So my neighbor had a deliciously full plate of Nepalese cuisine, all prepared for him by his girlfriend – all he had to do was microwave the multi-course meal, and voila! And it smelled scrumptious, too. He spotted me, sitting there in the lounge, stabbing at stewed tomatoes in a can (by choice, thank you very much) and uttered, “Straight out of the can?” It took me a few moments to realize that he had on that expression that you only wear when you pity someone with that “bleeding heart.” It was rather amusing, really, as if he were saying, “Oh, you poor thing, living that desperate life. I was like that, too, before I met my girlfriend.” He offered me some of his meal, but I politely declined. I had already eaten dinner, and I was just craving stewed tomatoes. So what?!
But he really can save the pity, because there’s nothing about me to pity. Like most people out there who have found someone who could be a partner for life, I feel like the most blessed person on Earth. It doesn’t matter if my girlfriend can cook or not; what’s important to me is already a part of her, and that’s what really counts. I enjoy food as much as the next person, but the true feast and delicacy exists somewhere higher. There is a splendid, intimate banquet that she lays out just for me, and everyone in love can attest that that banquet, unlike real food, leaves you full and happy forever.
Archive for the ‘Food’ Category
:D
After dropping off my bow to be rehaired (and getting scolded by the bowmaker … ask me for details if you’re curious about bow matters), I was rather hungry, as it was already 3:30 and I hadn’t eaten lunch. As I strolled north to get from the violin shop to the Public Library (using a mental map that turned out to be correct), I spotted a curious fast-food restaurant called “b.good” to my right that had an amusing ad postered outside, to the effect of not needing an industrial fry cutter ’cause they’ve got Ronaldo or some generic-named character like that. I looked over their menu, and it looked pretty gourmet, for a fast-food burger joint, anyway. Then I spotted the pricing – $5.95 – and the option of “crisp veggies” as a side … and believe me, I was sold. Mouth watering, I wandered inside, noting the signs of “free wireless” and a few curious posters that I’ll describe later on.
I ordered the “Adopted Luke” (you can go to their website and find out yourself why on Earth a BBQ mushroom-onions-‘n-swiss burger has that name) and a side of the veggies. Before sitting down, I grabbed a fountain drink — and to my surprise, they had unsweetened iced tea. It had been so long since I unsweetened iced tea was spotted alongside Coke and Fanta, and I was so overjoyed that I ran up to the counter and announced my joy and gratefulness, to which she brightened and gave her two cents on over-sugared confectionary tea. I then sat down, but within one minute, the food was ready and I brought it back to chow down. The burger was indeed delicious, not huge but definitely not puny, and with that hearty, beefy taste that only comes with using lean, fresh-ground meat. And the vegetables – fresh broccoli, carrots, and red peppers, lightly stir-fried in garlic and olive oil so that they weren’t raw nor over-cooked, and nowhere near bland – were scrumptious and a perfect balance to the burger.
Now, the posters: there was one about the turkeys they used in their turkey burgers, proclaiming that turkeys across the nation were addicted to drugs (read: antibiotics), but theirs were “clean and sober.” Always a good thing. Then there was one about their fries, and how they loved the fries so much that they didn’t dare to dunk them into a giant vat of reused oil (they bake them instead, making them about as healthy as the veggie mix, believe it or not). And then there was my personal favorite (paraphrased): “Han Solo was frozen by Jabba the Hutt, and that sucked. So we don’t do the same thing to our crisp vegetables.”
Ohohoho :)
And now the :(
Why the heck is the Boston Public Library so disorganized? Last time I went, the French section (several shelves) was in absolutely no order – not by title, author, or call number. And now the foreign films are just jammed together onto two shelves at pure random. Ranma 1/2: Nihao My Concubine was right next to a film in Farsi and one in Hindu, and then there was a Chinese film to the side. This place is either for those who know exactly what they are looking for and would stop at no length to obtain it … or those who don’t care at all what they get (like the other woman there, who had an armful of ten rather random selections).
I’m learning how to make red bean (hong dou, or azuki) soup today, and it’s a rather simple recipe that follows the main principles of bean-cooking. What struck me first was advice from my girlfriend’s mom to soak the beans for 2-3 hours in water prior to cooking. Then I read online to soak the beans overnight. I talked to my dad this morning about it, and he said, “[We] never soak the beans, but we boil them and let them cook for a long, long time. [. . .] Do NOT add the sugar to the soup until the very end, or they will stop cooking.” At this point, I suddenly remembered the lab I had just done on Friday, where we pushed cell solution at 1x PBS into a microfluidic PDMS trap and replaced the liquid with 0.1x PBS. The cells bloated and bordered on exploding, with a 1.5-fold increase in diameter (coinciding with approximately a 3-fold increase in volume). Yet another recipe I just came across warns you not to add any salt whatsoever to the soaking water – hard evidence that maintaining a strong concentration gradient is the key to cooking red beans.
Just as making crunchy Chinese pickles must be done by patting the cucumbers with loads of salt in order to coax the water out, to bloat and explode the beans so that they form that characteristic grainy red soup, one must only use pure, solute-free water. Because the sugar (carbohydrate) concentration of in beans in extraordinarily high, adding sugar too early to the soup would be deadly – something that seeing the ingredients list off-hand would not convey.
Wouldn’t it be fun to compare the osmotically-driven expansion curve of the white blood cells in dilute saline solution (or even ddH2O) to the expansion curve of red beans in soup solution?
One of the biggest lessons I learned this summer, cooking with my friends, is how critical particular attributes of food are to people’s enjoyment. Prior, I had been of the assumption that people generally agreed on what tasted good or what tasted bad – at least within my family, we were pretty consistent and there was little argument over whether or not a restaurant was good or not. However, I have found that this is not always the case.
When cooking for large groups, one should go with the “least common denominator” of all people present. That means adding the minimum of attributes, giving the option of adding greater amounts at a later time. When cooking for someone personally – a friend, significant other, etc. – I think the best option is to try to take into account that person’s tastes, which one must realize may be highly different from one’s own.
The three major categories of attributes that people are hypersensitive to are: salt, oil, and spices. Oil includes butter and other ingredients that add “richness” and “weight.” Salt, I think, includes sugar often (those who like salty foods probably like sweet ones, too – this is a hypothesis). Lastly, there is the issue of spices – pepper, garlic, cumin, MSG, basil, mint, oregano, thyme, rosemary, etc. What tastes just right to someone might be completely bland to someone else, and intolerably strong to yet another person.
Here are taste profiles for this summer’s group:
Kenny – low salt, low oil, low spice
Chensi – high salt, high oil, high spice
Joseph – low salt, high oil, low spice
Jenn – low salt, low oil, medium spice
Tejia – medium salt, high oil, high spice
Because of this, we generally cook things with low salt, low oil, and low spice — that’s the only way to make sure no one is offended by the food. People with “high” preferences can tolerate “low” foods – it just tastes boring to them. But people with “low” preferences have a hard time even eating the “high” foods.
My own preferences are high salt, low oil, high spice. This derives from my home’s cooking style, which actually achieves such high concentrations of herbs and salt through the removal of water. We boil away the water in curry, fry our dumplings, and very rarely if ever drink any soup. This means that from “ordinary recipes,” we end up increasing the impact of the final product. However, I also have oil sensitivity – I have had a lot of stomachaches due to food drenched in oil, and even if something is deep-fried, I prefer it to be dabbed a lot to remove most of the excess oil.
My appetite has a certain instinct for what it wants to eat, and its focus tends to be one particular ingredient or property (of any sort). However, it expresses itself in a most bizarre suggestion: by recommending particular food items that I can eat that would contain the ingredient, without telling me explicitly what that ingredient or property of the food is. Sometimes, it’s really trivial – chocolate ice cream bar, Twix bar, and Godiva — I obviously want chocolate (this happens periodically, maybe once every month or so). It can sometimes be more subtle: corn flakes, beef jerky, and a wrap from the Olive Tree Cafe food truck. The common denominator of those three is the requirement of higher-than-average chewing. Oftentimes, the cravings actually address needs of my body – cravings for bell peppers may indicate a vitamin deficiency, and one for pineapple may indicate the need of the enzymes to settle something in my stomach.
Today, my stomach told me: “buffalo chicken fingers and pickles.” I was like, hmm, maybe what I want is vinegar (by the way, I ate both). I double-checked by thinking about hot & sour soup and guo tie in soy sauce-vinegar sauce, and indeed, I got approval from my appetite with those as well. It also so happens that I have been rather dizzy and light-headed all day, and after eating the buffalo chicken fingers and pickles, I gradually but surely began to feel less spinny-headed.
Suspecting that perhaps dizziness and vinegar are linked, somehow (I’ve never thought of that before – I usually eat ginger or drink ice water for dizziness), I searched the web. I came across many remedies citing apple cider vinegar (which isn’t really what’s in buffalo wings or pickle, which, as far as I know, use plain white vinegar). There may really be some wisdom behind these cravings … I take great care to always listen to my stomach – I tend to have far more satisfying meals when I do.
Skeptics can choose to believe, instead, that I became less dizzy because the dizziness was caused by hunger in the first place, and eating anything would have reduced the dizziness. Some evidence to the contrary, however, is that I wasn’t feeling particularly hungry, and in the absence of having buffalo chicken fingers, I would have preferred to just eat nothing at all.
By the way, have you ever heard of “Mother of Vinegar”?? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mother_of_vinegar. What a bizarre thing o_O
… at this point, after seven test meals, I’ve come to the conclusion that I’m eating better here than even at home. Quality-wise, it’s about the same, but the sheer variety is amazing. Even amongst Chinese foods, you see, family preferences sometimes preclude you trying out the whole spectrum. I never really had eggplant before at home. And now I’ve also had avocado .. plus there are plans for artichoke! You have people coming in with expertise in soup, or in vegetables, or in pasta, or in Korean vs. Chinese vs. Taiwanese vs. Japanese vs. Italian food (and soon to be Indian food, too!), or in fish. Some people love the stove, some love the oven, some love the microwave, some leave it raw.
Another interesting thing is considering dietary restrictions and preferences: we have an even split between those who prefer low-salt and high-salt foods, and we have a Seventh-Day Adventist and a vegetarian to take care of, too; and one person dislikes onion and carrot. So this means learning to be creative with recipes, and also making differently-flavored ones for different people, further forcing us to be flexible cooks.
This past week’s food; * = I cooked it; each separate dish has a separate number – we try to go for 3-4 dishes per day:
Sunday: (1) Tomato and scrambled eggs, (2) Si gua “soup”, (3) Sparerib soup with fishball, (4) Ginger tilapia
Monday: (1) Korean soba (Nang myun) – cold buckwheat noodles, fresh avocado, dried seaweed, pine-nut kimchi, hard-boiled egg with sesame oil + sesame seeds. (2) Kimchi pancakes!
Tuesday: (1) Green beans with garlic*, (2) bamboo shoot chicken with spiced dougan, (3) chicken curry, (4) ginger cod
Wednesday: (1) Honey pan-fried chicken, (2) steamed broccoli, (3) pan fried-steamed cabbage (really awesome combo technique)
Thursday: chicken dumplings with napa cabbage (also, tofu + chive vegetarian option)
Friday: (1) shrimp pasta or mushroom pasta, (2) Chinese soy sauce-sesame oil-pepper fresh pickles*, (3) pineapple teriyaki salmon*, (4) eggplant in spicy garlic chili sauce
Sunday: (1) beef and broccoli (oyster sauce)*, (2) chicken & cabbage fried rice, (3) corn egg-drop soup
It’s always fun finding common ground with friends where you never thought you’d find any. I announced how I would say, “Ouch!” for objects I drop or hit that, if sentient, would indeed be hurt by the impact. But little did I expect a newfound friend to agree, telling me how, when she crashes into a table, she pets it to make sure it’s okay. It was so cute! And plus, three other completely dry people at MIT? Woow .. it was really shocking to me (in a pleasing way) … people here drink wayyyy too much .. such a turn-off sometimes ^^;;. Speaking of drinking, I told another friend that I was spending most of the summer cooking, but she misheard it as drinking, and yet admitted that, in light of it being me, she took that to imply that I was drinking lots of water. =) Nice to know what I’m internally consistent on *something*.
I really love cooking … . So today, I brought the raw salmon and a bag of ingredients with me in the morning, parking the salmon in the lab lounge fridge and the ingredients in the BMES lounge. After lunch, I skipped down to marinate the salmon (was aiming for a 4~5 hour incubation marination period), but I had forgotten my detergent, so after slicing the salmon (to distribute it evenly into the high-salt and low-salt containers – gotta be sensitive to peoples’ tastes, ya know!), I carried the knife through the lab-filled hallway. Strangely, no one seemed to care (or notice) that I was wielding a big sharp knife with my hand covered in some strange glistening substance.
Afterwards, I bumped into my ATS little sis (wow, good job Jen and Kenny! You really paired us up well – we talk all the time now =) ) and she asked me why my shirt was wet around the belly. I answered, “So I was in the BMES lounge cutting [raw] salmon, and a piece of it got on my shirt.” She just sort of looked at me quizzically. It was rather amusing =P. I told her I was on my way to Pearl to get some materials for an art project (heehee, it’s for a very special person ;) ;) ). She advised me to go across the street to a run-down looking place simply labeled “Art Supply.”
Indeed! Not only was there such a store, but their products were considerably cheaper and varied in ways I didn’t expect. For instance, they had many racks of cheap hand-made paper (huge — like 3′ x 4′). They also had matte board of all colors, precut foam, etc. etc. I was really astounded, not expecting such a place in a crumbling basement of sorts. I bought a decent paintbrush on clearance for a buck. Highly recommended! The true artist, after all, is starving and therefore must be frugal =P. Half-kidding ~_^.
So I had a can of half-eaten pineapple; stuck it in the fridge for safekeeping … but the fridge was so cold, it froze! Oooooh what a nice dessert ^_^
I’ve been highly strange-feeling as of late, so I took several measures this morning to try to address the confusion/fatigue. I switched my shower schedule back to mornings, thinking that maybe a combination of automatic “wake-up-I’m-dirty” (vs. ahhh I’m all warm and relaxed and I want to stay in bed) and the morning head-stimulation may help me think more sharply. So far, that seems to be roughly the case. I also went and played violin for a few minutes, and that seems to also have helped.
I’ve decided to help out on my spring project for the time being, and in whatever other time, work on other projects and wrap up med school applications. I also want to try out the new Subway in Lobdell! (screw the roaches =P).
I just got an e-mail detailing an interesting summer cooking plan that resembles Pika’s system, where people rotate cooking/dish duty. I’m pretty eager to join, ’cause it’ll mean less strain (and less leftovers .. and less cost ..) on me, but at the same time, it sort of regulates what I can make. I might take some days off just to fool around with new recipes and such. Hmm! I wonder if this will work out?
This morning, I fried two eggs for breakfast. They were good.