Happy Thanksgiving!

My daughter flew back for the Thanksgiving holiday on Tuesday night.  She had been away for college and missed the Chinese food terribly.  The first thing she asked for was a nice Chinese dinner.  That's where we had our dinner after picking her up from the SFO airport.  There are many restaurants in the area close to the airport.   We usually go to Broadway Bistro since they have a big selection on the menu.

Broad Bistro

349 Broadway

Millbrae, CA 94030

(650) 692 - 3378

We have been to this restaurant many times.  We usually order the Hong Kong style milk tea and drinks here.  We wanted to try the One Man Hot Pot since the weather was so cold that night.  It was $16.98 per person but the portion was big enough for two people.

The raw ingredients selection was quite filling.  There were shrimp, oyster, fish fillet, meatballs, chicken, pork liver, egg, tofu and plenty of lettuce and cilantro.  I believed the meat marinated with salt since I could taste them without dipping them in the soy sauce.

The waiter poured in the soup and vegetable firsts, then let it boil so we could cook the raw ingredients ourselves.  The ingredients were fresh and we enjoyed it very much.

The kids always liked to order baked pork with pasta. It was average in my opinon.

This is my older daughter's favorite,  Portugese baked chicken, but it was a dissapointment at this place.

Happy Thanksgiving to all of you. Hope you all have a wonderful holiday full of food, laughter with your family.

Art Museums in San Francisco

Every local knows the first Tuesday of every month is a free admission day to visit many of the recreational activities in San Francisco (i.e. museum, zoo, etc).  We went to the De Young Museum in San Francisco to see the special exhibition from the Musée d’Orsay in Paris on Tuesday.  The first exhibition, Birth of Impressionism: Masterpieces from the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, exhibited many magnificient oil paintings by famous artists from the mid-to-late 19th century in France.

Although it was a free admission day at the museum, we have to pay a fee for special exhibition.  It was $15 for adults and $10 for minors.  We rented the audio tour that comes with a headset for $7, so that we could hear about the life stories of the famous artists and their paintings.  I was so excited to see these famous original oil paintings.  Before our designated time to get in to the exhibition, we went to the cafe at the museum to get our lunch.  The food at the museum is usually pretty good.  We had these for lunch and they were excellent:

S H E L L F I S H V O L A U V E N T
 (wild shrimp, dungeness crab, bay scallops,

lobster cognac gravy, puff pastry, concord petite pois) $12.50

C O Q A U V I N ( red wine braised chicken stew with root vegetables )$11.50

Although we could not take pictures, here's a list of paintings that were exhibited.  These are a few of the famous paintings I saw and I downloaded from the website.

Degas - Dancing Lesson

Whistler - Arrangement in Gray and Black No. 1

Edouard Manet -The Fifer

 

"The Floor Scrapers" is by far the painting I liked best from this exhibition.  All the lighting and details done on this painting just took my breath away.

Caillebotte - The Floor Scrapers

 

I was allowed to take some pictures without using flash in other galleries of the museum.  Here are a few pieces of modern art that I liked:

Paper Collage

Modern Furnitures

Blown Glasses

Wooden Human Organs

It would have been nice to go to the Legion of Honor to see the Impressionist Paris exhibition, but I wanted to visit the SFMOMA since I have never been there. I had really liked visiting the MOMA in New York and wanted to see the MOMA here in San Francisco.  It is so much smaller than the one in New York that we finished within an hour.  There were not many modern pieces that interested me except for these abstract paintings, but I was dissappointed to find there was only one painting exhibited from each of my favorite artists.

Painting by Paul Klee

Painting by Matisse

Painting by Picasso

It was a nice surprise to see Ansel Adams's photos here:

It was such an excited moment for me to see there were many original paintings from Claude Monet at De Young Museum, but unfortunately the paintings I hope to see were not there.  I am hoping that I will be able to go back to Legion of Honor soon to see other great masterpieces at the Impressionist Paris exhibition. 

Educated Palate Restaurant

We have been wanting to go to this restaurant called Educated Palate Restaurant in San Francisco. For our wedding anniversary day, we finally went there for lunch. This is a restaurant open by the culinary school located inside the City College. The purpose of the restaurant is provide a place for the students to have an on site training and practice what they have learned! Here's the front entrance of the restuarant: We were early for our reservation, there weren't any customer yet:


After we ordered our food, the student waiter presented 3 kind of breads for us to choose. There're Baguette, Olive bread and Foccacia，We both chose the Olive bread and the Foccacia. The bread on the left is Olive bread (I thought it was walnut) and the Foccacia is on the right。 You can see the whole olive was used on the olive bread and the Foccacia was soft and smell with fragrance of spices, they're just delicous!As appetizer, we decided to order the fried oysters. They were just done right. They were crispy outside but tender inside. They were so good that my husband wanted to order one more, but I reminded him that we have ate some breads and we should save some rooms to enjoy our main course and dessert! I ordered the roasted salmon as the main course, it was good and the green vegetables were very tender but had the same bitter taste as arugula which I don't really like. There were a lot of lentil beans bedded under the salmon and I couldn't finish them：
My husband had the braised pork rib with risotto. The pork rib was so tender, and the risotto was soft and went so well with the rib. It also came with the cabbage and a small puff, the whole dish was just delicious：I love dessert! I would never passed on dessert even if I am full, the student waiter pushed out a desserts cart and let us choose:
We chose this chocolate mousse cake：They have done a wonderful job with this dessert. It's moist and has just the right amount of sweetness, just excellent! I am going to order this again next time I come.

They often change their menu, the one we ordered from is for November to December 2009:

We have very good experience with this restaurant! The service was excellent, the food was delicious, the place was pleasant and quiet, and it wasn't expensive at all to have all these for a wonderful lunch! It's totally worth to go back again!