Peanut Potatoes and...

...My dad's garden.
My dad used to live on a farm, with his parents and seven siblings. No kidding. His eldest sibling has kids who have kids, who are older than I am, and a bunch of my relatives still live on the same farm. Actually, the government wants to demolish the farms and build random housing there, which not only messes up a whole culture, but also displaces my dad's "roots". He is quite proud of his roots, actually. From Farm to Pharm [Pharmaceuticals]. Needless to say, if his family didn't know how to farm or garden, they'd be pretty darn hungry [and that's an understatement].
So, when we moved here, my dad wanted to buy a house with a huge garden. Luckily for us, we found a house that was CLOSE TO THE SCHOOL, and had already had raspberries and garlic etc. growing in the backyard, because the previous owners also loved to garden.
This year, among the typical Chinese vegetables, there are also mini potatoes and green beans. Actually, I think that they're runner beans, but I'm not really sure. Flat green beans, maybe? So, I decided to take a picture of my dinner today :). The stuff that looks like minced cow pieces is actually TVP with cheese and seasoning. I made it a while ago [yay for freezers!] but I never had to chance to update about it.My sister stated that the smallest potatoes looked like "peanuts". In fact, in a blind test, I think that many people would indeed mistake them for boiled peanuts. The texture is the same. The potatoes aren't super starchy yet.
That's a teaspoon by the way. Just so you can gauge how cute and tiny the potatoes are :D
Flat green bean thingys, with garlic and some wo[1] ju[1], which is this Chinese plant stem thing.
Potato - the spud of da club!
MINI POTATOES!

La Tasca

Spanish food is NOT Mexican food. It is NOT even close to Tex-Mex. People tend to forget that. Anyway, at D.C., we were wandering around the Gallery Place, after having visited all those museums, and we decided to go to the Hard Rock Cafe in order to show grandpa the "American" cuisine. Of course, being the disorganised family we are, we only decided this after trudging through random streets. By that time, we couldn't relocate it. Earlier, to prove that we actually passed by it, I had taken a picture: In the end, we went to La Tasca, which is a Spanish restaurant that sold tapas. On WordReference, "La Tasca" means "cheap bar" in Spanish, and "tapas" basically means "tapas". Or, "hors d'oeuvres". Or "snacks". [Today, I presented my senior project about The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao; great book! and there was tons of Spanish that I pronounced very badly. Je parle francais; haha]. Anyway, this is one of the times in which QUALITY is much more valued that "quantity".
My dad got some shrimp/scallop thing. $7
Grandpa got salmon. For these two, I have no opinion to give as I didn't consume animal pieces. $7.25
My bro got some kind of sausage with white beans. $6.75
My mum got this Spanish potato and egg and onion omelette. $5.75. In all honesty, this was really good [I tried some, because the mayo was spicy and my mum didn't like it]. Actually, it tasted more like mustardy-mayo, or something. It was EXOTIC!
My delicious mushroom risotto. Oh-so-smooth. $7
It's not really "La Tasca" because at Costco, you can get tons of food for $7. As in, you can get 48 pieces of sausage, or 92 mozzarella sticks. However, this restaurant had damn high quality [except for when they forgot to cook my brother's dish. By the time we 4 had finished, his dish hadn't arrived yet]. Although you can't really tell from them photos [they could be the size of my laptop, I guess], the serving sizes were really small, compared to other restaurant chains [the restaurant with the largest serving size has to be the American Olive Garden. I don't think I "love" Olive Garden. Anyway, good culture! [In the outskirts of D.C's Chinatown].

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.

Veggie Crunchers.

I really would rather call them "Veggie Chips", but there's probably some copyright issue with FritoLay or something, or someone did a [as typical] bad translation from Chinese to English. Anyway, these... chips are extremely crunchy!!! There is a weird sweet and salty taste, because, as you can probably tell, SWEET potato is sweet. Thus, sweet potato chips covered in [ostensibly,] "sea salt" just tastes kinda weird. Not "bad", exactly [as in, not like mint chocolate + fat free plain yoghurt, which is the WORST COMBINATION OF FOOD IN THE WHOLE UNIVERSE!!], but just not satisfying. Also, though they aren't fried, they still contain 6g fat per 28 g serving. Sure, it's better than Doritos [8g per 28g serving], but I think I'd rather eat the vegetables raw.

In order: Sweet potato [brown skin], carrot, taro, green bean [THE BEST PART!], purple thing... I don't think that it's taro, but it probably is, but it's too dark..., squash - a.k.a. pumpkin [green skin]. Now, a 3D view!:

Sittin' on my chair. I'll definitely buy a pack of green bean chips in the future, but I probably won't be buying these again. They're not super. [Well, my mum bought them.]

On another note, today in Calc we had an M&M lab, in which we had a graph of f(x)=xx+1, and we found its integral by putting M&Ms in the area between [0,3] and between f(x) and the x-axis. I put them in order of colour... turns out I had a lot of green, a lot of blue, barely any red.. some orange and yellow and brown. I didn't take a picture because I'm not allowed to use my phone [though if I had brought it, I'm sure I would've been allowed to...]. It was pretty chill.
SMILE GUYS!