Frugal Fridays: Mulitas - Checked off the Guide

After months of obsessively uploading everything I eat out to Foodspotting, I finally decided to create some 'Guides' on the site - culinary tours or challenges, where you list foods at restaurants, and then people can try to collect a badge for your guide by eating and posting pictures of the items. There weren't many created for Seattle yet, so I thought I'd make some, if for no other reason than to give myself some ideas of items to try, or remind myself of restaurants I've been meaning to check out.

Inspired by the tasty carne asada tacos Dan & I had with Ruth & Paul in White Center, my first guide is of Seattle Street Eats, including those tacos from Taqueria La Fondita II, as well as things like Poutine from Skillet, Beignets from Where Ya At Matt?, and Spam Musubi from the brand new Motosurf truck on the UW campus. I'm a food truck novice, so creating this list forced me to do some research of what's out there, and inspired me to try to find opportunities to try more street meats and sweets.

Today turned out to be my first chance to begin checking things off the guide, as I worked from home after a morning doctor appointment. Every day I pass by Tacos El Asadero - a converted school bus that serves Mexican street food right next to the Othello Link Light Rail station at Othello & MLK. Since I walk by in the morning and evening when I'm going to home to make dinner, it's never a time when a quick snack makes sense. But today I hopped in the car and drove over to get the item I'd put on the guide: Mulitas.

I actually had no idea what mulitas were, but found reviews of El Asadero that recommended them, so that's what I put in the guide. Turns out mulitas are kinda like mini quesadillas - two small flour tortillas with cheese and meat sandwiched in between. I figured as long as I was being adventurous, I might as well go all the way, so I ordered mine with tongue - lengua.

The two little mulitas were a perfect lunch, and a bargain at just $1.50 each. The tongue was cut into little cubes and was tender and flavorful. I'll definitely order them again in the future, and will be back to El Asadero to try more of their menu. The next item might very well be lengua again, as the second Guide I created, titled Offal-y Tasty Seattle (a guide to dishes featuring offal and other 'extra bits') features the Lengua Tacos at El Asadero.

Frugal Fridays: Fresh Table

On my walk to Thoa's the other night for dinner, I checked out the menu in the window of Fresh Table at 4th and Spring and saw something promising: Salad Wraps for $4.25 (plus tax). I wondered whether these wraps could be a satisfying lunch and vowed to give them a try.



They have four Salad Wraps to choose from: Beverly Hills Chop, Chicken Caesar, Greek - Feta Lover's, and Asian Crunch. I went for the Chicken Caesar, which turned out to be a full sized Roma tomato tortilla filled with Romaine lettuce, grilled chicken, parmesan cheese, croutons and dressing - and served with a lemon wedge. True to their name, it tasted fresh and it was definitely a filling lunch.



(Frugal Fridays is a series dedicated to finding Seattle lunch spots where you can walk in with a $5 bill and walk out with a fulfilling, preferably healthy, lunch. If you have suggestions of places in the Seattle area with a great lunch for under $5 after tax, post a comment - I'd love the help.)

Frugal Fridays: Tig Asian Tapas Bar

This week, I had another Frugal Friday find while wandering down in Pioneer Square. Just two doors down from the Seattle Underground Tour I saw a sign in a window advertising lunch specials - REAL lunch specials (as opposed to the spots claiming $7.95 is a special) - at TIG Asian Tapas Bar, which occupies the space at 614 1st Ave.



After a few moments without anyone popping up at the vacant host station up front, I peeked around a wall dividing the entrance from the dining room to find a mostly empty restaurant with no art on white walls except for some graffiti scrawls. I caught the eye of the only staffer, but had to ask if I should seat myself. I definitely got a vibe that this was a nightclub, not a restaurant - which had me questioning my choice. Fighting against my intuition to turn around and leave, I sat down and was brought menus and a glass of water.



I was happy to see quite a few cheap eats on the lunch specials menu, including Chicken Teriyaki ($3.99) and Spicy Ramen ($2.99). I went for the one that sounded the healthiest and heartiest despite the price tag: Veggie Bibimbap for just $3.99.



When the bartender/server brought out a huge bowl of food and a little bowl of hot sauce, I was a little surprised by how big it was and how beautiful the sunny side up egg was on top of all the fresh veggies. I took a moment to take it in and get ready to photograph it, when the server returned to tell me how to eat bibimbap - mixing the egg, veggies and rice together first. He explained that the word bibimbap' actually means 'mixed rice' in Korean. The culinary education definitely won me over. I stirred it up and dug in.

The generous portion was brimming with carrots, cabbage, arugula, zucchini, scallions, onion and mushrooms over white rice, and blanketed by the egg. The hot sauce wasn't all that spicy - more spicy/sweet - so after a tentative taste I stirred the whole thing in. The veggies were cooked well - still crisp and offering their distinct flavors to the dish. It wasn't greasy or oily, and was filling in a good way.

If my bibimbap was any indication of the quality of the rest of the dishes, I highly recommend checking out TIG at lunch - just don't be shy about walking in and seating yourself.



(Frugal Fridays is a series dedicated to finding Seattle lunch spots where you can walk in with a $5 bill and walk out with a fulfilling, preferably healthy, lunch. If you have suggestions of places in the Seattle area with a great lunch for under $5 after tax, post a comment - I'd love the help.)

Frugal Fridays: Noodle King

Awhile back, I unofficially threw in the towel with Frugal Fridays - as I was having more and more trouble finding satisfying lunch options for under $5 (after tax). Some of the options I found had raised their prices, and it seemed inflation was eliminating any new options. I would walk around for an hour and not find anything, then settle on something disappointing. Then today, quite by luck, I stumbled upon a lunch for just $4.35 after tax.



A lunch date had to be postponed, so I found myself without a lunch or a plan. I just finished reading Serve the People: A Stir-Fried Journey Through China, so was eager to explore Chinese food beyond the familiar Kung Pao & General Tso's. I had read about the recently opened Noodle King over on MSG150.com, and thought it sounded perfect.



The restaurant is clean, spacious and well lit, thanks to the high ceilings, mirrors and windows - and the staff were friendly and efficient. I was seated quickly and given water and a bowl of kimchee-esque pickled & spicy veggies to snack on. The menu includes a wide variety of dishes, though nearly all feature the hand-tossed noodles you can watch being made in the kitchen. In the interest of eating outside my comfort zone, I went with the Soy Sauce Pig's Feet Noodle Soup (small) - a Pho-like broth with thick, round noodles, baby bok choy, cilantro, and delicious pig's feet chunks that seem to have been braised, as the meat literally fell off the bones.



The soup was perfect for a cold, rainy Seattle spring day - and I was happy to have tried something new. And then the bill came, and I was even more happy - $4.35. Hard to beat that!



(Frugal Fridays is a series dedicated to finding Seattle lunch spots where you can walk in with a $5 bill and walk out with a fulfilling, preferably healthy, lunch. If you have suggestions of places in the Seattle area with a great lunch for under $5 after tax, post a comment - I'd love the help.)

Frugal Fridays: La Vaca

For this week's Frugal Friday adventure, I made my way over toward the Pike Place Market, but stopped just before at the little walk-up window at 1429 1st Ave that is La Vaca.



I'd been searching the web for ideas of new frugal lunch spots, and kept running across mention of La Vaca - a little Mexican restaurant that I used to go to fairly often, when they had a second location close to Cherry Street. The posts I saw about it were pretty outdated, but I thought it was worth a trek to see if they still have the cheap, tasty burritos I remember.



I went for the $3.95 veggie burrito with black beans - the only, or one of the only menu items still falling under my self-imposed cost limit. After tax, it came to $4.35.



The burrito was big - heavy even - so as I walked back to my office I had high hopes. I'm usually not one to say I didn't like something, but I have to be honest that I wish I'd spent my money at Amigos & Bebas instead - where my dollar would've stretched further and the burrito would've been better.

As you can see from the photo, the burrito was nearly all rice, with a little bit of beans and a tiny amount of lettuce/tomato. It didn't seem to have any sauce at all. I kept eating further down, hoping to find the hidden pocket of flavor and fresh ingredients, but only found more and more bland rice. After many years of vegetarianism, I know that you can make a delicious veggie burrito, but sadly, this particular burrito wasn't one.

A passage contrasting eating establishments in Europe and the US that I read today in Barbara Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life seemed to capture the experience well:

"In our country [the US] it's a reasonable presumption that unless you have gone out of your way to find good food, you'll be settling for mediocre at best."

I also couldn't help but remember my old office mate Jorge, who would tell me about food from Mexico, and explain that burritos don't have rice inside them - that's an American addition. I honestly don't mind rice in a burrito. But in this particular burrito, rice was nearly all there was, and it made for a flat taste and unsatisfying (though certainly filling) lunch.



(Frugal Fridays is a weekly series dedicated to finding Seattle lunch spots where you can walk in with a $5 bill and walk out with a fulfilling, preferably healthy, lunch. If you have suggestions of places in the Seattle area with a great lunch for under $5 after tax, post a comment - I'd love the help.)

Frugal Fridays: Breakfast Muffins

Due to an erratic schedule this week (house hunting kinda throws one's routines off), I didn't find time to track down a lunch deal this week. So instead, I've decided to quantify the frugality of the choice Dan & I have made for keeping our breakfasts ultra-cheap.

Each week, we bake up a batch of 1 dozen large fruit muffins, which we eat throughout the week for breakfast. I've never added up the cost of a muffin, but thought it would be interesting to discover how much we're actually spending. I used prices I found on Amazon Fresh for the various ingredients, which will of course vary based on all sorts of factors, but probably not by a lot.

3 cups of flour ($0.57)
1/2 cup brown sugar ($0.60)
1 tspn salt ($0.01)
1 tbspn baking powder ($0.10)
1 tbspn flax powder ($0.02)
1/2 cup honey ($1.82)
2 eggs ($0.46)
1 cup milk ($0.13)
1 stick butter ($0.83)
2 cups fruit ($0-5, depending on season and fruit choice)

So if you do what I do and pick blackberries from overgrown lots, canes coming over your fence from the neighbor's yard, or from along the road, you can easily get a couple cups of berries for free - putting the cost per muffin at just $0.38.

If you go for organic berries during an off season, you might pay upwards of $5 for around 2 cups - making your cost per muffin skyrocket to a whopping $0.80 (is my sarcasm coming through okay?)



Berries tend to be pricier (except the free ones), whereas a couple apples, peaches, bananas, or other larger fruit will be cheaper and is all you need to get a good 2 cups. And of course, you can mix and match to create apple-huckleberry muffins, or black & blueberry muffins, or apple-plum muffins. And frozen fruits and berries are often even cheaper. Another trick is to always buy extra fruit when it's in season in your area, and toss it in the freezer. Then you can have delicious muffins throughout the winter, with flavors that remind you of summertime - without paying the costs (both economic and ecological) of buying imported fruits from the Southern Hemisphere.



Besides the flexibility to change out the fruits and berries used, you can also replace up to half the all purpose flour with whole wheat flour. You can also use 1/2 cup of granulated sugar, maple syrup, or molasses in place of the honey - each of which lends different flavors to the muffins. The flax powder can be replaced with an extra egg, if preferred. You can sprinkle some oats or even granola on top of the muffins, to add a little texture and fiber.



And you can press chunks of fruit or berries into the center of the muffins, after distributing the batter, to get a little fruit burst in the center of the muffin.



We've made everything from decidedly un-local coconut-poi muffins to rhubarb-raspberry muffins made from fruit bought at our local farmers market. We made poha berry muffins while in Hawaii, and recently made 4-berry muffins using blackberries & raspberries from our yard, and blueberries & huckleberries from my Mom's garden. We've used bananas, passion fruit juice, peaches, apricots, pluots, plums, apples, chocolate chips, strawberries, cranberries, and even tossed in macadamia nuts or walnuts once in awhile.

The recipe below makes 12 large muffins - perfect for breakfast. But you can stretch it to 2 dozen if you make smaller muffins (and cook them a little less time). And you can stretch it even farther if you make mini-muffins, which should bake for just 10 minutes instead of the full 20.

Fruit/Berry Muffins

3 cups all purpose flour
1/2 cup brown sugar
1 Tbspn baking powder
1 tspn Flax Seed Powder/Meal
1 tspn salt
1 cup milk
2 eggs
1 stick of butter, melted
1/2 cup honey
2 cups chopped fruit or berries

Preheat oven to 400 degrees F. Mix flour, brown sugar, baking powder, flax powder, and salt in a large bowl and stir until well blended. Gently beat milk and eggs together in a medium bowl. Combine melted butter and honey, then pour into milk/egg mixture, whisking constantly. Fold wet mixture into dry mixture just until almost all dry mixture has become moistened, being careful not to over mix. Fold in fruit very lightly, just until the dry and wet mixtures blend and the fruit is distributed. Spoon or ladle into a well-greased muffin tin (each will be filled to the top. Bake for 20 minutes. Makes one dozen large muffins.

(If using a drier fruit, such as apples, you might also want to add up to 1/4 cup of water to the batter.)

(Frugal Fridays is a weekly series dedicated to (normallY) finding Seattle lunch spots where you can walk in with a $5 bill and walk out with a fulfilling, preferably healthy, lunch. If you have suggestions of places in the Seattle area with a great lunch for under $5 after tax, post a comment - I'd love the help.)

Frugal Fridays: Quizno's Torpedo:

This week's Frugal Friday had me stumped at first, and I made my way over to a salad bar place called Chew Chew's, right next to Amigos over at the Municipal Tower. I took a gander at the selection at their salad bar, and decided it wasn't worth it - so I turned around and walked out the door. And that's when I saw the signs with the big "$2", "$3" and "$4" advertisements.



One bonus of the economic downturn is that restaurants catering to a lunch crowd are catching on that people don't really want to spend upwards of $10 bucks every day to eat - and are finding ways to create smaller, but still satisfying lunch options for under $5.

Quizno's is no exception, arguably leading the way with their $2 'Sammies' earlier this year. But now they've added two more under $5 price points to their menu: the $3 Bullet and the $4 Torpedo.

I opted for the Toasty Torpedo - a 15 inch long, slim Ciabatta roll sandwich for $4 (pre-tax; $4.40 after tax).

They have five varieties - Pesto Turkey; Italian; Turkey Club; Beef Bacon & Cheddar; and the Big Kahuna Tuna. All of them come with cheese, chopped lettuce, tomato, and condiments - plus the meat component.



I went for the Turkey Pesto, expecting it to be rather small for the price - but at 15 inches long, it's a filling sandwich. I wouldn't say it's overflowing with meat, but it's probably a more appropriate serving size than your average foot long sub, for sure, and had good flavor for the money.



(Frugal Fridays is a weekly series dedicated to finding Seattle lunch spots where you can walk in with a $5 bill and walk out with a fulfilling, preferably healthy, lunch. If you have suggestions of places in the Seattle area with a great lunch for under $5 after tax, post a comment - I'd love the help.)

Frugal Fridays: Noah's Bagels 'Wrapper'

Once again for Frugal Fridays, I was lured in by a sandwich board on the sidewalk advertising a too-good-to-be-true deal: $1.99 for a chicken bagel wrapper sandwich, at Noah's Bagels.



Once inside, I discovered I could upgrade that to a combo, adding chips and a drink, for just $3.99 - which, being still under the $5 after tax price point, seemed like an imperative.

It turns out you do get what you pay for, as the chicken bagel wrapper is fairly small, but actually surprisingly satisfying. It's a big chunk of white meat chicken, wrapped in bagel dough, and combined with either cheddar cheese, or swiss cheese & honey mustard. I went with the latter, while my office mate later got the cheddar and said mine smelled better.

He also noted that it might be a better use of your $5 to get two chicken bagel wrappers, and just drink water. Or you could always get one, and pick up some fruit to go with it, to make it a little more well rounded.

According to the signs, this is a limited time offer - though it's unclear how limited. So if you wanna check out the Noah's Bagels Chicken Bagel Wrapper - "What Bagels Do for Lunch" - do it soon.



(Frugal Fridays is a weekly series dedicated to finding Seattle lunch spots where you can walk in with a $5 bill and walk out with a fulfilling, preferably healthy, lunch. If you have suggestions of places in the Seattle area with a great lunch for under $5 after tax, post a comment - I'd love the help.)

Frugal Fridays: Amigos & Beba's Redux

For my third week of revisiting previous Frugal Friday spots in search of additional deals, I returned to my very first frugal friday spot: Amigos & Beba's on the terrace of the Municipal Tower at 5th and Columbia. The restaurant is two in one: Amigos Fresh Mex, and Beba's Sandwiches - all run by the same folks.



Scanning the Amigos menu, I realized just how many of their menu items fall under the $5 price point - even after tax. Although tempted by my usual veggie taco, I decided to see what their Veggie Burrito was like. My answer: ENORMOUS.

For just $3.75 ($4.13 after tax) you get a large flour tortilla stuffed to the gills with beans, lettuce, pico de gallo salsa, sour cream, and guacamole.



Add to that any or all of the salsas and condiments on hand, like spicy pickled carrots, onions, and jalapenos, or fresh cilantro, and you've got a serious meal for a pittance. It's more than enough for me for lunch, though perhaps not quite enough to share with someone else - so do yourself a favor and plan on having some leftovers. Maybe it'll be the perfect thing to get you over that 3pm hump when the end of the workday seems far off, but dinner is still too close for you to chow on anything too substantial.



(Frugal Fridays is a weekly series dedicated to finding Seattle lunch spots where you can walk in with a $5 bill and walk out with a fulfilling, preferably healthy, lunch. If you have suggestions of places in the Seattle area with a great lunch for under $5 after tax, post a comment - I'd love the help.)

Frugal Fridays: Zum Zum Redux

Back in June when I visited the Food Court at 3rd and Marion St, I noticed some price changes at Cafe Zum Zum. That day, I decided to go for something different, but also vowed to come back to Zum Zum to see if I can still live off their delicious curries without breaking a $5.



Thankfully, I can, and it doesn't look like that's gonna change anytime soon. In the windows, they now have numerous (apparently) commercially-made signs up adverstising their $3.99 Daily Special. What that $3.99 ($4.39 after tax) gets you varies every day, but always includes some type of vegetarian curry, rice, a tortilla (aka low-rent naan) and a 16.5 oz fountain drink.

This trip, the curry was actually two curries - one scoop of a lentil curry, and one of a garbanzo curry - paired with the usual rice & tortilla. For my drink I went for the ol' Arnold Palmer: lemonade and iced tea.

So my worries about Zum Zum - a staple of my M-F diet for years now - were alleviated, and those signs in the windows suggest a serious commitment to continuing their tradition of being one of the best lunch deals in town.



(Frugal Fridays is a weekly series dedicated to finding Seattle lunch spots where you can walk in with a $5 bill and walk out with a fulfilling, preferably healthy, lunch. If you have suggestions of places in the Seattle area with a great lunch for under $5 after tax, post a comment - I'd love the help.)