I found this package of dried mangoes at a Chinese supermarket, another product made from mangoes from the Phillipines. How did it compare to the ones that I raved about earlier, from 7D? Well, not as tasty, a lot chewier, not as fragrant, overall an inferior product. They do have going for them, that they are a third of the price as the other ones.
This weekend is the first warm days of the year, with temperatures over twenty degrees and sunny. It reminds me that soon summer will be here, and with that comes strawberries, in June. These strawberries on these napkins look almost good enough to eat!
This little chocolate ladybug looks almost real, and ready to fly off any second. In European myth, ladybugs are considered lucky; in Asian myth, if it flies off, it will find your true love and tell them your name.
The last of the five varieties in the No. 1 Series by Sarotti contains beans from the island of Java, and is presented as a milk chocolate bar at 33% cacao content. Like the others, the ingredients are quite good, as in a short list, just sugar, cocoa butter, milk powder, cocoa mass, soya lecithin as an emulsifier, and vanilla flavour. Java has had cacao beans since Colonial times. In 1560 Spanish conquistadors brought varietal Criollo beans from Mexico to propogate. This bar is a fairly good milk chocolate, it melts well in the mouth. There is something about milk chocolate that I have noticed lately, however, an aftertaste that I don't like, perhaps the milk itself. I don't think that I would buy this bar again.
Blood oranges are in season these days, they are quite sweet. I have bought recently from two different stores oranges from two countries, Mexico, pictured above, and Italy. The Italian ones seem juicier and sweeter, though less red-fleshed and red-skinned as the Mexican ones. Either one still makes for the best tasting orange.
Chinese hawthorn yields a large fruit similar to an apple, and its flesh is made into several sweetened products, including fruit leather, biscuits, ice cream, candied haw "apples" on a stick, and compressed discs of haw fruit, or haw flakes. They are kind of like a candy, with a unique taste that I like. Hawthorn has medicinal qualities, especially for the heart, though I can't see these candies having much nutritional value.
My beautiful Thai friend gave me this cute vegetable fridge magnet. What a sweetie she is!!
Before we went to our Chinese restaurant, my beautiful Thai friend showed me this small Japanese bakery called Grape Vine Bakery, located in Victoria Business Centre on Victoria Park in North York. There were many different baked goods, like any bakery, the smell was great. We selected two things to try, one a pastry filled with green tea filling with red beans, the other a crunchy rice snack, both unusual looking and tasting.
My father used to eat these growing up in Tanganyika, now Tanzania, he called them in the local language, songwa. These were labelled physalis when I bought them, though I have heard them more commonly called Chinese gooseberries, sometimes Cape Gooseberries. These come from Colombia. They do not tasted like gooseberries, rather have a slightly sour-sweet citrus flavour, very refreshing and unusual. They are quite expensive, a small container, which contains about 20 of them, costs about $4. Quite different than what my father remembers, there were so many, they could make jam of them.
On the recommendation of my beautiful Thai friend, we went to this Chinese restaurant, Congee Star, which is located on the west side of Don Mills north of Wynford Drive in Toronto. I would think that they would be known for their congee, and we decided to have one of their interesting combinations, ones I have not seen in other restaurants. This congee contained salted fish and preserved duck eggs. With this, we had a dish from the Snack section, which was Chinese fried dough wrapped in rice noodles. My friend told me that Chinese fried dough, without the rice noodles, goes well with congee. The congee tasted good, and arrived very hot, the rice toned down the flavour of the preserved duck eggs. Then we ordered a soup, with crab and fish maw; my friend likes fish maw, though the Thai cut up the fish maw into larger chunks than the Chinese do. It tasted pretty good regardless, and arrived piping hot. Finally, we ordered a dish with fish and bitter melon over rice noodles. The rice noodles were the thick kind, rather than vermicelli. Again, quite tasty, though I find bitter melon to have an odd bitter taste, something I can't stomach too much of. The meals were reasonably priced and were quite generous in size, we could not finish all of the food. I would go back, especially to try the hot pot, a dish that my Thai friend recommended for me to try but ultimately I did not choose, she knows I would like it, but she is mostly vegetarian, and I wanted to select dishes we could both eat.
