Issue #68: Cheesy beefy

I guess this is my first entry about restaurant food. Today I spent 5 hrs hunting down furniture and various interior design stuff at Vantaa. Accompanied by pommak / mfx, we found this cozy quiet restaurant called La Caramba (http://www.lacaramba.fi/) near the old neighbourhood where he grew up. Shopping takes lot of energy, so I was hungry as a wolf when we finally sat down to order.



I ordered a beef outer fillet with mashed potatoes and blue cheese sauce, with some vegetables grilled in oil. They didn't have mashed potatoes on the list of potatoes you can choose from, but the nice waitress said that she'll talk to the cook since we were only customers there at the time. The meal came quite quick and - mmmmmm, it was certainly delicious. I ordered the beef as medium, and it was not too bloody nor too dry, just perfectly soft and juicy. The mashed potatoes had smooth texture without any extra glimps or so, and they tasted like the perfect mixture of potatoes, butter and salt. Mmmhmm. The sauce was little bit salty and was maybe too cheesy to my taste, making the meal overall too salty. The vegetables were luckily soft, moist and sweet, so the saltness of the food wasn't that bad after all.

Verdict:
Excellent.

jML On The Road #1: First We Take Varkaus

No, this is not an advertisement for Koff beer. It's my party report from Simulaatio 4 that took place in Varkaus, Finland last weekend! Now that I've finally recovered from excessive drinking and hangovers, I can concentrate fully on writing this report that'll surely be filled to the brim with awesomeness. I mentioned in the last post that there were grand plans for reporting on this fine event, but I decided to ditch those plans while at Simulaatio. For instance, we were going to review every single can/bottle of beer we drank. Well, suffice to say, we didn't. I reviewed three. Beers #2, #3 and #11 to be exact. And those reviews were nothing special. At all. So uh, on with the show...

The trip from Turku to Simulaatio was a somewhat painful one (although not nearly as painful as the trip back, but more on that later), and we were all mostly just bored as hell when we arrived to the partyplace. But, when we finally DID get to the partyplace, we went inside, paid our tickets, left our stuff inside somewhere, and then proceeded to some beach nearby to commence the aforementioned excessive drinking. It was all fun and dandy, and I handed out a bunch of Smultronix CDs to people. (yeah, blatant advertising) The Koff picture in the beginning of the post is from the beach.

The day soon turned to night, and we were all drunk as fuck, out of beer and out of cigarettes. Thus, most of us went to get some sleep, me included. After sleeping incredibly badly on a hard floor next to some dude that had a really fucking hard time shutting up even while asleep (you try sleeping while some dude does a high-pitched "EEEH! EEEEEH! EEEEEHHHH!" noise at irregular intervals while sleeping), it was time to wake up, have a shower and get some breakfast. Me and my brother went to the legendary KGB Grilli which is around 100 meters from the partyplace, and both ordered the pictured Agenttilautanen. As we were both incredibly hung over, we figured that a meal with steak, eggs, sausage and french fries would do JUST THE TRICK. Well, it sort of did. We left KGB feeling slightly ill, but at least we weren't hungry. My god, I still see bad dreams about the size of that fucking thing.

The excessive drinking soon commenced again, and as we became hungry again sometime in the evening, another visit to KGB was required. This time, we both had a pepper steak. If the agenttilautanen was somewhat overwhelming, the pepper steak was incredibly underwhelming. By no means a bad meal to eat while drunk, but still. The steak was burned, there was no sauce, etc. It was all a bit, you know, meh.

The Eurovision Song Contest was of course something that had to be watched, as Lordi—Finland's representative—had a good chance of winning. In fact, the organizers of Simulaatio moved the competitions to an earlier time slot so that everyone could watch the ESC from the big screen. What happened then was almost as if it was from Tales of the Unexpected: Finland won! Whoa! This of course led to ze huge partyings.

The excessive drinking was far from over at this point, but my memories are slightly hazy, except that we were mostly just being sad little motherfuckers late at night/really early in the morning, treasuring every drop of beer and every cigarette puff like it was gold. But we came to our senses at some point and headed back inside to get some rest. And, in the morning, after the quite uninteresting and uneventful pricegiving ceremony, we headed back home to Turku.

We had to stop to eat at some point, and what I had was an incredibly terrible hamburger at a gas station called ABC. Words cannot describe how bad it was. It was as if someone at ABC had seen a hamburger once as a child, figured "hey, I can do that!", and not noticed that no, he fucking can't. Oh well. At least I wasn't hungry anymore. Instead, I felt sick and had to sit for hours in a car. Wonderful. Eventually we reached Turku, and it was time to rest. Home, sweet home.



Footnote:
For some reason, I took a picture of this plastic spoon that I used to mix my coffee, which was apparently very hot. Just thought you should know.

Simulaatio 4 Madness!

A big ol' bunch of the JFR crew will be at Simulaatio this weekend, so you, dear reader, can expect a whole lot of reviewin' and reportin'! Oh yes, it's going to be so good. We have grand plans for this weekend.

No promises though that it'll result in anything else than a two-line post saying the party was great and that everyone's hung over.

Issue #64: Chicken, Meet Goat

Every now and then I am required to write a post where me not being a native English speaker becomes a problem. For instance, in this post, I have no idea what to call this meal my mother made as a lovely Mother's Day meal. (heh) After asking around a bit, I found out (?) that it's a casserole. I have no idea if this is a casserole or not, but let's say that it is!


The basic ingredients were chicken, goat cheese, tomatoes and pepper. I'm no cook so I don't really know what the hell my mom did with them, but the finished meal sure tasted good! There's also some potatoes and salad in the picture. And yeah, I also have no idea how to make an aesthetically pleasing dish. I just eat. Ha.

Thanks, mom!

Verdict:
I didn't even know what goat cheese tasted like before this, so consider me edumacated!

Issue #59: Mmmmmm Pie

This is going to be a short one. Well now! I've had some lovely minced meat pies for a few days now, mostly because I've been way too lazy to cook anything myself.


Yeah. Minced meat pies, ketchup, mustard. Simple.

Verdict:
Faaaaaabulous!

Issue #58: Noodle Stew Thai Thing

Alright, I survived mayday! Let's dance! Anyway, I deliberately postponed the writing of this post til today so that I wouldn't have to write the classic "so I was out drinking last night..." introduction.

Indeed, yesterday was hangoverday, and as it was 1st May, we went out for a picnic. Like I said, the hangover was terrible, but after a few beers I was feeling fine and dandy again. After a few hours of intense recovery, we decided to visit the Thai restaurant that has been mentioned in one or two issues before this one.

Here's what I had:


Some kind of noodle stew with chicken and some vegetables. It didn't actually look like that when I received the dish, I just forgot to take a picture right away. It had some cucumber and carrots on the side, but I had already eaten them when I took the picture, plus I raped it with some nuts and soy sauce as well, as the waitress/owner/cook/etc recommended.

It was absolutely delicious, but as I was hung over, I craved for more. Not that I ordered more or anything, but I wanted to. Also, I didn't get a soup as "it was too hot outside", and I didn't get any spring rolls either as some fucking dickhead had come in earlier and ordered 30 spring rolls (YES, THIRTY), so she was all out.

Bastards.

Verdict:
Wonderful, definitely having this one again someday.