Monthly Archives: May 2012

Eat Out Restaurant Review

Moii Café

Cute Dia­gram — we read some mes­sages in the jar too!

My impres­sion of Moii Café is that it is a cutely odd place — does that even make sense?  I vis­ited the place with a group of friends and a coupon. It is located in Kit­si­lano on West Broad­way. The café is very small and their spe­cial­ties are crepes, coffee/tea, and drinks . They don’t have a web­site, how­ever, they have a face­book page that hasn’t been updated for a long time. The café inte­rior feels a bit vin­tage and had some cute crafty details. Their store hours are that they are “usu­ally” open seven days a week when they “feel like it”, so I made sure they were open before head­ing there.

Menu

The menu is stained and got this vin­tage look on it with items typed out with a type­writer — I don’t even know when I last used one. We ordered a total of four dif­fer­ent types of crepes, two savoury and two sweet.

Mixed Fruit & Ice-Cream — $8.50

Oddly, the sweet crepes came first, start­ing with the mixed fruit with ice-cream. I liked the tex­ture of the crêpe, it was very thin and had some crunch on the exte­rior. The fruits were fresh — they tasted okay, but much bet­ter when the ice-cream. It would even be bet­ter if they used home­made vanilla ice-cream.

Nutella + Mar­shal­low — $5.50

Next came the nutella and marsh­mal­low crêpe. The marsh­mal­low melted like cheese on a pizza as we cut into it. Nutella and marsh­mal­low tasted good together, but it was quite sweet because of the marsh­mal­low. I won­der if they can do a s’mores crêpe.

Teri Mayo — $9.50

After the sweets, the teri-mayo arrived. I read some reviews prior to the visit and many peo­ple rec­om­mended this crêpe. It had BBQ chicken pieces, bonito flakes, ched­dar & moz­zarella cheese, okonomi sauce, and wasabi. We told them to go easy on the wasabi as one of our friends wasn’t too fond of it. We all thought it was deli­cious, the flavours all worked very well. I loved how the cheese was gooey and it brought all the tex­tures together. It def­i­nitely reminded me of the teri-mayo Japadog. The okonomi sauce added a flavour­ful sweet ele­ment to it.

Great Cana­dian — $9.50

Last but not least, the great Cana­dian. It had smoked salmon, spinach, ched­dar & moz­zarella cheese. There was a gen­er­ous amount of smoked salmon in it, it was the cooked type, not the raw type. To my sur­prise, this one was quite tasty, all the ingre­di­ents tasted very good together.

I per­son­ally enjoyed the savoury crêpe more than the sweet ones. I think it is because I am used to sweet crêpe so I found the savoury ones more interesting.

Kitchen

Their kitchen is in front and it is very small, every­thing was pre­pared in the tiny cor­ner. “Moii” sounds Japan­ese but I think the place is run by Tai­wanese (the bub­ble tea menu gave it away). If I go next time, I would want to try more of their savoury flavours, and maybe some bub­ble tea.

 

Con­clu­sion:

Ambi­ence: 3/5
Food: 3.5/5
Ser­vice: 4/5
Value: 3.5/5

Moii Cafe Kitsilano on Urbanspoon

Chilled Dessert Recipes

JC100: Chocolate Mousse

I am very excited to post my first recipe from Julia Child in cel­e­bra­tion of her 100th birth­day! I was asked to par­tic­i­pate in JC100, a cam­paign launched by pub­lisher Alfred A. Knopf to cel­e­brate what would have been Julia Child’s 100th birth­day in August by cook­ing her recipes. One of her recipes will be revealed each week and we would make it and write a post about it. As an avid home cook, it is my plea­sure to try any inter­est­ing home cook­ing recipes, let alone French ones. This week’s recipe is Choco­late Mousse.

Chal­lenge Accepted.

This mousse recipe doesn’t use any whip­ping cream, instead it uses beaten egg whites to pro­duce its light and fluffy tex­ture. The orange liqueur also com­pli­ments the choco­late very well.

Choco­late Mousse by Julia Child

Ingre­di­ents

    Yolks and Sugar Mixture:
  • 4 Egg Yolks
  • ¾ cup Gran­u­lated Sugar
  • ¼ cup Orange Liqueur (I used Grand Marnier)
  • A pan of not-quite-simmering water
  • A basin of cold water
  • Choco­late Mixture:
  • 6 ounces or squares Semi-Sweet Bak­ing Choco­late (I used 72% cocoa)
  • 4 tbsp. Strong Coffee
  • A small saucepan
  • 6 ounces or 1½ stickes of soft­ened Unsalted Butter
  • Optional: ¼ cup finely diced, Glazed Orange Peel
  • Meringue:
  • 4 Egg Whites
  • Pinch of Salt
  • 1 tbsp. Gran­u­lated Sugar

Method

  1. Beat the egg yolks and sugar together until mix­ture is thick, pale yel­low, and falls back upon itself form­ing a slowly dis­solv­ing rib­bon. Beat in the orange liqueur.
  2. Then set mix­ing bowl over the not-quite sim­mer­ing water and con­tinue beat­ing for 3–4 min­utes until the mix­ture is foamy and too hot for your finger.
  3. Then beat over cold water for 3–4 min­utes until the mix­ture is cool and again forms the rib­bon. It will have the con­sis­tency of mayonnaise.
  4. Melt choco­late with cof­fee over hot water. Remove from heat and beat in but­ter, a bit at a time, to make a smooth cream.
  5. Beat the choco­late into the yolks and sugar, then beat in the optional orange peel.
  6. Beat the egg whites and salt until soft peaks are formed; sprin­kle on the sugar and beat until stiff peaks are formed.
  7. Stir one fourth of the egg whites into the choco­late mix­ture. Fold in the rest.
  8. Turn into serv­ing dish, dessert cups, or petits pots. Refrig­er­ate for at least 2 hours or overnight.

Notes

Excerpted from Mas­ter­ing the Art of French Cook­ing by Julia Child. Copy­right © 1961 by Alfred A. Knopf. Reprinted with per­mis­sion from the pub­lisher Alfred A. Knopf, a divi­sion of Ran­dom House, Inc.

http://​yum​my​work​shop​.com/​2​0​1​2​/​0​5​/​1​7​/​j​c​-​1​0​0​-​c​h​o​c​o​l​a​t​e​-​m​o​u​s​se/

My step-by-step gallery:

I thought it would be inter­est­ing to serve the mousse in a mason jar, it seems like a trend now to serve desserts in jars. :) I have also topped it with some whipped cream, shaved choco­late, and fresh mint leaves. I found that the mousse is best enjoyed at a warmer tem­per­a­ture because it will have a very smooth, light, and creamy tex­ture. I had some right out of the fridge but the tex­ture was close to a choco­late ganache. I used an extra dark choco­late (72% cocoa) instead of semi-sweet because I just love the flavour of dark choco­late. The choco­late, orange and cof­fee flavours in the mousse — so deli­cious together! This was quite easy to pre­pare, most of the ingre­di­ents are likely already in your pantry, so give this a try!

Freestyle Recipes Soup

Easy Vegetable Beef Barley Soup

Besides bak­ing, I also love mak­ing soups because they are super easy to make and of course they taste much bet­ter than their canned coun­ter­parts. For me, there is really no rea­son to buy canned soups when it is so sim­ple to make and it is much health­ier. Unless of course if you are tak­ing it to camp­ing. In this recipe, I have used my home canned toma­toes, in which the recipe can be found here. But you can always use store-bought, it would taste just as good. I have also used pearl bar­ley, which needs to be cooked before adding it into the soup. Alter­na­tively, you can also add quick-cooking bar­ley directly into the soup and sim­mer for a short time until it is tender.

 

Easy Veg­etable Beef Bar­ley Soup

Ingre­di­ents

  • 1–2 tbsp. Veg­etable Oil
  • 1 lb. Stew­ing Beef, cubed
  • 4 stalks of Cel­ery, diced
  • 1 medium Car­rot, diced
  • 2 medium Onions, diced
  • 1 cup Pearl Barley
  • 500 mL Canned Tomatoes
  • 4 cups Hot Water
  • 2 Beef Bouil­lon Cubes
  • 2 Bay Leaves
  • 2–4 sprigs of fresh Thyme

Method

  1. Cook bar­ley if you are using pearl bar­ley — I cooked 1 cup of pearl bar­ley in 2 cups of water in my rice cooker.
  2. Dice all the veg­eta­bles to bite size.
  3. Heat oil in a large heavy pot or dutch oven on high heat. Sautee stew­ing beef until browned on all sides — this will give the soup more flavour.
  4. Add diced veg­eta­bles and sautee for about 3–4 more minutes.
  5. Pour in the hot water, canned toma­toes, bay leaves, thyme, and beef bouillon.
  6. Bring the soup to a boil and reduce heat and sim­mer until the beef is tender.
  7. Add cooked pearl bar­ley and cook for 5–10 minutes.
  8. Remove bay leaves, and thyme sprigs.
  9. Salt and pep­per to taste.
  10. Optional: Gar­nish with chopped parsley.
http://​yum​my​work​shop​.com/​2​0​1​2​/​0​5​/​1​6​/​e​a​s​y​-​v​e​g​e​t​a​b​l​e​-​b​e​e​f​-​b​a​r​l​e​y​-​s​o​up/

This flavour­ful soup makes a great lunch or din­ner com­pan­ion. I love the chewy tex­ture that is left in the cooked bar­ley and the earthy aroma of the thyme. I’ve used good qual­ity, organic beef bouil­lon cubes but of course beef stock or veg­etable stock will also work well in the recipe.

 

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