Whew! Cake-bakin’ week is almost complete! I am so done with looking at cake right now.

Jeff and I will be at the wedding today, so I’ll be sure to fill you in on how I finished the cake and how everyone liked it tomorrow. For today though, I thought I’d show you guys a quick dinner that I made earlier in the week that turned out amazing.

Scrambled tamago donburi….or scrambled egg rice bowl!

This was ridiculously easy to make. I started by making some rice in the rice cooker. If you don’t have a rice cooker, you can use this method for how to make sushi rice.

While the rice was going, I chopped up half a bell pepper into small pieces and sliced a handful of shiitakes thinly. I sauteed those together while I got my egg mixture together.

I used three eggs and whisked in about a tsp. each of soy sauce and rice vinegar. I mixed in a finely chopped scallion and sprinkled with seaweed flake.

Once the veggies were cooked through, the egg mix was added to the pan and the veggies were mixed into it. It comes together pretty quickly at this point as the egg starts to solidify. Just keep moving a spatula through the mixture to break it up as it cooks, scrambling it.

And that is all there is to it. I think it took about 10 minutes total to make the scrambled tamago topping, can’t argue with that!

Served over hot rice with a couple squirts of fruity-spicy sriracha and a sprinkle of noritamago furikake, it was a warm and comforting meal ready in under 15 minutes.

What is your favorite way to eat eggs? (Cake counts!)

Just as predicted, the nice weather didn’t last and this week has been awash in shades of gray and just literally washed with buckets of rain.

I’ve spent several days feeling a bit moody at being trapped indoors with the memory of sunny walks into town that took place such a short time ago. I’ve used the “opportunity” to practice a few extra-long yoga sessions in the dining room, trying not to fall out of pose onto one or more curious cats.

But sometimes you just gotta get out of the house!

We hit up Garlic Thai again this week for a spicy little reminder of approaching spring. I got the fruitiest, springiest cocktail I could find on the menu; one with lychee, ginger, and sake. It was fruit-tastic. The maraschino cherry makes it fancy. 😉

Jeff got a barley shochu that was a bit lighter than he was wanting, but it was still good.

We both shared a plate of the prettiest spring rolls I’ve ever seen.

Love the basil leaves pressed perfectly between the layers of soft and chewy rice paper.

I got a miso soup. This one was pretty salty and inauthentic. Pretty sure it was a powdered mix or something and it had the wrong kind of seaweed in it; tasted like thick lettuce.

I got a glass noodle salad called Yum Woon Sen that had minced chicken and grilled shrimp all in a spicy lime-flavored sauce.

Unholy gates of hell! This was the single spiciest thing I’ve ever put in my mouth! Jeff asked for his curry to be Thai hot, and my dish was listed as mild on the menu. I think they got switched because I was sweating and breathing hard and my lips were huge and painfully red.

Jeff’s panang curry, on the other hand, was sweet and delicious. It had some heat to it but not nearly as much as my little salad did!

Still love Garlic Thai though. I can’t wait until it’s warm out again so we can drink fruity cocktails on their nice patio.

Tonight we got out again for sushi at Sushi Avenue. It’s not the best sushi place ever but it’s only a mile from our apartment so I can’t complain.

I had an Asahi Black beer which I love. It’s so roasty and malty, tastes a bit like toasted buckwheat or roasted barley. We both got seaweed salads to munch on. I was telling Jeff how much I like the sound it makes in your head when you crunch on the seaweed! Yeah, he thought that was weird.

Of course we ordered takoyaki, and it was just as awesome this time as it always is.

For sushi we got 2 inari, a crunchy eel roll, a spicy tuna roll, and a scorpion roll. Sushi Avenue is bad about cutting their pieces too large and packing too much rice around the rolls. It all tastes great though.

And here’s something I made at home earlier this week…

Miso-glazed salmon with stir-fried bok choy and shiitake mushrooms. It was so, so, so good! I love this dish, it takes so little effort to prepare.

Well, the weather is supposed to perk up a bit for this weekend, so maybe we can get out a bit and not feel so cramped up in the house.

I’m excited that I’ll get to attend an Atlanta blogger meet-up at 5 Seasons this Saturday!

What are your weekend plans?

Well, Thyme Bombe the blog is only around 7 months old. But as for me, Thymebombe the living breathing human, I turned 27 yesterday at precisely 4:46pm!

I didn’t do any crazy partying or anything (gettin’ to old for all that jazz.) Instead, I spent the day doing some personal shopping since I haven’t bought myself a new article of clothing in ages and then Jeff and I got gussied up for a nice dinner together.

We went to Spice Market, a Jean-Georges Vongerichten joint. Dude is a majorly famous chef, so we had high hopes for his south-asian themed fine dining incarnation.

Lemme go ahead and tell you right now that the lighting was terrible and all of these shots are super-blurry, they didn’t look that way on my camera screen but apparently they don’t scale-up well.

We, of course, started off by ordering cocktails. Jeff went for a standard Old Fashioned with Blanton’s bourbon and I had a ginger margarita with a ginger salt crusted rim.

It was really good, not too sour and just enough ginger flavor.

We were served a starter of papadams with an Indian curry “salsa.” Delicious! Very sweet and tomatoey with hints of onion and deep spices.

We ordered two appetizers to start with: calamari with basil salt and sriracha aioli followed by black pepper shrimp over sundried pineapple.

The calamari was some of the best I’ve ever had. The batter was so light and not greasy at all. The dipping sauce was addictive with it’s creaminess calming the spicy sriracha.

The black pepper shrimp were cooked very well, still bouncy and succulent. The sauce was spicy and earthy and heavily garlic-laden. I was sad that the pineapple was kind of sour. It’s just not in season and you could really tell that it lacked the honeyed juiciness that only an in-season sun-drenched pineapple has.

Next up, we ordered two more appetizers: A tuna tartare and the ginger fried rice with panko-crusted runny egg.

This is where the dinner started to take a turn downhill.

Tuna tartare may be a cliche item on every fine-dining restaurants menu, but it’s one of my favorite things in the world, so you can usually bet that I’ll order it if it’s offered. This tartare was absolutely drowning in the intensely-flavored chili dressing. It made the tartare so wet that it was falling apart and becoming a soup. The dressing was also just so intense in flavor that you couldn’t taste the tuna or avocado at all, rendering the expensive and beautiful tuna to little more than a flavorless textural vehicle for sopping up more sauce. Sad.

The fried rice was ok. When I took my first bite of it I was in love with it’s creaminess from the raw egg yolk and the intense onion flavor and perfect sticky texture of the rice. As I kept eating though, I fell out of love with every bite. It was extremely oily, for one thing, and I discovered as I ate that it was sitting in a puddle of soy sauce that made the last few bites an insufferable salt lick.

Moving on.

We shared the short rib entree which was described as being garlic and onion crusted, but was no such thing.

This was one of the most bizarre things I have ever received in a restaurant. It was almost entirely flavorless. The noodles tasted like bland paste and made no sense with this giant hunk of flavorless meat. The whole dish was really oily and fatty, and though the short rib was fall-apart tender, it just didn’t taste like anything. It’s like they boiled this whole dish in plain water and then added food coloring to make it look like a broth. FAIL.

Anyway, a nice meal isn’t complete without dessert, right?

Yay! A personalized pavlova with white chocolate cream, yuzu sorbet, and sweet basil oil drizzle.

Now this was a winner! Jeff could not shut up about how amazing the basil oil was. I could have eaten that yuzu sorbet alone, you could really taste the zest in it! We both felt that it would be a better dessert without the white chocolate, which didn’t seem to go well with the other more summery flavors, but it was a really yummy sweet nonetheless.

So, all in all, we liked Spice Market ok. It didn’t seem like very authentic asian flavors, and that was kind of what we were expecting. Aside from that though, it just didn’t seem to live up to the quality I would expect from the restaurant of a famous chef. We enjoyed ourselves, but we won’t be going back or recommending it to others.

That’s ok, I still had a great birthday, I don’t need things to go perfectly for me to have a good time.

Hanging out with this guy is all I need to enjoy myself. 😉

Here’s to 27 years of life!