Hello from my personal inadvertent R&D snack lab. I’ve eaten dozens of boxes of Pocky in my lifetime. And this week something brand new happened. I opened a Chocolate Pocky box, and the uncoated tops of the Pocky sticks broke off like matches with the rest of it hardened into a single chocolate-coated mass. So I did what any snack hungry person would. I opened up the pack and ate it like a cookie.
Verdict: Inadvisable. Pocky is really not meant to be eaten this way.
That’s what’s been going on on the snacking front. There’s also been a whole lot of cooking the last few months. The weekend the New York Times suggested making and freezing up tomato sauce for the frigid winter months ahead Kevin went tomato sauce crazy (Deborah Madison’s tomato concassé is our go-to recipe). I also made my first pot of jook using my mom’s recipe, ham hock, dried scallops and all. It turned out so thick that after one night in the fridge I could have cut into it with a knife. But I do have a little bit of pride about that. Kevin told his mom that I’d made jook and she warned him that Cantonese people make their jook too watery so he should thicken it up. Taken care of, mom!
I also made shakshuka a la Ottolenghi. I was hoping for something sensual and luscious, like those much-circulated cookbook images. My shakshuka was not sensual in any way. I’ve been steadily working on finishing a batch of chocolate banana muffins I made last weekend. Four in a day is my personal record so far. There was also Marian Burros’ NYT fav and food bloggers’ classic plum torte. I’ve been making a lot of fried rice with whatever’s left over in the fridge. And there was one dinner in particular recently that made me feel like I was back in my aunt’s apartment in San Francisco: steamed egg custard; asparagus; rice; and a chicken, shiitake, Chinese sausage stir fry. I even dotted the top of the seui dahn with an oyster sauce smiley face just like my mom used to do when we were kids. Nights like that I take special pride in the fact that I can cook the food that brings me so much comfort, even 3,000 miles from home.