Category: Food

Here is my Yuengling Lager beer I am having in the lounge in Pittsburgh airport.  I am heading back to Seattle, again via Denver.  It was sunny but cold here today.  I had to scrape a layer of frost from the rental car’s windows this morning.

 

I helped Anheuser-Busch put their SAP system in (this started in 1995).  A major article about the company and its beer just appeared in Bloomberg Businessweek.   Taken over by InBev in 2008, the A-B company, its iconic Budweiser beer and its packaging have been targeted with cost cutting by 52-year old Brazilian-born CEO Carlos Brito.  As far as investors are concerned Brito has done extremely well.  For beer-drinkers and traditionalists, it’s a different story. No more Hallentauer Mittelfrüh hops from Germany for Budweiser, no more whole grain rice (broken rice will do), and out of business goes one of its two beech wood chip suppliers in Tennessee.  Check out this cool ’99 Beer Facts’ chart from the Bloomberg Businessweek’s on-line issue.

Don’t be too shocked, but I have never owned a rice cooker! So I picked up this little Black and Decker model that can cook all of three cups of rice. It went for only $16 on a department store sale. Put the rice and water in (a cheat sheet tells you how much of each), and switch the machine on.  And 25 mins later you have perfectly cooked rice.  How easy is that?! And how does the cooker know when to switch from ‘cook’ to ‘warm’?  Well, water boils at an even temperature (and the steam escapes through a hole in the cooker’s lid).  As soon as the water is gone, the temperature of the rice rises, the signal to the cooker’s thermostat to turn off the heat and switch to ‘warm’ mode.  And there it is, waiting for you – warm fluffy cooked rice.

P.S.  And here is the most famous South African brand of rice that I remember from my childhood.  ‘It’s so easy, a child can do it’, said the commercials on TV back then.  It is parboiled (partially boiled) in the husk before packaging, and takes less time to cook.  About 50% of the world’s paddy production gets this treatment.

The Great Eagle is a grocery store here in Cranberry township north of Pittsburgh, and what a bargain its hot food buffet is!  Get exactly what you want, without waiting for your meal in a restaurant after a long day of meetings.   The store also has an amazing collection of beers for sale from all over the world.

 

My friends and I went to Bent Burger in the Seward Park neighborhood for a burger and a beer. (No, the burgers are perfectly even and not ‘bent’. Bent is the family that owns the restaurant).   I had a turkey burger with yam fries : very good.

 

So fall season has started officially here in the Northern Hemisphere.  It was a little grey on Saturday morning and I decided it’s high time I baked some rusks again, from a recipe I got from my mom a long time ago (1996 says the date on the hand-written fax with the recipe).  Rusks are hard, dry biscuits that are twice-baked to dry them out completely.  The pictures show the progression and the final result.  It takes a little patience to dry the rusks out, and the whole house smells rusky and biscuity afterwards, but hey, that’s not a problem. I discovered that there is such a thing as aluminum-free baking powder, and got some. Supposedly it makes for a better taste of cookies or biscuits that are baked with it.

 

 

Our training is complete, three-hour exam and all (three essay type questions, and what a shock to write an exam in long-hand pen on paper!).  Here are some pictures from my Friday night walk-about.

 

 

I could not get myself to throw this cool aluminum can in the recycle bin, so it came home with me all the way from a vending machine in Tokyo!  And what would ‘gokuri’ mean?  It is a Japanese adverb, roughly meaning  (drink down) gulpingly or noisily.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Here is a limited edition blue  ‘Aape’ Pepsi can that I spotted here at work. (They come in brown as well, and yes, that is an ape face in the circle .. with several other faces floating around in the camouflage).  As far as I can tell the cans are marketed only in China.

 

It’s Rainier cherry season and I got some even though they are pretty darn expensive.   The cherries were cultivated back in 1952 in Washington State. They are very sensitive to temperature, wind, and rain. About a third of a Rainier cherry orchard’s crop is eaten by birds.

‘Blue is back’ says the box of Smarties chocolate bean candies (Nestlé’s version of M&Ms that I bought in South Africa).  Yes, but which ones are blue? I see periwinkle and lavender but no blue.  Must be the ‘no artificial colours’ that mutes the colors. Aww.  I guess Nestlé wants to avoid the situation that Mars candy company had some time ago.  Red M&Ms were discontinued from 1976 to 1985 after the FDA banned Red Dye No. 2 — even though M&M’s did not contain this dye.

Here is my acquisition of the day from the fruit market : a papaya (in Chinese木瓜 mù​ guā), which means ‘tree melon’.  Yes, papayas grow on trees with a single stem that can get 10m (30ft) tall.  Papayas have good stuff inside, with lots of vitamin A and vitamin C.

Here’s Friday night’s dinner menu from the newly remodeled Wild Seafood Restaurant across from the Sheraton Hotel.  We ordered all the items shown here except the chao fan (fried rice).  And we did have seafood – a big grey, flat fish from the restaurant’s fish tanks as usual – a little bit like a sole, which is cooked and served up with a soy-sesame oil-green onion sauce.

So! These are the biscuits that came out of the Especially Thick Biscuit box.  The biscuits are in the mold of ‘rich tea’ or Marie biscuits.   They are good and ‘super big’, but not thick in dimension.  It turns out the thickness refers to the consistency of the biscuit.

This cardboard box with the cute translation is from the grocery store at work.  I will see if I can find some of the ‘especially thick biscuit’ on the shelf tomorrow !

These are Chinese bayberries (yáng ​méi 杨梅) from the fruit market close to where we work.  They are about the size of a US quarter coin, sweet, tart, and have a round seed in the middle of the fruit.