We wanted to make an attempt to celebrate Chinese New Year this week, and what better way to ring it in than with Americanized, MSG-laced takeout? My normal go-to, especially since I moved, has been Number One Chinese in Hazlet. However, our last order there encountered a small problem: there was a piece of metal…
Tag: Spicy
Photo of the Day: November 30, 2018
Another one from Sichuan Cottage. I have been there several times now, and there is little reason to try anything new. Their beef with chili in hot chili oil is not quite the harbinger of doom it appears, but rather a complex blending of flavors and textures. The spice makes your mouth tingle rather than…
Photo of the Day: November 29, 2018
Wontons in hot chili oil from the place that quickly became my favorite Chinese restaurant: Marlboro’s Sichuan Cottage.
Photo of the Day: November 19, 2018
The famed Italian breakfast dish (and hangover cure) “Eggs in Purgatory”. Homemade chunky tomato sauce, get it bubbling, and then delicately float two eggs over the sauce. Cover for a few minutes and done. Easiest thing ever. Loaded it with pepper flakes to get some warmth on what was a bitter cold night. You don’t…
Photo of the Day: August 25, 2018
This is an incredibly easy dish with no name. Do black pepper and olive oil count as ingredients? If not, then this is a two ingredient dish courtesy of Jacques Pepin and Fast Food, My Way. Take clumps of chorizo and add them to a hot skillet with just a splash of olive oil. You…
Photo of the Day: August 21, 2018
A Buffalo Chicken pan pizza from Salerno’s in Hazlet. That thing is just glorious.
Restaurant Review: La Cipollina (Freehold, NJ)
I opened the menu to see the following inscription on the bottom of one of the pages: “We ask that you refrain from cell phone use unless you are instagramming or facebooking our delicious cuisine.” As an avid food blogger (I despise the term “foodie” as you know), this was license to go crazy with pictures…
Restaurant Review: Sichuan Cottage (Marlboro, NJ)
I wanted my 200th restaurant review to be of a solid restaurant. As an avid reader and contributor to the Hungry Onion message board, I have noticed a love affair with a particular Chinese restaurant. That place is Sichuan Cottage in Marlboro. While the board is a place for debate over dining, there seems to…
Photo of the Day: July 22, 2018
I wanted to give the cold Indian dish Bhel Puri a try. I took leftover basmati rice and some crispy Indian snacks from an event I attended and mixed them up with some homemade spicy onion chutney. The result was incredibly similar to what I have had in restaurants. I was proud of myself.
Photo of the Day: June 26, 2018
A slightly odd but delicious dish from Little Szechuan: chicken tossed in a spicy sauce with peanuts, edamame, cucumbers, and water chestnuts. It could have done without the cucumbers, as I am not a fan and the menu did not list them, but no big deal as I removed them. The textures present here were…
Restaurant Review: Edison Noodle House (Edison, NJ)
It looked like a total dump on the outside. The picture I have of the place in the sidebar of this article does not do it justice. As it happens, moments before we ended up walking into the Edison Noodle House, I had remarked that we needed to find a hole-in-the-wall, authentic, dumpy-looking place. That’s…
Photo of the Day: June 3, 2018
Back-to-Back spicy shrimp dishes featured in the Photo of the Day column. This is named (simply enough) “Hot and Spicy” Shrimp, from UJ’s Asian Bistro. It had wonderful flavor, but despite the sinister look with all those chili flakes, really failed to deliver on the heat.
