thoughts escaping my mind
Unlike my earlier trip to Hong Kong where I did a little reading on the country, I visited Seoul with zero expectations of it, except for my already-booked tour to the DMZ.
Besides the confusing names, arriving in about an hour late at around 6:45pm, it was dark, and after a flight where I barely got sleep, it felt like it was 11pm.
Okay, so off to Yosemite we head after LA.
At the famous Ahwahnee, with its massive (taller than me) fireplace, large dining hall etc, we were faced with a very limited yawn-inducing lunch menu of mainly sandwiches.
The service was slow. In this grand hall of 50 tables, only 5 were taken at the time we went in and most tables only had two-somes – we still had to wait a good twenty minutes for our sandwiches. Perhaps the assumption is that we’d love the grandeur of the dining hall so much that we would wait.
But hungry people do not have the stomach for good views. We were just waiting and wondering when food would come.
So some people have been bugging me about updates about my trip.
Since I’m already back for two days, I guess it’s long overdue. But this will only cover the US portion of the trip. Most food photos were taken with my mobile phone, in available lighting, no flash, so some were really crappy.
Anyway, here goes:
In the Straits Times today, 19th October 2009, the article “Food bloggers face legal heat over reviews“, caught my eye.
As a child, during mooncake festival, there was nothing more I loved than the Lotus Mooncake with two yellow yolks. I despised the nut version, which I found lacking in nuts, and full of winter melon. It was too sweet and too rich.
Somewhere between then and about 8 years or so ago, when I had almost completely stopped eating mooncake, both lotus and nut version, I decided to taste a nut mooncake again.
That was the turning point. Not only did I start to eat mooncake again whenever mooncake festival came, I switched from my preference of lotus mooncakes to nut mooncakes.
During this time, of course, snow skin mooncakes had come up in popularity and they seem to be going strong still, judging from the new flavours coming out every year. But it never won me over. It’s the initial taste of flour that hits the tongue that I can’t get over. And some snow skin mooncakes have an overwhelming stench of artificial flavouring, much like the smell of cheap perfumed cards, that’s such a turn off.
Even though Mooncake Festival has come and gone, it’s only today that I managed to sit down with the nut versions of the mooncake from the popular Hong Kong bakeries of Wing Wah and Kee Wah.
Today is the first time I’m spending Mooncake Festival alone in a long while. It used to be that my mother would make us have mooncake, tiny yams and that horned coconut tasting thing, which I don’t know what it’s called. We would consume this with good Chinese tea, sitting under the full moon.
So, I decided to conduct my mooncake tasting tonight.
Originally, I wanted just to compare the mooncakes I’d gotten from Hong Kong from Kee Wah and Wing Wah, since out of four people who spoke to me about mooncakes, the preference was split 50-50. But, my sister brought over a specimen from East Ocean, so I put that to the test too.
So today was an early day for me. 6:30am out of the house to the market to get some inspiration for Friday’s barbecue, but I found none.
Instead, what I did find was a pack labeled “animal meat” at Sheng Siong.
Why, oh, why do I always do this to myself?
I don’t cook frequently, yet when I do, it must be these big multi-hour productions that don’t always end up the way I envision them.
Total cooking time: 5 hours.
Total eating time: 30 minutes. Maybe less
So I over estimated the number of ribs my guests would eat, which means now, I have photos of the ribs that were featured at my most recent barbecue. This time however, they will be finished in the oven.
Along with the ribs, I made a tomato salad and pumpkin, all ingredients that I used for my barbecue to complete dinner this evening.
