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My first Bánh Mì in NYC

18 Nov

I have been reading about Báhn Mì’s for about a year now… maybe even longer. These Vietnamese sandwiches are all the rage in the US.

I have heard about them during the first season of The Great Food Truck Race via the successful Nom Nom Truck from Los Angeles. They were selling these sandwiches like there was no tomorrow… And even in Serious Eats, Kenji went on a dissertation of what makes a Báhn Mì a Báhn Mì and he even went on a search for the best Báhn Mì in NYC.

Báhn Mì’s are a Vietnamese sandwich that originated as a fusion of cultures when Vietnam was under French rule… According to Kenji, the main aspects of a Báhn MI are:

  • Bread – French-baguette type bread usually made using rice flour for added crunch and lightness
  • Main Ingredient – we will concentrate on vegetarian, tofu-based Báhn Mì’s for the purposes of this vegetarian blog post
  • Sauce – the traditional Báhn Mì has a spreading of mayonnaise or butter cut with mayonnaise. These sandwiches are considered vegan, so there were no spread included. However, we should introduce these Báhn Mì people to Vegenaise. I think it would add a certain something- something closer to the traditional offerings.
  • Vegetable toppings – usually made of pickled daikon radishes, pickled carrots and cucumbers all cut into small thin sticks. Cilantro stems and some sort of spicy chili pepper. Some people put Sriracha sauce on theirs, but according to expert Kenji, this is neither typical nor respectable in the Báhn Mì world.

In the search for my first Bahn Mi, I deferred to Kenji, the expert in the matter and decided to head to Saigon Vietnamese Sandwich located at 369 Broome Street, New York NY; 212-219-8341. Saigon was rated third best sandwich in Manhattan so I knew it would be a good choice over all and was easily reachable by subway. Something I liked about them as well, they had 4 vegetarian options on their menu… so we had plenty to choose from.

Mom and I were super hungry and decided to try two of their tofu sandwiches – the Bánh mì chay đạc biêt – House Special Vegetarian (with tofu, mushroom, pickled carrots and radish) and a Bánh Mì Chay Đậu Hũ, Xả Ớt Rau  with Vegan chicken (tofu) with lemongrass.

I tried both versions… and my favorite was the House Special Vegetarian. Way more flavorful and interesting than the tofu lemongrass in my opinion. The House Special Vegetarian has a delicious sweet/salty peanut sauce that made the sandwich. As for the cilantro, I can certainly do without the stems. Only a few leaves on mine, please!!! I added a few drops, literally, 2-3 drops of sriracha to mine and the heat level was too much for me. I am still a spicy wimp… sorry!!!

The verdict… I loved the Báhn Mì. And if I have it again in Saigon Vietnamese Sandwich, I will order the House Special and not bother with anything else. I will try to bring some Vegenaise to use on mine… I will try to scope out other places to get a more complete sense of what a true Vietnamese báhn mì is… but for now, the intrigue is OVER!!!

Have you had a vegetarian báhn mì before??? Where are your favorite spots???

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Roberta’s Pizza and my debut on Online Radio…

16 Nov

Almost every October I visit NYC to participate in the Anniversary celebrations of our USA Devanand Yoga Center in Queens, NYC. I think we’ve been doing it for the last 5-6 years…

This time around I stayed a few days longer to take care of some other business – KarmaFree Cooking business to be exact. I was invited by Nicole Taylor, hostess of the online radio show Hot Grease to be part of her Halloween Day show. Hot Grease airs LIVE every Monday at 3:30PM Eastern Time.

Hotgrease

I was honored that Nicole was interested in a vegetarian topic… what would she be interested in talking about??? Well we spoke for about 15 minutes – a lot in radio time – on Puerto Rican Halloween traditions, what makes candy vegetarian, some of the candy ideas and recipes we have here on KarmaFree Cooking and a few other random Halloween things.

The Heritage Radio Station is located behind Roberta’s Restaurant in Bushwick, Brooklyn. You need to go inside de restaurant, across the dining room, outside into the indoor patio (if that makes any sense…) and out there, within 2 recycled shipping containers there is a radio station!!!!

I was accompanied that day by Luscious Lifestyle Diva Yolanda Shoshana a.k.a. “ShoShi” talking about how to make Halloween a tad sexier. It was definitely an educational experience for me… Here we all are waiting for the broadcast to start.

Here you can find a link to the radio Interview if you would like to listen over and over again… at least you can now put a voice to my writing, no???

Afterwards, like any respectable food oriented radio show housed within the premises of a restaurant, we were invited for a few slices of pizza. Actually, it was more like a pizza for every 2 people. My mom and I shared this Pizza Margherita… we kind of broke the rules a bit because this was made with white refined flour, but it was delicious!!!!! And it would seem rude to say no after Nicole had been so gracious to us.

I hope Nicole was happy with our participation on her show… we sure enjoyed ourselves. It reminded me of my days of being a spokesperson on personal care brands a few moons back. But different, because this time around I was talking about myself and our lifestyle, which is super cool. We are definitely open to the possibility of traveling again to NYC if she would like for us to visit her once again.

Hey, that pizza margherita at the end sure is worth it!!!

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May Wah Vegetarian Chinese Market

14 Nov

Many of you have asked me here on the blog comments, on Serious Eats, on our Facebook page, on Twitter or even via an email directly where in NYC do I purchase the soy-based vegetarian goodies I use in my recipes…

For about 8 years I have been visiting the May Wah Vegetarian Market in Chinatown in NYC. It’s located in 213 Hester St.

There you can find vegetarian chikn nuggets, tuno, veggie hams and bacon, vegetarian prawns/shrimp and vegetarian spare ribs, among many other oriental products.

You can visit them directly in Chinatown NYC. They also deliver to Connecticut, Boston, Washington DC, Philadelphia, Maryland, New jersey, Long Island and of course, New York. But you can also visit their website where they offer all their delicious products and can send them over to you via UPS Ground, 2nd Day or even Next Day. You can find them at:

website – www.vegieworld.com

email them  – maywah@vegieworld.com

@maywahnyc on Twitter

on Facebook – www.facebook.com/vegieworld

 

 

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Vegetarian Vegas – Other Notables and Pending Places…

18 May

Last month we went to Las Vegas… it was the first time for me, the second one for my Mom. Because we’re not that into gambling, we decided to spend our time visiting the fabulous hotels and casinos, lunching at delicious restaurants and at night, enjoy the extraordinary nightlife and shows.

Let’s do this chronologically…

New York New York Hotel – Il Fornaio

We started most of our days with stops at the New York New York hotel – the hotel so nice they had to name it twice 🙂  Our hotel shuttle would leave us to start our daily Vegas adventures. It is also the home for Zumanity, the first of the Cirque du Soleil shows we went to. Nice place to start… it’s a small theater in comparison to the others we saw and the theme is very risqué and very apropos to the image I had in my head of Vegas.

Afterwards we had dinner at Il Fornaio, an Italian restaurant right next to the Zumanity Theater. I’ll be honest – I was for a while confused with this restaurant thinking that it was a Vegas arm of the Rhode Island restaurant Al Forno, famous for developing baked pastas like my favorite Baked Pasta with 4 Cheeses… The names are soooo similar, no? I was disappointed there were no baked pastas suitable for vegetarians, but was glad they had a VEGETARIAN vegetable soup, meaning made with vegetable broth and not chicken broth. It was comforting on a chilly Vegas night.

MGM Grand Resort

The next night we went to see Ka from Cirque du Soleil. SPECTACULAR!!!!! Simply superb… I was so taken by surprise. I did not expect at all the visual overload we experienced. Fully recommend it.

Ka is shown at the MGM Grand Resort. We tried to eat at two places at the MGM Grand – The Wolfgang Puck Bar & Grill and ‘wichcraft, Tom Colicchio’s sandwich place. We checked out the menu at Wolfgang Puck’s place and it seemed super nice… I loved the ambiance too. It’s an open restaurant that you can see straight from the casino floor, but the day we decided to eat there, CLOSED. Apparently some filming or something… and the sandwich place, we looked for it, but never saw it. Could someone please tell us where it is???

 

Vegetarian Picnic @ The Grand Canyon

The next day… Grand Canyon Trip. We opted to travel with Grand-Adventures.com because they offered a sunset walking trip. How nice!!! Start with breakfast, followed by a stop at Hoover Dam, another stop somewhere along Route 66, a picnic overlooking the Grand Canyon, some walking thru the Grand Canyon Southern Rim trails and a drive back to Las Vegas.

I was a bit skeptical of the breakfast and lunch options – McDonald’s Breakfast and Arby’s Lunch, WHAT?!?!?!  Lucky for us online menus and ingredient lists exist. We could order ANYTHING we wanted at MacDonald’s, but I had not stepped inside a McD in over 10 years. I used to love their fries and chocolate shakes until I learned all their potato products are generously sprinkled with beef broth. Yep!!! But we maneuvered thru the menu and got a Brown Sugar Oatmeal with Apples and Raisins, Apple Pie and Orange Juices. Surprisingly satisfying for a fast-food joint… 

And lunch… we could pick among all the Market Fresh sandwich menu at Arby’s, a fast food chain that was very short-lived in Puerto Rico, mostly known for their roast beef sandwiches. Well… because LV is so close to the West Coast, they do not offer them openly in their menu, but you could order a vegetarian sandwich – just imagine any of these sandwiches here, but without the meat filling – 2 kinds of cheese, lettuce, tomato, red onions, mustard… you could even order it w/o the mayo. The view was spectacular, so the food, to be honest took second billing.

You work up an appetite when climbing the Grand Canyon...

Sunset at the Grand Canyon South Rim

The Bellagio

The next day we went to see O at The Bellagio, the logest-running of the Cirque du Soleil Vegas shows. It’s AMAZING!!! I was afraid people had hyped it so much for me that I would not enjoy it. But it is everything people told me and MORE… I hope I am not overhyping it for you…

But O is not the only spectacular show at The Belaggio… the décor inside the front desk with Chihuly’s glass sculptures on the ceiling, the wonderful interior gardens and the Fountains in front are just sublime. We got to watch a few shows there – some in the afternoons, and a few at night. I got some video, but it does not do them justice.  I would definitely stay at this hotel if given the opportunity… lovely, just lovely and elegant.

We went to the later 10PM show for O. We were not hungry before and by the time the show ends at 11:30PM, it was too late to have dinner at Olives by Todd English. I was so much looking forward to eat here because one of the first recipes I did when I discovered online recipes was their marinated olives recipe… We were eating olives for almost a month. I went overboard with the measures, as if I was really doing them for a restaurant crowd. Now Olives is in my TO EAT list on my next Vegas or NYC trip.

Another place we wanted to try was the Mandalay Bay… we visited there one morning and of course all the restaurants were closed still. There we wanted to try several places – Fleur by Hubert Keller, Aureole by Charlie Palmer, with their impressive wine tower where the “Wine Angels” suspend in wires to get your favorite bottle of wine. Amazing, even when they’re just taking inventory in the morning hours…

My mom really was taken by the menu from China Grill, she really wanted some Asian food. Unfortunately, China Grill is only open for dinner and our theater options were not close to Mandalay. I promise her we will eat here on our next trip. And we also wanted to try Border Grill from Top Chef Masters Mary Sue Milliken and Susan Feniger. Unfortunately for us, the menu is not very vegetarian-friendly. Although the quinoa fritters Mary Sue made last week on Top Chef Masters seemed interesting enough to consider again.

I hope if you’re vegetarian like us you also get to experience Las Vegas as deliciously was we did… and until the next trip, Ta ta!!!

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Vegetarian Vegas – I LOVE Burgers

16 May

My apologies to the local people of Las Vegas, but visiting Vegas for the first time you feel like going to an amusement park. It’s really visiting one street you walk up and down the whole time you’re there. And depending where you’re staying, you get to really learn the ins and outs of the hotels, where everything is, how to best get there from here…

 

A hotel we visited a few times because of the ambiance, the décor, and basically because it’s THE LARGEST HOTEL in the world was The Pallazo/The Venetian hotel combo. And The Shoppes that connect both hotels are just so special with a replica of a Venetian Channel running all through the center and the ceilings painted as a clear Italian sky… it’s really like an amusement park for adults.

We traversed these shoppes so many times that one particular restaurant captured my eye, time and time again – I LOVE Burgers. I love burgers too… but I needed to know if they loved vegetarian burgers just as much as I do.  AND THEY DO!!!! They have one Eggplant Parmesan Burger on the menu and a Vegan Burger that they only tell you about if you ask about vegetarian burgers. I think they should put it in the menu so people KNOW they have 2 options to choose from.

One day we made it a point to have lunch here. Here is what we had:

Of course we ordered the 2 vegetarian burgers on the menu… The Eggplant Parmesan is just that, an eggplant parmesan sandwich with tomato sauce and cheese on a whole grain burger bun.

The Vegan Burger is a patty made from a bunch of stuff… because it’s not on the menu I’m going by what I remember the server told me – black beans, rice, oatmeal, and a variety of veggies. It comes served on a whole grain bun with onions, lettuce and tomatoes. I was extremely tempted to ask to put some cheese on top, but decided to go truly vegan and opted not to. But not being the greatest fan of beans, the texture is creamy like refried beans, luckily not so much that a little ketchup and mustard could not solve for me.

I LOVE Burgers claim themselves to be on the way to having the Largest Fry Menu in Las Vegas… typical Vegas where everyone is in LOVE with superlatives. We asked the server which were the MOST POPULAR and she recommended the Parmesan Garlic Fries with Roasted Garlic. The fries were AWESOME… really crispy and salty from the sharp Parmesan grated on top. The whole plate was GONE. We had to negotiate who would get the last bites…

We almost ordered a Salad… remember I need to have a salad to feel I am being good to my figure. But luckily we didn’t order because we would not have been able to finish it all. After yesterday’s Buffet at the Wynn, we wanted to take it easier today… We would have ordered de Warm Spinach Salad – The Vegan version with warm wild mushrooms and truffle balsamic vinaigrette. Sounds delicious, no???

The verdict… A great alternative if you want something more casual. And if I go there again, I am sure going to break character and ask some cheese on my vegan burger… deal??

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