Since I have the lovely assignment of writing a 500-word essay for my food communications class about my vacation, I may as well document it. I'll try to make this not-too-painful for the handful of people reading this.
My vacation started yesterday since I don't have class on Friday. Diana stayed overnight because we went to Pianos the night before to see I Am Kloot (more info at my music blog). I was feeling somewhat shitty due to food related matters. Ah...food. What was the problem? Overall I was feeling bad thinking about what I should eat, or what I shouldn't eat, or how I should organize my food schedule as to not bloat into an obese, Asian 19 year old.
My mum said if I weren't Asian I may be less conscious about my weight. I'm not sure about that, but it definitely doesn't help knowing that if I actually lived in Taiwan (ie, if my parents had never come to the US) I'd stand out among the hoards of slim Taiwanese people for my whale-esque likeness. Yes, I exaggerate, but not by much. I'm glad I can fit into the pants I'm wearing now, an old pair of my brother's, but they're a 28/29 inch waist and that's not much to brag about.
(insert sigh)
I kind of wish I could be happy and overweight but I don't think I ever could be after doing raw food and knowing I weigh 15 pounds more than I did a year ago. What went wrong? Would I be less insane if I never did raw food? I'll never know. At the very least I figure I should be able to fit comfortable into a pair of green, courduroy pants I purchased a few years ago before doing raw food in order to be deemed not insanely fat. Lately, I've been able to fit into them but not as comfortably as I liked. This means i have to lose more weight, but being at home has seriously thwarted my dieting plan because THERE IS FOOD HERE AND IT TASTES GOOD.
Example of the crazy food eating I've partaken in during my homestay that wouldn't occur in my dorm: there was some rice in the rice cooker that no one planned on eating so my mum told me to turn the rice cooker off. I asked my mum what to do with it and didn't get much of a reply. My dad had told me earlier to save it for later but I said I didn't want to do anything with it as I'd just eat it. (Sidenote: I haven't eaten rice in about 8 weeks.) So later in the night I see the rice and...I plop it onto a plate and eat it. I could easily eat plain rice but decide to rummage around for something to put on top. I found a bottle of barbecue sauce in the fridge that looked abandoned (I had never seen it before) leading to my lovely recipe of cold barbecue sauce + rice = late night snack. There was also a bottle of teriyaki sauce so I put a little bit on the rice as well.
Of course, I regret doing it. My life is full of regrets. Regrets are stupid, but so am I. Rice doesn't have much nutritional value and i wasn't even hungry when I ate it. It's just that I wasn't unhungry enough to NOT eat it.
Last night was a different story. I had eaten okonomiyaki for dinner and it made me strangely thirsty, causing me to chug about half a liter of water. As lovely as water is, body organs probably don't like being hit with that much water after having already been stuffed with okonomiyaki and other foodstuffs. My organs didn't feel like releasing the water, making me feel like a floation device. Despite that, I STILL ATE. Why? BECAUSE THE FOOD WAS THERE. What food? CHOCOLATE! What the hell? I wasn't even hungry.
Later last night I retreated to my room in a state of "oh crap, something inside me is going to explode" and I laid down on my bed in a state of organ failure-ness. I fell asleep while looking at a Japanese hot cake recipe book I bought the same day (looking at that didn't help much), woke up at around 5 AM realized "oh crap, it's 5 AM", somehow found my way to the bathroom and too kout my contacts, then plopped into bed.
I woke up at 2 PM today. Could've been worse. I took a shower while being horrified by my expanding girth (although it was worse a few weeks ago...[shudders]) and tootled to the kitchen wondering what to do.
My life is totally useless. I wish I were more depressed so I'd commit suicide. It would make the world a better place, maybe.
ALAS, I am still here. Besides food related things, today I went to Borders with my mum since she had some 20% off coupons. I'm afraid i'm going to return to the food theme as I saw this interesting book, Chocolate:A Bittersweet Saga of Dark and Light. I flipped through the book, reading an interesting account of the suckness of Valrhona's PR deparment, but their chocolate is so good (dammit) that it certainly isn't going to put a dent in their share of the chocolate market. A later chapter talked about chocolate places in NYC; I will vouch for the "it'll probably make you sick but drink it anyway" hot chocolate at City Bakery but I have yet to try Kee's Chocolates. I'm actually not that into truffles as much as plain chocolate bars or hot chocolate. Strangely, maybe, I'm into trying foreign or old-fashioned chocolate confections. For instance, a few days ago I ate Mallo Cups not because they're an amazing creation but because they're an old fashioned American candy that I've never had before (for great candy reviews, check out Writers & Artists Snacking At Work).
What can I say; I have weird tastes.
I got a bit off topic. I ended up buying a book about someone's fooding experience in Kyoto. Awesome. I went to Kyoto and unfortunately, can't remember much about fooding besides takoyaki. ...damn, went back to food.
Okay, here's something that I hope cannot be related to food at all; I donated to last.fm so now I have my own radio station. IT'S AWESOME. It's like putting my iTunes on shuffle except I can listen to this from any computer that has an Internet connection. All my mp3s are on my external hard drive, which I left in my dorm, so last night I donated $5 to last.fm to try out the personal radio. You can donate as much as you want so if you use audioscrobbler to record your playlists and junk then you may be interested in donating as well.
And...back to food. I've been interested in making chocolate covered potato chips for no real reason besides that I ate them twice in my life and I think they tasted pretty good those two times. My mum had various solid chocolates lying around and we bought a Valrhona chocolate bar from Market Basket on the way back from Borders. We didn't find out until unwrapping the chocolate bar that it wasn't solid chocolate but hazelnut-bit filled chocolate. ...so we threw that into the double boiler as well.
The chocolate just hardened as I made them a few hours ago. I just tried one of the small chips and it tasted like a thin, crunchy piece of chocolate. Which is what it was. Methinks I may have put too much chocolate on it. Ah well.
I need to something more productive with my life, which is ironic for me to say as I write this too-long blog entry.
Lastly: I played Taiko Drum Master today as my brother recently got this game and IT IS AWESOME. I mean, I enjoy it. It's the best game I've played in a long time. Then again, I like playing drums (I practice my drum set today and I still suck).