The Girl Who Ate Everything

A heads up to anyone who may try to contact me next week: I'll be even slower at responding because I'll be on a press trip to Hong Kong from the 9th until the 15th. ...And then I'm visiting my dad in Taipei for 1.5 days. I'm coming back to New York on the 17th through Hong Kong. (If you think that sounds like a weird schedule, then yup, it kind of is. When I got the press trip office a few weeks ago, I asked if I could get the return date extended, allowing me to get my own round trip ticket to Taipei, a mere 90-minute flight from Hong Kong. Ultimately, the schedule only allowed for the Taipei leg of the trip to be 1.5 days, but I'm still grateful for it.) I would've mentioned my trip sooner (like, not the same day I'm flying out), but I didn't want to say anything until I received my final itinerary, which just happened yesterday afternoon.

I don't know if I have many readers in Hong Kong (and by "many" I mean like, two people), but I would love to meet anyone who's free and interested in putting a face to this blog. (I know most of you have seen my face, but...have you seen it morphing and breathing and being all congested?! ...Oh yeah...no one wants to see that.) The only problem is that my itinerary is super packed—I'd only be free after 10 or 11 p.m. most days—and according to one of my friends in Hong Kong, most good food places are closed at the start of the lunar new year holiday. So....hm...

I don't really expect anything to emerge from this, but I figured I'd put the message out there. If you want to respond to this message, email me at roboppy@gmail.com (do not leave a comment). Thank you!

(Guys, I swear I have a substantial post that's...almost ready to go. It's 95% written. But that last 5% will probably take a few hours to finish, hours I won't have until I get back from my trip. Yeah, I should get an award for "SLOWEST.")

All right, time for me to get four hours of sleep before heading to the airport.

If the phrase "treat yo' self" doesn't mean anything to you, watch this:

(And if you're not familiar with Parks and Recreation, you should watch that, too. You've only got five seasons to catch up on. Piece of cake.)

"Treat yo' self" may be a once-a-year thing in the world of Parks and Recreation, but in my world it's "any time I'm in the Serious Eats office during off-hours by my lonesome, which is many of the times." And my favorite way to treat myself on the cheap without straying far from the office is to walk five minutes to Yaya Tea Garden and plop down $5 in return for one of these babies:

Chicken pile, come to me.

Tokyo Fried Chicken. It's a simple thing—chicken katsu topped with katsu sauce on top of too little cooked chopped cabbage and too much white rice—but I love it to the point that I've eaten it twice in the last week. The generous two-cutlet amount of chicken is mostly moist, except around the edges where it's most crisp; the rice is well cooked so that each fat, sticky grain is well defined and not too soft and I can easily shove satisfyingly big clumps of it in my mouth; the cabbage provides some vegetable content, allowing me to pretend I'm not totally destroying my health; and it only costs $4.95. That's a good happiness-to-dollar ratio right there.

Since I have trouble eating all the chicken without feeling disgustingly full (and I ignore the sensible option of not eating everything), I've gotten in the habit of asking for more cabbage and less chicken. The last time I asked this (which was, um, last night), the cashier told me, "People usually ask for it the other way around."