I went to Blue Mountain the other weekend to snowboard for the first time in a few years. I really thought I would have forgotten how to do this, but I remembered. It was like riding a bike. I’d forgotten what the food was like here. I think I’ve gotten the chili before. Perhaps some soup. I always ate at the Summit Lodge before, but this time around, we were at the Valley Lodge, all the way at the bottom.

By the time we ate, we were both famished. We’re dummies that forgot to eat breakfast. Then we boarded for a little bit. I was starvin! Nothing really appealed to me, but I needed fuel, so I got some chicken fingers. Boy, were these terrible. No amount of bbq sauce or honey mustard helped. They just weren’t good. You’d think it’d be hard to screw up some pre-made chicken fingers, but man, I just did not enjoy these in the least. And they didn’t have any regular gatorade. It was some weird fierce melon flavor. It wasn’t good either, but I figured I could use the electrolytes.

You all know I’m crazy about Banana Leaf. Are you surprised I chose to go there for one of my birthday dinners? I knew you wouldn’t be. I’m rarely there when it’s so busy, so at prime time on a weekend evening, we had to wait. How unfamiliar. So while waiting, I watched them make the roti for the appetizers. It started out as a big ball of dough, and he magically stretched and fwacked it until it became all thinned out and huge. It was fascinating.

After watching the roti acrobatics, we had to get the roti canai. I think our appetites had been whetted by this season’s premiere episode of No Reservations, with my favorite eater, Anthony Bourdain. He had gone to Singapore and eaten all this great food, so I’d been hankering for Banana Leaf for weeks.

I’ve had the roti canai before and liked it, but it had been awhile since I last tasted this. I enjoyed it very much this time round. The bread is thin and chewy, and when accompanied with the side of curry with chicken and potatoes, it’s a perfect little appetizer. It looks like a small thing of bread, but remember, it’s huge and has been folded over many times. It is plenty of food for two people.

I chose Hokkien Char Mee as one of the dishes to get. It comes with really thick yellow noodles in a soy sauce with pork, shrimp, squid, and veggies. This is a great and flavorful dish. Not mild at all. I would totally order this again. You know I’m in love with most kinds of noodles.

Like I said, Tony had eaten all this great food during the Singapore episode, and one of the dishes was Prawn Mee. I’ve been thinking about it ever since. I’m a fan of many of the noodle soup dishes at Banana Leaf, but I hadn’t tried this one yet. It has thick egg noodles, sliced pork, shrimp, veggies, and bean sprouts in a spicy shrimp broth. It’s weird because the broth is red from the top (yes it’s spicy), but when you actually scoop it up in a spoon, it’s actually much more grey. Strange, but truly tasty. I could have done without the pork, it was a bit too porky for me, and would have preferred more shrimp instead.

The service was fairly good, as usual. With it being so busy, it was probably not as good as other times. The hokkien char mee took too long to come out though. The appertizer and prawn mee came out at the same time, and we were wondering where the hokkien was. We had to ask about it once before it eventually came out. Otherwise, everything was great as usual. Great food, cheap prices, good service.

Remember the beautiful dutch oven that I got for christmas last year? I finally busted it out again. I picked up an old copy of the Moosewood cookbook from a yard sale earlier this summer, and with the weather being all cold and crappy, it got me in the mood to make soup. I decided to make some succotash chowder. First I cooked up some onion, garlic, and celery with some basil and thyme. I don’t like celery, so I left mine purposely huge so I could easily fish them out later. Meanwhile, I had soaked the lima beans for many hours and had been simmering them. I’d also cooked up some potatoes.
You then add some frozen corn. I had gotten some extra sweet organic sweet corn from TJ’s.

You then add the lima beans in there. I also took some of this mix and pureed it with an immersion blender (a new toy I’d just picked up for future soup making) to make the soup thicker.

And to finally chowderize it, the potatoes and milk are added.

I removed the celery at this point. So the mistake I made was that the lima beans weren’t cooked enough. I followed the recipe, but I should have followed the instructions on the bean bag instead. I should have soaked them for hours longer and certainly cooked them even longer. They turned out crunchy, which isn’t very appetizing. So mostly, I just ended up fishing around the lima beans. The rest of the chowder itself was quite fine.