It's It - the ice cream sandwich of my youth

Let's have a blast from the past, well for me anyways - It's it was the ice cream sandwich of my junior high youth. They sold these, individually from the cafeteria, for 75 cents each, with a variety of flavors to choose from - vanilla, strawberry, chocolate, coffee, mint. It's been a long time since then, but I realized that Southern Californians did not even know what an It's it was, much less had access to them. I naively thought that everyone had access to these! I guess it's more of a bay area thing, since the only It's it factory that I know of is off 101, right outside of San Francisco. However, one day while perusing the aisles of a...Vons? Ralphs? I forget now, but I saw a 3 pack of It's It! I blindly grabbed at it, and brought it home to share.
Here's a snap of the wrapper - vanilla flavor, old school illustration, same old lettering. I love it.

And here it is, bitten into. The chocolate coating, the oatmeal cookies, the vanilla ice cream. It really is the perfect ice cream sandwich. I think I can only have one once a year though...don't exactly still have that junior high school metabolism anymore, heh.

http://www.itsiticecream.com/
Supposedly, they're available at Albertsons in Southern California, but I don't recall where I got these!

Chaya Venice - DINELA lunch

Finally, catching up to some old posts - a little late for posts on DINE LA, but wanted to share anyways. I wanted to really try some new restaurants, with a discounted price tag, and I had heard good things about Chaya Venice - well, the place looks dang nice from the outside, in any case.

Service was brisk and pleasant. I think I stuck with water but Owen got some iced tea.

Bread basket landed first to the table. A good crusty white bread, and oddly enough, a raisin bread. These were both amazing in their olive oil/finely minced olive dip. The raisins really shone through!

Owen kicked my ass in the healthy department that day, he ordered the
Wakame Seaweed and Organic Green Salad with Ginger Vinaigrette as his starter. I didn't think there was anything particularly special about this salad, honestly, I can eat this at home from a bag of organic salad from Trader Joe's. Owen's not really a fan of seaweed in this fashion so I took advantage of that by sneaking as much as I could on my plate, heh.


So of course, I order the most unhealthiest thing you can order from the appetizer list, the Fried Calamari with Cajun Spice and Spicy Marinara, with Curry dipping sauce. The batter was nice and light, very Japanese tempura style. The squid was nice and supple, not overcooked, this is actually one of the best preparations of calamari I can remember in recent days. The curry dipping sauce is what catapulted this to another level - a bit of a kick, and a different flavor that I'm used to having with calamari. I really enjoyed the combination.

Owen's main course was the Spicy Lobster Roll - Lobster, Shrimp, Smelt Egg, Cucumber, Avocado, which came with more of that salad. If he had known, he would have gotten the soup of the day for an appetizer instead! On to the rolls themselves...

...here's a blurry closeup. I tried one, and I didn't think it was any kind of special at all. I didn't really taste anything that resembled lobster, the roll was pretty dry and uninspired. I doubt I would ever get sushi here if I came back.

However, my meal was much more to my liking - a Kobe Beef Burger - Grilled Kobe Beef with Lettuce, Tomato, Grilled Onion, Aged White Cheddar, Mango Chutney, Spicy Mayonnaise and served with Beer Battered French Fries. This is serious stuff. First off, LOVED the fries. Why aren't all fries beer battered ones? The crispy flavorful texture on the outside, and the warm soft potatoey insides. The person manning the fryer here is a masterful one.


Here's a close up on that burger. It's a decent one, the meat was great quality (although, was it really Kobe? Will I really know?) It was a lot more done than I had asked for (medium), but it didn't detract from the juiciness and the overall satisfuying experience of the burger as a whole. The bun held up well against all the burger ingredients. A solid, filling burger, I only ate half and let Owen eat the rest of it later, which he throughly enjoyed.

Dessert! Owen's favorite part of the meal, he ordered the Profiteroles with Candied Pecan Ice Cream and Hot Fudge. He absolutely loved this. The creamy ice cream was distinctly pecan flavored, but had a subtle burnt sugar taste in the background. The hot fudge was just the right amount, and aided in the melting of the ice cream, which brought it to just the right temperature, soft enough to cut through with a spoon but still frozen enough to let you know it's still ice cream. I think Owen would order this again, definitely.

I decided to get SOME sort of healthy nutrition in me, so I opted for the Fresh Fruit with Green Tea Ice Cream. Nothing special, some of the fruit was off season and tongue punishingly tart, but the green tea ice cream healed all wounds. A welcome light finish to a heavy meal.

I would definitely come here again, even without the special DineLA menu, but I think it's best to stay away from the sushi here. This might be an asian food inspired place but it's no sushi bar.

Chaya Venice
110 Navy St
Venice, CA 90291
thechaya.com

Alaska Cruise Pt. 2: Another Dinner at Sea

Another day, another dinner in the dining room. These early dinners were a little rough on Owen and I, as we are used to later dinners and later wake-up times (we're on vacation, right? I always seemed to get a call in the room around 8am with my mom bugging me about why I haven't gotten up yet...) Considering the later wake up time, we'd eat lunch around 1 or 2pm, and having dinner at 5:30pm, it was difficult to be totally excited about what to eat when you're still digesting the last meal...well, I guess it's the way of cruising, right?

One of the appetizers we had that night was the Spinach Turnover on a Light Cheese Sauce. This was pretty decent! I remember the outsides being very crispy and light and the insides being savory and good. I couldn't tell there was cheese in the sauce but it did add to the dish.

I love salmon, so it was a no brainer for me to order this: Norwegian Gravlax and Dill-Mustard Mayonnaise. This was AWESOME! I would slice off a bit of salmon, mash it with a roll - I kind of wish I had this plate in front of me right now.


In the interest of trying new things, I got the Chilled Blueberry soup- "velvety smooth, fruity and creamy", the menu proclaimed. It was actually alright. I was expecting worse, but it kind of tasted like a melted ice cream soup, but more watery. I usually hate that kind of texture but I think the fact that it was properly labeled as a "soup" made it okay, and the bits of real blueberry floating around made the taste very pleasant. I would almost liken this to a Chinese dessert soup, like the red bean tapioca soup I would get at the end of a Chinese dinner. This was a very desserty soup - wish they had this as an option for dessert instead of a soup.


Sea Scallops on a bed of Belgian Endive - Pan Roasted Coquilles with Carrots, Scallions and Rice Pilaf. Pretty good, the scallops were pretty big, and had a good texture to them, and the rice was really tasty. I think this is one of the few times on the cruise that I had rice.


Aged New York Steak- (this is one of those plates that are always available) - Owen got this because he didn't want anything else on the rotating menu. He said it was okay, but not salty enough (like every other meat eaten on this cruise). Oversteamed and overcooked carrots, asparagus and mushrooms, and mashed potatoes rounded out the rest of this plate.


My brother got the "Veal Cordon Bleu - Breaded thin slices of meat, stuffed with swiss cheese and ham, accompanied with zucchini and anna potatoes". I try not to eat veal very often, for the immoral-ness of eating baby cow, but I admit, the small taste I had was pretty good. Really, if you fry anything and stuff it with cheese and ham, how can it not be good?


I got the Yankee Style Pot Roast - Braised top loin of beef in a cabernet sauvingnon sauce presented with cream potatoes, glazed baby carrots and garden green peas. Alright. Nothing to write home about, but the gravy helped the meat, to not be so tasteless. The texture was good, but again, not salted very well. Overcooked peas and carrots for the old folks, and mashed potatoes.


Ah, dessert. I got strawberries cooked down in liquor with vanilla ice cream scoops. A decent dessert but strawberries weren't really in season so the slices I got were kind of tart, which they tried to mask with the liquor sauce. The one thing that DID disappoint consistently other than the unsalted meat was the ice cream - it always arrived to us half melted, whereas I prefer ice cream to be very frozen. I admit it's a preference thing.



This is my brother's poached pear - the sugar free choice of dessert for the evening. It was okay.

After a full evening of milling around, checking out the casino, and then playing video games on Owen's laptop till 3am, we would get a bit peckish and order some room service, which was operational 24 hours a day, and free. Owen really took advantage of this by ordering what was to become his favorite thing on the cruise...

Their clubhouse sandwich. Usually, it comes with turkey (from a REAL TURKEY, sliced turkey breast, this was the main draw of this sandwich), crispy bacon, and lettuce and tomato, on white bread with the crusts cut off. Later, Owen would order this with avocado too. It came with chips by default, but you could have fries or a salad instead, if you so chose.

Here's a shot with a few bites out of a half. Aside from the great turkey they used, the bacon was really tops - crispy crunchy and plentiful. Owen could down 2 plates of these on his own - that's how much he loved this. At 3am in the morning. Yep. We were living large...

More to come, for our Alaska cruise!

Stinking Rose

Stacey had never tried the Stinking Rose, and had been curious, so I made reservations for a few of us to go. Last time we had been there, it was for my 23rd (?? something like that, the years start melding together) birthday, so it had been a few years since we had been here last. We were all willing to go again, so I made some reservations and we headed over after work, which is a hop skip and a jump from where we work on Miracle Mile.

Stinking Rose has a bunch of memorabilia on the walls, a la Buca di Beppo style (although I think Buca di Beppo ripped this place off). We were lead to our booth, in the middle of a faux patio area, and settled in.

They delivered a set of bread rolls to our table, which we dug into. I remember last time I was here, they had a separate container with this garlic parsley mix which we could spoon over our bread, but this time, they had baked it right onto the bread. I actually preferred the other version, where I could spoon my own amount on top of the bread (because I would have smothered it with garlic, hah!) but the baking of the garlic mellowed it out a bit, so I wasn't horribly upset.

Owen and I ordered the Bagna Calda for the table. "garlic cloves, oven-roasted in extra virgin olive oil and butter with a hint of anchovy. "...This is a pretty neat dish... you take one of these cloves, mash it with some bread, and you've got an amazing flavor/texture combo going on. I think I ate a bunch of these on their own too...I love garlic.

Now, the main courses...Owen got the Garlic Braised Boneless Short Rib, which comes with, of course, garlic mashed potatoes. I tried a bite of this, and agreed with him - it tasted like my version of pot roast that I'd make sometimes, and that's not a bad thing. The meat was soft, easily cut with a fork, and the gravy was spot on, not too salty.

I chose the Forty Clove Garlic Chicken - roasted chicken, with a ton of garlic cloves (were there really 40 of them? I didn't count), and those garlic mashed potatoes. This was pretty decent, the white meat was still moist and not overcooked like I sadly get most of the time whenever I order chicken from a restaurant. The skin was a good golden color, and the mashed potatoes were great. I enjoyed this dish for what it was, a good roasted chicken dish.

Stacey got the Italian Garlic Meat Loaf, the other dish was mulling over to get. What a HUGE chunk of meatloaf - this was the size of half a brick, literally. I tried a taste of it, and it was pretty good, very garlic infused. More of those garlic mashed potatoes again...and...spinach? What is that? I actually don't know what that green mass is on the plate...

Bryan got the salmon and veggies as a side - so healthy! I didn't try any but he finished it all so I'm assuming it was decent.

I've had it before, but everyone has to try the Gilroy's Famous Garlic Ice Cream with caramel mole sauce. If you notice, the dish itself is frozen as well - I guess they pre-scoop these, and freeze everything, dish and all. The ice cream was EXTREMELY hard, very difficult to even try to liberate a small bite out of the garlic ice cream scoop. We had to let it thaw out a bit. It was actually very good, more of a sweet creamy mellow garlic flavor and not at all gross like most people would think garlic ice cream tastes. The caramel sauce also elevated the ice cream's flavor.

The Stinking Rose was pretty good, especially for a chain and a hyped special occasion dinner place on Restaurant Row. I admit though, my stomach hurt a bit afterwards..was it all the garlic? Maybe we're not meant to eat that many garlic cloves...but it was worth it either way.

The Stinking Rose
55 N. La Cienega Blvd.
Beverly Hills, CA