The Girl Who Ate Everything

You know you've eaten dinner too fast when the risk of puking keeps presenting itself during the night. I swear that this situation doesn't happen often. I ate leftover pesto pizza (yeah, I ate pizza for the first time in a few years, WHOA), leftover rice noodles, some bread, a fig, a mango nectarine, and a scone. Good god.

I had a nice lunch at Latour with my mum yesterday. They have a prix fix 3-course lunch for around $23 but we each just got a main course and dessert, which was the perfect amount of food. Not that we needed that much food but we ate it all without feeling uncomfortable. The restaurant is tucked away by the train station parking lot so you probably wouldn't notice it just by driving around Ridgewood. I think my mum first heard about it a few years ago from a friend since it's one of the few French-style restaurants around where we live. It feels more French than American due to the clean country-style environment and artwork depicting French villages on the walls. Even though I've been to France, I couldn't tell you what real French food is like since I was seven years old at the time.

(Note to any parents/future parents: if you bring young kids to France, they probably won't care. What they might do is hold it against you that you brought them to France at an age that they couldn't possibly appreciate it beyond cavorting around Disneyland Paris. If you do bring kids to France, don't drag them to too many museums or they might really hate you.)

salmon on a stick

"Salmon on a stick" isn't the real name, but there was a stick in it. Very yummy and simple with little plops of mashed potatoes and a few vegetables. Part of the reason that I liked my salmon was because it was round. Yes, I like round food; it may be stupid, but I don't care. Miniature cheesecakes are round. Pancakes are round. Cookies are round. Of course there are lots of non-round things I like, but I don't eat round pieces of salmon very often. The only thing that disturbed me about the salmon was that I couldn't tell what it was crusted with. It had a nice texture and it was...uh, green, but I couldn't figure out what it was. Oh well, still good!

pear tart

Tarts are really good! Of course, I knew this already but I tend to go for simpler things like cake. I guess tarts aren't really hard to make (not that I've ever tried it...*strokes chin*...perhaps I should?) but they seem nicer. I would have liked it more if it had been warmed up first, but it was still delicious. And by delicious, I mean I ate the whole thing. And even if it weren't, I still would've eaten the whole thing. You know, I shouldn't write reviews on desserts; I like EVERYTHING!

Oh wait, I have a complaint. After my mum and I left Latour, we went to the A & B Ridgewood Bakery & Cafe, which is right on the corner of South Broad Street and East Ridgewood Ave. I got a chocolate chip scone and wasn't really paying attention to how much it cost, so I thought I misheard when the woman said that my scone and two thin sugar cookies was around $6.50. No way it could cost that much. ...later that night when we actually ate the baked goods at dinner, I found out my scone was $4.50.

HUH? Wait. Have any of you ever paid $4.50 for a scone? It was a large scone but really, it would have to be ginormous to cost $4.50. I'm perplexed by this; did the lady mess up when charging my mum? If I had paid, I would've asked (actually, I would've asked for the price before buying it). I'm not super-cheap but $4.50 for a scone that isn't at least speckled with gold dust or full of Valrhona chocolate can't be worth it. The scone was fine but I wouldn't put it among the best I've had (a little too tough and dry by a smiiiidgen...a smidge. The taste was good but the texture, not so much). Pricing error or are the scones truly $4.50? And if they do cost $4.50, who would buy them when Whole Foods is just down the road and makes better ones?

That was my "weird food of the day": the enigmatic $4.50 scone. $4.50 can buy you a very good slice of cake. $5, an ever better cake, maybe a little tart-esque thing.

...I think I've eaten too many pastries to know their general pricing structure.

Weird food of the day: Trivial Pursuit Pringles. WHY? WHYYYY? I DON'T WANT GREEN WORDS ON MY TATO CHIPS! Even though I loved Pringles as a poor misguided childen, they've got to be the crappiest "potato" chips ever. Molded potato goo...ye....YEAH!

*cell phone rings*

CJ: Hey, want to go to the pancake house tomorrow?
Me: Sure! I LIKE PANCAAAKE...uhoh, I'm getting another phone call. Hold on. *picks up other call*
Carol: Hey, want to go to the Clinton Street Baking Company today?
Me: Uh...sure!

*after I finished talking to Carol*

Me: I'm going to a place that specializes in pancakes with a friend today. And I'm going to the pancake house tomorrow. Does that make me a glutton?
CJ: Yup.

Yes, yes I am. OH WELL!

First, a photo:

waffle time

And now, a rant.

I decided to take the 1:30 train from Ridgewood to NYC, figuring I would get there at around 2:30. Either the train schedule semi-lied to me or I missed something because I had to wait about 10 minutes in Secaucus for the next train to Penn Station, which literally puttered along the track until rolling into NYC. Rolling. Methinks trains in the US are technologically behind the trains in Europe and Asia.

While trains are much more comfortable than buses, they may not be much faster. Doh. Adding to the disruption in my traveling schedule, I hopped onto what i thought was a downtown E train, only to find that it was an uptown. IT WAS IN THE DOWNTOWN PLATFORM. I should've figured out something was wrong when none of the gates to the uptown platform allowed entry.

No problem besides the wasted time. I changed trains at 42nd Street and went down to West 4th to change to an F train. Sitting in the F train, the PA system cracked: "*fuzz fuzzle fuzz* C *fuzz fuzz*" Wuzzat? As we pulled out of the station I found out that the F was running on the C track. Al. Righty. This...why...w...uh? I was hating myself and the subway system by this point; I don't take the subway enough to be used to all the service changes and such.

I got out at 6th Ave and Spring Street, figuring that at my location there was no faster way to get to the restaurant except by foot. The next 20 minutes was a mix of running and brisk walking straight east. Surprisingly, running didn't make me asthmatic at all, thus throwing out the idea that my asthma may be triggered by physical activity (my main asthma-triggers are coughing, sleeping, and talking on the phone; I almost never get asthma in NYC, no matter what I do). I had a surprisingly steady amount of endurance considering the heat (and if you know me, I'm way out of shape) but maybe my body changed due to the incentive of pancakes and waffles.

Even though I was a little later than the 3:30 meeting time Carol and I agreed on, she was running a little late due to F train mishaps. So in the end, it all worked out. Kind of.

Oh, FOOD!

waffles and biscuits

Even though the Clinton Street Baking Company is known for its pancakes, we decided to try an item from the July 4th menu, which was something like "vanilla buttermilk waffles of deliciousness with loads of cherries, almond slices, and maple butter that looks like gravy but is really sweet golden maple butter that you will become addicted to." We also each got a biscuit since they're known for their biscuits, which are featured on their postcards as being primarily made of love. ...and a large fraction being made of butter.

biscuit-ness

The restaurant is a bit cramped but HELLO, BISCUITS. WAFFLES. Who cares? It's clean and bright, all the better to take close up photos of biscuits with. Everything was great but the best part of all was the maple butter (completely liquid, not like something you could spread). It's like a magic wand that makes everything it touches taste better!...this probably won't work with meat or broccoli but it works wonders on biscuits and waffles. Keep in mind that biscuits and waffles are inherently delicious, thus with maple butter, which tastes like caramelized butter juice (that would make a great beverage, don't you think?), they're the best. Bestest. Mm.

You've gotten the impression by now that I like a lot of food, but there are only a handful that have blown me away. The maple butter blew me away. (Another example of a highly rated foodstuff is the pizza bianca at the Sullivan Street Bakery.) AND IT'S JUST MAPLE SYRUP AND BUTTER! If I always had maple butter around, it would make deciding what to put on my pancakes much easier. "Maple syrup? Butter? OR BOTH?" The biscuit tasted better with the maple butter than the waffle since the biscuit was more adept at soaking it up, but I of course poured it all over my waffle. Can't get enough of that fat-sugar combination.

(If you're wondering, I have no idea why I'm not 400 pounds yet. I'm getting there though.)

Since this entry is already too long, I'll do a quick run-through of the rest of our day:

piggy pudding

• Sugar Sweet Sunshine: I got Piggy Pudding, a layered pudding "cake" atop walnut shortbread; recommended for those who like pudding(myself). Carol got a blueberry muffin and hot tea.
• Happy Happy Happy: Carol got a madeleine but said it wasn't that good. I don't think it could compare to a regular one seeing as they specialize in gluten and dairy free desserts. It's too bad because it looked really yummy!
• Amy's Bread: I didn't get anything but Carol got a few goodies
• Polka Dot Cake Studio: Carol and I shared a super deliciously moist carrot bread pudding and I tried the vanilla bean lemonade. I'm not a huge fan of lemonade but it was interesting as it first tasted like regular lemonade (thankfully not super-sweet, quite tart) before releasing the vanilla-ness a moment later. Or maybe that was just me. Good stuff!
• Sullivan Street Bakery: I was way too full to buy anything but I told Carol to get a slice of pizza bianca. Unsurprisingly, she loved it. Seriously loved it. AND YOU WILL TO, IF YOU KNOW WHAT'S GOOD FOR YA.
• Sun Dou Dumpling Shop: Carol needed dumplings. 50 pieces of frozen handmade dumplings = cheap food to last ages!
• Dragon Land Bakery (or something like that): We were too full to think of buying anything. Doh.

So as you can see, it was quite a day of fooding that only took about 4 hours. ...actually, that's kind of long. But if I lived in NYC and didn't have to spent the time coming home, I would've done more! After sitting in a recovery room to let my stomach deflate, at least.

I know Japan has some strange commercials, but...24 + Calorie Mate? It's unintentionally hilarious. I can't imagine how much Keifer Sutherland got paid to do it. Oh, and why would anyone NEED Calorie Mate? I've seen it in stores, somewhat intrigued by its rather nondescript square yellow box. It's usually around the snack section surrounded by Pocky and chocolates, which are things I'd rather go for if I were really in need of calories. [from tokyo times]

I ate too much today. Many times I thought about how I wasn't hungry but ate anyway. Why? Cos. I'm a. GLUTTON! Also, CJ may have died; we never got our pancakes. Hm. Here's a list of things I ate:

• italian bread (god knows, maybe half a loaf? MORE? I ate it with honey or olive oil)
• 4 figs: OH MY GOD, FIGS ARE THE BEST EVER! EVER! EEVVERRR!!!!@#$#@%!! Better than cake!
• a mango nectarine (or NECTAGO)
• two oranges
• a bowl of some Chinese veggie and half an onion, cooked in butter and salt and some olive oil...whoa
• a bunch of potato chips (DAMMIT)
• some chocolate (an ounce maybe?)
• a little bit of a donut (free sample from Market Basket; oh lordy, their donuts are just wrong. No wonder I never liked them as a kid. Their donuts are likering-shaped cakes but not good enough to be cake and not donut-y enough to be satisfying donuts. They don't seem like they're fried but why would you want a baked donut? The taste is okay but I wouldn't buy em.)
• I feel like I ate more, but maybe I didn't? Huh.

Just a weird eating day because I ate THAT MUCH FOOD (aka a crapload) without being very hungry. If I could, I'd just eat fruit and bread all day. Actually, I do that sometimes.

...wow, I feel fat just thinking about all that food. I told my mum that we probably eat too much (I'd dare say we ate almost the same amount of food. My mum is quite little, by the way. I was semi-appalled when she informed me that she just wants to eat a lot today (it's past midnight) so I asked her if she really thought that was a good idea.

"Well, we don't get to indulge in anything else. Why not?"

I guess by indulge she means buy anything else. We're upper-middle class which means we're by no means anywhere near poor, but maybe she feels like it sometimes. Or not that she feels poor but that she feels like food is the main way to have fun. She indulges in more things than food but ...ah nevermind, it's kind of complicated. Basically, food is our main source of fun.

Damn, I need to go to a concert. Does anyone in NYC like Kaiser Chiefs? I like them enough to see them at Webster Hall but not enough to go by myself. If you're interested, let me know!

Crazy Happy Lunch! is a collection of haikus about Japanese kid's lunches. Awesome. I'm not surprised by the level of detail and effort one (a Japanese mum, for instance) would put into making a kid's meal look like Pikachu, but I'll always be in awe of it. (And somewhat frightened.) Here's a good one:

Merry broccoli decorated with peppers oh, gaseous Christmas.

Maybe your x-mas be gassy.

So, moving on. I came across The Judgement of Paris, a website dedicated to "plus size models and timeless beauty", and while looking at these galleries I thought about how fat the women in the models are by today's standards. Which is kind of ...alarming, maybe. I know nearly nothing about history so I don't know what the average sized woman was during the Renaissance or what they ate. And since I'm too lazy to do research (hence my ever increasing girth), you should tell me if you know. Whatever people ate back then couldn't have been nearly as bad as what we're eating today.

People weighed less decades ago than they were now though, for the most part. I think the separation between underweight and overweight has increased. I keep wondering what my optimal weight is and...I don't know, but I'm sure I'm at least 10 pounds over it. (pokes self) Right now I'm probably about ten pounds heavier now (or more) than I was a year ago and I've hovered around the same weight (in a 20 lb range...wait, that's not hovering is it?) since 7th grade. I haven't gotten any taller so I guess it makes sense.

This morning I woke up at 7:30 due to backed up nasal passages. Ugh. For the next hour I tried blowing my nose as much as I could without feeling like my brains would expel through my nostrils and trying to get my mind off of the breathing difficulty, which isn't something one is likely to be able to ignore. I must be coming down with something, but I don't know what; can't say I'm nauseous or especially tired. Unfortunately, I ate too much today.

French toast

My brother and I went to the Country Pancake House for a late lunch. Three slabs of French toast is definitely better than 4 satellite dish sized pancakes. I tried the cinnamon apple walnut raisin French toast, which I didn't like as much as the banana almond ones I got before, but they were still good. Our server forgot to give us corn bread and I had never been so thankful in my life to not get complementary food. I ate one and a half slices of the toast (and all the apple) and saved the rest for dinner, at which I ate one slice and gave the other half to my mum. I also had two oranges, a small piece of chocolate, some chocolate babka (er, more than some, a few slices) and some bread and oil. And a few thousand milligrams of vitamin C.

Nope, not that healthy. That's like 1000 times the amount of carbs I "need" in a day. Hm. Well. Maybe I'll do better tomorrow.

[Sidenote thing: To the person who left two somewhat strange comments on this entry, yes I eat a lot and I have photos in my flickr page. ...were those even real questions? Um.]

I saw this meme a few times and never thought about actually filling it out since my answers would suck. After reading Michael's answers, I figured I'd fill it in because 1) things that suck can be funny and 2) there is no number 2. I'm not in a good mood right now so it might not be that funny, but I'll try. I'm tagging Lori to fill this out because she rocks and, like me, is not a fan of alcohol. :)

Meme Myself and I: The Cook Next Door

1. What is your first memory of baking/cooking on your own?
   Uh…I’m drawing a blank. Seriously. ...oh wait, I took some cooking thing in elementary school as part of the “indoor winter recess” program (couldn’t go outside cos it was too damn cold, HA HA HA) and I think I made pizza. Maybe.
2. Who had the most influence on your cooking?
   No one. Unless you count my cooking class, but that’s kind of obvious. Maybe.
3. Do you have an old photo as “evidence” of an early exposure to the culinary world and would you like to share it?
   Nope, and nope because of the first nope.
4. Mageiricophobia – do you suffer from any cooking phobia, a dish that makes your palms sweat?
   My cooking class from first semester of last school year stressed me out in general, if that counts. Otherwise, nope.
5. What would be your most valued or used kitchen gadgets and/or what was the biggest letdown?
   Plates are useful. Without a rice cooker I’d never cook rice. The rice paddle with all the little bumps on it is really good for decreasing the instances of scraping off the rice in the rice cooker and ending up with rice paste. Knives are good. Can’t think of any letdowns.
6. Name some funny or weird food combinations/dishes you really like – and probably no one else!
   Can’t think of any. God, I’m boring. I mean, I like eating honey plain but that’s not weird, that’s just sugar.
7. What are the three edibles or dishes you simply don’t want to live without?
   Fruit. Sugar (in various forms). Bread. They all kind of have the same thing, you see.
8. favorite ice-cream(s)…
   Is it weird that I’m not really big on ice cream? It’s good, but I dont’ have a favorite flavor. OH MY GOD, I’M SO BORING.
9. You will probably never eat…
   Insects. Worms. Anything like that.
10. Your own signature dish…
    If it’s something I have to cook, then nothing. If I don’t have to cook it…hm. Still nothing. Something sugar based.
11. Any signs that this passion is going slightly over the edge and may need intervention?
    Besides that I have a food blog and that I’m a food studies major and that the endless spurts of gluttony end up in depression and guilt that make me think I’ll commit suicide at an early age? NOPE. NOT AT ALL.
12. Any embarrassing eating habits?
    I eat too much? That’s kind of embarrassing. I think there are certain people I’d be too freaked out to eat around…kind of. Not really. But then I’d be too freaked out to do most things about the certain people.
13. Who would you want to come into your kitchen to cook dinner for you?
    Hm. ...I’d have to go with Morten. Or Pierre Hermes. But Morten because he said I have too many food issues and maybe if he cooked for me they’d all go away and I’d be SO HAPPY!
14. Who’s your favorite food writer?
    I love Steve Almond, but I’ve only read one of his books. Love Jeffrey Steingarten, of course. Calvin Trillin is awesome. I haven’t read much else besides those people. If anyone has any humorous food writers to recommend to me, please do.

    ...and thus concludes this meme. I’m disappointed in myself.

    If anyone's curious, yesterday's diet consisted of an orange, an apple, honey and sesame seeds, a sheet of nori, some dark chocolate, some chocolate bakba, and...okay, that's it. Overall it felt rather depressing because I didn't want any "normal" food. Still don't. I wrote "Don't Eat" on my hand last night before going to bed to remind myself to not eat (gaining way too much weight lately) and it didn't work. It never does. I've even written "Don't eat" on post its and attached them to places. Nothing really works besides willpower or lack of food...doh.

I just ate an apple.

IT'S PAST 1AM. Doh.

Today after leaving Corinne's place, I went to the too-close-by Sullivan Street Bakery to pick up a loaf of sourdough bread for $4. They give you one freakin' huge loaf of bread for $4. My only problem was not knowing what kind of oil they used on it (they don't list it on the website). If I really wanted to know I guess I could ask, but maybe I don't really want to know.

I ate one of the end crusts while waiting for the bus to go home and ate some more once I got to NJ and my mum and I went to the Container Store. (To answer my brother's question as to what I got at the container store: a container.) Even though the loaf felt rock-hard at first, the crust was nice and chewy (along with being flavored with FAAAT) and the inside was soft and just slightly sour. I gave my mum chunks of the inside while I ate the crust. Good thing our oppositional bread eating habits are compatible.

For dinner, we each ate two thick slices of French toast. I don't really use a recipe for French toast: two eggs, some milk, some vanilla extract that I couldn't taste (I guess I needed more). Two eggs wasn't enough for the slices we cut, but it's a matter of trial an error. After making French toast 10 more times I'll hopefully have the measurements (eyeballed, that is) down. Pan-fried in ghee (my mum's prefers it to regular butter) and spread with raw honey after its done, I can't think of many other dinners that I'd enjoy as much but not feel overly guilty about. I mean, it's bread, egg, butter, and honey. Could be worse, right? (Just agree with me.)

Besidse the French toast and excessive amounts of bread, I also ate two oranges, an apple, and some chocolate (a really small piece). And that was pretty much all one meal, beside sthe apple which was more like a midnight snack. Doh.

LINKS!

• Zankou Chicken review: BEEECK! Beck eatery! Er. You know..."Like a fruit that's ripe for the picking / I wouldn't do you like that Zankou Chicken." Okay, maybe not. I like Beck so I thought that review was rather cool. Too bad the food wasn't as cool.
• Why Keep Soda In Schools?: Oh god, you're joking me, right (the stuff in bold, that is)? "Children Need to Learn How to Choose" is such a lame excuse; you could say the same about having crappy cereal and snack commercials on TV for kids...oh, but you know what, KIDS SHOULDN'T CHOOSE THOSE THINGS. "Parents are Really the Problem" is also stupid. I didn't have soda in the house growing up but if I could get it in school, I would. I'd also get it in restaurants. Thank GOD I didn't have soda at home also, and looking back I really wish I had drank less of it. I guess at the very least it's good that I haven't drank it in a few years.
• Candy Critics Workshop: OH CRAP, why can't I pass as a 12 year old?! Or could I? I bet I'm shorter than a bunch of 12 year olds, but even I couldn't pass. (I think I've grown an inch in the past 7 years, if that.) Oh...bother. And it's limited to 8 students! I hope those 8 students are really into candy. [from cakehead]

Does French toast count as a homecooked meal? I guess if I made the bread that would make it more so, but..nope. My mum bought a loaf of sourdough bread from Market Basket and I bought a loaf of challah bread from Zaro's Bread Basket (not knowing that my mum had bought a loaf of bread). Challah is definitely THE bread for deliciously soft squishtastic French toast, but for eating plain I don't like it as much. It's very good at soaking up buckets of milk + egg goodness though. Mm...spoooonge.

I almost didn't eat lunch. Until. Corinne presented me with a plate of three thirds from three tarts from Once Upon a Tart reconstructed to look like one super tart, with layers of fruit atop a golden butter crust...oh lordy. I gave in, of course. Moments before, she had asked me if I wanted lunch and I said no (after a prolonged "ummm") so the way to get me to eat is to bring me food while I'm at my 'puter. (It's too easy to get me to eat, which is one of the reasons I like going to her place; I can prevent myself from eating! Wee! Seriously, I'm getting fat. My intestines do NOT love me, that's for sure. I'll look like I'm preggers soon.)

TARTS!

Oh, the tarts. SO GOOD! The crust. SO GOOD! (My English. NOT SO GOOD.) The first bit that I ate was a piece of crust that had broken off and it was just...better than most crusts. My favorite of the three (peach, apricot, and plum) was the peach but that's just because I like peaches more than apricots and plums. THEY WERE ALL GOOD. I had actually been to Once Upon a Tart twice before without getting ANYTHING because 1) I couldn't decide and 2) I didn't think I liked tarts that much. But I dooo. Cake and bread still rule over tarts but tarts are damn good.

Boy, is my diet unbalanced or what? Besides French toast for dinner, I also had some veggies (my mum cooked onions and romaine lettuce) and an orange. I could go for another orange.

And now for the non-eating portion of this entry (because that happens sometimes!).

Losing Weight = Gaining Wealth? Hm. If I dropped 10 BMI I'd probably be dead, but I could stand to lose ...5. I remember filling out a survey at the beginning of the year comparing how I was at the time to a year ago and while I'm fatter this year than last year, I'm happier. Not so much because I'm fatter--god knows I'd rather weigh what I did a year ago--but I guess it told me at least that being slimmer didn't really make me happier (and being richer may not make you happier either, but $11k ain't bad). Then again, it only lasted 1.5 years. And for the next topic...

Raw Food Real World Launch Party: There's a new raw food book. My mum and I used to have LOADS of raw food books and just like our regular cooked food recipe books, we didn't actually use them. Something I liked about raw food was the simplicity of it; to me, it's the lazyman's diet. I was also under the impression that with raw food you should eat really simply. Most of my meals (in college) were plain ol' apples and bananas, peaches too if I were lucky, salad if I were bored, and way too many nuts and seeds. Not really a good idea, I might add. However, I did lose a lot of weight (all since gained back) so if that's what you want, raw food is pretty good. Unless you're like me and used it as an excuse to have very little human interaction, in which case it is kind of bad.

I think I'm dying. I was hacking up some mucus a while ago, beacuse...um. Well. I'm not very healthy. It's not surprising considering the crap I eat.

But man, is that crap yummy or what?

...yes, I need to change my ways. I was planning to eat at the Shake Shack on Monday before class but I don't think I can. I mean, I need to start somewhere so I think at the very least next week should be "no eating out" week. Perhaps it should extend to more than a week. And I need to phase out the baked goods, maybe after I finish the ones Carol made me. :)

I know exercise is important, but from my experience, the biggest source of my health problems has been diet. I have yet to feel much impact from doing (or not doing) exercise. So...diet. I'd almost rather eat nothing than something to replace my wheaty mucus-producing friends.

...

Oh. Bother.

I had French toast for dinner three nights in a row. Good stuff. That's not really the root of my problems.

Having asthma if I "need" to have it isn't really such a bad thing, but I don't understand why I don't get it in NYC. Two days ago my asthma was worse than usual, which I thought was due to the humid and rainy weather. It rained yesterday in NYC but that didn't do anything to me, besides make me a little wet. ...I'm just saying random stuff, by the way. It's past 3 AM and I'm kind of surprised that my head hasn't flumped onto my keyboard yet.

pancake

Pancake. I had a pancake. A giant pancake from Quantum Leap. I should give some backstory but this whole entry is kind of jumbled. REALLY QUICK BACKSTORY: yesterday I met up with dear friends from middle school, Karen and Carol. We were all good friends but Karen and Carol hadn't seen each other in ages and I hadn't seen Karen in a while either. It was exciting. I was happy. WE'RE HAPPY PEOPLE!

So back to the food. On the menupages page, someone wrote "The waitresses on Saturday and Sunday are the nicest people on the planet", which I agree with. Or at least the one waitress that I've had, who is very cute and funny. There were six of us: (I wouldn't be surprised if I got some names wrong but...*breathes in*) Carol Karen, me, Karen's friends Rachel and Tyler, and Tyler's friend, whose name I can't remember and I won't attempt to mess up because that would be sad (seriously, why can't I remember?). Carol, Karen and I got pancakes while everyone else got something non-pancake. The table was literally divided between pancake and non-pancake as Carol, Karen and I were sitting on one side of the table. ;)

I don't know why I never hear about Quantum Leap; the food's good! Sadly, I couldn't finish my "Grand Canyon" pancake but I enjoyed it. It may have had too much jam but if it didn't already have jam splodged on it, I would've poured on maple syrup. Carol said she really liked her banana pecan pancakes and I think Karen liked her pancakes, judging from the amount of pancake left on her plate when she was done (not much). I think everyone else liked their food too.

chocolate demo

Before eating lunch, Karen, Carol, Rachel and I went to Jacques Torres' chocolate demo (thanks to Janet for the tip). We didn't know that the 1 TRAIN WOULD SUCK SO MUCH (the downtown train skipped the stop we wanted to get off at, and then some) so we were kind of late, but we still got to see most of it, except for Carol who came in later and had the same subway problem (grr). Jacques talked about tempering chocolate, how to make a chocolate box, a chocolate frame, and how to paint chocolate. And maybe other stuff. I was mainly thinking, "Ooh...chocolate," and oogling the free samples of bark being passed out (there were lots of em). I had never seen so many people in the store before. Hopefully they did very good business. :) I noticed that they had more baked goods (beyond those sinfully delicious cookies) but I didn't try any. I'll save that for NEXT TIME!

Mega-fast forwarding, Carol and I split from the group and went to her dorm on the Upper West Side for some fooding (naturally!). Laid back for a bit eating cake, then went out for MORE CAKE-ISH THINGS!

don't worry, I didn't eat these

We went to the nearby Hungarian Pastry Shop, a spacious but also cozy feeling bakery/cafe featuring HUNGARIAN PASTRIES, which is a whole line of pastries that I'm unfamiliar with. We shared a ginormous baklava and cherry strudel for pseudo-dinner (skip the entree and go straight to dessert!) and we were very satisfied with our resulting increased blood sugar levels. :) Carol almost tea-ed herself to death ("death by tea sloshing") but I felt fine and comfortably phyllo pastry-ed (yes, I'm turning foods into verbs).

God, I'm tired.

To wrap things up, when I got home I ate some of a delicious cake + glutinous rice + red bean cake thing that Carol made for me (about a bucketfull of it...that she made, not that I ate), cherries, a bit of the other Hungarian pastry Carol got, and some potato chips. Yeah, potato chips. Not really a good idea but I think I was getting a little tired of all the sweet food. If the potato chips weren't there, I wouldn't have eaten any non-sweet food though. Meh.

The loveliness of my day isn't well illustrated in this entry but...must...sleep. Sleepage. Is good. Better than food at this very moment in time. Oh yes, I have to remember to clean up my diet. Right.

I'm not a big fan of eggs unless its use is to coat bread, but this egg poaching experiment is interesting, mainly the last one on cooking it in clingfilm. [via...um, I forgot]

Not much is happening in the food world. I just coughed few minutes ago and immediately went into "can't breathe, uhoh" mode. It's almost ended by now but that scares me a bit. I sit while trying not to move for a few moments so breathing can commence again. This kind of thing usually only happens at night, more so when I'm lying down in bed, ready to fall into a state of semi-consciousness.

I walked a few miles in NYC yesterday (under that lovely HOT SWELTERING SUN) and was never close to getting asthma. WEE. I passed a bunch of foiod places that I didn't eat anything at:

Cupcake Cafe

F&B

Big Booty Bread Co

Shake Shack

Bread Factory Cafe

Oh lordy, I'm hacking up all kinds of weird stuff from my...lungs? I guess I need to lay off crap food.

I had no idea that chicken parmagiana was standard pub fare in Australia. [via boing boing] I used to eat chicken (or veal...yeah, poor cute little cows, oh crap) parm ALL THE TIME when I was little. It was my favorite meal when my family went out for Italian food, which was a lot, probably part of the reason I don't like Italian food that much anymore.

But I could go for some chicken parma.

chicken katsu curry

I had my own version of breaded chicken yesterday at Tokyo La Men on University Place near Union Square. I can't find much information about this restaurant online but I passed it a gazillion times, intrigued by the name, which has to do with their noodles dishes. I didn't feel like getting noodles (which means I'll have to go back and try it, bwahaha) but I'm always hungry for Japanese curry, which isn't something i see very often in Japanese restaurants. Tokyo La Men has a large menu, including a wide array of noodle soups, rice dishes, sushi, and some Korean dishes.

And I went for CURRY! Comfort food, I guess. I finished all the meat but as much as I wanted to, I coiuldn't eat all the rice and curry without doing some damage to my stomach or triggering my gag reflex. I wish there had also been some pickled vegetables with the curry but not for any good reason besides that I'm used to pickle vegetables coming with curry.

I dragged two friends with me who didn't object to my Japanese food craving before heading to a Royksopp concert. CJ got seafood curry on noodles and JD got teriyaki chicken.

chicken teriyaki

We all went "holy crap" at the sight of his dish. I guess spreading it out on a huge plate makes it look like more than it actually is, but it was a good amount of food. We were all kinda "uugh, stomach full of tasty food, can't get out of seat" when we were done and maybe 10 minutes later after walking a bit, we all felt fine.

ICE CREAM MAN! ...boy, did that come out of nowhere? I think I've only mentioned the site on my music blog but hello, ice cream! Food. I don't eat much ice cream, but I could go for some right now. I have to admit that I feel a twinge of something (inner child?) every time I pass an ice cream truck in NYC (which feels like every four blocks). At home in NJ I sometimes hear ice cream trucks, which feels somewhat creepy because of the dinkly song they play that gradually Doppler effects (I verbalized it...and I just verbalized "verb") in and out of tune.

Check out the write up on the Charlie and the Chocolate Factory Premier with insane photos that almost drive me to seizure with candy-induced glee. YOU SEE ALL THAT CANDY? I don't know whether to cry or...or. Well. Cry. I don't think I could ever go to something as visually stimulating food-wise as that event or else I'd explode from eating too much candy. That's like a hallucinogenic version of the Chocolate Festival, intensified by 10000 lumens and put on the highest level of saturation.

The world needs more ice cream men! Or people!

...because I'm going fooding tomorrow in NYC. NO, NOT JUST FOR MYSELF. That would be a tad too gluttonous, yes? Vassar friend Jason is coming down so we're going to roam around for foodstuffs and ultimately get dim sum with other Vassarites, but I didn't prepare very well.

Dinner. Doh.

Today I had an interesting lunch: a plum (mmmm), an apple pastry pocket, half of a lobster tail pastry, and some potato chips. Yup, screams HEALTHY! For dinner I had some swiss chard cooked in butter and salt, fried rice with onion, mung bean sprouts, and egg, the last slice of my brother's b-day cake (I don't think he really wanted it...too late to find out now) and some cereal.

Cereal? There's one common food that I rarely eat. After buying one box last year and eating it in TWO DAYS, I decided never to buy cereal again. However, for my graphic design assignment, I needed to buy a cereal box to use as a template. I figured that if I were going to buy a box, I may as well buy a cereal that I'd like. I went to Whole Foods and got Gorilla Munch because it wasn't very expensive (I think it was less than $3) and only has three ingredients: organic corn meal, organic evaporated cane juice, and sea salt. To me, this cereal is a healthier version (or not so deadly version) of Kix, whose ingredients are...a lot more. It contains three forms of sugar! WHY DO YOU NEED THREE? Gorilla Munch is sweet enough in my opinion and tastes good!

So. There's my recommendation for anyone who likes cereal. I might be the only person in my class who doesn't eat it. A few people came up with a "grab and go" single serv cereal cup, one which had caffeine, some with a separate container of milk. I can't imagine every being hungry enough (or wanting cereal badly enough) to need that. It sounds like something good for camping, but if I want something quick to eat in the morning I'd eat a piece of fruit.

Yesterday I ate at Pane e Cioccolato with Mary after we saw March of the Penguins (BABY PENGUINS, HOLY CRAP CUTENESS AHH). I had never been there before but Mary really liked it, so for once I didn't have to choose the restaurant. ;) It's an Italian place (duh) but I got a cheeseburger. Yup. After I looked at the menu and decided I didn't want meat, I got a cheeseburger, aka animal product topped with animal product. It was pricey (menupages says $6.75 but I think it was $8.50, comes with fries at least) but I didn't feel like getting pasta. I actually never voluntarily go to Italian places (not that I hate them, it's just always at the request of someone else). Why? Maybe I ate too much of it as a kid? That doesn't explain why I eat so much Chinese food though. Even though I love Asian noodles and pasta is almost the same thing, it's...not. I don't hate pasta but for some reason I don't love it either.

blurry burger

I don't love hamburgers either though. I CAN'T EXPLAIN MY WAYS! The hamburger was good, juicy and pink (my mum says I'll get mad cow disease), but I was bothered by my inability to taste the mozzerella. It was obviously on the patty, but it escaped my taste buds. Weird. If I ever go back to that restaurant I'll try a pasta dish or a sandwich.

Randomness: Anthony Bourdain shopping at Mitsuwa! I need to go back to Mistuwa. I haven't been there in a while, a few months possibly? Since that time I saw Bjork (SURREAL)? I love Anthony Bourdain's books and would love to see No Reservations if I had cable.

Fast Food Nation to become a textbook? Sounds awesome to me. I had to read it first semester in my class, "issues of food and society" (or something like that). I had already read it before but it's always good to read again.

Soda = bad! But you knew that, right? I'd agree that soda isn't helping the whole "America is getting really fat" problem but it's not the reason for my weight gain as I rarely drink it (I've had it a handful of times in the past three years). My problem? EATING TOO MUCH CRAP! OR TOO MUCH! PERIOD! HA. HA!

(sigh)

I don't understand the soda addiction though. I remember being appalled by the amounts of soda people would buy at the supermarket. I was also disgusted by watching a few of my high school classmates drink coke in the morning. I recall one girl in particular...who also smoked in the morning. Anyway, soda won't turn you into a deliquent but if 1/5th of kids are drinking soda at the age of one and two, then...well. That's just stupid. At that age, kids certainly don't pick up a can and crack it open, meaning that their parents are giving their kids soda. OKAY! Good job there.

Today (yesterday by now) my mum and I went to Corrado's, which is fairly close by but I've never been there before. They have lots and lots of cheap produce and cheese hanging from the ceiling.

I wanted this

We got some fruit, a box of Turkish Delight (totally random; I think I've had it once in my life), and some pastries because I LOVE MAH PASTRIES. The fruit may be covered in chemicals but for $0.99/pound, I couldn't NOT get some plums. So I did. And they were yummy.

While driving to Corrado's, my mum and I passed through Paterson, which I've never really been through before. But I must go back. Why? Because...Main Street has a gazillion bakeries on it (the density of bakeries reminded me of Chinatown). Are they good bakeries? I dunno. Do I care? Not really. Gimme baked thiiiings!

last random link: A Century of Candy Bars (PDF, from Speak Up) analyzes candy bar packaging (but you probably figured that out already). Combining candy and design? Methinks I have an excuse to eat more candy; "It's for research purposes. REALLY." Okay, you don't actually have to eat candy to look at the packaging but it can't hurt the process. I'd like to print this out and read it but it's 75 pages. Hmm.

Me: Okee..w..well..plan out what we're eating..to make sure it's feasible without killing us
Jason: Hmm well ice cream, a baked good, yogurt

Oh, how lovely it is to have friends like Jason who don't mind doing a good NYC food crawl, even on a muggy Saturday afternoon. Jason came down from Vassar with two of his friends, who we'd meet up with later in Chinatown to behold the largest variety of dumplings I've ever eaten at one time.

First, we went to Japan Society as to not dip into the food-ness right away. It's a small but cool exhibition, if you like Japanese stuff that is. There's a room with gigantic plush costume things that scared me. It's my dream to see huge-ass Poofies though...or is that a nightmare? Hm.

Continuing the theme of Japanese stuff, we went to Bears Papa's by Astor Place. I'm not a big fan of cream puffs for some reason, but I do love me some VOLANIC CHOCOLATE CAKE!

splodgey chocolate

The real name is "fondant chocolate" but I prefer to call it a splodgey liquidly chocolate cake-thing. It was slightly warm and while we cut into it with our forks, chocolate goo oozed out. DELICIOUS. ROBYN APPROVES! Even though one person could easily eat this, eating half was satisfying enough. Eating with friends means splitting the calories! WOO.

After checking out the Giant Robot store, we went to The Yoghurt Place II. I've been there a few times since it's right next to the Sullivan Street Bakery but I never tried anything. Somehow, I never noticed the cold case/counter of yogurt cups before; the first thing you see is the trays of pastries and the case full of yogurt tubs. If you don't want a tub of yogurt, you can get plain yogurt topped with fruit and nuts.

yogurt and mixed fruit and almond topping

I've never had this kind of yogurt before but I think I like it more than ice cream. The texture is like cream cheese but not heavy, although it's not like a light cheesy cream filling either. It didn't have a strong sour yogurt taste (the kind regular plain yogurt tends to have) and with the fruit topping it was slightly sweet. I think I'll buy some from the supermarket and put honey on it. It's much better than regular yogurt in my opinion.

We started walking to Chinatown and I figured that since we were on the west side, we may as well stop by the Bouley Market. It was on the way! Yes. I was quite taken by this macaroon cake creation:

ginormous macaroon

$28 doesn't seem so bad considering how much their big macaroons cost. Not that I'd buy it. But...whoa! That's big. I bought a slice of flan and a raspberry tart, although I didn't get to eat either of them since I got them for my mum.

We headed to Chinatown to eat at Shanghai Cafe, a place I've passed many times and noticed for looking un-Chinese but never remembered the name of. The decor was bright neon lights resulting in most of my photos having a blue tint. Jason picked it for their dim sum and said we should each get two dishes. This was before we realized each dish was probably enough for one person, as our table (meant to seat six people) gradually filled up with more and more plates.

dumpling time

more food keeps on a-coming

tiny buns!

There were four of us so we ended up with eight plates, six of which were dumplings. Stuff we ordered + commentary:

1. Steamed Tiny Buns with Pork - Aka soup dumplings, aka xiao long bao (I think the most Chinese I know, which is barely anything, has to do with food), I burned my tongue on the first one I tried to carefully slurp up. Doh! Yummy, of course. I don't have a favorite place for these (I've also had them at Joe's Shanghai and New Green Bo) so I'd say these were as good as any others I've had.
2. Fried Tiny Buns with Pork - In the picture above, are exactly what the name says. Tiny pork buns! Mm! Or like pork dumplings with very thick skins.
3. Pork Fried Dumplings - I think we got too many pork dumplings, but anyhoo, these were like the tiny pork buns but in a different shape, unless I'm remembering incorrectly.
4. Vegetable Steamed Dumplings - Stuffed with minced veggies and rice noodles. I love these kinds of dumplings. My favorite vegetable dumplings of all time were from the dumpling house that used to be on Pell Street, but these were good too.
5. Scallion Pancake - I didn't eat this, but it looked good. It's hard to mess up scallion pancake unless its burnt or something.
6. Fried Shanghai Wonton - Mmm, crispy! I don't like deep-fried dumplings but these were tasty with a thin crispy skin.
7. Wonton Szechuan Style - This was one of my favorites due to the spicy sauce made of...I don't know. IT WAS GOOD! It's the front-most dish in the previous photo of the three plates of dumplings.
8. Sticky Rice In Bamboo Trunk - OOH, STICKY RICE! m SO GOOD! I rarely eat sticky rice but I love it. I could've gone without eating this and stretching my stomach to its limit, but...eh! What can you do?

sticky rice

While the fooding should've ended there, it did't. One of Jason's friends wanted to check out something before going back to Vassar so the three of us left went to Ten Ren.

Ten Ren

Those guys make stuff quickly. I could never work there in fear of spilling drinks all over the customers. Which would be bad. I like getting something different every time I go to a Chinatown tea shop so I got Black Sesame milk, which was SOOO GOOD. SOOO. Unfortunately, I couldn't finish it because...

pumpkin pie ice cream

...we got ice cream at the new Nolita Ice Cream Factory (same as the Chinatown Ice Cream Factory but in Nolita or not). I tried a sample of their black sesame but since I just had a black sesame drink, I figured it was best to try something else. Jason and I shared a scoop (kind of a large scoop) of the pumpkin pie ice cream. Oo, yummy! There were little bits of stuff (er, pumpkin I hope) and it was very creamy (as ice cream should be). I'd get this again but I want to try all the flavors first. My plan was to get avocado but they had already sold out. :(

So. That was a lot of food. AND THAT'S HOW I HAVE FUN! Awful, isn't it?

I'm immature. So?

There's an Australian ice cream bar called Golden Gaytime and I thought that was hilarious. Check out this photo taken by Elyse. "4 delicious chances to have a gay time!"

Man, I want some of that. Other food doesn't sound nearly as happy.

I'm very much not hungry right now and that kind of disappoints me. I wasn't hungry before eating lunch but I ate it anyway and now I just feel "eh". Not overstuffed, just "eh". EH? I ate a plum (a rather large one), 4 ounces of Greek yogurt + some honey, three potato chips, and some cereal (that's a vague measurement, I know...maybe 2 servings). Calorie wise, that's a lot I guess. Kind of low on nutrition but what do you expect of me? HA HA. If I had class today (cancelled for this week) I wouldn't have eaten lunch. And...I'd have left home by now.

I'm still in my pjs. Oh my.

Check out the gazillion Chinese people opening a bank account to get a free rice cooker. I had no idea that bank opened; it looked like crap before (well, it was...being built and I hated the scaffolding). Don't all Chinese people have a rice cooker already? Oh well, I guess that's a good incentive to open a bank account. My family has two rice cookers but we rarely use one of them and we use the other one a few times a week.

Here's an awesome idea: Be Rachel Ray for A Day by making a $40/day fooding itinerary for your hometown. $40 is more than I'd want to spend in a day; maybe I could do a "student budget" version. Or a bakery edition (ooh...$40 of baked goods in one day would not go well with my digestive system). I don't think I'll actually try this but I can do a hypothetical version, involving chocolate, cake, bread, some other pastry, and Chinese food. :)

Tonight my mum, brother and I went to Van Dyk's Ice Cream after going to Chef Central (well, that's where I wanted to go since my brother wanted to check out the adjoining Circuit City). I've only passed Van Dyk's once (it's not in the central part of Ridgewood but a little bit into the residential area) and never been there. My brother told me their scoops are ridiculously large and that I had to go. Spur-of-the-moment decisions can be the best ones.

coconut ice cream

Instead of going with something new, I went with something I knew I'd like: COCONUT! And like it, I did. It helped that the $2.50 scoop was ginormous. If you're like my mum and like ice cream cones but no ice cream (I guess those people exist, but...um), they sell them for $0.50. My mum dropped her first one, resulting in a sad shattering of cone upon the floor (my response: "Good job, Mom"...yeah, I'm not very nice), but they gave her another one. I think my brother got cookies and cream and he had no intention of sharing. I shared some of my ice cream with my mum.

Van Dyk's Ice Cream

As I said, Van Dyk's is in a residential area, resulting in much foot-traffic. Loads. People just kept coming out of the darkness and shadows of the trees, creating a scene that could've come out of a horror film where zombies stumble out of nowhere in search of human flesh, except in this case they were mainly teenagers in search for ice cream. The parking lot isn't large but it seemed substantial...until it was full. At 9:30 PM on a Monday night, the place was doing very well with people walking from their homes and cars steadily driving through. The shop itself is no-frills and there isn't a display case with the ice cream. A green board in the back with plastic letters displays the flavors with specials and other announcements written on paper plates in colorful magic marker. All the people working there seemed to be teenage girls. Hey, I wouldn't mind working there...uh, except that I might eat a lot of ice cream. Bad idea.

Going back in time (because going out of sequence = fun!), at Chef Central I saw these nifty Mesu bowls:

Mesu bowls

Simply designed bowls that show how much food you're eating? Damn, why didn't I think of that. At some point in my life I considered eating out of a measuring cup so I'd always know how much food I was eating, but I never did that. These bowls are much prettier than Pyrex, eh? Even if they didn't have measurements, I like em because they're PRETTY! OOH. COLORS. I'm so easily amused. $50 isn't so bad, but I have a $10 coupon so that's actually $40. I could "save" $40 (Calvin Trillin's idea of saving money is my favorite, in that if you were deciding to buy something and then changed your mind, you've saved that much money and can spend it on something else) by eating...much less. Or a bit less.

For dinner I had rice and sauteed vegetables (onion and swiss chard). Simple, eh? BECAUSE THAT'S ALL I KNOW HOW TO MAKE! And not really! I sauteed them in butter and threw in a bit of whatever else was in front of me: salt, ground coriander, and garlic powder. I couldn't taste anything except for the butter and a bit of salt, so that didn't do much. Next time I'll just use butter; that's all I really want anyway. I really like veggies and rice (my brother seriously asked me, "Who just eats veggies and rice?"...um, have you heard of vegetarians?) but last night's dinner of waffliciousness was tastier (or tasty in a different way).

fruit waffle

Yes, it was back to the Ridgewood Country Pancake House for the semi-weekly meal with CJ and whoever else wanted to come along. This time, CJ brought one of his friends and her sister and I brought my brother. We ate at dinner time for the first time (I had eaten way too much the day before) and it wasn't crowded at all. Sunday night dinner is a good time to go, I guess (it closes at 9PM).

I'm sure I ate 500000 calories today (yesterday, more like), but at no time did I feel stuffed. Good, yes? Unless my fullness sensors just don't work, which is a possibility. I've decided that ice cream will never make you full. Sick, maybe, but not full. It all goes into some magical ...ice cream sac. It's a happy sac.

LASTLY, if you're on flickr, join my pancakes and waffles group! Can you believe that there wasn't already one? THE HORROR! Well. That problem's solved.

You know it's a poopy day when I have nothing I actually ate to report on. I can sum it up right here:

• Lunch: last of the Gorilla Munch cereal (maybe 2 servings), a Tim Tam.
• Dinner: a plum, a bowl of collage greens (first time I had it; thought it was okay, prefer kale or swiss chard) and onions sauteed in butter and mixed with curry sauce, white rice (a good amount), a piece of bread with honey (my brother got some sucky plain enriched white bread and what do you know, it sucks compared to chewy crusty loafy bread).

And all day I suck on Claey's Green Apple Candy...okay, not ALL day. Part of the day. A friend who loves me/wants my teeth to rot gave me a pack. ;)

Eat Me: delicious, desirable, successful food packaging design

What's better bedtime reading than a book about graphic design and food packaging? NOTHING! Or. EVERYTHING! Although it could've been better, the book was worth my $25 for providing a look at all kinds of food packages (candy, cereal, water, alcohol, prepared foods, sauce, and other stuff I can't remember), mainly UK based. I've come to the conclusion that UK supermarket chains have much better design sense than American ones, the best of which I've seen is Whole Foods. I went to England last summer and drooled and everything, including the food at TESCO (yes, I'm easily pleased). It was probably the biscuits. But even the packaging for that looked good. Simple. Biscuit. FOCUS ON THE BISCUIT! I don't need elves dancing on my cookies.

One Woman, Two Messages is Marie Claire's experiement to answer the question, "Does your attitude about your body influence the way other people see you?" [via Big Fat Blog] The same photo of a size 14 model wear a bikini was put on two billboards asking either "I think I'm sexy. Do you?" or "I think I'm fat. Do you?", pitting confidence against uncertainty. More people agreed with "I think I'm sexy. Do you?"

If I had seen both, I would've agree with...both. They're not exactly opposites but I can see how they're trying to make a point. As someone with negative confidence levels, I'd be really depressed if I were a size 14. It doesn't mean anything to me that the average American is a size 14 since my genes are Chinese and I'm already too large in that respect. Then again, I have an American mindset...hohum.

...nah, that doesn't mean anything. I have a bunch of Asian friends who've lived in America their whole lives and they're not bulging at the seams. They also don't eat SO MANY PANCAKES. I'm not fat enough to be really concerned with my weight but I am asthmatic enough to be concerned about my lungs. If I were really determined to get rid of my asthma (without drugs), I'd go back on a raw food diet. As you can see, I'm definitely not looking in that direction.

Oo well. ICE CREAM! (I like shouting random tasty foodstuffs.)

Herro Flom Japan (admit it; it's a great name!) has a video cast of buying food from a Japanese style fast food restaurant. I guess that makes buying food a little bit easier, or at least cuts down on the human interaction (WOO!). I never went to these places when I was in Japan but if I did, I'd also get curry. Mmm...curry...healthy chicken curry...

Herro Flom Japan almost makes me want to video blog my food experiences. But it wouldn't be that interesting, unless I were recording the birth of funnel cake.

Lose Weight By Eating Dairy? You know what else can help you lose weight? SMOKING! I don't think we're going to see that advertisement soon. I know, dairy isn't deadly for you like smoking and I'm not totally against dairy, but this sounds like a joke.

Marketing. (sigh)

The Dilberito doesn't need marketing. LOOK! DILBERT! It has to be good! [via A Full Belly]

America is known for its gluttony, but we don't have a loaf of bread topped with ice cream and bananas. Do we? I don't think we do. If we did, I'd know because some kind of "delicious bread" sensor-thing would go off in my brain.

God, I love Japan. Japanese cuisine is constantly noted for how healthy it is, with seafood, veggies, and...other healthy stuff (I dunno, I mainly eat rice) but the people who talk about that tend to disregard their love for desserts (correct me if I'm wrong, but they really like French stuff). I'm not saying that Japanese food is unhealthy, just that Japanese people are down with the sweets. :) I swear that I'm going to try and make my own bread + ice cream + banana thingy someday.

Big head coasters: Aw, that's cute. Kinda. "YOUR HEAD IS FLAT! I SHALL PUSH YOU OVER AND PLOP A DRINK ON YOUR MISHAPEN CRANIUM!" [via cool hunting]

Open sourced beer? [via halvorsen]

Ginormous 13 lb gummy bear: I am very frightened. It's quite beautiful though. [via boing boing]

Ice Cream Man is giving away FREE CANDY! Craploads! DON'T YOU WANT CANDY? YEAAAH!

That reminds me, I need to call my orthodontist.

This almost never happens (maybe once or twice a year), but I just remembered a dream/nightmare last night due to its relation to teeth and the destruction of them. In my dream, my top two front teeth were...not there. It had something to do with part of my jaw being aligned incorrectly. For some reason, I could push my teeth and pop them back into the right position. That would've made more sense if they were fake teeth, but no, it was just my mouth.

Creepy. I wouldn't have remembered this if I hadn't been thinking about teeth.

Yesterday I went to NYC for a night of walking around and eating too much food. I skipped lunch so I didn't feel overly guilty about eating a lot, but I spent almost $20! Which is a lot. I can do better than that...just need to leave out Shake Shack.

First off, I roamed around midtown for a bit (ie, 15 minutes) around the Port Authority terminal. On 9th Avenue, I came across a Mexican bakery. I'll mindless go towards any sign that says "bakery".

stripey bun thing

They had lots of bun things like stuff you'd find in a Chinatown bakery. SWEET! I didn't try anything since nothing was labeled and ...well, I figured that shouldn't be my first meal of the day, but maybe another time when I'm roaming around the area I'll drop in.

vegetable buns

Diana and I went to Tien Garden for dinner and shared three dim sum: vegetable buns, spinach dumplings, and tofu crepe rolls.

tofu crepe rolls

The tofu crepe rolls were my favorite, but everything was good. The restaurant is inexpensive and their menu has a lot of stuff that I want to try so I'm sure I'll go back. It was the first time I went and I had been meaning to try it out all year since I kept passing it on the NYU bus to school. They had a large selection of desserts (including some enticing cookies) but I didn't try any; yet another reason to go back!

While roaming around Chinatown, we came across a new bubble tea place on Grand Street and Bowery. I can't remember at all what used ot be there even though I've walked around there a bunch of times in the past. OH WELL, I guess they weren't doing well.

watermelon shake

QUICKLY! DAMMIT! I guess that's an appropriate name, as it is...quick. I got a watermelon shake for $3.25. You can choose whether to have your drink with tapioca goo or not, and I soon regretted agreeing to having chewy black blobs plopped into my cup. While I like having tapioca in my drink so I won't chug the contents of the cup in 5 seconds, it's...it's. It sits in your tummy. And it's annoying to chew after a while. I don't think I'll get that included in my drink any more. The watermelon shake was very tasty (ie watermelon-ee) and if you have a student ID, everything is $0.50 off. WEE!

After hanging out in the park at Christie Street and roaming around the East Village, Diana and I went to the Shake Shack per my request. I had enough of passing it over and over again without trying anything. The time to stuff myself with a super chocolatey dairy-based dessert had come.

Shack Attack!

It turned into soup.

At around 9:30 at night, the Shake Shack is a hoppin' place. Many people were eating their burgers and fries, while all I wanted was a concrete/chocolate soup (well, the soup wasn't an intentional result). The menu describes the Shack Attack as "chocolate custard, hot fudge, chocolate truffle cookie dough and vahlrona chocolate chunks, topped with chocolate sprinkles". For $6.25, it's a nice combination of yummy things but...it was too much. I can't tell you the last time I paid that much for any kind of ice cream dessert; maybe I never have. And I don't meant to say it was too much in general, just too much for me. My first bite was of a chocolate chunk and brownie. Exciting? Yes! But after a while it was like chocolate and brownie swimming in chocolate soup, which wasn't as exciting. I might get another one someday but I'd try a different flavor.

On a totally unrelated note, I passed a place called "Plumpling" on West 3rd Street yesterday, near 6th Ave. NEW DUMPLING PLACE? I need to check it out.

Lastly, check this out:

pancake machine

Deli Pancake! Wow. Damn.

NONO WAIT, that other lastly was fake. The REAL LASTLY: Beck serenades burrito eaters at Pancho Villa. [via brooklynvegan] Does that place serve magical burritos? I can't even remember the last time i had a burrito, but I've probably never had a "real" one. In fact, I've rarely ever had "Mexican" food in my life--I could probably count them all on one hand.

I do have fooding things to speak of, but ...later.

• Mei Wah - Eating in Chinese: I can hardly remember any of this stuff, but if I learn ANY Chinese, this should be it! [thanks Susie]
• Lobster Ice Cream - Oh my god, NO. That's. WRONG! NO! I recall a newspaper article about weird Japanese ice cream flavors that sounded worse than lobster, but still...no.
• Aliment: The Definitive Food Film List - I don't watch many movies but I'd watch these. Out of this list, I've only seen "Eat Drink Man Woman", "Chocolat" (loved it...for all that chocolate, of course) and "Supersize Me".
• Synthesizer Cake - AWESOME! [via music think]
• Basil-Ham-Tomato-Parmesan Bread - Oh man, if only I knew how to make bread. I know it's not the most difficult thing in the world, but...well. It's not that easy either. If you don't know, I barely cook anything! You'll see lots of weeping here when I start my cooking class next semester.

You know you're living in a boring place when you spend the entire day inside. No, I didn't even peek my head out the door to get a whiff of fresh oxygen. ALL DAY. INSIDE. Why?

I had no reason to go out to buy food. That's usually the only reason I go anywhere around here, besides seeing a movie every so often. NJ is hazardous to my health. *cough*

I went to NYC on Friday to meet up with an Internet friend visiting from San Francisco (plus her friend, also from San Francisco...or at least California). We went to the MoMA to stare at confusing art. For a late lunch, we ate at Kiku, an easy-to-miss Japanese restaurant we randomly came across.

una don

If you don't know what that is, then maybe you should eat more Japanese food. :D Grilled eel on rice is a common Japanese dish that you could find in just about every Japanese restaurant you go to (at least, around where I live) and it easily qualifies as my favorite Japanese food (curry is also a favorite). I don't eat it as much as I used to because I thougtht ordering the same thing all the time was kind of boring, but you know...WHO CARES. It's consistently good, no matter where I go. If you've never had eel before, I highly suggest you try it, even if you don't think you like fish. Grilled eel doesn't taste like any other fish. Since I suck at describing what food tastes like, I'm ripping a description from bento.com:

Good unagi combines a rich flavor (a bit like pate) with an appetizing texture, crisp on the outside but tender on the inside. The cooking process is what makes the eel both crisp and tender: The eels are first grilled over hot charcoals, then steamed to remove excess fat, then seasoned with a sweetish sauce and grilled a second time.

Eel doesn't taste as good without the sauce. Oooh how I love that sauce.

After being totally stuffed, we walked through Central Park to Lady M, perhaps the fanciest bakery I've ever been to.

Mille Cr�pes

Their signature cake is the Mille Cr�pes, which consists of 20 layers of crepes and pastry creme. All crepe creations should be like this. The top layer is burnt caramel, like the top of creme brulee. A nibble of this thin layer exploded with caramel-goodness. EXPLODED. The crepes easily gave way to my fork tongs, but held up nicely, not getting mashed (rather important, as I was taking small bites). A slice will set you back $6.50, which isn't very expensive in my mind; it's not like I'm going to attempt to make 20 perfect crepes and make my own cake.

(On a semi-related note, someone once suggested that I make a cake out of pancakes. At least, I know the idea didn't pop out of thin air. I've wanted to do this, but never have. I think some of you reading this have much more cooking prowess than I do, so why not whip up a few pancakes and stack em, sandwiching buttercream in between the pancakes? YUM? Yes?)

Miroir Caramel

We also shared this caramel mousse cake, which was just as good as the crepe cake, bursting with even more caramel goodness since the bulk of it was caramel flavored. A slice of this is $6, definitely worth it.

Lady M is worth going out of your way for. SO GO! Screw eating real food--just get a bunch of cake. Besides that the desserts are delicious (even the free water was memorably tasty), the service may be the friendliest I've ever come across in NYC. Or anywhere. Then again, is it a surprise that the young women working there would be in such good moods after getting to eat those lovely desserts every day? Damn, I'd be happy too. :)

bakery interior

A random thing: their bathroom has a cool sink. It also has the thickest disposable towels I've ever come across. I almost thought they were regular towels!

After that we went to La Maison du Chocolat, where I picked up a few ginormous macarons.

macarons

The last time I had their large macarons was in 2002 before a Strokes concert. I figured I was allowed to try some more. :) They were very good, of course, and not even that bad on the wallet, costing $4.25 each (well, that's expensive for a cookie, but they're a pain to make; I've seen my roommate last year make miniature ones).

When I got home, I found out I got a few foodie packages!

the postman brought me candeee

Santos sent me the orange & cream Kit Kats and Maaike sent me the Dutch goodies. THANK YOU! The Internet is great for things like making friends and having peopel send you food. I'll retaliate the kindness with mix CDs and Poofy wares.

The hot weather unfortunately melted the Kit Kats, which have since then solidified in the fridge in splodgey forms. Of course, they're still tasty! Methinks that America is totally screwed in the Kit Kat variety department. Although the orange & cream ones are American, they're a limited edition flavor. I guess America's not very big on fruit flavored chocolate (when I went to England, I was surprised at how much stuff was orange flavored), and we're definitely never gonna get red bean.

Thanks to Maaike, I think I've found my new favorite food: STROOPWAFELS! Oh man, these things are good! I don't know if they're supposed to be soft (it seems like you soften them by putting them on a cup of a hot drink) but again, due to the heat my mini stroopwafels were all soft. TASTINESS! I didn't know what the tastiness was coming from until I read a description: A stroopwafel is a traditional Dutch pastry that consists of a layer of caramel and spices sandwiched between two thin wafers of waffle. I already ate three of them today; hey, mine are MINIATURE SIZED, remember? :) But I think I'm going to find some regular sized ones as well, hehehe...HEHEHEHE.

(cough)

The coffee candies are delicious also. They're more like hard caramels with a bit of coffee taste than just plain ol' coffee, which I wouldn't like as much. The chocolate unfortunately also gave into the heat and became rather deformed, probably having its taste altered in the process. Still, chocolate is chocolate, ie yummy.

So my diet during Saturday was varied due to all the new treats I had. I ate some miniature Kit Kats, quite a few coffee candies, some chocs, some stroopwafels. As for real food, I ate a slice of sourdough bread, two peaches, two plums, a large bowl of collard greens and onions cooked in butter and somen sauce (I know that it's for somen but now I know it tastes really good with vegetables!...as long as you don't mind the taste of bonito/dried fish), and rice. Basically, a gazillion more calories than I needed for a day of staying at home and napping (after I woke up at around 1, I took a nap just a few hours later...pathetic, yeah).

I hope to get out of the house today (it's almost 5 AM, oops).

I think I'll start making up a Be Rachel Ray For a Day $40 eating itinerary in NYC. I don't think I'll actually use $40 since that would probably make people explode. But. Hmmmm. I'm calling my food itinerary, "for the person who isn't allergic to anything, likes Asian food, baked goods, sweets, and can eat lots of sugar without resembling a jackhammer or feeling nauseous." It's a long title, I know. It doesn't include many drinks (probably just one) since I don't drink much besides water. SO. Water is not included; bring your own bottle.

Do people really need to eat three meals a day? I can do with one but I guess I eat something like FIVE, especially with all the coffe candies I've been eating lately (craploads). But if you NEED breakfast, I'd suggest starting off at Sullivan Street Bakery and dropping a whole 100 pennies on a slice of pizza bianca. If you like bread, this could be one of the yummiest things you will ever eat, EVER, HOLY MOLY YES.

pizza bianca

Okay, you're kind of stuffed now. Walk around in Soho (assuming you went to the Soho Sullivan Street Bakery) and when it gets near lunch time, get a #1 bahn mi from Bahn Mi So 1 on Broom Street for $3. It's quite colorful inside:

inside the bahn mi

That should be enough for lunch. Actually, you should still be hungry because it's TIME FOR SWEEETS!

Go to Sugar Sweet Sunshine and get...something. I haven't figured out what yet. Cupcakes would be a natural choice, but there's always piggy pudding.

piggy pudding loves you, hates your waistline

I don't know if they always have it, but let's assume they do. Eat $3.25 worth of pudding and cream and shorbread cookie. YOU LOVE IT.

You're full now!...so naturally, you'll eat more food. Yeah. For the purposes of this itinerary, you should walk everywhere so you can burn calories and maybe build up your appetite. I don't know how long exactly it'll take you to do all this walking, but it's do-able. I might have things in the wrong order though.

You like chocolate, right? Of course you do. Get a chocolate mudslide cookie from Jacques Torres for $2.50 and risk falling into a chocolate coma.

best chocolate cookie every

Curren expenditure is $9.75. Hm. Well, you're gonna spend at least $10 on dinner. That still leaves another $20 to play around with. (rubs chin)...I'll have think about this. Definitely go to the Golden Dragon Boat Cafe and Bakery (on Bowery a little north of Canal Street) and get a mexican style bun filled with...something. It doesn't matter cos it's ALL GOOD! Here's a sweet potato one:

sweet tater filling

It'll set you back $0.80. You might want to buy a few and save some for later. I remember that they also have coconut, custard, and green tea fillings.

After dinner, which I haven't figured out yet, go to the Chinatown Ice Cream Factory and get a scoop ($2.75) of something. DON'T GET A BORING FLAVOR THAT YOU CAN GET ANYWHERE ELSE! COS THAT'S BORING! I haven't tried a lot of the flavors but ginger and coconut are good. Taro isn't taro-ee enough. Pumpkin and black sesame are great too. If you want, you can afford to buy two scoops but...aren't you comatose yet?

Oh, I forgot about one drink you may as well try: BUBBLE TEA! Yum. It's okay but I think I've gotten tired of drinking it already. If you don't mind alternating between chewing on balls of tapioca and drinking something, then try a bubble tea. I don't know what's the best place but Green Tea Cafe on Mott Street makes a good taro bubble tea that isn't too sweet and TASTES LIKE TARO. I think it's around $3.50 but I'm not sure.

let's chew!

So minus dinner, you've spent $16.80. I think. I may not have all the correct prices but ...you know, maybe you should skip dinner and just eat more cake. Hey, I'd do it (hell, I've done it).

---

Okay, I can't imagine that anyone has room for dinner but if you want it, go to the Shanghai Cafe and get...dumplings!

the table isn't full yet

Okay, maybe you need a little more guidance. I'd get "Steamed Tiny Buns with Pork" ($4.25) and "Sticky Rice In Bamboo Trunk" ($2.95). It's unlike you could finish those dishes but you can at least try them.

End cost: $24. You cannot eat all this food, or at least I hope you can't. Also, it's far from balanced in any shape or form. I'm just telling you what I'd like to eat. :)

The new livejournal community Cookumentary is perfect for someone like me who barely knows how to cook.

For dinner I cooked red swiss chard and red onions, resulting in a lot of veggies swimming around in red pigment. I don't mind cooking the same way every day (sautee, splodge on some seasoning, eat), but it's rather unadventurous.

And I ate too much today. Many coffee candies were dissolved. I ate one miniature Kit Kat, and I think two mini stroopwafels. I have no idea how many sugar plums I adte, but they're the size of bloated cherries (each one is probably like eating two cherries) so I'd say around 10. I ate a peach that while soft, sadly din't have much flavor. Somewhat randomly, I shared a cannoli with my mum, which we got from a cart at the Ridgewood Farmer's Market that mainly sells mozzerella. Neither of us are big fans of Italian food/pastries (she LOVES tiramisu, though) but the cannoli was worth trying. I wouldn't choose it over cake, or muffins, or scones, or cookies, but ye know...it's good.

Oh, I also bought a hamantashen from the farmer's market. I LOVE HAMANTASHEN! LOVE LOVE! SO GOOD! I love poppy seed! More things need poppy seed! The one I bought didn't have orange juice in it, the kind which I prefer, but it was still oh so delicious. I know it's not really a cookie but I CALL IT A COOKIE, thus it is one of my favorite cookies.

Oh. So. For lunch I had a lot of bread with olive oil, some sugar plums, and a slice of bread with muenster cheese. It's my favorite melty cheese and I haven't eaten it in maybe more than 10 years (honestly, I have no idea). I used to eat it semi-frequently as a kid (keep in mind I didn't eat much cheese overall) and it's one of those things that still tastes good. For something that doens't taste as good, I used to eat scrambled egg sandwiches nearly every day when I was in grade school. Eh. (It was really easy for my mum to pack for me, I guess.) I'm sad to find out that American muenster cheese is the poop; yup, it's super bland. It has some taste, of course, but I'm not surprised that it's supposed to have more. To do: eat real muenster cheese.

At around 11 PM I felt like getting a snack for some reason. ALERT: LATE NIGHT SNACKS ARE VERY BAD. Was I hungry? Am I ever? Nope, wasn't hungry, just kind of hobbled down to the kitchen and ended up eating some potato chips my brother got from Whole Foods (note: Satan's grocery store is completely filled with potato chips) and another slice of toast and muenster cheese. And the aforementioned peach.

Lordy. I better walk off some of this tomorrow. :| I must seriously be gaining lots of weight; my attempts to lose weight have been futile, considering how I haven't really been trying. Every time I think I can, a new fun fooding thing comes along. I had no excuse for eating so much today though.

I ate some food yesterday. But...maybe I'll talk about that later today.

Electronic musician Matthew Herbert brings up food and politics through his newest album, Plat du Jour (via boingboing, related Guardian article).

This is the most interesting music project I've ever heard of...and I mean that in relation to my interests. Overall, I'm sure there are more interesting things but I think Herbert is doing an amazing thing. I've listened to his music before and wasn't very into it but without haven't heard any of the tracks, I've already been won over by the making of the album. Read all 5 pages (navigation is at the bottom of the page) to find out what was involved in making the songs and factual reasoning behind song lengths and beats-per-minutes. "NIGELLA, GEORGE, TONY AND ME" is just...funny:

we recreated the meal that nigella lawson cooked for george bush when he came to britain to thank tony blair for his support during the iraq during the meal the wives ate separately. then we drove over the meal with a chieftan mk 10 battle tank from the mid-late sixties

The website has a great list of books to read, some of which are only available in the UK, but sound interesting enough that I might buy them. I'd love to read EVERYTHING on this page. Sadly, I've only read three of the books, or more like two and a half. I started reading "Food Politics" in 12th grade (two years ago) but I never finished it for some reason. It's an interesting book, just very fact-heavy. Another book I think that could fit on that list is Diet for a New America by John Robbins. The Food Revolution is also great. John Robbins is especially interesting because as the only heir to Baskin-Robbins, he refused to have any part in the company after witnessing the ill-health of his family (due to all that ice cream, I guess).

On that note, I've been interested in trying Baskin-Robbins, a place I've been to maybe three times in my life, after seeing anzyAprico's mango tango parfait.

(sigh)

Obviously, I'm not on a crusade to eat the best food possible and rid the world of evil agribusiness and expose all the problems with the food industry. I'm interested in those things, but you've seen what I eat; it may not be McDonalds, but there's a lot of crap. I don't eat as much local food as I could. I don't monitor my eating habits as well as I could. One of the reasons I did the raw food diet was so by cutting most foods out of my diet, I wouldn't support ginormous food companies plus other...bad things. However, I'm kind of addicted to wheat now, so that's not going to work.

Be as mindful of your food choices as you can bear/afford to without going mentally insane or broke. Is that reasonable? :)

I have a bit of fooding ahead of me in the next 7 days. Ahhh. I did rather well yesterday, not totally pigging out, but I didn't eat healthily. Lunch was a peach, a few pieces of my brother's penne pasta that he didn't want to finish, and one of those YUMMY COFFEE CANDIES. I had a dulce de leche bun from Big Booty Bakery as a snack. Dinner (at around 11:30 PM, ugh) was...cherries, half of a hunk of Big Booty Bakery bread pudding, half a chocolate cherry bread roll from Amy's Bread and a wedge of Irish soda bread (not really my thing, I found out), also from Amy's Bread. I have to say, I haven't been terribly into the bread at Amy's Bread so far, but I've never bought a loaf of anything (just rolls and twists).

NYC was hot and humid, like being in someone's lung. I think I walked around 4 miles, feeling the sweat dripping down my back (and other...areas with skin) while smelling the ominous sour stench of garbage. For a while, I was also smelling urine. WOW.

Despite that, I still love NYC.

...hate Times Square though. I love how everything goes kind of dead as soon as you hit 9th Avenue. 8th = "get out of my freakin' way", 9th = "Oo, I can breathe!" (Except you might be breathing garbage-y air.)

Oh well, more about yesterday later today. It's almost 5 AM.

If you play The Kingdom of Loathing, you know what a meat stack is. If you don't, don't you want to now, knowing it involves MEAT STACKS?

But this isn't about meat stacks. I just wanted to say "meat stacks" a lot, and force you to read the words "meat" and "stack" together a lot. It feels good, yes?

My Year of Meats

I'm not much of a reader, so if I spend an entire day (well, not the whole day, but a good part of it, thus keeping me off the Internet) reading a book, you know I must like it.

My Year of Meats: half novel, half meat industry expose? The story (or many little related stories) are funny, loving, and disturbing. The meat industry parts are mainly things I already knew, but it hits me harder every time I read about slaughterhouses and drugs and such, especially since my mum keeps insisting that the drug cocktail I received as a baby (moments out of the womb, I guess) have resulted in the health problems I have today. It's ironic since I don't have that many health problems, but I do get asthma almost ever day (I think it's because I don't like NJ; it doesn't happen in NYC, but that may be due to the fact that I usually exercise more in NYC).

The health problems this novel deals mainly deal with the female reproductive system. The main character has a deformed uterus from drugs her mother took (DES given to her by her doctor, before the drug was banned) when she was pregnant. The most shocking part of the book has to do with a 5 year old girl who is already going through puberty due to being raised on a cattle processing plant and being exposed to a cornucopia of unsafe chemicals.

Anyhoo...um. Good book, unlike any I've ever read before in that it's like a regular novel with lots of information about the meat industry (which could be distracting, but I didn't think it was). If you read the reviews, someone says it's too "preachy"...um, yes, it's an expose? About MEAT. And "Propaganda with stereotype characters", well. It's a novel. It's PC and has stereotypes (semi-submissive Japanese wife with abusive husband). If it didn't, people would complain anyway; you can't win either way. The book could've been better, could've been worse. I'd still recommend it.

I read about this book from another food website or blog, but I can't remember which one! Doh.

Yesterday I saw The Island". Yes, this is a bit of a topic change, but it's still related to health. Kind of. Figuring you're not going to see the movie (it made about zilch, sadly; I thought it was pretty good), I can talk about it freely. WEOOEHEOEOEOHE FWOOP anyhoo.

The story is that in the future, super rich people get clones made as a way to live longer, aka, harvest their organs. The rich people think that the clones are vegetables with no souls or emotions, but it just ain't true. Damn, that complicates things The clones are told that they're the survivors of some mass contamination of Earth and if they're lucky, they'll get to go to The Island, the last uncontaminated place on Earth. Of course, there is no island; when someone is needed for organs, they're picked in the "lottery" and happily trot off, until they realize their liver is being taken.

...hopefully, I'm not making this movie sound worse than it is (I wasn't very into the MASSIVE ACTION SCENES and PRODUCT PLACEMENT). The overall idea is that people will do anything to live and pay any price (I was in disbelief at a low 5 million dollar price tag for a clone). It's a disturbing concept and I guess with the clones, entails a crapload of ethics questions, but the idea that people are so obsessed with staying alive isn't unbelievable. Dying as a result of an accident is one thing but if you're dying because of an illness you brought upon yourself or something that you could help with a lifestyle change, then...do something.

I'm annoyed by people who take craploads of drugs to fend off illnesses instead of figuring out the real cause, or who partake in recreational things that contribute greatly to ill health. I don't mean eating a bacon cheeseburger, but if you ate 5 bacon cheeseburgers in a row, that'd be kind of...not good.

I'm not sure what my point is. It's around 4:30 AM so I should probably be sleeping. Uh. Well. I'm annoyed that many people think that if they get sick, they can go to the doctor and get some drugs/surgery to patch things up and then go back to their old ways, knowing that if their life were to go in jeopardy, they can just run back to the doctor. I'm not talking about people who need constant medical attention, but you know...people.

FOR SOMETHING FUN, here are food links!

• Fruitscake Factory? Like the Cheesecake Factory? DUDE, I totally want a Fruitscake Factory! I'd rather have that than cheesecake. WHY CAN'T I BE JAPANESE?
• Japanese Pizza Hut commercial. [via nihaokatie] Look at the Japanese Pizza Hut menu. IT ACTUALLY LOOKS GOOD! US menu? Um, the SUCK? A lot of chains are better outside America, even in Canada. I'd actually go to Pizza Hut in Japan, maybe (at least try it) while I never want to go in the US. I used to get Dominos in Taiwan sparingly and I remember trying tuna pizza...actually, that wasn't very good, but I did have the choice.
• Fat pie thief gets stuck in a window: HAHAHAHAHA! [via Lia...oo, that rhymes!]
• Lori eats taho: how come this taho sounds so much better than the kind I've eaten? I see it as a rather boring thing but her's sounds more exciting. AHH GIMMEH.
• Taiwanese toilet-shaped cups! More photos at boing boing with the ice cream/poop inside. I LOVE YOU, TAIWAN!

Okay, I think that's it. Phew.

Because I'm super unproductive (although I did finish a website today, quick and dirty, weird header, could've been better, blah blah OH WELL too late), I found myself looking at Johnny Rockets' Meal Calculator. It's neat: type in what you want and it'll spit out the nutrition (or lack thereof) facts. I put in fries and a burger, then hit "Calculate", mulling over my impending caloric doom as the food stats appeared on my screen.

Doh. Not that the facts were surprising, but it's really hard to enjoy what you're eating at a restaurant if you actually know all the nutrition facts. Irgnorance is bliss. And impending coronary complications. I was thinking of trying out Johnny Rockets since I've never been there before but my brother and I are meeting up with a friend at Cheeburger Cheeburger. Yeah, that's not an improvement whatsoever, but I'm thinking of not getting a burger. WHOA.

Um. I also want to go to Coldstone to try their wasabi ginger ice cream, if that's the flavor of the month. I'm doomed, right? Yeah. Doom. Coldstone is RIGHT next to Cheeburger Cheeburger at Palisades Center. On the same floor you've got McDonalds, Macaroni Grill, The Outback, Stir Crazy, Legal Seafood, TGIFridays, and other stuff I can't recall. Pretty much a crapload of big chain restaurants, the best being Legal Seafood and Stir Crazy (I've only been there once though, been to Legal Seafood...a bunch of times).

DOOM. Okay. You know what's bad? When after eating dinner, you keep thinking you're going to puke. No, I wasn't nauseous, didn't eat anything that made me feel ill; I kept feeling like I had to burp, the problem being that there was FOOD in the way of the air that wanted to escape, except I didn't really want it to since THERE WAS FOOD IN THE WAY. Good lord, how quickly did I eat? For dinner I made a sammich with cheese and onion and eggs (uh, no, I don't EVER eat that but my mum was making an omelette and there were two slices of bread left), a huge-ass cinnamon muffin from Demarest Farm (really good, maybe a little too dense but I'd get it again), a bunch of sugar plum, and an orange. I probably ate a mini stroopwafel at some point. And. ...a bunch of potato chips...

OH JESUS! Yes, I eat too much. I'm sure I'm gaining weight, but I like being irgnorant, remember? So instead of stepping on the scale and feeling like a hippopotamus with a penchant for sweets disguised as a human, I'll just ...not do that. Yup!

But I have been thinking more about health lately. No one's invincible, especially if you live in America. I can't blame my ill-health on America but seriously, aren't we guinea pigs to the lack of food regulation our government imposes on the food industry (well, there are worse places but they could do better). Whatever, I'm no spokesperson for eating good food.

But I did eat this wonderously ripe white peach from Demarest Farms. The skin peeled off almost effortlessly, and the pinkish white flesh was saturated with the juicy products of...rottening. "Ripening" is a better word, eh? Oh. Good peach. I'm lucky to have local farms with peaches and plums, but Demarest Farm is almost a 30 minute drive, I think.

I found out that yesterday was EEL DAY. There's a day! FOR EEL! Actually, it's supposed to be the hottest day of the year (it was cool in NJ, compared to previous days). What does that have to do with eel? "Everyone is supposed to eat eels since eating eels helps that metabolism, accelerates perspiration, makes up for the loss of energy and renews strength in the summer heat. Ri-i-i-ight" says 3Yen. Yeah, my metabolism and perspiration pretty much stay the same when I eat eel. Take a look at eels being grilled. Lovely, eh? [rubs belly]

On a totally unrelated topic (but related to my last post), my mum was telling me how some parents will have a second child in order to provide organs for their first child who's sick. I find that...sick. That's worse than being an "accident": "We had you so you could give your little brother your kidney. Not like you need both!" Does that show insane love for the first child? Or. Huh? I don't know. I mean, the parents would probably want another child too but it still sounds wrong...

My mum told me about one of our old family friends who passed away more than a year ago. She had kidney problems (she had lots of problems, unfortunately, and she died in the hospital somewhat unpeacefully from what I heard\) and could've used a new one, so her daughter offered hers. Her mum refused, saying her daughter was young and would have more use for it. My mum said she wouldn't give a kidney away unless she had three of them. Haha.

I don't know what the point of that last paragraph was. I just wanted to talk about kidneys.

The camera.

THE CAMERA! My camera. It's kind of sickly. As in, when I turn it on, it says it's looking for my memory stick and returns the message, "ERROR BEEP BEEPOO NOW YOU DIE!" I don't believe it's actually looking for my memory stick, or else it'd find it. RIGHT THERE! Jammed up the camera's butt.

It's one of those murderous Sony cameras. Anyhoo, the point at which it stopped working was odd; I was taking a few photos and then *click*...nothing. It wasn't like I turned it on and it stopped working, rather I had already been using it and it pooped out turing the photo-taking process. It turns on and such, but it can't find my memory stick. I haven't tried putting in another memory stick yet, but before that mishap, it actually wouldn't turn off correctly and I'd have to take out the batteries. This all happened today while I was at Cheeburger Cheeburger. Maybe the restaurant had bad vibes.

So...I went to Cheeburger Cheeburger and got a portabello mushroom melt instead of a cheeseburger. I just wasn't in a burger-y mood. It would've been really good if not for the super-vinegary taste of the mushroom. WHYYY? I couldn't really taste mushroom, more like eating a mushroom textured vinegar thinger. Weird. For the toppings I got onion, guacamole, and grilled peppers (in addition to the cheese) and the onion was too much for my taste. By the last 4th of the sandwich I was just eating a sandwich with condiments because I had eaten the mushroom already. Oops. So...pass the mushroom burger, unless my vinegar mushroom was an isolated incident. Othewise, I do like portabello mushroom burgers (the last time I had one was about a year ago at the Beech Tree Grill by Vassar, very yummy!).

My brother, Bert, and our friend, Jesse, finished their burgers. I think they got the serious or delirious burgers. I find this hard to swallow (that wasn't supposed to be a pun...damn, too late) as "The Classic" seems big enough already. Then again, my brother only weighs 10 pounds more than me (roughly), which is JUST SAD because THAT MEANS I'M TOO HEAVY. My brother isn't necessarily skinny, I'm just...fat. If he were skinny, we'd probably be the same weight. And then I'd cry.

We also got a half order of frings (fries and onion rings) and I really don't want to know what a full order is like, seeing as a half basket easily fed the three of us and would be fine for four people. The onion rings weren't as good as the last time I went. I'm going to assume that the onion rings hadn't completely changed, so maybe if we go another time they'll be better. The fries were good, nothing to complain or shout home about (at least you could tell they're from real potatos, with...skin). They had salt and pepper on em, which I liked.

Before seeing Wedding Crashers, we went to Sweets From Heaven since i wanted to get some candy for a friend. ...and then I ended up getting candy FOR MYSELF. It's a nice store, with a good selection of UK goodies (they had PENGUINS, in the same kind of pack that my friend and I had so unabashedly plowed through last summer...mush weight was gained, many lungs were asthmatic, but it resulted in good times) and American stuff like Mallo Cups and Abba-Zaba (peanut butter in taffy doesn't sound so good, but maybe I'm disillustioned?). I bought a Wonka Bar (chocolate and graham cracker isn't terribly exciting but IT SAYS WONKA, OKAY!!!), a Skybar (four flavors in one bar, for the girl who wants it all, or eats it all and isn't allergic to anything), Kit Kat Kubes (aw, teaching the kiddies how to spell cubes incorrectly!), and Cadbury Fudge, which I got because Iv'e never seen it before and...the package is shiny! Also, the package says 15p, although it cost $0.75. 15p is mega cheap, although it does only weight 25 grams (about .9 ounces). ...that's still cheap. The ingredients are a bunch of sugars with different names, so you know that'll taste good!

During the movie, Jesse made me share his chocolate bar. I forgot the name but the wrapper was yellow and it was just milk chocolate with peanuts in it. Jeez, good way to buy a BORING CHOCOLATE BAR! I mean, it's not that bad but I'm not a fan of peanuts in chocolate, thus explaining why I lean towards non-American chocolat bars that tend to have more hazelnuts and whatnot/anti-peanut. I don't mind if other people like peanuts, but gimme hazelnuts! Or fudge! I dunno. I thought it was funny that Jesse couldn't finish the whole bar because 1) it wasn't that large, maybe 1.5 ounces, aka something I would inhale and 2) Jesse eats a lot. At lunch he drank three glasses of soda, ate a huge ass burger, a bunch of fries and onion rings, and he met his match with a weeny chocolate bar that was a quarter of a inch thick? DOOD! What is that?

After the movie, we went to Coldstone. I wanted to go thinking that they might have ginger wasabi but NOPE. I settled for oatmeal cookie dough with a Kit Kat mix-in. Kit Kat = good mix in. The oatmeal cookie dough ice cream was unfortunately NOT OAT MEALY ENOUGH, and I'm not even sure I would've been able to tell it was oatmeal if I didn't know what it was supposed to be. But I guess it was, kinda. Basically, it was just...tasty. Some people say they don't like Coldstone and while I wouldn't say it's the best ice cream out there, it's not bad. I like the texture; maybe other people don't? The ice cream doesn't melt quickly and it's...it's. I don't know how to explain it, but it kind of stretches. That makes it sound gross...

I got the small size, aka "Like It". God, I hate stupid names. IT'S CALLED SMALL, DAMMIT! SMALL. "Love it" is MEDIUM! My brother said "I'll have the 'like it'" and Jesse said he was a tool. Even though the small looks kinda...small, it's definitely enough for one person, if you're my size at least (er, short girl). I could finish a larger one but that would be a bad idea. Jesse got the medium because my brother had a $1 off coupon that could only be used on a medium or large (what's that one called, "gotta have it"? LARGE! LARGE, DAMMIT!).

So. Um. I consumed around 2000 calories by that point. For dinner I ate fruit and a salad sandwich (with some cheese) on Whole Food ciabatta bread (it was freshly warm and my mum and I couldn't resist not buying a loaf). Yum. That's one way to get me to enjoy eating a salad; wrap it in bread.

Boy, I eat a lot of crap.

"Whoa, I feel...dizzy."

[few seconds later]

"Okay, now everything's going black."

In 6th or 7th grade, I remember totally blanking out during a PE class while practicing tossing a softball. I hate PE, but hatred alone wouldn't make my brain recreate the "fade to black" at the end of a movie or make my stomach churn like angry bees with hats (or even normal bees without hats; they churn too). I went to a nearby water fountain and felt fine, but it was weird to BLACK OUT AND FEEL PUKEY.

In 8th grade during PE, my class was running around the field when I got black out-y and nauseous once more. Do the PE demons hate me? Nah, I didn't think so. Wobble inside, get a drink of water, sit down, feel better.

11th grade during physics class (physics may have been worse than PE), I was about to doze off but then my head felt like someome was pouring molten lead into it. Why would anyone pour molten lead into my head? And how? I was quite sure there was no weird person hovering over me with a pail of molten lead because someone would've said, "Robyn, there's a weird person with a pail of molten lead hovering over you."

What's my point? Well. Obviously, the random dizziness doesn't happen much. I can't recall it happening since that physics class, but for some reason it was at that point that I realized the black outs and nausea were due to dehydration. Actually...that's my assumption for which I did no research on. I'm usually dehydrated but nothing weird happens. (That time in 6th or 7th grade was under the flesh-searingly hot Taiwanese sun, mixed with a constant humidity of 200%. And bees. With hats.)

Two days ago when I went to Cheeburger Cheeburger, the level of water in my class had lowered by two inches over the course of the meal. Jesse downed 3 glasses of soda and my brother drank at least one. I wasn't thirsty.

For some reason, I'm rarely thirsty. Is there any physical explanation for it, or do I just have to force myself to drink more? I have a bottle of water with me most of the time (like now, *glug glug*) so I can drink whenever. I woke up yesterday morning with asthma (and when I started this entry, I was asthmatic--I'm fine now) and my mum said that drinking more water would help. Fasting would also help, so I'm going to try that on Monday.

Why not try it today? Well...I'm going to NYC in the afternoon to meet some friends and go fooding.

Something I've realized lately more than usual is that I'm not hungry. I can eat, but I'm not hungry, not for normal food at least. I can eat sweets on command (unless I'm full beyond belief) but I eat normal meals for the sake of eating normal meals. I'm usually more hungry than I've been in the past week, so I don't know what's going on. Not being hungry takes the fun out of eating.

For lunch I had some ciabatta bread and sheep's milk cheese and fruit. For dinner I had a turkey sandwich from Panera Bread, which was yummy but added to my decision that sandwiches aren't "Robyn" food. THere was nothing wrong with the sandwich (I thought it was going to be hot for some reason though, oops), but I would've much rather eaten a loaf of bread. Hell, next time i'm just gonna get bread, then I'll save money and be happier! Why have it any other way? For the sake of being nutritionall balanced? Pppsshhh.

For some reason, I inhaled the sandwich. Obviously, something I have to learn to do is CHEW MORE. I do chew, but pushing the blob of semi-digested food around in my mouth makes me feel like I'm suffocating after a while (yeah, I've learned how to breathe through my nose, don't worry). Actually, even when I don't eat quickly I feel the same way.

I just wanted a LOAF OF BREAD. HAPPINESS! FWEE!

...okay, I just found out the sandwich I ate had 950 calories. No. Biggie. Yup. NO BIGGIE. It's nice that the website has nutrition facts on it. Yeah. Uh. Huh.

Oh, and in between the meals, I ate random foodstuffs. Mini stroopwafels. Caramel coffee candy. I tried the Wonka Bar I bought on Friday and it was pretty good, even though it wasn't what I was expecting. The candy description gave me the impression that it was a chocolate covered graham cracker but instead it's chocolate with little graham cracker bits in it. Not bad, although it could've used more cracker.

And I ate a small pack of Nerds. When I was little, I thought Nerds were one of the coolest candies ever, partially due to the cute little square box and the rareness of occasions I'd get to eat them on. It's a nicer container than, say, a boring limp bag of Skittles. I guess they still taste good but I prefer chocolate-based snacks or cookies now.

...wow, I eat a lot of crap. I'm kind of surprised I'm not dead yet.

I had to start writing a new entry because the last one was getting too long. I was all like, "Hey, this is what I ate, and I also wheeze"...who wants to read that? I dunno. This website isn't called "The Girl Who Wheezed", although that's not such a bad name.

The aforementioned Nerds were courtesy of Ice Cream Man, who must've had lots of extra candy to give out. ICE CREAM MAN IS AWESOME! I don't know what kind of life is much better than driving around with a happy truck (it's an emotional truck) full of ice cream and giving out free ice cream to kids and watching the kids get all excited and smiley and going to concerts and eating ice cream because YOU HAVE A TRUCK OF ICE CREAM and obviously everyone loves you because YOU HAVE A TRUCK OF ICE CREAM! (I'm aware that the previous sentence immediately fell apart, but I'm talking about ice cream!) He also sent a little DVD (in length, not size, because that would be weird) about the life of Ice Cream Man and given away shitloads of ice cream and happily ice creaming across the land of Ash. Or Ashland.

[Digression: Raw Family, aka the Boutenkos, is from Ashland. They have an amazing story about battling major health problems by switching to raw food diets and following a healthier lifestyle. Valya doesn't have asthma anymore, which should inspire me but...*sigh*. I think I've already decided that going back to a primarily raw food diet would drive me insane, but at least I didn't have asthma when I was a raw foodist. ...actually, I should rethink that. Oh. Dammit. Just thinking about it is likely to drive me insane.]

Uh, where was I? The idea of being asthma-less is so appealing. But, but...

ICE CREAM! Eating raw food means no ice cream. Hell, it means no to many things. I'm in complete awe of people who can follow a raw food lifestyle for many years without being overly preachy about it. ...I'm done talking about raw food now.

I can recall buying something from an ice cream truck only twice in my life. Once was when I was in 3rd or 4th grade when an ice cream truck came to my school and everyone in my class was entitled to one treat. I got the cone-ish squirly thing that had a gumdrop at the bottom. No idea why, seeing how I didn't chew gum. PEER PRESSURE? PERHAPS. You know how ruthless 8 year olds can be. Last summer/fall I got a Mr. Softee cone somewhere around Union Square for the sake of saying I had a Mr. Softee cone. It was alright.

So...um. In conclusion, it'd be awesome if the Ice Cream Man would come to the East Coast, or if we got our own regional ice cream man. However, I think I could eat eight ice creams in an hour, and even though I've never tried, it's probably best to not find out.

For some reason I thought it'd be cool if there were an "International Ice Cream Man" who had loads of weird ice cream bars from all over the world, such as all the stuff on this page. Something I miss from Taiwan (even though I probably only ate it two or three times when I was there) are ice bean bars, or whatever they are. Red bean, crushed ice, and vanilla goo in handy popsicle form. I haven't eaten one in at least seven years, yet I still remember it.

In second conclusion, I need to exercise.

I lied; I have a third conclusion. Ice cream in a condom (scroll/search for it) is just not good. No. NO. How about ice cream in a STOMACH? HUH. (That made no sense, I know.) I say no to condom ice cream.