House of Pita Hanan

Last Tuesday (I know! I have so many things to blog about and not enough time because I've been programming!), SP and I went to the House of Pita Hanan, which is a food truck. I think that I'm obligated to go to every food truck on/off campus (from 30th to Walnut, from Spruce to Market, I guess) since I

1. am a college student
2. have a food blog
but I'm busy all the time and enjoy eating peanut butter sandwiches with spinach. Either way, two trucks down (the other one being Magic Carpet, but I haven't posted about them yet since I didn't take a picture of my food last time...), many more to go, 5 semesters left (oh. wow.)

Going to the House of Pita and getting a falafel+hummus+lettuce+feta cheese sandwich really cheered me up though, from the organic chemistry exam that I completely shredded with failure...(got the results back today, but I'm not looking at my exam until 3pm tomorrow so that I can stay happy for another 25.5 hours). SP and I walked in the rain for 4 blocks, and when we arrived, my jeans were drenched, my sweater was soaked, the jacket under my sweater was getting moist, and my shoes and socks were saturated with rainwater. SP, on the other hand, was just lightly speckled with rain water. It was also really cold, and I huddled under the counter-that-juts-out-of-the-truck, out of the rain, next to the engine, for a minuscule bit of warmth. Apparently, the counter is taller than me, which is pretty sad. SP remarked "You should take a picture of yourself and send it to your friends in HK and tell that that everything in America is big".

Ha. Ha.

I would've brought my camera if it hadn't been pouring.

Anyway, I enjoyed the sandwich because it had crunchy bits of falafel (NOT dry) and a nice sauce. I kind of wish they put more falafel pieces in instead of having a lot of lettuce, though. That's the whole point of the falafel sandwich, right? However, it was overall a delicious sandwich. I can't really judge falafel sandwiches though, since I've only had two in my life.

SP got rice with chicken and falafel and a piece of pita bread. For some reason, the pita bread that he got wasn't as flexible as the pita bread in my sandwich, and it was less tasty. I know it's a bit strange to measure pita bread by flexibility, but it's the perfect adjective. I think like flexible, chewy, gluteny pita bread.

House of Pita Hanan
38th and Walnut St

College Pasta

So, cliche 5-college-friends-get-together-and-make-pasta-for-dinner-at-10pm. This is a whole week before college actually starts...

I'm handing out CFL (energy saving light bulbs) to the frosh, so I get to live NSO all over again!

TJ thought that I diced the onion and tomato really well.

We bought garlic bread and the sauce.

So. College.

Hot Dry Noodles (Wuhan Specialty)

In exchange for providing my cousin with ongoing hours of ACT and TOEFL prep, my uncle bought me food which my dad brought back food from his trip to China. There is nothing I'd rather have, especially as the food they got is just unobtainable here in the U.S., or it's really expensive, or the shipping fee costs more than the actual food product. Wuhan is a city in Hubei province, and my uncle and his family live there, as does a local culture of pretty delicious food. My mum always reminds me that Wuhan cuisine is quite spicy and numbing - 麻辣 (ma2 la4).

Today at lunch, my mum made some of the Hot Dry Noodles, 热干面 (re4 gan1 mian4 - it's literally called "Hot Dry Noodles" in Chinese), from a package of them that we got from my uncle. Of course, normal Hot Dry Noodles are eaten in dingy little restaurants or at street food stands in Wuhan. I remember this one time we went to my mum's friend's restaurant when I was really young, and the Hot Dry Noodles were too spicy for me, so I didn't really appreciate them.

Despite the fact that we didn't eat the straight-from-the-pot-in-a-cheap-Wuhan-eatery Hot Dry Noodles, the packaged version still reminded me of those sultry summers when I was in China, forced to eat Chinese food all the time, and being fussed over because we were "foreign". It's actually pretty funny because once, at one of those banquet dinners, my relatives ordered some fries for me and my brother because we refused to eat the Chinese dishes. The fries ended up being extremely spicy, due to the fact that the oil that the restaurant used was spicy. It's pretty funny, now that I think of it.

The Hot Dry Noodles came with packets of sauce that usually is homemade at those roadside eateries. One is a sort of chili oil with carrots and ginger, another is sesame sauce (sesame paste and sesame oil), and the other is soy sauce. The Hot Dry Noodles today were so spicy that I only used half the package of chili oil, and I had to eat a lot of bread on the side. They weren't as numbing as I remember them to be, which is a good thing. I don't really like the numbing sensation, even though it's always present in Ma Po DouFu - ma2 po2 dou4 fu3 (麻婆豆腐). I think that my brother was more zealous about these noodles than I was; he sighed that these reminded him of Wuhan. I don't feel too much nostalgia from eating these, which is a little bizarre. Even though it doesn't look sanitary (food inspections?! Psh, yeah right), if you ever go to Wuhan, you should try these! They're probably not going to be plated neatly, and the cook may tell you to hurry up and pay the few yuan already, but Hot Dry Noodles are one of the most famous dishes in Wuhan (this statement is backed up by my cousin's response to a TOEFL Speaking question).

Pesto Sauce & Whole Wheat Macaroni!!

Since we have a LOT of basil growing in our yard, I decided to finally make pesto, something I've been planning for the past 5 years. No kidding. With plenty of basil, a whole bag pine nuts, and a tray of garlic, all I needed was some parmesan cheese.

I adapted this recipe a lot since my sister doesn't really like basil. She actually doesn't like garlic either, so next time I'll just make pesto sauce without garlic specially for her and then make real pesto. In addition, I didn't use too much oil, since I used a whole cup of pine nuts and a whole cup of cheese. The pesto itself was therefore much creamier and thick, which I prefer over a light and liquidy pasta sauce. It also occurred to me that pesto is a raw sauce... Hm. Interesting. The nice thing was that I got her involved in the cooking process. Dinner was quite spectacular for my mum too because she didn't have to cook or do dishes.

Ingredients

1 cup fresh basil leaves!

1.5 cups spinach leaves (or more basil - again, my sister doesn't really like basil)

2 small bulbs of garlic

0.5 cup olive oil

1 cup pine nuts, toasted.

1 cup grated parmesan cheese

250 g organic whole wheat macaroni

0.5 cup water

Method.

1. Cook macaroni.

2. Wash leaves. Stick in blender with garlic and toasted pine nuts and pulse a few times

3. Add cheese, oil, and water. Pulse.

4. Scoop generous globs of pesto onto drained macaroni.

5. Sprinkle with more parmesan!

6. EAT EAT EAT!

The best part is that I made restaurant-quality sauce for literally something like a dollar.

Oh, here I am again ranting on that other person's blog (see yesterday's post) who lists the price of all the ingredients.

I'll do that here too, just so I can be "famous" and "adored".

Ingredients if I want to be honest about the price

1 cup fresh basil leaves! - $0 (from garden)

1.5 cups spinach leaves (or more basil - again, my sister doesn't really like basil) - $0.25

2 small bulbs of garlic - $0 (from garden)

0.5 cup olive oil - $0 (got reimbursed)

1 cup pine nuts, toasted. - $0 (got reimbursed)

1 cup grated parmesan cheese $~1

250 g organic whole wheat macaroni $0 (used dining dollars, so it's technically free.)

0.5 cup water $0

Total: $1.25

Price per serving: $0.25

Or, Ingredients if I want to emulate the other blog

1 cup fresh basil leaves! - $1

1.5 cups spinach leaves (or more basil - again, my sister doesn't really like basil) - $0.25

2 small bulbs of garlic - $0.20?

0.5 cup olive oil - $0.40?

1 cup pine nuts, toasted. - $3?

1 cup grated parmesan cheese $~1

250 g organic whole wheat macaroni $2

0.5 cup water $0

Total: $8

Price per serving: $1.60

IN YOUR FACE, TRITE OTHER BLOG!

I guess I'm still bitter about how that person gets so much freakin' respect for something not that notable.

I'm really glad that I made pesto sauce, since we have a LOT of basil, a lot of pine nuts, and a lot of delicious cheese. It's also so simple! I tried it on fries and it was great too. I don't think I want to use any oil next time; I'll just make it with water since the pine nuts have a lot of lipids anyway. I won't use spinach either, if I'm not making it for my sister.

Spaghetti and Cheese

I like whole wheat pasta.

We don't have any whole wheat macaroni at home [and I don't think we have any macaroni], so I made some whole wheat sphaghetti with cheese sauce today.

I started looking through allrecipes.com to find a nice cheese sauce to make, since I've only made legitimate cheese sauce once before in my life [I think it was during Food Tech class? I'm not sure...]. I got sick of looking through recipes though, because the comments irked me and... I guess I just didn't feel like following instructions.

So here is my recipe, and it makes enough sauce for one pound of spaghetti, approximately. If you really like cheese, make more sauce!

1. 1 tbsp oil [highly unnecessary, actually, if you use normal-fat cheese].

2. 1 c fat-free milk

3. 1 c whole fat milk

4. 2 tbsp mustard

5. Old Bay seasoning, pepper, garlic, herbs, pepper.

6. 3 tbsp flour

7. Whatever filling you want, e.g. TVP, salmon chunks, ground-up flesh, lettuce etc.

8. 3 cups of shredded cheese. Or 4 cups. or 5. or 6. However much saturated fat you can handle.

Method:

1. Mix all the ingredients except for the flour in a saucepan. Put it on high heat until you start seeing bubbles.

2. On lowish heat, add flour, 1 tbsp at a time, and mix until there are no more lumps.

3. Turn off heat and mix in shredded cheese, one cup at a time. If you want, add in fillings.

4. Add in cooked pasta.

5. EAT WHEN HOT. When the cheese sauce gets cold, it tastes grainy and... cold... and not comforting at all. The image below is cold pasta because no one was ready for dinner at 5:30pm. After it was heated again, it was nice and gooey again. I know it doesn't look like the cliche "mac 'n' cheese" because I didn't use cheddar cheese and I used whole wheat spaghetti...

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.

Quiz Bowl - 18th!

I'm getting sick of posting about stuff that happened daysss ago.

This is the last one. I am finally up to date. Sort of.

On the 18th, I went to my first Quiz Bowl tournament at Newark, DE. It was amazing, even though I only buzzed in on two toss-ups. Out of 200. Yeah, 2/200. I guess I'll keep you all updated on how much I suck at Quiz Bowl, so you can all laugh at me :). I did get some bonuses though, which was nice. The best two bonuses that I got were the lac operon, and iodine [the clue had to do with thyroids... and I consider myself quite knowledgeable about thyroids now. I think.]

We had lunch at California Tortilla, which according to C doesn't exist where she lives... which is in California. I find this pretty amusing. The burrito had more vegetables than Chipotle's burritos. California Tortilla tends to be really cheesy. I mean this figuratively... not literally. I suppose it all evens out, since the burritos aren't cheesy enough. There were all these cheesy remarks posted everywhere on the walls.

There was a Wall of Flame [see image] with a zillion bottles of spicy sauce. I have never seen such detail in my life for spicy sauce. For wine, yeah, and for oil, yeah, but not spicy sauce. I tried some [not-too-spicy] chipotle sauce, which was actually sweet and spicy, and a tad sour. Quite delicious.

Do you see vegetables [that aren't pieces of shredded lettuce?! I DO!!]?!

After the tournament, four of us went to Tlicious [Newark, Delaware is extremely cheesy. One store was called "Lettuce Feed You", and they sold wraps. I'm telling you. This is cutesy cheesy campus. Which is pretty cool.]

I hate choosing a bubble tea flavour because they're all so delicious!

COCONUT BUBBLE TEA ROCKS...

We four ended up cramming in the back of a [small] car, sans seatbelts, for the drive home. The other four had to cram into the back of the other car, since they had missed the train. At least we had bubble tea :) and the game Contact [and trust me to use the word "rutabaga"].

CHILI SIN CARNE!

CHILI sans la viande - without animal pieces...instead, there are roman beans and lima beans and TVP and pickles and artichokes and tomato and parmesan and onion and crushed up tortilla chips [the leftovers].

A.k.a., awesome-everything-I-love-chili!

In fact, this chili even looks better than these here! YAY! This is just to prove to my brother that my plating, in fact, is not substandard [I've never really liked the idea of plating though, because it makes food appear more as an ornament than as a food].

Onions, artichokes, pickles, getting "gently browned"

Rehydrated TVP with dried chili and tomato paste marinade.

Adding the lima beans!

Ingredients:

1. A LOT of water. Keep adding cups of water throughout the.... 3-4 hours it takes to cook. I was initially going to make tomato/chili soup but that would mean that I used twice the amount of water. Which would've required a larger pot. Which I do not possess.

2. Lots of tomato paste!

3. Garlic

4. Onions! LOTS!

5. Pickles

6. Artichokes in oil - we have a jar of them. I don't know why, since no one in the family except for me and my brother has actually ever heard of the term "artichoke" before. I don't know who bought these... just that they've been sitting in the fridge for a while. Well, at least it covers the "oil" part of the chili.

7. Two cups of Roman beans. Soak these for a few hours. They take AGES to cook.

8. Half a cup of lima beans. They swell TREMENDOUSLY when soaked for a few hours. Literally 2.3 times their original sizes.

9. Half a cup of dried TVP, mixed with two cups of water and one scoop of tomato paste and two packets of dried chili. This way, the flavour gets "infused". Supposedly.

10. One cut up Boca burger since I dislike eating them grilled.

11. Leftover tortilla chips with the salt at the bottom.

12. Herbs - oregano, basil.

13. Quinoa, just because.

Method:

Cook everything on low heat for a few hours in a giant pot. Cook for an hour, turn off the heat, and go to XC practice for three hours. Come back later at around 9:30pm and continue letting the stuff simmer on low heat, adding water every now and then. When the roman beans are done, the chili is ready. The roman beans determine the cooking time!!

I wonder who else makes chili at 10:41 pm.

I ended up with a lot of chili. Look at that! Three boxes of chili. BUT IT'S AWESOME BECAUSE I LOVE CHILI!

The last time I made chili was the first day of school last September. It wasn't as great as this one. This one is "awesome-sauce"ly thick and beany and protein-filled! And it DOES NOT taste bland... for those of you who think vegetarian stuff is "rabbit food". It is NOT.

Spaghetti and a Broken Mug.

I was just about to update when I decided that I would go get my Pink Panther mug and microwave some gingerbread batter. The mug somehow slipped as I was picking it up from inside another bowl, and fell about 10 cm smashing on to the countertop.

Apparently, there had been a lot of oil in the bowl, which inevitably coated my mug. I guess I didn't pick it up properly... I don't recall ever dropping a mug before this one.

So. Now, there are four major pieces left of my mug. You've all seen the mug before in previous posts; it's one of the regular vessels for anything microwaved. It's large enough to use as a bowl. I had breakfast using it today! :(

I ended up microwaving some gingerbread batter with a piece of it anyway. More about that later. I'm wondering what I'm supposed to do with this mug... though my mum is throwing it away tonight. :'(

On the other hand, my actual post today is about what I made for lunch. Spaghetti. Thin whole wheat spaghetti is really yummy, just plain [and a tad undercooked. I love undercooked spaghetti!!]. But, I made a sauce anyway...

Ingredients:

Drained spaghetti water

3-4 HEAPED tbsp tomato paste [PASTE. Not sauce.]

Dried oregano

2-4 tbsp white vinegar

1/4 of an onion

Two mashed up veggie burger patties [I got sick of Boca burgers so I'm trying to use up what I have left before I go to college]

NO SALT.

Garlic

Method: Stick everything in the pot [the water should still be around 100 degrees C] and let it simmer for a while. Then, pour it on the spaghetti, and consume.

YAY for basic! R.I.P. my mug.