experience; Rincon Taurino in La Puente, El Picoso in Azusa, and Tacos del Chino in South El Monte for great taco stands. The King Taco chain also makes some pretty good tacos. For hard tacos, it's hard to beat Pepe's, with locations in Azusa, San Gabriel, and Alhambra.

One of our favorite restaurants was Cajun Way (AKA Frank and Joe's) in Monrovia. It was an extremely good example of Cajun cuisine. There is still some cajun left in the valley, mostly of the Chinese Cajun variety such as Boiling Crab, but nothing compares to Frank and Joe's. For really good Southern food with a smattering of Cajun, you need to leave the valley a bit and go to Spoonful in Studio City. Try to get there when they're having  Cajun boil, pictured above.

One of the more obscure cuisines we have is Himalayan food or the cuisine of Nepal and Tibet. On a quiet street in Old Pasadena sits Tibet Nepal House, serving the very hearty food of the high-altitude Himalayas.

It's quite delicious and very filling with lots of protein like eggs, beef, and...of course...yak. Above you can see a bowl of thupka (a hearty stew), Tibetan bread, and fried rice.

Next time you're in Southern California, slip on over to the SGV and give some of these cuisines a try. You'll love it.

More to come next week!

Darryl
Copyright 2013 - Darryl Musick
All Rights Reserved.