Hummus (The Restaurant)

At Pennfest, I got to sample pretty much half (or 25%. I don't know Hummus' serving sizes) a meal from Hummus. In fact, I could've sampled a bucketful of falafel and pita if I really wanted to... the next morning, as I walked around campus for MI Green, I saw that the whole platter of pita (kilos and kilos!) was on the floor. Delicious, but social suicide to pick up. The servers were friendly (well, of course they would be; here was the one chance to win the allegiance of some 2000 college students!), and the food was all vegetarian!! It was surprising, because before that, I had passed a whole herd of dead cooked animals in the form of deli food, subs, pepperoni, chicken curry...

I really liked the spring-roll-type-thing, and I'm not sure what the filling was but it was really umami. The hummus was beany and the pita tasted gluteny/yeasty (which was unexpected) and pillowy, which contrasts with the normally more dry pita bread that I'm used to. In all, I did enjoy the food by Hummus.

In other news, SR (who gave me the peanut butter cookie), abides by the vegetarian-most-of-the-time-unless-the-animal-flesh-is-getting-thrown-away. This sort of encourages me to be that type of vegetarian (in that case, I wouldn't be a vegetarian anymore), because it means that less food is wasted. Interesting concept, since I've been trying to figure out the logistics of being a sorta-freegan. More on that when I feel like typing an essay.

Hummus Restaurant
3931 Walnut St.

Sitar Indian Restaurant

It's so hot today.

My room's AC is also pretty terrible.

Anyway, TJ, CL and BN and I met up at The Greek Lady for dinner, but after looking through the vegetarian options, we decided to go elsewhere. It's not that their selection was scanty; it was just that everything vegetarian was basically the animal version, sans animal. For example, the vegetarian gyro was lettuce, tomato, feta cheese, sauce and pita. Uh, where is the protein part? Where is the falafel?

After much wandering around in 96F weather (yes, I was watching the really vapid "news" - how the heck is "Oh. Today is 96F." allotted to 15 minutes worth of news?), BN decided to take us to Sitar, an Indian restaurant/buffet place. Apparently, lunch is around $8 and dinner is $11.75+tax, and there is a student discount of 10% [allegedly]. We each ended up paying $13.

I'm not really sure whether or not the mango juice was free, because the menu claims that it's $2.50, but either way, we all ate a lot of food and laughed at many jokes. The juice was unusually sweet, pulp-free (sigh.), and chilled. TJ put pepper in BN's water, but he didn't notice. Chances are, the pepper, being an insignificant amount and also insoluble, sank to the bottom of the glass.

I don't know the names of many Indian dishes, unfortunately, but the naan bread was amazing. Actually, it tasted kind of like the flour tortillas that my mum used to make, which means that either my mum unknowingly made naan, or the naan just tastes really similarly to flour tortillas (well, not Qdoba/Chipotle flour tortillas. Those are more gluteny). The spinach and paneer cheese was really delicious paired with the naan. On its own, the cheese was great, but the spinach was too spicy for my liking. Actually, a lot of the food was too spicy for me (I guess I'm just not that tolerant). The yellow lentil thing that is covering the naan in the picture was really great, too.

Plate 2. Unlike at Penn Dining, it is kind of hard to consume more than 1.5 plates of food. Also, the rice had animal pieces in it even though it was labelled vegetarian and BN mistook the animal pieces for nuts, which I then mistook as cashews. It turns out it was something chewy and meaty. :( The potato in the potato and green beans was really great, but the green beans were really salty and wilted (due to the salt, of course). I loved the potato samosas and the chickpeas! At that point, however, I really felt like not eating anymore Indian food for at least a few months. Seriously, I was that full and I honestly do not crave Indian food anymore. Although the food was pretty good, I think that if I were to buy food from here again, it'd be the potato samosas!

Fruit watery custard-y thingy. The fruit? canned apples. Actually, they're canned pears, but they look like apples (the red parts), so I'm not really sure what they REALLY are, but they're definitely canned. The custard part was pretty good, though, although it was less viscous than yoghurt. I guess it's a bit confusing for me because I prefer custards to be super thick.

Vanilla ice cream (50% of it melted, because the bowl was warm) with some carrot+nut+syrup, which tasted kind of like rice pudding. It wasn't bad, but it wasn't something I'd crave.

Unlike peanut butter sandwiches, chocolate, and avocado sushi, which I can never get tired of, Indian food is something to be enjoyed only occasionally, although I do love it.

Sitar Indian Restaurant, 60th S 38th St (around 38th and Chestnut St.), Philadelphia

Psychology Dinner Weeks Ago...

There was a psychology dinner a few weeks ago and I completely forgot to blog about it. The dinner was supposed to inspire us and make us want to major in psychology. The speaker, however, was extremely biased. She advocated against double majoring, stating that psychology is the most important subject in the world since it infiltrated every subject. Well, I would say that Biology is more important, because it studies LIVING THINGS whereas psychology only studies animal behavior [arguably, only human behavior, because psychologists always try to extrapolate animal data so that it can explain HUMAN behavior. However, then people may say that chemistry is what makes the world run since it explains THINGS, and the physicists will then claim that physics actually explains both THINGS AND NON-THINGS [a.k.a. tangible and untangible, including all those theoretical quantum stuffs] instead of just THINGS or merely LIVING THINGS. However, the mathematicians claim that maths runs everything, because physics relies on mathematics. This is an idea from XKCD.

Anyway. I got kind of irked because she had no right to tell me to singly major, so I think I lost some respect for her. She's a psychologist so she should have an inkling on how to manipulate us so that we'd leave falling in love with psychology.

Anyway, I'm here to talk about Indian food, not psychology, so I'm just gonna say that I couldn't eat half the stuff due to the chicken chunk infestations. I actually thought the spinach was with paneer cheese but it turns out it was chicken chunks...

However, the chickpeas were quite nice, as were the vegetables with paneer cheese. I don't really know why I'm so fond of curry yet not so inclined to eat spicy Chinese food. Perhaps the curry, due to the addition of tons of fat, is mellowed out, whereas Chinese spicy food is a full-out firecracker.

This is some doughnutty cake thing that was saturated in sugar syrup. It was extremely soggy and quite uniform in taste, so I'm not sure why I liked it. I believe it was deep fried before being drenched in sugar syrup, because it had that oily taste to it. Perhaps that's why I liked it.

The naan was extremely oily so I didn't really enjoy that part; generally I prefer savoury floury carbs to remain low in fat [breads, my mum's tortillas etc.]

Mad Cool Grad Partayyyyyz

I have not updated in ages due to:

1. School. I actually had 5 projects.

2. Grad Party planning, and shopping for grad stuff [presents, shoes, dress. Bleh.]

3. Graduation reshopping because the dress I had gotten earlier was too formal. I can not tell the difference between a sundress and a prom dress. Unfortunately, I needed the former and had bought the latter.

So, the past week in pictures... [I don't know why my formatting got messed up, but bear with it].

1. First garden snow peas, thanks to my dad :D We also got our first two strawberries, and a bunch of blueberries.

2. JB's grad party, 19th - pasta was really hard at the top, but not crispy. So, it was hard to bite, but I liked it. Something I noticed is that nobody's pasta has herbs in it... I'm gonna put basil or oregano in my pasta dish at my party :)

JB's dessert. Costco on a plate, pretty much. I didn't know the ingredients of the stuff in the cake [turns out there was trans fat], so I think I should be more wary, next time. Well, now I've decided that I'm not gonna get a red velvet cake for my grad party. Actually, I think that I'm not gonna get a cake. Just get cookies. And pie.


MJ's Grad Party - 19th - This is the best damn picture ever... you can see the mood - summer chillaxin'. My first legitimate pina colada, and it was great. The crushed ice added a nice touch to it and I could definitely taste the coconut and the pineapple. To cap it all off [haha. Think bottlecaps], there was no alcohol! Yes!


MJ's grad party - 19th - Seriously good mashed potato with peas. Funny how no one is making mashed potato with apple [That's what I ate the first time I had it...], then two types of rice - the browner one had some kinda herb in it that I didn't really like, but the rice wasn't too mushy, which is good. The pasta and cheese was really great. Every party has a pasta dish. And cake. It's just a trend I've noticed.

The garlic bread was okay. The fried plantain was simply delicious... I couldn't decide whether it was savoury or sweet, but the inside was soft and gooey while the outside was crispy. After learning about it through The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver last summer, I've honestly been interested in trying it out. And it was great! MJ's got great food. Seriously. She even had green puffed rice and marshmallow treats, but I forgot to take a picture of most of the food I ate. Plus, I was in the pool the majority of the time.

16th - MP and LS's chem project was about baking, so they made carrot muffins and sourdough bread. I'm not in their class but MP gave me some :) The carrot cake was really nice without the icing, and the bread... It didn't really taste like sourdough; it was crumbly, dry, and the crust tasted the same as the inside. I don't know if I have the authority to make a statement on the definition of sourdough, as I have only had it once before in my life. That time, it tasted much more different from what I ate that day.


13th - NYC with my mum. We were dress shopping as I have stated earlier, and for lunch, we went to one of the NY-style restaurants, where a pound of food costs a certain amount. We went to Speedy's, which is around 36th and 6th, I think [Not sure.] A pound of food costs $9.50 there. I suppose if one was obsessed with eating salads, one could get a ton of lettuce and tomato for a pretty low price.