It had been a while since I first/last had durian on Zanzibar in 2007. So when I was at the Chinese supermarket recently, I convinced May that we needed to buy one of these spiky fruits. When she then purchased another one couple weeks later, I decided that it had to be shared with my family to help them in their quest for delicious eats. So we cut it up and hauled it up to Aaron’s place.

Durian so ripe it is splitting

Durian is known for its unique, strong odor, which some liken to rotting flesh. It doesn’t smell anything like rotting flesh, but its odor can spread quickly throughout your house. We put the cut up durian into a glass container with a snapping lid sealed onto the top and carried it in the trunk of our car. After being in there for a couple of hours, when we got back in the car, the whole car smelled like durian, despite being in a pretty airtight container.

Splitting the durian to remove fruit

The flesh itself is delicious, with a taste somewhat similar to jackfruit, though the texture is quite different. Its texture is more like custard, soft and not requiring any chewing, really. Such a delicious fruit. If you ever see one, you should at least try it!

Jason is back in town on a return trip from Japan, and he decided to bring along a box of delicious treats. This included several packages of natto. Natto is a Japanese food made from fermented soy beans, and it has a very stringy and slimy texture.

The first step in the preparation is to mix up the natto with some chopsticks, and add in some soy sauce and hot mustard. This mixing process makes the natto very sticky and stringy, and as Jason kept saying “the stringier, the better.” We then put in on some rice and ate it with some seaweed. Not a bad flavor, just a very interesting texture.

Mixing up the natto.

Demonstrating some stringiness.

Natto on rice with seaweed.

I am back home in Seattle for a little while hanging out. Nate and I decided to cook up some squash and zucchini blossoms. Nate stuffed them with a mix of cream cheese, parmesan, onion, zucchini, basil, parsley, and salt and pepper. Then we breaded them with a simple batter of milk and flour. We also fried a couple that were plain. They made a nice complement to our meal of salad, broccoli from my mom’s garden and fresh liver.

Fried Squash Blossoms

Liver, Broccoli and Salad

On a recent trip to visit my brother in Fort Lauderdale, we went out to this place to try out some quality Chinese food.

My brother had mentioned that he always saw Chinese people eating there, which is always a good sign. He had also picked up a menu of theirs, which was quite different from your typical Chinese fare in the U.S. When we arrived, they gave us the standard menu, General Tso’s Chicken, that sort of thing, but we traded these in for the red Chinese menus. At a lot of Chinese restaurants, these menus aren’t even translated into English, but here they were, with a few errors here and there.

After looking through the menu, we settled on a few things to try:

Chicken Foot Mixed Taste

This came like a chicken foot ceviche almost, similar spices and flavor to it. A cold salad comprised mostly of a stack of chicken feet with some ginger, spices and onions. Interesting, but in general not our favorite item. Of course we finished the stack.

Abalone – Whole Braised

Most of us had never had abalone before. These were delicious. Of course, it is expensive. $30 got us two abalone, a couple of mushroom caps and a few pieces of broccoli. One of the best things we had that night.

Whole Squab

This came with the head, which had been sliced in two. The head was fried nicely to the point that you could just eat the whole thing. The rest of the squab had been marinated in something (hoisin sauce perhaps?). It was delicious and probably our other favorite for the evening.

Some mixed soup

This soup had shark’s fin, abalone, sea cucumber and fish maw, but it was hard to tell what was what. It tasted like a fish soup, nothing too special, but not bad.

Sea Cucumber with Yellow Chives

This items was listed on the menu, but the waitress told us that it wasn’t the right thing and pointed at something else that was clearly different. She ended up bringing exactly what was listed above. The sea cucumber was a first for me (except for in the soup) and it was pretty good. It turns out the Chinese on the menu had been translated poorly. What the dish was supposed to be was some sort of sea cucumber innards, but they switched it to regular sea cucumber for us. The guy at the front said they had never had white people order that item before, so they hadn’t noticed it was translated poorly.

Fried wontons

The standard item. They were good.

Overall, it was a successful visit and there are plenty of things on the menu that need trying at some point.

Dragon City
6708 Stirling Road
Hollywood, FL 33024