Text 26064, 119 rader
Skriven 2015-04-16 20:44:00 av MICHAEL LOO (1:123/140)
Ärende: tastes 525
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So there's this hotel I go to irregularly when I have meetings
or concerts that get out late and I don't want to spend the
night a vagrant at the airport (the bus and train stations
close around midnight), and they've gotten used to me there;
I was surprised to find that I had been named "guest of the
day," which apparently meant nothing, as I went up to my room
and other than the two bottles of water that I get anyway,
there was no special gift or anything. Turns out they'd
forgotten it, and when I went downstairs again for something
someone came rushing out of the office with a little snack
basket that included odd things that I would normally mostly
not eat, in manageable 1/2 to 1 oz servings.

180 Snacks "gluten-free, oven baked, Kosher, 100% vegan"
almond pops with cranberries - I opened the pack and was
greeted with the aroma of artificial blueberry, The crunchy
rice things tasted rather like breakfast cereal, though
perhaps not as interesting. There were slivers of toasted
almond here and there. The ingredients list - oven baked
almonds, cane sugar, rice syrup, crispy rice, puffed brown
rice, puffed white rice, dried cranberries, palm oil,
natural flavor, sea salt, guar gum. I'm guessing that the
almonds, being denser than puffed rice, got kind of lost
in the volume of the latter despite being first on the list.
Also that cranberries and blueberries both being Vacciniums,
the difference in flavor rests more in the difference in
acidity than anything substantive.

Brookside dark chocolate pomegranate flavor - I wonder why
these seem to be the most common, because I find them the
least tasty of the three flavors available (acai-blueberry
and goji-raspberry being the other two). Still, they are not
bad. They're made by Hershey Canada, to which my response is
that the Canadians keep better reins on their Hersheys than
we do. When the brand first appeared, the labels were worded
to let you think there was a substantial dose of the fruits
in question; I suppose someone complained, because now it is
made clear that the confections are flavored only.

A bottle of spring water to go with the two I already got.

A lobster-shaped lollipop, not tried yet.

And discount coupons to P.F. Chang's (the local one only,
otherwise I'd put it up for grabs), Sonic, and Texas
Roadhouse.

A decent haul for no work.

=

I had a sort of yen for spicy food, and a few blocks down
from the clubhouse where the meetings are is the first US
outlet of Little Lamb, a 600-strong Chinese chain of hotpot
restaurants. It's a spotless space across from a building
of Massachusetts General Hospital, looking more like a
trendy coffeehouse than a Chinese restaurant.

For lunch, you choose your meat, an accompaniment, and a
boiling liquid out of several choices. Mine:

lamb, which came in microtome-thin frozen slices, maybe 3 oz,
with no visible grain and a goodly layer of exterior fat - it
must have been shoulder, sliced on the thinnest setting of an
electric slicer;

mini dumplings, also frozen;

and the spiciest of the broth choices, mala, with numerous
medicinal herbs and spices ramped up with Szechwan and other
peppercorns and dried hot peppers.

Also, at lunch you get a "free" plate of vegetables - celery
cabbage, watercress, about a 6th of an ear of corn, a carrot
stick, a mushroom, some bean sprouts, and a broccoli floret.

The waitress succeeded in a subtle upsell by bluntly asking,
any appetizer? I went with what is listed on the menu as meat
pie for an unseemly $5, but meat pie really did appeal this
slightly chilly day.

The girl lit up a gas appliance set in a hole in the middle of
the table, sort of like what you get at a Korean barbecue, then
came along with a big pot of soup to heat up: the mother broth
is a pork-chicken base with garlic, scallions, various roots and
barks including greater and lesser ginger and maybe other kinds
as well, wolfberries, dates, and other medicinals; the mala-ness
came from a sizable dose of the aforementioned hot things and a
glug of hot sesame oil. The spice was well within the tolerable
range unless you inhaled a bit of the oil floating on the top.
Pretty tasty, but I got tired of the Szechwan peppercorns early
and did not drink much soup (which gets tossed after the meal,
a huge waste).

The lamb thawed instantaneously in the bubbling broth, then
cooked in seconds (overcooked in a few more seconds). It was
somewhat chewy done this way, not unpleasantly; the flavor was
good and, with the nice fatty edge, pretty lamby;

the mini-dumplings were like guo teh only about the size of a
large marble; these came frozen and required a considerable time in
the pot to tenderize the wrapper and thaw the (pork and scallion)
filling, There were about 6 or 8 of these; I couldn't keep track
of them in the pot, much less in my memory. Speaking of which, they
were kind of unmemorable;

vegetables were fresh and abundant. I ate almost all of them.

The meat pie was nothing like what I'd set my mouth for, which was
fine-chopped lamb in a spicy, sweetish sauce with cilantro on top
served in a steamed bun. What came was fatty chopped roast pork
shoulder and skin, folded in a semi-flaky pastry and baked. The
taste - like pulled pork a la Chinoise - was better than what I
had expected, but still I was a little disappointed.

The tab was somewhat past $20 plus plus, quite a tidy amount
to pay for a Chinese lunch.
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