Actual and I were talking today and noticed that we had been eating a lot of white people food lately. As many of you know if I don't have my daily ration of rice, bad things happen. So it was interesting as to just how long I had gone without an Asian meal... well if you don't count the "Asian-inspired" Healthy Choice frozen dog food meal that I ate in desperation a few days ago.
For lunch, we decided to return to our favorite sushi place: Sakuran. The longer we go between visits to Sakuran, the more interesting and sometimes scary things the chefs have been dreaming up in our absence. As you will be able to tell, it's clearly been too long since we've been there.
This first course is the only thing that was ordered off the menu. Traditional zaru soba, or cold buckwheat noodles. You add onions and wasabi to the sauce, then pick up the noodles with your chopsticks and dip them in the sauce, then consume. I believe this is a traditional breakfast food in Japan. These are great on a hot day, but were a questionable choice on my part on this cold and rainy Friday. Tasty anyway.
And then a standard (for them) chef's special roll. Crabmeat and soft shell crab on the inside (interesting combination, don't you think?) and a variety of different fish on the outside topped with tobikko. I call it standard, but it's really better than everything the other sushi places in town serve.
And then things got a little crazy.
We saw the chef walk out of the back kitchen with something the size of a Pop Warner football. We watched for about five minutes as he messed around with it and plated it. Turns out he took a whole squid, then stuffed it with a blend of raw fish and spices, then deep fried the entire thing. It was really good, and I don't even like squid.
But they weren't done. I saw the chef giggling as he plated the last dish. It took us a few minutes to try and figure out what it was, and eventually we gave in and asked the chef to explain his dish. He made lettuce wraps and stuffed them with shrimp in a ponzu sauce. Then he deep fried the lettuce wraps. Ok, seriously. Nobody cooks lettuce. It just goes limp and wilts. Not this stuff. I don't know how he managed to deep fry the wraps and leave the lettuce still crunchy. He just flashed me a peace sign and told me it was a secret technique he came up with one night.
About eight hours later we were ready for dinner. We decided to close out our Asian Extravaganza at Golden Dragon, a world-class Szechuan restaurant inexplicably stuffed into a strip mall in Rocklin.
This is me enjoying my Tsingtao. Check out how dirty my glasses are :(
First dish: traditional Szechuan spice dumplings. Those red peppers are your color code for DANGER. The owner says she has this for breakfast every morning. I doubt she needs coffee after these things. Intense fire, but oh so good. After these, every wonton you get served is just another ball of meat and dough.
Next we have the Szechuan cumin sauce lamb. This is the dish that PF Changs bastardizes into "Chengdu Lamb". Once you've had the real thing the corporate chain restaurant version just tastes bland. The Szechuan peppers and cumin work well together.
Salt and pepper scallops. They take fresh scallops, dip them in a lotus flour batter and fry them up. Simple and sinfully delicious (and I'm too lazy to crop this picture).
Last up was the tea smoked duck. These guys do it the right way. Most places that serve this dish don't go through all the proper steps to make it properly. The correct way to make it goes something like this: take a duck, marinate it in spices and Chinese booze, then give it a quick boil and dry it. When the customer orders one, hot smoke the duck over tea and camphor branches, then steam it, then deep fry it.
The final product after all this almost defies description. It smells like it was cooked in a campfire. The meat is highly spiced from the marinade. The skin is crisp and tastes salty and smoky. Because of the tea and camphor branches, the smoky flavor is unlike anything you've ever tasted (except for... other tea smoked duck).
I could probably eat four of these plates in one sitting.
We got a little surprise at the end. Usually we get fortune cookies with the bill. Today they brought us fresh baked Chinese red bean cookies.
Guess tomorrow we're back to pizza and burgers :)
