Separate Lives

Note from the editors: Every so often, this web site will feature things that we find so appalling that we must smite them with our ire.

The first of these random rants tackles an ad from Philadelphia Cream Cheese. I'll start off by saying that I love both chili and cream cheese. And I'm not opposed to having dairy in my chili, e.g. sour cream or cheddar cheese. But what Philadelphia Cream Cheese has suggested this holiday season is a culinary abomination of mammoth proportions: a block of cream cheese smothered in chili (no specific kind, and really, does it matter?) and cheese.

I can just picture the Director of Food Innovations and the Marketing Manager getting together to come up with something new and delicious for the holiday season, you know, something that a busy family can just whip up for an appetizer while the ham is cooking.

Eureka! Chili-smothered cream cheese! Idea green-lighted. Production company called. Hand-model booked. Jingle-writers contracted. Done.

Speaking as a person who loves to combine food that shouldn't go together (mashed potatoes and corn, for example. Sue me, it's good), I firmly believe that cream cheese should be used in dessert and bread items, and chili should continue being liberally served over noodles, Fritos, and cornbread. But never the twain shall meet. -AK

Ice Cream Oddities

I always pegged The Scoop Grill  in Old Town, Alexandria as a second rate ice cream shop that was content to live off the nearby Ben & Jerry’s fannypack crowd overflow. But a friend of ours who lives in D.C. swears by their cinnamon ice cream. And then I read a review somewhere online that touted some of the unusual flavors that round out the Scoop Grill’s repertoire.

So this weekend I dragged an unenthusiastic AK to the Scoop Grill in an effort to give them another chance. Sure enough, in addition to the usual ice cream shop staples, Scoop Grill also offers flavors such as black walnut, orange chocolate chocolate chip, and Guinness. Those familiar with York Castle, the Jamaican ice cream shop in Silver Spring, might be heartened to learn that they no longer have to schlep all the way up Georgia Avenue to see if Guinness somehow translates into a palatable ice cream.

For the record, we’ve made the pilgrimage to York Castle to try both their Guinness and Grape Nut flavors and can report that they are every bit as unusual as they sound. Both of these unlikely flavors are supposedly very popular in Jamaica. The Guinness flavor has a rich taste of malt and a mild taste of alcohol, not entirely offensive, but unlikely to inspire a desire to ever sample it again. And the grape nut flavor is essentially a bunch of grape nuts mixed in with sweet cream, which results in a merger of ice cream and whole grain goodness that could almost be described as nourishing. I used to be a believer that nearly every comestible is likely improved further by the ice cream format, even savories, but Guinness ice cream has forced me to modify this belief with some reservations. Still, everyone who loves ice cream, and that really should be everyone, needs to try at least one spoonful of Guinness ice cream before they stumble into the afterlife.

Anyway, back to Scoop Grill. I opted for the orange chocolate chocolate chip, hoping for something akin to an ice cream version of a Grand Marnier truffle. Sadly, the orange flavor overwhelmed any hint of chocolate. And while the chocolate flavor might have fought back in chip form, the chocolate chips they use are thin, brittle and insubstantial. I salute them for creating a flavor that sounds like a good idea even if their execution is off, and their execution could be so easily improved. The orange flavor should be more subdued and would likely make a better pairing with their bittersweet chocolate flavor. And the chocolate chip situation definitely needs to be rectified: they need those bittersweet chocolate chip slabs that Ben & Jerry’s deploys.

Scoop Grill also offers a few baked goods, most of which take the form of a bunch of tired, dilapidated looking cobblers. I did try one of their peanut butter chocolate chip cookies, which ended up being outstanding. Thick, stuffed with bittersweet chocolate chips that enclose a buttery peanut butter center.

While I was hardly impressed by Scoop Grill, I’ll likely make a return visit to try their bittersweet chocolate and black walnut flavors, though probably not Guinness.

The Scoop Grill is located at 110 King Street.

-AC

Uncurdled Bean Curd

Although I’ve been known to eat as many as three or four different meats in one meal (often including at least one in a casing), I’m just as enthusiastic about vegetable proteins as I am about animal proteins, particularly anything derived from the soy bean.  I’m an especially big fan of tofu’s most garbagey incarnation, kung pao bean curd. Few things are as excting as ripping open the take-out cointainer to survey  a deep fried tofu and peanut sprinkled pile-up with glistening red chili peppers peeking out from all angles. So a couple of months ago, I was excited to spot a shabby sign posted on the side of Little River Turnpike touting the arrival of the Cho Dang Tofu House in the adjacent Annandale strip mall. I knew that the Cho Dang Tofu House was likely replacing an unremarkable Chinese restaurant of the General Tso’s chicken variety, so I was hopeful that perhaps the Chinese owners had decided to abandon General Tso in favor of dozens of hitherto unknown deep fried tofu dishes from their home province.

Of course, Annandale is also known as Little Korea, so once I was able to peruse the menu, I quickly realized that this is yet another Korean restaurant. Of course, that didn’t stop the irritable soccer mom, who stumbled into Cho Dang at about the same time I did, from repeatedly demanding that the staff whip up some chow mein even as the hostess sadly replied to each of her insistent entreaties, “No, Korean now.”

Like other Korean restaurants, Cho Dang, despite touting itself as a “Tofu House,” offers a full-on meatfest replete with bulgogi and bibimbop. Cho Dang’s titular tofu specialty comes to fore in the ten different soups that comprise roughly half the menu, each of which features soft tofu paired with a different ingredient, such as oysters, mushrooms, pork, and intestines (presumably tripe). I’m not particularly a fan of soft tofu, but Cho Dang’s soft tofu soup specialty seemed to be somewhat of a departure from the typical Korean restaurant, so I resolved to return with AK on a Cho Dang expedition.

On our return visit, we decided to order one of their soup and meat combinations, as this seemed the most efficient method to sample each of their strong points. We settled on the spicy pork bulgogi and a soft tofu with dumpling soup. We also momentarily considered ordering the fried seafood pancake, but opted instead for the barbecued beef ribs.

Soon  enough, the small bowls of panchan, the numerous Korean side dishes that typically turn a Korean meal from adequate to gut-busting, began to arrive. We began with a modest iceberg lettuce and cabbage salad with what seemed to be a vinaigrette comprised of soy sauce and rice wine vinegar. The stand-out panchan were the kimchi, of course, and potatoes served at room temperature in a sweet and savory light brown glaze. While most of the panchan were standard, there was one that we had never seen before: thin slices of whitish ridged gelatin, each about the size of a Saltine, dressed with soy sauce, sesame seeds, and scallions.

The soup easily had the most impressive presentation, a fiery red broth, bubbling over with thin pieces of soft tofu, and three dumplings, each of which seemed to be bubbling in sympathy with the broth. Unfortunately, we may have selected the wrong soup to showcase Cho Dang’s specialty. The dumplings were somewhat unremarkable in that their contents seemed to be bitter, shredded vegetable. The presence of the soft tofu in the broth is largely textural, thickening the soup into more of a stew.

The pork bulgogi was studded with scallions and interspersed with cabbage, and accompanied by rice still cooking in a hot stone pot. The best part about the stone pot, of course, is that the rice at the bottom is charred and crunchy, a wonderful textural counterpoint to the tender bulgogi.

The sweet and savory barbecued beef ribs practically fell off the bone, and after a few fumbling attempts with chop sticks, we opted to eat them with our hands, rib shack style.

Sadly, Cho Dang does not offer dessert, but there are plenty of Korean bakeries about two minutes down the road with boba tea and pastries.

Visit Cho Dang Tofu House at:

6653 Little River Turnpike in Annandale.

Be sure to call ahead to make sure that they’re open: (703) 642-9898

-AC

A Storied Cookies 'n' Cream Past

I have never liked the Oreo. Straight up? Dry and bland. Dunked in milk? Soggy and ruins the milk. Coffee? You’d have to be nuts. But on one fine day, about 20 years ago, a Steve’s ice cream opened in our suburb of Dallas. Steve’s was one of the first ice cream places to take the toppings and ice cream and mash them up right before your eyes (Now we have Maggie Moo’s and Cold Stone Creamery, both of which don’t even rank on my ice cream scale). And though I was no friend of the Oreo, I thought, “If a free-thinking human being is mashing up huge chunks of the thing, certainly, the Oreo could finally reach its full potential as an excellent cookie and ice cream add-in.” So, I went for it, and I was forever hooked on cookies ‘n’ cream ice cream, simply because it was mashed up, frozen, and embedded in ice cream.

Since then, Steve’s closed, and I moved on to Blue Bell’s (Texas ice cream), Ben and Jerry’s, and Häagen Dazs’s respective versions of cookies ‘n’ cream, all of which I have eaten straight out of the carton while watching television. But I always felt that those companies didn’t capitalize on the cookie chunk as much as they should have, and certainly there had to be an ice cream out there that knew what the cookie could really do.

And then, when I moved to Northern Virginia (via other places with substandard cookies ‘n’ cream recipes), the search for the best cookies ‘n’ cream came to a screeching halt. The Sundae Times in the Del Ray neighborhood of Alexandria proudly serves Gifford’s ice cream, a company that has been serving the DC area for more than 60 years. And I can now say with confidence that Gifford's makes the best cookies ‘n’ cream I have ever had. Here’s why:

1.    When the proprietor hands over the small cup of ice cream, I can just see the dome of ice cream bursting with enormous chunks of cookie. There have been times when I have encountered an almost entirely WHOLE cookie!

2.    The cookie chunks are always completely frozen solid. This is key. There have been times when I’ve bitten into a dish of cookies ‘n’ cream ice cream when, for whatever reason, the cookie isn’t completely frozen, and is, therefore, a lot like the dry bland cookie that I loathe to this day.

3.    A frozen solid cookie also means really, really cold sweet cream ice cream, the kind that takes serious muscle contraction to get even a small bite. But when the icy coldness hits the 98.6 degrees of my mouth, it turns into a nectar of the creamiest kind. That, friends, is what cookies 'n' cream ice cream is and always will be to me.  —AK

Candybar Compromise

In my office, there’s always candy around. Our receptionist usually provides the lil candybar minis of Snickers and Milky Way and whatever else, while my direct supervisor tries to mix it up a bit, and usually purchases a huge bag of the half-size candybars. When that happens I’m like “score!—we’re half way to a FULL-SIZE candy bar.”

The other day, I was lamenting the fact that the Thanksgiving holiday had given way to a wholesale ignorance of the candybar situation. There was none to be found, and I was experiencing that early afternoon lethargy that can only be repaired by a jolt of cheap-ass chocolate, nougat and maybe a nut of some kind. So I brought this to the attention of my supervisor. She hopped right to it and got some loot for our department. However, I was disturbed and dismayed to see her walking toward me an hour later holding a basket full of Paydays. Paydays, I thought, were the ghetto versions of Snickers, the candybar that my mom would buy on sale for trick-or-treaters.

Getting a Payday made me feel the way I felt when, at 12, I asked my stepfather for Bon Jovi’s “

New Jersey

” for Christmas, only to receive Bon Jovi’s debut self-titled album filled with tracks completely unknown to me. When the Paydays came my way, that horrible feeling came rushing back.

But for crying out loud, I’m the one who made a fuss about the candy, and therefore, I must take a Payday. Admittedly, I was never really sure what was in a Payday (I’d always thought, erroneously, that nougat was a component), so I knew I had to find out and just bust right into it. Payday is simply a caramel log encrusted with extremely salty peanuts. Nothing really to it. The first bite felt and tasted like I’d just taken a spoonful from my overpriced tin of fleur de sel. Salty as hell. But then lo and behold, the chewy caramel comes in with its superhero sweetness and BAM!—a wonderful combination of sweet, chewy and salty. The next frontier: Zagnut, anyone? -AK

Unfulfilled Falafel Lust

In recent years, I’ve had no love for falafel. This may have been the result, in part, of the role falafel assumed in my becoming an outlier on the freshman year college weight gain bell curve. Instead of the “Freshman 15”, I created a new category of shame known as the “Freshman 45”. I was a freshman at NYU, and as any college student in New York will attest, the two cheapest and most obvious non-meal plan options are rubbery slices of pizza or falafel sandwiches. I also occasionally went for the two cheeseburgers combo meal at McDonald’s, supersized, of course, with a sundae for dessert. But that meal only ever followed 40 ounces of Old English “800”. And don’t even get me started on those nights when I was ill-advised enough to stumble over to Sixth Avenue for two slices of pizza, typically opting for at least one that had baked ziti on top, and then shuffling to the diner next door for a stale 2 a.m. donut chaser. But it was Mamoun’s Falafel that figured the most prominently in my freshman year weight gain. For some reason, one falafel sandwich with four falafel slathered in tahini was never sufficient. I always ordered two falafel sandwiches, which may have been marginally healthier, but were nevertheless the middle eastern approximation of the 2 cheeseburgers meal at McDonald’s. And Mamoun’s was open until 5 a.m. every night which was perfect when studying late into the evening. As a result, I ate myself sick with falafel more than I care to remember.

But last week, I had a sudden hankering for falafel and I knew my father, arguably the world’s greatest falafel enthusiast, would be down. We tried to hit the Alexandria branch of Georgetown’s George’s King of Falafel, but it was inexplicably closed. My father was not keen on The Pita House, so I suggested that we check out Lebanese Village on Restaurant Row on 23rd Street in Crystal City. Since returning to Northern Virginia just over two years ago, we’ve been slowly working our way through 23rd Street’s various offerings. Given that Lebanese Taverna manages to be among the very best Middle Eastern restaurants in the area despite being a chain, we’ve never felt compelled to risk a less than excellent meal anywhere else. But I didn’t feel like grubbing falafel amidst the outdoor mall atmosphere of Pentagon Row this time.

Unfortunately, Lebanese Village’s halfhearted efforts failed to sate our lust for falafel. This may have been partially due to the fact that we ordered the Lebanese equivalent of the pu pu platter, a plate with various piles of tabbouleh, moujadarah, foul, hummus, baba ghanouj, tahini, and falafel. I’ve often found that the pu pu platter at even the best establishments is poorly executed. Perhaps the folks in the kitchen figure that anyone ordering a sampler is a novice undeserving of the attention lavished on other dishes. But since most of the items on this platter were likely made well in advance, and the fact that items that are typically distinct at other establishments all blandly ran together at Lebanese Village is a sign that something is truly wrong. The baba ghanouj lacked the smoky taste that baba ghanouj should have in nearly all instances. The hummus was a weak caulking paste. And the falafel were mostly dry, lukewarm, and brittle, rather than piping hot, crunchy on the outside, and moist within. Even liberal applications of tahini could not rescue the platter from its lack of savor.

In addition, the beveraging at Lebanese Village is equally poor. The jallab, a date syrup and rosewater drink inexplicably sprinkled with pine nuts, was cloying even for a drink that is supposed to be supersweet. And the housemade lemonade had plenty of tart but only the faintest hint of the rosewater that makes the Lebanese lemonade at places like The Pita House and Lebanese Taverna among the greatest versions of lemonade in the world.

Fortunately, the Lamb Fatteh somewhat made up for the other shortcomings: Chunks of lamb sit in a yoghurt based stew, strewn with toasted pita pieces, sprinkled with sumac, and drizzled with butter. Still, even though we enjoyed the Fatteh, we couldn’t shake the feeling that a superior version of this dish could surely be enjoyed at Lebanese Taverna. There were a number of other interesting items on the menu, but we won’t be back ever again. --AC