The Empress's Chicken Saga Debuts

Tsing Tsao, Chinese food, Des Moines

This is another old review but I might as well do it anyway to honor the Cyclones that were playing the Hawkeyes the weekend we went to this restaurant. So I think it was on a Friday. It was show your team spirit day at our school so that is why me and my brother and sister are all wearing Iowa State Cyclones clothes. That night we decided to eat at a Chinese restaurant, which I was happy about because one of my favorite dishes was at that restaurant -- Empress Chicken. It's something I get at a lot of Chinese/Asian restaurants.

Empress Chicken is breaded chicken with a sweet sauce on it. It is served with rice. It also has veggie in it. I like it because the sweetness goes good with the rice. I like the vegetables because they are stir-fried. They're good that way because they give off a different kind of taste and they're not mushy. They're crunchy.

We like Tsing Tsao because it is not the most expensive restaurant. With your meal, you get an egg roll, a crab rangoon and soup of your choice.

Pho All Seasons, Especially Spring!

Pho All Seasons, Des Moines

On Friday, me, my brother and my mom went to Pho All Seaons, a Vietnamese restaurant that we had never been to before. It turned out to be a very good restaurant serving great appetizers, such as pot stickers and calamari.

I ate three of the pot stickers. They were so good! A pot sticker is like a noodle shell with meat and vegetables on the inside. It feels smooth and it's not crunchy.

Here I am by my meal. I got the Korean short ribs. And they tasted really, really good! Part of that was the sauce on the ribs that made it taste good. It was kind of sweet, tangy and it was a little bit spicy. At a barbecue restaurant, the ribs are like baby back ribs -- you get the entire rib bone. But at this restaurant, they cut the ribs differently so each piece of rib had just a little bone circle and the rest was meat. 

 The other things on my plate was a salad, which was sweet. It had carrots and zuchinni cut really thin. There was also rice. And in this bowl was a spicy sauce that went good with the calamari that my brother ordered.

 The restaurant is a smaller restaurant. It was authentic with cool lights from the ceiling. It was pretty busy on a Friday night. Many people were ordering big bowls of soup, like the one that my mom got.

My mom ordered the pho soup that had brisket, noodles, green onions and broth. It was served with a plate of fresh basil, sprouts and a lime wedge. When I tried it, it tasted good with the noodles and the broth. But I was not a huge fan after eating lots of spoonfuls of just the broth. The meat tasted a lot like roast beef and I really liked it. I think the addition of the fresh vegetables made that soup taste fresher and better than other soups.

My brother wasn't that hungry so he just ordered an appetizer of calamari for his meal. Calamari is squid breaded and fried. I like it because it has a unique taste that I think is really good. I'm not a huge fan of raw calamari with no breading because it's really rubbery and chewy. This calamari tasted tender and not really chewy. It was served with a sweet sauce, and fried onions and carrots. The calamari tasted great! It was one of the best I've had. 

We will go to Pho All Seasons more often now that we know it is a good restaurant. I recommend it!

The World Food Fest

We went to the World Food and Music Festival in downtown Des Moines, Iowa. There is lots of food from different countries. We got a lot of food there. We are going to talk about the foods we got and how they tasted.

Here, this is my brother Bo talking about his food:

"I ate the alligator bite. It was on a stick in a box with frog legs. I didn't eat any of those. The alligator tasted good and chewy, like meat and it had a crust around it.

I ate pizza. It was pepperoni with cheese and a hard crust. It tasted like cheese and pepperoni. Then I ate some Hawaiian chicken on a stick. It was sweet and good with a little chewy inside. Then I had two marshmallows on a stick. They burned them first. When I touched them with my tongue first, it was hot. Then it got sticky. And that is done."

OK, back to me. I ate alligator bites -- it was a little sour and fishy. It's breaded and fried. It was from a stand called Fat Tuesdays -- the food is from New Orleans. I also ate three frog legs from there. They tasted very much like fish. I really liked them. They were moist and breaded. The bone was very thin, the size of a small chicken bone.

After the frog legs I had some of my mom's food from Ecuador. It was a potato tortilla. My mom said it was the best food she ever had. Next, we went to the Hawaiian stand for Hawaiian chicken with terriyaki sauce and rice. The rice was plain and the chicken was tangy, so was the terriyaki sauce. I ate most of it until it got too sweet and then I traded with my dad. He had some Korean food -- a spicy pork bowl. It was pretty spicy. They had a red sauce in it. It had lots of vegetables and it was pretty meaty.

After that we were about to leave so we had some marshmallows. My sister got strawberry, my brother got raspberry and I got kahlua -- it's a type of alcohol. The marshmallows were on a stick. They roasted them over a little fire. They were burning hot. They were sweet. The marshmallows are from Beaverdale Confections from Iowa.

It was very crowded at the festival. It was on the bridges. 

This is me using an ear swab and that is the gunk out of my ear! Just kidding, that's my alcoholmallows!

We're eating our marshmallow. 

They are toasting the marshmallows. 

That is me eating my spicy Korean pork with rice. 

This is me eating my Hawaiian grill chicken. 

That's the thing that I just said in the thing above. 

That is not mine. It was my mom's. It was a taco that I wanted to get but I didn't.

That is Bo eating his Hawaiian chicken on a stick. 

That is the potato tortilla from Ecuador that my mom said was the best thing in the world. 

That is Bo eating his pizza from the Ecuador stand. 

I'm having a serious look. I'm a professor. Professor of Food.

That is my yummy frog legs that I will not share with anybody. Not even if they asked and gave me $100. 

Those are flags from around the world. My favorite flag: I don't know. I'd have to look at them later. 

Flag Festival with Goat

Sorry it's been so long since I had my last post. It's been a busy fall, and we haven't been able to do much, anyhow lets get down to business. In the summer I went to the world food festival. When we first got there it was pretty crowded so we had to stick together. As we were walking around I was getting hungry and we went to some place. I saw they had a kim chi taco. when I got it I took a bite and then a another and thought hmm....messy...little to much kim chi. It was the kim chi that I didn't like because it was too sour.

Next I got pork belly. When I first tried it I thought too much fat because I didn't take a bite of the meaty part. After I figured out it even had a meaty part it tasted pretty good.

Ladies and gentleman may I please present to you the world famous blood soup!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Sorry about all the enthusiasm but it kinda fits in with the sentence. The blood soup was a little bland and dry. I thought it tasted better last year?

Oh those suckers tasted good. The one with the white stuff was good. One reason I liked it was because it was goat burger and I think it had goat cheese YUMMY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Those are the flags of all the places where the food came from.

I asked for iced coffee and then I started reading a newspaper like my cousin Theron did too, heeheeheeheeheeheehee.

There I am eating ice cream stupidly. NOW ALL DONE !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Dr. Abla's Monster (I know how to spell Alba!)

Last wednesday me my mom and my dad went to a restaurant called alba. When we walked in I saw bugs in jars and old peppers to. It was Restaurant Week 2013 in Des Moines -- which means the food is cheaper.  

Heres my appetizer its bacon wrapped rabbit terrine with pickled radish and some green that I don't know the name of. I really liked the rabbit terrine. I tasted the fat from the bacon. And I also tasted the tenderness of the rabbit terrine. It was a good mix of flavors.

I forgot what that was. I think it was my dads appetizer.

I didn't eat much of my sweet corn soup. It was to sweet for me. So me and mom traded appetizers. My mom's original appetizer was the rabbit terrine.

Here I am eating my vegetables like a good boy.

Here is my entree' pork loin and a             darn I forgot what it was called. Mom said it was sweetcorn and bacon like a cake. It was too sweet. The sweet corn was mushed up, like the soup, and I think that makes it too sweet. If it weren't mushed up it would have been better.

Here I am cutting my pork loin with a knife. The pork loin was a little dry but with a bite of peach salsa it made it much much better.

The reason my plate isn't all clean is because I wanted a dessert.

There were a lot of doors on the ceiling in the restaurant and the reason I liked my spot is because there was a blue door over me. And if the blue door fell, I would be safe because I was sitting below the window part but the window didn't have glass in it.

My dessert was a root beer float -- it had vanilla ice cream and root beer. The root beer was sort of like, well I don't know what root beer is made of. The fizzy and the kind of bitter sweetness and the vanilla tasted good together. And if that was my last picture then this review is over. But I'm not sure this is the last picture. I'm checking right now. This is not my last picture... more talking.

I do not remember what my mom's dessert was. It tasted sweet again. Really sweet. Because it had sweet corn.

I'm still drinking it and I'm halfway done, you can see.

My tummy hurts! 

Do not throw anything at the doors at alba. They'll get mad at you, and they might fall and hurt the doors feelings. So you better not do that! I would recommend Alba for people that like fancy restaurants, not for picky eaters.