Month: January 2019

A few years ago I began a quest for the best nigiri bento box in Baton Rouge. Like any other food quest, best diner burger, best grilled cheese, a decent carbonara–the quest is ongoing. As of now, Koi is second to Waka House, but it is easier for me to get to Koi for lunch than either location of Waka so that makes it de facto number one in my book, even though the Waka bento comes with baby shrimp and chicken yakitori sticks and a house fried rice that blows Koi’s away. There are a lot of sushi places now, and that is a very good thing because you can pick and choose where you want to go for whatever mood your are in and what kind of experience you want. Koi is right across the street from Kaminari Sushi and Hibachi which is a buffet style place with everything pre-made and laid out with a few hot dishes and a build your own hibachi grill. Both are good lunch spots and Kaminari is cheaper but Koi has far better sushi and dumplings. And every buffet I’ve ever been to outside of Caesar’s Palace in Vegas has that vague whiff of an EBRP school cafeteria. The mass produced food (which doesn’t mean it isn’t tasty) the cooks and servers who act like autoworkers, the grabby, jostling atmosphere of the line and the tables jammed too close together sometimes bring back that gnawing anxiety of being in high school. But then again, sometimes you are pressed for time and just need to chow down on something good to eat without a server between you and your meal.

For a few bucks more, Koi will upgrade the salad from iceberg to seaweed and the soup from miso to clear. Worth it to me and no problem to them. You being there is why they offer the lunch specials anyway so they are always happy to see you. This is true for every restaurant open at lunch besides the fast food joints. They want the business and will go out of their way at lunch to get you what you need. Same thing on week nights. Restaurants survive off of weekend sales, but they thrive when they build lunch, happy hour, and week night crowds. So Koi is my go to for the nigiri bento. Drunken Fish when I want to mix Japanese and Vietnamese. Umami is my favorite, and I will write them up soon since I got a hundred dollar gift card for Christmas. He is very good about importing Japanese fish to try.. Waka House is a must for lunch if you are out near Sherwood Forest and Coursey for store one or Highland and Lee for store two. And Koi does offer a Chinese menu as well and is right by campus which makes it convenient for week nights before or after a play or choral recital or jazz ensemble at LSU.

My favorite Emeril Lagasse slogan is Kick it up a notch! Of course for Emeril that is followed by his favorite slogan BAM!!! where he dusts whatever it is in more of the seasoning that he wants to sell you. I agree with the notion of adding something to make it better, but not necessarily that it is always more seasoning. I know I go on and on about our access these days to foods that weren’t readily available in the good old days, but it is very nice to go to the Whole Foods or Fresh Market and always be able find lamb and duck and rabbit. Maybe one day we will be able to count on finding fresh eel and abalone like you can in Houston and Austin. I certainly hope so. Anyway, I marinated this lamb steak over night in some syrup left over from a jar of fig preserves and added Lea & Perrins and roasted garlic olive oil and garlic salt/garlic powder/onion powder/black pepper and fired up the gas grill and went 5 minutes a side on high.

This gave me a nice mid-rare steak. I used about half of it for this lunch dish. The rest is cooling its heels, waiting to meet up with bread and mustard later this week. I wanted to play around with a packaged porcini risotto I found at Whole Foods while I was stocking up on packaged rice pilaf (another one of my go to sides) and that is where kick it up a notch comes in. I am constitutionally unable to just follow the directions on the box. In this case I sautéed some baby bellas and red onion before throwing it all in the rice maker and letting it roll. Before I plated it, I added a bag of steamed frozen vegetables. This mix was asparagus with white and yellow corn and carrots. In the back of my mind, I was already planning to reheat some and add in scrambled eggs and green onions for an Italian style fried rice later this week. BAM!!!

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The television shows Chopped and Chopped After Hours have really helped me to look at leftovers as opportunities. The contestants and even more so the judges when they take to the kitchen in Chopped After Hours demonstrate how you should look at the pantry. Coming up with a bunch of ideas really quickly, weeding through them to find the one you have the time and resources to execute, and continuing to improvise and adapt when things go south. In addition to teaching the lesson of running constant scenarios, even as you are working on something, they really drive home the notion of re-purposing packaged foods. And so we come to this dish which came together for breakfast because I had some leftover beef tenderloin and had bought some sliced baby bellas to add to a packaged porcini risotto I’ve been wanting to check out.

I didn’t really want to go the ramen route, so I decided to use the instant noodles and save the flavor pack for another time. Tossed it right into the drawer with all the tiny plastic pouches of duck and soy sauce that probably won’t ever be used but I can’t bring myself to throw away. So, beef, mushrooms, noodles. Check, check, and check. I put the leftover beef and a handful of mushooms in a pot with 2 cups of Swanson’s beef broth and fired it up while I scrambled some eggs and chopped some green onions. Let it roll for a minute or two when it came to a boil just to get the mushrooms right then added the noodles and told Alexa to set a ramen timer for 4 minutes (not really ramen, but Alexa didn’t need to know that). Set the eggs and green onions in a bowl and poured the beef and broth and mushrooms over it and Voila! breakfast. But it didn’t have to be breakfast. This quickie would be good for any meal and takes so little time and effort to throw down and goes equally well with coffee, coke, or an America pale ale like Parish Envie.