Busy Busy

I've been busy doing some non-food tasks, so there's nothing terribly exciting to report. One of the better meals last week was actually take home from a Chinese restaurant. Not take out, which I consider practically its own form of Chinese cooking (greasy spoon, Americanized food from under a steam tray--often bad, but occassionally pretty good). Take home Chinese is just food from a restaurant you like that you happen to have asked for to go. Take out food (Mongolian beef, tangerine chicken, BBQ pork fried rice) would still be take out food even if you ate it at the restaurant.

And lest you think I'm even more of a hog than I am, the following was enough food for two people for three days.

Saltwater duck: much tastier than saltwater taffy, I tell ya. The duck is brined in some combination of rice wine, anise, and salt. Then it's boiled. The resulting duck is rather chewy, but very flavorful.

Pork hock: I'm not sure what this is cooked in or even how it's cooked, but it's somehow simultaneously all the way cooked through (you can chew through the tendons), but incredibly rubbery and chewy (it takes forever to break it down in your mouth). It's interesting, but too fatty to eat a lot of. Unless you're J, in which case you eat an entire three orders by yourself in under three days.

I'm going to call this dish "Stir it up" because the Chinese name is literally "Mix it, mix it." It's a motley assortment of popular cold items: seaweed knots, pigs' ears, beef slices, beef innards, and cilantro. Everything is simmered in soy sauce, sesame oil, sugar, and Szechuan peppercorn, then chilled and served. And I'm pretty sure the beef is the same cut of meat as used for pastrami.

Chinese mustard greens: I stir fried this myself, because I needed something green and unsalty to go with all the crazy flavors in this meal.

Dessert was a box of gigantic blueberries. This was one of the bigger ones. Look at it, it's bigger than my thumb! Blueberries, for the few weeks in the summer when they're in season and not horrendously expensive, are my favorite fruit for eating all by themselves.

One of my non-food projects. This is a present for a friend. Hopefully she won't check this website before I have a chance to get it to her. Isn't it cute? It's the first cube-like object I've sewn. Those 3-D corners are tough! This was inspired by SlateBlu, one of the cutest blogs around. Check it out if you like sewing, crocheting, knitting, eating/shopping in SF, or looking at adorable photos of little Asian babies.