Eating Adventurously on a Budget

Guest Article: Ella Davidson of Coupons.org has provided this guest post. Coupons.org is a consumer savings and deals website that helps consumers save money. Their research has appeared on financial news channel, CNBC.

Adventurous eaters love to find the richest, most unusual, and of course tastiest treats from around the world to tempt their palettes. It's no surprise that this kind of appetite can run into money, as foods “off the beaten path” tend to come from establishments that are more concerned with the quality and flavor of the food than with keeping prices affordable. Often, these exciting and exotic dishes are found at exclusive eateries using only the finest ingredients. People with an appetite for adventure can feel at a loss for how to excite their taste buds when they find themselves on a budget. Thinking creatively about their budget and desire for flavor adventure, though, leads frugal foodies to get the best of both worlds.

Prioritize Food Fun

Being budget-conscious doesn't mean cutting every luxury from your lifestyle in order to save money. Budgeting is about making the best decisions for you to help you reduce unnecessary spending and increase saving. If eating adventurously is really a priority for you, make it a priority in your budget. Cut out other luxuries that don't mean as much to you – ditching your cable subscription, for example, can free up over $100 a month – and apply that money to taking yourself on dining adventures.

Look In Surprising Places

If you are willing to risk a few failures along the way, start exploring the hole-in-the-wall restaurant establishments in your area. Lacking big name cachet – and the big price tags that accompany it – these eateries often feature dishes and flavors you've never even heard of! Every adventuresome foodie has a secret, unknown restaurant that they just love; organize a trade with foodie friends. You tell them your favorite local find, and they tell your theirs. Eating off the beaten path means not only lower prices, but smaller crowds and the opportunity to make a small place your own.

Go With A Group

Dining family-style can help bring food costs down in a major way. Instead of going with one other person and ordering your own individual meals, grab a big group of friends and organize a menu mix-and-match. Restaurant portion sizes are almost always too big for one person these days, so a group of six people can get away with ordering four entrees or several appetizers to feed everyone. Splitting the bill brings down your payment in a big way, and you also get the chance to taste so many more menu items than if you all ordered your own plates.

Shop For Food Fairs and Special Events

Lots of exotic, upscale restaurants share their food with the general public at events like street fairs and food festivals. Look for these kinds of events in your area; though prices vary, you can often pay a one-time admission fee and then sample a certain number of foods for free. This is a great way to sample many different foods for one low price. Keep your eyes open also for special events at restaurants you want to try; they occasionally offer a prix-fixe menu at a lower-than-normal price to let diners sample items across their menu.

Cook It Yourself

Do you know how many food blogs are out there on the Internet? You can find a recipe for just about anything you could ever want to try, and making it at home is almost always cheaper than eating it in a restaurant. You may need to invest a bit in some essentials like proteins, spices, and other pricier items, but will end up saving overall compared to dining out. You can also control the meal yourself and tweak an exotic meal to combine all your favorite flavors in one place.

Dining adventurously can be expensive, but it certainly doesn't have to be. If you have an adventuresome dining personality, think creatively about how to satisfy your exotic cravings without breaking the bank and find solutions that fit your lifestyle. Employ the same spirit of adventure that dominates your taste buds in finding a way to make dining on a budget work.

Oyamel 2012 Tequila and Mezcal Festival

This past Wednesday I went to a press event to preview Oyamel's 2012 Tequila and Mezcal Festival, which begins this Monday and lasts through March 18.

I got to sample a few of the featured plates for the Festival, which were great, but the real show was the cocktails. A squad of persistent servers and some peer pressure from my fellow food journalists left me no choice but to tackle half of the tequila and mezcal menu, as well as some shots after that.

Here are the cocktails I downed: 

- The T&T: El Jimador Blanco 30-spice "ginquila," house-made sour orange and epazote tonic, and lime ice.
- El Pescador: Herradura 3-ways, Orange Curacao, Maraschino, Velvet Falerrnum, grapefruit, lemon and hand-cracked ice.
- High Tea: Los Nahuales Reposado Mezcal, chamomile tea, St. German elderflower liqueur, lemon, tabacco bitters, Oaxacan chocolate ice.
- Oaxacan Swizzle: Del Maguey Mezcal "Vida" fresh pressed apples, ruby port, ginger iwth a cinnamon swizzle and apple-chip.

Oyamel says any connoisseur of Mexican spirits can appreciate these fine liquors.  I imagine this is true, but I still had a excellent time despite my lack of tequila expertise thanks to a bunch of creative ingredients.  Particularly memorable were the chocolate ice and tobacco bitters, as was the ginquila: tequila made from gin botanicals. 

Check out the schedule for Oyamel's mezcal and tequila tastings over the next couple of weeks.  In addition to the tastings, the Festival includes tequila and mezcal dinners with special guests like Ron Cooper.

Mike Tyson BiBimBap

I haven’t posted on this blog for about six months, but an experience tonight brought me back from the dead.

What could bring me back?  Only some really weird shit.  Like running into Mike Tyson at Whole Foods. 

Seriously, that happened tonight.  And it was the Whole Foods in my Friendship Heights neighborhood because Mike Tyson immediately makes you think of friendship.

He was hanging out with two serious-looking men, maybe bodyguards.  Do people really start beef with Mike Tyson?  I remember hearing that when he was in jail some of the convicts picked fights with him, hoping to get through it with their brains intact enough to say they scrapped with Iron Mike.  The customers at the Friendship Heights Whole Foods were pretty much like this too except that everyone got misty-eyed and stared at their shoes when within ten feet.

Everyone except for one of the checkout clerks.  Tyson walked right by me as I was paying for my groceries, and the clerk called out, “Yeah, Mike!”

I thought the clerk was cheering good-naturedly.  But the looks Tyson and his crew gave the guy suggested he was on his way to a very unFriendship-y face stomp.

this is harder in real life

I then did what I do when I see famous people: I pulled out my phone to take a picture.  Over the past six months, two other celebrities had no problem with this: Alexander Skaarsgard and Stephen Colbert.  And then there’s Mike Tyson.  As I pointed the phone in his direction, he saw me and we locked eyes.  I thought about asking him to say cheese, but he was eyeing me like he was hungry and I was the cheese.  Without any sudden movements, I put the phone back in my pocket. 

Then he walked out of the store to the garage, leaving me pic-less.

And yet, getting stared down by Mike Tyson at the checkout counter was not the weirdest thing that happened tonight at Whole Foods. 

The weirdest thing was buying a new item in the prepared food section called “The Seoul.” 

The Seoul is an attempt by Ambassador Whole Foods to bring bibimbap, the Korean mixed rice dish, to the masses.  At least, that’s what I think it’s supposed to be.  I’m not sure, because if the Seoul is supposed to be bibimbap, it is the most ridiculous bastardization of Korean food I can imagine.

I like Whole Foods.  I shop there all the time.  But I was offended by this concoction, and I’m not Korean.  Or even Asian.

What’s the big deal?  Where to start.  The Seoul came with a liquid called “bulgogi sauce.”  Except, there was no bulgogi in the bowl.  You know what's awesome with bulgogi sauce?  No bulgogi.  Plus, bulgogi sauce is a marinade of sesame oil, soy sauce, garlic … you know, Korean ingredients.  This sauce wasn't Korean. 

It was Tobasco! 

I really, really hope someone accidentally put the wrong sauce in the bowl.  Because if Whole Foods is trying to get honest, hard-working Americans to put Tobasco on their bibimbap, I can never go to a Whole Foods store again.  And it’s right across the street from where I live, so that would be very inconvenient (Giant is crazy far away, like three blocks).

The ingredients said the "bulgogi sauce" was soy sauce, honey, garlic, ginger, and green onions.  Trust me, it was Tobasco.  And since when does Whole Foods have handwritten labels?  I'm so confused.

Just the sauce was enough to make me angry, but that wasn’t the only problem.  The description on the front of the package says that the Seoul comes with “beans.”  This seems to refer to edamame.  First of all, bibimbap is Korean, not Japanese, but putting edamame in there is okay because it’s all the same continent, right?  Just like you can sell a hamburger or pizza as Mexican food.  Also, if Whole Foods is right that the only way Americans will buy edamame is if they call it “beans,” I'm done living in this country.

The package says “Good Food.”  But the rice was cold and chewy like when you keep it in the refrigerator for a few days.  Was I supposed to heat it in the microwave?  There weren’t any directions.  Halfway through eating, I desperately tried microwaving, but when I took the Seoul back out, the seaweed reeked and I had to throw the rest away.  “I’m so confused,” I kept crying out to Marcy.

And so, I went to my computer for a therapeutic retelling of the gory details of tonight’s traumas.  Will I blog again?  Anything's possible especially if Mike Tyson sees this post and becomes a follower.

Wild Wednesday at Thunder Burger

This past Wednesday I went wild in Georgetown. 

This didn't involve me maxing out my credit card with a bunch of trophy wives at Mineral Kingdom and Urban Chic (that was Thursday).  There's a weekly event called Wild Wednesday at Thunder Burger on M Street.  Every Wednesday, Chef Ryan Fichter serves something no sane person would want to eat: beer-braised alligator ribs, rattlesnake, boar, antelope, turtle, or llama.  And this past week, yak.  Birch and I immediately made plans to check it out.
.
Thunder Burger started Wild Wednesday just last month, but it's already attracted some controversy.  City Paper and DCist reported that animal rights activists were "deeply troubled" because the restaurant was going to serve lion.  The restaurant caved and won't serve lion even though the animal isn't endangered (and tastes good).  Plus, Serbian Crown in Great Falls has been serving lion since the 1990s and I don't know anyone who has a problem with it. 

There's an important lesson here: serving Simba is a devastating blow to wildlife but only if it happens within 15 miles of D.C.

Wild yaks are extinct in Nepal, but there were no animal rights activists when I showed up for my yak because there aren't enough cartoon characters based on yaks.  The ambiance of Thunder Burger is a mix between biker bar (snakeskin leather menus) and Georgetown restaurant (the only piece of road the customers are biking is the Capital Crescent Trail).  The music (Wolfmother and Pearl Jam) strikes the right middlepoint.  The regular menu looked enticing, especially the Kobe beef burger, Pig in a Cow Suit (beef burger with bbq pulled pork), and the elk burger.  But then I spotted the white-board over the bar: "WILD WEDNESDAYs: YAK burgers."  I rededicated myself to the mission at hand.

I've never had yak before.  The closest I came was when Smita, the Nepalese checkout lady for the cafeteria at work, made me momos, but she's a vegetarian.  True or false: Once you go yak, you never go back?  I couldn't wait to find out.

When I got my yak burger, I was disappointed that it was covered in cheese.  I aimed my kisser away from the cheese so I could have some no-frills yak. 

Yak is a bovine, but I was still surprised when it tasted exactly like sirloin.  This made me wonder whether I was tasting pure yak or a cross-breed with domestic cattle - a theory supported by theyakranch.com (a website worth bookmarking if only for their catch-phrase: "YAKS ... not Gnu!  Are they for you?"). 

The meat wasn't particularly lean or gamey.  It wasn't uniquely marbled.  It was possibly the most average hamburger I've ever had.  It was about as wild as reading some articles about the debt crisis.

I'm not giving up on Wild Wednesday.  This week Thunder Burger is serving up black bear burger, and you can bet your ass I'll be there for that.  I guess once you go yak, you do go back.

Domku in Petworth

I could write a lot about the visit Rupa and I recently paid to Domku, a Slavic and Scandinavian restaurant in Petworth.  But I think this picture says it all.

Go to Domku only if you have a good place to hibernate afterwards.  Almost all of our dishes were crammed with thick cream, the kind of cream that dredges up memories of sloshing through foam parties in college, and then strikes you where you stand like narcolepsy.  With a meal like this, you have to wonder, how is it that Americans are more overweight than Scandinavians?  Just try taking down the cream baked smoked sprats, the pink peppercorn kulebiaka in cream sauce, and the swedish meatballs and mash.  A KFC Double Down will suddenly seem like lentil salad.   

Creamy sprats

Pink Peppercorn Kulebiaka (with cream)

Swedish Meatballs and Mash ... and CREAM!

Spike Mendelsohn Opening Food Truck; Prepare for Corned-Beef Sandwich Greatness

Below, some exciting news from Kate Nerenberg of Best Bites: a new food truck dedicated to the noble cause of perfecting the corned-beef sandwich.

"Spike Mendolsohn - Top Chef alum and owner of We, the Pizza and Good Stuff Eatery - wrote on Twitter Thursday that he's starting a food truck called Sixth and Rye, with a corned-beef sandwich as the signature dish.  The Feast had more detail: The truck, a Friday-only lunch option, is a joint project with Sixth & I Historic Synagogue and hopes to debut in April.  And New York's branch of the Feast had more Spike Mendelsohn-expansion news: HE's finally making good on his promises to franchise Good Stuff Eatery.  In an interview at the recent South Beach Food & Wine Festival, he said he's looking at spots in Chicago, Philadelphia, and, of course, DC."

Borough Market in London

The weekend before Valentine's Day, when I was in London, Ed and Betty took me to Borough Market, a huge open-air collection of food stalls south of the River Thames and London Bridge. 

The market goes back to at least 1276.  Its staggering size, about 85 stalls depending on the season, reminded me of La Boqueria in Barcelona.  Unlike Boqueria, though, Borough features a lot of fine food retailers – like the ones you see at Madrid’s Mercado de San Migel.  But there’s no analogy for the heavily sauced sausages, hot pies and stewed meats.  If you're looking for the full monty of Brit cuisine, Borough's the place.    

On a Saturday afternoon, the market is packed, despite its expansive territory.  Sometimes you're shoulder-to-shoulder with the other shoppers.  Not a new problem: in 1754, the market was causing so much traffic congestion that Parliament temporarily shut it down.

The market’s popularity these days makes it hard to imagine another closing.  I can’t report any celeb sightings, but Borough is supposedly one of the best spots for ogling your Jude Laws and Keira Knightleys.

I have a hard time picturing Keira diving into Borough’s extravagance.  The smoked meatball sandwiches, pork roast, asparagus soup, jamon (okay, that one isn’t so authentic), blood pudding, mashers and fresh cheese were all of highest quality and caloric content.  The highlights of the afternoon, though, were the hot pies, vegan roasts, wild rock oysters and reindeer burger - even though my request for the red-nosed variety was rejected by a humorless Brit.

We got the hot pies (and blood pudding) from the stall run by Sillfield Farm, which is located four hours away in Cumbria (northwest England).  The producer, Peter Gott, keeps no less than 150 rare breeds of pig.

Guess what they sold like

Not to be outdone were the oysters at the Haward stall.  The Haward family has been harvesting the waters of Essex since 1792, and their go-to items are the same now as they were then: Colchester native and wild rock.  I enjoyed both, although I'm not sure I agree with the Romans, who, according to the Haward website, declared 2000 years ago that wild rock oysters were the only good things to come out of Britannia.  

I wanted all of these

The vegetarian roasts, sold at the London Roast stand, are stuffed with beetroot, potato, carrot, apple and corn flakes, and seasoned with fenugreek, cardamom, cumin and sea salt.  Even better than their earthy taste is the shape of London Roast’s muffins, which are baked in clay plant pots.

Healthy stuff

We tracked down the reindeer burgers at the Ostrich and Exotic Meats counter.  Reindeer is the same type of deer called caribou in North America.  Prancer was tender and juicy.  More than 70 percent of reindeer that are slaughtered for meat are calves, which tend to have fatty, soft flesh.

Me, stunned at my good fortune in finding an exotic meats stand

A humorless Brit

Prancer burger

A bit knackered after our Borough feast, we got on line at a coffee shop, which was a ways from the market.  But cow monuments are always a good reminder that passionate meat purveyors are nearby.  Who is Valentine to judge the object of one's affection?