Mura - Raleigh, NC

Due to request by some friends who patiently sit through my photo sessions before digging into their meals, I am anachronistically posting photos of my latest food conquest.

Mura is a decently new restaurant in North Raleigh, part of the completely revamped North Hills shopping center complex. I remember North Hills as being a half-abandoned lot back in high school, where store fronts were so cheap that a handful of high schoolers could afford to rent one out to build the decorations for their winter formal. That is not the case today, where Kobe beef at Mura can cost $69.00. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, you heard that right. Raleigh - Entree - $69.00. I think we've hit a new high.

We took advantage of the great weather to sit outside, but unfortunately it made for poorly-lit pictures. For that, I apologize. Dinner started off with VERY lightly seared tuna marinated in ponzu sauce, served with a sriracha paste. When I've had tuna before, you could see at least 1/8 inch of cooked edge. At Mura, they try to only cook the surface. I was extremely impressed with the pile of orange paste that presented itself, enough so, that I flagged down our waiter and asked him "what is this and why is it so good?" According to him, it is a puree of crab, shrimp, and daikon, mixed with sriracha. Some food purists might say the spiciness ruins the subtle flavors of the tuna, but I say it was brilliant!
left: TNT Crunch - shrimp tempura with spicy mayo. I made him bring out more sriracha because it lacked the TNT that was promised. If you order the TNT Crunch, make sure not to get it "mild."
center: Ebi Maki - Shanna's choice. Soft shell crab with asparagus, avocado, topped with wasabi dressing and spicy mayo. Very good.
right: the Mura Roll - basically a ton of fish rolled inside of rice, nori (seaweed), and thinly sliced daikon. I wasn't particularly a fan of the daikon on the outside, and the roll is much better without the cilantro in the middle overpowering all the other flavors.
I am sort of bewildered by the tackiness of the logo, "Mura" embossed on the dessert plates. I tried to obscure it with the tiramisu. The tiramisu torte looked a little like a bench. I must admit I am not used to the ladyfingers being on both edges of the dessert. Sauces from the inside, out: dulce de leche, caramel, dark chocolate, enveloped in raspberry syrup.
Shanna's choice of dessert, a chocolate torte with ice cream. Now that I think of it, the weather was perfect for ice cream!

Desserteries, continued

In a similar circumstance to Room 4 Dessert(see post below) , I went to Chikalicious, another desserterie mentioned in the NY Times article, on another date back in November. No, my life isn't as glamorous as to exclusively involve studly men taking me to dessert parlors on romantic dates all the time; I've just been meaning to go to Chikalicious since my trip to NY right before France (Summer 2003). I finally went last year around Thanksgiving (Fall 2006), after 3 years of delays. At Chikalicious, the prix-fixe menu is always $12, plus $7 if you're going for a wine pairing. The chefs pair your amuse-bouche and petit-fours for you, and you get to choose what dessert you would like. The great thing about going on a date is that you can get two desserts, and try both of them!

I have a feeling that the two ladies who run and own Chikalicious enjoy making ice creams and sorbets that are shaped with their long thin spoons, like the leaf-shape you see below. Our amuse-bouche was butternut squash ice cream with spiced apple jelly, I believe. It's only about the size of a teaspoon, but the butternut squash ice cream was so smooth and subtle, delighting even the taste buds of a squash-hater like me.
On the left is a small molten chocolate tarte, paired with red peppercorn ice cream (with bits of red peppercorn on top), and raspberry coulis. The red peppercorn ice cream was the highlight of the "meal," in my opinion. It was smooth yet spicy, calming yet tantilizing. Quite amazing. The molten chocolate tarte was good, but not as original as the peppercorn ice cream.
This is caramel panna cotta topped with cashews and some sort of sorbet. I can't remember exactly what flavor the sorbet was, but I think it may have been lemon or something. The panna cotta was devine, not too sweet, but just sweet enough to break up the smoothness.
Our petit fours were, clockwise from the top: chocolate truffles, lemon poppy seed shortbread (you can order this online off of their site), and coconut coated marshmallows.

Room 4 Dessert

An article in the New York Times today mentioned a recent trend of pastry chefs starting their own dessert-only restaurants, two of which I have had the pleasure and honor to visit (on dates!). The first is Room 4 Dessert, a delightful little "sliver" of a restaurant hidden somewhere in Nolita, that Chrissy took me to in May. It is the perfect place to go after a romantic dinner in the Lower East Side (extra brownie points for Chrissy, who took me on the perfect "date"). While walking to dessert, you shift the huge dinner in your stomach around, so that there's more space for goodies! Room 4 has just enough space for a bar, where patrons watch as the baristas and serveurs carefully construct the dessert platters. It reminds me a little of a sushi bar, but less wet and more sweet-smelling.

The head chef, Will Goldfarb, set the menu up so you can get what appeared to be sampling rafts of 4 types of desserts, and each raft had a theme and different wines (red, white, dessert, effervescent, french, german...etc) that paired well with the theme. Some of the themes were chocolate centered, some focused on light and fruity spring time combinations, while the one we got was just whimsical.
The placemats are black vinyl mesh, and the wood counter had the most amazing striated pattern. I have never seen such a refreshing and simple way to spruce up wood. Our dessert platter from left: smooth but tangy apricot preserves on modified ladyfingers; tangy cherry jello; mellow pistachio creme; plum and sugar coated bon bon (some what like a dense marshmallow with fruit sorbet in the middle)
Another view of the bonbon and the pistachio creme.
the bonbon
apricot preserves
pistachio creme
I apologize for the dim lighting...I didn't want to mess up the ambiance of the desserterie with a sudden bright flash.

Chinese People Eat Desserts

Contrary to popular perception, Chinese people do eat desserts. Cakes and other sweet baked goods that fall into the "dessert" category are usually reserved for western cultures (except for western-style Chinese bakeries), but people who live in Taiwan are all very used to having various cold soupy desserts. This may look like black coffee, but it is in fact melted shian tsao. Usually, you eat shian tsao in little black jello-like cubes in a sweet syrup. The cubes are gelatinous, and when heated, turn into what looks like heavy slime-of-death but taste like heaven. Weird, but not to me or anybody familiar with Taiwanese night markets.Here's a closer look at the consistency of shao shian tsao (literally: burnt shian tsao). You can see how it is sort of slimy, between solid and liquid. It is delicious but hot. I'm so not kidding.
Another soupy dessert that people enjoy is doe hua. Doe hua is like the sweeter, more delicate cousin of silken tofu, reserved for desserts. One usually only eats it with sweet ginger soup with peanuts.
This bowl has the typical ingredients yi ren (or Job's Tears), doe hua, peanuts, and gingery sweet soup.

Afternoon Tea

We lived close to Shimen Resevoir (shi men shui koo) when I was growing up. I never really appreciated how lovely the flora was around that area until returning to it many years later. According to guidebooks-for-white-people-looking-to-do-things-off-the-beaten-path, it is a great day trip destination if one were a tourist in Taipei.
This is the field in front of the place where we had afternoon tea. Afternoon tea is usually reserved for cultures influenced by the British Empire when it was an empire, but the practice can be adopted by anyone who has nothing better to do in the afternoons than chat with one's friends. I've always marveled at how skinny Taiwanese people are despite how much they eat. If you think about it, they have 5-meal days: breakfast, lunch, afternoon tea, dinner, and latenight snack at the night market...and model-sized is considered "big-boned." I'll have whatever they're having.
Notice we are carrying umbrellas on a sunny day. One should just get in the habit of using an umbrella, rain or shine. Later that day, it started flash-flooding, and the umbrellas that were previously preventing us from tanning sheltered us from the rain.
I think this bottle of mint water was just for decoration, but the commercialized version of that, metromint, is one of my favorite beverages.
Standard offerings at a Taiwanese afternoon tea parlor, clockwise from left: whole wheat bagel, mango flan/custard (mang guo nai lao), green tea and sesame stick of some sort, and whipped cream drizzled with mango coulis. Bagels are a relatively novel food item in Taiwan, and the nai lao is the latest craze in custard-looking desserts. There's even a restaurant in Nei Hu (in Taipei) that sells ONLY nai lao!

Every Taiwanese kid has had an infatuation with boo ding at some point in their lives. It is called flan only to make it comparable to something in the Western world, but the Taiwanese version is actually more gelatinous and less creamy than Spanish or South American flan. Nai Lao hits somewhere between the creaminess of traditional Spanish flan and the bounciness of Taiwanese flan. This ramekin of mango nai lao is covered in mango coulis. I thought it went well with the vibrant fuschia of the flower.
Here's another plate, this time with a blueberry bagel. The green leaves are fresh mint.
I ordered a iced green milk tea, but it came out as matcha-flavored milk with ice and some stewed sweet red beans as garnish. Not the best I've tasted, as it was slightly too sweet, but it makes for a pretty beverage.
I should have gone with the hot green milk tea, pictured below.

Madeleines

Madeleines are small seashell-shaped "cookies" that are really miniature sponge cakes. They are synonymous with Marcel Proust (the npr story examines the question: why is my madeleine crumb deficient?!!) and his giant 7-volume memoire, a la recherche du temps perdu. The little seashells look very unimpressive until you actually see, touch, and taste one with tea. I recently purchased a flour sifter and a silicone madeleine mold just for the purpose of cheering myself up. Madeleines are most commonly had with tea, and for a good reason. The sourness of the lemon aftertaste (as with the ones I made, but some other common flavorings are almond, cocoa, etc) goes perfectly with the sweet aftertaste of tea. It's one of those combinations that goes beyond peanut butter and jelly, to enter in the realm of soy sauce and sesame oil - so simple and subtle yet so mindblowing. The only downside to making madeleines is filling each individual mold just right, repeatedly, so that the batter doesn't overfill and leave an unattractive skirt around the edge of the seashell. That took a couple batches to correct, but the baking took almost an entire night.
I highly recommend getting a silicone mold if you're going to be making madeleines. The tin molds stick and tend to burn the madeleines. With the silicone mold, all you had to do was pop the finished cookies out. Clean up for the molds involved light sponging. Non-stick silicone is my new best friend!
Madeleines are usually completed with a light dusting of powdered sugar. It's sort of hard to control where the sugar goes if you're using a sifter to dust, but some people have used stencils to make fun patterns on their madeleines.
The roommate and I had some fresh strawberries and blueberries around, so we made little strawberry (plus rogue blueberries) shortcakes. They are bitesized and SO CUTE! Oh, and the whipped cream was freshly whipped! I've never whipped whipping cream before, but it's not rocket surgery. A bit of sugar and some whipping cream makes for a workout for your forearm and tasty whipped cream. (textbook peak! so exciting!)

I got a little carried away with the tiny sculptures, but you can see how some berries and a madeleine can make for a fun session of miniature sculpting.
Some of the madeleines tasted like our refrigerator (read: don't use butter that has been sitting in the refrigerator for a long time), so as a way to compensate, I used this dirty little trick I learned from Jean Georges. Nothing quite beats the aroma of freshly grated lime zest. Add to that a bit of sugar, and you have a colorful citrus coverup that will do away with any odd flavors (refrigerator or otherwise).
Madeleines can also make good dessert hors d'oeuvres.

Exotic Fruit Therapy

What do I do when I've had the worst day ever?!? EXOTIC FRUIT THERAPY!!! Thanks to a tip from my mom, I took advantage of 2/$5 papayas at the local Harris Teeter. What can make me happier than a papaya milkshake? Nothing. Papayas can make you forget all your worries and woes.
At the instant when your knife slices through to the inner chamber of the papaya, the colorful fruit lets out this whisper of an exhale, as if telling you the secret to its glossy black pearls.

In my Asian film class, kids tried to equate the experience of touching papaya seeds to something sexual when we were analyzing The Scent of Green Papaya. I think it's definitely something of a sensual phenomenon, exciting, exhilarating, but maybe not bordering on sexual. Look at the gorgeous color! That's the tip of the papaya.

A lot of chopping and peeling later, PAPAYA MILKSHAKE!

Cupcakes

Being disappointed in life makes me want to bake. I still don't have an appetite, but at least I have cupcakes to show for it. I want to start making cupcakes with hairstyle frosting. Next time I'll get more decorating supplies.

OOOOoooo red velvet! The "red" part of red velvet comes from either food coloring, or, in the old days, mixing vineagre with buttermilk and cocoa to turn the cocoa into a dark reddish brown color.
Red velvet cupcakes with cream cheese icing.
The classic way of icing in my book - slicked back.
The "Tintin" curly-Q
UPDATE, 3-13-07: Django ate it
The faux-hawk (if it were a real mohawk, there wouldn't be icing on either side of the 'hawk)