toastykitten

Per my Facebook ads, apparently there is a Stephen Yan, a Canadian Chinese TV chef who had his own cooking show "Wok with Yan" who was on around the same time as Martin Yan of Yan Can Cook, and who also makes a million puns a minute.  Here's one episode that is also notable for
his instructions on sharpening your cleaver - with the back of a china dish.

 this trailer for the Rose of Versailles anime:






No idea what's going on but I love the art. 

This company called Strike Gently has some amazing blankets: Cat Warrior, Be Gay, Do Crime, T Rex Cat are among my favorites.  

Accented Cinema has completed their Cinematic Themes and Visuals of Ancient China with Part 4, all the way up to the "Century of Humiliation":


My fave foul-mouthed chef Cadence Gao makes some Uyghur type dumplings and makes some points about colonialism. Or something; I dunno:

Just ordered fresh produce from https://www.surplusproduce.com/, which does home deliveries or pickups from local stores/restaurants in the Bay Area. They have plenty of Asian veggies and fruits, as well as the more mainstream stuff. Prices seem reasonable, delivery fee is about $6. Good for minimizing grocery trips out, and also supporting your local farmers. 

Highly recommend doing this classic guacamole recipe. Also worth watching the video for tips on how to fix everything I've been doing wrong with avocados for the past decade. :P

Andrew Zimmern is opening up a Chinese restaurant chain in the MidWest so he can "showcase the authentic flavors" to people there. Meanwhile, Chef Chu's is one of Silicon Valley's favorite Chinese restaurants but gets accusations of being unauthentic because he dared to cook food the way his customers liked. (Also, Chef Chu is father of Jon Chu, Crazy Rich Asians director.)

I wonder how David Chang feels about having Asian food validated by someone like Zimmern.

My standard disclaimers:

1. I like Roy Choi.
2. I've made some of his food from his cookbook.
3. I like but do not love his Kogi tacos. Would not stand in a line for an hour for them. Love some of the concepts of his other restaurants. Would try them all if practical.
4. I admire his goals.
5. I've never eaten at either Locol location.

Pete Wells apparently wrote a pretty inflammatory no-star NYTimes review of the Locol location in Oakland. Jonathan Gold called him, maybe not wrong, but "ungenerous". Roy Choi wrote something, honestly, that is kind of incomprehensible to me.

That being said, this location is on Broadway, downtown? Ain't nothing going to survive in Oakland if it don't deliver on flavor. This location is not in a food desert - on Google Maps it looks like Pandora's headquarters are right around the corner. And it doesn't matter how good your intentions are, if you can't compete with the taquerias or the Vietnamese delis with $2.00 sandwiches (it might be $3 now; it's been a while) a few miles away, what are you even doing?

Funny, I remember going home over my break in November, and taking a walk around my neighborhood, being alternately nostalgic and horrified/fascinated by the changes that gentrification brought to it. We walked into a store whose aesthetic screamed Silver Lake hipster, and I point-blank asked my sister who in our neighborhood could actually afford anything there. She shrugged. We passed by an artisanal popcorn shop, a "new American" themed restaurant with a pricey looking menu and communal benches, and another breakfast place. She claimed that people drove over an hour just to come to that restaurant. I wondered if they do, do they just come in, eat, and go, or do they stick around to explore?

Ironically, that day was Sunday and apparently all the restaurants were closed. We ended up eating at the KFC I'd grown up eating at, that our friends had gotten their first legal jobs at. Saw the bulletproof glass and I was like, yup, here we are.

They taste pretty disgusting, and were not much improved by the addition of sugary strawberries.

I went on a little shopping spree yesterday, as my immigrant instincts kicked in:

Bone-in ribeye steaks - $4.49 a pound! Compare to Whole Foods at $16.00 a pound.

I didn't buy these, but the prices are from the weekly ads they send to us:

Oranges - 4 lbs for 99 cents.
Butternut squash - 4 lbs for 99 cents.
Green cabbage - 5 lbs for 99 cents.

I am still in amazement. I don't even really remember most of what I bought, other than to say OMFG those prices are awesome and I grabbed some stuff. Oh, and though I don't believe any of it is actually organic, the produce is really fresh and tastes great. I'm still wondering how they get stuff that cheap and still make any profits.

We went to go see Jennifer 8. Lee at Vroman's in Pasadena talk about her new book, the Fortune Cookie Chronicles, which traces the lineage of various Chinese American food items such as fortune cookies and chop suey and General Tso's chicken. It was fascinating and very humorous discussion that brought up all sorts of huge, relevant issues - food, masculinity, racism, immigration, and of course, "what it means to be American". I think what she said was "if our standard of what it means to be American is 'as American as apple pie', then how often do Americans eat apple pie, and how often do they eat Chinese food?"

Her presentation was pretty organized, and we saw a bunch of different images and videos, from Chinese people in China trying fortune cookies for the first time, to the video of a sad little five year old girl in China explaining that she was born in America and was being raised in her village in China while her parents were working in America, and America was "at the airport, far away".

Get the "The Original" Outdoor Cooker for Christmas. It is a burner on stilts that comes with a hose to hook up to your propane tank and a 30 quart pot. It is tall and unwieldy and should not be turned on when children are around because it's a recipe for nth-degree burns.

Do research on various types of seafood boils and a seasoning mix. The most popular mix is Zatarain's, which makes a bunch of other instant mixes like jambalaya and gumbo. Go to the following stores and fail at finding the seasoning packet necessary to an enjoyable boil: Ralph's, Gelson's, Trader Joe's, the Chinese market, even. Later discover that Zatarain's Crab Boil Seasoning is sold on Amazon. Give up on finding it in the grocery store and make your own seafood boil mix.

Next, decide on the seafood. Six pounds of live crab, two pounds of shrimp, one pound of what looks like langosteens but what the Chinese butcher dude calls "freshwater shrimp" from the local Chinese market (with an A rating, even). Get a phone call from guests who decide to also buy a pound of scallops, salmon with crab cake and five pounds of mussels from Costco. Back home, stick the crabs in the fridge before they can wake up. Stick all other seafood in the fridge before they spoil. Scallops and salmon will be cooked separately.

Make preparations for the other food - butternut squash soup and bruschetta (ok someone tell me if it is pronounced brusketta or brus-CHetta?). Make the mirepoix.

Set up Outdoor Cooker.

Start cleaning seafood and fill up the pot with water. Boil water, then toss seasoning packet in. Toss in the mirepoix. Add seafood and anything else you wanted to toss in like potatoes, sausages, etc. Seafood will be done in about twenty minutes.

EAT. And EAT. And EAT.

Verdict on the freshwater shrimp - nobody really liked it, but that may be the fact that it's probably supposed to be cooked differently. It kind of looks like a cross between a lobster and a giant shrimp. The taste was kind of bland in comparison to all the other seafood.

Make seafood cakes out of the leftovers. That's my project today!