Fresh & Easy IV: Shrimp Ceviche

For a couple weeks those $6 coupons from Fresh & Easy disappeared from the website and the mailbox. It's still gone from the website but my mailbox has been inundated with coupons; on the same day I got a coupon for $6 off a purchase of $30 or more, and a $5 coupon off a purchase of $20 or more. (Perhaps these rumors I've heard about Fresh & Easy missing their projected sales numbers by hundreds of millions of dollars have some validity to them.)

On my recent trip I purchased several things. My friend Mick is a fan of their dungeness crab, but the crab I saw at the Arcadia location did not look very good, and the expiration date was that day. Never one to mess around with the expiration date of seafood, I opted to get some shrimp ceviche instead. (Years ago I got food poisoning at a seafood restaurant in Pasadena and it was one of the 5 most unpleasant experiences of my life. I won't mention the name of the place. Let's just say it rhymes with McCormick & Dicks.)

I also cooked one piece of their garlic bread - just bread with garlic butter, nothing special - and opened a bag of their "light" Caesar salad. Last month I had their regular Caesar salad and loved it, but this one was on sale for $1.99 so I figured I would try it. It was nowhere near as good. Unless you really need to save the calories or $1.50, I would recommend always getting the regular version.

The ceviche was good, much better than I had expected. Before I opened the package, the shrimp looked like they might be rubbery. But they were quite fresh. I would have liked a bunch of cilantro to chop up and add to the bowl, but I did not have any. There was about a quarter of it left over the next day, and it still tasted good.

So far the rule at Fresh & Easy seems to be that their uncooked and prepared items are good. However, I have had several things from their freezers under the Fresh & Easy label, and they have been lousy (egg rolls, potstickers and empenadas; I will probably post them all together under a title of what not to get there.)

Shanghai McNuggets: A Love Letter

Ed. note: Since "ChickenFingersIsBack" requested that I reprint my letter to McDonald's, I will do that and more.

Does anyone else remember Shanghai McNuggets? It doesn't seem like it. I just Googled it in quotation marks and it returned 127 results. By contrast, "OJ is innocent" yielded over 8,000 results. My God, "nude pictures of Kirstie Alley" returned 215 results. More people are interested in that than Shanghai McNuggets? I swear, I'm nothing but a stranger in this world. (Oh, and if my friend Elizabeth is reading this... I used your computer to Google all three of those things. Sorry.)

Shanghai McNuggets were the greatest fast food promotion ever. They were tasty, unhealthy, and more than a little bit racist. That's all I ever ask out of life. (I can't decide whether my favorite part of the commercial is the line reading "Cooked in 100% vegetable shortening" or the announcer saying "Taste the Orient at McDonald's!") Basically they were McNuggets served with three dipping sauces - teriyaki, sweet & sour, and hot mustard. They came in an Asian-style box with chopsticks and - I kid you not - a "Mcfortune cookie."

Is there anyone reading this who would not buy them if they came out again? I might camp out overnight to be the first in line, something I have not done since Showgirls was released back in '95. This was the letter I wrote to McDonald's back in October of 2007, to which I never heard a reply:

"Greetings! I am writing you to suggest that you bring back Shanghai McNuggets. I, and all of my friends who grew up in the 80s with me, agree that was the greatest fast food promotion of all time, even better than Burger King's Return Of The Jedi glasses (not counting the Ewok glass, obviously; that was freaking awesome.)

I recently took some young cousins of mine to McDonald's and while we were there I told them about the Shanghai McNuggets. They thought those sounded so spectacular that they made me take them home so that they could eat their McNuggets with chopsticks and dip them into teriyaki sauce.

I could go on and on with anecdotes about how many people I know loved Shanghai McNuggets. One time my brother and I were eating them and he poked me in the eye with a chopstick. It hurt like crazy but I did not care because I was busy enjoying the greatest food combination of all time: McNuggets and a fortune cookie.

Every person whom I have told that I would be writing you about this matter has been extremely encouraging. Literally 100% of my friends would love to see a return of Shanghai McNuggets. My friend Bryce got a tear in his eye reminiscing about them. So I suggest a limited return of Shanghai McNuggets in the Southern California area. There is a whole generation of people who would love them as much as my friends and I did."

So, if anyone else would like to see the return of these delicious little treats, feel free to let McDonald's know. And if not, that's okay, too. I have certainly had stupider ideas. (Like waiting all night to watch Showgirls. I don't know what I was thinking. That movie was so bad that even though I was 17 and the movie was full of naked girls, I still walked out.)

Bristol Farms Panini

There are only a handful of things I have purchased as an adult that I consider indispensable: a Global chef's knife, Van Morrison's Astral Weeks, my digital camera, my Jack Sack, my third wife, and a plastic football helmet with beer can holders on the side. My panini press would certainly have to make the list as well. There are very few sandwiches that can't be made better when grilled.

I first had a Bristol Farms panini about 6 years ago. My brother was on his way back from rowing in Marina Del Rey and picked up a Southwestern Turkey sandwich for me. It was a culinary revelation, comparable only to the first time I had a truly great pulled pork sandwich (Rum Boogie Cafe in Memphis.) I became addicted to them. After about a year and a half of buying them and having them pressed on the machine at Bristol Farms, I finally bought my own press.

The other night a friend and I got sandwiches to grill at home. I got my usual Southwestern Turkey - turkey, pepper jack cheese, and a spicy mayo-based sauce. I also got a chicken pesto with arugula and red onion. They both grilled up beautifully. A favorite side dish of mine at Bristol Farms is their "Chinese cole slaw." Admittedly, I am perplexed by the name, but it's a good mix of cabbage, oil, vinegar, noodles, green onions and sliced almonds. For some reason I enjoy eating it out of a wine tumbler.

Chili

I love making homemade chili. Chili is one of my favorite things to eat when it's done right, but there are very few restaurants whose chili I like, and even fewer brands of chili out of the can or jar. I hate beans, and most of them tend to be full of beans. Now, I am not one of these purists who proclaim that real chili can't have beans. I understand that some people love beans, and I certainly understand beans as a substitute for meat back when the price differential was huge. (I am also usually suspicious of people who claim that a food isn't "real" or "authentic.") But not only do I not like the taste of beans, I do not see the need to pay several dollars for a jar of chili that is mostly beans.

The first thing I did making this chili was saute some sweet onions and a Serrano pepper with about 4 cloves of garlic. When I am making chili just for myself I usually add at least 6 cloves of garlic, but I was sharing this with some people so I went a little easy. In addition to ground beef, I chopped up a strip of tri-tip steak. I mixed this all up with some tomato sauce, a little mustard, chili powder, oregano, cumin, and a couple dashes of hot sauce.

I made myself a bowl with some chili-flavored Fritos on top with some melted cheddar cheese and a dollop of sour cream (another in the long list of things that I hated as a kid but now find indispensable to certain dishes.) It was good, but as always happens with chili, it was better the next day - when I spooned some over a plate of Fritos - and even better the day after that when I baked some fries in the oven and added chili with cheddar and mozzarella.

Fast Food Review: Del Taco Spicy Chicken Mole Soft Taco

I've had the first picture, of the chicken mole taco, on my computer for a few months and decided not to post it because Del Taco discontinued the promotion, but then a couple nights ago I picked my brother up from the airport late at night and he was hungry so we went by Del Taco. And, in keeping with yesterday's post about Shakeys, I figured I would do another post from a place which I have been visiting for as long as I can remember.

When I was a kid I loved Del Taco because of A) their french fries, 2) the awesome little plastic ketchup packets you could dip your fries in, and D) you used to be able to buy their hamburgers in 6-packs and 10-packs. Of those things, only the french fries remain. I understand why they got rid of the ketchup packets: I'm sure they were much more expensive than the soft packets that everyone uses now. I don't know why they got rid of the burger packs. (I actually haven't order a burger from them in as long as I can remember; maybe they don't even sell those little hamburgers anymore.)

I have too many anecdotes from Del Taco to list, but I will share my favorite. In my early 20s my friend Tom and I used to meet for dinner every Friday night and go out for beers at an English pub. There were always people there wearing soccer jerseys, hanging out for hours, watching games and getting wasted. We decided that one day we would go there for lunch in soccer jerseys and hang out all day. We went there on a gorgeous Saturday during Labor Day Weekend and spent the whole day there. Finally, probably one in the morning, we got a cab home. We decided we were hungry and Tom offered the cab driver 20 bucks to take us to Del Taco. I was deciding what I wanted when Tom said he didn't want anything, which stunned me. A minute later he got out of the cab, went over to the bushes and threw up. He promptly got back in the cab and decided he was hungry again.

We ordered 24 dollars worth of food. If you've ever been to Del Taco you can imagine how much food this was. (For months I kept the receipt just so people wouldn't think I was making that up.) With that and the money we had promised the cabbie it ended up being a $60 cab ride. Of course, when we got back to my place we could only eat a little bit of it before we fell asleep. The next morning there were piles of hardened french fries, crusted tacos, and stuff we didn't even remember ordering covering the coffee table. I dared Tom to have one more taco, but he wisely declined.

Anyway, I have always loved their chicken soft tacos, so when they came out with the mole version last summer I had to try it. It was great. I usually don't like mole sauce because I find it too sweet, but this was spicy rather than sweet. If I had known the promotion was going to last for such a short time I would have gotten them more than once.

The other night when my brother went to Del Taco I wasn't even hungry, but since he was paying I figured I might as well eat again. (This seemed logical at 1 in the morning.) I got a chicken soft taco, medium fries, and a fish taco. The first two things were good, but the fish taco was lousy. I'm not sure I was expecting anything less, but I wanted to try it out just in case.

I don't think I'll ever stop liking Del Taco. I wrote them and asked if they would bring back the mole chicken taco, but I never heard back. This does not suprise me; most places do not respond to my requests. I once wrote a very elegant essay to McDonald's asking them to return the single greatest fast food promotion ever: the Shanghai McNuggets. I did not hear back. In fact, the only success I have ever had was asking Jack in the Box to bring back the chipotle chicken sandwiches. (Ok, maybe that wasn't because of me, but I had written them a letter about that just a month before they decided to bring them back.)