食飯: Meaning "to eat food", or as a fixed expression when beginning a meal with others- "Let's eat!"
Because fried spring rolls are the best thing for a throat that I should be protecting the night after a long and bomb concert and the day before a phone interview.
For some reason I’ve been eating a little less meat when I’m out. I guess that’s why I make it up with a spring roll.
(If anyone’s interested, I have pictures and a small fan account of the SM Town Live in NYC concert 
not sure that fits well into the food idea of the food blog, though.)
I didn’t realize that it’d been a month! Time is going by really quickly this semester… So much to do, so much scheduling to get everything done, so much hanging out with intimidating professors!
Well, to refrain from gypping this blog of a good substantial post after that unexpected hiatus, I’ll post a series.
I’ve been making a lot of pasta. (One reason is because it’s so much faster than the rice cooker…) Here are my pasta collections:
My first time on my own with lotus root, I think. I was paranoid about how dense it was, so I parboiled it before stirfrying with the rest of the ingredients (which was unnecessary, since apparently lotus root isn’t harmful raw) but even after boiling and stirfrying, it was still super-crunchy! Like… kind of rocks-crunchy. Oh well, delicious 
Kind of strange to me that it’s not pinkish, which is the color I’m used to in lotus root soup.
Ah, XO sauce makes it so delicious. And I always like fish-fu 
(I’ll dissect this photo for you in another post.)
The celery enthusiastically contributed to the color of the soup, but most of the flavor was corn.
My friends were planning a Costco trip, and I’ planned to go with them and get pasta (among other things) but because my friends are pretty horrible schedulers, they didn’t go. (They still haven’t gone.) I gave up and got the pasta at Kmart.
It looks good but is on a very Canto-style flavor spectrum, despite being basically an American food. It was very light and mild-flavored, with the vegetables doing most of the work.
Can you tell I really like this fish-shaped dish?
My reference/thought for the caption was “sushi boat”, but I don’t know if that’s intuitive.
Carrots and celery, then the old rice and baked chicken from the night before, fried with an egg. IT WAS AMAZING and smelled fantastic. I really needed a bigger frying pan though–I only have the one 8-inch, and this came out to about three normal bowls of rice. I love this fish. It’s great.
I covered the chicken drumsticks with pasta sauce (Ragu) and threw it into the oven. Done!
Lacks the feeling of nostalgia since it’s an ‘original idea’ (how much of an idea can two ingredients be?) but there’s that element of new pride for it.
With my diminished cooking supplies (read: lack of dishes and bowls) and possibly time (read: senior year of uni!!!), I foresee this as a possibly common meal for the upcoming year.
The soup is some kind of beef-based canned soup from Progressive. It looks like I also threw in some bell pepper and tomatoes 
This is a fantastic bit of food for allergies, headaches and just a general boost of your immune system. This is my first time making it myself, but I took some progress pictures so I could post them here, since I haven’t done that in a long time.
Jump the cut for the instructions!
蛋花湯 is a very typical soup in Taiwanese households–I am Cantonese. What does that mean? I didn’t grow up with this soup. Gasp! But I was craving something simple and light, as well as easy.
I’ve never watched anyone make this, and I haven’t had it that often myself actually, but I knew the basic theory of flowering the egg, so I just boiled chicken broth (from Trader Joe’s), added some tomatoes and brought it back to a boil, and stirred the beaten egg in. I didn’t want to overcook the egg so I turned the flame off once all the egg was safely in the pot. The soup was already boiling, so it would still have been cooking the egg even without the flame–my reasoning, at least.
Not bad! I’ve made it a few times since then. It’s great when you know you need to eat but have no appetite at all.
(Tagged chicken because it’s pointless to make a category for “chicken broth”…)
Adapted from Christine’s recipes.
Instead of her Worchestershire and Tabasco combo, I used a packet of hot sauce that came with dumplings I’d ordered from takeout. Since I don’t use those things, I just kept them in the fridge until someone comes over who does use them or until I get experiments like this.
Also, I used my family’s method of cooking chicken wings, not much different from Christine’s, but I use a little less oil and let it cook a little longer.
It was honestly a little strange. The original recipe is probably much tastier. It was fun to experiment, though. I’ll probably stick to more traditional-tasting experiments. I keep forgetting that my tongue, stomach and soul are completely Chinese, completely Cantonese, through and through.
Thought I’d make use of this one update to cover two more things that I didn’t make:
Stogo Vegan Ice Cream
Love love love this spot. I’m lactose-unhappy so I don’t drink milk and can’t take very much of ice cream and yogurt. This vegan ice cream, however, has sorbets and soy-based ice cream. I took Elaine here as well. She prefers her ice cream creamier, which really needs the dairy component, so vegan ice cream doesn’t work out as well for her as it does me.
I got the sorbets because my throat was really hurting that day.
The following is a breakfast that my roommate Jesse made one of the earlier weekends when we first moved into the summer apartment:
Potatoes were okay- burnt for flavor, but there wasn’t much else besides the strange herbs thrown on top. Omelet ingredients were overcooked into oblivion, and all the vitamins from the bell peppers were thrown out because “I don’t want so much liquid in my omelet”. Well then, don’t overcook them into oblivion! More strange herbs on the egg.
