serene’s posterous

This is riffed off one of of my mom's regular dishes.  She would stir fry shrimp and squid with onions, peppers and tomatoes with a touch of sweet and sour sauce.  Since Eu-Jin doesn't eat shell fish or shrimp, this would be something I cook for myself only.

I don't have any sweet and sour sauce so my sauce is a tomatoey combination with tomato sauce, some sweet mirin, soy sauce and a touch of Sriracha sauce.  I stir fried the shrimp (no squid because I am too lazy to buy and prepare squid) to set aside first.  Then I stir fried garlic, onions, orange peppers and broccoli.  When the veggies were almost done, I added the cooked shrimp and tomatoes, as well as the pre-prepared sauce.

Saw this article on NYtimes on sriracha sauce.  I love the garlicky chili taste of the sauce, because it reminds me of the garlic chili sauce we get in Singapore, kinda like the cousin to tomato sauce.  I got a bottle of the sauce recently from the Chinese grocery store, and have been using it liberally on all sorts of stuff.  I recently mixed some sriracha sauce with plain yogurt to make a weird egg salad.  It was strangely satisfying to have a pinkish slightly spicy egg salad.

I am more of a tea person, but sometimes I just want some coffee for an extra caffeine fix.  My version of ghetto mocha is to mix some Trader Joe's freeze-dried instant coffee and some powdered Milo (thanks Vince!) in a small amount of hot water and then to add low-fat milk to the brim of the mug.  I would then just heat the drink in the microwave if I want something hot.

Eu-Jin got me this bottled beverage (in the Asian pear and ginger flavor) to try.  Surprisingly, I liked it.  The flavor was interesting - a little tart but not too sweet, with very mild pear and ginger flavor - with the great mouth feel of the slight carbonation and possibly the kombucha.  Well, it does seem a little strange to be drinking tea that has been fermented with a "macroscopic solid mass of microorganisms".  What if there's mold(!) in the culture? I also don't buy all the health claims.  The bottle states: Naturally detoxifying and energizing, Helps strengthen the immune system, Aids digestion, and Regulates sugar levels and appetite. 

Better digestion would be nice... This drink, like most fancy bottled beverages, would fall under "something I would try again if I don't need to pay full price for" category.

I like having muesli soaked in milk for breakfast.  I much prefer muesli over granola because weirdly, I don't like crunchy breakfasts.  One of my favorite pre-mixed muesli is the unsweetened fruit and bran muesli from Marks and Spencer, but it is not easily available here.  Currently, I have been eating TJ's Blueberry Muesli, with a bit of flax seed with blueberries added.  It's okay but a little lower on the oats (and the other healthy stuff) and sweeter than I would like.  I think maybe it is time to create my own muesli mix to make sure I get what I want.

I always liked eating tea eggs, because the smell (a mix of tea and herbs) wafting from big vats of steaming tea eggs is almost irresistible.  I made some tea eggs recently roughly based upon this recipe.  I didn't really follow the recipe exactly.  After boiling the eggs and cracking the shell to allow the sauce to seep in, I tossed in guesstimated amounts of dark soy sauce (plus a bit of light soy sauce), black tea leaves (English breakfast?), star anise, cloves, cassia bark, pepper seeds, tangerine peel and a touch of sugar.  And I simmered the eggs for a few hours at low heat.

Last week, I felt that I needed some Singaporean food.  Since we had bean sprouts, thick rice noodles, and most importantly, Laksa sauce paste, we decided to make Laksa.  This is the Singaporean version, which has coconut based curry, and dried shrimp paste.  The sauce box also came with sambal belacan and dried laksa leaves.  In Singapore I would have ordered my Laksa with cockles, but here I made do with shrimp.  Eu-Jin had his with two hard boiled eggs since he doesn't eat shrimp.

After climbing at PG on Saturday (hmm I suck at climbing...), we proceeded to Pho To Chau on a side street of Castro.  Eu-Jin and I usually prefer this place over Pho Hoa.  We got the usual rice vermicelli with marinated pork and egg rolls.  But this time, I also shared the fresh spring rolls (with shrimp and pork) with Ray. 

The food was nothing to shout about, but it was reasonably tasty and we were really hungry.  It also took a longer time than usual for the rice vermicelli dishes to arrive, but I think that's because they were shorthanded.  I am just a little puzzled why this place always seems a lot less crowded than Pho Hoa, even though they serve essentially the same food and it is probably marginally tastier here.

I was somewhat curious how Mark Bittman's soup broth from this week's Minimalist column would taste, with its special ingredient of ketchup(!). 

Ketchup is not an alien ingredient in noodle dishes from Singapore.  Hawkers in Singapore do serve wanton noodles with a soy sauce/chili/ketchup mix, and it is a fantastic combination of sweet, sour, spicy and salty, especially if you grow up eating the noodles in this style.  When I was young kid, one of my favorite lunch treats was drained ramen with a sauce of ketchup and chili (and perhaps some dark soy sauce too).  Yes it was terribly unhealthy...

Working off from Bittman's recipe, I made the noodle soup tonight.  I used soba noodles instead of egg noodles.  For the broth, I started with quartered roma tomatoes (to amp up the tomatoey taste), 2 cloves of garlic and a small slice of ginger in the water.  After cooking for a while, I added a small amount of sesame oil, some rice wine, soy sauce and ketchup to taste.  Also added some chopped up thai chilies - for some heat.  To make it a complete meal, I added some silken tofu, xiao bai chai, enoki mushrooms and scallions.  It was quite satisfying - and a lot less unhealthy than ramen with ketchup and chili sauce.

We went to Rumi in San Carlos to celebrate a friend's birthday.  I liked the atmosphere of the small restaurant, the lovely amuse bouche (pork belly on crostini?) that was served at the start, and just the smell of the bread (and the wood fire?) in the restaurant.  The food was overall tasty and fresh, but some items on the menu seemed strangely overpriced.  The four of us shared the flatbread with the trio of dips (tasty but seemed overpriced $4+$7 for what you get).  I had the five vegetarian tastes (cauliflower, spinach, Brussels sprouts, crimi mushrooms and mashed potatoes) as my entree.  It was also tasty, but it didn't seem sufficiently special for the $18.  Perhaps the other entrees were a better deal?  The others in the group seemed to enjoy their food, particularly the Niman ranch beef and the roasted beet and goat cheese salad.  The one dessert we shared was very good.  The caramel nut torte with some kind of berry sauce and vanilla semifreddo was a perfect sweet end to the meal.