Looking for a big bowl of noodle soup

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As dinner time drew near Monday evening, I felt like driving over to Wondee's in Hackensack and ordering its biggest bowl of noodle soup. Of course, when we got there, we remembered our favorite Thai restaurant is closed on Mondays.

So we just turned toward the shopping center near Route 4 and the best Chinese restaurant in North Jersey -- Lotus Cafe, which is open seven days a week.

And there it was on the menu: seafood soup noodles ($11.95). In truth, the bowl isn't that big, but there is enough broth, homemade noodles, shrimp, scallop, squid, fish cake and spinach for two to three people as an appetizer.

The fat, toothsome noodles appear in other dishes, notably zar jiang mein, the Chinese version of spaghetti Bolognese, with a hearty meat sauce that will have you coming back for more.

Following the soup, we really enjoyed the house special, pan-fried tofu ($9.95) with white rice. The soft, eggy tofu is dipped in a light batter before stir frying with meaty black mushrooms and vegetables. Another nice dinner.


Lotus Cafe, 450 Hackensack Ave., Hackensack; 201-488-7070.
Open seven days, BYO, free delivery within 3 miles ($12 minimum).

Going meatless: Hits and misses

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I've started to look for meat substitutes in nearly every food store I visit. Is this a sign we are wavering on our meatless pledge -- now more than six weeks old? Will we be going back to eating meat? Well, we've discussed it, but that's where it remains.


I was happy with some of the items I found at Whole Foods Market in Paramus, but not with Westoy vegetarian stir fry strips ($3.39), which turned out to be seitan. I thought seitan was made of soy, but these strips are made of wheat protein and provide "the same texture and mouth feel that a piece of chicken or beef would have with only half the calories and only 1.5 grams of fat," the box states.

I stir fried the strips with organic red Swiss chard. I didn't especially like the color, texture or taste, but when my wife ate the leftovers, she thought the strips tasted fine, and I won't be returning a second, 8-ounce box for a refund.

On Thursday, I visited New King Fung Supermarket on Kinderkamack Road in River Edge to return a Japanese bowl with an errant brush mark, and took a closer look at its prepared soy items, most of them shrink-wrapped and kept cold.

Another shopper showed me vegetarian chicken and vegetarian duck ($3.99 each), but the ingredients included MSG as well as soy and mushrooms so I passed. I bought sweet-and-spicy soy chunks, fried triangles of tofu, spicy soy discs and fried Japanese tofu ($2.49 or less), plus a vegetable with dark green leaves that resembles bok choy.

For dinner Friday night, we steamed white rice, and I heated up the sweet-and-spicy soy chunks. I blanched the vegetable and sauteed it with Chinese rice wine, soy sauce, mirin and sesame oil. The soy triangles were pan fried with a sauce of chilis and shrimp. A nice meal.

The jumbo Black Tiger Shrimp I bought at Costco were some of the best I have ever had. I marinated them in the juice of a big lemon, extra-virgin olive oil, garlic powder, black pepper, no-salt organic seasoning and salt for an hour or so, then pan fried them in more olive oil until they curled up and turned white. 

I plated them and the sauce was thick with spices -- perfect for sopping up with crusty bread. My 12-year-old son was raving. We ate the shrimp with bow tie pasta in pesto sauce (Costco).

Meatless run to Whole Foods

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I ran out on Sunday to Whole Food Market in Paramus to see what it had to offer in the way of meat substitutes -- five weeks into our pledge to avoid chicken, beef, pork and lamb. There were few shoppers and it was easy to get a parking spot.

For dinner last night, we enjoyed a vegetable-and-soy meatloaf smothered in our own barbecue sauce, with mashed potatoes, translucent Korean noodles and an organic green salad. The meatloaf weighed one pound and cost $7.49.

I also picked up strips of wheat protein called seitan for a stir fry ($3.39), Italian-flavored soy sausage ($2.99) and two bags of textured soy meatballs ($3.99 each). Normally, we buy chicken sausage and meatballs from Costco. Whole Foods also had two pounds of Blue Bay mussels from Canada for $5.99, so I grabbed a bag. (Photo: Seitan with eggplant, spinach and tomato).

At Chung Dam Dong Restaurant

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Broad Avenue is the main street in Palisades Park, home to dozens of Korean restaurants and coffee shops.

If you love to see your meal cooked on the table at a Korean restaurant and if you're a big fan of octopus and squid in a seriously spicy sauce, head over to Chung Dam Dong in Palisades Park.


We had dinner there last night after negotiating with the waitress and the kitchen over what we wanted in our seafood stir fry instead of those invertebrates, which I love but which my wife and son abhor. 


The meal came with eight panchan, or side dishes, including a delightful salad of greens, two kinds of terrific kimchi, stewed radish and fish, steamed egg, and potato salad with mayo and raisins. Another was scallion, green pepper, carrot and Spam on a toothpick, battered and fried.


So we agreed on pork and shell- and head-on shrimp in our stir fry, which was cooked with vegetables and a half-dozen mussels in the kitchen and brought to our table in a wok that was placed over a gas grill to keep it bubbling. 


The mussels never opened, so I didn't eat them. A stone bowl of coarse, bland bean curd -- or was it tofu? -- was the perfect counterpoint to this spicy dish.


After we put a serious dent in the entree and several dishes of salad and kimchi, which were replenished when empty, the waitress brought out fresh bean sprouts and a medium-size bowl of steamed white rice and dumped them into the wok, stirring them into the remaining sauce and flattening the rice against the bottom and sides of the blackened wok -- for sort of a Korean paella. We tried, but couldn't finish the rice.


I don't know the name of this entree, but you can find it on the menu by its lofty price -- $42.99. The waitress told us it served only two and urged us to order soup, in addition to the fried vegetable dumplings we wanted ($11.99). We declined. 


This is one restaurant where the quality of the "free side dishes" make some of the pricier entrees palatable. The only beer available is Coors Light, and a small bottle of soju is about $12.


Chung Dam Dong also offers Korean barbecue, but I didn't pay too much attention to those selections, because we have long ago decided to buy our own free-range, grass-fed Australian beef and prepare barbecue at home, after consuming so much "mystery meat" at restaurants.


You'll find this second-floor restaurant in the same building on Broad Avenue that houses So Gong Dong, our favorite soft-tofu place. At the top of the stairs, you turn right for tofu stews, left for spicy stir fries and great side dishes.


Chung Dam Dong Restaurant, 118 Broad Ave.,
Palisades Park, 201-313-8900. No Web site.