Golden City revisit

Golden City
5375 Kearny Villa Rd
San Diego, CA 92123

(858) 565-6682

www.goldencitysandiego.com

It's been a long while since I've done the Golden City late night special. So we paid Golden City a visit a few weeks ago. Previous posts can be found here and here.

First we ordered a pan fried seafood noodle dish. I was pretty happy with it. The noodles were crunchy around the edges. There were lots of generous pieces of shrimp, fish, scallop and squid.

However, everything went downhill from there. Beef with vegetables and black bean sauce.

This dish was very salty. Also, the only "vegetables" were onions and green peppers.

Pork chitlins with black bean sauce:

This dish was also super salty. And the pork chitlins were dry and tough to eat.

Clams with black bean sauce:

There were quite a few clams in this dish that weren't fresh.

Fish with black bean sauce:

Again, this dish was really salty. Much like all the other dishes except the first noodle dish.

Squash with glass noodles:

Despite this dish looking like a soup, it still managed to be really salty.

For dessert we were given complimentary red bean soup:

We joked that perhaps the cooking staff was all on a break when we
ordered since we saw quite a few employees eating at a table. In the
past, we've had some great experience, but this was not one of them.
Hopefully this was a one time fluke and not a pattern that continues.

Giant Blueberry muffin tops

Like many people, my favorite part of the muffin is the muffin top. I knew that there existed muffin top pans, but for some reason I didn't think to buy one until recently. I bought the Chicago Metallic Original Muffin Top Pan.
I was a little surprised by the size of the muffin tops when my pan came. Basically, it spreads an entire muffin into a muffin top. I thought I would just have a bunch of small muffin tops.

Spreading a regular-sized muffin and spreading it into a muffin top makes the muffin top look huge. I kinda wish they were regular sized. It was a bit weird to eat a muffin top without the bottoms. I think this works better for certain muffins and not others. For example, I like having the bottoms of the blueberry muffins. It's not my favorite part, but the soft, super moist bottom works well when eaten with the streusel top. I think if I made chocolate muffins, I might not miss the bottoms at all.

The baking time and oven temperature is slightly different for muffin tops. I used the recipe printed on the back of my muffin top pan for reference.

Blueberry muffin tops (recipe adapted from allrecipes)

Ingredients

• 1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
• 3/4 cup white sugar
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 2 teaspoons baking powder
• 1/3 cup vegetable oil
• 1 egg
• 1/3 cup milk
• 2 cups fresh blueberries

Streusel topping
• 1/2 cup white sugar
• 1/3 cup all-purpose flour
• 1/4 cup butter, cubed
• 1 1/2 teaspoons ground cinnamon

Directions

1. Preheat oven to 325 degrees F. Grease muffin cups or line with muffin liners.
2. Combine 1 1/2 cups flour, 3/4 cup sugar, salt and baking
   powder. Place vegetable oil into a 1 cup measuring cup; add the egg and
   enough milk to fill the cup. Mix this with flour mixture. Fold in
   blueberries. 
3. To Make Streusel Topping: Mix together 1/2 cup sugar, 1/3 cup
   flour, 1/4 cup butter, and 1 1/2 teaspoons cinnamon. Mix with fork, and
   sprinkle over muffins before baking. (I mixed with fork and then mixed
   with my hands, pressing the mixture together and then rubbing it between
   my fingers to make it crumbly)
4. Pour enough batter so that it lines the edges of the muffin tops (it's about the same batter for a regular muffin). Sprinkle tops with streusel topping.
   
5. Bake for about 20 minutes in the preheated oven.

Funny Food Fotos

Hi Everyone! Boyfriend here. It’s been a while since I’ve done a Funny Food Fotos Friday section. Both Kirbie and I have been super busy this week, so while we’ve been eating, Kirbie had not had as much time to write up her posts as usual. So, here is a post from me. We recently visited a Korean supermarket in Irvine, and I couldn’t help but laugh at some of the snack images: