Pho

The Penn Vietnamese Society had Pho Night, complete with club members having cute "Got Pho?" shirts. For those who don't know, Pho is a Vietnamese rice noodle soup, usually with cow pieces, and it's supposedly DELICIOUS. It's one food my brother's tried before I have, because I don't generally eat cow pieces. However, TJ told me that they would serve vegetarian pho, so, of course... OFF I GO!!

The Penn Vietnamese Society came up with an ingenious way of serving some 240 bowls of pho. They had those quart-sized plastic tubs, each filled with cooked rice noodles and a choice of raw beef slices, tofu, or chicken(...?? not sure). Huge metal pots of broth were brought upstairs (into the Rooftop Lounge) from the kitchens on the 24th floor. This broth was then scooped into the tubs when we customers chose our tubs. Plenty of people turned up, and even though we got there a tad early, the line was already pretty long. They also hadn't got the vegetarian broth ready, so TJ and I waited for a bit. They also apparently dropped a pot of beef broth, which is really unfortunate.

The vegetarian pho was pretty delicious; there was a hint of lime juice (which was COMPLETELY UNEXPECTED).

TOFFEE APPLE!

On Friday the 1st of October, Commons decided to give out toffee apples and LEGITLY AMAZING DESSERTS. I still can't get over the fact that they had all these random desserts like chocolate ganachy balls and coffee chocolate with cream and cheesecake with a hint of jam. There were also eclairs but I don't really like eclairs. Nor does TJ. Actually, we just sat there for over an hour, talking and eating these sumptuous I don't understand why they decided to parade out desserts. I was simply stupefied... unfortunately I didn't have my camera, but they were beautiful desserts. *Sigh.*

Well, at least I have a toffee apple to blog about. I don't really want to advocate prepackaged toffee apples though, considering it has some PHO... I ate it anyway, though. My first toffee apple, ever. I know in Woolworths in Penrith they used to have green and red cellophane wrapped toffee apples, without the nuts, I think. I always wondered what they were... but I never tried them.

This toffee apple was so pretty.

Experimentation with the lack of light in my room... I have to put everything really close to the window in order to take pictures without flash.

This was the first bite of the toffee apple. I didn't manage to bite any apple bits though, since the toffee layer was so thick. The toffee and nut combination was amazing though; it was really sticky and sweet, which was sort of neutralised by the nutty chunks.

This was after taking a ridiculously large bite of the toffee apple. It was a tremendously difficult feat. Yes, HARD [both meanings]! Try biting into a sticky apple on a stick while holding the stick with one hand, without getting toffee all over your face and your hand[s], because having sticky hands means getting the camera sticky.

Oh gosh that sounds wrong.

I think that I might want to make a real toffee apple one day. Actually, maybe I'll make a hard toffee [not soft toffee] apple... actually, I think I'll cut up slices of apple, and then dip them in toffee and let it set so there's be a bigger toffee-to-apple ratio. Also, this way the only ingredients would be apple, sugar, milk, and some sorta fatty substance [butter? oil?] lacking transaturated fatty acids.

Chocolate Shell Ice Cream

I think that this was the first time in my life in which I tried a hard shell coating ice cream. Once, when I used to go to Mc.D, I ordered a sundae, and the guy gave me one of these instead... and I told him, no, I wanted a chocolate sundae. So he promptly dumped the ice cream into the bin and made a sundae for me.

I wish he had just given me the chocolate coated ice cream... that would've been cool...

Anyway, in March, I tried the chocolate-shell ice cream for the first time in my life... and as you can see above, one end of it was smooshed, due to the fact that it arrived in a box from Carvel [my sister's friend's parents own a Carvel]. I saw the mum today at the library, actually, which is why I thought about blogging about this [I've not only lacked the chance to blog about this, but also haven't eaten anything of note today to blog about, so this is a suitable time to talk about this ice cream].

I imagined that the chocolate coating would taste waxy or oily, due to my belief that there are tons of random emulsifiers and additives in order to make the chocolate have a low melting point, but also a low freezing point. Actually, while I was at Carvel, I made a bunch of these... you basically make a vanilla soft serve, dunk it in the melted chocolate [or cherry] sauce AT AN ANGLE for 3 seconds, and gently pull it out and let it stand there for a while. The shell forms FAST. I unfortunately lost an ice cream through this procedure, but I think I made.... around 10 of them? I never cared to try one, though.

So, taste-wise... the chocolate actually tasted sweet, like chocolate. It wasn't waxy. It wasn't bland. It wasn't very chocolatey, either, but actually sort of tasted like a less creamy version of fudge. Maybe chocolate plastic would be a good description of it.

The vanilla ice cream... is just vanilla ice cream. Eh. And, the cone was just a sugar cone with PHO but oh well.