2 Days in Philadelphia

I hung out for 2 days with SP before the semester begins (tomorrow)! We ate a bunch of food (no surprises there...):

1. Falafel food truck on 35th and Market St.

Thought I had escaped from rice since I'm not going to be home until at least March. Guess I was wrong. At least it isn't plain ol' steamed white rice (actually, the older I get, the more and more I appreciate eating plain ol' rice. Maybe it's because I have just grown to love food/carbohydrates, in general).
The falafel was kinda dry and crumbly and uniform in texture.

2. Ramune (Japanese drink with the marble that seals it until you push it down).

3. Singapore Chinese Vegetarian Restaurant 1029 Race St. (six stars out of five)

 Dim lighting (how utterly romantic!), cool tablecloth*, light green tea, and multiple utensils (fork, spoon, and chopsticks that seemed to be made out of a really absorbent wood). When passing me a fork, the owner (?) of the restaurant jokingly asked me, "Do you know how to use this?", and I replied "I'll try...he'll teach me [referring to SP]." (because SP isn't ethnically Chinese, but I am). Since moving to the US over five years ago, I've used chopsticks maybe 20 times in total, usually at restaurants that don't offer alternatives. My favourite eating utensil is probably the metal teaspoon.

 Stuffed tofu with amazing chunky ginger-peanut sauce. Dude. I could drink this sauce! I realise that I would probably be terrible at getting a guy via a dinner date. Especially with the picture-taking and my indecision. Particularly if there is a vegetarian menu with sections labelled "Beef", "Poultry", "Pork", and "Tofu" (all made with soy or gluten, of course).

 VEGGIES!! I am going to make stuffed tofu one day. I think they stuff the tofu AFTER stir-frying it, else the veggies would fall out.

 We also got dumplings. I want to drag SP here for dim sum one day, just because I love dim sum, and every time my family and I go to some dim sum place, most of the stuff has animal pieces. I didn't particularly love the dumplings because the filling was kinda mushy, and there was a lot of extra space inside the dumpling. SP liked them though.

 SP got a curry hotpot, and the veggies at the bottom were still tongue-burning-hot by the time the meal was over. It was pretty amazing, although I got my tongue burned a bit. I was going to get curry with gluten (read on the menu as "Curry with Beef") but I ended up getting Crispy Sweet and Sour Spare Ribs (gluten). I was debating between that and Sweet and Sour Pork Loin (soy), but the owner (?) recommended the gluten, so I got it. I mean, what do vegetarian chefs substitute animal bones with, right?

The sauce was really sweet. There were chunks of pineapple, tomato, pepper, carrot, and broccoli in the dish. I'm glad that this restaurant uses sundry vegetables in all its dishes (unlike other Chinese restaurants that pair broccoli with EVERYTHING) -- well, duh, it's a vegetarian restaurant.

The gluten ball tasted a bit like potato, a bit like gluten, and sort of had the appearance and texture of pig flesh. It obviously didn't taste like pig flesh. The sauce masked everything, though, which was neat. I'm going to believe that the "bone" part is just a potato fry, because that's what it tasted like. It was odd chewing the "bone". Seriously. It's like having an edible popsicle stick.
Note the brown rice.

At the end, we got 2 orange slices, 2 fortune cookies (grr) and 2 fried sesame balls with custard filling. My fortune was "The weather is nice". Great.
I think that for a sit-in vegetarian restaurant in the city, the meal was reasonably priced. With presumably fresh ingredients and a lot of veggies in the dishes, dim sum at night-time, a regular customer sitting in the corner reading a book (who ate a meal and also ordered take-out before leaving), and pretty tablecloths*, Singapore Chinese Vegetarian Restaurant is quite charming. SO BRING YOUR SIGNIFICANT OTHER(S) THERE!

*In looking at pictures of this restaurant online, I realised that they also have pink tablecloths. I prefer the paisley blue ones more)

4. Lotte Koala's March (cookies) - not a huge fan of them but SP loves them.

5. Lovash Indian Cuisine on 37th and Spruce St.

 More rice (long grain, rather cold -- but that may have been due to the weather, but the peas and paneer cheese were still warm). Some of the peas were still a bit hard, which means that they use dried peas, and not frozen ones. I love frozen peas and frozen corn. I eat frozen corn while it's still frozen, and I intend to do that with peas too, in the future (for other frozen things I eat, read here). The panner was less plasticky/smooth compared to paneer I've had before, and I'm not sure if that makes it more/less authentic.

 SP got chicken with something...It looked good because it was in a plastic container while mine was in a styrofoam one.

6. The Crepewalk, 36th and Spruce
Nutella crepe. Obviously better than the crepes that I made (which SP said were too thick). These are pretty much translucent!

Boiled Dumplings

Delicious savoury food!! For some reason, I've been consistently craving savoury food throughout the last quarter of the year. Today my mum made egg and carrot filling for dumplings!! My sister and I filled the dumplings with the filling. Actually, my sister made one dumpling and I made the rest. Her dumpling looks like a bag (it's the second one to from the left in the image below). We had some dumpling skins left over, and my sister cut tiny holes out of one of them and made a "snowflake" design.

 I'm not sure how to make boiled dumplings look appetizing. So here they are, dripping with soy sauce, like mini brains dripping with blood... well, not really.

 SO DELICIOUS. Reminds me of childhood. Of being 5 years old and helping my mum make dumplings from scratch...and not being able to crimp the tops correctly...

Qin Dynasty Seafood Restaurant (秦皇食府)

Parsippany NJ.

A few years ago, my parents were unwilling to drive me there to visit someone, but now, apparently, lunch is worth the (longish?) drive in the rain. We went in order to celebrate Mother's Day and my end of the semester as a college frosh. There were tons of people because it was tea/lunch time, and there were people pushing around trolleys of foods. Typical Cantonese restaurant style; you pick what you want, and they stamp at the correct section of a piece of card at the table, and later, you pay for however many stamps of food you got. Pretty neat, because you get to try sundry foods at a relatively low price (Okay, much cheaper in HK, but can't complain).

Xiao Long Bao - the buns with the soup. I didn't eat any but my sister liked them.

The egg tart's custard was phenomenally creamy and flavourful. The spring roll was still drenched in oil (Yes. Dripping.), but it was pretty good. At least I could tell what vegetables were inside it...

My brother liked this.

Pig blood. My brother and dad liked this. Bad picture quality. :( In the background, you can see the sesame ball thingy, which was pleasantly crunchy and not too sweet.

Nicely garnished and seasoned chicken legs.

Halfway through eating my egg tart, I felt compelled to take another picture because the cross section looks just as amazing as the whole egg tart. Notice how creamy it looks!

Fried tofu with one piece of shrimp in the centre. I'm not really sure how they managed to stuff/inject a cube of tofu with one piece of shrimp. The tofu wasn't that great, actually. The fried part was soggy (as it was in sauce...), so there was no real point of it being fried, in my opinion.

Dumplings with glutinous rice skin. For such large dumpling skins, the filling was really scant. It was also a cow flesh filling, along with some peanuts and a few pieces of vegetables.

The good thing about the waitresses was that they would explain pretty much anything on their trolleys. This green ball was apparently made with bitter melon...

...and it was absolutely NOTHING like bitter melon; inside was sesame paste and peanuts, and the green part was just glutinous rice that was deep-fried on the outside.

Rice noodles (chang2 fen3) filled with fried dough (you2 tiao2). Novel concept, nice sauce. I'm not super fond of fried dough, though. I really love rice noodles, however.

My brother and dad love durian. I don't. I never have, and I'm not sure that I ever will. This is a durian pastry.

It looks pretty delicious, actually, and I did eat some, first while smelling, but then without smelling the durian. By inhibiting my sense of smell, the flavour was harder to detect (Monell!), and I felt like I was just eating some sorta sweet pudding. However, I really can not ingest a lot of durian. I've tried it in all these forms, and I still really don't like it; I've had it fresh (the same way I eat any fresh fruit), in candy form (yes, durian candy exists), in chip form (well, okay, they were jackfruit chips), and now in pastry form.

And I still don't tolerate it.

Final thoughts:

Good for large groups: you get to try more dishes, and each dish is pretty easy to split

Great if you want authentic Chinese (actually, Cantonese) food without broccoli and cashews. I'm saying this because when we first moved to the U.S. and got food at Chinese restaurants, there was a lot of broccoli, cashews, and sweet food.

Kids like it (i.e. my sister, who doesn't eat much at home)

Pretty fair pricing.

Go between 11 and 2 on weekends. On weekdays, the variety seriously goes down, and any time after 2, the variety also goes down. If you go for dinner, you end up with the more formal Chinese restaurant style, with ordering actual dishes, and having bowls of rice, and a tureen of soup etc. If you want just casual dining with lots of choices, you should go for tea time/lunch!

Qin Dynasty Seafood Restaurant (秦皇食府), 857 Rt. 46 E, Parsippany

NYC Trip No 2

I suppose it will become a tradition for me, KC and DS to go to NYC once/year just to chill out and eat food. Last time, we hung out after AP exams in May.

We got to Chinatown at 10:30 am, but nothing much was open until over 11 am. Actually, some bakeries were, so we browsed them (because I was looking for strawberry egg tarts for my sister. We actually got to a store that sold green tea, papaya, almond, Portuguese, and normal egg tarts, but did NOT sell strawberry ones! Upsetting!). There were also other bubble tea places, but DS wanted to go to TenRen. This time, I got the coconut bubble tea since I think I prefer the milk-based teas over the water-based ones. This makes sense, of course, because the fat in the milk is highly loved by taste buds. Actually, is "fat" a taste? Is it a flavour like sweet or umami? If not, then why is fat-free milk so much less palatable than whole-fat milk? There perhaps are some sort of receptors that respond to fat content in foods. The coconut bubble tea was actually just sweet milk bubble tea [I think they used sweetened condensed milk at some point) with dried shredded coconut in it. I wish they had used coconut milk or coconut water, since the coconut flavour wasn't too defined. Also, all the tapioca was glued together into a great clump, so I ended up chugging 17 or so tapioca balls at once. Overall though, the bubble tea was awesome.

For lunch, we went to Shanghai Asian Manor, which was interesting because the shop side had a giant depiction of a bun in a bamboo steamer. Evidently, it's disproportional; honestly, do you expect a bun the size of a bamboo steamer? The silliness, for some reason, made me want to go to the store. Actually, any restaurants that have food sculptures on the store front beckon me in.

A meal in Chinatown is pretty well priced and pretty amazing too. We got 24 steamed buns, which was a lot, actually. The ones above are some grilled pig-mince buns (pork buns). Since DS and KC couldn't finish the last three, they ate the animal parts and I ate the bun parts. The grilled part was pretty amazing, and I wish that the whole bun was crispy and grilled instead of just the bottom of the bun.

These are the crab and pig-mince xiao[3] long[2] bao[1] with the soup that leaks out when you bite into it. Apparently, the crab taste is really not prominent, and the soup was too watery and unauthentic. I can't vouch for that since I didn't actually eat any, but I remember this time I was in Wuhan MANY years ago, and my relatives and I ate a zillion mini xiao[3] long[2] bao[1], and it was DELICIOUSLY ADDICTIVE.

For some reason, the vegetable buns were wrapped in dumpling wrappers. I do not consider these buns. Sure, they're steamed, but where are the yeast-and-white-flour-and-salt-and-oil infusions [aka, the dough for the steamed BUNS!?]!

These were delicious, and filled with vegetables that complemented each other, and the dumplings [oh, I'm calling them dumplings now because they don't taste like buns!] went really well with the soy sauce mixed with with Chinese celery and sesame oil. They were also really pretty. They remind me of triskelions [that compose clathrin-coated pits].

For dinner, we were going to go to Red Lobster but KC and DS were being really considerate because they realised that I don't eat animals. I suppose I would've liked to go to Red Lobster, just to check it out, but Olive Garde was fine too [yes, Olive Garde. The neon light for "n" in "Garden" was broken]. Since it's NYC Times Square, the prices were really jacked up. Also, since it's NYC, the Calories of each dish was posted, which made me feel terrible and super conscious of myself. We had a nice view, though.

I was debating whether I wanted eggplant parm or mushroom ravioli, but I actually didn't really want either... I wasn't really hungry, to say the truth. It's been 4 hours since then, and I'm still not hungry. Emotionally, perhaps, but physically not. So, at Olive Garde(n), I got a chocolate mousse with cookie crumbs, because I don't think that my local Olive Garden has chocolate mousse.

The mousse was really good, but that's a really generic statement because chocolate mousse is always really good. The cookie crumb base was basically crushed Oreos. I should try to make mousse myself one day. Once, in HK, I made peach mousse and it was only alright. After we kept it in the freezer for weeks, my mum started using chunks of it as ice (not in drinks or food or anything, but as ice, to keep non-foodstuffs cold). Another time, I was trying to make chocolate pie and I overbeat the cream, and it turned out sort of like mousse, but much more airy and ugly.

Dumplings!

Today AK came over to my house and we made vegetable dumplings! I had made the filling earlier on [9am, to be exact], using my brother's drink blender. Actually, it's also a solid-ingredient blender, and it chops carrots and tofu really well! The filling included carrot, extra firm tofu, garlic chives, bean sprouts, and some soy sauce... and PLENTY OF PEPPER. Perhaps there was way too much pepper...

We used premade dumpling wrappers, because it is seriously time consuming making my own dumpling wrappers. My mum used to do that when I was ... 5, and we didn't have any Chinese supermarkets nearby in Australia. She used to flatten out tons of little dubloons of flour, and I used to use the rolling pin and make irregular ovals. The wrappers were much thicker then, and tasted much better than these ones [more gluten, I think, and more transparent and chewy]...

The lettuce leaves are there to prevent the dumplings from sticking. However, at least two dumplings DID stick to the pan. :(

YEAH DUMPLINGS! This was also a great time to catch up on life and college, and to get fat for the winter. Haha.

D.C. in a Nutshell

Damn awesome, except that it's, uh, a QuakerFoods ad for oatmeal, in the metro station.
Chipotle in Chinatown in D.C. I didn't think that this was possible. But it is!! Yay hope!
Giant plastic icecreams on the way to the metro station. The family sitting outside was watching me with scorn. They probably thought I was the stereotypical tourist with camera who doesn't speak English. Well, they're WRONG!
Space/Air Museum. They're actually M&Ms. However, there is probably some copyright/royalty issue with using the phrase "Mars M&Ms".
Air/Space Museum, plastic aeroplane food way back when gas appeared "unlimited". Looks very tasty.
Some vegetable pizza. The crust... reminded me of this pizza from Pizza Hut in Australia. Or, it could've been Pizza Box, in Hong Kong. I'm not quite sure, but it was that thick, doughy and dry kinda crust. The best ever!!
Swiss Roll at breakfast time from their Asian food market. In the end we ended up trying the green tea, orange, coffee, and strawberry flavoured ones. They all tasted exactly the same, except that the strawberry one had a little zing to it. Apart from the colour, they could've all passed off for "Original!" flavour [whatever "Original!" means in company terms]. Later I found out that there was propylene glycol inside the cake. Which irked me. Yay antifreeze ingredients...
Green bean soup, with sugar and TAPIOCA. Genius! Gotta try that soon.
My parent's friend made dumplings. Egg and Chinese chives... BEST. DUMPLINGS. EVER!
I will post about La Tasca tomorrow.