the world is your acorn

The picture is kinda crappy, but I had the duck breast at Sunset Grill the other night and it was delicious.

The Little Red Haired Girl and I went back to Ouyang House yesterday with another friend of ours to give the dim sum another go. There seemed to be more people there this time, and twice as many carts. We had some new things this time, including pan fried dumplings, stuffed chive pancake things, sesame balls, and crystal shrimp dumplings. We also ordered salt and pepper shrimp, which were perfect and delicious.

We also talked to the hostess, who remembered us from last time. She is, apparently, off to New York soon to pick up some ingredients for the chef so he can expand his menu. They are also waiting on a noodle machine so they can make the rice noodle roll things. I was happy to hear that this dim sum venture is looking successful so far, and I’ll definitely keep going back to see the new things going on and to support what they’re trying to do. You should go too.

Yes, there is dim sum in Nashville! After I read about Ouyang House on the Scene’s Bites Blog last week, I immediately made plans to go. We got there at around 11:30 this morning, and saw right away the rows and rows of buffet. When they were ready to seat us I asked if there was dim sum, and the led us off to a room to the left where just two tables were occupied. Our server came over and immediately addressed me in Mandarin (the other two I was with are white), asking what kind of tea we wanted and saying that she’d bring a menu. It was kind of hilarious, since I haven’t been mistaken for a Chinese-speaker for a long time. I can actually sort of hold my own in basic conversation, but my vocabulary recall gets worse and worse and my accent has become embarrassing. For the rest of the meal I sort of bumbled along, trying to stick to Chinese when I could and switching to English when I had to.

The menu was clearly the special Chinese-people-menu, and had some dishes listed only in Chinese on one side and the familiar dim sum items on the other. That side had English translations, but soon our server rolled a cart over with a bunch of different things on it and I just picked from there. I’m happy to report that they had just about everything that we generally expect from dim sum (although we didn’t see the head-on shrimp that The Little Red Haired Girl loves), and it was all quite delicious. I wasn’t responsible enough to take pictures of any food, but imagine steamed pork buns, shaomai, short ribs, bean curd skin roll, eggplant stuffed with shrimp, fried sweet rice and pork dumpling, taro dumplings, and a couple other things I can’t remember. Probably because of the small number of occupied tables there wasn’t that much variety in the cart, but we could have ordered what we wanted from the menu.

The service was really nice; our server brought over the taro dumplings as soon as they came out of the fryer to see if we wanted them. She kept recommending things on the menu to me too, but I could only partially follow the things she was pointing out. We did order one bigger dish that was a wide rice noodle and shrimp thing, which was fantastic. So, it’s not quite the cavernous banquet halls of restaurants in New York with a cart rolling by every few minutes with new piping hot items. But it’s a great start. We’ll go back, probably soon, just to support their endeavor. We think you should go too. I think you can always order the dim sum items, but it’s weekends when they have the cart(s).

Oh, and we spent just over $30 between the three of us, including tax and tip.

Ouyang House is at 4523 Nolensville Pike, just South of K & S International Market. They open at 11am. Let me know if you go, I’ll come with you. Especially if you read Chinese.

via Wooster Collective

A co-worker of The Little Red Haired Girl’s just forwarded this to me and I had to post it right away. Teresa at Green Bag Lady makes cloth bags for groceries and the like and will send you one for free, in exchange for your promise to use it instead of plastic. Seems like a pretty good deal if you ask me. She is also looking for fabric donations to help her with this project, so if you have shirts, futon covers, or whatever, send them along.

After having a fire lit under my ass about exploring the restaurants down on Nolensville Road, The Little Red Haired Girl, The Superheroes and I hit Istanbul Cafe last week for our kickoff Nolensville Wednesday. I hate to say, I was a little disappointed. Maybe we just didn’t order the right thing. Stupidly we forgot to check the article from Good Magazine to find out what the recommended thing was.

We started off with some fantastic stuffed grape leaves, which I forgot to get a picture of. They just looked like 7 grape leaves on a plate, anyway. The Superheroes ordered a salmon plate and white bean soup while we ordered some sort of meat combo. The entrees were so-so, but cheap with huge portions. We thought most of the things on our plate were too salty. The salmon that The Superheroes ordered didn’t seem to come with everything as described on the menu, but there was still plenty of food and the salmon was quite good. The service was strange and inattentive I thought, and we never got the olives that we thought we ordered. The Little Red Haired Girl and I talked about this later and decided that we never actually expect the service to be all that good in small cheap eateries. But if the food isn’t great, then it becomes an issue for some reason.

Anyway, I’m not sure we’ll go back to Istanbul Cafe, but if someone invited me I wouldn’t refuse. I think I might ask for recommendations about what to order though. I’m not discouraged about Nolensville Wednesday either. Wherever we end up this week, I’ll make sure I do a little more research about what to order.

For three years now I’ve been complaining about the lack of good ethnic food in Nashville, all the while knowing that I haven’t really checked out Nolensville Rd. Shame on me, I know, but it’s just always seemed too insider, too hard to figure out where to go. Well, now I have somewhere to start. GOOD Magazine listed it as one of America’s 7 tastiest streets for affordable food, and they name five “Don’t Miss” restaurants:

ABAY ETHIOPIAN RESTAURANT 3792 Nolensville Pike
Try the: Meat combo with seven items

NORMAN COUSER’S COUNTRY COOKING 3754 Nolensville Road
Try the: Fried chicken

ISTANBUL CAFÉ 2631 Nolensville Road
Try the: Lahmacun

LA HACIENDA MARISQUERIA 3744 Nolensville Road
Try the: Fish tacos

PARISA’S 2424 Nolensville Pike
Try the: Fessenjoon

I’m psyched to go forth and pop my Nolensville cherry. Now I just have to find some folks to share my local eating adventure with. Anyone?

“Good Magazine names streets around the country with cheap and tasty food” [via Slashfood]

I have no idea how old this news is, but I’ve just discovered it. First, when you login to your online Nashville Public Library account now you can get Due Date Email Reminders and “My Reading History.” The Reading History is not retroactive, and you have to click a button to “Opt In” in order for them to keep track, but it could be useful somewhere down the line. I’m most excited about Due Date Email Reminders. I rarely get to read outside of my school reading, and when I think I’ll have a couple of days to do that I generally get greedy and take out more books than I have time for. Of course instead of returning them when I realize this is true, I hold out hope and renew as many times as I can. An irresponsible renewer does not keep track of when her books are newly due, has no paper record of it, and ends up with library fines. I think NPL is pretty lenient with library fines, and I have had $2.10 outstanding for half a year now, but I’d still like to not accrue them if possible. Anyway, the email reminders come 2 days before, so hopefully that’ll be enough of a window for me to do the right thing.

The other new and exciting thing the NPL website has going on is the new Encore catalog search. It’s a bit more sophisticated than the old catalog, although not fully integrated into the other functions available on the NPL site. Here’s some screens of what it looks like. It’s definitely more user-friendly and navigable.

The Search Result Page:

The Item Page:

Now all I really want is for them to have a better login system. Currently the site doesn’t allow you to stay logged in if you leave your account area. It’s frustrating. Also, just a tip for any firefox users like me who does not have her library card number memorized, I use the Signature extension to remedy that problem.