Chinese Hot Pot

 I bought an electric skillet thing. It's basically a square saucepan powered by electricity, with a lid. Amazing!! My mum decided to break it in by doing Chinese hot pot (火锅, huo[3] guo[1]) tonight for dinner. I haven't had hotpot for at least 5 years!! You start off by boiling a lot of water, and adding some sauces. Then you stick on whatever you want, wait for the water to reach a rolling boil, and then take out your cooked food...and you eat it! One of the spices in the soup was the Chinese five spice, which I don't like.

 First, we had noodles, tofu, and fish balls. Although I don't generally eat animals, the soup base included a lot of minuscule animal pieces, so I guess I ate animal pieces today (fish, cow, lamb). Oh well.

 My sister throwing in fish sticks (made with lard).

 Second batch! Spinach, mushrooms, and blurry chopsticks. After you fish out all the food from the first batch, you can add stuff to the soup base, and wait for the rolling boil (although for thinly sliced items such as  the lamb or the spinach, you only need a really short time). Note that the soup now has more debris.

 Stuff we fished out from the first batch, all cooked!

We cooked some salmon, which isn't traditional, but my sister enjoys it.

 You can also crack eggs directly into the soup, to get poached eggs. My brother tried to cook his in a ladle, which took way longer to cook. His egg also ended up sticking to the ladle. Mmm egg.

 At some point, you should add more hot water to the soup (because a lot of it evaporates or is drunk) so this hot pot meal can go on for hours!

At the end, we had this thick soup filled with lots of animal pieces, small wedges of spinach, and bits of noodle, mushroom, and bean sprout. My mum is using the leftover soup as a base for noodles tomorrow.

So, hopefully in the future, I can make pasta and fondue and grilled cheese sandwiches in my room. No more kitchens! :D

Boiled Dumplings

Delicious savoury food!! For some reason, I've been consistently craving savoury food throughout the last quarter of the year. Today my mum made egg and carrot filling for dumplings!! My sister and I filled the dumplings with the filling. Actually, my sister made one dumpling and I made the rest. Her dumpling looks like a bag (it's the second one to from the left in the image below). We had some dumpling skins left over, and my sister cut tiny holes out of one of them and made a "snowflake" design.

 I'm not sure how to make boiled dumplings look appetizing. So here they are, dripping with soy sauce, like mini brains dripping with blood... well, not really.

 SO DELICIOUS. Reminds me of childhood. Of being 5 years old and helping my mum make dumplings from scratch...and not being able to crimp the tops correctly...

Beijing Restaurant & Spherification

I have been here to get bubble tea, twice, and this time, I was here for lunch with my Advanced Genetics/Molecular Bio professor and 4 other students, at Beijing Restaurant. Penn has some sort of program that dishes out money to professors so that they can take students out to lunch, in order to know students better. It's pretty nice because in a class of 6, 40, or 200, it's really difficult to actually know your professor (and vice versa) if you only get to see him/her for 3 hours a week for some 14 weeks. Since I've been busy for the whole semester so far, I chose to have lunch after class on Tuesday (before the Thanksgiving break) since the only homework I have is programming (well, okay I have studying... but I'm not thinking about that right now)

So, I got a brown rice + vegetables + mushroom + tofu dish which had the name "Buddha" in it (I forgot the name on the menu) and we all talked about biology classes, graduate school, and hobbies. Quite pertinent to me, as I'm interested in grad school... and I never knew that the Rockefeller University was top-notch in the biological sciences! There are just so many possibilities in "food science"...

1. Research genetics of flavour/taste/receptors

2. Molecular gastronomy

3. Food engineering

4. Flavour creating

5. Food safety

6. Food policy

7. Nutrition/research/obesity...

8. Food-related diseases

9. Food companies.

Um, anyway, the rice and shiny glutinous vegetables were pretty nice.

In addition, I found out what the bubbles-filled-with-mango-goo is, in the "poppy soda"  from the Cube Cafe, where I visited this summer. There is a process called "spherification" in molecular gastronomy... in which sodium alginate is mixed with the liquid (mango pulp/juice in this case?) and calcium carbonate or calcium chloride is added to it, to form some sort of outer membrane. Alginate comes from brown algae, and calcium, chloride, and sodium ions are pretty safe at this amount, so I don't see anything wrong with poppy soda at the moment. Either way, I haven't researched this enough and this is a reason for pursuing food science. Not sure where the computer science falls in, though.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spherification

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alginic_acid

Study Break!

In my dorm house, every Wednesday from 10:30pm to whenever is study break. Every week, a dorm room gets $40 to spend on sundry food for 25, 50, or 107 people. Yesterday was my roommate TJ and my turn, and we wanted to do something spectacular! The make-your-own sundae thing has been done too many times,  chips were too trite (but we bought 2 packs anyway)...so what could we do!?

TJ came up with the idea. Bubble tea.

So, despite the fact that I had a proof to do for maths, I ran to Chinatown, met TJ there (she took SEPTA), bought 6 packs (so, 1.5 kilos) of tapioca pearls, 1 tin of green tea and 1 tin of black tea. I didn't want to use tea bags due to environmental reasons, and I think that the loose tea leaves added a more "authentic" effect to the tea while people were scooping it up, which is always nice even though I'm sure that authentic tea doesn't mean ladling tea out of a giant saucepan.

We then bought 4 lbs of sugar (even though sugar generally comes in 5-lb packages) and 2 gallons of whole-fat milk. I know that sweetened condensed milk might've been better, but that would've meant that we'd have to add the milk into the tea, which would have been really confusing since:

1. How much tea did we need?

2. What if people are lactose intolerant?

I used this recipe as a guideline although I don't really think that I should even cite it because I didn't follow it since it is really difficult mixing ratios of tea leaves:sugar:water:milk when people are crowding around you.

Note that I used my own bag. NO PLASTIC BAGS!!

Miraculously, the tapioca pearls were quick-cooking, which is SURPRISING because last time, for the same price ($1.68) at Kamman, I bought tapioca pearls that took hours to cook. This time, the bubbles floated up to the top in 5 minutes. Less than 5 minutes.

DO YOU KNOW WHAT THIS MEANS? I'M NEVER BUYING $3 BUBBLE TEA AGAIN! (Well, perhaps in the company of friends) $1.68 can yield me so much more bubble tea in 5 minutes (whereas walking to a bubble tea store, ordering, paying etc. takes more time than that, and it also wastes plastic).

We bought two types of tapioca pearls: coloured ones and the typical black ones. They don't taste different, and I find it bizarre that most stores sell the black ones since the rainbow ones are quite pretty; I guess it's just tradition. Unfortunately, 1.5 kilos of bubbles (purported to serve around 40 people?) was not enough to serve my dorm house (and a few people from other college houses who came because I made study break the subject of a Facebook status and I'm currently kicking myself for doing that *insert selfish angry rant*). TJ also bought bubble tea straws from a bubble tea store nearby, although I was against it (plastic waste) but I agree that it made it more "authentic".

We had a huge problem because we had three spoons, an electric kettle, one saucepan, and one giant saucepan (I borrowed the saucepans). I also had a pie pan and a glass bowl (in which we put the tapioca). We also obtained a ladle, a colander and a vegetable-washing bowl. The main issue was making enough tea to please everyone. We made enough tea to fill the two pots, brought those downstairs, and decided to wait until study break to make refills.

People ladle tea at the speed of sound. Really. Luckily, two friends lent me their kettles (and we promptly ran out of electrical outlets), and we started doing this boil-water-pour-water-refill-throw-in-sugar-throw-in-tea-stir-serve!-serve!-serve!  while attempting to communicate and transport kettles and saucepans back and forth. Meanwhile, a mob (a.k.a people in my dorm house + intruders) was scooping up tapioca pearls, sloshing out milk, chattering happily, and complimenting us. Yay!

The House Dean said that this certainly hadn't been done before. :) I must say it was a chaotic success.

An hour later, the crowd has dispersed, the bystanders were trampling stray bubbles on the carpet or sitting on the sticky-tapioca-studded tables, and TJ and I were packing up. We went to the kitchen and had a nice laugh and evaluation of the event while we picked out tapioca from the leftover 2 L of sweet Chinese tea and  tea leaves (There were a LOT of tea leaves) and drank tea. I note that this is something I won't forget, and I can't wait to make 5-minute bubble tea again!

I will definitely take better photos in the future. I really wish that I had the time while shuttling hot water around to shoot the crowd - I mean, shoot pictures of the crowd.

Ma Hua ("Sesame Flowers")

I really don't know what these are called in English, but the translation of 麻花 (ma2hua1) is "Sesame Flowers". I suppose "Braided Twists with Sesame Seeds" is a better description of the food product though. In the past, I've only eaten the mini version of these ma2hua1, since that was the only kind sold at Kamman, and I don't recall ever eating these in China/HK. I don't think it ever occurred to my mum to buy these for us, actually.

Thus, I feel quite indifferent to these crunchy, crispy, ultra unctuous (Don't ask me how, but oil was leaking out of the neatly-sealed plastic, into the tin, and even out of the tin) sweet fried pieces of dough studded with white sesame seeds.

They've a hint of ginger and are quite sweet, which is not what I'd expected from ma2hua1. The ones I've had in the past (and generally all fried crispy Chinese street food) is savoury, so this is a surprise.

This is another of those traditional Wuhan foods, but again, I'm not sure whether this huge sweet version is authentic. My mum told me about when she was younger, she used to buy ma2hua1, the size of her finger, for for a few cents at street stalls. That size seems more appropriate considering the ma2hua1 I've eaten in the past. Instead of having 2 x 6 strands of dough being twisted together, it was only two strands of dough (Well, technically one strand, since it would be folded in half, and the two ends would be looped around each other).

I think I prefer the finger-sized seaweed flavoured (or even just the original flavoured) ma2hua1 that I've had before. Just my preference.

Noodle Chu

With lack of a Chinese or cliche restaurant name (maybe there is one but I just didn't see it?), Noodle Chu struck me slightly suspicious. Why would there be an authentic Cantonese dim sum place next to the distinctly American Shoprite/Kmart/IHOP? But, because a friend of a friend had mentioned it after I talked about the Qin Dynasty Seafood Restaurant, I figured that I should go at some point. Apparently, the rest of my family had already been there for dinner (but not dim sum) due to my dad's work place having some party there, but I missed it because I was in college. This time, we went for the dim sum. I'm still not really sure why we went out to eat; usually, we go out to celebrate something and this time I don't see much that requires celebrating. No complaints, though.

One distinct thing about Noodle Chu is that it is highly decorative. The interior design has been meticulously planned - and I mean, more meticulous than the starchy tablecloths and the square-tables-that-can-become-circular-tables. They had drawings of (all?) the Chinese emperors on the wall, and rather ancient looking room dividers next to the walls, and one wall was just covered in Chinese face masks (the kind used in Chinese operas). They even had one (yes, one!) potted plant in the corner. Compared to most other Chinese restaurants, Noodle Chu - despite not sounding authentic - looks like they made an effort to transport people to China/Hong Kong.

The place was quite empty at 11:30, but by noon, all the tables were full and people were sitting in line. We ordered food by choosing tins of dim sum from the carts that the waitresses would push around. My mum got me a tofu even though I didn't want it, but oh well. It was just plain ol' fried tofu...with a lump of cow flesh in the middle.

My brother got a thousand-year-old-egg congee, and it was pretty tasty although I think there may have been chicken bits floating around in it. The congee (rice) is made the Hong Kong way, and reminded both my brother and I of the congee shop on the third floor of Marina Square in Hong Kong. No matter how hard my mum tries, she can never replicate that texture and taste.

The vegetable dumplings had shrimp in it. Figures. My sister particularly enjoyed the xiao3long2bao1 and the pork/shrimp spring rolls, although she spent most of her time reading and not actually eating.

The fried glutinous-rice-flour-ball-of-dough with lotus paste filling was delicious. My brother and I pretended that they were toffee apples, which is really silly. However, when we were younger, we used to pretend that our bowl of rice was a cake and we used to cut "slices" of rice to eat. So, it's not entirely bizarre for us. Plus, it's appalling for the other customers, haha.

My brother asked my sister, "Hey, do you want to eat Squidward?", and my sister replied indignantly, "No!!!!"

Overall, the Qin Dynasty Seafood Restaurant has more variety (I mean, they had DURIAN), but Noodle Chu is much calmer, has tons of the basic dim sum, including congee and pig tripe, and looks more impressive (for those who care about appearance/for those who are looking for places to take co-workers). It's family-friendly, of course, but also extremely busy during the 11-2 dim sum period. The best idea is to arrive around 11:15 or 11:30 - the food is out, but there are also plenty of empty tables.

Noodle Chu, 770 Rt 46 E, Parsippany. You won't miss it. It's in a huge outdoor mall area.

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).

Hong Kong Bakery Shop

Yet again, I yearned for Chinese bakery food.

This time, I found three items of intense interest at the Hong Kong Bakery Shop. These were the pandan Swiss roll, the taro bun, and the pineapple lemon bun. Unfortunately for me, the pandan cake was sold by the roll, which was $5.50. I asked whether they sold slices of cake, and she said no, even though they DID sell slices of green tea cake along with the roll of green tea cake! Ah well. I guess next semester I'll just have to buy a whole pandan cake.

I got a taro bun because I felt like biting into big, starchy cubes of freshly cooked taro. I was severely disappointed; the taro was pink and mashed! PINK! and not textured like taro at all! It was cold and lacked the sought-after flavour! The bread was poofy though, but that still didn't make me feel good about spending 80c on a mediocre, unsatisfying bun. Especially when Mayflower Bakery sells taro buns for 70c.

I also got the pineapple lemon bun, this time careful to ask whether there was actually lemon inside the bun after the fiasco at Mong Kok Station Bakery last time. Of course, the "pineapple" part refers to the pastry top.

This bun was amazing! The pastry was like all other pastry (although there were a few sesame seeds on top), the bread was like all other bread... but the lemon curd filling simply rocked! It was also a pretty generous ratio of lemon curd:bread. I now have to learn how to make lemon curd. I am definitely coming back to get more of this bun. It's squished in the picture because it had been in my bag for 4 hours, but it was still scrumptious!

In retrospect, however, I'm thinking that maybe Mong Kok bakery just gave me the wrong bun when I asked for a lemon bun. Maybe they put the pork floss buns in the lemon bun shelf by accident. Either way, I wouldn't want to risk it again, and since Hong Kong Bakery sells lemon buns, why would I go to Mong Kok Station again? Plus, the buns cost the same.

I guess this is how businesses win over customers. Serve the correct food item.

Next time I'll try the taro bun at Mayflower Cafe. It's probably better than the one at Hong Kong Bakery.

Hong Kong Bakery Shop

917 Race St.

Qin Dynasty Seafood Restaurant (秦皇食府)

Parsippany NJ.

A few years ago, my parents were unwilling to drive me there to visit someone, but now, apparently, lunch is worth the (longish?) drive in the rain. We went in order to celebrate Mother's Day and my end of the semester as a college frosh. There were tons of people because it was tea/lunch time, and there were people pushing around trolleys of foods. Typical Cantonese restaurant style; you pick what you want, and they stamp at the correct section of a piece of card at the table, and later, you pay for however many stamps of food you got. Pretty neat, because you get to try sundry foods at a relatively low price (Okay, much cheaper in HK, but can't complain).

Xiao Long Bao - the buns with the soup. I didn't eat any but my sister liked them.

The egg tart's custard was phenomenally creamy and flavourful. The spring roll was still drenched in oil (Yes. Dripping.), but it was pretty good. At least I could tell what vegetables were inside it...

My brother liked this.

Pig blood. My brother and dad liked this. Bad picture quality. :( In the background, you can see the sesame ball thingy, which was pleasantly crunchy and not too sweet.

Nicely garnished and seasoned chicken legs.

Halfway through eating my egg tart, I felt compelled to take another picture because the cross section looks just as amazing as the whole egg tart. Notice how creamy it looks!

Fried tofu with one piece of shrimp in the centre. I'm not really sure how they managed to stuff/inject a cube of tofu with one piece of shrimp. The tofu wasn't that great, actually. The fried part was soggy (as it was in sauce...), so there was no real point of it being fried, in my opinion.

Dumplings with glutinous rice skin. For such large dumpling skins, the filling was really scant. It was also a cow flesh filling, along with some peanuts and a few pieces of vegetables.

The good thing about the waitresses was that they would explain pretty much anything on their trolleys. This green ball was apparently made with bitter melon...

...and it was absolutely NOTHING like bitter melon; inside was sesame paste and peanuts, and the green part was just glutinous rice that was deep-fried on the outside.

Rice noodles (chang2 fen3) filled with fried dough (you2 tiao2). Novel concept, nice sauce. I'm not super fond of fried dough, though. I really love rice noodles, however.

My brother and dad love durian. I don't. I never have, and I'm not sure that I ever will. This is a durian pastry.

It looks pretty delicious, actually, and I did eat some, first while smelling, but then without smelling the durian. By inhibiting my sense of smell, the flavour was harder to detect (Monell!), and I felt like I was just eating some sorta sweet pudding. However, I really can not ingest a lot of durian. I've tried it in all these forms, and I still really don't like it; I've had it fresh (the same way I eat any fresh fruit), in candy form (yes, durian candy exists), in chip form (well, okay, they were jackfruit chips), and now in pastry form.

And I still don't tolerate it.

Final thoughts:

Good for large groups: you get to try more dishes, and each dish is pretty easy to split

Great if you want authentic Chinese (actually, Cantonese) food without broccoli and cashews. I'm saying this because when we first moved to the U.S. and got food at Chinese restaurants, there was a lot of broccoli, cashews, and sweet food.

Kids like it (i.e. my sister, who doesn't eat much at home)

Pretty fair pricing.

Go between 11 and 2 on weekends. On weekdays, the variety seriously goes down, and any time after 2, the variety also goes down. If you go for dinner, you end up with the more formal Chinese restaurant style, with ordering actual dishes, and having bowls of rice, and a tureen of soup etc. If you want just casual dining with lots of choices, you should go for tea time/lunch!

Qin Dynasty Seafood Restaurant (秦皇食府), 857 Rt. 46 E, Parsippany