Avec

Plugging my bro's new website. He has amazing food porn pics from Avec. Mmm.

Iguana Restaurant

A few of my friends and I decided to try Iguana Cafe in Portsmouth last night. It was basically our last hurrah until our last exam is over. With 3 lab practicals, 5 Shelf exams, and Mini 3 all in the last 2 weeks of school, the next 4 weeks are going to be incredibly tiresome, so it was nice to treat ourselves one last time before it's time to go into hiding.

I ordered the Grilled Lobster with a pumpkin and garlic sauce. Even though the portion was a little bit small (it was mostly shell), I thought it was pretty good. I knew the lobsters were very fresh because the meat was incredibly tender. The sauce could have used more seasoning, but I still liked it. So far, I think this might be the best restaurant I've been to in Dominica in terms of food alone, but I may have just ordered the wrong things at other restaurants and the right thing at this restaurant. I was just happy that this place had everything on their menu. Most of the time, restaurants here don't have at least one thing that's on the menu. Sometimes MOST things, which really sucks.

I think I've come to accept the fact that food in Dominica simply isn't up to par with even the most mediocre restaurants in the US and Europe. Still, it's nice to get out of the immediate campus neighborhood and eat food that's not what we would eat on an everyday basis.

P.S. This post should probably go in my food blog, but I think I've come to the habit of posting all Dominica-related things in this personal blog.


Glossary: A lab practical involves looking at an microscopic or gross body part (depending on the class) and identifying whatever the pointer/tag is pointing at. Some of the questions are secondary. A Shelf exam is a standardized final exam for every subject in the first year of medical school. I'll have 5 of them - Biochem, Histology, Physiology, Anatomy, and Neuroscience shelves. A Mini is what Ross calls their own exams. We have 3 of them each semester - 1 for all the material learned in each month. So yes, all 5-6 subjects for one Mini.

Linguine Bolognese

Since I JUST realized that one of the groceries in this neighborhood sells frozen meats, I decided it was time to finally buy some and cook something real. By real, I mean not pasta with ready-made bacon, fried rice, scrambled eggs, corned beef, or instant noodles. As I've mentioned a few times before, it's hard to get meat and fish in this immediate area, and equally difficult to get fresh meat and fish anywhere else on this island. Yeah, you'd think it'd be so easy to get fresh fish here, but it seems like it typically goes to people who own restaurants and such. You also have to get up super early on a Saturday morning to get the freshest fish.

Anyways, since many of my friends have gotten the frozen ground beef from this little convenience store near campus, I figured it was safe enough and that I'd make bolognese sauce. Since I've never seen celery on this island, I couldn't incorporate a mirepoix (a term I learned from Gabe, who knows far more culinary vocabulary than I do). So I used my own version and used frozen peas and carrots instead, and of course with fresh onions. After cooking the veggies and ground beef, I added some leftover canned diced tomatoes and a 28oz can of Hunt's mushroom tomato sauce. Using ready-made tomato sauce saved a lot of propane. If that wasn't an issue here, then I would have used fresh or canned tomatoes. I then added maybe about a 3/4 cup of evaporated milk. Again, there's no fresh milk here. Only shelf milk, evaporated milk, condensed milk, etc.

It turned out to be pretty good and close enough to my mom's bolognese sauce. She Filipinoes it up a bit by adding diced Vienna beef hot dogs. Not to be confused with Vienna sausages. Oh, and in case you're wondering if my mom and I add sugar to our spaghetti sauce like how most Filipinos do, then yes, we do, with one caveat. The sugar is purely for balance and to enhance the tomatoes, rather than to actually make the sauce sweet. Sweet spaghetti is still a strange concept to me.

The sauce turned out pretty good. It definitely not ambitious or even worthy of note, but for me, it's pretty exciting to find some protein other than eggs that I can cook on this island. But if only I could find some parmigiano reggiano on this island.

Uhhh

I have a StatCounter for this blog. Why is there at least one person from most, if not all, European countries, a couple of South American, and a couple of Asian countries visiting my blog JUST TODAY? I'm confused. And creep out.

Twitterfied

I'm on Twitter, and I'm not particularly proud of it. Since I'm living abroad, I suppose it's a legitimate excuse to have Twitter. Ugh, but I even downloaded TwitterDeck (pictured above), so I don't have to use the website and can just have a cooler-looking program on my Mac. I'm sure that when I go home and have the Internet re-activated on my Blackberry again for a mere two weeks, I'll download TwitterBerry so I can update on the go.

I'm not gonna lie. I love Internet communication. I barely ever used Friendster or MySpace back in the day, but I won't deny my unending love for Facebook. I'm proud to say that I've been on it since spring of 2004, before the rest of the world caught on. It really is a useful tool.

Clearly, I love blogs too. Reading and writing them. I'm not sure how much I'll love or hate Twitter. I guess it is kinda cool that celebrities and news journalists are on it though. John Mayer Twitters too much though. I'm thinking about un-following him.

Possible Future Projects?

I've been keeping up with Tastespotting, The Kitchn, and a few other food blogs in order to gather some future projects for my next visit home to Chicago and New York. It will be a pretty busy 2 week break of lots of eating in both cities, but I definitely want to get some cooking in. I'd experiment here in Dominica if only fresh meat and seafood were more accessible on my part of the island.


Braised Pork Shoulder. I'd love to cook this with Gabe when I come visit on the night we plan on cooking dinner for ourselves, but I feel as though we'd rather spend 4 hours doing something else in the city. We'll have to cook things that don't use up so much of our precious time together in NYC.


These Pandan Pistachio White Chocolate cookies look appropriately St. Patrick's Day-ish, but who says you can't make bright green cookies in May?!

No picture of this one, but Roasted Loin of Berkshire Grass-fed Veal with Roasted Potatoes, Wild Ramps, and Morel Mushroom Sauce would be the perfect cooking project for end of April slash beginning of May, as it will be ramps and morel season!

That is all for now.

Back from Hiatus

Wow, I completely abandoned this blog for the last few weeks. I had my 2nd exam of the semester on Monday, and it took intense preparation because I didn't perform as well as I should have on the 1st exam. My hard work paid off because I actually did quite well on Mini 2! Instead of going out last night, I decided to watch some movies that I downloaded back in the beginning of the semester.


The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, the tale of a man who "grew" younger rather than older, was amazing. While it can be weird and creepy, I thought it was a beautifully executed movie. I even found myself crying several time throughout the movie, and I rarely ever cry during movies.


I somehow managed to gain the attention span and patience to watch a second movie. Milk, the story of Harvey Milk, was also a great movie. I don't think that every girl who loved Brokeback Mountain will feel equally as comfortable with Milk. But in any case, I also loved this movie, and Sean Penn certainly acted the hell out of his character. He deserved that Oscar. James Franco is quite nice to look at too.

So I have FINALLY watched all the movies I downloaded. The only one that didn't impress me so much was Gran Torino. I guess it just wasn't nearly as moving to me as Benjamin Button, Milk, and Slumdog Millionaire.

A little more than one month left to the semester, so I'm in the homestretch now. I just want to go home now!