Food!

It’s been a while since I’ve put a post in this category. Obviously, I haven’t been cooking as much as I used to, so my restaurant expenses have shot up. There is however, a very good reason I don’t attempt cooking as much as before. Because I’ve always sucked at it, and will never get better.

Right now, I’m down on a lot of food supplies. The simple answer would be to go across the street, and buy something. No. I refuse to accept this answer! I will further scavenge the dark ends of my kitchen to find what hasn’t expired yet, and use it up, so that I can save up enough money [and splurge it on restaurant food].

Lacking rice, I still have rice noodles. Rather than trying to simply boil them, and eat them, I thought, I’d try a different approach on things! I’d fry them, and see how they come out! Very interesting enough, if you fry it long enough, they turn up like a long, bloated rice crispy. Unfortunately, in an attempt to spice things up, I used chili oil. It didn’t help that it was somewhat stuck into the bottle, so when I tried to pour out the contents, more than the expected amount went in. The rice noodles didn’t fry up evenly either. So while some parts were all puffy and crunchy, other parts were still hard and dry. So I kept frying away at the “non-cooked” areas. This lead to a bit of haze in the air, and some inhalation of chili smoke –hence the title! Nothing like the burning sensation of chili in your bronchial! I experienced something similar, a little over 9 years ago. We all lined up in a room with gas masks, and then, one by one took them off. I had a cold at the time, so I came out not only with watery eyes and burning lungs, but with copious amounts of snot from the nose as well. Others came out puking, but that’s beside the point. The point is, in comparison to “Gas Mask Faith Test”, this was nothing.

My lack of culinary sense is compensated with an awareness on how to divert most emergencies –or so I tell myself– I opened up the windows, and set up my window sill fan. It’s starting to smell normal again (almost an hour later).

Good news is: My smoke detector didn’t go off!

Today, I saw this video:

But then, he talks about charging more and giving less fish. This might work with people in upper-class neighborhoods who could afford to shell out that kind of cash, or willing environmentally-conscious people, but this could not happen anywhere in Asia. Asians would eat the whole fish as is. The only thing left would be the bones, fins, and maybe part of the head. Point proven by this episode of “101East”:

So this leads to another topic: Sustainable and safe fish farms. In searching for the first video again, I came across two other videos regarding fish farms:

When i was in Hawaii, fish was surprisingly enough much more expensive than it was in mainland America. I mean, I’ve lived in coastal areas before, and fish was never this expensive. My first impression was that there were greedy unscrupulous people making a lot of money off of all of us in Hawaii. I’m sure that’s actually going on, but there’s more than that. We’re running out of food in the world, and a lot of attempts at reversing that are actually making things worse. However, with the right tools and resources, it doesn’t have to be this way.

I’ve said it before, and I’d like to re-emphasize it again. In fact, if I were to try to make some popcorn shrimp just like the Swedish Chef, my kitchen would probably do the same thing…

Once again, 沙茶醬 makes everything taste much better!

So after waking up from my nap, I noticed it was about 6pm. TIME FOR DINNER!!!

So… I took some pork chops, and then just went ahead, and tried my best to mince it. Well, it wasn’t quite minced, but at least I managed to chop it up into small pieces…

And of course, pork being pork, I just threw it into the 鑊, and immediately, all that fat turned into greasy oil, which makes frying up rice much easier! But before I did so, I did add some chilli oil, to give it a spicy flavor to it. Mixed it around, and then I added in the rice that was leftover from yesterday –When making fried rice, leftover rice is drier, and more suitable in fried rice. But knowing that there wouldn’t be enough flavor, I added in the 沙茶醬!!! _{You have to use a lot too}.

Every time I use this sauce to fry up some rice, it just makes everything taste that much better.

As with the Halibut MiSteak, I did the same thing, except, I used a lot more shacha oil, added some butter (not too much though, just enough to smooth over the skin), and basically everything else that was in the Halibut MiSteak but in a smaller amount. This time, I also added some soy sauce.

Came out much better. Although, the bottom was somewhat charred, and contained most of the salt flavor (this time, I didn’t flip it over, because I left the skin on. Much better. Although, once again, not much salmon flavor left. Need to fix that. Maybe I should just eat it raw next time. Just slice it up from the store, and eat it as is.

So I still have some halibut steak that Tom had left me. Now, when it comes to fish products, I hark back to the days when I was young, and my mom would fry up fish. I hated it. It was dry. In fact, I hate it when pork and beef are dry too. That’s why I prefer to eat beef, in rare form. But Pork on the other hand, is much more dangerous, so what does one do there? Simple. Grease it up with oils, and make sure it’s nice, fat, and oily. Mm… Solved! Another thing you can do to beef sometimes, is use lemon or lime juice as part of the marinade, to help make it more tender. So, I thought, I would put in a bunch of butter, and then grab some lime juice and cook up this halibut. The result? I put too much lemon juice, so it really ruined that Halibut flavor. Maybe if I’d just kept it with just the butter….

Other things I added:

• dashes of ginger.
• dashes of finely chopped thai basil (kinda’ like confetti, but not like dust).
• sea salt with dashes of thai pepper.

Things I could have done to lessen the damage:

• less lime juice, or maybe none at all.
• use regular salt instead of sea salt, or else you’ll still be biting on the sea salt.

Dave Chappelle changed the definition of “itis” from a suffix denoting inflammation, to word in it of itself, a word that implied “drowsiness, caused by eating too much”, from his “Dave Chappelle Show”. In that clip, he attributed the “itis” to a giant jar emulating medicine pill containers, with barbeque ribs inside, parodying sleeping pill commercials.
[If I could find the clip, I'd use it, but I can't. So you're stuck with buying the DVD, or catching an illegally uploaded clip online.]

I just finished some “LA-style갈비“, and now am feeling the itis setting in. Apparently, it doesn’t matter what you call ribs in any language, the itis will still get to you. Ugh…

It’s Tuesday, and Mm… The stuff I had from last Saturday’s Hotpot+Korean BBQ shindig is still good! In fact, I’ll admit. I might be leaving the marinated meat untouched for too long, because now that I’m cooking with it, it has an ever-so-slight fermented taste to it. Adds to the taste, I think, but I’d better eat faster. This stuff ain’t gonna’ last THAT long!

So yesterday, I missed the early train to get to the main station that would get me to Milan, Italy. So when I finally did wake up and tried to catch a later train, they were all out of seats. Apparently, I’d forgotten about Easter Day Weekend (Unlike in America, it’s an actual holiday here), and apparently Milano’s the place to go during this time.

Because here in Frankfurt, Germany, almost EVERYTHING shuts down. But according to my buddy, they all go out, party, and get drunk during Christmas. So why not Easter too?

In Europe, everything shuts down early, and it fuckin’ blows. But now, especially after yesterday, I realize why: Customer service sucks balls. It sucks so bad, people want to stay home and not deal with these fuckers. Fuck! Should’ve just gone back to Griesheim, and ate at that pizza place close by. If I’d known that they were miraculously open….

That restaurant that we did go to though, was pretty bad. The food was mediocre, and it was the second time that day, that I asked for plain old water, and the mineral water I got was more mineral than water. Then, the guy kept saying that I ordered a beer for my buddy. No, I ordered a Cola Light (“Diet Coke” for the Americans)! But he insisted we ordered the beer, and then, charged us up the ass $20 more than the actual price of everything. We only found this out, after checking the prices with the menu up front. GREAT! So we were ripped off too!

So that’s why shit shuts down early in Germany. Because customer service sucks so bad, people would much rather eat at home. So it’s probably safe to say that the businesses that stay open late enough, usually don’t get enough business and HAVE to stay open to try to attract a few more customers.

So my buddy once told me “You can always tell how cool a town is by how many Chinese restaurants they have”. Strangely enough, this white boy had a point.

Unfortunately, when it comes to “authentic” Asian food in Europe, or rather just any place outside of the Asian continent, it’s really hard to find. Which just reminds me more and more how places like Toronto, Los Angeles, California’s bay area, and other places are such rare gems.

However, when you want to combine good, authentic food with good service, that tends to be much harder. Now, I’m not expecting anything like the service you’d find in Japan, but I expect some basic courtesies.

Just now, I went to Thai Orchid in The Griesheim/Darmstadt area, and aside from the food not being spicy enough, everytime I’d tried to switch to a a language these people used, they would try to ignore me. Some Thai place! It’s run by ethnic Chinese from Vietnam! The best they ever did was stay in a Thai refugee camp before arriving to Europe!

Now to make “authentic” cuisine doesn’t depend on WHO is making it, but HOW it’s made. Authenticity? They failed. Service? My German isn’t good enough, they didn’t like my Vietnamese, and didn’t say anything when I asked for the bill in Cantonese. This place looks nice, but damn, service is horrible!