Mango Custard Tart

SP and I made deliciously juicy mango custard tarts using this Fruit Tart recipe. The tart includes defrosted frozen mango, sliced and layered onto a light custard cream that is enrobed by a sweet buttery crust. The above tart was decorated by me (with the aid of a spoon, because the mango was surprisingly slippery!). The tart below was decorated by the SP, the Super Pastry-making-guy.



Notes on the Method:

• With the same amount of dough and cream, instead of one tart, we ended up with two generous tarts that were smaller - 6 to 7 inches in diameter?
• As I didn't feel like washing my rolling pin, we just pushed chunks of dough into the pans and flattened them with our fingers. This worked pretty well, though the edges should probably get more dough next time. The holes in the bottom need to be larger and more numerous so that there is less puffing of the pastry. Also, we only froze the flattened-out tart shells for about 20-30 minutes (while we made the custard cream), so there was no prechilling of the dough.
• The dough, when done, really does clump up into a ball when stirring with a spoon (or for the other folk, a mixing blade)!
• We used fat-free milk for the custard cream even though the recipe specified fat/low-fat. I don't think that it matters, taste-wise.
• A lot of the ingredients were NOT dutifully measured, but everything turned out fine!
• We replaced the corn starch with three tbsp of white flour in the cream. I think this is what gave the custard a more doughy/floury/pudding texture as opposed to a light pastry cream texture. Either way, it was still not too heavy (not like egg tarts at all!), had the viscosity of chocolate mousse, and paired well with the crust. Before incorporation of the heated milk, the egg yolk mixture had the consistency of pancake batter. On the heat, after merely a few minutes, the cream started to thicken!
• The only fruit we used was mango. Fortunately, mango is really shiny, meaning that there is no need for an apricot jam glaze!

Thickening custard on the heat!

Shells - baked, and filled with custard.

I am pleased with this tart because I can now successfully gauge when custard is "ready", and so can SP! This is a skill that will help him woo the women (far far far in the future)! Also, we had heaps of frustrating fun decorating with irregularly-shaped mango slices. The best end to the day was, of course, sharing a whole tart and watching the Q&A video on Curiosity's second day on Mars. 

Changes I would make include substituting whole wheat flour for the white flour, using two egg yolks instead of three, and adding more corn starch & milk. I would also make the give the sides of the tart thicker crusts so that they don't burn as much, and I would poke more holes into the crust to let air out (so the dough doesn't puff up).

Cheese and other things

I am slowly making my way through all the cheeses at Trader Joe's (from cheapest to most expensive), and I recently tried Dubliner cheese and Comté. It turns out that I don't particularly enjoy either :(. Although both taste delicious melted, from my experience, ALL cheeses taste good melted. Even the free giant wedge of some sorta fancy cheese we got from Costo in 2006 that reeked of some kinda herb or mushroom or ... I dunno. Even that was n-fold zillion-fold uh, better heated up.

Dubliner cheese: Specially made in awesome Ireland, this cheese has a firm texture, smells pretty good, and is rather crumbly like parmesan. It also tastes crumbly and sour, and has a bite that kicks like Swiss cheese (I'm not a fan of the...hard/translucent (huh, weird adjectives)... taste of Swiss cheese although it looks absolutely beautiful). It tastes good melted though, and is super stringy.

Comté cheese: This French cheese is also hard and has a waxy rind that is crumbly and extremely smelly. To me, this cheese smelled like E. coli on petri dishes. Urg. It may just be me as a Bio lab person, though, because once I walked into my boyfriend's dorm and it smelled like yeast growing on petri dishes (he had just had a certain brand of cheese pizza). Lab smells do not entice me. The cheese itself is hard, dry, and tastes a bit off.  It is, again, delicious when melted, but the parchy E. coli sensation is still there.

I went to Whole Foods and tried their hot food/cold food for $7.99/lb. As this was my first time, I asked the guy giving out gazpacho samples about how the system works. Basically, you grab a box (small cardboard "~1-pound-sized", large cardboard "~2-pound-sized(?)", and large compost-able cardboard (~2-pound-sized(?)") and fill it with hot and cold foods from the trays. You can ask the people at the deli to weigh your box if you want. When you pay, the box and contents are weighed, and you can ask for utensils! I ended up getting around $6 of delicious food, which I ate while reading Grimm's fairy tales right outside the Whole Foods (they have chairs/tables). Unfortunately, this demonstrated that I can hypothetically eat some 3 pounds of honey mustard vegan chicken and still have a raging appetite afterwards. I also really liked the Asian tofu salad thing. The mushrooms were a bit too sour for me. I don't know whether the boxes are recycle-able; they have a waterproof coating on the inside, but it was easily tear-able, so I recycled it anyway...

I also have decided to make dinner by putting all dinner ingredients into a pan and baking them for around 20 minutes at 350 F in an unpreheated oven. As I have a LOT of cilantro (doing pilot taste tests), I baked that too (I am NOT a fan of raw cilantro). So far, I've had three or so of these dump-and-bake dinners. The one below has corn tortillas, topped with sliced eggplant, Comté cheese, soy ground beef mixed with a whole onion, and cilantro.
Also, instead of ice cream, I bought 680 g of frozen mango, ~400 g of which I ate on the way home from Trader Joe's. It is absolutely gratifying, and DOESN'T MELT! It's a great treat.

Epic Run Times

Run around town...Actually, once I got to 9th St., I started walking, and I walked four a few hours. Hehe. At least four hours.

I saw a bunch of giant cakes in a storefront, but the store looked like it was closed and there wasn't a door or anything. The cake looks pretty sumptuous.

I went to The Space Corner again and got dried roses (to make rose tea, rose water, and Turkish delight later when I get home) for $1, mango black tea ($1) and cream of tartar.

Then I walked around the "Little Italy" area of Philadelphia and checked out the market on the pavement...and I noted that Italians aren't the ones who sell the vegetables, which is kind of ironic I guess. I bought some red peppers and walked over to a candy store, Sweet Tooth, on the corner of South and 4th. I'll update about that later.

Then, I went to Reading Terminal Market and saw this at one of the chocolate stores...which I like. Haha. Screw the diet.

At Reading Terminal Market, I dropped by the Sweet as Fudge Candy Shoppe to buy some pretty delicious morsels of sugar. That'll be another blog post.

After getting to Chinatown, I walked past a dingy little store with a zillion boxes in the store front. Then, I realised that it was a fortune cookie factory, which is pretty amusing in my opinion.

I dropped by the Mayflower bakery to get some bubble tea.

I was shocked. They had kiwi bubble tea. They had avocado bubble tea. I couldn't believe it; AVOCADO BUBBLE TEA! This is when I'm glad I'm bilingual; I asked if they used real avocado, and the lady picked up an actual avocado and said, yes, we use real avocado. It's kind of funny because on the shelf above the sinks, there were tons of boxes of powder, labelled "taro" or "coconut" or whatever.

She cut up half an avocado, used half-and-half milk, (and sugar?) and added crushed ice at some point. In all honesty, it was more of a smoothie than a "tea" or drink.

The smoothie was very thick, and tasted mildly of fresh avocado. I was surprised that avocado tastes good when it's sweet, although I prefer it in avocado sushi with soy sauce. I suppose avocado's sort of like peanut butter; both incorporated in sweet and savoury dishes.

I was really thirsty, so I ended up drinking all the slushie (oh so thick and my favourite colour and nicely textured!), and there were lots of bubbles left. The bubbles were really chewy, and not overcooked. I would really recommend Mayflower Bakery. 1008 Race St.

After a bit, I went to KC's Pastries and got a sweet yam tart, which I've never had before. Egg tart, sure, and coconut tart, but not a sweet yam tart!

Unlike other bakeries, KC's Pastries doesn't have seating, so I went to eat at Reading Terminal Market.

The yam tart was surprisingly gelatinous. It was like a super-thick pudding.

The pastry was just normal and bland.

I dropped by some grocery stores to get some vegetables and Chinese snacks.

Then I went to Cube Cafe, intending to get some eggettes ($1.95), but I was so thirsty as opposed to hungry. I contemplated bringing some eggettes home. Instead, after chatting to the shopkeepers (who were very helpful with explaining dishes and drinks), I got the Icy Poppy Drink.

I've been abstaining from soda for the past half-a-decade (I think?), partly because of the high-fructose corn syrup thing, and partly because I've just been indifferent to it (e.g. the way I'm indifferent to baklava). This drink is basically some sort of clear soda with mango bubbles.

Now, the bubbles are the strange exotic things. Once popped, the bubbles reveal a thick mango goo. I'm not sure what the covering of the goo is; it seems to be some cellulose fibre. It's an interesting concept, but I don't think that I'm going to get it again. It's an ephemeral toy.

On the way back, I got samples of hummus and chips. "Why are you guys giving out free hummus?"

"Oh, it's cuz a lot of us still don't know what hummus is, so we're giving it out to people"

Cool.

I also saw Wizard Con, like Comic Con, but I didn't get in because I needed tickets.

At Rittenhouse, I got a free can of coffee.

Nice day for food.

Sweet Tooth, 630 S 4th St.

Sweet As Fudge Candy Shoppe, 12th and Arch St.

Mayflower Bakery, 1008 Race St.

KC's Pastries, 109 N 10th St.

Cube Cafe, 145 N 11th 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

berkshire bark - Tropical Heat

So here's a funny story.

The Uncommon Market unintentionally sells a lot of expired food.

There is expired vegetarian sloppy joe sauce, pasta sauce, curry sauce, noodles (okay, the noodles will expire on May 11th this year), and other stuff. It's not as though the Uncommon Market is AWARE of this situation, though, since the same jars and packets of sauces have been sitting there for at least 3 months. Yes, I've been checking for 3+ months, because I've felt inclined to buy vegetarian sloppy joe sauce, and I've been waiting for a new shipment because the packets sitting on the shelf have been expired since February 2011.

No one else really checks expiration dates, but it's become a habit of mine ever since I bought some chocolate from the Uncommon Market in January, only to find that it had expired on December 17th, 2010. When one purchases a small bar of chocolate for $3.99 (Yes. Everything's price is jacked up), one expects high quality chocolate. One does not desire expired chocolate. In general, I don't mind eating relatively expired food - expired pasta, expired chocolate, expired rice (stuff that isn't perishable), but in this case, I had to make a stand. I'm already buying overpriced Dining Dollars, which I end up spending on overpriced food, so I'd BETTER get fresh food out if it

.

Sometimes I aspire to work for the FDA's Food Safety department so that I can research what "expiration" means, and whether one would drop dead after consuming some pie one hour post-expiration. Then, I wonder what life would be like being a freegan. If you push back the expiration date by ONE day - 24 hours - much more food (especially milk, yoghurt, ham, cheese, pudding, canned goods) would be saved in this world. However, I can't support any of this because there doesn't seem to be much research concerning food expiration.

Anyway, I ended up switching the chocolate for a new bar that will expire in June (but I've already eaten it), and I suppose the expired bar was thrown away, although it was perfectly edible (yes, I'm a hypocrite, right? Perfectly edible, yet I was so bothered by it that I had to exchange it).

The bar was called Tropical Heat, by berkshire bark, and the impression I got is basic, chunky, wholesome, and...spotty. It contained macadamia nuts, pineapple, mango, papapya, coconut, chili, and cayenne, and I couldn't wait to try it because I do like spicy chocolate.

The coconut texture was very pronounced, but I couldn't really taste its flavor. The pineapple, mango, and papaya were indistinguishable from each other (which is a bad thing, because...they're different fruits) and they all tasted flavourless and had a weird texture. I've had dried pineapple, mango, and papaya before, and those instances never made me think, "Wow. Am I chewing gillyweed? Stale gum?" The chocolate was normal dark chocolate, and yes, there was a hint of spicyness, but nothing too hot. It reminded me of the spicy chocolate drink from the Penn "Chocolate" Festival, so that was good. I honestly don't think it was worth $3.99, especially when I can buy really high quality pure chocolate, or just plain ol' cocoa powder, for $3.99 at Shoprite, or even Trader Joe's.

Back to buying noodles, rice and polenta, because at least those prices are only jacked up by 10-30% rather than 50-70% at the Uncommon Market.

Kiwi Froyo

Kiwi.

Previously called "Sprinkles". The most popular flavours in Philly include vanilla, chocolate, original tart, and cookies and cream. Seasonal flavors turn up every few months.

Owned by Ryan and Matt Mealy, Kiwi is a frozen yoghurt (okay, for this post I will spell it "yogurt") store located on 36th and Chestnut, and I signed up for a Preceptorial lead by them. A preceptorial is basically a 2+ hour class that isn't going to be graded, and I suppose Penn gives them out because it's a way for students to learn things that aren't part of their majors/requirements. For instance, I signed up for a Thought Experiments Preceptorial, which is... well, philosophy, right? There was also one called Wine Tasting, and I got accepted into it but I'm not 21 yet so I can't actually go, legally.

I thought that this Kiwi Preceptorial would be interesting because it would open my eyes up more to the commercial/production aspect of food companies. I also hoped that there'd be a tour of the actual store, including what ingredients are used and how flavours are created. This wasn't the case though; the Preceptorial focused mainly on business. Ryan and Matt are businesspeople. They love food, sure, and they love frozen yogurt, but they are fully focused on the -open-more-stores- & -promote-Kiwi- & -sell-more-. They grew up in a family-business household, they have business degrees, and they decided to open up a frozen yogurt store because frozen yogurt was a business-grabber, with it being touted as "healthy" and all. If, for some reason, the frozen yogurt business dies down (although I highly doubt it, with more and more people believing that frozen yogurt is healthier than ice cream), they claimed that they are ready to pursue a different fad, including non-food ventures.

See, if I was going to open a bakery/patisserie, it'd be because I like food and I love baking and I want to cut out the stigma that pepper, vinegar, and chili "are too weird to put into sweet cookies/cake". So, this Preceptorial showed me why businesses expand and why Aramack and Campbell (and all the other places I applied to for internships) want Management and Marketing degrees. Thanks. Biology (and Chemistry, even though I really don't want to admit that) gets thrown out of the window. Actually, I take that back. I did ask Ryan whether they created their own froyo from scratch, and she said that they currently didn't. "However," she said with a grin, "my husband, who is a scientist, will be working on it at some point, although he doesn't know it yet."

Which goes to show that I should marry a Whartonite. Haha. I think that I prefer Engineers.

The Kiwi story, as I said, starts off from a family business; Ryan and Matt had a bunch of experience helping out in the family furniture company. They claim that each company needs to offer something "new", and to stay within that niche, in order to get recognition. The "new" thing for their furniture company had been that they offered same-day delivery, and the "new" thing for Kiwi is that the frozen yogurt is self-serve. I had never gone to Kiwi before, so, yes, I agree that this is indeed new. Unlike Flurt or any ice cream stores, Kiwi gives you a container and 14 flavours from 14(?) machines to choose from (16 in other Kiwi stores; only Philly has 14 flavours. I think that this is due to the fact that there is not enough wall space to stick in more machines here). For 49c / ounce, you can fill out however much of frozen yogurt you want; you just pull down the lever and let the frozen yogurt flow. Then, you can add toppings/fruit, and you weigh the bowl and its contents, and pay. I suppose this is great because it

1. Offers customers customizable sizes.

2. Offers customers every single flavour in one sitting.

3. Offers customers the ability to have 90% toppings and 10% froyo, if they really wanted to.

4. Means that employees don't have to be trained to make the perfectly pretty froyo. When I was at Carvel, I had to make sure that the ice cream on the cone looked pretty. If it looked wonky, customers would appear a bit upset, and I'd look unprofessional.

5. Means that only 1 container needs to be ordered. There's no such thing as a "small", a "medium", a "large", an "extra large", or a "kiddie cup".

6. Is "new".

Initially, Ryan and Matt were going to Franchise, but they decided that they should just open their own store, and they were going to call it "Wondercream", which has various connotations, one of them being inappropriate and another of them meaning "fat" (if you think about the word "cream", you will instantly think of "fat". Yes, you will, because the Media said so). Technically, they're still registered under the name Wondercream, although the name Kiwi is "fresher" seems to make customers like it more.

Back to the story. Ryan and Matt opened a store in June 2009 in Cherry Hill, NJ, and it was a really tough time up to that point because literally no realtors wanted to rent to a new company. Apparently, that's how it is in the business world; you're of zero value until you stick a dent in your market. (This is where I think the story got confusing, because Ryan said that they had started searching for location, equipment, interior design etc. in "December 2008" and that "after 16-17 months, we finally opened", which would imply that they started in December 2007. Nevertheless, the point is that they took a while to plan everything.) They ended up signing four leases before even opening the first store, and because nearly no-one turned up on their opening day, they had this huge "Grand Opening" and gave out unlimited free ice cream to everyone at their Cherry Hill Mall place. Both these events demonstrate how confident they are; apparently, they gave away 15000 oz of frozen yogurt to ~2000 people. Matt laughed about how it was a huge business risk, but that summer, they averaged 700-800 people per day.

This was a different story in Philly though; when Kiwi opened here in September 2009, the unlimited free froyo idea made people line up and just TAKE AND TAKE and be CRAZY! It's pretty interesting to see both Ryan and Matt laugh at all these events, which one could consider to be "failures" or "setbacks"; again, they're really confident people. They "want to dominate", they say.

So, here is the advertising component of Kiwi from Ryan and Matt. I'm typing it down because it's true, although I'm not sure how much more likely I am to buy froyo from them when I would rather buy bread since I like bread more:

1. Customers are greeted every. Single. Time. //I guess I'm indifferent to this part, unless I get discounts or something if I become a loyal member.

2. 30 toppings. //Thanks for the choices, but I'm not paying 49c for an ounce of marshmallows or an ounce of sprinkles. I'm paying 49c for an ounce of frozen yogurt.

3. Clean. //Whoot!

4. Fruit delivery 3 days a week! Fruit is also freshly cut!//See comment 2

5. Short shelf life of everything; no HFCS, no preservatives. //Whoot!

6. Good place to go for lunch. //But is there a nutrition label somewhere? See, I would pick a sandwich over this because I know that I will get enough protein and iron from eating whole wheat bread. For froyo, how much sugar did you add?

After the preceptorial, we all went to Kiwi to get some froyo. Everyone got 25% off, and I got $5 off because I was one of the lucky 25 people out of the 40 or so people who signed up at the right time. $5 gives ~10 oz of yogurt, and since I actually didn't bring any money with me (hey, with a prepaid meal plan, what else would I be using money for?), it was really useful having a few sets of scales sitting there so I could measure my yogurt content. I ended up with 8.7 oz of various flavours, but not all of them. The restaurant environment was pretty cheerful, but that may have been because of the swarm of people in there from the Preceptorial.

I tried original tart, peanut butter, green tea, chocolate, strawberry, mint, cheesecake, mango, and I want to say pomegranate but I'm not even sure that flavour exists. I just know there's another flavour buried underneath the ones in the pictures. The peanut butter flavour actually tasted like peanut butter, which is a change from "peanut butter flavoured" items such as Clif bars or cookies etc. The green tea flavour was light and poofy, as was the original tart flavour. Actually, all the flavours tasted very light (but NOT BLAND) and watery/icy. Another word I would use to describe Kiwi froyo is "fragile" because it melts mad fast.

Yes, I'll go again next semester, when I don't have a meal plan. I'll do a proper flavour review because I was too preoccupied talking to someone new (who I guess I will never see again, unfortunately) who I had met at the Preceptorial.

3 Dinners!

Somehow, my normal dinner at Commons ended up, in three hours, being a triple dinner. I went to a career info session, where there was food from Greek Lady. I then went to French House and my professor, who hadn't had dinner yet, decided to take us all to Tandoor India Restaurant for dinner. Whoot...

The Greek Lady sandwiches made me realise that I indeed haven't been eating many sandwiches lately, and that I indeed LOVE and miss sandwiches. So, for the past week [This was the 4th], I've been eating at least one sandwich per day. Sometimes, one sandwich per meal. It is delicious.

So, I was full by the time we went to Tandoor, so I just tried some stuff...dude, this was at least $10 and I felt bad for not eating a lot... but I was actually full. The naan bread was AMAZING though, as was the potato and vegetable samosa. The spinach with cheese was also great, but the cube of dessert [I'm not really sure what it is, and it's kinda hard to see due to the flash of the camera] was really gross. I think it's just that my taste buds don't like it...

We all then had some mango lassis, which I initially disliked because I could taste the grains of sugar. After a while, though, it got more tolerable, although I didn't feel hungry, which is perhaps why this review is quite negative. I just think that fresh mangoes, mango ice cream, or even mango pudding tastes better. I don't like having grainy pieces of sugar in my drinks... and this drink was supersaturated with sugar. For those who like sugary foods, this is for you :D!

I Tell You, Mango Smoothies Require Mango.

For La Maison Française, my college house resident program, we played pétanque, which is basically like curling, but without the ice or the skates... so before we went to play, we went to Saxbys, which is this coffee shop right next to my college house [still not explicitly stating where I live! :O but one could definitely find out...]. I got a mango smoothie since it was 8pm and I didn't want caffeine in my system, lest I lie in bed for seven hours unable to fall asleep. I was really happy when they gave me a big straw too :D

Isn't my photo beautiful? I'm trying to make food look more amazing... And the amazing part of this was that I took it in at around 8:20pm, without flash [can you believe it!?]

Anyway, the smoothie was quite disappointing. It was basically sugar and mango juice and crushed ice. I do not call that a smoothie. There were no mango chunks, mango textures [the fleshiness did not exist], or anything else... I'd imagine that smoothies have milk or some sort of apple juice/juice base, but this was full out basic.

I suppose some people like smoothies that are way too smooth [so smooth that they are essentially drinking a thin liquid], but I prefer smoothies to be thicker, and have actual pieces of the substance with which the smoothie was made, which in this case would be mango.

Free drink on the house, though, so it was still nice :D

PennFest! 3 Sept

Pennfest is this event in which retailers try to sell their products to unsuspecting frosh. Since I'm not really advertising the companies that I don't love, I'm just going to refer to them as "this company". This company gave out free cups with a ping pong ball nestled inside. I honestly spent a whole week pondering why they would give us a ping pong ball... and yesterday evening, as TL, JX and I walked back from dinner, it finally hit me. The ping pong ball and the cup was for beer pong. DUH!

Way to advertise alcohol to us...

Cupcakes from Insomnia Cookies... didn't take them.

Anyway, Pennfest had a lot of companies selling dorm stuff, selling "online-food-ordering" services, and plenty of "ohh get a discount if you come to our store!" I ended up consuming a taco from Chipotle, an amazing coconut pecan cookie from Insomnia Cookies [very famous on college campuses, apparently] and some mango water ice. There was also popcorn and candy floss but I wasn't actually that hungry. In all honesty, I think my hypothyroidism is kicking in [Yeah, apparently my hyperthyroidism has been lowered way too much, so I have to cut the meds again]

All my pictures are blurry because it was 11pm and I was walking around while taking pictures. This is actually a huge problem; I can't take a picture without getting ominous stares from strangers.

A Mangoes Into A Bar...

As I was chauffeuring the food from the car into the kitchen, I realised that "mangoes" is actually "man goes".

Even though I've never found the "a *insert something* goes into the bar and..." jokes hilarious [or even remotely amusing], I figured "A mangoes into a bar..." to be pretty chill since a "bar" can mean a granola bar. Or an ice cream bar.

This actually reminds me of this granola bar wrapper that KT had one day during Study. It was an apple cereal bar and it said "An apple walks into a bar..." in the literal sense.

However, my version is cooler since "mangoes" has a double meaning :D

And my blog welcomes puns. :) I'm actually submitting this to www.somuchpun.com and hopefully it gets displayed.

I made those mango granola bars in May 2009, before I had this blog. They were the first and only time I had made granola bars, and they actually turned out better than the Nature Valley trail mix bars. Just saying :P

Cocoa Oatsy Couscous

Oat bran?

You probably automatically think of bran muffins. With raisins.

Couscous?

Hm, maybe a salad this time, or some savoury side dish.

Yesterday I discovered that cocoa powder goes well with everything. So, this morning I had cold oat bran with mango and COCOA POWDER. It is amazing. It tastes just like chocolate, sans icky-sweet-stuff, and the texture of oat bran [which I love, and is a key component to this meal] perfectly contrasts with the smooth gooey part composed of the water/cocoa/oatyness.

Then I decided to make chocolate couscous, which isn't as great, because I don't like couscous as much as oat bran, but it is still quite a novelty for me. I took a bunch of pictures but they all don't fit. [That is a euphemism. Out of context, you will realise why the photos are inappropriate for a food blog.] so I just have one of each. Or should I say one of eat? [since I'm out of oat bran now :( so I gotta get more!!]

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.