Soy Butter

When we were in Weymouth, MA, I bought some soy nut butter because it was on sale. It was $1.43 for 425g, and this was only because its sell-by date was in two months. I, however, consume nut butters at a rate greater than 212.5 grams/month. Actually, I long to consume a jar of peanut butter within 24 hours, but I think that might kill me, or I might end up regretting it after going through seven rounds of liposuction. Anyway.

If I had to choose, I would always choose peanut butter over any other nut butter [okay, soybeans are legumes... not nuts...so it's technically out of the count. So, let's just say, out of all butters, I'd pick peanut butter]. However, the past few days, I have been utterly obsessed with this crunchy soy butter. Jar appearances aside, this stuff. Is. Creamy. With a nice random crunch, once in a while. Unlike crunchy peanut butter [which I haven't had in at least five years], the crunchy soy parts do not get stuck in my teeth, and nor do they make the butter hard to spread. It's a win-win situation! It's quite neutral tasting, so even people who don't like toasted soy beans will probably enjoy this, although it does not in any way taste like peanut butter. The jar is actually kinda cheesy in both appearance and company name/logo [haha... I.M. Healthy...]. It is not completely healthy though, in my perspective, since there are 15 grams of fat per serving. "Good" fat, yes, but "bad" in the sense that it's, well, fat. As a vegetarian, 90% or more of my fat comes from the monounsaturated or polyunsaturated variety, yet I am not skinny. So, it really depends on how MUCH one consumes. In which case I lose. Every day. So, they should instead name themselves SoyJoy, if that name hadn't already been taken by a granola bar company. This is literally Soy Joy.

The last time I tried soy butter was the creamy one from Trader Joe's... two years ago. It didn't leave that much of an impression on me, and I preferred almond butter to it [Have you noticed how THICK and CREAMY almond butter is? It is literally the densest [read: oiliest] butter out there.

So, this is a completely biased and laudatory post, but I do blog about what I consume, and I basically have been chugging through the jar the past week or so.

Coffee Ice [or...Granita?]

I'm technically not supposed to have much caffeinated stuff anymore due to the fact that it apparently interferes with methimazole efficacy, but this was made with decaf coffee [so, it has 2% of the caffeine it otherwise would have] which means that it probably has the same caffeine power [if not less] as some chocolate. I started off with coffee, fat free milk, some honey, and some saccharin. I froze it for an hour, and it looked like the image above.

An hour later, a layer of ice had formed on the inside sides of the plastic container, but the centre was still liquidy [or, slushy, after I mixed it]. The whole point of making this is to chop up the ice crystals every hour or so. I actually should've used a shallow container, since it was more difficult to reach the bottom parts which were frozen.

In total, six hours later, this is what I ended up with. Granules of frozen coffee and milk! The volume had [evidently, due to not only the lattice structure of ice, but also to the air between each crystal] increased to... about 157% its original liquidy volume.

I'm not sure whether this is "Italian Ice", "ice" or "granita". When I was younger, my brother and I used to make watermelon granita, which I recall included 150g of caster sugar dissolved in water, a lot of watermelon juice, and lemon juice. It was made in the same way as this, and did NOT taste like artificial watermelon flavour. It used to be such a big deal! Today, I felt like making this since it's too humid to drink hot coffee [even though it was pouring with rain all afternoon] and I felt like this would be yummy. Before freezing, the slurry tasted like normal sweet coffee with way too much milk [I tend to like coffee without milk]. After freezing, I feel as though it tastes even more watery than originally... which means that next time, I have to brew super-strong coffee. This is saying something, since I generally make really strong coffee. However, it isn't super sweet, which is great. I'm just worried that it's going to freeze into one huge mass by tomorrow morning, since I probably didn't add enough sweeteners to keep the ice not-that-frozen, since adding sweeteners means that the freezing point of the solution increases, which means that, in theory, the granita would freeze at a higher temperature [because the sweetener molecules prevent the water molecules from bonding to each other as efficiently].

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

Samurai Sushi

I lacked a camera.

My mum took both my camera and phone to NYC today, so I couldn't take pictures of the food that I consumed. I can, however, describe the sushi with such utter detail that your keyboard will break down due to drool.

Or not, since it wasn't that big of a deal. The only reason we went to Samurai Sushi for dinner is that my sister wanted to eat sushi rice. Oh, and I suppose, also that my dad thinks that cooking is for females.

So, my sister consumed maybe 50ml of Sprite, two pieces of raw salmon, half a piece of another fish, too much soy sauce, and half a bowl of rice. My dad got this plate of sashimi, which came with some miso soup and some salad with ginger dressing. I distinctly remember there being one cherry tomato in the salad, last time. And the time before that. And the time before that. I suppose the staff decided that tomatoes aren't important to their restaurant menu, since the only thing WITH cherry tomatoes was the salad. I suppose this is a wise choice, even though I now have an empty space in my expandable stomach, shaped just like a cherry tomato.

Since I don't consume fish, I got this vegetable sushi. It was a lot of pieces of pickled radish [which I don't really like], pickled carrot [eh, okay], raw sprouts [not enough], raw cucumber [awesome!] and one piece of avocado, wrapped in rice and a piece of nori. I was pretty devastated [okay, overstatement] by the fact that there was only one piece of avocado in each piece of sushi [there were 5 pieces of sushi]. I LOVE AVOCADO! Why give me two pieces of pickled radish per piece of sushi, yet only leave me one meagre chunk of avocado?

The raw sprouts were cool, though, since my mum has never let me eat sprouts raw before. Actually, she never used to let me eat peppers, cauliflower, broccoli, or spinach raw, until I read recipe books and realised that these plants aren't toxic fresh out of the earth.

In conclusion, I lacked a lot of protein in this meal. I think that I should invent gluten/soy salmon sashimi substitute, although I personally don't miss the taste of fish anymore... [but this may be a different story in HK].

Penn Frosh Dinner!"

Today at 6:30pm, the UPenn alumni club made a Class of 2014 picnic thing. During the picnic, we all introduced ourselves and said "one interesting thing" about ourselves. I totally could've said that I'm a runner... I like pie... I'm a vegetarian... I like stale cornflakes?

Instead, I said that I blog about food, which is why I was waving my phone around, taking pictures of my food [I honestly felt awkward doing it this time]... although the quality is compromised, my phone camera is the most useful function on my phone [oh the irony.] and it deserves a ton of credit.

I wasn't too fond of the pasta, which was very oily, although I liked the olives and sun-dried tomatoes, and the fact that there was no salami pieces or anything inside. In fact, I was surprised at the lack of animal pieces in this picnic/dinner. There were platters of wraps, including tuna, cow, and pig pieces wraps... and there was also plain vegetable wraps! In fact, they were really good wraps; the eggplant in it was nicely grilled, with some balsamic marinade which didn't taste too strong [I don't really like strong balsamic flavoured stuff] and the green flatbread was quite textured [and also toasted]. It lacked the empty-carby-taste that comes with so many white breads and it was definitely not stale.The salad was basically lettuce with some sharp cheese and croutons, which were nicely toasted although quite oily.

We also had these mini waxy chocolate candies that were basically dots of waxy [read: not chocolate, but chocolate FLAVOURED] candy coated in some crunchy candy shell. For some reason, I could taste a peanutty flavour, but that could totally be my imagination. Note the colour choices in this whole picnic/dinner.

A chocolate chip cookie.

And... that's a wrap for today :P