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Charleston Eats: Thai East Fusion

Over by the Tanger Outlet Mall in North Charleston, just a few doors down from Mr. K’s Used Bookstore on International Blvd is a new Thai restaurant, Thai East Fusion.  I learned about it from a recent article in the Post & Courier and we decided to check it out this afternoon.

Rows of benches line the side of the strip mall space, with a row of tables running down the middle.  Inside is comfortable, brightly lit and not overly decorated.

We started off with a dish of kimchi and the ginger salad.  The salad that came out was larger than expected with a nice amount of sweet ginger dressing that wasn’t too gingery.

Thai East Fusion Salad and Kimchi
Thai East Fusion Salad and Kimchi

The kimchi, according to the P&C article, is made in-house using the family’s secret recipe.  Crisp, pungent, spicy, and delicious.  Probably some of the best kimchi I’ve had in the area.

Thai East Fusion Kimchi
Thai East Fusion Kimchi

Entrees come in 5 levels of spiciness: No spice, mild, medium, spicy, and Thai spicy.  For dinner, I chose the  Pad Thai with beef (Thai spicy), and Connie got the Basil Chicken (medium).  Generously laden plates came out, each enough for three or four people (two or three if everybody is really hungry). 

The Pad Thai was pretty tasty with the good flavourful kind of spicy.  A few squirts of Sriracha sauce can be used to bump up the spice level even more.

Thai East Fusion Pad Thai
Thai East Fusion Pad Thai

The Basil Chicken was quite good with a nice coconut-y curry sauce.  The chicken was nicely cooked and very tasty.  The medium spicy-ness was perfect for Connie.  For fellow anti-cilantro types, the cilantro on the Basil was just a garnish and is easily removed (or just ask to leave off the cilantro).

Thai East Fusion Basil Chicken
Thai East Fusion Basil Chicken

Everything we had was delicious.  We quite enjoyed the meal, and are looking forward to going back to try the mango sticky rice, which they unfortunately didn’t have when we were there.

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Fossil Grant Collection watch battery

For future reference (and in case anybody else needs to know).

My Fossil watch (Grant Collection, FS 4736) takes a SR621SW type battery.

Naturally, it’s a different type of battery than all the other button cell using devices I have.

Also for future reference, this is a nice cross-reference chart for button cell/watch batteries.

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Shhh

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Remembrance Day: Armistice + 100 years

Today is the 100th anniversary of the armistice that ended World War I.  A day to pay respects and honour to the millions that served and died in The Great War and the wars that followed.

Lest We Forget
Lest We Forget

In Flander’s Fields
In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

– Lt. Col. John McRae (1872-1918)

At 11AM, bells will ring in remembrance across the US.  When you hear them, stop a moment and remember their sacrifice.

US WW I Centennial Commission: Bells of Peace
Bells of Peace
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Validation in Laravel Artisan commands

One of the things I like most about using Laravel is that most everything I’ve needed to do so far is pretty intuitive.  If I try to code up something the way I think it’s supposed to work, usually it does.

I’ve been working on adding some new Artisan commands to my equipment database to handle some of the back-end administrative tasks that I’d normally have to fire up a browser for.

Naturally I want to validate the input.  Laravel’s got some really nice validation rules that would be nice to use in my new artisan commands.  The documentation covers doing validation on incoming HTTP requests, but isn’t clear on whether the Validator can be used more generically.

Looking at the documentation for manually creating validators, a Validator instance takes two arrays: an array with the data to be validated, and an array containing the validation rules.

It seemed like I could use the Validator facade pretty much anywhere as long as I had arrays of data and validation rules.  In my artisan commands, I added a use statement for the Validator facade, 

use Illuminate\Support\Facades\Validator;

and the rest mostly followed the manual validator creation docs.

$validator = Validator::make($model->toArray(), [
  // validation rules
]);

if ($validator->fails()) {
  // show validation errors and exit
}
else {
  // do stuff with validated data
}

Much happiness ensued when I tested things out and saw that the validations were working just like I thought they should.