preserved

pickled

substitutions

I made do with a sieve over a pot and a damp rag both below and above the sticky rice in place of this. The rice sat on the stove for more than 2 hours and it still hadn't cooked through. After I googled "is eating raw rice bad for you?" I ate it anyway.

brown glutinous rice with orange peel and goji berries. served with milk.

not food!

flattery

Apparently this place does a hot chocolate made with peppercorn-infused milk. I did the milk thing and then put it in coffee.

gnocchi, gnever again.

it looks deceivingly pretty (at least to this sweat-like-a-pig to make it happen beholder), but it was a sticky process that ended in a gummy thumb-like product. (look at that one in the lower middle! It hella looks like a thumb!) Sweet potato gnocchi with sage and brown butter sauce. sauce is a misnomer.

you can take the dumpling out of china

back in biz!

bon soir! croque madam!

is confit supposed to be more like jam?

pizza with red onion haphazard confit, mozzarella, and apples

beet salad

with beet greens, capers, and leftover pasta with mizithra

little ethiopia is rolling over in its grave

tofu salad

with peppers, tomatoes, carrots, daikon, cilantro, fried scallions (is there an emoticon for delicious?), peanuts

singapore lust

Thanks to Ruby Dokken's adventures, and Aditi's insane job, I've been noggin-scratching on how to bring Singaporean street food to me, rather than the $1500 alternative. Dot's entry on the elusive carrot cake nearly killed me, so I was surprised to find that epicurious had a recipe. I bought fresh daikon, but got overwhelmed before I started, and ended up making another trip to chinatown to buy premade radish cake.

Anyway, kudos to co-chef Lindo. It turned out amazing, though we might recommend decreasing the amount of sweet soy sauce a bit - at least if your is incredibly molasses-like as mine is.

as a side note, I don't know why half the pictures are suddenly showing up as pixelated and awful. I'm guessing it has to do with shutterfly's redesign, but it's irritating and will be a long time before I get around to reuploading.

how i kept my eater's figure

a dapper british breakfast

In HK I sought the things the guidebook told me (I conceded they are guides for a reason). specifically, I was interested in the half tea half coffee (those in the know call it "halfty half"), and a bun that promised a pad of butter inside. pad of butter bun was sold out all the time! I had to leave HK to find it. But H-ty H, shown here dwarved by supergulp serving of oatmeal, was a new thing for me to be obsessed with and pretend to have the rights to. Its "chowder-like" taste was an enigma.

a breakfast i originally avoided because the name of it was the word for intestine. but it was a thin rice pancake with egg and lettuce (though there were certainly meat options), and wrapped (jus' like an intestine!), sliced, and served with a sweet soy sauce.

hester eats dust

hard to taste much in a crowd like this.

Ending on a high note

This may be my last post of new content, since I'm tucked up cozy in my american blanket as of feb 08. But "coconut rice" turned out to be the best surprise I'd ever ordered, and you won't hear from me again until I've figured out how to recreate it.

shanghai aquarium: keep danger away

new year's

Gan Bei! to Lesley's fam, who made new year's dinner the way, I suppose, it is supposed to be in China. Cabbage with fake tuna, many a mushroom fungus soup, fake fish with mayo kris-krosses. fake cream of crab in a crab shaped dish, fake meat floss, sweet and sour deep fried.

this is a blurry picture, for no reason, but these huge brown chunks of things that look like brownies are blocks of sugary instant tea, which i thought was super cool.

the holy grail of adorable meets delicious

i threw a major whining fit two nights ago when we came across this little shop and they had the precious display treats all lined up and beaming, and then the two cute girls who worked there being all mock helpless and in despair for our benefit, while they said they were sold out. i'd had the poor man's boring version of the biscuit shaped, cream-filled pancakes, but these were like the japanese-style Cadillac of such things! with flavors like green tea, and coffee with pudding, and chocolate-chocolate. I found them again tonight.

indifferent breakfast

the excitement of accidentally ordering something you haven't had before is often tempered by an unexpected and uncomfortable mix of sweet and savory. this sticky rice ball was filled with some pickled radish (fine), half (or maybe even just a stingy quarter) of one of the brown hardboiled eggs (also not a problem), and then waayyy too liberally doused with a super sugary breadcrumbs mixture, which i had to shake out towards the end. is it gross that the picture includes the egg all gnawed-on?

ps RIP Ledger

this was a new thing

and i love new food things, and i love things that are in little packages, even though i didn't know what was contained in this baseball sized bundle of joy. i chose "vegetarian curry" flavor, and therefore it came floating in a pool of curry. it was a medium thick tofu skin packet housing thin rice noodles, and it kind of had some edible gummy paste swiped across the top, to keep the noodles in I guess. 阿给 wasn't, like, the world's coolest taste or anything, but I had a fondness for it.

milk tea, not just with bubbles anymore

Mine, on the left, is "pudding" milk tea. you can see a smear of ivory towards the bottom of the cup. they open a small plastic package of, well, pudding, and then dump it in the cup before adding your milk tea.

this was genmai milk tea with - since the tapioca balls weren't done stewing yet - brown sugar jelly.
on a disappointing note, as heavy metal awesome as milk tea is in taiwan, most places make it with milk powder as opposed to real milk.

if i hadn't heard of Japan

I might mistakenly think I was there.
Here, in a subway station, they sold individually plastic wrapped pieces of sushi. for instance, a piece of sushi with a hello kitty slice of fishcake on top.

I'm not kidding when i say this beer has braille on it

i drank this, braving the consequences:
but not this. too soon.

this little man of gold

tasted like warm waffle batter and was filled with custard, which was applied to the uncooked batter in its cast iron little man shaped mold as a little blob covered in cornstarch, and therefore man-handle-able. we ate a box of twelve, after we each had a sample of one.

it's what's i'm eating, mostly

subway y dunkin donuts, in a way

"The Salad Boat" consists of a bialy-shaped deep fried donut that is liberally filled with mayonnaise and then holds cucumber, tomato, hardboiled egg, and, for some, meat slices.

eats taiwan treats, snacks

rice from within a banana leaf, with nuts and beans covered in a stupid sweet/salty sauce, but with cilantro, so thank you.

sugar soup with 4 selections of beans, taro balls, and pudding.

tofu byproduct with peanuts and small fish egg tapioca type business.

mochi filled with sesame and coated in peanut.

small things filled with cream, red bean paste, taro mush, corn, or apples.

eats taiwan breakfast

flaky bread with a egg inside

breakfast addendum, a now more treasured favorite. a green onion pancake fried up with an egg fried on to it. rolled up, cut into manageable pieces, and squirted with sauce.