Thanks to facebook, I’ve reconnected with old school friends. One is Danielle, both my brother and I took an after-school Chinese class with her. She’s back in town, slowly developing a confectionery business.
With my brother also visiting this weekend, we all got together for a Sunday lunch. The weather, while a little blustery, was still sunny. Just fine for some outdoor grilling and indoor eating.
 
 
The tri-tip came from Whitefoot, initially unseasoned and the butcher seasoned it for me with a dry rub. The grilled winter squash came from the garden, a sort of hybrid between a butternut and a kabocha. I only seasoned it with olive oil, salt and pepper and let the flavor of the squash do the rest. My mother prepared some homemade salsa to spoon on the tri-tip, which we ate with warm toasted tortillas.
My secret to the tri-tip is initially searing the fatty side on medium high heat on the grill for about 5 minutes, then turning it over, and turning the grill down to medium-low for a combination of even heating and indirect heat. It doesn’t burn, and the fat on top now starts rendering into the meat.
I grill it for an additional 30 minutes, then leave it to sit and rest for another 10 minutes. This results in a medium tri-tip. Well-done on the outside and edges, and pink in the middle.
Finally, I slice it very thin against the grain, pile it into a wide shallow bowl or a deep platter and pour over any remaining juices that may have escaped during slicing.
The beans are Santa Maria style pinquitos, with the pink beans coming from Shepherd Farms at the Saturday morning farmers market. Although I made them beforehand in my pressure cooker, I poured the beans into a heat-proof casserole and set them on a high rack in the grill so any smoke from the grilling would seep into the beans. Plus, it kept them warm. I added a couple tablespoons of water to the casserole to keep the top of the beans from drying out.
Finally, dessert was my homemade strawberry and orange marmalade frozen yoghurt, topped with Danielle’s homemade chocolate caramel sauce and a little whipped cream.
We spent the lunch catching up on our lives and reminiscing a few high school memories. Good times!
Whitefoot is probably the last remaining mom and pop butchery in Santa Barbara. So I am very conflicted to hear that a Fresh and Easy grocery store chain is moving into Whitefoot’s space, along with a row of other mom and pop businesses in that block.
Ironically, F&E is supposed to be a neighborhood market that supports community.
Whitefoot is still open for business at this time, but may close any day.
I went there yesterday on an errand to get a tri-tip, some tri-tip sandwiches for friends who couldn’t get there themselves and those sandwiches are their very very favorite, and to buy up a big bag of their smoked ham hocks.
The shopkeepers honestly did not know whether they had to close or stay open, but they are staying open as long as they can. They are also looking to relocate, should they have to vacate the property.
Either way, if you have butchery needs and want to show you appreciate a very local business, go there and show your support.
The tri-tip sandwich is indeed lovely, this photo is of just half the sandwich. In you’re eating in, get the salsa on it, if you’re taking it away, get the salsa on the side so the roll doesn’t get soggy. The salsa is critical to a good tri-tip sandwich. This big gut buster full size sandwich costs about $9 and can feed two.
The *best* ham hocks are available here. They are sold whole, and the butcher can cut them up into several chunks for you. Wonderful for bean soups and stews. Where else locally can you get this?
My tri-tip I bought plain, and they seasoned it for me. Chain store seasoned tri-tip I normally have to wash most of the sauce off before I’ll set it on the grill. Here it’s hand seasoned by people who know how to bring the best out of their cuts of meat.
Whitefoot
336 N Milpas St Ste E
Santa Barbara, CA 93103
I have to give a big shout out to Shepherd Farm, who sets up shop in the middle of the Saturday farmers market, the first aisle along the Cota side. I believe he comes to the Tuesday evening market, but I’ve lately only been going to the Saturday market.
This time of year he has a variety of newly harvested dried beans, including one of the prides of Santa Barbara county, the diminutive pinquito bean.
It’s used in the classic Santa Maria style tri-tip meal, and unsurprisingly are called Santa Maria style beans, very similar in flavor to ranch style beans or bbq beans.
The pinquitos are cute, pink, firm, and small. They cook up fast because of their size, and even faster because Shepherd’s are so fresh, grown in Carpinteria. They’re sold by weight, $4 a pound.
He sells several types of beans, and the big bins of them are down to bits and pieces by the end of the market. But I am all over the pinquitos, as they are not common;y available like pintos or kidneys outside of the area.
Btw, Shepherd Farms also has a CSA program.
Here is my Santa Maria style pinquito beans, adapted from Recipezaar.
Santa Maria style pinquito beans
* 1 lb pinquito beans, dried
* 2 slices bacon, diced
* 1/2 cup diced ham
* 1/2 onion
* 2-3 garlic cloves, pressed (I used roasted garlic cloves)
* 3/4 cup tomato puree
* 2 Tbls cup red chili powder (I use smoked Chimayo chile powder)
* 1 tablespoon sugar
* 1 teaspoon salt
* 1 tablespoon dry mustard (I used Coleman’s hot mustard)
Pick over beans to remove dirt and small stones; cover with water and let soak overnight in a large container. Drain.
Sauté bacon and ham until lightly browned in a pressure cooker pot, then add the garlic and sauté a minute or two longer.
Add the beans to the pot, cover with fresh water and pressure cook them for 15 minutes. Or, simmer 2 hours in a standard pot, or until tender.
Release the pressure, and add tomato puree, chili sauce, sugar, mustard, and salt. Stir and taste, then eat!
Keep warm on low heat until ready to serve.
Shepherd Farms
6701 Casitas Pass Road
Carpinteria, CA 93013
shepherdfarmscsa.com
So soon after my first review, I really feel the need to revisit this.
But I want to be very clear about the topics I’m addressing.
Mongolian BBQ - 4
Heat Lamp buffet - 2
Standard menu - 3
Chinese menu - 4
Bar/Happy Hour - turning that bad boy all the way to 11!!!!
Happy Hour is M-F, 4-7 pm. The special is half price appetizers. No deals on the drinks, but they are roughly $7.50 per serving, which is a good price.
The Zombie came in a cool Fu Manchu mug.
The Chi Chi came in frozen coconut mugs, that were still cold nearly an hour later.
The Scorpion Bowl aka Parents Liquor Cabinet (costs $15, serves 2+) comes AFLAME, and with crazy long straws.
Photos of the first three drinks are below.
  
Mai Tai was big and delicious.
King Kong Bundy (sp?) was dangerous.
I don’t believe there is any other bar in town that serves up these tiki-style cocktails with the kitsch style.
With my little group, we were able to sample nearly every appetizer on the menu. I’ll go through the whole list.
* Chinese Chicken Salad - did not try
* Fried Wontons (10 pork, or 8 cream cheese) - ordered both. Simple, fun to share, lots of dipping sauce provided.
* Egg Rolls (4) - appeared vegetarian. Standard. Let these cool down before eating.
* Paper Wrapped Chicken (4) - actually foiled wrapped. Stuck to foil. Meh.
* Fried Shrimp (4) - good.
* Bar-B-Q Spareribs (4) - yummy and filling.
* Bar-B-Q Pork - did not try
* Fried Dumplings {Pot Stickers} (6) - SKIP! But filling.
* Sa-Tay Beef Sticks (6) - winner.
* Chinese Country Style Chicken Wings (6) - good!
* Assorted Appetizer {2 pieces each of: Egg Roll, Paper Wrapped Chicken, BBQ Sparerib, and Beef Stick} (8) - winner! Came in a kitschy platter with a mini hibachi flame to heat things up.
* Fried Shrimp Balls (4) - has potential. Some of ours were too salty.
* Salt & Pepper Sauteed Mushrooms - yummy! Great to share.
  
(Pictured: appetizer platter, shrimp balls and s&p mushrooms)
* Bon Bon Ji Chicken - WINNER! Shredded chicken in a citrus peanut sauce with greens. Can take a while to prepare, and worth the wait.
* Swa-Ni Pork - WINNER! Thin-sliced pork in spicy garlic sauce.
Now, don’t expect the party to fall in your lap. You need to bring your own. Ming Dynasty is not the place of beautiful people, unless it’s Goleta’s own special brand of beautiful people, which is folks in costco clothing and a mullet or two. And that’s part of its charms.
Also, the bar only has two scorpion bowls, so you gotta share and play nice with others.
We had a blast. LOVED the happy hours. We will be back.
Past entry.
Ming Dynasty
290 Storke Rd, Suite G
Goleta, CA 93117
www.mingdynastygoleta.com
I go through Kitchen Clear Outs reasonably often. This time, among other things, I had eggs, bananas and butter to use up.
So, banana bread.
Banana Bread
* 3 or 4 ripe bananas, roughly mashed
* 1/3 cup melted butter
* 1 cup sugar (can easily reduce to 3/4 cup)
* 1 egg, beaten
* 1 teaspoon vanilla
* 1 teaspoon baking soda
* Pinch of salt
* 1 1/2 cups of all-purpose flour
Preheat the oven to 350°F (175°C).
With a wooden spoon, mix butter into the mashed bananas in a large mixing bowl.
Mix in the sugar, egg, and vanilla.
Sprinkle the baking soda and salt over the mixture and mix in.
Add the flour last, and continue mixing.
Pour mixture into a buttered and lined 4×8 inch loaf pan. Bake for 1 hour.
Cool on a rack. Remove from pan and slice to serve.
When eaten fresh and hot, the top is lightly sweet and crunchy. But even once it has cooled and been stored in an airtight bag, it remains sweet and moist. Adding butter, or cream cheese, or jam is fine, but it is fine on its own, even with the reduced sugar.
Ming Dynasty caters to a diverse Goleta crowd and the variety can be distracting to the menu that suits each person best.
The prepared buffet on a Sunday afternoon seemed very popular to families, and non-Chinese. It was cheap, $13, and plentiful. It is also not for me, so of course I did not order it.
The Mongolian BBQ looked very good, and freshly prepared according to your own sauce and ingredient concoction, and there is a list of flavor combinations to guide the uninitiated, in English and Spanish. Meat options were beef, pork, chicken and lamb. The price of the BBQ was included in the buffet. Maybe this is not always true for other meals, but for Sunday afternoon, it was. We were very tempted by this, only for the bbq, but opted to try it sometime later during a work-week lunch.
The sit-down menu had three distinct parts: the English menu, the dim sum menu and the Chinese menu.
The English menu looked fine, the standard stuff most people go for.
The dim sum menu looked fine, just keep in mind that the items are not made from scratch in-house. This is typical for Santa Barbara, so not surprising.
The Chinese menu, not offered to the average diner by default, seemed very similar to the English one, but there were some differences, like having items that were more Taiwanese than Chinese and this is where we enjoyed our meal most.
  
We ate:
* Clay Pot 3 Cup Lamb - on the Chinese menu. This is thin-sliced lamb cooked in wine, soy sauce, ginger, garlic, sesame oil, with fresh basil. Served in a clay bowl over a bed of cabbage, we took the cabbage and buried it under the hot lamb to give it a quick blast of heat before eating.
* Half a roasted duck - not made in-house. It was okay, but drier than duck roasted in-house. Served with plum sauce. On both the English and Chinese menu.
* Sauteed pea shoots - yummy! Eat lots of pea shoots while they are in season!
* Rice. I guess I suck at making my own Chinese rice. I quite liked this rice.
The place was very busy with customers, lots of gweilo but also a good number of asians, particularly in groups.
There is also a cocktail lounge! Reminiscent of asian exotica kitsch. I think that’s pretty cool.
For my meal, I’d put this at 3.5 stars. But, my best item was on the Chinese menu, which you will not be able to parse without understanding Chinese or someone at your table understanding Chinese. So, I knock off a star to match better with what another diner could best replicate.
These menus also require more preparation time. So this requires patience. If you lack that, go with the buffet and bbq.
Ming Dynasty
290 Storke Rd, Suite G
Goleta, CA 93117
www.mingdynastygoleta.com
Oh dear, don’t even get me started on how much fail the LA Street Food Fair was to us. It was too packed to even drive by it, much less get in. While en route, a friend texted me to say they’d shut the gates because there were too many people there. So much for hitting up the food carts all in one go on this day trip to LA.
Alicia and I gave up and went to the Fashion District to run other errands, and picked up bacon-wrapped hot dogs there. With NO QUEUES, thank you very much.
A hot dog, piled high with grilled onions, pico de gallo and guacamole, sipping a Mexican coke, sitting at a table watching people bustling by with arm loads of clothing and funky fabric. Fine by me.
LA Fashion District
110 E 9th St
Los Angeles, CA 90079
www.fashiondistrict.org
Cindy’s in town! We all trooped over to Kobachi for her first night visiting.
First, what’s new. Beer on tap! For my birthday I received a copy of Oishinbo’s Izakaya Pub Food and the first story is about a master beer pourer in Tokyo. The main character has been talking up the perfectly poured beer to his friends, but upon receiving a glass he can immediately tell it was not done by the Master. It turns out the highest honor the master beer pourer could bestow upon a guest (speciality black edamame) was mis-interpreted as rotten beans, but since the beer pourer would never assume the guest would be so ill-educated as to not know about the beans, he quit.
Long story short, a perfectly poured beer has at least one inch of foam on top, and during the time of drinking it, there always remains a solid layer of foam covering the beer. This way, the effervesence of the beer stays in the beverage, and the flavors do not escape. The new tap at Kobachi pours the beer in two ways; first as the liquid, while a second tap tops off the beer with a fine foam. Okay, so they cheated a little by not pouring by hand. BUT, Ken-san insisted that HE pour the beer, so they maintain the tradition of being honored with having someone pour our beers.
  
  
  
 
Top row: freshly poured Asahi beer, seaweed salad, vegetable tempura.
2nd row: mame aji nanban, shiitake nigiri, tsukune renkon shiitake-an.
3rd row: renkon chips, hamachi kama, seared tuna in sauce (this dish is not on the menu).
4th row: aburi saba, and mixed sashimi with sweet miso sauce.
Past posts.
Kobachi Izakaya Dining
4141 State St
Santa Barbara, CA 93110
www.kobachiizakaya.com
La Colmena is one of two new favorite taquerias of mine.
I first sampled their food when they were the taco caterers for a friend’s birthday party. While no taco truck, they showed up with a custom-made grill, and tables to serve up condiments and side dishes.
They prepared fresh tortillas on site, and offered simple beef, chicken and pork tacos with the standard fixings. It was simple and delicious, especially those fresh tortillas! The party crowd ate up the whole lot.
Their actual restaurant is a quirkly shape, situated on the street with roads on either side merging just behind it. So it’s on a little triangle. For SB oldies, it’s the former location of Cajun Kitchen and a Greek place (Pavlako’s?)
The resulting interior is small, but long and narrow. It is definitely a no-frills environment with very little ambiance other than a wall-mounted tv showing Mexican comedies, music videos or soap operas…perhaps all at once if you’re lucky.
The simplicity of la Colmena is also evident in the food. You want tacos? They’ve got tacos, about a dozen different types, and that’s about it! And they are pretty darn good.
Again, tortillas are made fresh to order, so patience is advised, and rewarded.
Meat options are your standard: asada, pollo, adobada, lengua (lengua is chopped. I prefer slow-cooked and shredded), chorizo, and so on.
All are simple and delicious, but my favorite is the rajas, with grilled chiles and cheese. I could eat a stack of those. So good!
Best part of these tacos with freshly made tortillas? $1.50 each.
If you go between their happy hours, I think it’s 2 pm - 6 pm, they are $1 each. Check the sign on the doorway to confirm these hours.
But even so, $1.50 each is a very good price. Compare it to other taquerias up the road, where tacos with fresh tortillas are $3.00+ each. Or with other $1.50 taco places and the tortillas are factory produced.
The salsa bar has a good variety on offer. The tacos come undressed, so the salsa bar offers cilantro and onion, lime, radishes, several tomato salsas and guacamole. A good range for those who want mild to hot.
They also have tacos de canasta. This might just be a weekend thing. These tacos have less filling, and are briefly cooked in oil. These cost $1 each and I enjoy the potato tacos the best.
Extra kudos: Mexican coke! No HFCS!
Finally…CASH ONLY!! It’s alright, it’s just a few dollars for a simple meal.
Past entry:
5 October
Taqueria La Colmena
217 Milpas St
Santa Barbara, CA 93103
This was one of those spur-of-the-moment evenings when we’re downtown, hungry, and suddenly decide it’s the perfect time to grab a meal at Square One. Sitting at the bar is the way to go, so we can engage the folks working there.
Funny enough, we had walked by a couple other restaurants on our quest for food, but it didn’t feel right. Square One, ironically, was so sparsely filled at the late time we turned up, they were almost considering closing up for the night. Thankfully they stayed open a bit longer for us.
 
 
We had a glass of red wine, and shared two main dishes. I focused mainly on chestnut ravioli with bacon and cress. Sweet tasting, and very good. T got the “Petite” steak, which was very confusingly titled, because the petite steak was anything but. If petite means 12 ounces, then yes it was petite. Coming in at $19, cooked perfectly, and served alongside french fries and green beans, this is a great deal.
Dessert was fresh sugar doughnuts with an espresso creme anglaise for dipping. Delicious.
Past entries.
Square One
14 E Cota St
Santa Barbara, CA 9319
www.squareonesb.com
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