Food: Over Rice, Phoenix Upper Main
There's a native fruit in my neck of the woods called the pawpaw. Looks like a little green mango thing, tastes like a creamy banana custard. It's pretty much impossible to store or ship, so one can pretty much taste it mostly if one knows people where to find them.
Anyway, a friend took me on a hiking trail where a few pawpaw plants grow in the hopes that we can find some before the season's over. The pickings were slim, but I got enough to be able to share with a couple friends. On the way I also got introduced to spice berries, a particular variety of edible rose plants, barberries, and also mushrooms that looked really cool but when I texted a picture to my mushroom expert the verdict was 'not edible'. (This same mushroom expert has given me a bounty of chicken-of-the-woods, which I still have a bit of left.)
New restaurants have been sampled.
Phoenix Upper Main has outdoor seating in a little area between it and the next building; it was alright except when passers-by were smoking as they strolled along. (I have never been to Phoenix in their old location - whenever I walked in, the downstairs was loud enough that we always fled. The restaurant needed to move from their previous location due to the Main Street floods a few years back, and a month before the pandemic hit it merged with Ellicott City Brewpub with the result supervised by Gordon Ramsey. I had found EC Brewpub inevitably mediocre whenever I ended up there for a group outing.)
The menu is a QR code - a trend which I understand, but I've come to abhor it, because the last thing I want is to rely upon scrolling the tiny phone through their website which has (srsly) not been optimized for this pursuit. They were able to offer a laminated menu of the food but not of the beers, the inconvenience compounded by beer prices not being published, requiring that one recalls the selections one is interested in and inquires of the waitperson. The menu was pub basics - the truffle fries I pilfered from a friend seemed fine, and she quite enjoyed her burger. (I do enough cooking of burgers that I'm rarely motivated to pay restaurant prices for them). I went for a pair of appetizers. Chicken strips were fine, their honey mustard sauce pleasant. Pretzels came with an interesting cheese sauce and an in-house mustard, both of which were worthwhile. There were several interesting desserts on the menu, but by then I was way too cold to stick around, and had to flee in disappointment.
We also tried Over Rice in KoreaTown. Btw, the strip of Rt 40 where many of the Korean restaurants and businesses are is now designated KoreaTown, with cute little gate-signs along the sides of the road. (I'm not sure just how the signs designate the boundary, since most of the restaurants are to one side of it but the supermarkets along with clusters of yet more businesses are to the other side.)
Anyway. Over Rice offers just two things on their menu, poke bowls and mochi donuts. The poke bowls were fine - Blowfish Poke has both an interestinger variety and better prices at equivalent quality. (That said, I am THRILLED that poke now exists in our area and comes with options. Ever since I discovered the dish in Vegas I'd been awaiting its arrival on our coast, which took a couple of years, so I'm beyond thrilled that it's now landed quite definitively.)
As far as mochi donuts... I'm yet to find anything made with mochi that I'm not instantly addicted to. Glutinous rice dough always feels luxurious and comforting to me, whether wrapping an ice cream or a filled pastry or enhancing a soup or just about any other application. The donuts in this case consist of eight little dough balls stuck together in a ring and glazed with a topping. I have found that the texture of the donut is very much my thing, but the flavors and glazes, which vary by day and range from expected to adventurous, don't do an awful lot to enhance them further to my particular palate. Originally posted at https://leiacat.dreamwidth.org/351944.html. Please comment either there using OpenID or right here. I read both with the same distracted semi-frequency.
Anyway, a friend took me on a hiking trail where a few pawpaw plants grow in the hopes that we can find some before the season's over. The pickings were slim, but I got enough to be able to share with a couple friends. On the way I also got introduced to spice berries, a particular variety of edible rose plants, barberries, and also mushrooms that looked really cool but when I texted a picture to my mushroom expert the verdict was 'not edible'. (This same mushroom expert has given me a bounty of chicken-of-the-woods, which I still have a bit of left.)
New restaurants have been sampled.
Phoenix Upper Main has outdoor seating in a little area between it and the next building; it was alright except when passers-by were smoking as they strolled along. (I have never been to Phoenix in their old location - whenever I walked in, the downstairs was loud enough that we always fled. The restaurant needed to move from their previous location due to the Main Street floods a few years back, and a month before the pandemic hit it merged with Ellicott City Brewpub with the result supervised by Gordon Ramsey. I had found EC Brewpub inevitably mediocre whenever I ended up there for a group outing.)
The menu is a QR code - a trend which I understand, but I've come to abhor it, because the last thing I want is to rely upon scrolling the tiny phone through their website which has (srsly) not been optimized for this pursuit. They were able to offer a laminated menu of the food but not of the beers, the inconvenience compounded by beer prices not being published, requiring that one recalls the selections one is interested in and inquires of the waitperson. The menu was pub basics - the truffle fries I pilfered from a friend seemed fine, and she quite enjoyed her burger. (I do enough cooking of burgers that I'm rarely motivated to pay restaurant prices for them). I went for a pair of appetizers. Chicken strips were fine, their honey mustard sauce pleasant. Pretzels came with an interesting cheese sauce and an in-house mustard, both of which were worthwhile. There were several interesting desserts on the menu, but by then I was way too cold to stick around, and had to flee in disappointment.
We also tried Over Rice in KoreaTown. Btw, the strip of Rt 40 where many of the Korean restaurants and businesses are is now designated KoreaTown, with cute little gate-signs along the sides of the road. (I'm not sure just how the signs designate the boundary, since most of the restaurants are to one side of it but the supermarkets along with clusters of yet more businesses are to the other side.)
Anyway. Over Rice offers just two things on their menu, poke bowls and mochi donuts. The poke bowls were fine - Blowfish Poke has both an interestinger variety and better prices at equivalent quality. (That said, I am THRILLED that poke now exists in our area and comes with options. Ever since I discovered the dish in Vegas I'd been awaiting its arrival on our coast, which took a couple of years, so I'm beyond thrilled that it's now landed quite definitively.)
As far as mochi donuts... I'm yet to find anything made with mochi that I'm not instantly addicted to. Glutinous rice dough always feels luxurious and comforting to me, whether wrapping an ice cream or a filled pastry or enhancing a soup or just about any other application. The donuts in this case consist of eight little dough balls stuck together in a ring and glazed with a topping. I have found that the texture of the donut is very much my thing, but the flavors and glazes, which vary by day and range from expected to adventurous, don't do an awful lot to enhance them further to my particular palate. Originally posted at https://leiacat.dreamwidth.org/351944.html. Please comment either there using OpenID or right here. I read both with the same distracted semi-frequency.