Why hello there! And welcome back to Kitchen Catastrophe. Today’s post is…I’m not going to lie, it’s in a genre I’m still fairly uncomfortable with, but I am going to try and soldier on. Namely, as this week draws to a close, I was reflecting on the fact that, while the last few weeks have been interesting for me and my family, they also come at a time that I wouldn’t normally get to do all too much in: normally, right now, I’d be in Leavenworth, prepping for the last weekend of Oktoberfest. But with Oktoberfest cancelled due to COVID, that meant I had a couple more weeks to just…hang out with my family, and that happened to coincide with some opportunities to try new things. So this is…kind of a travelogue, for not a lot of travel, a sort of itinerary of the last month or so, and my thoughts on the foods I had, and what I’m thinking about working with. It’s not like, a formal review of the restaurants involved, though I will talk about them, it’s more of a “what I did on my Summer Vacation”, but for the start of Fall. So we’re REALLY leaning into the “blog” end of food blog this week.

Full disclosure: This is also because I took a lot of picture intending to upload them to our social media, only to discover that my new phone only remembered my personal account info, so this is a way to catch up with all the stuff that was SUPPOSED to go on our Twitter, Instagram, and Patreon over the last month and a half. I figure if I offload it all now, when I spend 3 hours on Friday getting those accounts open and organized, I can “start fresh”.

Early to Mid-September

I’m counting all of this from “early September”, because that’s when I feel like I kind of got to start recovering from the chaos of summer: the end of August marked the last show I was working on, the return of my car from the shop, etc. And also just so I can include that, based on a Facebook ad, my family decided to go to the 5-Year Anniversary party of a brewery we’d never heard of in Seattle, to try their tasting menu.

The courses were, in order: “Octopus Ceviche with tortilla chips” (bottom middle and left), “Gravlax on toast” (bottom right), Mille-feuille (top left), goulash (top right), and Bratwurst and Sauerkraut (not shown). So a bit of a “Jon just needs to get through the first 2 courses, and then things are fine”.

The beers were all, in my opinion, fine, though my family weren’t huge fans of one of the beers, because it had a very molasses-like flavor. That weird mix of bitter and sweet, which they didn’t love. I kind of liked it, but couldn’t weigh in too much, as I was far busier trying not to throw up from eating the gravlax (a type of cured salmon) Which is not to say it was bad: I just do NOT do well with certain rubbery or gristly textures, nor do I particularly like fish. So when I had TWO slices of salmon on my slice of bread, I said “I’ll eat one on its own, so I can better enjoy the remainder. Suffer a little extra at first, for an easier time later.” Turns out, I underestimated how much I would NOT like that first part. I thought the Mille-feuille and the Goulash were both pretty good, but honestly the stand out part isn’t even pictured: they had a bratwurst with wasabi mustard and sauerkraut that was quite delightful.

Then, on the 17th, Nathan and I went to Finnriver, Nathan’s “happy place”. As mentioned in our 2018 coverage, we are Club members, specifically of the highest possible caliber, “Swan”, which means we HAVE to buy around 48 bottles a year from them. A challenge my family does not struggle with, because we probably buy closer to 150 bottles a year from them, if not more. (Definitely more this year, where part of the open bar for the wedding were several crates of Finnriver cider we bought for the event.) This was for an early test of their “production tours”: while they’ve long offered tours of their orchard with cider tastings, they are just now starting to offer tours through the building where they physically MAKE the cider: you get to come in (on Friday afternoons, after the work has ended), and see the vats they ferment in, the racks where they store and ‘riddle’ the champagne style cider (riddling being a process of rotating the bottle slightly every day in order to keep the sediment from the fermenting yeasts from sticking to the bottle, or cloudy-ing the cider itself), the grinder that processes the fruit, we even got to take a cider pear and apple and try them, to show that “holy crap these taste nothing like the super-market fruit, and are very bitter and grainy.” We also discovered that we could now buy their cheese-covered pretzel with added pulled pork, which was delightful.

Those are some bright pickled onions. Not much else to say about this.

That was a kind of wet and dreary weekend, and I’d already cooked the pasta alla Nerano for the next Monday’s post, so we ended up getting Chinese food delivered that weekend from a place that was new to us: Weihai House. There’s a unit in a local shopping complex that’s gone through a couple restaurants and businesses over the years: before Weihai, I believe it was a Pho place, and before that, I believe it was a different Chinese place. According to Google, it’s the highest-rated Chinese restaurant in town, and we’d never tried it. So we ordered enough food for a couple meals, and made ourselves some plates.

I was particularly amused that they offered “Mandarin Beef”, which is DEFINITELY NOT a rip-off of Panda Express’s “Beijing Beef.” Similarly, we got some professionally made mapo tofu, which was notably less aggressively numbing than the version I made.

For the small size of the building, they did a very good job, in our opinion. I think there was ONE dish that was a slightly disappointment, and that was a miscommunication issue more than anything. (Nate wanted something yakisoba-esque, so we ordered pan-fried noodles, when we should have ordered Lo mein. The pan-fried noodles were noodles fried to crispiness/crunchiness, served with the toppings/sauce on the side. Still good, just a different texture than we wanted.)

A few days later, Nate had to run a quick errand, which prompted Kado to decide she had tired of living with us, and was off to find her fortune…before she remembered she hates the outside for more than 10 minutes at a time.

“Why did you let me do this, stupid human?”

The Big Week

The end of September/start of October was the biggest week for new food activity, due to a confluence of events. As noted a couple times before on the site, it was my 33rd birthday. Nate had a to run an errand in Tacoma, and thus, for my birthday, we discovered ourselves at a Tacoma Ramen bar named “Moshi Moshi”, as it was “Whiskey Wednesday”, meaning it was half-off whiskies. We celebrated with around $63 in Whiskey (after the discount), and by running rampant through their small plate section: we didn’t try a single ramen while there, just 8 or so different small plates.

Somehow, the clearest picture I took is of the LEAST visually intelligible dish. This is Japanese style elote, roasted corn topped with an array of okonomiyaki toppings, including bonito flakes.

I have a BUNCH of pictures from that trip, which I’ll try and toss up somewhere when I work out the social media stuff. Probably Patreon, so I can talk about the various dishes more easily. Anywho, we had a great time, and noticed that they had a fair number of vegan options, which was great, since my brother Stephen and our new sister-in-law Anna were planning on coming up soon, and Anna is vegan, so we resolved to bring them there.

Then, that weekend, my mother had a doctor’s appointment in Silverdale on Friday. (to briefly recap for those not in the Kitsap area: Silverdale is a nearby “town” that’s a major retail center for the region. It’s both the site of the closest mall, and kind of “a town that is itself a mall”, without the walkability that implies. (It’s not LEGALLY a town, it’s an unincorporated area, because if it incorporated, it would start having more local taxes. Like I said, “a mall town”) and she invited me to come in order to go shopping at Barnes and Noble, and a nearby international market for some interesting snacks and drinks, and I’ve just remembered I bought vegan jerky for when Anna and Stephen came, and we didn’t have it out while they were here. Well, looks like I have to eat whole bags of seasoned dried mushrooms.

The Korean one is the only one I have tried so far. It’s…fine? It’s very definitely not meat, but it doesn’t taste bad.

While there, we got to visit MASAS for the first time in a long while: MASAS started out as MASA, a pizza-truck run by a local family that we quite liked, and used to order from once every month or two. They then moved into a brick-and-mortar location in downtown Port Orchard, and weirdly, we kind of just stopped ordering from them: the traffic situation of getting into and out of downtown for us was just a little harder than we were willing to oh my god this is the whitest thing I’ve ever written and I hate it. That existential crisis overcome, they then moved to Silverdale, which…man, if we gave up ordering pizza from a place we liked because driving to pick it up would be a 20 minute round trip with traffic instead of a 12 minute one, I assure you, it being 25 minutes away one-way meant it was practically dead to us. But since we were in town, we decided to visit, and learned they had a new Caribbean menu, with Cuban Ropa Vieja, Colombian Hot Dogs, and other cool things to try.

Colombia has a very different understanding of hot dogs than we do.

That’s the SIMPLE hot dog, since it only has 2 sauces, lettuce, and chips, instead of additional meats and veggies. It was very good. One of the sauces was kind of sweet, and it mixed with the lettuce ended up kind of filling the same role as relish on a normal dog. The ropa vieja was also quite tasty.

Then, the next day, we had to go BACK to Silverdale, because we needed to pick up some stuff from Costco, and I wanted to try Soondubu jjigae before I made it for last Monday’s post. (Meaning yes, the first time I tried the dish was literally 2 days before cooking it) We went to Seoul South Korean BBQ, and had a VERY good time: both of our entrees came with “side dishes”, the menu’s simply summary for “banchan”.

The brown-glazed potatoes and the sesame-oil broccoli stem under it were the star players of this line up.

My mother got to try Japchae for the first time, which she quite enjoyed. They had great customer service, though I am loathe to tell the exact story, for fear of causing people to PUSH for what was a thoughtful and kind gesture…but I will overcome that concern out of a sense of respect for you, my readers. I would hope you’re not the kind of people to take advantage of front-of-house staff for a show of compassion. As we were finishing the meal, my mother stepped away to the restroom, by which time she had only eaten maybe 1/3rd of her japchae. The waitress came up, and asked if we had enjoyed the meal, and if we needed a box for the noodles. I replied with “Sadly, no. We’ve got to go shopping after this, and there’s no way they’d survive in the car through the shopping trip and the way home. She really enjoyed it, though!” She thanked us for the compliment, and went to get the check. When she brought it back, she offered that, if we wanted, she could keep the left-overs in one of their refrigerators for us as we shopped, an offer we sprung for. When we returned, I saw that the fridge in question was in fact a mini-fridge, so it was certainly a meaningful AND NOT BROADLY USABLE offer.

We’ve resolved to go again sometime soon (and I have just realized we could potentially fit it in on a proposed trip for this weekend…), but I just wanted to highlight the degree to which they were willing to go to help us out.

Early October

I have to confess: not a lot. We spent a lot of the first week cleaning the house for Stephen and Anna’s visit, so we relied on local staples for meals: Arby’s, Cosmos’ Deli, Brick House, our ‘standards’ of the lockdown dining rotation. Other than that, I made Asian foods (though I don’t know if next weeks’ dish will be Korean, or if we’ll briefly detour into a different Fusion dish that we just made on Wednesday. More on that at the bottom)

The biggest thing is that we did go back to Moshi Moshi as planned, and try their Ramens, as well as some other small plate dishes (Nate expressed a sentiment close to disgust to learn that the veggie gyoza were as good, if not better, than the meat-filled versions.) I was SLIGHTLY disappointed with my ramen choice, as I went with the tan tan ramen, a kind of ramen variant of Dan Dan noodles, and, at the time, I didn’t know that tan tan ramen is typically less complicated than dan dan mian, flavor wise. It’s creamy, spicy…and that’s kind of it. It was a “I really liked the first 5 minutes of eating this, but I’m at the 10 minute mark now, and I would LOVE for something to change up the pace a little” situation. Which is partly my fault: You can order additional add-ons for the bowls, and I thought to myself before I ordered that I felt like the default toppings of “pork, chili oil, scallions, and bok choy” were a little light. (I think what I really should have done was break the bulb of the bok choy wedges, so instead of 3-4 wedges, I had 12-16 individual leaves.) If/when I get it again, I’ll probably add an egg, and maybe some pickled mustard greens would really help balance it out. Still, I ate the whole thing.

This is taken like, 3 minutes before I finished, but after I’d eaten most of it.

And that’s the highlight reel, as it were. Or at least, the parts of the last month or so I felt interesting enough to take pictures of. There’s a definite bias toward Asian dishes right now, as my mother has been watching a ton of Asian dramas, and Nate’s gotten into Aaron and Claire. We had a brief family meeting the other day, and talked about how, while we still have some Asian dishes we want to try (we have the noodles and vegetables for a batch of japchae, but I want to pick up some dark soy sauce to get the right color for the noodles), we also have some “classic O’Guin recipes” we want to have in the next couple weeks. Stuff like our “big batch tacos”, tater-tot casserole, chicken enchiladas, etc. None of which we covered on the site, because originally I considered them too pedestrian, and then because they were a little too tightly bound up with memories of my father. So you might be seeing more quasi-Mexican/Tex-Mex/So-Cal and rural America dishes as the cold sets in. And hopefully you’ll see these kind of pics and excerpts on our social media, once I remember the web of passwords and emails to reopen them all.

MONDAY: YOU’RE DEFINITELY GETTING NOODLES, THE QUESTION IS WHETHER THEY’RE CHICANO FUSION (RAJAS MAC AND CHEESE) OR QUICK SEOUL FOOD (JAPCHAE)

THURSDAY: I HAVE BEEN CHOKING ON MY YOUTUBE BACKLOG, AND DISNEY PLUS SHOWS BUT I AM LIKE, 5 HOURS FROM BEING BASICALLY CAUGHT-UP. SO HOPEFULLY IN THE NEXT WEEK I CAN FIT IN WATCHING SOME CULINARY CONTENT.