Goodfood Recap #26

We are back for some more Goodfood cooking adventures! Let’s check it out!

Haddock
with Fresh Chickpeas, Summer Vegetable & Mint Salad over Freekeh

Simple meals like this one always takes my heart. Its easy to put together and very straight forward in terms of dialing things back to the basic. Some carb or something like that, some easy veggies to make and then some type of meat. Its really a great time to just dial back to everyday things and eat a meal like this. We don’t eat a lot of fish but haddock does come around in these boxes fairly frequently and we almost always enjoy it a lot. This one was no exception.

Shiitake Mushroom Tempura
with Sugar Snap Peas & Snow Pea Tips Over Sushi Rice & Wafu Sauce

The way I thought about this one was a little different from how it turned out. On one hand, Sushi Rice and Wafu Sauce is a winner. However, I can’t figure out if we waited too long (which is weird since we cooked this box really quickly) but the snap peas and snow pea tips (which I ended up cooking) was a little older so cooking it actually made it very tough to eat. It is not the fault of the meal itself but of the bad timing in ingredients. To be honest, the tempura actually turned out the most disappointing. The tempura batter was a little disappointing and really thick and I wondered whether it was my issues with it since I don’t do meals with batter frequently. The batter is what made the mushrooms not so good. I actually would do this meal straight the way it is with or without wafu sauce.

Grilled Sirloin Steaks
with Lemon-Garlic Butter & Sesame Roasted Vegetables

This is a pretty interesting dish in general. The beef was really good, the spices worked well. The cauliflower and the potatoes were so easy to cook in the oven. Its a really nice and easy to sync up all the steps also making it very on point with the amount of time that they have allotted to make this meal. It does taste pretty good also. The butter works pretty well but I still like it as a simple meal with all these ingredients together.

Pork Meatballs in Thai Coconut Curry
with Kaffir, Lime & Mixed Vegetables over Jasmine Rice

Ever since we swapped over to Goodfood, we’ve actually purposefully avoided curry meals because of the previous meal subscription box experience. This meal looked so good and actually ours turned it fairly different from what it looked like but it still tastes absolutely fantastic. The meal that pleasantly surprised us for sure. The pork meatballs are delicious. The vegetable mix was awesome and the curry was just spicy and tasty enough. There’s so much to love about this one.

That’s it for this Goodfood recap!
Any of these meals that draw you in?

Restaurant: Congee Queen (Thornhill, Ontario, Canada)

I always talk about Asian cuisine after going to Toronto. Its usually the closest place with good Chinese cuisine in particular since to be honest, Montreal has a lot of great restaurants but Chinese cuisine itself is a bit lacking. Its why I tend to avoid it whenever given the option. Sad, because I do truly love Chinese food. I mean, its not hard to imagine seeing as I am Chinese and my mom makes about the best Chinese food in town or its my best friend who also is a master in the kitchen.

Not surprising that the rare time that we all end up in Toronto for a wedding, we meet up for a dinner the night before to hang out. We never do double dates much seeing as we all have funky work schedules and commitments so this was a great time to catch up and have fun.

We lived at the Courtyard Marriott in Thornhill and right next door was the flagship store of Congee Queen. Let’s check it out!

Congee Queen

Dinner Selections

Crab Meat & Vegetarian Shark Fin served with Conpoy Rice in Chicken Broth

My best friend was the one who ordered this meal. She wanted to give this a try mostly for the vegetarian shark fin. It actually had a really  nice flavor. The textures are all there and the chicken broth was nice. I was originally worried that it would be too strong like on the salty side as broth sometimes tends to be, but it wasn’t like that.

General Tao Chicken Rice

My husband mostly focused on eating this meal. General Tao is very much non-traditional Chinese food however, I don’t usually fuss over these things. My husband thought it was good although he did end up not eating all the huge pieces of chili peppers because those were really intense.

Snow Pea Leaves with King Mushroom

One of my choices for the evening was this snow pea tips with oyster mushrooms. I think my description is the correct one but the one in the description is the one that is shown on the menu in case you ever want to get it at this restaurant. The season for snow pea tips is a little bit past so it was expected that they were more old in texture so it was more stiff and chewy. The mushrooms are always a nice alternative. I actually eat more of these types of mushrooms in Goodfood boxes and I really like them a lot. This veggie plate is a win. If we had it back in April when the snow pea tips were in season, then it would have been perfect.

Pork Rib with Onion on Sizzling Hot Plate

The second dish that I picked was pork ribs. This is a pretty traditional dish at least for myself when we went to Chinese restaurants when I was younger. I don’t go to Chinese restaurants as much mostly because Montreal cuisine isn’t great but Toronto is a different story so I was excited to see how they would prepare this. This one was okay. I think we all agreed that it tasted okay but it was nothing too fancy and felt a little overpriced.

Fried Eggplant, Minced Pork with Spicy Sauce

My best friend’s second choice was this dish which is an uber traditional Chinese dish. I was pretty full so I didn’t eat a whole lot of this one but it was fairly good. I’m not a huge eggplant eater but I do appreciate its health properties so I try to eat it more often and learn to appreciate it. This one was slightly spicy also.

Congee Queen had some pretty delicious meal. It does some cool dishes and sometime switches up some traditional meals to something of of a fusion of sorts. I do think that for the experience, it is a little bit more pricier than I would want to pay. I don’t mind so much paying for good food if there is something original but for the portion size and the price of some of the very common dishes, it definitely felt not exactly equal. Luckily, I am visiting and I don’t like Montreal chinese food so I didn’t mind it so much.

With that said, I am aware that for a congee restaurant, I didn’t have congee. We did have dinner but next time, if I was going for brunch or lunch, then that would absolutely make an appearance. Suffice to say, despite little things, Congee Queen is a place that I would go again when I head down to Toronto again.

Food Review: Sushi Yasu

On Saturday evening, I was invited to dinner with my girl friends and others to meet one of the girl’s long distance boyfriend who came in town to visit! She chose to have it at a pretty popular Japanese restaurant around where I live called Sushi Yasu!

To have dinner with friends and meeting new people, we all had a great time! I’m not really much of a Japanese food person since I can’t eat raw fish.  Still, a lot of friends rate this place highly!

I started my meal with Miso Soup (which came with my meal).

Miso Soup

I ordered the Chicken Teriyaki and it came with a bowl of rice! I didn’t manage to finish the rice since it was really filling so I managed to eat most of my dish! It looks good, right?

Chicken Teriyaki

The Chicken Teriyaki was pretty good.  The sauce tasted really awesome and the chicken was tender.  I just found it so huge that I couldn’t eat it all.  Oh, and those are fried onions which were quite delicious as well 🙂

I didn’t get a chance to catch everyone’s dishes but two of the girls chose to eat Deluxe Chef Set (I think thats what it was called). It looked amazing but had so much food.  That also came with soup or salad and a bowl of rice 🙂

Deluxe Chef Set

And of course, someone has to order sushi 🙂 Here’s one of the platters shared!

Sushi

Looks pretty good! Sometimes, I miss the days when my stomach could eat sushi but I was never a huge fan! I do miss the raw salmon.  This looks awesome and there weren’t complaints I believe, or none voiced out loud!

Do you like Japanese cuisine? Do you enjoy eating raw fish in sushi, hand rolls or sashimi?

Stir-Fried Pork with Vegetables and Pineapple Chunks

In the previous post, I had promised to post up the second part of my Chinese New Year dinner and here it is.  I went into my Looneyspoons cook book and did a recipe that I’ve been planning to do for a while.  I love cooking with pineapples.  Since I already had chicken on the menu, I went ahead to make stir fried pork tenderloin with vegetable and pineapple chunks and its paired with sweet and sour sauce.  Doesn’t that sound delicious?

Here’s how it turned out:

Ingredients:

2 tsp sesame oil

1 1/4 lbs pork tenderloin, cut into cubes or strips

2 tsp grated gingerroot

1 tsp minced garlic

1 1/2 cups each chopped red pepper and sliced carrots

1 cup chopped onions

398mL pineapple

1/4 cup each ketchup and rice vinegar

3 tbsp brown sugar

2 tbsp (reduce sodium) soy sauce

1 tbsp cornstarch

2 cups white rice

Directions:

1. Heat oil in a large wok over medium-high heat.  Add pork, gingerroot and garlic.  Cook and stir for 6 to 7 minutes, until pork is cooked through and begins to brown.  Remove pork from wok and keep warm.  Add green pepper, carrots and onions to wok.  Cook and stir for about 5 minutes, or until vegetables are tender.

2. Meanwhile, prepare sauce.  In a small bowl, combine ketchup, vinegar, brown sugar, soy sauce, cornstarch. Add sauce to vegetables in wok, along with cooked pork and pineapple chunks.  Cook until sauce is bubbly and has thickened, and pork and pineapple are heated through.  Serve over white rice.

The recipe is inspired from Looneyspoons. The one up there is how I did it because I did make a few changes to the original. They used peanut oil instead of sesame oil.  Also, green bell peppers instead of red peppers, and canned pineapples where they could use a bit of the pineapple juice to add to the sauce.  The sauce had chili powder but I don’t eat that so I took it out. The last thing is that you should match it with rice but they recommend to use brown rice or quinoa.  That is pretty much all that I modified.

Finally, to the actual results! This was awesome tasting.  I’m serious, these two ladies over at Looneyspoons have some amazing skills.  All their recipes that I’ve tried have been pretty great.

The best reward of cooking was to see my boyfriend give me the approving reaction that he liked it.  And he did for the complete meal and I enjoyed it a lot too.  Even have some leftovers for lunch!

Do you cook with pineapples or other fruits for meals? Any ingredient combinations you like in particular?