Archive for the ‘Food’ Category
Nothing’s as good as a dish of banh cuon in the morning. There’s this one stand in the marketplace, and when I’m in Vietnam I eat their banh cuon pretty much every other day. Nothing beats fresh banh cuon warm from the pan.
8D Lucky for me, my mom makes it almost every month, and I get to help her!
For those of you who don’t know, banh cuon (literal translation: rolled cake) is a crepe-like roll with ground pork, minced wood ear mushroom, & sweet onions. The batter is made with a mixture of rice flour, water, and vegetable oil, and it’s a common Vietnamese breakfast dish that’s usually serviced with blanched bean sprouts, fried dried onions, and nuoc cham, a sweet & salty Vietnamese dipping sauce. The roll, when made well, has a soft, silky-smooth consistency and almost melts in your mouth when you bite into it. Then there’s a burst of sweet-salty flavor when you reach the filling. The texture that the minced mushroom adds is nice. You just have to taste it to believe it.
A quick run-down of the process:
- Batter: rice flour, water, bit of vegetable oil. Stir it all together until it is liquidy, like thickened milk. Let it for an hour, stirring occasionally.
- Filling: Ground pork & finely chopped garlic, combined with sugar, just a little bit of salt, and pepper. Marinate for a few hours, then take out and fry in pan with minced onions and wood ear mushrooms until cooked. Set filling aside.
- Process: Heat a pan, medium-high heat. Add a tablespoon of vegetable oil. Pour batter on to form a thin sheet. When it looks cooked, bring the pan off the stove quickly and over a big dish. Plop the pan upside down to get the sheet of rice flour onto the dish. Spoon some filling into the center, fold in two parallel sides over the filling, then roll it the other way. Use a spoon to help, because it may be too hot to touch with your hands! And then slide the roll off your dish into a storage container (possibly lined with paper towels).
Okay. Pictures
 The set-up.  The batter cooking on the pan. Looks better than this irl.  We made a lot.  Ready to eat~ *__*
I’m actually not a big fan of cookies, mostly because aside from The Cookie Corner cookies, I find most store-bought cookies horribly boring, not chewy enough, too sweet, or too chocolatey. Chocolate chip cookies are so very ubiquitous and I am not a fan of chocolate. So when my nephew said that he wanted to bake cookies one Sunday afternoon, I wasn’t exactly thrilled.
Easy way out: Pillsbury Doughboy cookies. But those never turn out the way I want them to. Too brittle and dry and tastes exactly like what there are: something you bought at the store. So I ventured out into the internet, and found this recipe for soft-batch choco chip cookies at allrecipes.com.
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 Made from a soft-batch recipe from allrecipes.com. Perfect. Lately I’ve been having a pretty hard and stressful time, for a variety of reasons not appropriate for public consumption. I’ve noticed that on the days when things really seem crappy, all I want to do is stay home and bake. Obviously, because I have a job, I can’t just stay home and bake. So I get up extra early or stay up extra late instead.
I’m a food enthusiast, but for a long time what really got my enthusiasm going was the eating of the food. Because food = yum. Over the past month or so, though, I’ve come to realize why there are so many people who buy cookbooks and trade recipes. (more…)
Inspired by my DW writing buddies to explore the wealth of inspiration that writing books provide, I bought a book. It’s by Roy Peter Clark, and it’s called Writing Tools: 50 Essential Strategies for Every Writer. I picked it because it received good reviews on Amazon and because its four sections have great headers: Nuts and Bolts, Special Effects, Blueprints, and Useful Habits.
I’m more than 2/3 in, and I agree with the good reviews. I really do like the overall organization of the book, though, as with any book that attempts as grand a task as teaching people how to write better, there are bound to be some things that one already knows. Even for the seasoned writer (which I’m not, by the way) this book will probably offer some insight into the craft of writing, or inspire inspiration for starting new projects. (more…)
Today was the first time I came into the office (1580 Makaloa St, across from Ala Moana) before 11:00 a.m., and at around 10:30, to my surprise and glee, there came a knock at the door, and a muffled “Bentos!” announcement from outside.
Apparently, every Monday and Wednesday the bento guy comes with bentos in his coolers and sells them to the office workers. I picked up a delectable bento for $5. It’s some sort of mochiko chicken patty thing, with sweet, crunchy green beans on the side, on a bed of rice. So so good. It’s been a while since I’ve had a bento that good.
I think delivery bentos are such a good idea, especially for lazy office workers like myself who don’t want to walk all the way across the street to get food XD
It is lunch time, and I still have half a bento to go, so I’m signing off now =P
*editedit* I was halfway through before I realized I should have taken a picture. Here’s a picture of the incomplete bento, taken on camera phone.
This evening, as president of our Student-Alumni Associates club, I went to a Pizza & Pitcher night hosted by da Hukilau. Da hukilau is a nice little restaurant and bar on the bottom floor of the executive center on the corner of Bishop and Hotel in downtown Honolulu. On Tuesday nights you can get any one of their specialty pizzas for $5 each. You can also order a pitcher of beer for $5. I had eaten there before, but it had always been their catering menu and not the regular entrées. I was looking forward to it, since one of my coworkers loved the place. (more…)
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