Day 14: The Snail

From now on I am never going to say that I am going to Old Town because whenever I say that I am going, I jinx it. Eventually I will go and have a fantastic dinner and get back in the running in the friendship competition, and everyone will be pleasantly surprised.

Today was the last day of my official May Project because I presented this lovely blog to a group of very nice eighth graders. However, since I was in Hyde Park anyway, I decided to use the opportunity to eat lunch in Hyde Park again. Although, sadly I do not have any crazy bus-people stories to tell because I came to Hyde Park in a car. You know, I kind of miss my friends from the bus. I wonder where Jeremiah and Bald Hitler are right now... Anyway, my mom, my mom's friend Robin, and I ate at a Thai restaurant in Hyde Park called The Snail:

The Snail is located at 1649 E. 55th Street and is a favorite of many Hyde Park residents, although I really do not know why it is called The Snail, because snails are not particularly Thai. And other than a few drawings of snails, the restaurant is not really snail-themed:

In fact, I think that was the only snail in the restaurant. In fact, most of the other decorations are sort of random:

Do you see the flying cow in the upper right-hand corner? Why is there a flying cow in a Thai restaurant called "The Snail?" And unless I am very wrong, I don't think Thailand is famous for its cacti:

But I suppose the food made up for it the bizarre atmosphere. The menu is quite large, so even though there were three of us ordering, and three people ordering allows me to try a lot more food than when I eat all by my lonesome, we still did not cover all the types of food that I wanted to eat. For example, we did not order Pad Thai and I was sad. Look at how sexy Pad Thai is:

But I am not complaining. We ate a lot of good food. When we sat down, we were greeted with what looked, smelled, and tasted, like Mexican corn tortilla chips. In fact, they probably were Mexican corn tortilla chips:



If nothing else, I suppose this puts the picture of the cacti into perspective.

First, we ordered a side Cucumber Salad:

This was basically cucumber and a few onions with a sweet and sour sauce dressing. Then, after we had eaten a few bites of the cucumber salad, our waitress came over with our entrees and knocked an entire pitcher of water onto my mother:

She had a puddle sitting at the bottom of her purse, she looked like she peed herself, our cucumber salad had drowned in the deluge, and worst of all, our waitress did not even give us free sexy Pad Thai!

After we were all dried off, we started to eat our food. Even though we shared everything, each of us ordered our own dish. I ordered the Yellow Curry with chicken:

The term "curry" usually refers to a variety of spiced dishes. "Curry" is a Tamil word, usually understood to mean "gravy," not "spices," although typically curry dishes are spiced with cumin, turmeric, coriander, or red pepper. Curry is in many types of Thai cuisine, although curry has become popular in other places like Japan and even Britain. Thai curry comes in three color-coordinated flavors. The curry pictured above is yellow curry, but red and green also exist:

Thai red curry is usually made with coconut milk and/or fish sauce and red curry paste. Green curry typically has coconut milk and/or fish sauce, green curry paste, and pea aubergine. Yellow curry, on the other hand, is usually creamier because it contains both coconut milk and coconut cream in addition to the yellow curry.

My moist mother ordered pork Pad See Ew:

Anybody who is on the Lab School math team has eaten my body weight in this stuff. It is a Chinese-influenced noodle stir-fry dish served with meat (in this case pork), egg, and broccoli. Pad See Ew is typically a street food served in Thailand. Now, don't get me wrong. Noodles, etc. has a special place in my heart. But this pad see ew was the best that I have ever had. I ate about half of this dish by myself, and it was a big dish.

Robin ordered Bamee:

Bamee is the Thai name for a type of noodle called Lo Mian. Lo Mian (not to be confused with lo mein) is a type of hand-made or hand-pulled noodle. This is the type of wheat flour based noodle from which ramen is derived. This bamee contained chicken, garlic, peppers, soy sauce, sugar, vinegar, bean sprouts, cilantro, and crushed peanuts. It was a lot less soupy than I have seen in the past and it was really, really good. But I think the highlight was still the pad see ew.

Because the only thing snail-y about this restaurant is the speed of the service (except when they are spilling water on your mother) by the time we had eaten our lunch it was already 1:00 and I had to be at school to discuss this lovely blog to the nice eighth graders that I met today at 1:15, so we did not have time for dessert. But if we had I probably would have tried some sweet taro root with ginkgo nuts. Seriously, doesn't that make me sound super-Asian?

So we had to leave without dessert, but that saved us like $4.00, so I guess it is okay. Our bill totaled to about $33 for three people. Plus, we took home enough food for at least one more dinner. I am beginning to notice a pattern... I think I bring home more food than I actually eat.

I'm not going to even pretend like I am going to have time to post again until this weekend, and maybe not even then. And since May Project is officially over and real life is starting again, my posts will become more and more sporadic. I don't think I will stop posting any time soon because I have received so many recommendations from my gazillions of fans that I will need to at least continue through the summer. And like I always say, I have to eat anyway, I might as well write about it! But there will no longer be a strict schedule for posts. So, keep checking back here every few days to update yourself. OR if you want to make things easier, you can become a follower of my blog, or you can even friend me on facebook (if we are not already friends) and you can receive updates about my blog in your newsfeed. Until next time... happy eating!

Day 6: Southloop

Slight change of plans... A power greater than I deemed the Grand Lux Cafe to be too expensive, so instead of eating there, my Pa & I ate at a Thai/Japanese fusion restaurant called "Ma & I" located at 1234 South Michigan Avenue:


This is very accessible from public transportation because it is about three blocks away from the Roosevelt stop for the red/green/orange line trains. However, I got there going east for about 6 minutes on the number 12 bus. The best thing about this restaurant is how open it is. Whenever the weather is nice, they open up the windows and you can enjoy your Thai-ponese food while watching men use dogs to attract women and women use running to attract men. Or, if you don't like to observe the mating patterns of 20-something humans, you can climb in and out of the restaurant using the windows, a la Sam from "Clarissa Explains It All." OR, if you don't like classic 90's Nickelodeon, you can count the number of people that illegally park in the tow zone directly in front of the window (2).

The restaurant itself is very nice, but not exactly elaborately decorated. There are a few simple decorations:
The only part of the restaurant that is exciting is the back where there is a sushi bar:


Again, I do not eat things that can swim faster than I can, so I took a picture of the sushi that the man next to me was eating:

I hope that man isn't one of my trillions of readers. He was in the bathroom when I took this... Actually, from the looks of it, this is sashimi not sushi. Sashimi is just sliced raw fish alone, and sushi is served inside of rice with seaweed wrapped around it. Sashimi is a traditionally served as the first dish in a Japanese meal. There are forms of sashimi other than fish. For example, some people eat basashi, which is a raw horse meat:


Ma & I has separate lunch and dinner menus, although you can order off of both when you eat there for lunch. The portions are slightly smaller at lunch, which means that the prices are lower. Even so, the portions still end up being really big. So, I recommend eating lunch there instead of dinner. The lunch menu is divided up into Thai food and Japanese food, so my I ordered something from the Thai menu and my dad ordered from the Japanese menu. My father ordered chicken teriyaki:


This is actually not what the chicken teriyaki looks like at Ma & I. See, I learned something today: cameras have batteries. My camera died right before I was able to take a picture of my father's chicken teriyaki. So, this is image is brought to you courtesy of Good Image Search. *Thank you Google Image Search!*

Anyway, terikyaki is a cooking technique used in Japanese cuisine involving broiling or grilling food, in this case, chicken, in a sweet soy sauce marinde. Usually sake, a Japanese rice wine, is added to the terikyaki sauce, as well as sugar to add sweetness and to thicken the sauce.

Another good thing about eating lunch at Ma & I instead of dinner is that the entrees come with appetizers. My dad's chicken teriyaki came with miso soup:


Miso soup is a Japanese soup that consists of a miso paste that is mixed into a stock called "dashi." The dashi can be made up of anything from dried baby sardines (called "niboshi") or shiitake mushrooms. Usually, solid ingredients are added to the miso soup as well. In this soup there were onions and tofu. Sometimes seaweed or shrimp is added as well.

My dad ordered off of the Japanese portion of the menu, and I ordered off of the Thai portion. I ordered Spicy Thai Fried Rice:


Fried rice is usually considered a Chinese dish. However, Thai fried rice is cooked differently than Chinese fried rice is. Chinese fried rice is made with regular long-grained rice. Thai fried rice, on the other hand, is made with Thai Jasmine rice. Most fried rice is cooked with a meat; mine contained beef. What else is in the fried rice varies from chef to chef. They usually contain some form of spices, like coriander, and other ingredients, like onions, eggs, and mushrooms. This one contained cucumbers, lime, green onions, green peppers, and egg. This is some of the best fried rice that I have ever had.

Just like with my father's meal, my meal also came with an appetizer. I ordered crab rangoon. I don't care what you say, there is absolutely NO bite mark taken out of that crab rangoon on the bottom. And I can eat crabs because even though they can swim faster than I can, they walk sideways so I would beat them in a footrace so it's okay and I'm not a hyporcrite:


Anyway, the inside of crab rangoon is a mixture of crabmeat, (sometimes it's fake anyway, so there!) cream cheese, garlic, and generally something like celery or cucumber. The mixture is then placed inside of a wanton, which is then wrapped and deep-fried. The dipping sauce you see is a sweet and sour sauce. Crab rangoon is also sometimes dipped in soy sauce.

One bad thing about Ma & I is that there is no dessert menu, so that was a disappointment. I was feeling sad about this, so I went back home and ate a bunch of peanut butter ice cream. Problem solved:

Mmmm.... Food porn... Now I'm food horny.

The total cost of our meal was $32, and I took home about 3/4 of my meal because if I had eaten all of it then I would not fit into my prom dress. It was very good, and I would certainly go back again sometime.

Tomorrow is sort of a complicated day, so if I do end up going out for lunch it will be in Hyde Park. Although, I may just end up doing a segment on Subway... eat fresh!