deep-fried twinkie and deep-fried oreo (death through grease and sugar--mmm)

I feel like I should say something about the experience about eating these things a few weekends ago.

First, a justification against claims such as:
-Ew!
-Why would you put something like that in your body?
-SO MUCH FAT
-That is a frightening piece of food...

...this is something that I will eat once and ONE TIME ONLY, just because I feel it's an experience that I need to have given my extreme food adventurousness. Also, given that I just had this once, the calories will distribute themselves out. Oh yes, most importantly, these things were free, because it was part of a school fair where all the food was free, so I am not actually endorsing this type of food behavior, and am instead just participating in it as a kind of spectator (albeit one with front-row seats).

Deep-fried Twinkie: I've never had a Twinkie, so no comparison there. Deep-fried Twinkie was better than I expected, because once you bite into its crisp, greasy crust, the Twinkie filling oozes out into your mouth as a sugary mess (one that is only achieved through the wonders of artificial flavoring and high-fructose corn syrup I'm guessing). Could not finish it though, just because the grease on my fingers (I was eating this with my hands) reminded me of the process that created this monster.

Deep-fried Oreo: Marginally better than the Twinkie (at least I thought so) because the bitter taste of the black oreo cookie was able to balance out the sugary-sweetness of the white filling. Still greasy and all, but not bad.

Side note...I looked up how many calories were in a deep-fried Twinkie, expecting like 1000+ calories or so, but it turned out to be around 450 (and I'm assuming the Oreo had less)...so overall, not bad! I was satisfied with the explorations of my palate to American fair favorites. Of course, I went to the gym to burn off those calories+fat the week following my deep-fried tastings.

Additional side note: I actually ate dinner the day I had these deep-fried concoctions in Chinatown. Suffice to say, the proportion of salads in my diet has increased slightly.

Because I don't want to start my paper...Volare!

So I have not updated this blog in a while...a long while. This is what a combined total of 5 weeks worth of midterms has done to me. Sigh.

Volare: Went here with friends because we wanted to watch Iron Man 2 on the weekend it came out (it was decently good as a sequel, but the first one better I thought--Robert Downey Jr. of course, was funny as always). I saw this restaurant on Yelp, and decided on this one because it got decent reviews. So, here goes.

First off, the bread. I did not like the bread, because it was not warm. Not only that but the bread was not even good bread (definition of good bread: soft, crusty and chewy--the bread in Volare was spongy, cold and hard), which may be acceptable when not warm. Anyway, to the food...

Zuppetta de Cozze al Vino Bianco o al Pomodoro (of course I--we--picked the vino over the pomodoro): I really liked this dish, because the mussels were soaked in the buttery, white wine sauce, which made the bad bread (see above) good. In addition, soaked in the sauce (of which there was a lot of) was a piece of crusty bread SOAKED in buttery, winey, mussel-y goodness. I feel like they cooked the bread with the mussels, and that bread was the best part of that dish.

Fritto di Calamari: Calamari to me is just what it is--fried squid. Nothing really special, since it's really difficult to mess up calamari--it just has to be hot and crisp. This calamari passed my test on both counts. Nothing spectacular, so I shall move on.

Salmonata (with fettucini): Probably the best pasta that we ordered, in my opinion. The salmon was good and savory, which went well with the creamy sauce such that the pasta was not sickening (which is what happens with a lot of cream sauces most of the time).

Vodka (with hand-made gnocchi): probably my least favorite among the pastas that we ate, which was partly my fault since I picked gnocchi as the pasta in the heat of the moment (and since I didn't think the sauce was really going to be that heavy...). In any case, the creaminess of the pasta and the heaviness of the gnocchi was a bad combination. Also, there was no "vodka flavor" to the pasta, which was disappointing--I mean, obviously the alcohol evaporates but there should still be some type of flavor imparted into the sauce right?

Arrabbiata (with angel hair noodles): In my opinion, the sauce was too acidic, and did not have the depth of flavor that I would generally attribute to an arrabbiata which is gained through the noticable appearance of pancetta and garlic in the sauce. For this sauce, I was so focused on the acidity of the tomatoes that I could not discern any pancetta at all, or any garlic taste. It really makes me want to cook a decent arrabbiata just to have the satisfaction of eating one that was done correctly.

Overall, we were full (no room for dessert) and enjoyed ourselves (good company). I must say that I was rather underwhelmed and disappointed to some degree about the food, which was not that cheap either. Maybe I'm just too harsh on Italian food--the large quantity of Italian restaurants in the Philippines makes me a very discerning eater.

cookie making and ingredient hijacking

It was my friend's birthday yesterday, and since I wanted to do something nice for her, I decided to bake her some of my cookies and give some Nutella to go along with it. :)

Here are the cookies:

And this is the story that goes along with them:

Basically, I don't like spending extra money if I don't have to. Since ingredients cost money, I decided to...take ingredients for free from as many sources possible. In other words...

- I took baking powder, baking soda, vanilla extract and espresso powder from my aunt when I visited her a few weeks ago

-I took butter, 1 cup of brown sugar and an egg from the dining hall at 9:30 in the morning (as well as spoons+bowls, which I returned after)

-I used some random person's bowl that was in the kitchen

-I went to someone else's dorm kitchen to bake everything (since mine is TOO SMALL and kind of disgusting)

-I saw some foil in that other kitchen and used it

-I used a baking tray that was in my dorm's kitchen

...total cost of ingredients (flour)+Nutella: $5.30, split between 3 people--$1.70 total cost. WONDERFUL. I am so Asian. ^_^ (HAHAHA to Asian smiley face)

Cubs game

The thing with me is that I am not really a sports person. I mean, I will watch football, basketball, soccer, etc... (just not golf and curling), but I don't really "follow" sports teams and all, aside from things related to national pride (i.e. Manny Pacquiao and boxing).

In any case, my school was giving out free tickets to see a Cubs game to 150 people. Yes, FREE. Of course I tried to get tickets, and succeeded (after 45 minutes in line, I was #126 I think).

But yes, baseball. I like watching baseball live because it's a slow-paced enough game that it's perfectly acceptable to walk around during middle of it and disappear for innings at a time to go look at the concession stands (which is, by the way what I ended up doing when I was watching the Mariners game in Seattle--I now have a pretty good general idea of what is being sold and where it is located in Safeco field). Another thing with Mariners games is that most of the time, the Mariners were not really winning anyway (sorry Seattle people, but it is true), so there was no pressure to sit and watch for a home run or something exciting to happen.

Compared to watching a Mariner's game, watching the Cubs game was a different experience. Aside from the fact that the stadium was a lot older (and also did not have a huge screen to watch close-up views of the players), there was a "fan spirit" that permeated the air of the stadium that made up for the lack-of-TV. Everyone seemed to be pretty into the game, such that my impression was that there were a lot more fans than spectators. Also, Cubs won 10-5 against the Diamondbacks with 4 home runs. Not that I was paying close attention at every point in the game though (although I really did watch most of it). Hahaha. I'm glad I went with my friend who actually likes (and watches) baseball because I would just get my commentary/recap on a second-hand basis (and also after the fact).

Here are pictures of Wrigley field:

And of course, the food (sadly, we missed one home run while we were getting this but it's okay):

Note on the selection of food--I missed Seattle food while I was here because Seattle has Japanese food (go Ichiro!), other Asian food (go Asians on the West Coast!) and REALLY GOOD GARLIC FRIES (fries topped with raw garlic, salt and parsley)-->vampires would hate these fries (sorry Edward Cullen).

Chicago dog: Obviously, overpriced at $5.25. It was a regular hotdog with onions (yum). And I just put A LOT of mustard on it...of course, no ketchup for me because I am in Chicago.

Kettle Corn: Also overpriced at $6, even though it was A LOT of kettle corn (see below for approximation--maybe 1 and a half of those bags).

I was very disappointed that their water WAS SO EXPENSIVE at around $4 a bottle (I refuse to pay this much for water even though I love it so much). Given that, I did not drink water for the entire time I was there and was quite dehydrated when I got back.

Nuevo Leon, or a very philanthropic foodventure

Pilsen is, and will always will be (to some extent) linked to good memories. To enumerate:

Orientation week before school started, dinner with Hispanic friends, winter foodventure...and now a spring foodventure that was also philanthropic.

So let me explain the philanthropy. I have a friend who is really skinny, whose goal is to reach the same body proportions as Keira Knightley. Also, this friend is a guy, and he probably weighs less than me--partly because he forgets to eat and does not eat that much anyway. For me and Alice, this is unacceptable behavior, because food is an essential part of the day--the thought of "forgetting" about a meal is a bit shocking. In any case, we invited this friend to our foodventure.

So here's what we ended up eating...

Churros at Don Churro: SO GOOD. They were only a dollar, and they had different flavors of fillings--chocolate, caramel, strawberry, bavarian... I got bavarian, Alice got chocolate and Kevin got caramel, and we all liked our churros. Yum.

Free Appetizers: chips, salsa, soup

Chips-freshly fried and not from the bag

Salsa-tasted fresh, as always

Soup-always good and it has actual stuff in it (meat)

Lengua a la Mexicana: Lengua has always one of my comforting, childhood foods to be sure. I have so many fond memories of eating lengua from a very young age where I went to this restaurant in the Philippines that served lengua with mushroom sauce, and buttered vegetables+rice on the side. YUM. In any case, back to this lengua. It was cooked perfectly, to the point that it was tender--its tomato-based salsa sauce with a lot of onions went well with the lengua, making it a very hearty but not too filling dish. The lengua was served with flour and corn tortillas that were made by hand, so they were a LOT better than the dining hall ones that I tried today--in other words, did not taste like styrofoam.

Carne Asada Tacos: Well, I've actually never tried these myself, so I shall let Alice's picture speak for itself. That and the fact that this picture is from another time that we went to Nuevo Leon, where Alice also ordered the same thing.

Huevos Rancheros: Kevin got these, and he actually finished the whole thing (which is an accomplishment), so I'm assuming they were good. Unfortunately, I have no pictures to document how his food looked like before or after he ate it, so you will never know how it looked like or whether he actually finished his food. Maybe next time.

Horchata: Nueva Leon has the best horchata I've had. Normally, the horchata I've had in the past has been powdery or too sweet, but the horchata here is perfect and smooth. Also very good cleansing out your palate when you eat spicy food.

funventures and yumventures

Yay! Today I made $22 and got a free ticket to see a Cubs game!

That made me happy. Free things are always the best, even though I do understand that there are uncounted costs within the "free" umbrella that make things not totally costless.

So. Yesterday my mom sent me a bunch of Anthony Bourdain clips from Youtube and my mouth just watered (I WANT DIMSUM AND PEKING DUCK AND CHILI CRAB--yes, I was watching Asia-located shows).

Combine that with my friend and I looking at various Chicago restaurants and seeing (dreaming/imagining) which ones we would go to if money was not an issue. Oh Alinea, Charlie Trotter's, Spiaggia and contemporaries, how I want to visit you...

Here's where I went last week though:

Sunshine Cafe, somewhere in Andersonville for a glorious foodventure/yumventure/tongueventure/tumventure/nomventure (we discussed the various permutations of this expedition) with ALICE LI (shoutout!) and as always, Yelp did not disappoint. I went here once before with my mom and my cousin's cousin and so decided to go again because I was craving Japanese noodles. Yumyum. Japanese food is one of my comfort foods, having eaten it pretty regularly as a child.

Sunshine Cafe has really nice Japanese food. I say "really nice" as opposed to something like "so extremely amazing" or "I would die because this is so overwhelmingly good" because it was just that--nice. In other words, it was very simple, very comforting Japanese food served in a homey environment. A better description would be to say: if I were Japanese, this is the type of food that my grandmother would serve me (since she would be a good cook--of course).

So, here you go, and these are from my own camera (which is pretty bad--especially if you look at the picture of the potato croquette--my apologies, I am just a poor college student):

Interior of Sunshine Cafe: it was around 5:30 on a sunny, Saturday afternoon when we had dinner so there were not a lot of customers yet--while we were eating though, there were a LOT of people who started to arrive and so the place was pretty full at around 6-6:30ish.

Tea and the chopsticks cover with their name on it: their tea was pretty good green tea (pretty standard but it had matcha in it so that made it nice), and the waitress refilled it a lot while we were eating so my cup always had tea in it during the entirety of the meal.

Grilled Eggplant: who knew eggplant could taste so different when it was grilled? The thing with grilled eggplant is, a lot of the time it's cut too thick so the middle part is quite raw in a sense and so the whole eggplant experience is not that great. However, this eggplant was cut pretty thinly, so the flavor came out quite nicely. Paired with the shaved ginger and the sweet sauce on the side, the eggplant was pretty delicious. :)

Potato Croquette: We ordered this because a lot of the Yelpers were raving about it. The potato croquettes were very...fresh. You could taste that they just were just fried, and the panko crust was still crispy, which contrasted with the mashed potato inside that was combined with carrots and other good things. To be perfectly honest though, as good as this was, I thought that the attention accorded to this was largely overblown. Compared to the eggplant, the eggplant wins in my taste test.

Pork udon: I've always loved udon for its chewiness and the simplicity of its broth, and this bowl of udon was good on all those levels. Not much else to add about this udon, but that it gave me a warm, fuzzy feeling of comfort, which I think is always a good thing. It was simple food that was executed well (which in some respects encapsulates the entire Sunshine Cafe experience).

Oh, to add: my friend that I was with ate their Tonkatsudon. It was good tonkatsu, which is hard to find especially it is very dry and unseasoned in many restaurants that I've been to. She said that this udon was better than the udon that she had in the Japanese airport. Also, my other friend who's part-Japanese said that the broth was good after tasting the leftovers of this meal--after which I can conclude that since if it tasted authentic 2 days after, it must've been really authentic while I was eating it.

We walked around in Andersonville after, later going on to Argyle (Vietnamtown is there!), which was about 10 minutes away. Food, friends, sun=fun. :)

More movies

Both of these are a bit overdue, but here you go...Megan's movie's in three sentences spiel (first sentence summary, second sentence what I think of the movie, third sentence "Megan advice")

1.Fight Club

(1) One guy (let's call him Cornelius) realizes that he cannot fall asleep and so he starts going to support groups (where he pretends to be in need of support, and somehow becomes addicted to support groups because they allow him to sleep), after a while of being a support group tourist, he meets Marla Singer who is also a support group tourist like him (which is a bad thing, because he falls back into insomnia); in this newfound state of insomnia, his condominium burns down and he meets Tyler Durden, with whom he helps create an underground fight club that grows to scary proportions at the end (because of Tyler Durden); Cornelius tries to stop the escalating violence emerging from Fight Club but then realizes something that changes everything (not going to reveal this because I didn't know it when I watched it and thought it was pretty mind-blowing).

(2) This is such a guy movie (gore and violence)--even with that, I thought it was such a good movie (Brad Pitt's abs helped) that reminded me in a sense of Wanted (but not really) and American Psycho (focus on material goods--Ikea).

(3) If you befriend someone who has Brad Pitt's abs (or is Brad Pitt), be very careful.

2. The Shining

(1) Jack Torrance decides to become a caretaker for a hotel over the winter (despite the fate of the old caretaker and his family) and brings his family (including a son who has a weird relationship with his imaginary friend, has psychic powers of seeing ghosts and events of the past and the future) with him to the Stanley Hotel; everything is fine at first but Jack starts to display signs of aggression caused in part by cabin fever--this aggression escalates during a snowstorm where the family becomes trapped in a hotel and Jack becomes influenced by the ghosts of the hotel and goes on a mad rage to try and kill his family.

(2) Creepy movie but I was able to sleep that night because I dissociated myself from the movie by focusing on technical aspects like acting (also, there were parts that were SO RANDOM during suspenseful parts--and by random I mean shot of person in a rabbit costume kneeling down and doing something to someone else who was on a bed--I have NO IDEA what that was supposed to mean).

(3) Yeah...don't become a caretaker for a hotel during the winter (AND OBVIOUSLY DON'T IF IT'S A HAUNTED HOTEL).

*Note: interesting story about this movie though--I was talking to one of my friends and she said that her dad brought her mom to a hotel for an anniversary and they watched this movie there together. I would not want that to happen to me. I would have nightmares...not even kidding.