FOOD PIC OF THE WEEK

Calle Ocho (***)

2756 Broadway, New York, NY 10025

I have been going to Calle Ocho (Cuban fusion) since the early 2000s, and it always hits the spot. To be perfectly honest, Calle Ocho was a favorite for my grad school buddies and me because the restaurant has an all-you-can-drink sangria brunch with the purchase of any entree.

LOOK AT ALL OF THESE DIFFERENT SANGRIAS!!!!

 
 

FYI: The Samba, Roja, Gramada Punta Cana, and Blanca are my favoritas.

Man those were the days when we did not have time limits for our all-you-can-drink brunch needs. Now, most places have a 1.5 – 2 hour time limit, which is fine . . . I guess.

For my most recent brunch visit, I went with something new and ordered the

Camarones Ahumados

 
 

Normally, I order the same things (ropa vieja or chilaquiles), but I am glad that I decided to go with something different.

While I love coming here, I will say that the prices have gone up a bit. Since I have been dining here for about two decades, I guess that’s understandable. Back in the day, dishes were about $20 and included all-you-can-drink sangria. Now, the delicious brunch options are around $40. I mean it’s not a huge deal because most places typically add an extra $15-$20 bucks if you want an all-you-can-drink option. I guess Calle Ocho now includes the all-you-can-drink in the price of the entree. There is no way in the world that anyone should pay close to $40 for a bowl of shrimp and grits. I guess this kind of sucks for non-drinkers to pay that much for a brunch entree.

That said, the muffin basket (err box) is totally worth it.

 
 

One tip if you dine here: As long as you continue to order food, the sangria will keep flowing. When we dine at Calle Ocho, we usually get a dessert after brunch so we can have one or two more sangrias for the road.

FOOD PICS OF THE WEEK - A POTPOURRI

We’re going to do a few mini entries.

The Jeffrey Craft Beer & Bites (***)

311 E 60th St, New York, NY 10022

I have been going to this bar for YEARS. It is a few blocks away from my former place of employment, and I passed it pretty much every day on my commute to and from work. While this place has countless types of yummy beers and unique cocktails, I never really had the food here . . . with the exception of the $1 happy hour oysters and probably the french fries. On Friday, I was STARVING, and my half dozen of oysters just was not going to cut it. The bar has an interesting list of tacos, and I decided to go with the Pho Tacos. OMG!!!

The Pho Tacos reminded me a bit of Birra-style tacos, but these tacos had a pho-based consommé. After the first dip of one of the tacos, I was this || close to asking my waitress for a larger bowl of the cosommé to eat as a soup. These guys were out of this world delicious. Looking back, I wished that I had ordered four instead of three

Thanksgiving

Harlem, NY

This year, I decided to stay in NYC instead of going to VA. This decision always makes Thanksgiving a bit bitter-sweet for me; however, you gotta power through adversity. The hubby and his friend pretty much made our Thanksgiving feast. It was a nice touch because they are chefs so we get some traditional bites with some fun and unique sides. I gotta say the six of us had a nice Thanksgiving . . . I guess they call it Friendsgiving these days.

Once again, my contribution to Thanksgiving dinner was dessert. For this adventure, I decided to make this White Christmas cake.

RECIPE: White Christmas Cake.

I know that the recipe has the word “Christmas” in it, but I wanted to make a cranberry-based dessert. While I did not have a baking meltdown like last year (last year’s meltdown post ***), the cake started off kind of a struggle. I was this || close to aborting the dessert after this happened.

 
 

I decided to power through this fiasco and continue with the cake by making it with three instead of four layers. I really have to give it up to the pastry experts or near experts out there because I did not realize the complexity of frosting and assembling a multilayered cake.

I deviated from the recipe a bit

  • Added whiskey to the cranberry jam

  • It was three layers instead of four because I messed up one of the cakes as you can see in the photo above.

  • Since I had so much cranberry jam leftover (remember, there was one less layer), I decided to mix the remaining butter cream with the cranberry jam. Actually, I think doing that somewhat masked my crappy frosting technique for the top layer. While assembling the cake with the buttercream and the cranberry jam layers, I was like why didn’t the recipe just mix the buttercream with the cranberry jam for the filling in between the layers.

  • Not sure why the recipe called for TWO cups of cranberries for the garnish. I think that I used about 20 cranberries for the garnish on the top layer. I guess if folks are huge fans of cranberries, one could use all 2 cups. With the cranberry jam-filled layers, I figured that topping the cake with 2 cups of cranberries would have been overkill . . . and this is coming from someone who loves cranberries.

  • Boy was it tough to cut the cake evenly for the layers, which resulted in the cake looking very lopsided. The hubby said that pastry work requires quite a bit of practice, and I have to agree with him.

Overall, everyone was pleased with the cake, and I will admit that it was delicious. Aesthetically, it looked like it was on the losing end of a knife fight.

Meal Prep

I’m still trying to power through Beachbody’s 21-Day Fix, and we’re going with the tuna noodle casserole with veggies.

It’s an interesting take on an American classic; however, I will say that it tastes “weird” without any cheese. I guess the lack of cheese is what makes this thing healthy. While the veggie component was kale and peas, I decided to up the veggie content by adding shredded Brussel sprouts, carrots, corn, and tomatoes.

21-Day Fix Container Equivalents: 0.5 green (veggies), 0.5 red (protein), 1.5 yellow (carbs)

I hope everyone had nice Thanksgiving . . . or a nice Thursday if you do not celebrate Thanksgiving.

FOOD PIC OF THE WEEK

Since it was too hard to pick one favorite food pic or restaurant while vacationing in Spain, I figure that I would put my top meals in one post. This way, the next five entries “Food Pics of the Week” will not be food entries from Spain.

MADRID, PART 1

Bang Cook

Bodega Maribel

Santander:

La Casa del Indiano

Restaurant: ???

Restaurant: ???

Barcelona:

Restaurant ???

La Mar Salida

Madrid, part II

El Brillante

Going forward, I probably should take pictures of the restaurants’ names and menus so I can 1) know the name of the restaurant and 2) know the actual names of the dishes. I did try to check in to these places on Yelp, so they would be in my recently checked in folder. However, many of the spots we visited did not have Yelp listings, and I was not trying to create new Yelp listings for these places

Food Pic of the Week

SETTEPANI (***) 

 196 Lenox Avenue, New York, NY 10026

A few weeks ago, I stopped this local restaurant to try their Limoncello Sorbetto. Oh, by “local” I mean a quick, 3-min walk from my apt.

 
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Basically, the Limoncello Sorbetto is tequila and limoncello (of course) infused with lemon sorbet that is placed into a hollowed-out lemon. Although I liked this dessert cocktail, going forward, I’m going to substitute gin for the tequila.

A couple of weeks later, I went back to try the orange version of this frozen cocktail.

 
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This version is pretty much a negroni infused with orange sorbet. Comparing the two, I think that I’ll lean toward the lemon version because it was less syrupy than the orange version.

Since we have to order food with cocktails in NYC, I had a delicious octopus appetizer with my orange negroni sorbet. Technically, wouldn’t the sorbet count as food?

 
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