Dining In: 40 Clove Garlic Chicken

Whole Chicken cut into 8 pieces (you can buy pre-cut and packaged)
Seasoned salt
Pepper
1 & 1/2 Tablespoons dried thyme
2-3 bulbs of peeled garlic cloves (depending on how big and how tired you get) Feel free to actually count out 40 cloves if you want to get anal about it.
Olive oil

Pre-heat oven to 350 degrees.  Season chicken generously with seasoned salt and pepper.  Sear chicken on both sides on high heat on the stove top in an oven safe skillet with olive oil until golden brown.

Take skillet off heat.  Add an additional 1/3 cup olive oil, garlic cloves to skillet and sprinkle thyme over the chicken.  Cover the chicken with foil and slit a hole for it to vent. Then allow to bake in the oven until chicken reaches an internal temp of 165-170, about an hour. 
The olive oil combined with the drippings makes a great au jus. 

Goes great with garlic sautéed spinach, garlic mashed potatoes and dinner rolls for a special stinky night.

Tips:
Just so you know, for the most part, when it comes to meat and an oven, I don’t really rely on timers anymore.  Get a meat thermometer, it’ll be your best friend if you don’t have one already. Timers can’t really tell you when meat is done or over cooked. Thermometers can




Lightly smash garlic cloves with the flat end of a knife, it makes peeling easier.

Take some of the roasted garlic and au jus and blend it into your mashed potatoes.

Remember to come up for air while eating.

At Last Café–Long Beach, CA

I knew about this place from my friend Nicole who saw this on Food Network’s Diners Drive-ins and Dives.  The best way to describe this place is gourmet comfort food; food that is definitely familiar, but it feels like you’re eating at a fancy restaurant despite being a jeans and t-shirt kind of place.  The best part is that not only is the food fantastic, but everything is reasonably priced at about $10 per entrée and portions big enough to make two meals.  However, that most likely won’t happen because you’ll want to eat everything off your plate.  Lastly, you should know that three of the four dishes featured come with a gravy made from chicken bones, stock and tomatoes which sounds weird but trust me, it’s a part of what makes them famous.  It reminds me of a brown gravy but slightly thinner in consistency and goes with everything.  Everything I tried was so good, that it’ll make even  your burps taste good.

Stuffed Pork Chop: The chop is the most moist I’ve ever tasted, which is such an accomplishment considering pork can be dried up easily.  The stuffing is a cranberry apple stuffing that reminds me of Thanksgiving even though it’s pork and not turkey.  If Thanksgiving were revamped to serve this pork chop with this stuffing, it will change the course of Thanksgiving.

Meatloaf:  The meat has herbs and onions and stays clear away from the ketchup taste that traditional meat loaf made of.  Now I’m not sure if this actually has ketchup, it’s refreshing to bite into meat loaf that doesn’t have any hint of that ketchup flavor.  I think it has to due with the gravy.  As an added bonus, the loaf is put together and cooked so well that when you break off a piece, the meat doesn’t crumble.

Brick Chicken: Consists of a roasted half chicken, that’s right, half of a whole chicken.  Again, the meat is perfectly seasoned and moist with the skin having the perfect amount of crispness to it.  Plus look at the size of this thing, its bigger than a brick.  I honestly don’t know how this place makes any money.  There’s that gravy again.

Macaroni and cheese:  This mac and cheese is for adults, consisting of cheddar, Monterey Jack, Gouda and parmesan cheese, topped with ham and bread crumbs.  A mac and cheese that has been kicked up so much, you’ll never go back to blue boxes again, only for your kids.  I love how the cheeses compliment each other but it’s also nice that the gouda shines through.  More and more, gouda is becoming one of my favorite cheeses.  You would think that with the cheese and ham the dish becomes overly salty, but that is not the case at all. 

Rating: 5/5 Knives

Pricing: $ – It is about $10 per entree , give or take, but considering the generous portions, I’m going to rate it lower.

Make reservations!  The restaurant is cute and cozy but that doesn’t mean it isn’t packed.

Great find Nicole and Kevin, or is it Kevin and Nicole

http://www.jmchefcatering.com/

Dining In with Dessert First: Mom’s ChocoFlan

Finally, the first entry of the year.  My other half made this and I wanted to share because I’m particularly proud of his accomplishment.  He got the recipe from my mom and though the directions are not that difficult, it is a challenge in itself to be compared to Mom.  The recipe itself is a basic flan recipe baked with Devil’s Food cake.  I don’t know the science behind this, but baked, the layers do separate to create the perfect harmony.  The flan comes out perfect in consistency and the cake comes out super moist.  A must for parties and potlucks.  Sorry to say, but I’m not posting the recipe on the internet so freely.  You’ll have to message me if you want it.  This entry is mainly meant for eye-candy :)

Cafe Grill, Fountain Valley CA

I found out about Café Grill because the food critics from OC Register raved about it and wanted to try it for myself.  I have to say that my feelings are a little more mixed than I like them to be.  Don’t let the scrumptious looking pictures fool you, there were some really high points and are worth checking out and then were some dishes that had great potential but fell short.

  

Butternut squash ravioli:  It does not help that this was served first because this set the bar high.  You can just tell the the ravioli was assembled that day simply because the ravioli did not look perfect and that the squash and the ravioli itself tasted so fresh.  It comes topped with a balsamic sauce, chives and tarragon and everything went together so well.

Potato pancakes:  Unfortunately this was one of those that fell flat.  I don’t know if it was because I was there at 2 in the afternoon and was getting the last of the servings, but that shouldn’t be an excuse.  You could tell that these were not freshly fried and had been sitting under a warmer.  You know that dry potato texture you get when fries have been sitting out a little too long.  Yeah, kind of like that.  Plus I found the flavor lacking, I had to add quite a bit of salt.

Wild Boar Sausage sandwich:  Back to our high point, this also contained grilled onions and whole grain mustard.  Everything about this sandwich was very good and especially the sausage itself packed so much flavor with a perfect amount of grilled char to go with it.  Unfortunately this was not my lunch so I only had a couple, but man I wished I had ordered this.

  

Parsnip Soup:  I found this interesting because I’ve never had parsnip before and have nothing to compare it to.  I would not rate this bad, just interesting.  The best way I can describe it is a cross between and turnip and a potato soup.

Chicken and Brie sandwich: I don’t have brie often on a sandwich but I liked how it went with the chicken and plus it was nice to have a sandwich with a cheese I’m not used to having on there.  Unfortunately the chicken was bland and lacking in flavor once again.  If it would have had more seasoning, even maybe a splash of lemon, I would have liked this more.  Plus the mayo was very stingy.  Being generous on the mayo could have helped this out too.

Chocolate Profiteroles: Basically cream puffs covered in chocolate sauce.  I’m so glad I ordered this because this did help make up for other blahs.  It seemed like the chocolate sauce was a dark chocolate because it had that slight bitterness, which was great because I love dark chocolate.  I think it was good to make the chocolate dark because the sweetness of the cream needed to be contrasted with that tiny bit of bitterness from the chocolate.  Whatever the chef did here, did an excellent job.  If there weren’t other people in the restaurant, I would have gladly licked the sauce off the plate.

Rating: 3.5/5 Forks

Cost: $$, about $20-25 per person.

I would have rated this place higher had I happen to only ordered the things that were great.  However, I did have to rate it lower than I would have liked to because it’s always a goal of mine to try a new place and sample as many dishes as possible, which was what I did.  As I said, the high points were very high but unfortunately 2/5 dishes fell short which made me bring the score down.  The dishes that were done well are worth checking out.

Dining In with Dessert First: Hawaiian Bread Pudding

So what do you do when you’ve bought a Costco pack of King’s Hawaiian rolls and realized you actually don’t need 100 rolls for your ham sandwiches and are in the process of turning rock hard… bread pudding!


8-10 stale Hawaiian rolls
2 tablespoons melted butter
3 eggs beaten
1 1/4 cup vanilla soy milk
2/3 cup brown sugar
1 teaspoon: cinnamon and vanilla extract
Pinch of nutmeg
1/4 cup chocolate chips

Directions:
Preheat oven to 350 degrees.  Break Hawaiian rolls in to pieces into a loaf pan.  Drizzle melted butter over bread and sprinkle chocolate chips.  Mix eggs, milk, sugar, cinnamon, vanilla and nutmeg in a bowl and beat well until sugar dissolves.  Pour egg mixture over bread and allow to soak for a few minutes.  Bake at 350 degrees for 40 minutes or until the top springs back when lightly tapped.
ENJOY