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May 2024
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Week 6: Eating at Shiki3/29/2024 For week 6, we went to Shiki and all got different meals. Maggie got the teriyaki chicken with rice and vegetables, Lilly got the hibachi chicken with rice and vegetables, and Hannah got the teriyaki shrimp with rice and vegetables. We had a little bit of a scheduling problem, so Maggie got there late, after the food arrived. It turned out that Lilly and Hannahs food was not very good so that’s pretty disappointing, but because of that we decided to recreate the teriyaki chicken with rice and vegetables for week 7. Hannah had to leave a little bit early because she had somewhere to be, so Lilly stayed with Maggie while she finished eating and then they left. All in all, Shiki was probably our most expensive meal yet, but that’s probably because we all got 3 separate dishes and didn’t split a meal this time. All of the dishes were around $10, and we all got water, but if we hadn’t it would have been about $13.
For the atmosphere, there was pretty much nobody at Shiki because we went right after school. It was us and maybe 5 other people so it was very quiet and our waiters were very nice. We will all be out of town for spring break on week 7 so we will actually have to double up on week 8 and do the cooking and the next restaurant in the same week, which might be a challenge because we already have trouble trying to come up with one day to meet up together, and now we will have to come up with two days. Anyways, tune in next time to see us cook the teriyaki chicken with rice and vegetables and see if we can measure up to the real thing. Bye!
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Week 5: Recreating La Carreta3/29/2024 This week we were at Lilly’s house and we recreated the La Careta ACP. We first started by gathering all of the ingredients needed to recreate the ACP. The main ingredients were chicken, queso, and rice. To start we had to prepare the chicken which was time-consuming and it wasn't pleasant touching the raw chicken. Once the chicken was prepped we put it on a cast iron skillet and started to cook it. After it had been cooked we then added the rice and queso and this mostly was all we had to do other than adding the spices. This wasn't the best we had done but it wasn't the worse. Hannah and Maggie enjoyed it, Lilly not so much but she doesn't like cheese so that why she didnt like it. Maggie and Hannah rated it a 7 overall for taste and accuracy and Lilly rated it a 4. We had made a mistake of adding to much spice to it, so it was a little more spicy then the original which through off the taste a little bit. This week it was a struggle trying to find a time when we were all avalible. We ended up doing this on a Wednesday, after we looked at all of our sports scedules and things. We all drove separately after practices and things, and met at Lillys house. This was a quck and easty meal to make and didnt require a lot of materials or money to make.
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Week 4: Eating at La Carreta3/29/2024 For week 4 we went to La Caretta and got the ACP. This is a Mexican dish and it stands for arroz con pollo. This dish contained rice, cheese dip, and chicken. We went on a Saturday and all drove separately. We tried to be considerate of the price and make things as cheap as possible for us so we all split it. Ava Jane was hanging out with Lilly that day so she tagged along and got enchiladas.
The dish overall was really tasty. It is a big dish for one so splitting it was a good choice. Our waiter was really nice and kept checking in on us regularly. Maggie and Hannah got a water to drink and Lilly got Mr Pibb. Ava Jane also got a Mr Pibb. The restaurant was really loud that day since there was a party beside our table so filming was kind of hard. We saw a lot of people we knew eating since it was a Saturday. We went and said hey to some of our friends Zowie, and Stella. We decided to go to the La Carreta in Advance because we all think their food tastes better and Lilly and Hannah were already in the area. We went around 6:30 and it took about 10 minutes to get our food. The service was really good and they were really quick with everything which made the experience better. Lilly is not a big fan of cheese so she didn’t really enjoy it, but she said it was okay. We had to go on a Saturday because me and Lilly had games pretty much taking up our whole week. It has been a bit difficult to coordinate our schedules but I think we're making it work pretty well. Next week we are going to cook at Lilly's house.
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Week 3: Recreating Chang Thai3/11/2024 For week three, our goal was to try to recreate the Drunken Noodles from Chang Thai. We started by finding a recipe online that was similar to the dish we ate and then we gathered all of the ingredients we would need. Overall, I would say the price for the ingredients wasn’t that bad because each of us would have spent around $6 for what we got. We all went to Hannah's house and started cooking. First, we boiled the noodles and then we mixed up the sauce by using three or four different oils and sauces and finally we cooked the broccoli and the carrots to add them in.
When we were finally done cooking, we dished up the food and sat down to see how well we had recreated the Drunken Noodles. All of us thought the noodles were pretty good as far as the taste but not very accurate compared to the dish at Chang Thai. Our ratings were around 6-8/10 for flavor and 5-7/10 for accuracy. Part of this could have been the fact that we made a few adjustments to the recipe, like adding a few more tablespoons of brown sugar and chili sauce, but even though it didn’t turn out exactly how we thought it would, we learned some valuable lessons for the next dish we make. In conclusion, we are done with our first part of Genius hour, the dinner, and the recreation. The next restaurant we have on our schedule is La Carreta on Wednesday and we are all looking forward to that! We are planning to get an ACP and try to recreate that, which we think will go a lot better than the Drunken Noodles. See you next week!
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Week 2: Eating at Chang Thai3/4/2024 For week two we decided to start the actual project. On 2/28/24, we went to Chang Thai and ordered the drunken noodles, and California Tempura rolls. We all gave this dish a rating of a 10/10. They were both so good and we all enjoyed them. We split the bill between these two items to try and save a little bit of money. The total came up to around $10 for each of us.
We did face some setbacks when trying to complete this week's task. First we had to find a day that worked well for all of our schedules, and when we found a day that worked for all of us there ended up being bad weather that almost caused us to not go. In the end though the weather wasn't a huge problem so we were able to go and eat. We all didn't want to drive because of traffic, so we met at the school and Hannah took us all to Chang Thai. We had a very nice waiter who’s name was Freddy. He was very kind and was very on top of things. Anytime we needed a refill we didn’t even have to ask he already had done it. We got our food very quickly and did not have to wait long at all. Everyone was so nice and it was an amazing environment. Next week we plan to look up recipes and go to the grocery store to get the ingredients needed to make the Drunken noodles. It is difficult because we are still keeping in mind our budget and busy schedules, since two of us play sports. We are going to try to find the cheaper version of all the ingredients needed and hopefully make it still taste the same. Overall I would say that this week was very successful and was a great start to our genius hour project!
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Week 1: Planning it out3/4/2024 For week one we did a lot of planning. We sat in the hallway and brought a notebook and some other materials and started doing research. At first we weren't sure as to what we wanted to do. We all had some different ideas and thoughts along the way. We ended up coming up with the idea to go around to different restaurants every other week and try different culture foods and then try to recreate the foods.
We didn’t really think about the price when we first started which definitely should've been a leading factor into making our decision. We decided to go to the restaurants every other week just to save a little bit of money. We also decided to split the cost of one meal to make everything overall a bit cheaper. The weeks in between eating out we wanted to try to recreate the foods. In order to do that we are going to have to go to the grocery store and gather all the ingredients we will need. We then will split the end cost of that to make it cheaper for everyone. Then we will go to one of the group members' houses and recreate the recipe we ate the previous week. At the end of the week we will sit down and do a podcast style episode on how the dishes differed from each other and if we would recommend making them. The way we started out was by mapping out every restaurant we will be going to and the dishes we will be trying and recreating. The restaurants we are trying on order are Chang Thai, La Carretta, Shiki, Venizia, and Olive Garden. We are trying to get simple dishes but still ones that show the cultural differences. At the end of our project we will take all the video clips and add them into one long video to present to the class as our final piece. |