Juhhhst Peachy!

The Clark Park Farmer's Market has been selling peaches for $1.75/lb. I bought some peaches, including yellow peaches, a white nectarine, and a yellow nectarine. According to Wikipedia, nectarines are the same species as peaches... it's just that they have a recessive allele for a gene that gives peaches fuzz. I love both peaches and nectarines equally, because peaches remind me of China, and nectarines remind me of Australia (we used to have a nectarine tree).

Look at that beautiful skin! I love peach skin...I love peaches.

However, like the guy who was selling me the nectarines, I prefer white nectarines over yellow ones. The white ones are sweeter. The yellow ones are more sour and tangy. I also prefer nectarines slightly unripe (crunchier rather than soggy). The guy (sorry I can't be more descriptive... I wish I knew who I was buying these from; after all, that's the point of the Farmer's Market) actually let me try a piece of white nectarine because I couldn't decide which to get. I ended up getting one of each. He told me to come back next week and tell him which one I preferred. I don't know whether I'd go this weekend, since I want to try get on the 11:30 bus rather than the 12:30 bus.

The left nectarine is the yellow; the right is the white.

White nectarine. Delicious! Fresh!

Yellow nectarine! Delicious! Definitely more sour.

On a side note, I wrote a Python script that will convert my images from the Blogger size of 400px x 300px to my preferred size of 700px x 525px. It's weird; despite taking CIS110, it never occurred to me that I shouldn't have to do it manually every time I want to poof up pictures. So, for the past 8 months, I've been manually backspacing the "4" and adding a "7" and backspacing the "300" and adding a "525".

The good thing about my script is that it also accounts for when Blogger makes images 399px x 302px due to rounding errors.

I also realised that there are definitely programs out there that do conversions (e.g. Microsoft Word's Find and Replace), but it feels pretty good being able to write my own program.

Kale

I don't think I've ever had kale before. I've heard of it before, but I never knew what it was until I was at the Clark Park Farmers' Market, and I decided to buy some kale from the high school kids garden...I'm not sure what the group is called, but it's basically high school kids growing vegetables. In short, I'd rather buy from them than buy from other vegetable vendors because I can relate more to high school kids. They sold chard, kale, spinach, and other vegetables, and I asked them which is kale, since I couldn't recognise it (embarrassing!). One of the high school kids let out a laugh and showed me what the kale was. I asked him how to cook it, and he said, "Oh you know, you can boil it, add some salt and pepper..."

Pretty nice; $2.50 for a fresh, leafy bunch.

I ended up checking whether I could eat kale raw, and it turns out that it tastes like broccoli. This is a good thing, because due to my single nucleotide polymorphisms on the TAS2R38 gene, I'm either a heterozygote, or homozygote for the haplotype that doesn't detect bitterness. I don't think that raw broccoli is bitter, although people homozygous for the other haplotype think that raw broccoli is extremely bitter. I'd say that raw kale is more bitter than raw broccoli, so those with the other SNP can probably only stomach cooked kale...

Anyway, raw kale is simply beautiful and delicious (even the stems are okay, although I'd prefer them cooked. Chard stems and leaves, on the other hand, MUST be cooked, in my opinion), and I think it's my new favourite raw leafy vegetable (because spinach, although delicious, has some sort of astringency after a while).

I ate four kale/roasted eggplant sandwiches today, with organic baguette-style-sliced bread from Slow Rise Bakery. My mum told me that she roasted eggplant using my method, and that "it was delicious, even when cold"!

Yay!

The kale on the left is raw kale, whereas the one on the right is kale that went through some heat processing (in a sandwich press). I had to use a sandwich press to make my toast because the toaster was broken... :(

Slow Rise Bakery

I have decided that bread is my favourite food. Although I adore chocolate, soft chocolate chip cookies, and avocado sushi, if I had to pick one food to live on for the rest of my life, it would be bread.

Crusty whole wheat sliced bread.

French bread.

Ciabatta.

Grain bread.

Walnut bread.

In short, I love bread.

At Clark Park's Farmer's Market, I found a loaf of bread sitting in a box.

It was $1 because it had been in the freezer.

I toasted it. Mixed it with milk and coconut and dried roses. It turned out really textured...and bland.

Lesson learned: ADD SUGAR!!

To the layperson, it probably looks like oatmeal or oat bran. This is amazingly versatile! Bread that can double as oatmeal, granola, oat bran, toast, pudding, cookie batter, and dessert, all at the same time!

Later I finished the loaf of bread through toasting it. This bread, unlike the other breads I've tried, is extremely gluteny and...chewy, it's almost like there's rice flour in it.

Slow Rise Bakery, 43rd and Baltimore Ave.

Reading Terminal Market - The Spice Market

It was forecast to rain around 1pm today, but it never did. It rained for around two minutes at 2pm. It never rained again. Because of this, I had planned my run for the morning, when I totally could've run in the afternoon (which is what I prefer). I ran to Reading Terminal Market with $5 in my key pocket, my key strung to my shoelaces, and my ID card in a secret location (haha).

$5 couldn't possibly buy everything that I wanted at Reading Terminal Market. It's a wonderful place; nothing like markets in Hong Kong (which are way better), but it's still pretty amazing; it's like Quincy Market in Boston, except that Reading Terminal Market sells more than prepared food; there are links of sausage, expensive kitchenware, honey, candles, and spices!

After browsing around the candy store and the spice store (The Spice Market), I decided to spend my $5 on curry powder and sour salt. Apparently, the sour sugar on Sour Patch Kids (and other delicious, addictive sour foods) is called "sour salt", which is just citric acid. Around February, all I wanted was to eat citric acid! ...Now I've found it, for $2.50 for 2 oz! (At least, I think it was 2 oz...the broken customer balance said "0.14". The woman told me that the stuff in the packages are either 1 or 2 oz). There were also juniper berries, but they weighed "0.07", so I'm assuming they were selling 1 oz for $2.25.

I've yet to try the curry and the citric acid... so stay tuned.

On the run back, I went through Rittenhouse and browsed the farmers market there. It's pretty awesome; next time, I'll have to bring more money and walk back, instead of run back. I'm lucky I have running shoes, and plenty of time. I don't know what I'm going to do during the semester, when I need my citric acid fix...

Later, I went to Clark Park's Farmers Market, and bought 8 oz of unsweetened coconut for $2.50! I also bought a bunch of organic rainbow chard ($2.50) for the first time, since I recall that chard tastes pretty okay from Penn Dining (although the way they cook it isn't that appetizing).

So, now I'm nearly out of cash.

Dollar Stroll and Spinach.

So, I've finally been living on my own in Philadelphia, and I'll be here for another two months with a Mon-Fri 9-5 job. Technically, it's an internship, and I don't get paid much (a lot goes to taxes too. Wonderful.), but it's still nice experience for my future in science.

I'm actually not even living on campus, so I don't go outside after it gets dark (not that I have any need to, since there are no things to study for at libraries). But, it's summer, so it's still light outside at 6pm (as opposed to January)! Today was the Dollar Stroll. A bunch of stores on Baltimore Ave (from 42st St to around 50th...that's how far I walked because it got really empty after 50th) offer smallish portions of food for $1 each. By "smallish portions", I mean one tofu slider, one cupcake, one samosa, one scoop of ice cream, or one brownie. Actually, maybe I take back the "smallish portions" part, because a cupcake certainly costs more than $1 in Philadelphia, and samosas probably cost around $6-$10 for a plate of 3 or 4 at any fine restaurant.

I didn't know that the Dollar Stroll was so popular; I saw lines of people that wound around the block, college kids chatting, slurping ice cream, eating kebabs, drinking juices, and even a woman rollerblading and chatting on her phone in the bike lane. According to college kids here, it's not a good idea to venture to West Philly alone, but there were so many people, it was interesting walking to 50th and back, because I've never gone past 43rd St. before. On the way, though, I realised that I didn't fit in at all; I was ethnically very very part of the minority, I was ignored/left alone, and the scene was just really different; it was exclusive in the sense that you had to know someone at the stores to feel comfortable (or I'm just paranoid). It wasn't like NYC, because NYC is literally lined with shops and stuffed with people everywhere. The reason the Baltimore Dollar Stroll spans some 10 streets is that each street only has one or two restaurants/stores. That's it.

I guess living on my own for the past few days has made me realise that food costs a lot. Okay, let me rephrase; it's made me realise that produce costs a lot. It's not like I didn't know this before, but now I've caught myself wondering how necessary vegetables are. They're vital, of course! But what if I eat Chipotle instead of buying a bag of carrots and celery?

It's kind of weird to be thinking in terms of Calories and % daily values. I think I'm becoming too reductionist in making food choices. However, how else do I make food choices? What if I had bought a samosa, a brownie, a kebab, and an ice cream? $4. A nice cheap dinner, but completely devoid of anything nutritious.

So instead, I went to the farmer's market at Clark Park (it turns out that the actual market is on Saturdays) for the first time, and bought a bag of spinach for $3.75 and I made acquaintances with the two girls who sold me the spinach. I'm not sure how much spinach is, generally speaking, in University City. With taking the reductionist approach, however, $3.75 for 6ish servings of iron and vitamin A etc. vs. $4 for one serving of not-many-nutrients seems to show that the spinach was a better choice.

I'm surprised I actually have 6ish servings of spinach, actually. Okay, I don't know for sure that it's 6 servings, but I took approximately 1/6th of the bag of spinach out today, ripped the huge leaves to smaller pieces, washed it, saw the water turn green due to the chlorophyll, and stuck the leaves with my (already cooked) bean & garlic spaghetti. Dude, this is fresh spinach. You don't eat this spinach cooked!

While I was eating, one of the girls who lives in this house (I'm just renting a room) walked into the kitchen and took a red pill and some coffee to her room. I don't really care what she consumed, but I'm kinda irked that she got a paper coffee cup with plastic lid for her coffee. She totally could have used one of the mugs (they have over a dozen mugs). She probably thought I was really weird eating cooked spaghetti with raw large spinach leaves.

I know that farmer's markets sell local produce (I can now say that this spinach comes from around Lancaster, PA), and it's supposed to be, perhaps, organic, right? The spinach I had today was lighter in colour compared to Costco baby spinach. It was also a different texture and shape. The leaves were huge, and they were definitely not the small dark ovals I'm used to. A Google search of "spinach varieties" yields pictures of the spinach I think I have - thick savoy spinach. I guess I've just been living on baby spinach ever since we moved to the U.S.

OKAY! Taste! It was really crisp. The leaves were thick. It initially was pretty tasteless and reminded me of lettuce, but after a while, that characteristic stay-in-your-mouth spinach taste was really overwhelming. Pretty simple.