Category: Food

This cartoon is from John Atkinson’s ‘Wrong Hands’ cartoon blog, here.  For my readers that may not know what the heck Instagram is, and what the cartoon pokes fun at, let me help.  Instagram is an online mobile photo-sharing service.  Its users (you need to set up an Instagram account first) take pictures and share them on Facebook and Twitter. People take all kinds of silly pictures with their phones, and many times of the food or dessert that they are about to eat : a totally 21st century social media phenomenon. So here we have a smart and dexterous kitty cat called Max, using his mobile phone and an Instagram account to post pictures of his food everyday. Go Max!  How about a mouse?

I have a bad cold and so I missed the Fremont (it’s a Seattle neighborhood) Solstice Parade with its naked* bicycle riders this year.  *OK, they have body paint on, but they are an evergreen source of titillation for the crowd.   The parade celebrates the start of summer here in the Northern Hemisphere.

I did make it out of the house to go gather some food at my local grocery store, though .. and found some nice Japanese gummy candy to cheer me up.

‘I’ll have a Japanese soda’, I told the waitress at the sushi restaurant where we ate on Monday. (That’s all the menu said : ‘Japanese soda’). Hello, what’s this? I thought when the bottle with the narrow neck and the blue plastic top fused onto the glass bottle arrived.  There is a carbonated marble in the top that you push into the drink when you open it.  Wikipedia says Ramune is one of the modern symbols of summer in Japan and is widely consumed during warm festival days and nights.  It has been around since 1876.

What’s a Jimmy lunch? Why, it’s a lunchbox from the sandwich franchise Jimmy Johns. I would say my lunch made for a classic American lunch : a turkey sandwich (with a pickle), a bag of chips and a cookie.   No soda pop for me, though. Too much sugar and therefore verboten.

The Today Show of Friday morning featured matcha, a finely ground powder of specially grown and processed green tea leaves*.  Weatherman Al Roker and anchor Matt Lauer each took a sip and pulled a face.  The green tea has been around for centuries in Japan, but now gaining popularity here in the USA, especially in San Francisco.   So I would have to find a place that serve it up and try it.   I think the stuff definitely blows one’s hair back ! It looks a lot stronger than regular green tea.

*Green tea has epigallocatechin gallate (EGCG) in abundance, a polyphenol shown to pep one up and fight off diseases.

 

My friends and I went to Lark Restaurant tonight .. newly located in a repurposed warehouse on 10th Ave in Capitol Hill.  It’s nice to see a ‘new’ place that for once did not involve the complete demolition of the original building.  I see the restaurant bills itself as offering ‘French’ food .. but I had a very Pacific Northwestern meal of salad and salmon and that universal of desserts, a gooey and chocolate-y.  All very nice.  The ‘Old German Lager’ style beer I had was brewed in Pittsburgh and did not quite hit the mark for me, though.

 

There’s a new Mediterranean fast- casual* restaurant close to where we work, and we went there for lunch this week.  You choose falafels or a kebab, and then they add rice or lentils.  They have some unusual side salads as well, such as eggplant and beet and kale.

*From Wikipedia : A fast-casual restaurant is a type of restaurant that does not offer full table service, but promises a higher quality of food with fewer frozen or processed ingredients than a fast-food restaurant.

 

It’s Sunday night.  My bags are packed, and my peace made with what I could get to, for the weekend, and what I could not.   There will be another weekend soon, right?

Check out my grocery items from my stop at the Asian grocery store Uwajimaya on Saturday.  We are omnivores (most of us), and modern-day scavengers for food : food in the grocery store, that is, not the jungle or the savanna !

The little card is from the Starbucks across the street from the hotel here in Walnut Creek. Sulawesi is a large island that is part of Indonesia.  I found that out when I wanted to know where the ‘special reserve’ coffee from Starbucks came from.    The water painting art on the card must be a nod to the cave paintings found on the island.  In October 2014 it was announced that paintings in Maros had been dated as being about 40,000 years old – among the oldest anywhere on earth.

 

My friends and I went ten-pin bowling for the first time in years on Saturday night.  We did not do too badly, breaking a 100 for both the rounds.  (Yes, a long way from the perfect score of 300, but spare a thought for President Obama’s bowling disaster while on the 2008 campaign trail.  While attempting to woo blue collar voters in Pennsylvania, he bowled a 37.  Several balls into the gutter.  The late night comedians were relentless in making fun of it.)    Afterwards we went to Jack’s BBQ.  The owner (Jack, of course) that started the restaurant spent 12 years working at Microsoft and decided it was time to pursue his passion for making barbecue the way they do in Texas, and offering it to Seattle diners.   The brisket that I had was great, and I give the black-eyed-pea salad top marks as a very tasty side dish.

 

 

Here’s the Year of the Ram table advertisement for TsingTao beer (say ‘Ching-Dow’, advises the sign) at the Jade Garden (Chinese) restaurant where we had lunch today.   It was a wild day, and I may have looked a little like this ram at the end of it .. and just very happy to get out of the office and call it done !

We have three Chinese colleagues in our team, and therefore we ran out to the ‘Little Sheep Mongolian Hot Pot’* restaurant here in the city of Dublin on the east side of the Bay.  It is the start of the Lunar New Year 2015.

‘I love the arrival of the Lunar New Year’, I told my colleagues.  You just think the year is not new anymore, and then the celebrations of the Lunar New Year comes.

*As far as we could tell, it’s a coincidence that the name of the restaurant matches the Lunar New Year’s zodiac animal : the sheep.

I’m hardly ever home on Wednesdays, but tonight I was – and I could go out with my friends for a bite and a beer.  I had falafels with tabbouleh at the Elysian Pub tonight. Tabbouleh originated in Syria and Lebanon, and has become a popular ‘American ethnic food’, says Wikipedia.   The version of it that I had, had pita bread, falafel, cherry tomatoes, couscous, feta and cucumber.  It was very good !

We had burritos for lunch at a ‘High Tech’ Burrito close to the office.  The burritos were tasty enough, but certainly not high tech in and of themselves.  I suppose the clientele it hopes to attract are high tech workers .. or it’s simply a reference to Silicon Valley to the south of us.  The term Silicon Valley for the high-tech industry in the Santa Clara Valley area was first used in 1971 and already in widespread use by 1986.

And what was state-of-the-art technology back then?  No internet, and no cell phones of course – but Intel’s classic 80386 microprocessor appeared in 1986.   And that year IBM introduced its first ‘laptop’ computer : a flat, boxy machine that weighed a hefty 12 lbs, cost $1,995 ($4,200 in today’s dollars), and that had all of 256k bytes of random access memory (RAM).

These days we find food from all over the world in our grocery stores, but this Himalayan brick I spotted at my regular grocery store made me wonder : is it really from the Himalayas*?  Is it something like Turkish delight? (A pink confection made of a gel of starch and sugar). The answers : yes, it is from the Himalayas; it is a pure salt brick; no, it is not manufactured; it may in fact have been formed millions of years ago !  It needs to be tempered (warmed up) before its first use, and it can be re-used many times after that for serving up food such as sushi, or finely sliced meats.

*Am I putting my ignorance about food on display here?  I’m a pretty simple guy when it comes to food – but I would have the reader know my favorite kind of toast is one with Marmite and avocado, and my favorite veggies are Brussels sprouts and asparagus.

It’s ‘sugar season’ here in the United States around Christmas time, writes the New York Times (click for article), and most of us have a sugar addiction.  The average American consumes anywhere from a quarter to a half pound of sugar a day. Yikes. Stay away from soda, from concentrated juices, from packaged food (cookies and snacks), and take it easy with sugar in tea and coffee.

I walked down 12th Avenue to the new Starbucks Reserve Roastery and Tasting Room that opened here in Capitol Hill in Seattle on Friday.  The feel of the inside is somewhat like that of a microbrewery, with the industrial equipment in use and on display.  I’m sure it’s quite a treat to see the roasted coffee beans come out of the roaster, but I did not have time to wait for the next batch to come out.   I just did a quick walk-through and checked out the equipment on display.  The place was packed with people.

So how do you like your coffee?  I checked out Wikipedia’s entry for coffee roasting, and compiled this list –

22 °C (72 °F) Green Beans
165 °C (329 °F) Drying Phase
196 °C (385 °F) Cinnamon Roast
205 °C (401 °F) New England Roast
210 °C (410 °F) American Roast
219 °C (426 °F) City Roast
225 °C (437 °F) Full City Roast
230 °C (446 °F) Vienna Roast
240 °C (464 °F) French Roast
245 °C (473 °F) Italian Roast
250 °C (482 °F) Spanish Roast

We went out for a sandwich for lunch on Wednesday here in Walnut Creek.  The sandwich shop has a number of colorful vintage signs, some for Pepsi-Cola, and some for bread and bakery items.  Check out the dagwood (multi-layered) sandwich with olives from the Boge’s bread sign.

Dagwood sandwiches are named after Dagwood Bumstead, a central character in the comic strip Blondie (first drawn in 1936).

In the Sunday paper in South Africa, the comic strip was called ‘Pantoffelregering’ .. loosely translated as ‘slipper government’ to indicate that Dagwood was ruled by the person wearing the slippers in the house (Blondie).  Blondie at the time, was cast in the comic strip as the traditional housewife and homemaker, wearing slippers for the better part of the day.

Halloween was just a few weeks ago, and Thanksgiving is still approaching here in the USA.  So with a lot of pumpkin around, it finds its way into all kinds of products.  My pumpkin yogurt, part of my in-room dinner tonight, was not bad.  (But not as good as pumpkin pie). 

We ran out to our favorite sandwich shop here in Walnut Creek today at lunch time. I ordered a vegetarian one with ‘everything’ on : cream cheese, lettuce, bean sprouts, cheese, green pepper, cucumber, sunflower seeds and raspberry jam.