What's up with all the island restaurants? Revisiting Gourmet Island

A friend of mine did a project a year ago that consisted of taking pictures of food from a bunch of restaurants down Valley Blvd. in the San Gabriel Valley. While she was doing her research, she discovered the enormous amount of restaurants being named with the word Garden and Happy. Lately I discovered a few places being named with the word island. I initially thought it was a Taiwanese thing to do since Taiwan is an island. But then when I discovered Gourmet Island, I couldn't figure out what island had to do with their Chiu Chow style cuisine.

I personally have a Chiu Chow heritage. I am seven-eighth Chiu Chow and one-eighth Hakka. I'm no stranger to Chiu Chow style foods. Gourmet Island had a barely adequate selection of authentic fChiu Chow foods, mixed with some other general Asian style foods. I had been here once previously and enjoyed the foods a little bit. The last time I visited there I experienced a major issue; the taro mud dessert was spoiled. My family loves taro mud, a quintessential Chiu Chow dessert. It's only offered at a very few of the Chiu Chow seafood restaurants around town, and only a few make them well. Generally they are served with a sweet wet dressing with lotus seeds and cloud ears. The mud paste itself like most Chinese desserts should be lightly sweetened. It's actually hard and takes a lot of work to make taro mud and so we always get it whenever we visit a Chiu Chow style restaurant. But since we had a bad experience with it the first time around, we opted out of it the second time around.

Nevertheless my family and I decided to return to this place to check out more of what they had to offer. We do generally give restaurants revisits if it's decent enough, if only to give ourselves a variety. The rest of the original dinner was enjoyable so we didn't want to let one spoiled dish ruin the restaurant.

(Beef Stew with Light Broth)

We love a good beef stew. Most people are familiar with the Taiwanese version of beef stew, which has a heavy dark colored soup base. It's extremely rich and generally served with noodles. Sometimes beef stew is served dry over rich or in curry. But if you are in for a slightly lighter in flavors version of beef stew, I would recommend the Beef Stew with Light Broth. This dish is actually commonly found in a lot of Cantonese restaurants around town.

The beef this night was cooked thoroughly to a very nice and soft texture. The soup was very flavorful with a fair amount of spices. The black pepper really added a little sting to the soup. This was also a great way to save some money by not having to order an actual soup. It was kept hot the entire time with a little fire from a small portable stove that came with the dish. It was a bit strong in the beginning so we had to turn it down to keep the water from being boiled off and evaporate. It was certainly a juicy and delicious dish. The truth is all it took to make this dish good was time and enough spices. It's very hard to get it wrong.

(Fried Rice)

A lot of restaurants in the San Gabriel Valley recently had been doing promotions by giving away free food. Gourmet Island gave away a free plate of fried rice served in their sizzling plate. I believe Green Island was the first restaurant around the area that started using this wooden framed metal sizzling plate to serve their fried rice. It's a great way to keep the food continuously warm. However the rice tonight was a bit bland and I wouldn't order it if it wasn't free. Even as a free dish, it wasn't all that interesting to eat. It was basically a filler, a replacement for just plain steamed rice.

(Combination Appetizer: Roasted Suckling Pig, Fun Tai and Jelly Fish)

This was the best dish of the night. Although it's an appetizer, I never really think appetizer meant much in Chinese food except during banquets. Ultimately for most meals, things are all served and eaten together. The roasted suckling pig skin was perfectly crunchy while the meat was flavorful and retained some juiciness. The jelly fish was well marinated without it being overly sauteed. The Fun Tai was fine, but I suppose it's just a cold cut so it's hard to go wrong and hard to be impressive.

(Stir Fried String Beans)

I am a big fan of string beans, and stir fried string beans generally is among my favorite. I did find their string beans a bit on the oily side despite being flavorful. I seem to be coming across more and more oily string beans. I really prefer them to be less oily and drier. The garlic also wasn't as strong as I prefer and I generally like it with just a bit of stir fried ground beef in the dish which this was lacking. It would had given it that little bite to the dish that pulls out the crunch in the string beans. It wasn't my favorite version of string beans, but it filled my stomach with enough flavor that neither impressed me nor disgusted me.

The meal was finished off with a sweet soup free of charge. We didn't order the taro mud fearing it may turn out sour again. The sweet soup had some water chestnuts, lotus seeds and an assortment of other goodies inside. However it was way too sweet for my entire family. I never understood why any restaurant would inject their desserts that full of sugar. Fortunately most drinks in the San Gabriel Valley can now be ordered with half sugar or no sugar. But unfortunately the same cannot be said about the desserts. My mother has diabetes and both my brother and I are extremely weary about this since it seems to run on my mother side of the family. So we all basically took a couple sips and decided it was probably best not to finish it. 

Gourmet Island was a nice break from some of our usual joints. It wasn't amazingly prepared but it was still good enough to visit once in a while, very long while. Personally if I were to pick a Chiu Chow restaurant of my choosing, it would be Seafood Village. Their food is much more true to the Chiu Chow culinary style with a few more selections of ethnic dishes. Gourmet Island seemed to be a Cantonese restaurant with a few specifically Chiu Chow dishes added onto the menu.

By the way, Chiu Chow isn't located on any form or Island. It's not even on or near a peninsula.

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Holiday Colored Dessert

It's the holiday season and there are certainly no lack of holiday parties and events to go to. With so many meals to pay for and all those presents to buy, it can get pricey. At last weekend's holiday party at a friend's house, I decided to make an easy-to-make, low budget but still very tasty dessert treat. Best of all, it's red; perfect to get into the holiday spirit with.

(Red Beans)

(Red Beans in Boiling Water)

It's a pretty cheap dessert that can feed a lot of people. A bag of red beans cost $1.69 a the local supermarket, and I only used half the bag. A bag of green beans cost also $1.69, and I also only used half a bag. A can of coconut milk cost $0.59. A bag of small tapioca pearls cost $0.69 and I only used less then 1/5 of the bag. The rest was used to make a tapioca dessert soup for another party. I already had cane sugar and water at my home so the total cost was around $5.00 while the actual cost of making this dessert was approximately $3.00. For $5.00 I have enough to make almost two pots of this red and green bean dessert soup and one pot of tapioca dessert soup.

There are a lot of variations in making the red and green bean soup. In place of the coconut milk, you can use dried tangerine or orange skin. There are also all sorts of other little items that could be added to the soup, half of which I have no clue what the English names are. I have to go back to the supermarket and look them up. You could also make a pure red bean or a pure green bean version. The thickness of the soup could also be altered based on your own preference. Some people like it more watery while others like it thicker. Some prefer the beans to be boiled to a paste while others like the beans to be more intact. The red beans takes longer to turn completely into a paste while the green bean is much easier to do so. I mix the two together so that I would get a graininess to the soup while still be able to eat some of the beans sort of intact. The tapioca is optional and adds a little starch to the soup and thickens it that way. In the end, experiment with it until you get the consistency that you prefer.

(Green Beans)

Ingredients:

Red beans - half a bag

Green beans - half a bag

Cane Sugar - between half a cup to a cup depending on how sweet you prefer

Small Tapioca pearls - a couple table spoons

3/4 can of Coconut milk

Water - depends on how thick you like it. 1/5 of my pot were the beans. 2/3 of the pot was the water.

Instructions:

1. Boil the water.

2. Add the red beans and tapioca pearls to the boiling water.

3. 20 minutes later, add the green beans.

4. Cook for an hour or so on medium till the beans are all soft.

5. Let it simmer for another 30 minutes or until the consistency you like.

6. Add sugar. Taste it till you get it to the level you prefer. If you plan on serving it cold, you should add a little more sugar than you would serving it hot.

7. Add the coconut milk, stir till it's well mixed and turn off the heat.

Serve it hot as is or chill overnight and serve the following day.

(Red and Green Beans Sweet Soup)

Here's how I actually cooked it, keep in mind that I don't measure anything:

I boiled the water. I had a pretty large pot where I knew the beans would take up a little less than 1/5 of the pot. I added the water to a little more then 2/3 of the pot. Once the water was boiling, I added the red beans. I stirred the pot a little over the next 10 to 15 minutes. The red beans looked like it was a little softened so I added in the green beans. I figured I wanted it all mushy in the end anyways so who cares if I added it a little early.

Ten minutes after that I found out that I could add a little bit of tapioca pearls into the pot and so I did, just a little bit out of the bag that I bought for a different dessert I was going to make the next day. I just added a little bit off the top of my bag. I let the pot cook for about one hour in low heat. Then my Dad decided to add the sugar in for me without telling me because I was in the middle of teaching a piano lesson; I knew I had an hour. He told me he added about half a bag of sugar, which was about a 1/2 cup. I told him to let me do it myself or I'll never learn.

The thickness looked right so I finally opened the can of coconut milk and poured in 3/4 of it into the pot. The way I open cans to pour liquid out is by using a giant butcher knife to poke a hole in the middle and a hole on the side of the top of the can; one to let the air in and the other to let the liquid out. I stirred the pot until everything mixes and then I turned off the stove and let it sit there for a little bit before heading off to my friend's place.

I know I should do more taste testing when I cook. That's the one thing I don't do enough of. It did turn out really well and my friends enjoyed it. I did have a lot left over because I didn't know there were only seven of us going to the party. I put the leftover in the fridge and ate it over the next few days. It was so much better by day three chilled.

Well this holiday season instead of eggnog, which I still have never tasted, feel free to try out a red and green bean soup to delight your guests.

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