What’s been happening

A few weeks ago I helped serve at a dinner in conjunction with the Gwangju Design Biennale. For the starter, diners were presented with syringes filled with olive oil, vinegar and mascarpone

 

Paris shopping list

– Speculoos spread
– herbs de provence
– figue violette jam
– rillette de canard
– salted butter caramels
– lentils de Puy

Am I forgetting anything?

 

I miss Paris…

It’s salad season and I seem to be missing out. While I think California wins when it comes to making delicious, healthy and satisfying salads, my favorite thing in Paris was going to my weekly neighborhood farmers market. I looked forward to walking down to the market on Sundays and strolling up and down the different stalls.

 

Stuffed bunnies

I was helping out with a Lunch in the Loft cooking class where there was a lesson on de-boning rabbit.

 

OCD: Obsessive-Compulsive (Duck) Disorder

Hoarding jars of duck fat in my fridge probably stems from the same pathology as some people who keep a stash of Vicodin in their medicine cabinet.

I might never use it, but it’s reassuring to know it’s there if I ever do need it.

 

Handmade ricotta cavatelli

 

My food rant for the day

I hate to kill everyone’s Paris fantasy but there’s something I have to say.

The food here is mediocre. French food here is good. Cous cous is good. Eat those things, by all means.

But in terms of Japanese, Korean, Indian, Chinese, Mexican, Vietnamese — all the things I crave on a day to day basis — it’s a don’t. These are things that will have to wait when I go home for the holidays. But a warning to you, Reader: Don’t waste your precious calories/depressed dollars on these foods when you’re in Paris (and people do, just check out any Paris food board).

I’m warning you.

It’s terrible, it’s an outrage, it’s a mockery to people who know better than to eat soggy ramen, boring pho broth, naan with Laughing Cow cheese stuffed in it. I once read someone’s post on a food board how Japanese and Chinese food were just a “cheap option for Parisians” which threw me into a rage for days.

If the French are totally condescending about the way non-French people butcher their language, then I can say that they mess up a lot of good food, even the simplest things — like guacamole, anyone??!!!

My friend just got fed up with this food travesty and inspired by this post, decided to make his own Shanghainese shengjian bao, from hand-making the dough to boiling down pig’s feet to get the gelatin for that tiny bit of soupiness. Me being me, I helped out with the construction and eating parts of the project.

 

Scavenging notes

If I were living in one of those hunter/gatherer societies, I think I would have starved to death.

Case in point: I went mushroom hunting last week and I sucked at it. I wanted to be a natural, thinking that suddenly being in nature would make my senses super focused, that I would be the master of scanning the land for mushrooms and tracking all the most edible, delicious mushrooms in the French forest.

I did find lots of mushrooms, but they were all the wrong ones. Like this one for example. I loved this mushroom, it’s so adorable. I would have liked to take it home, shellac it and put it on my bookshelf.

Apparently this is the one that killed Snow White or however the story goes. Even touching one of these is not a good idea.

 

Ugh. Life transitions

I’m not complaining, because as you can see, my life is pretty sweet, but still stress-inducing at times. To cope, my near-daily dose of macaron pistache framboise.

 

 

Duck, duck, duck, duck…

I have a very bad habit of being fixated on a food for weeks at a time and eating nothing but until I get completely sick of it.

It happened once with fried foods, when my friends got me a deep fat fryer in college and I was deep frying things almost every week which culminated into this insane deep-fry party and the apartment ended up smelling like a greasy taco/burger stand. We all ended up passed out on the couch, our stomachs coated in canola oil.

There was a two-month period when I only wanted to eat pho and I went on a pho crawl on Valley Boulevard from Alhambra to Rosemead.

I go through too many phases like that in life.