H Mart - Upper Darby, Pennsylvania

I went to H Mart with TJ and CL. To get there from Penn, you take the L train to 69th St. Terminal, followed by a 5-minute walk. Sadly, we got on the wrong side of the SEPTA station, and had to get transfer tickets! I've never travelled West on SEPTA. I actually wanted to walk to 69th St, but apparently it's really shady (and it's about 3 miles?). The furthest west I've walked is to 50th St. (Baltimore and Market).

H Mart is a grocery store that primarily sells Korean, Japanese, and Chinese food, although there is other imported food. I was a bit let down by H Mart. Although there are many vegetables and foods not found elsewhere (green mango, yucca, etc.) it's quite pricey compared to the supermarkets in Chinatown. On the second floor, there is a food court with four restaurants and one overpriced bakery with pastries that are all pre-wrapped and made elsewhere (they don't have an oven; they do have expensive bubble tea and smoothies). There is a sushi restaurant, two Korean food restaurants, and one Korean-Chinese restaurant. I don't remember the names of them, but we each bought food from a different restaurant (except the sushi one). I had lunch and dinner there, while they (having stuffed themselves with pancakes and eggs earlier) just had dinner. We were there from 2 to 6 pm!

At the restaurant closest to the window, CL got a seafood noodle soup (and I got some kimbap). It came with radish kimchi that had sweet pickled garlic in it. CL didn't really like it, so she swapped her dish with TJ's. TJ had gotten a "noodle with seafood and black bean sauce" from the restaurant furthest from the window, but it turned out that there was pork in it! TJ is a pescetarian, so swapping was quite convenient. Her meal also came with radish kimchi. I got thick noodles and vegetables (number 25) from the middle restaurant, which had a yellow shop front. It was really good, and came with cabbage kimchi, miso soup, stewed potatoes! I was so surprised because the bowl is enormous; my chopsticks are shown on the bowl for comparison. I saw that other people also got these giant bowls. The bowls are about half filled with raw veggies and cold rice noodles, which were nice and chewy. There was a bottle of spicy sauce for me to add to my own taste. It was around $8.50 with tax, as were most dishes there. 

The kimbap was pretty good too, but the soy sauce with chili was really salty definitely not umami. $4 with tax. I know there's imitation crab it in...but I ate it anyway (we shared it; I also ended up eating squid that was going to get thrown away because neither TJ nor CL liked it).

H Mart itself is a decent size, has many snacks that I'd like to try, many varieties of miso, and kilos of kimchi (the smallest size was a pound, the largest was a bag the size of a microwave). The produce section offers a styrofoam backed and plastic-wrapped tray of nearly-going-bad-veggies for 99c, so I bought about 12 small potatoes, 6 Asian eggplants, and 4 zucchinis for $4.96. I just cut off the bad squishy parts (about 10% of the veggies).

 (not sure what it is...) 

(They're twice the size of avocados, and have smooth skin)

I also got some sort of mugwort cake with beans which looked so delicious! I thought it'd be sweet, but it's actually tasteless (like Chinese steamed buns without any filling). I've never had mugwort before, and I'm a little disappointed because I couldn't taste anything different than a normal floury-bread thing. I wish it had been sold individually, but it was not bad.

I also found something that I used to love when I was a kid: ready-to-eat crunchy instant noodles! It's not the same brand, but basically you can add the seasoning, crush the noodles, and then eat them the way you eat chips. There was a brand in Hong Kong that had Snoopy on the package, and came with a Snoopy sticker. I LOVED them. I got the hot rice flavour (but there was also beef and barbecue flavour). It's a bit pricey (99c) but, man, nostalgia!

Also, there was lots of vegetarian pudding. I didn't get any because I had bought some Kingo Pudding by Cocon at Chinatown recently, and here they are (they taste really good frozen)

Although these look like jelly made with gelatin, they're actually solid due to seaweed extract! Here are the ingredients for the pineapple one: water, sugar, nata de coco, milk powder, pineapple juice, seaweed extract, vegetable oil, citric acid, flavour, emulsifier, colouring (including tartrazine E102), and FD&C yellow No. 5. The lychee one doesn't include the last two ingredients, because, well, it's white. I'm not a fan of the pineapple one because it was too sweet, but I bought it for science (and for trying new things).

For those who want REAL pineapple jelly, then, pick these! Why can't gelatin jelly have pineapple? Well, pineapple has this enzyme called bromelain, a protease that breaks down proteins (our duodenum (small intestine) has trypsin, which is also a protease, which breaks down proteins during digestion). The protease breaks down gelatin (collagen protein), so the jelly won't set. I was so astounded when I learned this in high school Biology. The jelly itself is softer, though.
Ultimately, I wouldn't take SEPTA all the way to H Mart regularly, even though there are some pretty neat veggies there. Chinatown is the way to go for now for me!

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).

Taste of Penn Part II: Dr. McDougall's Right Foods

This is part of the series about the Taste of Penn.

Initially, I was gonna make a pretty nice and shallow entry for Dr. McDougall's Right Foods, but then I did some research and I've started to reconsider.

At the Taste of Penn, I checked out this table only because my brother and dad adore instant noodles, and I figured I should get a box for them. They sell instant cup noodles, but made with organic and "healthy" stuff instead. The representative did emphasise that the products do not have MSG and are vegan. I find this simply amazing because it seems to be a rule that instant noodles include animal juice. The fact that there can be vegan teriyaki seems pretty sweet (literally...). I've lost interest in instant noodles since 2006/2005. Because Dr. McDougall's seems pretty interested in the environment, I talked to representative about perhaps making compressible cups (accordion style packaging), so that more cups of noodles can be shipped per box = less transportation gas! I've emailed them about it too, so maybe one day we'll see accordion packaging hit the shelves.

When I had a few more dining dollars left, I ended up buying some more of these noodles because they went from $1.89/cup to $1.89/2 cups to 50c/cup.

50c for an ostensibly "healthy" meal seems pretty chill, right?

I tried the teriyaki flavour... the noodles were thin and dense, and the seasoning smelled good. I added water to the line on the [paper] carton and microwaved it.

The noodles were thin and pretty tasteless. They were definitely not instant noodles. They were egg noodles, but in a pretty bland way.

The soup was... salty. Sweet. Um. Not really teriyaki.

So now, to talk about the actual company. Why is it called Dr. McDougall?

The addition of "Dr." makes people feel like they're eating something healthy.

Dr. McDougall, according to the website, is a vegan who has a health programme for people and he sells books.

"As the founder and medical director of the nationally renowned McDougall Program, Dr. McDougall has helped thousands improve their health and their quality of life by teaching people about the benefits of a plant based, heart healthy diet rich in good starches like whole grains, fruits, vegetables, rice, pasta and legumes."

Dude. These instant noodles are plant-based, sure, but they aren't heart healthy. In the most simplistic way of looking at this, if you eat 10 of these in a day (200 Calories each, 2000 typical RDI of Calories), you'd have 200% of your sodium intake for a day. There is 480 mg sodium

Yes, 200%.

Contrast that to the plant-based diet that I eat. Cereal. Banana. Apple. Sandwich, peanut butter, jam. More cereal. Cookies. Tofu, rice, raw spinach. Boiled broccoli. Soymilk. LOTS OF Chocolate. LOW SODIUM, GUYS.

Let's continue.

200 Calories for a meal is kinda little; it's so unrealistic when people eat 100 Calorie packs as "snacks". If I follow the 2000 Calorie RDI (Okay, I don't, and I know it's very variable depending on your exercise level; there are many BMR/Calorie intake calculators online so you can calculate your own), each meal should be around 400 Calories, if you include snacks and drinks. As a complete generalisation, BMR is at least 1000 Calories for adults - this is the energy needed to run your body per day if you're just sitting there like a vegetable.

0.5 g fat. That's cool I guess.

7 g protein

14% vitamin A

2% vitamin C

2% calcium

6% iron

200 Calories.

Compare that to eating an orange (100% vitamin C, 40 Calories, maybe)

+ a serving of carrots (100% vitamin A, 30 Calories)

+ a glass of soymilk (30% calcium&iron, 7g protein, 140 Calories)

+ a lot of spinach (?? iron, ?? Calories)

210 Calories. More fibre, less sodium.

So, I don't see what Dr. McDougall is trying to define as vegan and healthy, or whatever.

On the other hand, why am I criticising a dude who is trying to get people to eat healthier fast food as opposed to Cup Noodle? Why am I pointing out his flaws when he's actually making people more aware of what they're eating? At least he's using organicish ingredients, right, and at least he's including some fibre and having 20x less fat that other instant noodles right?

So, it's your call.

Though, my nutrition professor (Dr. Compher) did influence me; I figure she'd say something that goes along the lines of, well, this guy is trying to sell his books and his diet and get money.

I guess, if he sincerely wanted to help "thousands of people", maybe he should be an actual physician, right? Or a professor. Or, you know, high school volunteer work, which is what I do for CHiP although the program didn't work that well this semester.

Nightmarket!

It's at night, and it's a market of food, sorta.

It's a swarm of people.

A mob of college kids, hungry for some culture (or just free food.)

At the Rodin College House rooftop lounge, there was a Nightmarket, brought to us by various student organisations, including the Chinese/Taiwanese/Korean/African/Vietnamese/some other Student Associations. There were trays and trays of rice, bowls of grass jelly, cups of aloe vera drink and bubble tea, and packages of Choco Pie.

All Free.

The catch? We had a reel of tickets (10 tickets? 15 tickets?), and each scoop of food cost at least a ticket. The "prices" were jacked up too; at first, the Choco Pies were only one ticket, but later, they cost two tickets. The bubble tea, by default, was two tickets, whereas the aloe vera drink was only one ticket. In general, two scoops of rice cost one ticket, as did two scoops of fried plantains.

From top to bottom: I tried the fried plantains (amazing!) and jollof rice (I'd never had it before, but someone mentioned it to me a few weeks ago and that's sparked an interest...and it's really good), along with some Vietnamese noodles (which had shrimp and I was unaware...), fried rice (don't know why. It wasn't even good fried rice. My mum makes the best fried rice in the world...or it's just an acquired taste, so I intrinsically dislike everyone else's fried rice), seaweed (best ever! Okay, a little salty, but I hadn't had seaweed in ages, so it was delicious), and a Vietnamese rice flour and glutinous rice dessert that was amazing.

The bubble tea was warm.

I was pretty upset that I was using a styrofoam plate. However, I did like this study-break-esque thing (It happened two weeks ago actually). Along with the food, there was also bracelet making and an African game called Mancala (I think), and it was really fun! I've been really busy with studying, so I don't think I'll be blogging until May 10 at the earliest.

My Grad Party!

Too much dessert from Costco.

YES APPLE PIE!! Though, I like pumpkin pie more. SD likes apple pie.

Fried rice [one vegetarian], cold noodles, grilled corn, water gun, croutons, POTATO SALAD WITH APPLE!, some weird cow-flesh thing [in the background].

Snack table: trail mix [I made it], fried corn kernels, tortillas, Goldfish crackers, Doritos, crudites and honey mustard dip [I made it], mango salsa, potato chips, toasted pine nuts.

I made rice pudding for the first time of my life. SC and JM liked it. :D YAY

Crudites!

Pasta with thyme and Monterey jack cheese!!

MORE RICE PUDDING!!!!!

I needa get better at estimating the amount of food to make. We had pretty much 60% of the food left, after the party. and maybe 80% of the dessert. This does not bode well with the fact that I will be home [since school is over] for the next few weeks, as I will be consuming that food.