Wearable Foods

Since my life has been pretty much about food all week since last Tuesday, let me bombard you with another food post - Wearable foods. Designed by Korean artist Sung Yeonju.


Lotus Root


Eggplant


Banana


Bubble Gum


Bubble Gum Again


Winter Mushroom (Enoki?)


Tomato


Tomato Again


White Radish (Daikon?)


Spring Onion


Red Cabbage


Shrimp

Obviously these are very unpractical and might change color, decompose or break off at any minute, not to mention the foul odor they will be emitting but they are still very interesting to look at. I wonder if I can borrow the concept for Halloween next year.

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Thanksgiving Meal: A Photo Essay

I'm continue to be baffled about cooking for parties, in which I'm unable to understand how much food I have to cook for the amount of people participating. I'm sure there's a standard something saying 1 serving of meat plus 2.5 sides per person somewhere, some experienced caterer probably know but not me. Every time there's a party I go hog wild thinking the things I can cook and most of the time I end up with leftovers but then it's usually ok, since people would take stuff home.

Apparently I don't know how much ingredients cost either, we started out saying $15 a person and expected 20 but at the end it ended up costing about $450 just for ingredients and booze and we got 25 attendees. If I were ever to open up a catering business I would most definitely go lose money.

I do enjoy cooking and the planning part of it. Every time I create a cheat sheet for it and it's most fun. It reminds me of academia which I used to take these notes that is more or less a paper saving game for me.



If you're interested to recreate the recipes, do enlarge the picture to read from it, I might suggest to be slightly generous on the salt and pepper end. The twice baked potato involved some piping action that is both messy and enjoyable. I altered the recipe and put some smoked turkey in it and they turned up pretty good. I also tried a new roast beef technique by just salting it and put it in the fridge uncovered for 24 hours to day up the meat. It's called "dry brining" and the beef turned out juicing and softer, it worked!



I try my damndest to put some vegetables in my friends so that they can have a balanced meal but the people I hang with go crazy with meats and not much else, so I have to resort to bacon wrapping them. We didn't have a chicken or a turkey because from experience, no one seems to know how to cut and after cooking a whole day I'm not going to be serving as well.



Even though they don't go for vegetables, they would go for this lobster fruit salad. We bought a big lobster for it but it didn't yield much meat at all. I much rather buy shrimps, they are more meaty and plentiful. Gutting the lobster was a bit of a hassle too, and the lobster was so fresh that it was quite dirty, some hazard of being a cook.



That's the spread here: Mushroom sherry soup, spiced roast beef, pineapple baked ham, popovers, pumpkin orzo risotto with scallops, green bean bacon rolls, cauliflower gratin and twice baked potatoes





A benefit of having Asian friends is that there's bond to have a few photographers around. My friend's father who was present was an award winning photographer and another younger guy has a very stylized iPhone app that got a close up of the roast beef here:



For dessert, one of them made tiramisu and another made a cheesecake that uses sponge cake as the base and then a layer of red bean cream cheese and a layer of green tea mousse on top that was marvelous. I'll try to recreate it sometimes.



After playing til 5:00 in the morning, everyone was quite exhausted and some turned into drunken messes. All around, we had a very merry time. 27 days til X'Mas.

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Thanksgiving Plans 2010

This year, I got invited by my former colleague and her vegetarian friends to go for a thanksgiving celebration but I'm feeling a little ho hum since the last time I saw them was a year ago when I didn't have a job and another year has gone by and my situation hasn't changed one bit. I cannot possibly seat through a meal feeling that way, I think I rather be at home. Well, that and the fact that they are vegetarians and they wanted me to bring a vegetable dish. How could I live up to the expectation when vegetables are all they eat? And to be politically incorrect, I'm just not excited about eating vegetables on Thanksgiving.

For Black Friday, my Straizian friends have invited me over to their place in hops that I will cook a meal for them and 20 something of our closest friends. It'll be a lot of work but I don't have a problem doing that. It's fun for me. But as the counter extreme from the vegetarians, my Straizian friends are carnivores especially for red meat. In the past two Thanksgivings, I have roasted turkey and chickens but they find carving their own piece of meat out of something with bones to be too troublesome so we won't be having any birds unless I sneak some turkey sausage in the form of a stuffing. As a rule when I cook for them, they always request dishes that I cook for them last and it usually bore me just a tad. So I decided to forgo the paella and steaks for a more traditional and earthy fare:

Sherry Wild Mushroom Soup
Cheddar Biscuits
Rib Roast
Glazed Ham
Turkey Sausage & Chestnut Stuffing
Pumpkin Seafood Orzo
Twice Baked Potatoes
Bacon Green Bean Bundles
Cauliflower Gratin

As in each and every gathering, someone will make a fruit salad with grape, apple, orange and a big amount of mayo and put lobster in it, which is quite a peculiar thing. It must have been an Asian thing since when I grew up these mayo/miracle whip salad was popular. My grandma used to make one with boiled eggs, potatoes, ham cubes, canned pineapple and everything else under the sun that I adore. I was proud to take that dish to every school picnic and parties. Now I realized that it might not have been the healthiest thing. Though the lobster fruit salad might just be on the sweeter side. Others will bring tiramisu and a cheesecake for dessert which will alleviate some work, though I do like making desserts.

All I have to do now is just have to write out all the ingredients I need so we can shop for them. Wish me luck, next week is going to be a busy week.

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No More Nuggets For Me

I haven't been into a McDonald's for years and it's not as much as a conscience health decision but more because of a taste issue since their food taste too greasy, there's a slight difference. When I do go a few years back, I like their Big Mac, Filet O Fish, milkshake, fries and chicken nuggets. No, I don't order all those things at once. I also like their Sausage Egg McMuffin, hash browns and sundaes, and they are all as high calories as possible. What? Who in their right mind would go to a fast food chain for salads?

Well, here's a picture that will have me swear off McDonald's for the rest of my life:



The picture above is what's so called Mechanically Separated Chicken and the process of making it goes beyond deboning and grinding. Yeah, if you've seen the movie Food, Inc., you'd probably know that chicken farmers are paid little to no money producing chickens. They are forced to pay and take out giant loans to build chicken camps and forced to keep up with the installation of the newest ventilating units and while the chickens are kept in literal silos that don't see any daylights, germs and virus manifests itself since no one really clean the poops up for months. Chickens are mechanically swept and dumped into trucks after a few months and taken to be processed. Instead of clean individual coop with fresh air, they do it this way to keep the cost low.

There's more: because it's crawling with bacteria, it will be washed with ammonia, soaked in it, actually. Then, because it tastes gross, it will be reflavored artificially. Then, because it is weirdly pink, it will be dyed with artificial color.

I guess I won't be eating chicken nuggets anytime soon.

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Chinese People Encountering Fortune Cookies For the First Time

The first time I ate in a Chinese restaurant in the States for the first time, I think I was baffled at the silly cookie and the bullshit unfounded superstition it spewed, but after knowing the culture associated with it and the "...in bed" gag, I started liking it. I especially like the ones with orange flavoring and the chocolate dipped ones.

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Loaves and Fishes

It's day 7 of my "not eating" diet, I spend most of the time thinking of what I would eat when I finish this thing. I'm actively planning the meals ahead, starting with the Friday ease-in juice and soup, Saturday's light fruit and vegetables possibly with a miracle fruit tasting, up to Sunday for a slice of cheesecake somewhere. These two weeks happen to be Philadelphia's and New York's Restaurant Week, it's really a good opportunity to get into some restaurants that I've thought I'd never be able to afford going in and have a meal in my life but since I'm still dieting this week, I'll have to go in next week when I'm off the diet to make up for lost time. At the end, I might just not lose any weight at all.

One side effect of the diet is that I have a whole lot more free time from not cooking and that somehow sparks up my creative side. I've been thinking about new artwork ideas, thinking about a little program that would generate a random name for certain things and since last year's last minute Halloween costume creation generate a fair amount of frustration for both me and my boyfriend, I thought I'd plan ahead and maybe even sew something since I have the time. After going to a few costume stores, the boyfriend has already made his purchase and I also have gotten a few ideas.

Browsing My Disguises, I come across these intriguing pictures:



Is it weird of me to think that it might be comfortable to step in the soft inside of the bread? They are made from real bread and sold at Da Da Da for 62 euros which is roughly $80 USD and they come in three sizes and multiple colors. Frankly, instead of paying $100 to get them mailed to you, just go to a nearby bakery and saw two loaves of similar breads into shoes, that'd save you a bundle.











In the item descriptions, it specifically says "not wearable on feet". I guess it doesn't really serve any real purpose but for me to be able to exclaim "I'm so hungry, I can eat my shoes!"

For a second course, consider these:

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Body Paint

Given the potential harm of anal douching, I don't know what to make of this. I mean is this really art? How is that different than using a water gun? I guess the process is art in itself and the buyer will be some guys with a certain fetish. But(t) how does this have anything to do with Zune?

Speaking of things squirting out of a butt, the boyfriend, two of his friends and I have embarked on a ten-days diet. For ten days, we won't be eating anything but a lemon-maple syrup concoction. It's called the master cleanse diet which is essentially a fast. Anytime I feel hungry, I'll have to mix 2 tablespoons of lemon juice with 2 tablespoons of maple syrup with water and a dash of (yummy) cayenne pepper. Since each glass is roughly 100 calories a day, having about 6 glass will make the grand total at about 600 calories, it's under one-third of the normal daily intake. There's also laxatives and a nightly salt water flush solutions that helps with the daily body functions and I'm also taking a daily vitamin and mineral supplements. Is it healthy? Absolutely not, but a skinny friend did this for 10 days and lost 16 pounds and I'm almost twice his size so I'm hoping for more. Don't worry, I'll bail if I feel I can't make it.

Obviously not eating food makes it that much more tempting, day-to-day I'll have to avoid watching Food Network and food blogs but I refuse to change my walking routes so I could avoid passing by popular eateries. It's not after a whole day of not eating did I notice how many food commercials there is on TV. Only one day and it's already driving me a bit crazy. So far my cravings include a slice of pizza, homemade siu mais, beef, roast pig from a certain Jose Garces restaurant and sushi buffet at another establishment 10 minutes from Philly. Basically everything and anything. Hope the 10 days goes by faster.

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Weekend Meme: Cooking 101 Meme

Friday night was spent at a friend's party where he was celebrating his 10th year as a florist. There was cheese, booze, sushi, sandwiches, cheesecake, a harpist, a jazz band and a whole bunch of gays. I helped a friend prepared for the upcoming labor day barbecue. Going to the Red Bull Flugtag today and see people jumping into the river with crazy fun design. I think that's a good conclusion to a week of art and creativity.

Today's meme is from The Queen's Meme asking for cooking advice. I guess I'm almost good enough to give out some of my observations. Let's commence...

1. What is the best dish you can cook?
My best dishes seems to be more self-conceived, something I crave and can only be satisfied by something I designed. The one that I loved the most was a 5-spiced braised beef with a white truffle barley risotto. I wanted the barley texture in my risotto so it can be creamy and bouncy at the same time.

2. Do I have to beat eggs or can I whip them gently? Sounds so violent to me.
Gentle whipping doesn't mix it so well and sometime you just need to beat them for scrambles or omelette. For baking, you do need to beat it preferably with machine which makes your life so much easier. Can I recommend a CuisinArt hand mixer? My friend got me one for my birthday and it's like holding a jet engine. It makes everything a breeze.

3. I am reading a recipe right now for Hearty Beef-n-Cheese Pie from a recipe book I dug out of the cabinet. The instructions read..."Preheat oven to 375 degrees. In large frying pan, brown ground beef, onion and green pepper." I am already lost. Why must I turn on the oven and put the frying pan in it? And how does one turn beef AND peppers brown at the same time?! What color should the onion be?
That's a multi-parter. 1) Everytime you bake something, it's best to preheat the oven, it means to turn it on for about 10 minutes before you put food inside to cook, so the temperature inside the oven can rise to the desired cooking temperature. So turn it on ahead of time. 2) You don't necessarily have to put the frying pan inside the oven, you could but not if your frying pan has any plastic parts on it. Most recipes will ask you to transfer the browned meat to a oven-proof dish unless you have a dutch oven. 3) You want your beef browned, your pepper soft and your onion translucent but not see through.

4. Did you ever cook something for your family that no one enjoyed and you had to throw out?
Rarely, but of course I have my moments though right now I can't remember any.

5. Why do all recipes say "mix sugar, flour and salt?" Don't they cancel out the other?
Sugar, flour and salt don't cancel out each other. Sugar and salt actually heighten the notes of food. It's my belief that sugar makes things taste fresher and more pleasing, salt makes things taste stronger and draws out the savory. Your tongue can tastes multiple flavors at the same time and it's with different degrees of each that makes the flavor complex and addictive. Flour makes the flavor more concentrate especially if you're using it to make roux.

6. Why must you add eggs "one at a time" to a mixing bowl? Does anybody really know the answer to this question?
If you're baking, adding eggs one at a time allow your batter to mix more thoroughly so that flour doesn't clump together. When you're cooking, adding eggs one at a time can eliminate the risk that one of the eggs may be bad and ruin the whole batch.

7. Please post the recipe to something you think even I can cook. I am begging you! It is no fun being a afraid of my own crockpot.
The best thing to cook of course is something that you yourself crave and likes to eat. The easiest dish even if cooking a steak. I love personally love rib-eye. New York strip and a T-bone is pretty great too. Choose a fresh marbled steak. The freshness of your ingredients helps and make your food taste better.

1. Take your steaks out of the fridge, sprinkle with salt and pepper on both sides. 2. Turn up a frying pan on high heat with a tablespoon of oil.
3. Wait until it starts to smoke lightly, put your steaks on it, wait for 4 minutes. 4. Flip, wait 4 more minutes.
5. Eat with a salad, pasta, mash or any sides.

Easy enough right?

For a higher degree, add 2 tablespoons of Worcestershire sauce and 1 tablespoons of soy sauce on top of the steaks after you've flipped them. There's nothing easier unless you're making instant noodles.

Watch some food network cooking shows to get yourself familiarized with the terminology, read the recipe thoroughly before you start, invest in some basic gadgets. Epicurious.com is the bomb (Foodnetwork.com and allrecipes.com are pretty good too)!

Anyhow, have a great weekend!

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The Pastry Equivalent of a Turducken

The Cherpumple...



At least this word doesn't start with a turd, but three cakes and three pies in one mega pastry? Can we say excessive? Also, baker gay Mr. Charles Phoenix here comes off just slightly creepy.

Not to be outdone, I embarked on a challenge and came up with my own triple t(h)reat.



It's a tiny cherry pie baked inside a chocolate cupcake with cream cheese frosting with a chocolate chip cookie on top. They are all made from scratch, none of that cake-mix, ready-made pies bullshit. I was sure it'll satisfy some cravings before I embark on a 10-day super diet. But I like my cake light and fluffy, to bite into a pie crust is kinda strange. I'm sure the recipe can be improved upon.

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Steps On Making The Perfect Woman (NSFW)

Nope, I'm not peddling titty porn here. A friend asked me if I can make a boob cake for her friend's birthday party so I spent 24 hours trying to make the cake the best I know how.

1. I got a boob mold pan from a novelty store and thought the boobs are a little too small which probably means that I'm a size queen, at least for cakes anyway.

2. Bake the cakes! Originally I was trying to make sheet cakes and stack them together, but the sheet cakes turned out to be a disaster with them wrinkling and even burning. The batter I end up using was a white cake batter found here. I used 3 times the batter to fill the boob mold and three 9" square cake pans.

3. Make pastry cream/cream/icing, melt jam and slice fruit. For this cake, I used a white chocolate pastry cream that I found here, strawberry jam and strawberries.

4. Put two cakes side-by-side, brush with melted jam, frost with pastry cream, layer with strawberries slices. Put another two cakes on top, brush with jam, frost with cream, layer with strawberries. Put another two cakes on top, brush and frost. layer strawberry slices at the center of one of the cake stack. Put the boobs on top and frost the whole thing. Fridge this gigantic thing.

5. Make fondant. I used the marshmallow fondant recipe found here with a few tweaks. Instead of melting marshmallows, I used Fluff and to get the skin color, I used food colorings. This video explains how.



Even with the video and recipes, it's hard to get it right since I've never touch real fondant myself, so the end product wasn't that great. It got too sticky and perhaps I should have refrigerate it a little more. It was nearly impossible to roll it out thin without having it sticking it to the board, I had to forcibly pull it onto the cake and then use water to fix the holes.

6. Decorate and make it more "lifelike". Make deeper colored nipple candles out of coloring darker. Push your thumb in lightly to make the belly button. Two dragees for a belly piercing, chocolate icing for a thong and a tattoo of the birthday boy's name. Shimmies all around the sides to hide the imperfections.

It looks pretty good in the pictures but I didn't have a big enough box for it so when it got to the site, parts of the breast got stuck to the foil. Also when the birthday boy blew out the tits, someone decided to push his head in, at the end, the cake or what's left of it tasted pretty good. If I had the resources, I need to take a cake decoration class and a bigger kitchen with a new oven that doesn't tilt.

But you got to see the humor of having a gay guy making a boob cake, no? So who wants to go into the erotic cakes business with me? haha.

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Free Food Tastes Better

I have been having free meals pretty much all week for the past 7-8 days and I'm quite enjoying it. Since past Wednesday, I have been treated to meals from my very good friends. A Japanese sushi buffet on Wednesday at a place called Tokyo Hibachi and Sushi Buffet that is relatively close to my place and with an awesome selection of sashimi and sushi at a relatively low price. Lunch with an old colleague and her daughter at a Korean place that's nice enough and they have these nice metal chopsticks that tempted and satisfied my kleptomania. Dinner with my straizian friends that treated me to an expensive restaurant of my choice but served really small portion food that satisfied more of my curiosity than my hunger. Then a lavish Italian meal that keep busing out plates after plates of food, that leave us stuffed and horrified. I was treated to all of them and plus all the booze we drank, the bills came a little too high and left me feel a bit guilty. On the weekend, the more-than-considerate boyfriend bought me groceries for the week so I'm eating free food all week, which is especially great for this unemployed slob.

Recapping some of the oversalted, overpriced, underportioned food:











During Summer there are plenty of discounted activities in Philadelphia like Restaurant Week or University City Dining Days that offer discounts. Websites like Groupon and Frugal Foodist also list their discount findings on their site for people to browse. Just yesterday, the new Cooking Network is having a promo and hauled an ice cream truck around to give out samples and promote their network.

Today, the boyfriend found out the creperie within Reading Terminal Market is giving out free sweet crepe. Even though there is no signs anywhere indicating this, me along with 4 friends all got free crepes. Chain Italian restaurant Buca di Beppo is having a free lasagna day that gives out a lunch portion of lasagna with any entree or pasta, plus since it's within 7 days of my birthday, I got a free brownie ice cream sundae. Also there's a $10 off coupon in the papers, so it works out really, really well for me.

A friend also has a pair of free prescreening tickets for Scott Pilgrim versus The World, so I guess I'll get to see a movie that I wanted to see ahead of its release time for free. Not all the time but sometimes, sometimes everything comes up roses.


Free food taste better!

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The $500 Dinner Plate

A $500 dinner plate is not such a big deal on its own, just Tiffany's offers a plate with hand-painted rims for 3 times the price, but what if that plate changes appearance all the time and can also function like a computer?

Japanese blogger Takahiko Shiina figured that there are plenty of benefits to use an iPad as a serving dish that he dubbed iDish. For one, you can change the appearance of your dish to the millions of image online.

Takahiko started his quest by dropping a piece of sashimi on his iPad and then thought of the possibilities by doing some experiments:



He found out that by putting food in a proper setting, even boxed sushi that's past its prime looks pretty appetizing:





You can make food look authentic, like these frozen shumai:



If you don't have lots of food to start with, you can make it look like you do. That'll work if you're on a diet:



You can even use your iPod as a small plate for condiments or small appetizer:





If an app idea like iDish is to really be prodcued, one should hope to add some sound or animation to the dish. Take this grill for example, it will be a lot better if some sizzling sound is in the background will some grease bubbles around.



Take the hand for example, Takahiko claimed that if you feel lonely you can pretend eating from someone's hand which is a creepy concept to start with but if you're going for that why not add the voice of your mom or some nice female telling you to eat up before it gets cold or something a caring person would say?



Of course, the concept is not without its problems, one thing is that the iPad is a flat surface and saucier food will run all over the pad and make it hard to scoop. Since there's no borders, food like curry rice will run across the border of the "plate" and ruin the illusions.



Some food textures like the one of this flan is very close to the human touch hence confuse the sensors on the iPad.



Takahiko also mentioned that the iPad is hard to clean and the smell of the food will linger on the iPad, it's best to use an LCD protector on top. So the conclusion of the experiment is that it's not recommendable to use the iPad as a plate.

Oh well, like we didn't know that in the first place.

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