Kashi GoLean Crunch! Oatmeal.

Because I don't have a fridge in my room, I also don't have any milk in my room. So, I can't actually have cereal with milk, which is kind of sad because I do love cereal and milk together [next year, my fridge will be filled with milk, chocolate, fruit, tofu, and vegetables].

I didn't feel like eating dry cereal, or cereal with cold water, so I decided to have hot water [yes, I have an electric kettle!] with the Kashi GoLean Crunch! cereal that usually is super sweet and... crunchy... [and reminds me of popcorn].

To my amazement, after absorbing a whole cup of water, the cereal swelled! It tasted like oatmeal mixed with some brown rice, with a really fibrous texture. It was still extremely sweet and had that Kashi company flavour. It was quite a nice change, and I think I like it better than I like normal Kashi cereal.

In this case, why is there even Kashi oatmeal out there? It makes so much sense to just buy a lot of cereal...and watch it puff and cook into oatmeal, instantly. JUST ADD WATER! [Wow, I'm turning into a college kid!]

WATER BLOG DAY!

If everyone remains faithful to one website, my blog will be among [at least] 5148 blogs in the world that blog about water. After all, this is supposedly the "year of water" [and I thought it was just a Penn phenomenon...]. Today is Blog Action Day 2010, and the topic is water... and I'm supposed to come up with a witty blog post about two hydrogens covalently bonded to an oxygen molecule.

By the way, here is the link to my blog on the Blog Action Day page! It happens to be called Food Tech :D. The Penn group "Free Stuff at Penn" also blogged about water, which makes me very happy since they even mentioned how water in Philly is hard water and is that the Penn campus has filters in places... [I can't attest to that since I haven't seen any of those].

Anyway, I suppose now is the time to talk the hard facts of hard water [ha.ha.ha.] and give an actual meaningful post, sans waffle. Again, everything on this blog is my opinion, so please don't feel offended if you like to buy 250mL bottles of water from Costco [my parents do that].

One thing that I detest about the U.S. is the fact that prebottled water seems to be a necessity. WATER IS A NECESSITY. Prebottled water is a marketing gimmick used to screw up the environment. I really don't know why else we humans in the U.S. require prebottled water. In countries where water carries bacteria, insects, disease, mercury, poop, etc., bottled water is necessary. For most of the U.S., however, bottled water [okay, I got sick of typing "pre"] just pisses me off. I don't care if you're only capable of putting "pure spring water" to your lips. It's freakin' H2O with a bunch of minerals and trace elements. What do you use to brush your teeth? What do you drench yourself in, when you're showering? Where in the world do you SWIM, if you dislike normal tap water? You've been ingesting tonnes of tap water in your life, and you even rinse your fruit and vegetables with it. You wash your dishes and your clothes in it.

Why, then, are you afraid of sipping it? Why do you fear calcium? Is it because it leaves a white residue on your coffee-maker? Do you censure the fluoride in water because it's ostensibly harmful?

Why is it okay - oh, I mean, imperative - that you, a privileged, literate, richer-than-80%-of-the-world person, drink water from a bottle, whereas other people have to live on malaria-saturated swamps?

Tap water makes so much more sense.

It's pretty much the same thing as bottled water.

I have to admit that NJ tap water tastes very different from HK tap water, and Philadelphia tap water. Actually, the best tap water I've had comes from the airport at South Carolina...or maybe I was just really thirsty after the plane ride]. I have to admit that NJ water didn't taste that great initially, but after a few days, it started tasting clear. In other words, it started tasting like water, and spring water started tasting chemically bizarre.

One thing to get clear [hahaha, "clear"] is the fact that if you get used to NJ tap water, you can get used to any tap water, because NJ has all the pharmaceutical monopolies. Another cool thing is that they give out water quality reports every year in late August to each resident, so we all get to know what's in the water we're drinking.

I have one bottle for my water. It is bright green, stainless steel, and doesn't smell at all [the ones from Marshalls absolutely reek when I checked their insides out]. It cost around $10 from Borders when the one in my town was closing down. I believe it was from Gaiam, and you can find this company's bottle on Google Shopping. It used to have some design on it but it washed off, although I prefer it plain green.

Is my argument solid like ice? Will you melt it with your anger? It's okay if you disagree; I'm not partaking in consumption. I'm not wasting the energy associated with

1. Obtaining and refining oil.

2. Making oil into plastic bottles.

3. Filling bottles with water at some factory.

4. Finding "spring" water [or tap water] and drilling holes in the ground.

5. Shipping water to warehouse.

6. Shipping water from warehouse to store.

7. Shipping water from store to home.

Instead I'm just getting water pumped from some local recycled/water-that-used-to-be-sewage-perhaps plant and putting it in a stainless steel container.

PennFest! 3 Sept

Pennfest is this event in which retailers try to sell their products to unsuspecting frosh. Since I'm not really advertising the companies that I don't love, I'm just going to refer to them as "this company". This company gave out free cups with a ping pong ball nestled inside. I honestly spent a whole week pondering why they would give us a ping pong ball... and yesterday evening, as TL, JX and I walked back from dinner, it finally hit me. The ping pong ball and the cup was for beer pong. DUH!

Way to advertise alcohol to us...

Cupcakes from Insomnia Cookies... didn't take them.

Anyway, Pennfest had a lot of companies selling dorm stuff, selling "online-food-ordering" services, and plenty of "ohh get a discount if you come to our store!" I ended up consuming a taco from Chipotle, an amazing coconut pecan cookie from Insomnia Cookies [very famous on college campuses, apparently] and some mango water ice. There was also popcorn and candy floss but I wasn't actually that hungry. In all honesty, I think my hypothyroidism is kicking in [Yeah, apparently my hyperthyroidism has been lowered way too much, so I have to cut the meds again]

All my pictures are blurry because it was 11pm and I was walking around while taking pictures. This is actually a huge problem; I can't take a picture without getting ominous stares from strangers.

Blood Test Soup...

I got another blood test yesterday morning, and I went home feeling fine. Little did I know that it would set up a perfect excuse for me, 12 hours later... [That's another story...]

My mum always makes this soup for me after a blood test. It's basically sugar, water, jujube berries, peanuts, white wood ear, a longyan/lychee-type thing, and lotus seeds. It's actually quite delicious if you add milk to it. Anyway, on the way back, my mum and I were discussing the soup. She claims that we're supposed to use rock sugar to sweeten the soup, rather than plain old granulated or caster sugar, since it's "sweeter" to use rock sugar. Urban myth also claims that using rock sugar is better since it adds a ton more nutrients to the soup, since it "melts" slower. My mum also said that the caster sugar "disappears" when put in soup, so you have to use rock sugar since it "cooks for longer".

I am here to disprove these ideas. Scientifically speaking.

1. If you have a chunk of rock sugar, and you emulate that chunk with granulated sugar, you will not get the same "sweetness" of sugar. I mean, if you have a cube of rock sugar, and you have a sugar cube, even though the volume is the same, the moles of sucrose is evidently not the same. There is a ton of air between each granulated sugar crystal in the sugar cube, whereas in a chunk of rock sugar, there is less air in a sugar crystal, let alone between each sucrose molecule. In fact, if you were to weigh the cube of rock sugar, it should definitely be heavier than the granulated sugar cube. So, more sucrose means sweeter soup. Simple.

2. Rock sugar is sucrose. Granulated sugar is sucrose. "Organic Evaporated Cane Juice" is sucrose. Brown sugar is sucrose, with some molasses mixed in. Sure, there may be "trace" minerals and blah from the refinement and treatment processing from when the cane or beet juice was evaporated. It's all one glucose covalently bonded with one fructose. In water, a chunk of sucrose molecules dissolves into individual sucrose molecules. Even if there were trace nutrients, you'd have to eat kilos of that sucrose to perhaps obtain 1% of your daily intake of some nutrient...

3. Both caster sugar and rock sugar dissolve in water. They both stay dissolved in the water. Sucrose doesn't just "disappear". Both caster sugar and rock sugar don't "cook" at 90 or 100 degrees C. They just stay dissolved.

I like this soup though. I'm glad my mum bothers to dump everything in the slow cooker and leave it on overnight.

Sugar Cane Drink

I was going to blog about an omelette that I made, but it was definitely not photogenic.

So. I will just say that it tasted really good and blocked out the characteristic Boca burger taste. I am never going to buy Boca burgers again. I don't get why I used to like them. They are so dry, and have that weird characteristic taste... Erg... well I only have two left.

TVP is way better.

Anyway, instead, I'm going to talk about this sugar cane drink that my mum bought for my sister, but she dislikes it. So... it wasn't worth 80 Cals of pure sugar, in my opinion. This is why:

1. I've had legit fresh-out-of-the-press [yeah, literally, a sugar cane press] sugar cane juice before, at ParknShop in HK. That stuff is REAL; it's not as sweet, has that sugar cane flavour [no, sugar cane juice is NOT the same as sugar syrup], and almost tastes a tad sour, in a refreshing way. I actually can't describe it.

2. The first ingredient in this juice is water. Great. It's not even concentrated. Then it's sugar. What happened to actual smooshed sugar cane? I am aware that apple juice is basically sugars and water... but you list apple juice as "apple juice" not "water, sugar, apple essence". Well, to be fair, there is pretty much no where else to get this stuff in the U.S., so I suppose if I had an emotional attachment to sugar cane juice, I'd probably enjoy it more.

Here is a picture. An "artistic" statement. Trashed...Should've bin in a bin [ha.ha.ha.]

Man Tou

There are two things that my mum has been attempting to make during her free time since we moved here, a few years ago. One of them is fa[2] gao[1], which is a steamed rice cake. It has failed miserably.

The second is man[2] tou[2], which has gone from rock-hard lumps of gluteny-water to actual scallion filled steamed buns of yeasty awesomeness. I am proud of my mum, and the fact that she somehow figured out how to make awesome steamed buns without a recipe.

She used to mix flour and water and baking soda, in an attempt to make something that resembled man tou. It was icky.

Now, she somehow manages to gauge enough flour and water and yeast... without measuring them or anything [!] and somehow yields a perfect-ish batch of the ubiquitous bun on the street anywhere in metropolis China.

This sure beats the airy sweet bleached stuff [okay, even though the flour my mum uses IS bleached flour, it doesn't taste like Wonder-Bread-bleach-crap] that look exactly like oblong sponges "man tou" that one can obtain from Kamman. Gotta respect her.