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Asian Pearl: Yet another spectacular Asian restaurant inexplicably located near me.

In the very first South Park (back when it was a video Christmas card and not a show on Comedy Central) Jesus is walking around the town when he encounters the kids. One of the kids yells out "What are you doing in South Park, Jesus?"

That's how I feel today, and for me it's a good feeling. My neck of the woods north of Sacramento is a culinary wasteland. Like most of suburban America, most of the mom and pop restaurants have been squeezed out by the big corporate McChain restaurants. I try to do what I can by promoting my favorite restaurants on here, but I can only drive so much traffic to restaurants.

This is compounded by what I consider the area's general palate. A lot of people in this area just love generic food. I don't know why, but there's no denying it. Most of the fast casual chains are packed solid every day. Even Johnny Garlic's, Guy Fieri's Hindenburg of a restaurant, packs them in every day. It makes me sad.

Because of this, I'm always pleasantly surprised when a good Asian restaurant opens in the area. There aren't many Asians around, and there aren't many adventurous eaters around either (and most of them probably read this blog, lol). So opening a good Asian restaurant with traditional food in this area is sort of a deathwish.

So I was more than pleasantly surprised when I found out that Culinary Wonderland opened a restaurant near me. These are the people behind some of Northern California's best traditional Chinese restaurants. We are big fans of their south Sacramento restaurant New Hong Kong Wok. 

Is their inexplicably chosen Citrus Heights restaurant up to the task?

When we sat down we got the complimentary pot of hot tea. And peanuts. Peanuts?

Next up, the ribeye chunks in Chinese sauce. Let me happily point out here that most "beef chunk" dishes served in Chinese restaurants use very chewy and dry beef. Not this place. I would rate the meat in this dish on the level of a Sizzler ribeye steak. It makes for an ok steak, but a spectacular stir fry.

I was feeling kind of sick today, so I needed the healing power of rice porridge. This is my serving of empress chicken congee complete with you tiao (deep fried Chinese breadstick). This made me feel 1000% better. They don't use as much MSG in this as they should but I think that's just my personal taste.

Braised beef noodle soup. The beef is perfectly braised brisket. Noodles were of thin and eggy variety. Great broth. Bok choy being stolen by Jody.

Our fried dim sums. Clockwise from top: deep fried shrimp ball, the aforementioned you tiao, crab rangoons and potstickers. All were spectacular, especially the potstickers.

Our steamed dim sum. Clockwise from upper left: shanghai dumplings, scallop dumpling, house dumpling, pork dumpling (shu mai). The shanghai dumplings were my highlight of the meal. Think juicy soup dumplings except without too much soup inside. The house dumplings were in a rice wrapper and had an interesting chopped filling with a lot of chives and a peanut.

I approve. I approve so so very much! Thank you, Culinary Wonderland, for opening one of your wonderful restaurants near me *wipes tear*.

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Chomple goes to Mexican Wal-Mart and the $10 Whopper

Everyone knows I'm a strange bunny.

The first thing I want to do in any foreign country is go to a chain supermarket. I'm a sucker for consumer goods as experienced by people in other nations. Between the differences in everything from industrial design to font selection, I have a blast being an average shopper in a foreign land.

I actually don't have pictures from when I was at Walmart. Let's just say it was huge and clean (cleaner than the ones here, and as Tony Cervo pointed out, the stuff there was actually on the shelves and not on the floor like in American Walmarts). But for all intents and purposes it really just looks like a normal Walmart, just with different stuff inside.

It cost me eight dollars each way to take a cab between the Riu Santa Fe resort we were staying at and the Cabo Walmart. I spent about an hour circulating the wonderland that was the Cabo Walmart. Honestly, I really wish I had taken pictures in there. Even their hot dog section was glorious. I definitely want to trade the Cabo Walmart for the Citrus Heights Walmart. 

I found this signage FAIL outside...

As I scooted through the checkout, I had a hilarious discussion with the cashier. While I have documented this in English, this happened in Spanish. If you know anything about my Spanish skills, you know this was an extremely labored discussion at least on the cashier's part. Bless her heart for still deciding to have a relatively lengthy conversation with me.

[Cashier finishes scanning my items]
Yod: [This was the only part I said in English] And... I need a pack of Marlboro Lights.
[Everything from here on out is in Spanish, crappy Spanish on my part]
Cashier: Ok. Huh. YOU'RE AMERICAN???
Yod: Yes.
Cashier: Ok, that's hilarious. No way.
Yod: No, really [I flash my US passport card].
Cashier: Hahahahahahahahahahaha, I never would have guessed.
Yod: Why?
Cashier: Tourists come in here and buy beer and chips, that's it. And stupid hats and shoes nobody else buys. You have a cart full of food and snacks that normal people eat.
Yod: Ha, well, that's what I do in every country. 
Cashier: Why?
Yod: I have a food website [I said this as "sitio web" which she understood, not sure if it's actually the right word]
Cashier: Haha are you serious?
Yod: Yes. Here's my card with the website.
Cashier: Ok, well have fun. I don't think anything in here is good enough to be on a website.

With that, I got in my cab and took the 8 dollar trip back to the resort.

So what did I buy?

First up is the snack collection.

 

Let's take these left to right.

The bag on the left is just a huge bag of Frito-Lay pork rinds. They were nothing special. I bought them because of the crazy pig graphic on the bag. It's downright disturbing. The pig seems to scream out "Holy f*** are you gonna turn me into those snacks behind my a**??? AHHHHHHH!"

Next up: the Diablo Doritos. Yes, that's a picture of SATAN on the bag. How crazy. I brought these out to the pool bar one afternoon while hanging out with Barbie Girlfriend and Uhura Girlfriend...

Uhura: Where the hell are the Cheetos?
Barbie: Yeah, you said you had Cheetos!
Yod: I ate all the Cheetos already. 
Uhura: Oh HELL NO. Don't you tell me about all the Cheetos you got and how awesome they were and not bring them out. I don't want Doritos. I want CHEETOS.
Barbie: Yeah, seriously, what's wrong with you. Don't you know what the Chomple crew wants?
Yod: Neither of your questionnaires mentioned Cheetos.
Uhura: Whatevz.
Yod: I brought Doritos though.
Uhura: Ok, fine. Why is Satan on the bag?
Yod: I guess they might be spicy.
Uhura: Ok, let me have one. [Crunch]. This isn't so bad.
Barbie: I'll have one too [Crunch].
Uhura: What the hell? This is horrible. It has a surprise burn. A bad burn. Not good.
Barbie: Ahhhh... what the. No, no no no bad bad. Ewww. Where are the Cheetos?"
Uhura: [Throws the bag at me] These are all you.

Trying to find something for them to snack on at the bar, I opened the third bag. It looked like a bunch of snack sticks. They tasted like a combination of corn, citric acid and dirt.

Uhura: You fail again.
Barbie: I guess we're not good enough for Cheetos.

So what about those Cheetos I ate before I shared them with the Chomple staff?

They were awesome.

I found them on one of the impulse buy racks at a random checkout in the Walmart. They were labeled "Cheetos Sorpresa" and had a bunch of characters from Ice Age 3 on the front. I had no idea what the hell was inside the bag. Boy was I surprised.

The Cheetos in the bag were not really Cheetos at all. They were deep fried corn dinosaurs flavored with salt and limon. These were awesome! I could have eaten a family size bag of these, if such a thing existed. Actual had a fun time dining on these with me. 

Sorry to Barbie and Uhura for eating them all :(

Lastly, we have the chili and limon Fritos. The Fritos themselves were just good. But check out the plastic band on the front.

I know they're trying to put forth some sort of public service announcement, but I really don't want to read about swine flu while eating my corn chips. Just sayin'

At this point I was tired of blogging my purchases and headed out to the Riu Santa Fe lunch buffet to have some "free" food. This buffet wasn't all that good. That was sad considering that it seemed they had really good ingredients to work with, but decided to turn out something that you would see at your local Hometown Buffet.

A funny sign I found at the buffet:

My usual lunch at the buffet. A pile of grilled whitefish and buttered rotini with ham. And about 5 of their watered down Dos Equis.

Now, why would I eat such a meal? Well, the view helped.

This meal was nothing compared to the oyster lunch I had the day before. Belons on the left, Kumos on the right. 

Back to work. Next up was this weird meat thing I bought. It looked like chunks of meat for some sort of dish. Reading the ingredients, it was a blend of pork, beef and soy. This would explain why a pound of this meat costs two dollars. It was actually pretty good. With a good char and some good sauce and garnish, most would never realize this was a 50% meat substitute.

And then there were the meat snacks. I love meat snacks. Beef jerky, Slim Jims, all that gas station food. I found some interesting things in Walmart. First up are Fud Snax. Included in the package are ready-to-eat pork and chicken sausages as well as a sweet tamarind-based sauce packet. I would eat one of these over any of our gas station snacks any day.

My readers in Europe will recognize this next one: Peperami. Imagine a Slim Jim, if you took out all of the fat and replaced it with actual flavor. This is the hot variety. You open the foil packet, then rip open the plastic casing and eat the meat stick. From what I've read, these are very popular in the UK, and for good reason.

 

And then it was time to leave. I snapped this picture of Sushi snapping pictures.

But there's one thing left to share.

We were stuck for a few hours at the Cabo airport. I saw a Burger King and had to have some. I saw their Mega Angus Chipotle burger. The airport price was 130 pesos, or $10. A ten dollar Burger King burger. Are you serious? I had to have one.

Inside the box...

Best thing I've EVER had from a Burger King. Crazy juicy patty. Fresh veg. And a ridiculously sublime chipotle sauce over it all. If BK sold these in the US, I would gladly pay $10. Alas, they don't.

And that's the end of my Mexican vacation. Where should I go next?