jalohing – Page 7 – The Snack Review

Food Dreams: Cafe Dulce’s Green Tea Donut

Leave it to me to make multiple trips to Cafe Dulce in Little Tokyo over the last few weeks and never take a photo of my favorite item of theirs, the green tea donut.

Their donut reminds me of the deep fried puff of cloud otherwise known as the malasada from Honolulu’s famed Leonard’s, which is to say it reminds me of deep fried dough perfection. Cafe Dulce’s is a touch yeastier though, and the green tea flavor is punchy, strong, closer to unsweetened matcha than a green tea Kit Kat in sweetness. And then there’s the custard filling…

This Fruity Pebbles Donut Hole, now, is not bad. It is a little gimmicky, a twist on Christina Tosi’s haute kitsch. And it’s fine. I like it just fine. It sure is cute. But don’t skip the green tea donut…

Movie Bites: The Fifth Element

Lately, as I’ve been looking to turn over a new leaf and stop making lunches out of the pile of m&m’s in front of me, I’ve thought often of this scene from The Fifth Element. I have a way of falling into my work and whatever deadline is in front of me so that during my work week especially, it’s a real drag to figure out what to eat three times a day. I’m fully aware that I’m extremely privileged to have these kinds of problems. Still, I’m gonna admit that when I’m swimming in browser tabs, pages of notes and interview transcripts on my desk, I wonder to myself: Where’s my bottle of microwaveable stewed chicken pills?

Teem Gok – A Chinese New Year Dessert

January and February were filled with so much revelry. Kevin and I hosted our first Lunar New Year dinner this year and it was a wonderful comedy of errors (well worth its own story someday). I made teem gok–that’s my best romanized Cantonese for deep fried sweet wonton–to supplement store bought desserts supplied by Kevin’s mom. I’ve seen teem gok recipes on the internet that call for dates and other dried fruit as filling, but my family has always stuck by a recipe that’s simple and nutty and crunchy.

Truth be told, my favorite dessert of the night was the red bean neen go which Kevin’s mom suggested I slice into squares, lightly fry, then dust with a bit of sugar. They were so delicious, like pan-fried red bean mochi. Those crispy corners holding the soft chewy red bean cake were Chinese dessert perfection. I’ll leave off an attempt on that one for the next new year.

Teem Gok – Deep Fried Sweet Wonton

Ingredients:

1 cup grated coconut

1 cup raw skinned peanuts, roughly chopped

4 tbsp brown sugar

¼ cup toasted sesame seeds

1 package wonton skins

1 beaten egg or water for sealing1 quart oil for deep-frying

1) Mix together filling ingredients in a small bowl.

2) Take a wonton skin in the palm of your hand, put 1 teaspoon of filling in each wonton skin. With your other hand, dip a finger in your beaten egg or water and line edges of your wonton skin with egg or water.

3) Bring wonton edges together into a triangle or half circle and seal tightly with fingers.

4) Fry in hot oil until golden brown. (Your oil is hot enough when a small piece of potato dropped into the oil fries quickly and floats to the top.) Drain teem gok on paper towels.

A Junk Food Lover’s Reckoning With Herself

I am 28, and it is dawning on me that I need to change the way I eat.

I love all kinds of food. Tasty is where I’m at, and while I love a clean and delicious and artisanal-everything meal as much as the next coastal elite, my love of tastiness includes crap junk food. My grocery staples are: eggs, milk, bread, spinach, mushrooms, and once a month when they’re on sale at Ralphs, jalapeno-flavored Kettle brand chips. When I’m lazy and distracted (so, during the entirety of my workweek) I will eat whatever involves the fewest steps of preparation. That means on good days I eat a lot of avocado toast, and eggs and toast, spinach and mushroom omelettes, frozen Chinese dumplings and some kimchi from the back of the fridge, veggie burgers on toast. And on the other days I’ll make a meal of butter almond thins. Or a banana and a bunch of cookie butter. Shrimp chips. Hello Pandas. Pocky! Or Flamin’ Hot Cheetos. Snyder’s honey mustard pretzels. Or, yes, jalapeno Kettle chips. (I really do live in The Snack House.) It’s disgusting but it’s so tasty.

What forced the realization? Not my full understanding of the vital importance of green leafy vegetables and the serious damage that even one fast food meal can do to a person’s arteries. Not Michelle Obama, one of my favorite public figures, and her healthy eating crusade. Not even my family’s terrible history with heart disease and high cholesterol.

This week I had a pretty nasty stomach bug. I really don’t think that much about my diet, but this week I became very aware of it because I couldn’t properly digest anything I was eating. I tried my version of the gentle stomach recovery BRAT (bananas, rice, applesauce, toast) diet. I made myself a soothing carrot and mushroom soup in chicken broth. I ate an apple for lunch. The next day I had a banana (and cookie butter) for breakfast. Serious stomach unhappiness continued. And then I got lazy. I had a bowl of cereal. I went to McDonald’s for dinner (seriously, after two weeks of Olympics commercials that told me that I, too, could be a world sports champion if I ate a chicken nugget, I moved toward the drive-thru with a truly detached powerlessness over my steering wheel). Stomach trouble continued. Kevin’s always trying to get me to eat better, and usually it’s this running joke between us, but this week he got impatient with me. “I have no more sympathy for you,” he railed on the phone when I asked him if I was dying late one night.

Yesterday evening after running errands downtown I ended up at Chego and ordered spicy jjambong noodles. I’d worked straight through breakfast and lunch and was super hungry by the time I sat down to eat. I had a few bites and immediately knew I was hurting myself. Greasy, spicy, saucy noodles are decidedly un-BRAT-like. I texted Kevin a string of sad faces, took my leftovers home, and immediately made some oatmeal as repentance.

This morning Kevin cooked me breakfast. An egg and a slice of turkey on toast. What’d I do? Doused the thing in Sriracha. I don’t really know what I was or wasn’t thinking. But when I see an egg on bread I automatically reach for some hot sauce. Kevin looked at my bloodied toast and fumed. He’d made breakfast for me with the express purpose of feeding me real, and stomach-friendly, food. “You are obsessed with tasty food! Even when it hurts you!” he yelled, then reached over and with his fingers wiped up all the Sriracha off my egg, went to the sink and washed it down the drain. It really upsets Kevin that I can’t lay off my need for maximum tastiness even when my physical comfort and health is at stake. I on the other hand don’t even consider the likely outcomes when there’s a delicious fried egg in front of me and a bottle of Sriracha nearby. Most of the time I haven’t need to. But as I’m getting older I’m starting to feel the effects of my food choices, even on the weeks that are stomach bug-free.

I guess that’s what growing up is about. Laying off the hot sauce and spicy noodles every now and then. Also, listening to the people who love me. Learning to look past immediate gratification, seriously thinking through the consequences. Putting my work on pause for enough minutes (30 to be exact) to boil some oatmeal for myself. Isn’t it incredible that it can be so difficult to act in our own self-interest?

The other day Appu and I were sitting at home reminiscing about all the crap we loved to eat as kids, and came up with a long list. Totino’s pizza rolls, those puffed rectangular pillows filled with orange squidge which leaked grease all over the place. Lucky Charms. Bagel Bites. Hot Pockets. Dinosaur-shaped chicken nuggets. Neopolitan ice cream sandwiches which are in fact not ice cream at all but “frozen dessert topping” or some such thing. We thought about organizing a party around the theme. But then when it came time to figure out who to invite, we realized most of the people in our lives don’t partake in such fare. Turns out we’re friends with mostly vegetarians, health-conscious people, and adults.

As I type this, two dark chocolate Cadbury Mini Eggs are sitting sweetly next to my keyboard. They are delicious chocolate nuggets with a thin, chalky crunchy shell that I discovered only last year on a pre-Easter tear through the candy aisle of CVS. I keep tossing the bag back into my desk drawer to hide it from myself, then reaching over and pulling it back out. At the moment, the bag is safely tucked away. And I’ve got two more chocolate eggs I set aside to savor. You know, sometime later.

Kanro Pure Cola Lemon Gummies

I got these from my favorite Japanese crepe+snack shop in San Francisco because they remind me of, well, coke and lemon, a drink that’s served hot or cold in Hong Kong cafes. They’re super fun. Heart-shaped, firm gummies coated in crunchy faintly tangy sugar. Unfortunately not a substitute for the drink that inspired them, but I’ll take it!

P.s. Rookie blogger mistake: I ate these up before I could snap a photo of the gummies themselves. Good thing the package has a photo of them on the front.

Movie Bites: The Joy Luck Club

I’m pretty sure my parents forbade me from watching “The Joy Luck Club” when the movie first came out. But I remember watching it at an aunt’s house not too long after anyway. I can almost feel my aunt’s living room shag carpet under me as I lay sprawled out in front of the TV watching this movie.

The movie is a fuzzy cloud to me now, but of course it’s the illicit parts of the movie which have stuck in my mind. The shine of that silk robe in the darkened bedroom, the baby in the bath, that handful of condoms being flung about.

And then there’s this scene. It’s a perfect, if ridiculous, white-boy-meets-Asian-family faux pas. (Because would Rich really have done the same to his white mama’s meatloaf? If so, that’s not just clueless, it’s rude.) For some reason I’d misremembered his soy sauce dousing as a vigorous salt shaking–equally egregious. It made me think. I rarely find salt and pepper shakers on the tables of Chinese restaurants. Maybe I’ll see little pots of vinegar and soy sauce and hot chili sauce, but they’re intended as condiments, not extra seasoning for the customer to augment the chef’s choices. I take it as a statement about the chef’s authority over the customer’s eating experience. What need does the eater have for more salt and pepper at the table? The cooking is done.

Furikake Chex Mix

Here’s a snack classic. The recipe comes from my Auntie Cindy. I know this because the xeroxed copy I’ve got is written in her friendly, confident, wide second-grade teacher script. I have no idea what else people use corn syrup for–please do share if there’s something I ought to do with my bottle while I wait for the next round of chex mix cravings to hit.

Furikake Chex Mix

1 stick of butter

½ cup oil

½ cup corn syrup

½ cup sugar

2 tbs soy sauce

2 – 14 oz. boxes Chex cereal (corn and wheat are best)

1 jar aji nori (seaweed+sesame seed) furikake

1) Melt first 5 ingredients together in a small pot on the stove.

2) In a large bowl, mix Chex cereal and melted ingredients. Sprinkle furikake over mixture and incorporate.

3) Spread onto baking sheet. Bake at 250 for one hour, stirring every 15 minutes.

4) Remove and cool in the pan. Store in an airtight container for up to a week.

Notes: I added in a bit more soy sauce than the recipe calls for, which gave it more of a salty/sweet edge. I’ve done this with every kind of Chex available and I like the corn version best. Wheat’s a little too coarse and rice will just disintegrate. Kitchen trick: measure out the oil first, and use the same measuring spoon for the corn syrup. It’ll slide right outta there, easy peasy.

Sunday Afternoon Gnocchi

We came, we saw, we rolled out some adorable fluffy potato pillows.

After mulling a gnocchi attempt for years, a few weekends ago I actually did it. With Kevin’s help of course. I consulted Yvette van Boven’s “Handmade” (thanks Appu!), and Lidia Bastianich in multiple forms. First, Bastianich and Martha Stewart during what I am guessing is the early 2000s, and the two together again in 2012. (It’s fascinating to see 1) what a total pro Bastianich is and 2) how she can fluidly repeat her gnocchi talking points almost verbatim even years later.) Then, the real whammy: Bastianich in text via Epicurious. It’s a fantastic, thorough recipe. Because gnocchi and anything dough-like remain uncharted territory for me, I appreciated the overabundance of detail. She has a step tucked in the middle of her recipe that says, “Wash and dry hands,” and I really liked that. And when she tells Martha that she’s looking for a consistency of dough similar to what a pint of ice cream looks like after you’ve gone in for a scoop, I got it immediately.

Armed with all that research, it was really straightforward. I listened to the Amazon reviewers and got this potato ricer. We rolled it all out on the kitchen table, made the Internet’s favorite tomato sauce to go along with the gnocchi, fried up a handful of sage leaves in butter for garnish (thus the shiny pool of liquid at the bottom of my plate), and sat down to eat on the side of the table that wasn’t covered in flour.

All in all, a success. Though Kevin was right. “That was a really complicated way to cook a potato,” he said. Then he went back for seconds.

Golden Gate Bakery Dan Tat

My folks and I were on our way to breakfast this weekend in San Francisco when we passed Golden Gate Bakery, and we sprung for their famous egg custard tarts. They’re an indulgence–over a dollar a piece, but they’re delicious. Unlike most egg tarts which are often like sweet hand pies, Golden Gate’s have a delicate crust that’s barely thick enough to hold the creamy egg custard inside. They require gentle handling lest they dribble out of your hand and onto your shirt (not that I’d know). They’re pretty close to egg tart heaven.

But there’s a downside to such perfection. Golden Gate Bakery’s legendary egg custard tarts are so popular that the decades-old bakery can afford to take monthlong vacations and stay closed on the odd day without notice. The bakery’s operating hours are unpredictable enough that as a public service someone even made a website, is-the-golden-gate-bakery-open.com you can check before you make the trek to Chinatown.

TV Bites: Puffed Eggs With David Chang

I’m thanking a big sink full of dirty dishes for leading me to Mind of a Chef one Sunday afternoon. (The housecleaning necessitated my rooting around on Netflix for something good to watch in the background.) Needless to say, the dishwashing went much, much slower after I found this show. This episode is so much fun, and the whole series really elevates the popular idea of chefs as mad-scientists-slash-food-artists. Plus, eggs.