New Year Party!

First post of 2011! I will now post about my "birthday party" on the 31st of December 2010. It's actually not my birthday on the last day of the year [but I do know someone who is born on that day!], but the idea was that I meet up with my friends from high school and celebrate my birthday which is around this time of year. The funny thing is that my mum actually let my friends stay overnight. The sad part is that 80% of the people I invited couldn't come due to another party or travelling. So, my brother invited his friends [and they took the TV to play games], and my mum invited her friends, so we ended up with a group of around 20 people. I also made a birthday cake, since I didn't want to buy a cake that had icky stuff in it. The cake I made included whole wheat flour and balsamic vinegar.

This layer of cake actually turned out alright [I was using a brownie recipe, so it's a bit flat and dense], but the first two layers were way too thin; when they were piled together they looked shorter than a pie. Or a fruit tart.

Orange glaze - 3 tablespoons of orange juice, 1 tablespoon of milk, and 1 cup of sugar! The glaze only had a hint of orange when it was dry, though.

See how flat the first batch came out?

A very coarsely-ground recipe for this cake [if you want 1-2cm-thick brownies that fit two 9.5 inch pans]

Ingredients:

2 cups of whole wheat flour

1 cup of sugar

1 cup of milk

1 cup of oil

1 cup of cocoa powder

3 tablespoons of balsamic vinegar

1.5 tsp baking soda [want it poofier? add 1-2tsp baking soda]

some salt

Method: Mix and bake for 20 minutes at 350 degrees F. Add more time if you want to.

First layer=blackberry jam

Second layer=marshmallows [Should've gotten marshmallow fluff, which doesn't have gelatin, but I didn't realise that I was going to be making a four-layer cake].

Third layer=peanut butter icing!

And... the cake! I have more pictures but I'm not uploading those because I do not want people to know my real name.

[The best] Sprinkles [in the world]! They're just like the ones from Australia - the Hundreds and Thousands that my mum used to put on honey bananas [except that these are only pink, green, and white, instead of rainbow-coloured].

So there were other foods, and I took pictures of them too, but this is one that I want to commemorate. This was brought by HM's family, and HM is my sister's friend. It's primarily composed of glutinous rice spotted with quartered jujubes [red dates]. Enclosed in the chewy, sticky layers is a mound of warm red bean paste. Curly swirls of orange and lime rind gently garnish the outside of the hemispherical [or parabolic... Actually, perhaps more parabolic, since bowls are generally more parabolically shaped] dessert.

Everyone said that the cake was nice, but they could've just been saying that because they knew that I had baked it. Apparently, one of the kids had been eyeing it for a long time before my mum realised that the kid wanted cake. The kid's mum told me that it tasted "fresh" and "rich", which are nice compliments! Another comment includes the "It's good". My sister, who had helped me with it, of course was scarfing down cake and burping out compliments.

We later watched some Harry Potter upstairs because my brother and his friends were still playing games on the TV downstairs, and then we watched the ball drop, which was seriously anti-climatic [as it is, every year].

We finished Harry Potter, and BV and I watched some Snoopy [yes, Snoopy and Harry Potter are awesome!]. It was a great birthday-partyesque-dinner-type-thing.

Eight Treasures Rice

I love rice pudding. With raisins, with cinnamon, with milk, or just plain... I love the gooey yet chewy texture. My mum today made some ba[1] bao[3] fan[4], which translates literally to "eight treasures rice". It's basically glutinous rice, another type of rice, kidney beans, mung beans, peanuts, lotus seeds, jujube berries, black beans, and there may be a few other ingredients [but it's okay, because I've already named 8 of them!]

Although I'm not really going to miss eating Chinese food every single day, I AM going to miss my mum's cooking.

With milk! Sans sugar.

Grand Shanghai (大上海)- Edison

I am exhausted. We went to the beach yesterday with another family, and we ended up going to Grand Shanghai, which is in Edison, for dinner. As the name states, the restaurant specialises in Shanghainese Chinese-American food. I say "American" because the food wasn't exactly authentic. I mean, super-sweet orange fish doesn't really exist in legitimate Chinese cuisine. For example, the fish was way too sweet, my brother told me. I decided to try some of the sauce, and he was indeed correct. "Fish with orange sauce" may exist, but "fish with a cup of sugar in the orange sauce" does NOT, in fact, sell itself in China.

Anyway, the parents ordered this planned-out meal, which included appetisers, a seafood soup, a bunch of dishes, and orange wedges with maraschino cherries [ew] at the end. Apparently, the two pots of tea were separate, which sort of defeats the idea of an "all-included" meal plan. We ordered Pu Er tea [the red tea, below] and Chrysanthemum tea [which I dislike, in general].
The appetisers included a lot of cold cuts of animal pieces, but there were two non-animal ones too. One was diced dry tofu, with cilantro/Chinese celery. Personally, I don't like the flavour of cilantro but this wasn't too terrible, since I was honestly really hungry.
The second appetiser was this spongey tofu with a spicy peanut sauce. In all honesty, I was reminded of spicy Thai peanut noodle sauce. It was great.
There were veggies and stuff as well, and at the end there was the nian gao, or, "year cake", which is basically pieces of flat dough made from rice flour. I usually love this stuff the way my mum makes it, but Grand Shanghai's method wasn't bad either... I mean, anything smothered in oil and seasonings tastes... "good".Of course, I have to ruin the intellectual atmosphere by posting the above image. Check out A17, the "Sampler [PU-PU Platter]! Hahaha!!

MS's Grad Party - Desserts!

Okay I lied. I WILL talk about MS's grad party, because it was truly the one with the most ethnically diverse foods [well. Apart from mine :P, but mine doesn't count]. This month, June, has been the most prodigal month of my life. No kidding. All that EXCESS food ["XS" as my chem teacher used to write, while we balanced out equations]... all that variety...

This is LEGIT Americana. Eat and party. Oh, and run away from exercise.

This is the stuff I've been missin' out since 2006, though I don't really know if I would've wanted partying to interfere with schoolwork. Maybe it was just better that I used to be antisocial, because by being antisocial, I would get all my work done.

But now that HS is over, I can party all I want!! This morning, JM came over for breakfast, I went for a super-long walk with MZ, JM and my bro and I went to the weight room... and it was all real chill, just hanging out and letting time slide by, without a sense of anxiety and procrastination.

Okay, so the dessert at MS's party was really sweet! She is Philippino, so there was a ton of ethnic food, which I love. Oh, there was a whole roasted pig... as a side note. MP commented on the irony that I found it enticing, but I basically blog about anything that interests me, food-wise... so here it is!

Glutinous rice pudding, with some brown sugar topping that was the reason the pudding tasted good. [I like corner and side pieces].

Mango trifle. It. Was. The. Best. Thing. There. Layers of mango and cream, patched up with sponge cake and crushed sweet biscuit pieces, and a crunchy top...

Pieces of trifle, with watermelon and the rice pudding.

I think that this was sweet grass jelly drink, with colourful tapioca balls inside. I am not sure, though.

Plantain wrapped in sweet pastry. It actually tasted like sweet potato pastry, for a second, but then I saw the seeds and the yellow filling. Oh, and the texture was not sweet potatoey. Plantains are awesome!

Eggplant parm; glutinous rice flour sweet bun, with a piece of processed cheese [It was sticky and nice until I got to the cheese]; soft taro pudding, coconut rice pudding - second favourite dessert there; some mini rice cake [see below] that I didn't like as much; upside down flan spongecake.

Another rice pudding, above which is the mini rice cake that I didn't really fancy.

Sponge cake! With flan on top! I love flan, in general, and the fact that this cake is absolutely beautifully shaped truly helped me to more helpings of it...

Plate of everything. The one in the bottom left is the coconut rice pudding, and I took the corner piece, with the crusty top and sides. I think that I love corner pieces because it has the widest range of textures.

Glutinous Rice Balls

Yesterday I fell asleep at around 7pm. I didn't intend to.
The run made me do it. Seriously. I finally decided [well, more like, was persuaded] to run, the week before track starts again... and what do I get running right after sittin' 'round at home for three weeks?
Pain, noisy breathing, that icky metallicy-blood taste at the back of my throat, and a crumbling of self-image.
In other words I should probably stop eating so much...
Or at least eat healthier stuff [a.k.a. probably not anything I've written about in the past 29 posts, save the peach. And oatmeal].
Anyway, on Sunday, my mum, my sister and I made a bunch of glutinous rice balls because it was the 12th day of Chinese New Year. NO, they are not those leaf-wrapped rice-and-animal-pieces-and-soy-sauce things! Those are zong zi. These... are tang yuan, which is basically glutinous rice flour and water mixed together, then boiled in a saucepan. Completely carb loaded.. but they're chewy and a bit sticky. For the past decade I've been eating them in sugar water, but on Sunday I decided to try them with soy milk... just because I eat practically every carbohydrate item with soy milk [think potato soup, milquetoast [though I honestly prefer the spelling "milk toast" because "milquetoast" is a corruption of French], steamed rice, oatmeal [there it is again!!].
It was awesome... Next time we ought to boil the tang yuan in milk, or use milk and glutinous rice flour to make tang yuan.

A few years ago I tried the chocolate-filled tang yuan. They were so good, but I saw them more as a snack rather than a meal...same with the sesame paste ones. So, I still think that I prefer these homemade ones.

Ohh it's glowing! It's a ball of heaven... tastes like heaven, guys.
[A.k.a. the camera messed up, or, with the typical lab speak, "due to human error"].