Bubble Tea Cookies!

I know that this sounds really cheesy, but I had a dream in which I was making bubble tea cake. I remember considering the logistics of the cake - how would it stand? Where do the bubbles go? How much does it have to look like a container of bubble tea? Straw? Do the bubbles stay at the bottom or are they distributed evenly throughout the (tea) cake? I remember applying bright orange icing to a cake shaped like a bubble tea container in the dream; in fact, it looked like this, except it was standing vertically and lacked the bottom and top. The rest of the dream seemed to be slightly morose, but I don't remember. 

Note: Throughout this post, I will refer to these tapioca pearls/bubble tea bubbles as "tapioca pearls" for consistency.

It turns out that no one has yet BAKED a tapioca pearl cake (or at least, I REALLY hope no one has ever done it). So, it's a race against time: I need to bake tapioca pearls into some sort of attractive cake thing, and post it on here. It will be an original product. When some famous celebrity chef finally does it in the future, people will search for recipes. MINE WILL SHOW UP and I WILL BE KNOWN AS THE ONE WHO DID IT BEFORE IT WAS COOL.

But first, what happens when you bake tapioca pearls?  Do they shrivel up? Or, do they get hot and steamy? Swell up and go hard? Explode? Pop like cherries? (Okay, I'll stop the jokes...)

So, here's a pilot test!

First, I made some cookie dough. I made half a batch of this vegan recipe, but I substituted the baking powder and water with baking soda and balsamic vinegar. There are also no chocolate chips or marshmallows. I added the balsamic vinegar right before adding the tapioca pearls, because the vinegar reacts with the baking soda.

Rehydrating "5-minute" tapioca pearls! A few months ago, they were $1.68, but now they are $1.98 at the underground Chinese grocery store in Chinatown :(. Throughout the semester, I would do this by boiling water using the electric kettle, pouring this water into my loose tea leaves in a tea strainer, sugar, and pearls, and cover my mug with a lid. After stirring about every 3 minutes for 10 minutes or so, the pearls would be chewy and edible.

However, I think that the pearls taste much better and are plumper when heated in boiling sweet tea on the stove.

For heating these instant tapioca pearls, I used about 1/4 of a saucepan of water, a handful of tapioca pearls and a tablespoon of brown sugar. There wasn't any tea in this rehydration, but I did use the leftover sugar mixture for tea.

After the pearls were cooked, I fished them out with a tea strainer and plonked them into the cookie dough. Leaving them in hot water for too long renders the whole pearl to taste uniform and starchy (well, it happened once, and I do not want to risk it happening again). After a quick mix, I scooped out the dough and baked the cookies according to that recipe. The mixture was really crumbly (think sand-like), so what I did was scoop up a tablespoon, squeeze my hand against the spoon, and keep squeezing until a ball was formed. The dough was kind of spongy.

AND THEY WORKED! They harden as they cool, so I ended up with crispy (but delicious) cookies that were devoured by my friends and SP. SP ate 5/12ths of the batch (of 12 cookies). The cookie recipe produced cookies that remind me of the almond cookies, like these, I used to get for 2 HKD  in HK near my piano exam place.
The tapioca pearls were chewy, not dry, and delicious! So, I will make a cake next time!

On the 18th day of the 6th month of the 2012th year of our wholesome flying spaghetti monster, I, PIE-314, OFFICIALLY MADE THE FIRST TAPIOCA PEARL COOKIES. EVER.

Cheese and other things

I am slowly making my way through all the cheeses at Trader Joe's (from cheapest to most expensive), and I recently tried Dubliner cheese and Comté. It turns out that I don't particularly enjoy either :(. Although both taste delicious melted, from my experience, ALL cheeses taste good melted. Even the free giant wedge of some sorta fancy cheese we got from Costo in 2006 that reeked of some kinda herb or mushroom or ... I dunno. Even that was n-fold zillion-fold uh, better heated up.

Dubliner cheese: Specially made in awesome Ireland, this cheese has a firm texture, smells pretty good, and is rather crumbly like parmesan. It also tastes crumbly and sour, and has a bite that kicks like Swiss cheese (I'm not a fan of the...hard/translucent (huh, weird adjectives)... taste of Swiss cheese although it looks absolutely beautiful). It tastes good melted though, and is super stringy.

Comté cheese: This French cheese is also hard and has a waxy rind that is crumbly and extremely smelly. To me, this cheese smelled like E. coli on petri dishes. Urg. It may just be me as a Bio lab person, though, because once I walked into my boyfriend's dorm and it smelled like yeast growing on petri dishes (he had just had a certain brand of cheese pizza). Lab smells do not entice me. The cheese itself is hard, dry, and tastes a bit off.  It is, again, delicious when melted, but the parchy E. coli sensation is still there.

I went to Whole Foods and tried their hot food/cold food for $7.99/lb. As this was my first time, I asked the guy giving out gazpacho samples about how the system works. Basically, you grab a box (small cardboard "~1-pound-sized", large cardboard "~2-pound-sized(?)", and large compost-able cardboard (~2-pound-sized(?)") and fill it with hot and cold foods from the trays. You can ask the people at the deli to weigh your box if you want. When you pay, the box and contents are weighed, and you can ask for utensils! I ended up getting around $6 of delicious food, which I ate while reading Grimm's fairy tales right outside the Whole Foods (they have chairs/tables). Unfortunately, this demonstrated that I can hypothetically eat some 3 pounds of honey mustard vegan chicken and still have a raging appetite afterwards. I also really liked the Asian tofu salad thing. The mushrooms were a bit too sour for me. I don't know whether the boxes are recycle-able; they have a waterproof coating on the inside, but it was easily tear-able, so I recycled it anyway...

I also have decided to make dinner by putting all dinner ingredients into a pan and baking them for around 20 minutes at 350 F in an unpreheated oven. As I have a LOT of cilantro (doing pilot taste tests), I baked that too (I am NOT a fan of raw cilantro). So far, I've had three or so of these dump-and-bake dinners. The one below has corn tortillas, topped with sliced eggplant, Comté cheese, soy ground beef mixed with a whole onion, and cilantro.
Also, instead of ice cream, I bought 680 g of frozen mango, ~400 g of which I ate on the way home from Trader Joe's. It is absolutely gratifying, and DOESN'T MELT! It's a great treat.

Honey Mustard and Onion Pretzels

I'm not a huge fan of pretzels, but there is ONE huge exception. I can easily DEVOUR Snyder of Hanover's Honey Mustard and Onion pretzel pieces (and the Cheese ones...I've yet to try the others). They're $3 for a pack, and because I inhale them extremely fast, I rarely buy them (unless it's Finals week. Then, I eat them for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. And snack). Last week, after I ran to Trader Joe's, it started storming, so I was stranded for an extra half an hour. I ended up buying twice as much food as I would've (not that it's a terrible thing, because I've been stress-eating even though it's summer). Stores should hope that flash-storms occur more often, especially when their customers' modes of transportation are legs or bikes. So, while languidly prowling the store, I came across the Trader Joe's brand of honey mustard and onion pretzels. I jumped with glee, bought them for $2.29, and strolled out into the glorious, rainbow sunset, as the storm had abated.
(Actually, it was still extremely gloomy and the trees cried rain, and the thin ropes of the drawstring bag cut into my shoulders)


The pretzels were sweeter than the Snyder of Hanover ones. They were okay. I would buy them again, but they only offer about 80% of the satisfaction I get from when I eat Snyder of Hanover Honey Mustard and Onion pretzel pieces.

In other news, this is the smallest take-away container, ever! It's the size of an apricot! It contained about two pieces of bak choi and one chunk of Chinese mushroom. I got it from Han Dynasty, at 37th and Market St., where our lab group had lunch. The food there is delicious, but a tad spicy for me. The servers are non-Chinese and speak  American English well, whereas the chefs are Chinese and...just do splendid cooking.

Also, 7-11 decided to have its free Slurpee day on the 23rd of May, as opposed to the 11th of July.

Hot Diggity

So! I haven't had an animal-filled hot dog since something like 2006. (Hmm. That's actually kinda scary). Sure, I make vegetarian hot dogs at home every once in a while, but it's not the same as biting into a slightly charred barbecue hot dog at a friend's place, or trying an overpriced hot dog at a fair. For some reason, everyone remembers the veggie burgers, but no one remembers the hot dogs. In all honesty, though, I've never had a super delicious veggie burger or hot dog; they all lack that meaty zing.

My most important hot dog memory is that of when I was really young in Australia (so maybe I was 5?), and my brother, dad, and I were probably at a town fair. It was a cloudy, possibly rainy, day, and there was a food truck on some sports field. My dad got a hot dog, asked the person in the truck to cut it in half, and my brother and I each had half of a delicious hot dog with tomato sauce. Other hot dog memories include consuming them at rugby games. I'm not sure why I absolutely LOVED rugby as a kid, but I know that I stopped liking once I realised that it was a "boys" sport and that others would make fun of me for it.

I don't think I've had many super hot dog memories since then, except that there was this brand in Hong Kong that sold cheese-filled sausages. If someone could tell me what the name of the company is, I'd be super grateful. They even sold cocktail hot dogs the size of baby carrots!

Anyway, my friend J and I went to Hot Diggity, which is on South St., because they have vegetarian (and vegan) hot dogs. I was super excited! They have multifarious flavours, a zillion cute posters lining the walls, and a warm atmosphere (with 3 long tall benches with holes cut into the middle so that one can plop the cone of fries into the holes--unfortunately, as both J and I got the "small" fries, we both feared that the cone would fall through).

I got the Desert Dog while J got the Big Kahuna (I think?). The sausage was much longer (5 cm?) than the bun, which was a little odd, as the sausages were also really skinny. The vegetarian sausage was a little bland, not really charred, and didn't have the juicy, squeaky, sausage texture. It was alright, though. The bread was nicely grilled, and the toppings were... dry. Despite there being a chili sauce spread on the bun, the whole hot dog was as dry as a plain slice o' cheese on a piece of bread. It lacked juiciness. Although some people may love the vegetarian hot dogs here, I was not a fan.

The fries were nice (when are non trans-fat fries NOT nice? They're even yummy frozen!) and they even had the skins on them. They aren't the best I've ever had, and they're thick cut (while I prefer thin). Each dipping sauce costs 25c, and the guy gave us the House flavour for free. It has horseradish and ginger, and tastes really similar to the salad dressing from Samurai Sushi. In the end, the best part was just hanging out with J and being... "social" with someone other than my boyfriend and/or 2 close friends.

This episode culminates in me wondering, again, why I am a vegetarian. Sure, it's easy to do, environmentally better, provided I don't eat a ton of other imported processed food (read: candy), possibly more ethical, and healthier (except for the lack of vitamin B12 and iron). However, I now miss eating animals a little. I miss being ignorant about the ingredients of burgers, miss contributing to abusive cattle farms in the Amazon rainforest, and miss devouring umami by the truckload.

However, what I really wish to be, and more for environmental than economical reasons, is a freegan. You know, forage for food, obtain food from dumpsters that have only expired by half a day, eating friends' leftovers etc. This way, I could eat pretty much anything (animal or plant or fungi) I want without guilt of ruining the environment, since all the energy used in producing said food would not be wasted (and energy to transport these expired/unwanted foods to the landfill would be saved! Better for all!). As I'm in a city, I feel like this should be easy to accomplish. I guess I'm just scared of going alone and/or being labelled as a weirdo.

Cooking!

 SP made tomato salad and we made mashed potato together. It's a huge mountain of mashed potato, and I even dug a tunnel for it!

I made SP risotto + poached eggs for dinner. It turns out that I'm terrible at making poached eggs, and I realised that I've never actually made poached eggs by myself before. Anyway.
 In exchange, SP also "made me dinner" :) It's curry (curry sauce in a jar) with fried tofu (first covered in flour), an orange pepper, and onion, all on sushi rice. Extremely delicious!! :) Better than any food truck curry.

Last week we also had dinner together, although there wasn't much fancy stuff. Just pasta one night and corn tortillas+cheese+egg the other. We had lunch together at Hummus last Sunday, and I don't think I'm ever going again. If there is a fast food name for Mediterranean food, this would be it. To me, everything was salty, the tabouli didn't have wondrous flavour (actually, the salt, in general, masks the fact that none of the foods have much flavour), and the falafel was dry. I feel like the hummus from the grocery store actually tastes fresher than the one here. It was just really disappointing, because all the food truck falafel/hummus-type foods have been far better (meaning the House of Pita and Magic Carpet). Oh well.