Kahn's

Installment three of last weekend. Not a long one, but definitely something to mention!

On Sunday night, after our day of art, Mark and I met up with Tim and Kate. Tim is Mark's friend from childhood and Kate is his girlfriend. Kate just bought a great little house in Roseville, and we were curious to see all the work they had done. After meeting at Kate's new house and getting the tour, the four of us headed out to Kahn's Mongolian Barbeque for a great dinner of stir-fry buffet goodness.

If you've never been to Kahn's, you have to go. It's not only good food for a small price, but you get to make your own food. Now, some people may say, why would I want to go out to dinner to make my own food? Isn't that the point of going out - so you don't have to cook? But making your own meal at Kahn's is part of the experience, and it's really fun.

You start the meal with an appetizer dish. It contains a hot soup, flat crispy bread with dipping sauce, and a chicken wing. The appetizers are good, but the four of us were so excited to get to the buffet that we didn't really take the time to savor that part of the meal.

This buffet is different than most others. For starters, everything is uncooked. You start with a load of meat or seafood - beef, pork, turkey, lamb, shrimp or lobster. All of this is frozen, and you put as much as whatever you want in your bowl. I chose a large piece of beef and a few shrimp. From there, you go to the vegetables section. You pile into your bowl zucchini, pea pods, tomato, etc. There are also fruits, such as pineapple, to load into the bowl. I chose zucchini and pineapples as my main supplements. At the end of the buffet line, there are two different types of noodles to put into the bowl. I decided on the soft noodles, although the crunchy noodle might have added a bit of fun to the texture. Now, at this point, your bowl is really overflowing with fresh and frozen foods. On a separate table is the key to entire meal. The sauce table. There are about 10 different sauces on this table. There are three recipes that you can follow, or you can just dive in and create whatever kind of sauce you want. I chose to follow the Mild recipe, while Mark was more daring and went with his gut. I'm not sure what exactly he ended up with...

At the end of the creation of the meal, you step over to a large counter top where a man with a tall hat and two huge chopsticks takes your bowl and dumps it out on to a huge round skillet. He can cook four meals on the same skillet at the same time. They mix it all up and cook it all up for you, put it on a clean dish, and off you go.

When we got back to the table, we had our white rice and our sesame buns waiting for us. I must make a special mention of the sesame buns. They are amazing. They aren't really buns, because they aren't baked all the way. It's more of a soft, doughy pocket with sesame seeds and a light sauce trapped inside of the pocket. When you take a bite, the sea some seeds and the sauce ooze out, and it's such a wonderfully light, sweet taste. I'd go back to Kahn's just for that.

We had a good time, making our food, eating, and just chatting. Nothing overly special, just a fun night out to dinner with friends. It was a nice way to top off the weekend.