Ba Doy Ow (That New Taiwanese Place)

We have a new restaurant here in Flint that is absolutely fabulous. It only took me about six weeks to be able to say the name without stumbling, but you may be more linguistically agile than I am. Say it just the way it sounds: Ba (rhymes with “la”) Doy (rhymes with “boy”) Ow (like you just stubbed your toe). Translation? “I’m Hungry!”

Eat at Ba Doy Ow and you won’t be hungry for long, even if you can’t say it right. Most often we just refer to it as “That New Taiwanese Place.” It’s right here on Linden Road north of Genesee Valley Center and I am learning that Taiwanese food is not very much like Chinese food. EVERYTHING is steamed, except for the soft drinks and the 35 different kinds of tea.  No egg roll, no fried rice, and no sweet and sour pork. You won’t miss them, trust me. And it’s HEALTHY food!

If you’ve ever had dim sum, little mouthfuls in a soft noodle covering, you’re getting warmer, but again at Ba Doy Ow, nothing is fried, everything is steamed.

Yi-Lan is the young owner and chef.  Tiffany joins her behind the counter most weekday mornings through lunch. They are both happy to explain the menu (multiple times without making you feel like an idiot) and they set the tone for one of the most friendly and welcoming establishments in Flint.

What should you order? Whatever is on special is a good bet. I’ve never had anything I didn’t like, plus it includes a tea or a soft drink. I’ve tried the rice and pork, bar-b-q noodles, steamed cabbage, bok choy, broccoli and garlic sauce, and more.

On the far right of my tray you’re looking at a Red Bean Bau. A “bau” is something yummy in the middle of a soft covering. For sweet centers (red bean, taro)the outside of a bao is made of rice flour dough. Smaller baos have savory centers (mushroom, spinach, bar-b-q pork) and the outside is more noodle-like.  In the middle of my tray is steamed cabbage. On the right are shumai, open faced dumplings with meat or vegetables inside. I’m on a chicken shumai kick right now, alternating every once in a while with shrimp.

You’ll alway find steamed dumplings on the menu at Ba Doy Ow. You can get them in combination plates or 10 at a time like I do. Choices are pork and cucumber, pork and leek, pork and mushroom, pork and celery, pork and Nappa cabbage, and vegetables, or chicken.

Are you getting hungry? I am! How about lunch? Join me on Wednesday, October 7th for a quick STEAMED bite to eat. I’ll be at Ba Doy Ow at about noon. Here’s a little map.  See you there!

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The Farmers’ Market

Last week we re-discovered the Flint Farmers’ Market. What a blast!

It was a beautiful late summer day, the sun was out, and the parking lot was FULL!

I bought tomatoes for some authentic Italian bruschetta:  diced tomatoes, 5 cloves of garlic, salt, fresh basil, olive oil all dumped on  a hot-out-of-the-oven pizza dough. Not that I cook any more, but I just had a taste for it.  (We ate the entire thing in one sitting.)

We also picked up an avocado, and three pounds of fresh strawberries for $5. The perfume of all those ripe strawberries on the way home was almost more than I could stand, but I did wait until we got home to dive in.

I had a juicy peach every morning for breakfast all week, leaning over the sink, so the juice wouldn’t run down my arm. The “Peach Lady” picked them in various stages of ripeness for me. Small ones right away, large ones later. That’s taking care of your customers.

I haven’t had great ribs since the PX Bar-B-Q closed. Ribs used to be a New Year’s Eve tradition, and about the only time we ever ate ribs. I don’t know how that tradition got started, but half the city of Flint was at the PX picking up take-out orders on New Year’s Eve. My nose led me to the best ribs I’ve had in a decade with just the right mixture of sweet and tang. My mouth is watering again. Thank goodness they do chicken too.

I think I’m up for a repeat visit. See you later…

PS: Flint’s Farmers Market was just named “most loved” in national online contest. Way to go, Flint!

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Punch Cards

Apple Tree Quilts in Flushing, Michigan has the right idea. It’s a blast to go in there because they have great stuff and great staff.  How many other folks would pose for a photograph knowing it would wind up in one of my lectures? (Email them at ATQuilts@sbcglobal.net)

They also have punch cards. I lose about one punch card for every one they start for me, which is probably par for the course when it comes to punch cards. That might even be why merchants offer them; what do I know.  But, if and when the lost punch cards show up, they’ll combine them for me. 

The punch card for Apple Tree Quilts is themed. I like that too. It’s an apple tree and  it’s called an Apple Pickin’ Card. I got another one today. I put it in my wallet this time. Or my coat pocket. Wait, it might be in the bag…

We’ve been going to the same Chinese buffet for about 12 years, way more times a week than I’d like to admit. They have punch cards too but I’m not as impressed. Not nearly. 

Every time Steve and eat there we each get one punch. One for each meal. But they insist on punching TWO separate punch cards. We come in together, we sit at the same table, we go to the buffet tables together, our meals are on the same bill, and yet we each get the equivalent of a punch, but on TWO cards. This makes me crazy!

They won’t put both punches on the SAME card. Everybody else does that.  And they won’t combine the cards. Argh! We can’t keep track of the dumb punch cards any better than the ones for Apple Tree Quilts and so we keep getting new punch cards, and losing those. Over a decade of dining and we’ve gotten maybe three free meals!

I have explained that we are good customers. We don’t hog the crab legs. We don’t eat for three hours solid to “get our money’s worth.”  We are polite to the staff and other diners. We respect the sneeze shield, unlike some patrons who reach under there like they plan on crawling in with the Pepper Shrimp. We tip. We keep coming back. We feel like idiots.

Administering a “loyalty program” that makes your customers angry and/or feeling stupid is a fairly bad marketing plan. We should just eat elsewhere. But it’s so convenient. And, if given enough time I’m sure I could make them see the light.

I have a plan. The next time we go there I’m going to make Steve go in first and get seated. Then I’ll come in and pretend I don’t know him.  I’ll snag the table right next to his. Instead of talking face to face, we’ll pass notes back and forth. We’ll linger over the fried rice and exchange news of the day, as if we just happened to bump into each other. When it’s time for the bills, we’ll get two! First he’ll pay and (get punched) and stuff the punch card behind the little Budda statue on the counter. Then I’ll come up to pay, just another diner, totally unrelated to the cute guy that just left. I’ll create a small diversion, perhaps by “accindentally” knocking over the pencil holder filled with rice. While the owner is cleaning that up, I’ll retrieve Steve’s punch card and present it for my dinner! HA! I will not be denied.

I just KNOW it will work. Look at what my fortune says:

I’m going to do that the very next time we eat there.  Make that the very next time we eat there after that! Look what I just found!

Now, can someone translate the “punches?”

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I Hope It’s NOT In There!

‘It’s in there!’ You remember the Prego spaghetti sauce tag-line, right?

I’m an adventurous eater and I’ve tasted my share of strange foods, the most odd (don’t worry there’s no photo) was in Italy many years ago. I ordered “calamaretti.” Little calamari. Squid. The whole squid, heads and legs, each one about the size of my thumb from the knuckle up. I was in for a treat.

So here comes my plate of calamaretti. I note that they are batter dipped and fried. Well most of them were batter dipped. Let me clarify: PARTS of them were battered. Apparently their little black eyeballs somehow repelled the batter and remained uncovered, staring at me. I ate them anyway and they were delicious, but the bottom line is that I might be a picky eater, but I have a wide comfort range.

This brings me to a recent meal at the Michigan (and maybe elsewhere)chain, Salvatore Scallopini.  They have a marinara to dip your bread in as you wait for your food that is to die for. And, so far (maybe not after this blog) they allow us to call ahead and ask them to put in a loaf of the “good” bread just for us. That’s the bread they usually serve on Sunday, the bread that is the perfect combination of soft inside and crusty outside. They bake a loaf just for us. (Why they don’t serve this bread every day is a mystery to me.) But back to my story.

The waitress brings out the nightly specials and at the top of the list is Penne Palamino.  I’ve lived in Italy for a year at a time and I’ve never heard of this particular sauce. Its name, however reminded both Steve and I of our honeymoon in Quebec.  It was there in Quebec, at one of the snooty restaurants we ate at that we saw this explanation under something on the menu that was all in French :  ”Meat from a neighing animal.” Thinking this must be a poor translation, we asked the waiter. He confirmed, intoning, “Yez, Madam, zat eez correct. Orse.” (The ‘H’ was silent.) Eeeew!

So back to the Palamino Sauce. I’m sorry, but this is a bad name for pasta sauce. I don’t care if they made it up or it it’s a real dish. And I’m not that great a speller so I don’t care if the horse with the very similar name is but one letter off (palomino, not palamino).  I understand and celebrate the notion that other cultures eat differently that we do, but there it was on the menu. In Flint, Michigan. Where nobody serves Orse. Not good. Especially since I didn’t have my camera on me. (You know I photograph things that make you wonder, “What Were They THINKING!” And so do a lot of other people.)

Pass me the calamaretti…

Play With Your Buffet

I may have mentioned this before, but we go out to eat a lot, mostly because I refuse to cook. As Debbie, Steve, and I were enjoying lunch at the Chinese Buffet a few weeks ago, Steve came back to the table with all RED food. He had those bananas in a sweet red sauce (which are about as Chinese as the chocolate pudding they serve) and some watermelon, and something else I can’t remember. It was very pretty and so I thought I’d take my camera the next time.

Aren’t the colors and shapes pretty?

Now it’s YOUR TURN. Take a camera to lunch. Or dinner. Shoot your food. If somebody with a Flickr account will volunteer to collect the photos for me and upload them, I’ll link. (Volunteer by way of a comment to this blog.) By sharing we can all admore your sense of color, understanding of good composition, appreciation for juxtoposition, and your ability to hold the camera steady and not make the rest of us lose our lunch. HINT: to get the best exposure, STAND UP. That way all the other diners will know where the flash is coming from. Seriously, if you sit, you’ll be too close and your flash will wash out the food.

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Bagels

Growing up in the Detroit suburbs, I know bagels. After Mom moved in with us we would drive back to the old neighborhood to buy bagels: 120+ miles roundtrip. (We bought 3 dozen at a time and froze them. Sacrilege, but what could I do?)

Quite the versatile food group, bagels are. Fresh with lox, cream cheese, and lemon; toasted with butter; or peanut butter. Broiled with melted cheese…

I also like a toasted bagel with a fried egg on top, but this can be problematic. It is the very definition of the “square peg in the round hole.” More to the point, it’s a lot of egg yolk falling through the hole in the bagel. 

The only way around the hole-in-the-bagel dilemma is to make a closed-hole bagel. (Heaven forbid!) Or, to cook the egg to match the bagel! 

 This is not as easy as it look. Therefore I would like someone to INVENT a cooking tool that would automatically make a hole in the egg to match the bagel. Perhaps a heavy, metal cone-shaped structure that sits in the frying pan. One would crack the egg on the tip. The egg would drip down around the cone and cook with a premeditated hole in the center. Or, the dumb metal cone would heat up and the egg would cook on the way down and you’d have to bit the egg off of it and throw away the bagel. OK, scrap that idea and get to work on something else, would ya?

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Walker Brother’s Pancake House

I gave up cooking, but I still like to eat. Kris Johnston took me to Walker Brothers for brunch on the way to the airport yesterday and suggested I order mini-version of their famous German Pancake called The Dutch Baby. Oh my goodness! Quoting from the menu, “it’s a thin and delicate plate-filling oven-baked pancake dusted with powdered sugar and served with lemon on the side.” It was as big as my head, a huge crater with 3″ walls, and filled with bananas and strawberries for only $2.95 additional. And light as a feather. I ate the whole thing. I’ve had mayonnaise on French fries (Holland) and salt on grapefruit (my husband’s favorite), but never lemon on pancakes. It was fabulous. Six great locations in metro Chicago. No, I don’t own stock but I’m considering it. I hear they have a mean Apple Pancake too, but I’m not messing with success.