I recently went home to spend Mother’s Day with my mom. I’ll post about it soon. But I realized just how behind I am on posting about my past Bay Area meals. I still have ones from 2011. Oops. So here’s one of the meals we had in December.

For New Year’s, my family likes to celebrate with hot pot. So over the holidays we paid a visit to Hot Pot Palace Buffet. It’s been a while since we’ve visited, but it was good to see that the place was as busy as ever. You can read about my first visit here.

Here, every guest gets an individual pot, and there are 8 different broths to choose from.

They also have a sauce station where you mix your own sauce.

The raw food section offers the standard hot pot items. The selection is decent and includes all the standards, though the selection is not as diverse as some other places specializing in hot pot. However, in addition to hot pot, they also offer some hot food items, including a pretty good selection of dim sum. Since this restaurant used to be a dim sum place before they converted it into a hot pot place, their dim sum selection is actually pretty well made. I also like that this place offers these random Costco frozen foods like chicken nuggets and bagel bites, which I can never resist eating.

Here are our broths.

The meats come in individual small plates which I like.
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Post tags: buffet, hot pot palace

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I tried making a hot milk sponge cake once before. I was disappointed with the result. It looked so beautiful but it tasted dry and not at all like I imagined.

This recipe seemed promising so I tried again. I was a little sloppy making it so my cake didn’t bake up as pretty as I wanted, but it tasted as wonderful as I imagined. I won’t share how much of the cake I ate myself in one sitting. I’ll just let you know it was a lot…(...)
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Post tags: cake, hot milk, sponge

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The company is based in La Jolla and the drink currently comes in two flavors: Zesty Lemon Lime and Brisk Blueberry Pomegranate. Each bottle contains two servings of water, 150 mg of caffeine and only 10 calories.

I’m not nutrition expert, but the energy water seems like a healthier alternative to other energy drinks out there, especially since there are so few calories and two servings of water.

I sampled both flavors. Each one had a pleasant taste with no carbonation. The waters are slightly sweetened with sucralose, so if you’re not a fan of artificial sweeteners, you may not enjoy the taste as much.(...)
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My mom recently gave me a bottle of hazelnut creamer which I find every excuse to use. The other morning, while pouring some of the creamer into my coffee, I had a thought. What if I could make a Nutella-like frosting by making a chocolate ganache with hazelnut creamer instead of heavy cream?

I haven’t had much success frosting with regular Nutella because of the consistency. The closest I’ve done is a Nutella whipped cream frosting. It’s really good, but I loved the idea of a chocolate hazelnut ganache idea even better.(...)
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Post tags: cupcakes, frosting, nutella

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FH and I recently had a tasty and affordable meal at Urban Eats, a new eatery that opened up in Hillcrest.

The intimate restaurant seats about 30 and has a bar area. What most impressed me about this place was the cost of the food. The menu is simple, but almost everything is under $10. The most expensive entree is priced at a mere $14. It’s rare to see such reasonable prices at restaurants these days.

The water here is flavored with cucumber. It’s something I’m seeing often at restaurants but I’m not complaining. I like the refreshing taste cucumbers bring to the water.

Crostini and Honey Butter

We were served some complimentary crunchy crostini, topped with parmesan cheese and a side of whipped butter mixed with dollops of honey.

salmon poki chips (wonton + papaya tomatillo + avocado)

For our starter, we chose to share one of their most popular appetizers, salmon poki chips. The salmon is served cold, ceviche-style, mixed with salsa and fresh avocado slices. The salmon mixture sat on crispy wonton wrappers. We loved every bite of this starter.(...)
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© Kirbie for Kirbie's Cravings | A San Diego food blog, 2012. | Permalink | 10 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: san diego, urban eats

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I was really curious when I came across a recipe for making yeast bread in 30 minutes–including baking time! Could it be true?

Well mine took a little more than thirty minutes, but it was still pretty fast and the end result was a soft and fluffy bread that is perfect as a dinner roll or a snack. I couldn’t believe how unbelievably soft these were. They did seem to have a slightly underdeveloped taste because they rise for so little time, but they are still good and perfect for having fresh bread rolls ready in a cinch.(...)
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© Kirbie for Kirbie's Cravings | A San Diego food blog, 2012. | Permalink | 4 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: 30 minute, bread, rolls, yeast

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But when I heard that Pho Lu in Garden Grove offers an oxtail pho, I made an exception. I haven’t yet seen oxtail pho in San Diego, and I love oxtail.

We went in the late afternoon. I’m not quite sure what meal we were having. Mid-afternoon snack? The menu was quite varied, offering various pho soups, bun, broken rice dishes, and stir fry noodle dishes.

FH ordered a Thai Iced Tea

Herbs for the pho:

Oxtail pho:

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© Kirbie for Kirbie's Cravings | A San Diego food blog, 2012. | Permalink | 4 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: oxtail, pho, vietnamese, westminster

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While browsing pinterest, I came across Bisquick chocolate chip cookies on Plain Chicken and I was pretty intrigued. I never would have thought to use Bisquick to make chocolate chip cookies.

I gave it a whirl. It was pretty easy to make but I encountered a few problems.(...)
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© Kirbie for Kirbie's Cravings | A San Diego food blog, 2012. | Permalink | 4 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: bisquick, chip cookies, chocolate

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I’ve had this image in my mind for a while of donut holes with glaze and rolled in crushed oreos. It took me a while to make the picture in my mind a reality.

On my first attempt, I mixed oreo cookies into the dough batter. The problem was that when I fried them, the bits of oreo cookie touching the hot oil ended up burning so while the donuts had a nice cookies and cream taste, they also had a slight burnt taste from the crushed oreo pieces on the outside. I couldn’t figure out how to mix cookies and cream into the batter without it ending up on the outside of the donut as well, which would result in it burning slightly.(...)
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© Kirbie for Kirbie's Cravings | A San Diego food blog, 2012. | Permalink | 6 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: cookies and cream, donut, douhgnut, holes, oreo

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Recently I was provided with a set of OXO LockTop containers.

I was pretty excited. I’m a big fan of OXO kitchen gadgets and have various ones in my house like the apple divider, peeler, mango splitter, just to name a few. Basically when in doubt, I usually by OXO brand because I’ve been happy with the quality of their products.

What really intrigued me with these containers is that they are leak proof. I’ve tried dozens of different food storage containers: screw tops, airtight locking ones, etc. They always leak. Even a slight nanosecond tilt will lead to leakage. So I was eager to test these out.

And it works! They really are leak proof. I tested it out with some coffee. The little mini ones don’t hold much, but I used two to store my coffee for the day. I usually use a travel mug, but it always leaks if I walk to fast or if I’m juggling a bunch of stuff in my hands.(...)
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© Kirbie for Kirbie's Cravings | A San Diego food blog, 2012. | Permalink | 84 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: giveaway, oxo

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