korean feast

i wen to the zion market with my korean friend, who admittedly knows nothing about food, but can read labels in korean *grin*

this was going to be dinner for two.. but somehow it ended up being dinner for 4 + leftovers. i think we got a little food crazy. lighting in the kitchen is always too dim. top- grilled salted mackerel, right- dukbukge, bottom- laver, left and counterclockwise- tofu pockets with seasoned rice, kimchee, spicy sweet fishcake, seasoned cucumbers, soybeans. plus the ubiquitous rice.

pear season!

actually, it's not pear season anymore. and if it was pear season, maybe it was in the beginning of october. i really don't know, but that's when massive amounts of pears started arriving in the markets. maybe getting an almanac would help... if i were a farmer. i think i bought one of every pear i could find that day, minus the really expensive ones (aka organics) of course.

seckels, bartlett, d'anjou, starkrimson, comice

taco rice

well, i made this a year and a half ago, and i don't think i posted anything about it.. remembered making this due to mmm-yoso's and others' reminiscences about taco rice. i didn't have any lettuce, cheese, or tomatoes... but tacomeat+onions+sauce on rice is close enough. it probably doesn't taste nearly as good when made by professionals... it tasted pretty bad, in fact. that's why there's some bbq sauce on the top in hopes that it could be salvaged--i mean, bbq sauce makes everything taste better.

rice bowl

bulgogi and kimchi on rice for late night snack.. some months ago.

the meat was but a fraction of several pounds i'd bought from DB marketworld and cooked with onions previously. even reheated.. it's ooooohhh soooo yummmyyyy.

sweets from someone sweet?

"...the candy man can because he mixes it with love and makes the world go 'round..."

that's what little Charlie Bucket would have you believe, but as the oompa loompas pointed out, they'll make your teeth rot out and get fat if you eat too much. however, i still have a fondness for novel candies (especially gum) despite the melodic warnings from little orange men. these are some of the edible souvenirs The Brain brought back from a trip to the far east.

the inserts from the xylish gums have some sort of cartoon printed on them and can be folded into a smaller sized box when your supply dwindles.

clockwise from top: xylish sugarfree fruity mint, lotte "bitter" yuzu and grapefruit flavor, whiteen sugerfree strawberry mint, haitai smoke-breath neutralizer(?) gum, glico "peach mint" watering kiss mint

not seen in the first is the xylish hypercool mint which is like chewing listerine. it's so strongly minty that it is almost bitter. the best tasting ones was were the peachmint and fruity mint.

stay tuned for the part 2 of the candy series! (probably in 2 months)

i spy

with my very own eyes:

12 motorcycle policemen

1 firetruck

3 police squad cars

1 FBI agent

1 building twinkling like a christmas tree

1 news van

2 news helicopters

1 jacque cousteau-esque exploder-chamber thingie

1 person trancing out and dancing to the beat of the evacuation alarms

... just kidding about the last one

starbuck's coffee

stinks. it's waaay too bitter (the mild) and leaves a sour aftertaste even when black. i really gotta ask my uncle what the name of the cafe near echo park with the 10 thousand dollar coffee maker is. mmm.. it was so smooth...

maybe i just like coffee less concentrated than most. i've taken to making my own coffee, but as i'm not at HQ and desperately crave caffiene... there is no other alternative. i love dark chocolate covered expresso beans, but that might not be a good breakfast. i mean, without bacon and fresh blackberries, it's just not a balanced meal.

the lowly potato

As my brother says, I am a eater of the most lowly and humble groveling foods that our society can offer. this group would include beans, gruel, and potatoes. my dinner a few nights ago only strengthen his statement. after a really long day i just wanted something to fill my belly quick so i could go to sleep and hopefully wake up rested for my exam. dinner turned out to be a microwaved yukon potato with some butter and a bit of kimchee, just for an added side excitement. yes, once again i ate a starch and pickled vegetables for dinner. guess it's a step up from ketchup. those vitamins sure come in handy... let me suffice to say that i made up for that meal by a much better one during the weekend. o-toro/kaki/unagi wa totemo oishii desu yo.



it's ridiculous how many pictures i have yet to post about. it's been busy times, so i'll get around to it eventually, especially when i'm an ex-college student.

Charred

It's been nearly one month since my last post, but this post is unfortunately not about food. I was starting to get cabin fever and the smoke was starting to get to me, so I left San Diego with a friend from Diamond Bar. We actually tried to leave the night before... but all northbound traffic on the 5 was shut off past Pendleton at night. La Jolla isn't too close to the fires, but I wanted to be closer to family...

These are some pictures I snapped from the car as we went north on Wednesday. It was mid afternoon. These are what I think parts of the Horno fire along Camp Pendleton and Oceanside. There were even flames right across the freeway from the San Onofre nuclear power plant (it probably wouldn't be good to have that catch on fire or burn power line poles.. so there was a lonely firetruck guarding the area) and right behind the inland border checkpoint. There was scorched land all the way up to the asphalt in many places. But those weren't places next to homes. It looked like Mars or an apocalypse outside.

I hope this will turn out ok. Thank you to everyone who's helping out.

http://www.fire.ca.gov/ http://www.kpbs.org/news/fires











this is near the same area past San Onofre on a drive up mid-august.

boiled potatoes

always looking for cheap food options, i've taken a page from America's pioneering ancestors who had to make do with what little they had. here i've concocted a potato stew flavored with salt pork. (maybe i'm just watching too much of Frontier House)

2 slices of bacon (er, salt pork is a little bit tooo unhealthy.. it's more fat than pork!) chopped up into a cold pot. heated on medium until the the fat started to melt all liquidly from the bacon. took 5 smallish-medium potatoes, sliced them up into fries as thick as my thumb, and threw those in the pot along with whatever veggie i had at hand. this time, it was cubes of a zucchini. stirred it around a bit, then added some packaged veggie stock (stockpiled from the Days of Lost Wisdom) and water in a 3:1 ratio, enough to cover an inch in the bottom of the pot, at least. put a tiny sprinkle of chili and ~1 tbsp of vinegar for flavoring. After boiling, cover pot and simmer on low for 20-30 mins (or until the taters get cooked). usually tastes better if allowed to sit a while before eating or reheated.

note to the brain - yes, sausages too

icy refreshing chicken broth

here's a couple things i made a while back. don't let the first picture deceive you, it's not as untasty as it looks. i split one of those little mini eggplants down the middle, filled it with garlic, dribbled salt and olive oil over it, and then pan grilled it slowly that the juicy insides would slowly cook itself.



these were the toughest, waxiest, limpest green beans i could find. they were also on sale for a ridiculously low price. after letting it age for almost another week (i kind of forgot about them...) i decided it was time to work my magic on 'em. i tossed them in a pot with some water, shrimp paste, fish sauce, and fried garlic and set it to simmer for a looong time. so soft and tender afterwards.. almost.. mushy. but not suite. they were too tough to start out with to get mushy. my roomates all made faces and closed their doors. i am evil.



last of all, this is what i ate for dinner last night? the night before? it's all a blur with the lovely moloko vellocet they gave me. and the wooden choppers aren't quite ready to handle solid food yet plus they need to be aged and treated. ah.. cold jook with dried green shiso leaf on top. and nothing beats an icy refreshing chicken broth with an ice cube floating around in it...

Ouchies Food

i'm missing some teeth. actually, i've exiled them from my mouth and have replaced them with wooden dentures, just like george w. the first. had to fast for the anesthesia, and boy, was that some good stuff. i had to try really hard to keep from cracking up at the dr.'s instructions. afterwards i was really numb. and yes folks, i have a drinking problem. i keep missing my mouth!

so what's am i eating today? lots and lots of cold chicken broth. and very recently, a very small trader joe's blueberry and cream yogurt. i don't usually like yogurt unless used in savory dishes, so either i'm really hungry, or this stuff really is good. i'm trying to avoid reading food blogs. everything sounds tasty right now. even those weird american sushi rolls with cream cheese in it. hmm, kind of reminds me of a snack i used to eat as a kid. i'd spread a slice of ham with cream cheese, roll it up, and viola, deliciousness.

scrambled eggs

the brown bits in the egg are that "tianjian preserved vegetable" in the background. it's been a while since i've eaten any sort of 冬菜 or 菜脯 with scrambled eggs as a meal at home or in a restaurant. chinese comfort food? i'm a sucker for anything preserved, salty, and spicy. one of my favorite dishes in the whole wide world is 梅菜扣肉。i wonder where i can find Hakka and ChiuChow style food down here in SD? i always have a craving for preserved lemon duck soup. it's a rarity nowadays of sorts. not many restaurants seem to want to go through the trouble of making it, and places that do make it only make a limited amount of it per day and you have to order it in advance.

you can't find good preserved lemons in the supermarket. that is the kind of thing little old ladies who smell like mothballs (ah, memories) make at home. hmm.. who can guess what my next project is going to be?

fried tofu s&p

so.. i finally did it.. i took the plunge... and decided to fry something. using more than a few tablespoons of oil.



i've been wanting to fry this for a while, but have always had some other form of protein around until i've cleaned out everything except for the costco-sized bag of chemically chicken breasts that were most likely grown not on a chicken, but in a tank with all the other clones. used firm tofu that i drained and squashed the water out of with a use of two plates and a heavy bottle of soy sauce. the heat was somewhere on med-high with canola oil. i got the crispiness right. it took ~5-10 mins per batch. i have no idea how restaurants make it so tasty. they must put in an entire handful of meijing and spices. before the cornstarch coating, sprinkled ~3 tablespoons of a mixture of salt, white pepper, 5 spice for a block of tofu, and still not enough flavor. maybe it was b/c i didn't add msg? need to flavor more aggressively. and the green onion and chilies topping... i don't know how they do it. mines didn't come out dry and almost with crispy bits like theirs.

in the background you can see the lovely brown veggie curry. japanese style curry with carrots, zucchini, onions, potatoes.

btw, the muffins at Henry's are delicious. i'm not just saying it b/c i like the market. trader joe's breads and things always have a weird dough-y taste...

x marks the spot

so i was at the store and i saw a pyramid of angel food cake. so i decided to splurge a little. now that i had that.. well.. certainly i can't eat it alone. it would be like eating my way through a vast empty dessert without an oasis in sight. so i bought some berries to go with it. but just berries and cake can be like a fair maid in a saharan sand storm, so i had to buy cream to smooth things out.

i added a tsp or two of sugar and some cocoa powder to the heavy whipping cream to make chocolatey whipped cream. oh, be sure to use a real whip. the cream actually gets fluffier when it cringes away from the whips.



this lovely presentation was designed by one of my lovely apartment mates. note the pirate themed "x marks the spot" strawberry. thar be treasure here, folks.



this was my roomate's cake. i didn't want her to murder me in the middle of the night, so i tried to make it pretty. however, lighting at my desk isn't exactly the greatest.

i dumped my cake and berries into the bowl i whipped the cream in. extreme laziness.. AND i get the most cream. hehe.

"The Whole Food Meal"

i don't like energy bars. they usually have this weird gritty protein stuff in it, taste like codfish oil, and leave a chalky feeling in your mouth. the closest i'll come to something like that is probably a granola bar, but then those are waaay too sweet. i need to start making my own. anyways, one day, long long ago at school, i was hungry. having spent most of the night awake, i didn't really feel like eating any junk food. didn't want a killer tummy ache. shunning junk food, i skipped the food court and decided to try my luck rummaging around in the student store for something semi-healthy and still tasty. somewhere in between the little debbie ho-hos and the chalky gross cliff bars i found this:



the pro bar. no pictures of the thing. it was brown. i ate it. only saved the wrapper. i'm not really one of those super organic wheat-grass infused Juice Tiger types, but i figure that the people who do buy this stuff tend to be rather particular. the blurb on the back is about how everything in the bar is raw, contain raw dried fruit, raw seeds, raw unprocessed natural cane juice, raw etc etc. i think they had to put in lots of oil to hold the thing together, or it'd be too dry. that kind of showed when i took it outside to eat with my carton of OJ. it started exuding oils from all the nuts and stuff. however, it was tasty. did not taste like cardboard or overly sweet, nor was it heavy and preservative-y tasting. has a nice identifiable mix of protein (nuts) and carbs (rice, oats). i deem this bar safe for consumption.

liver and lotus root. not together unfortunately.

the market had some nice looking liver... i rinsed off the liver slices, dried them, then dredged them in some masa corn flour (the stuff to make tortillas from) that was mixed with some salt and pepper. then pan fried them.



a hunk of re-toasted french bread (not from that stale loaf) and slices of lotus root stir fried with a little salt.



some slightly freezer burnt slices of beef cooked up in garlic and worcestershire sauce, and chunks of zuchini and tomato cooked with some garlic salt, garlicky mashed potatoes.

some canned dolmas and marshmallows over a firepit, a lightnin' jack's bbq sandwich. i need to eat more... time for the market.

nothing to declare

stir-fried up some lotus root with soy sauce as a snack. then i cheated.

a friend came down to visit and found a reason to go to izakaya sakura. i'd always wondered what was there when i first saw it while visiting the pancake house. my friends had suspected a shady storefront for the mafia. i guess we were wrong.

despite comments from a college student (not me) "dude, these waitresses are pretty cute", the place was not engaged in any other sort of shady business. just good good food.

i feel like the "hillbilly housewife"

i eat the same stuff a lot. preparation is noteworthy though.

1 fist sized hunk of frozen ground beef
1/2 half a frozen jam jar of tomato sauce
half an onion, diced
cooked pasta
garlic salt

threw everything into a pot without thawing and simmered for half an hour before dumping on top of pasta. if you call melting a jar-shaped chunk of frozen tomato sauce "simmering".

point of this: illustrate how i use old jars to hold food and keep food in 1-3 meal sizes in sandwich bags separately for easy preparation. space is tough to find in a fridge when sharing it with 3 other people. pitchers and tall kimchee jars make great containers for soup. small used up caper jars and such are really good for holding freshly made salad dressing, sauces, etc. also good for storing leftover coffee for the next day's reincarnation as iced coffee. it's also fun to drink out of jars...