Category: Food

Wednesday morning had me in the office early to prepare some lessons for the day’s training. The slice of pumpkin bread from you-know-who (Starbucks) and a banana was breakfast.

Is it OK to put gourmet* together with ‘noodle bowl’ and call your Asian restaurant the Gourmet Noodle Bowl? .. given that gourmet is (from Wikipedia) a cultural ideal associated with  haute cuisine, which is characterized by elaborate preparations and presentations of large meals of small, often quite rich courses?   No matter, they serve up great Chinese, Taiwanese and Indonese food there, and we ended the meal with ice cream servings of mango, green tea and durian flavors.  There is a picture of durian – the king of fruit – on my post of Tue Mar 27.

 

 

My dinner was vindaloo, basmati rice and pita bread last night at The Elysian Pub here in Seattle. Vindaloo is an Indian curry dish popular in the region of Goa but also in many other parts of India. Goa is India’s smallest state by area and is south of Mumbai on the west coast.

Our project is rapidly nearing its end.  I am leaving on Saturday, so I have to start packing up – and clear out the little food items I have squirreled away in the hotel room.  These cute little cans of peas and mushrooms are from Japan and came complete with pull-top lids.

This ‘Big Pasture’ beef jerky brought back to us from a colleague that visited Mongolia is very good !  It’s dry and breaks up as you chew it, so it doesn’t stick between one’s teeth the way jerky sometimes do.  The black 肉character right at the end means ‘meat’.

I was too late to snap a picture of the margerita pizzas* (玛格丽特  披萨 mǎ​gé​lì​tè pī​sà, we had on Wednesday here at work.  (See the writing at the top of the box?).  So one of the 24 pizza boxes is all I can show. The pizzas were quite good, with a thin crust. It is quite possible that the little Aloha Beach Club restaurant had to stretch the pizza dough it had on hand for our monster order.

*Legend has it that in 1889, during a visit to Naples, Queen Margherita of Italy was served a pizza resembling the colors of the Italian flag, red (tomato), white (mozzarella) and green (basil) .. and that is how Pizza Margherita got its name.

 

 

 

 

Saturday was cold and rainy, so I felt better about having to knuckle down and work .. and drink my beverages that I got from the grocery store across the street.  The sweetened Wanglaoji herbal tea (red can) rivals Coca- Cola in popularity in mainland China.  I think the green Wanglaoji version is a new flavor since I had not seen it before. It’s certainly new to me : you go whoa! what are those flavors in there? Well – it’s lotus seed and mungo bean, buster !  And of course I had to look both up on Wikipedia to see that they look like.

I like to check out the baijiu* packaging in the grocery stores here.  Some are downright spectacular.  And at 50% alcohol I am sure one soon starts to experience the fantasy worlds depicted on the boxes that the liquor is presented in.

*clear white liquor drink typically distilled from rice (southern China) or sorghum (northern China)

There is a wonderful fruit market here at the local shopping center at work. The oranges on the left are sweet and seedless. The little yellow fruit on the right are mangoes, but I’m not sure of the cultivar name. There are hundreds, says Wikipedia. The little ones have the same tough skin, and taste the same as the bigger, rounder ones that have a red ‘blush’  .. that wild tropical mango taste.  I have never quite grown fond of the way mangoes taste, though. Maybe I just have not eaten enough of them to appreciate them!

My colleague and I ordered fish for dinner at a restaurant here.   A good bet is always one of the flat white fishes.  They are quick to cook – you pick one from the fish tanks outside! And the bones stay in one piece.  We are not sure if it’s a kind of flounder, or maybe a sole. The fish is very white inside when cooked, and it is served up with a sesame oil-soy sauce and a garnish of spring onion.  Very tasty.

Three of us went to the Dameisha Sheraton for dinner, but this time in the Italian restaurant instead of in the lobby downstairs. And what wine did we have? A pinotage from the doorstep of my South African homestead Stellenbosch where I was a student, and lived for some time later on.  Pinotage is probably South Africa’s signature red grape, around since 1925.  Even so, some South African winemakers will not have it in their vineyards. Says Wikipedia : ‘A common complaint is the tendency to develop isoamyl acetate during winemaking which leads to a sweet pungency that often smells like paint’.  Ouch.

Every year on Feb 9, the Fisherman’s Cooperative in Tokyo offers fine torafugu (Japanese puffer fish) to the Imperial Palace. The picture is from NHK TV.  Fugu has become one of the most celebrated and notorious dishes in Japanese cuisine.  It must be meticulously prepared to remove toxic parts and to avoid contaminating the meat with the lethal poison tetrodotoxin found in the little fish’s organs. There is no antidote, and the poison is not affected by cooking.  It attacks the nervous system and leaves its victims unable to breathe.  The best the emergency room can do for you is to pump you full of active carbon (to absorb the poison from your stomach) and put you on life support to see if you make it !

I got these ‘lady finger’ bananas from a colleague.  She got them from a seller at a gas station a few hours away.  The little bananas are sweet, and are grown in Australia as well.

We still go to lunch every day at 12.00 noon to the cafeteria : a welcome break from the slog at work.  These dragon fruit are from a fruit seller close by.  I didn’t buy any today but will get some next time and report back how much they cost.

Here are two more cute signs from the large cafeteria where we have lunch every day.  Yes, spice yourself up instead of  ‘Blame yourself’ as one of the Republican presidential candidates used to say!  But for the record, I steer clear of any more spices in my food from the self-service counter.   What’s already in there is all I can handle!

This traditional little mandarin tree with red gift envelopes was at the entrance of the Dameisha Sheraton on Friday night.  During Chinese New Year, mandarin oranges and tangerines are considered traditional symbols of abundance and good fortune.   I had my usual beer but some of us had a gin and tonic.  The back of the little bottle of Bombay Sapphire gin with the 10 ‘exotic’ ingredients generated some discussion.  (How exotic can almond and lemon peel be?).  The gin was introduced in 1987 by Bacardi.  And of course after that Bombay became Mumbai (in 1995).     I ran into the Nestlé dragon display in the local grocery store on the way back.  I wonder if I would have gotten in trouble if I had taken down those yellow price signs so the dragons’ faces could be seen clearly!

A few colleagues and I are staying put for the weekend.  So we had a beer at the Sheraton – to celebrate the end of the work week, of course! I actually had a German Erdinger Weissbier.   The Kirin beer can pictures are from my flight in back on Tue night. Kirin beer is named after a qílín – a mythical hooved Chinese chimerical* creature known throughout various East Asian cultures, said to bring good luck.   *composed of the parts of different animals.   The Japanese braille (yes, just a little different from standard Braille!) on the can says ‘Kirin beer’ and has been on their cans for a few years now.  Could it say ‘open’? I thought when I saw it, then realized that cannot be, since it’s so easy for exploring fingers to find the pull tab.  But in the dark or if you cannot see, it will distinguish this can from ones with soda pop or something else!  Finally, a really close look reveals that the Kanji characters キリンfor Kirin are hidden in the creature’s mane and tail.

This last picture is from a post from a blog called ‘Tokyo Five’, showing the hidden characters キリンin the picture.

We worked on Saturday but ended the day right with a lively and enjoyable barbecue at two of our colleagues’ apartment here in Dameisha ..  complete with beef steak and salmon brought over from the USA!   One of our Chinese colleagues brought these cookies made by Japanese company Shiroi Koibito for dessert.

Even I could figure out the chocolat blanc (white chocolate) but did not know that langue de chat is a classic French cookie (translation : the tongue of the cat .. which explains the cat depiction on the golden open-and-close sticker!).    (Yes of course the cookies melt in one’s mouth).    The cookie factory is on Hokkaido island (see the map -the big northern-most island in Japan).  That is also where Mount Rishiri (picture on the box) is located.

Open wide ..!  That’s a ‘Hot Babe’ BBQ pork sandwich (burger?*) with a little coleslaw and carrot, and with sweet potato fries.    This item is a permanent fixture on the Elysian Brewing Company’s menu.  The beer I had was called ‘Hibernation Ale’ and it was a little too dark and heavy for me.  I should have gone with the one that all my compadres had : the ‘Fireside Chat’, an early winter seasonal brew with a brown color.

*a burger has a meat or vegetarian patty, which is not the case with this one