Aja in two takes

This week is Buckhead restaurant week. That means that participating restaurants offer 3 course meals at a pre-set cheap price. When most areas of Atlanta have it, the prices of the menus are usually $15 or $25. But because Buckhead needs to uphold its glitzy and pretentious reputation, its restaurants offer dinner for $25 or $35.

Anyway, on Friday night Cashew and I decided to try Aja, a so-called Asian fusion restaurant, i.e., they admit they serve Americanized Asian food... Well, the menu did look amazing, so we were excited to try it. For appetizers, we chose the Green mango salad with dried beef and the Spicy Cambodian fish soup. I liked my soup. It was light (read, no coconut milk) and not over-salty. The mango salad didn't have any mango flavor, so I was a little disappointed. I liked the dry beef, but Cashew says that it wasn't as good as traditional Vietnamese dried beef. Sometimes it is advantageous to never have tried the original version :P

Our entrees were the striped bass and the Masaman curry with beef. I loved both dishes. The bass tasted like really good pork, but with the light texture of fish. Sounds impossible, but I swear that's what it seemed like to me. The bass came on a field of rice with some kind of pesto. Again, the rice was really really light, especially compared to the sticky rice I got with my curry. As to the curry, it was the best Masaman curry I've had. Well, I have to admit that the only other place I've had curry is at Top Spice, and it is not a place for light food... Again, Cashew pointed out that real Masaman curry is better than what I got. It seems like I need to find a way to try more traditional Asian food...

Finally, our desserts were the Mango lassi and a parfait with pomegranate seeds and pistachios. The mango lassi was amazing. It tasted as if it was made with real fruit and not some weird juice concentrate. The same can't be said about the parfait :( I do like plain yogurt that's pretty sour, but the parfait had a really weird sour flavor that I couldn't figure out. Well, the pomegranate seeds and pistachios saved what it would have been an uneatable dessert...

The title of this post is "Aja in two takes." That's because I went to Aja today as well... Yup, that's right. I was supposed to meet up some friends from school for dinner, and they ended up making a reservation for Aja... The other choices on the $25 menu didn't seem too appealing to me, so this time I ordered off the regular menu. I got the miso soup and the wok-seared tuna with sauteed greens. The miso soup wasn't much better or worse than any other miso soup I've had. Haha, maybe miso soup is a fool-proof item that's impossible to mess up.

The tuna was pretty good, but not the best I've had (that honor is still held by Pura Vida). It was well seared, but it seemed a little dry. The sauteed greens were amazing, though. They consisted mostly of bok choi and something that looked like spinach (or a similar plant). They weren't soaked in oil, yet they had plenty of moisture. They were perfect!

While there were some good dishes at Aja, I'm pretty sure I won't go back. The two things I really liked, the tuna and bass, could be found at most good restaurants. I guess I'm not too excited about the idea of fusion Asian cuisine. The regular dinner menu at Aja had a section called dim sum. However, most all but 1-2 items in that section were not what I would think of dim sum. Aja did make me crave dim sum again, so I hope I can have it soon!

P.S. Especially for Pumpkin, I edited the pictures I took on Friday with my phone. I did remember to bring my camera today :)

Warming up

This sounds crazy, but there was still snow and ice in Atlanta a week after it originally fell. Thankfully, the temperatures are above freezing now. Everyone's mood is also warming, and people are enjoying the outdoors again after a week of cabin fever.

Last Saturday I met up with several people for dinner. We decided to have Thai food again. Thai food just seems perfect in the cold weather. Well, I think it's perfect in any weather, too :P We went to Noodle in Midtown. It won some distinction from Creative Loafing, but I don't remember the specifics now... Anyway, I was excited to try it. It has a pretty cool interior: long tables for community seating in the middle, booths on the sides. The menu seemed amazing when you read through it. There were so many things I wanted to try. I eventually settled on Green Curry Soup with shrimp. It had egg noodles instead of rice noodles. Honestly, I didn't particularly care about the soup. The noodles were too dense and long; it was hard to eat them unless you slurped them. Nothing else about the soup was very flavorful, either.

Cashew got a dish that was supposed to resemble a bird's nest. I don't remember the exact name, sorry... I just remember it came with crispy noodles, and had everything else spooned on top. I think Cashew did like her dish. Her only complain was that there was too much filling on top and you couldn't clearly distinguish the next shape. Our other friends got pho soup and green curry with chicken and broccoli.

Even though we were all pretty stuffed after the dinner, we decided to get dessert. Missing the warm weather, three of us got ice cream: cinnamon flavor (Cashew), coconut flavor (me) and green tea flavor. Our other friend tried the coconut cake. The consensus on the table was that the cake was the best dessert. It was so light and fluffy with the perfect smooth cream between the layers. I also loved my coconut ice cream. The green tea ice cream tasted just like green tea, which is great if you love that flavor (which I don't, but my friend does). The cinnamon ice cream had a strong cinnamon flavor which was too overpowering, so no one enjoyed it too much... Poor cashew... And to top it all, the serving size were HUGE! Three scoops! At that point I was glad for the filling dinner because I was able to eat only half the ice cream, haha!

Snow blues

I must admit, I am not doing that well at this blogging thing. I keep forgetting to take pictures when I go out. But I think I'll simply start describing the food, just so I can mention all the places I go to.

But for today, I do have pictures. Last week Atlanta got hit by an epic snow storm, and got a whooping six inches of snow :P  And these six inches of snow were enough to close down the city for a whole week... Well, the freezing rain right after the snow and the freezing temperatures for two days did make the situation worse than it might seem. Anyway, the fact is that I was stuck at home for 5 days. My friend Cashew was visiting me, so she was stuck here for the same length of time. By the 5th day, we were so ready to go out, we decided to walk to the local Top Spice Thai restaurant. Having spicy Thai food was a great idea for a cold winter day :) We first tried their veggie and tofu soup and coconut soup. Both were good enough, but nothing special.

For lunch we shared the spicy basil chicken and a seafood noodle dish with an unpronounceable name :P I only remember that it was the last item on the lunch menu. Just like the soup, the entrees were ok. They weren't as spicy as we wanted them to be, but at least they weren't too salty either. Despite everything, I do think that Top Spice has the best reasonably-priced Thai dishes in Atlanta. I've had Thai food at MaLi as well, but I don't remember what it tasted like :(

After the lunch, Cashew and I were looking for something new to do after a week of watching movies and TV. Pumpkin had sent us a recipe for French macarons, so we took up the challenge and decided to make them. The recipe she sent us was really really easy to follow, and included insider tricks and secrets that we credit with our ultimate success. Maybe our macarons were not the best ever made, but they were a valiant first try. Their texture was perfect, which is the hardest thing to get right for macarons.

Btw, here's the link if anyone else wants to attempt this culinary challenge: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jamie-schler/homemade-macarons-recipe_b_807876.html Enjoy!