Irvine trip Part 1 (Kula revolving sushi bar and The Balcony)

BF and I had some things to take care of in Orange County and decided to stick around for the day and revisit some old haunts. It's been a while since we've taken a trip to OC, as most of our road trips have taken us further: to downtown Los Angeles, San Gabriel Valley, Rowland Heights, etc.

Kula Sushi Bar
2700 Alton Parkway, Suite 133
Irvine, CA 92606
(949) 553-0747

For dinner, we wanted to go to Kula again. Kula has a revolving conveyer belt running throughout the entire restaurant. It's open all day; no break between lunch and dinner. It always seems to be pretty busy. Every plate is $2. We previously visited Kula here. I noticed on this trip that were quite a few new items.  This is the list of sushi plates they serve:

The list itself looks kind of small, but it's a pretty big variety. It seems like every time I looked up, there was a different dish passing by me.  Every time I come here, I want to get everything passing by me. I love the $2 pricing per plate.  I like this place more than BF. He doesn't think the raw fish plates are that great. I like this place because it offers a lot of things I like: clams, octopus, shrimp, mochi.

Here is the plates we ended up getting:

Seared scallop:

Conch:

Langosteen:

Spicy crunchy tuna:

Spicy tuna roll:

Ebi (sweet shrimp with deep fried head)

Heart clam:

Tako (Octopus)

Crunchy Salmon roll

Some sort of spicy roll:

Chicken gyoza

Salmon roll:

Crispy rice topped with crab

Uni

Spicy tuna on top of crispy rice

The Balcony
2710 Alton Pkwy, Ste 215,
Irvine,
CA 92606
(949) 387-0888

After dinner, we went to The Balcony for dessert. I've become obsessed with snowflake shaved ice, which is a very fine shaved ice that tastes like ice cream. Condensed milk is mixed with the ice before it is shaved, creating a fluffy sweet ice that also melts a lot slower than traditional shaved ice. I've been trying to find places closer than Class 302 and Pa Pa Walk that serve the shaved ice. I found out that The Balcony serves it as well. The Balcony is a taiwanese bar/restaurant. Their dinner menu consists mainly of shabu shabu, which I thought was weird since shabu shabu isn't Taiwanese. They also offer some Taiwanese snacks and of course the snowflake shaved ice.

Though they offer quite a few shaved ice toppings, the one I like the best, mango shaved ice, is not offered.

They have  strawberry and mango one, but it didn't taste the same. The strawberries tasted really sour when mixed with the mangoes, syrup and condensed milk. The shaved ice here is very much like the one at Class 302, coming out in sheets. It tasted good, but not as good as the one at Class 302. I also thought the quantity was a lot less.

Class 302 is still my favorite spot for snowflake ice. It's the cheapest spot I've been to and their mango shaved ice has sweet mango pieces and mango syrup in the actual ice. I was also surprised to see that the shaved ice here actually melted faster, whereas it really didn't melt at all when I went to Class 302 and Pa Pa Walk.

We also got some sweet potato fries:

These were just okay to me. I did like that they had sour plum powder sprinkled on it.

Fried stinky tofu:

The fermented taste was not strong enough. This dish was disappointing.

Finally, we got another shaved ice since we love the snowflake shaved ice so much. This was further proof that the quantities here are smaller than Class 302, since BF and I were able to polish off both shaved ices. This one we got with the more traditional toppings of mochi balls and red beans. While I normally love the traditional toppings, I've found that I don't enjoy it as much on the snowflake ice. Since the snowflake ice is already flavored with condensed milk, the toppings seem too sweet. The Taiwanese shaved ice I grew up with had no flavor in the ice, so it worked better that.

Here is the menu:

We went to quite a few other places in the area, but I'll have to cover that in another post.

Giant blueberry pancakes

One of the things I missed most when I went off to college was mealtimes with my family. With a family of six, mealtime is always a festive occasion. There is lots of conversation, laughter, and eating. For some reason, food just tastes better when there are others around, fighting sharing the same food.

I still get to experience family dinners and lunches when I visit my parents, but one thing we rarely have anymore is breakfast. Even if everyone is home, everyone sleeps in and breakfast is usually just a piece of toast. Growing up, breakfast would be pancakes, omelets, French toast, etc.

Over July 4th weekend, I finally got to have a family breakfast experience again with my brothers. For once, no one had to work and everyone was awake. It was the perfect opportunity to use my new Emilware aluminum cast iron griddle, which was provided to me by CSN Stores. You can read about CSN stores' generous offering here. I chose the griddle because I wanted to make more than one pancake at once and I wanted to make big pancakes.

The griddle fits across one and a half burners on my stove. It is super, super heavy. I was prepared for this as it's a better material, but it made it hard to clean since I had to use two hands just to hold it.  However, the grill was very sturdy, didn't slide around.  And other than the fact that it was heavy, it was pretty easy to clean. It worked quite well and I set out to make big, fluffy, blueberry pancakes. I was able to make the pancakes much bigger than with my frying pan. The only downside was that I was still only able to make one pancake at a time. The griddle is heated up on the stove. While the whole griddle gets hot, only the part that was directly above the big burner heated up sufficiently to cook the pancakes. Does anyone with a stovetop griddle have any tips? Was I do something wrong?

I had some sour cream I needed to use up, so I made sour cream pancakes. I love how high the sour cream pancakes rise. I had fresh sweet blueberries which I sprinkled onto the batter after the pancakes began to cook. I doubled the recipe below and added blueberries:

Sour Cream Pancakes

Print Recipe

Ingredients
1 1/2 cups flour
3 tbsp sugar
2 tsp baking powder
1 tsp salt
1/2 cup sour cream
3/4 cup + 1 tbsp milk
2 large eggs
1 tsp pure vanilla extract
PAM spray for the griddle

Directions
1. Whisk together the flour, sugar, baking powder and salt in a bowl.
2. In another bowl combine sour cream, milk, eggs, vanilla extract.
3. Add the wet ingredients to the dry ones and mix only until combined.
Don’t overmix the batter, or your pancake will be chewy, dense and
tough! (I love that you don't need to mix out the lumps)
4. Grease pan/skillet with butter or PAM spray
5. Pour the pancake batter into the skillet and cook until bubbles
appear on top and the bottom is nicely
browned.
5. Flip the pancakes over and cook for another minute or so until its
browned.
6. Serve warm with butter and/or maple syrup.

Yakitori Yakyudori & Ramen

Yakitori Yakyudori & Ramen
4898 Convoy St
San Diego, CA 92111
(858) 268-2888