You may think of box wine — or as I like to call it, Cardboardeaux — as cheap, terrible and something you had at parties in your university years to feel more grown-up, but:
Box wine is more environmentally friendly than bottled wine.:
Producing cardboard uses less energy than producing glass.
Cardboard is easier to recycle than glass.
Transporting box wine uses less energy and effort than bottled wine.
Le Casa’s specialty is Moroccan cuisine, and they have a very nice selection of tagines (pronounced “ta-ZHEEN”), which are slow-cooked stews that get their name from the traditional ceramic or clay dish in which they’re cooked. You typically serve them from the tagine they’re cooked in.
We started with zalouk, a cooked eggplant and tomato salad served with points of pita, which was an excellent appetizer. For our mains, we shared the chicken tagine, which is garnished with preserved lemons and olives, and the lamb tagine, whose garnish was hard-boiled eggs and prunes. These are rich, saucy dishes, and we scooped up the sauce with the frites and bread that they provided along with our dishes.
Lamb tagine. Tap to view at full size.
The service was incredibly friendly and helpful — one of the owners even came out to chat with us. We’re definitely coming back then next time we catch a film at the Tampa Theatre, a show at the Straz, or an event at one of the nearby museums.
We need to check it out on a Thursday, when they’ve got a live DJ and belly dancing, which should be pretty interesting.
In case you’re wondering: The folks at Le Casa Bistro have no idea who I am and most certainly didn’t pay for an endorsement. I’m just a fan who wants to see them stick around.
You don’t get a full pool with your order, but you do get 3.5 ounces of cheese. According to Delish:
That 3.5 ounces goes a long way, according to one Instagram account that showered their burger and fries in the cheese and still had half of the bowl left. Another account described the cheese pool as super creamy and yummy, and wrote that McDonald’s hit the nail on the head with this one.
Luckily, I have all sorts of tricks for this sort of schedule, one of which is the mid-afternoon veggie roast: Cut up some vegetables, drizzle with oil and seasonings, roast in the oven or turbo broiler for 45 minutes. It doesn’t take long to put together, and it doesn’t need to be attended to while in the over, allowing me to continue working.
While tasty, it doesn’t look pretty close up. It’s layogenic (pronounced “LIE-o-jennic”), a Filipino/English hybrid term that was BBC’s “Word of the Day” back in January. It means “attractive from a distance, but not close up,” — the “layo” part comes from the Filipino word for “far” or “distance”.
