A HODGE PODGE OF BITES

All of the things we ate below aren't worth their own posts (not that they weren't good, but most were snacks), so I've combined it all into a mini hodge podge post. The first one I'll start off with is pizza at Arizmendi. There are a lot of co-ops in Berkeley. We like going to this one co-op cheese store and bought our bikes at a co-op bike shop. It's a big thing here in the Bay Area. Another well known co-op is a bakery called Arizmendi. Much like Cheese Board Pizza, Arizmendi makes a single type of veggie pizza every day. They even have a pizza calendar on their website. The day we went, we go to try the Roasted Carrots, Arugula, Roasted Garlic, Three Cheese, Cherry-Balsamic Vinaigrette pizza.

I figured with so many ingredients that there'd be no way to tell the difference between each one. But this pizza proved me wrong. Here's a pic of the pizza:

It's kinda hard to see the carrots, which were shredded pretty thinly, but you could really taste the vinegar and cheeses. I thought the pizza was actually very nice. My only complaint was the fact that the crust was very very chewy. But I wouldn't mind going back to try a few other types of pizza.

Next up, the Solano Avenue Stroll. The Solano Ave Stroll is this neighborhood event that takes place once a year. There are tons of people who go and vendors setup their booths all along Solano Ave. Tom really didn't want to go. He hates crowds. But I love food booths. So I forced him to go along. As walked along the crowded streets, we soon realized that the food vendors weren't concentrated in one area - they'd been spread out between all the other vendors. This kinda sucked, because you can't check out all the booths at once and decide what you want. After seeing about 3 food booths, we ran into us with stuff that actually interested us AND the line was pretty short.

So below you'll see what we got:

Ok, at the bottom of the pic, you can see a corn dog. But the great thing about living in northern CA is that they offered turkey or veggie dogs. We both opted for the turkey. Since the batter was homemade, you could actually see the cornmeal in the batter and it was pretty tasty (too bad they were so busy they couldn't refill the ketchup.)

At the top of the pic is something less identifiable and rather strange - it's garlic fries topped with crab aioli (the white stuff) and crab (the pink stuff). Ok ok , it sounds strange, and I wasn't going to order it, but Tom wanted to try it. And to be honest, it wasn't that bad. Those garlic fries were really the best part - probably some of the best garlic fries we've had here. Tom felt that there was too much aioli (he was right) and really wasn't a fan of it period. But overall, I found this to be surprisingly good. Too bad we were so stuffed that we were too full to try stuff from the other stalls.

And finally, a cheap Thai restaurant on the Berkeley campus called Tuk Tuk Thai. We had dropped my car off at the repair shop and decided to stop here for lunch. They had pretty cheap lunch specials, which ended up not being all that bad. Here's my tom yum soup below:

And my chicken with basil and noodles. It came with a summer roll on the side. The food was decent enough, and the generous portion meant that I was able to take the left overs home. Overall, not a bad meal.

And that's my list of bites in the East Bay.