Guess this food game

If you can guess this food and where it's from, I will cook for you next time I see you.



Been a bit busy at work to write a blog, but I have some recipes and restaurant reviews coming next week.

Oh, and I'm also busy for the next three weeks as I will be moving into a condo! Woohooo I'm an adult now... I think...

Here's the rough agenda of what's coming up.

- Restaurant review for Irish Cottage, Ebenezer's Pub, and Dali's Tapas
- Sushi in Boston - not sure where yet, but I'm sure its sometime in March around my birthday
- Pasta - since I haven't had any sort of pasta post
- Logo - I am working with a show de bola friend that is designing my branding. I haven't told him specifically what I want, but it will come to life soon.

Ok that's it. Foreign recipe blog tomorrow (by foreign I mean my mom made up this recipe and I adopted it and made it my own but this definition of foreign recipe won't always hold true, it will get redefined again and again).

Xoxo
Your hungry traveling foodie

Newburyport, MA - my home

Newburyport, MA - port city, tourists, water view, and my home.


No blog yesterday as it was Superbowl Sunday. I didn't really watch the game since I was too busy cooking. And what was I cooking? Pancit. What's pancit you ask? Well, its a traditional filipino dish made up of rice noodles (you can actually make it with egg noodles as well but I prefer vermicelli), chicken, shrimp, cabbage, carrots, celery, and green beans. It's seasoned with soy sauce.


I keep getting asked to cook this so I ended up cooking two versions as one of my "customers" is a pescetarian (n. a person that only eats vegetables and seafood). So the first one I made had chicken and shrimp in it. Normally I put pork in there as well, but I wanted to keep this one simple. The second one was the pescetarian version. You can seriously even make it vegetarian if you wanted.



There's some sort of noodle dish like this in pretty much every Asian nationality. Pancit would be more of a combination of Chinese and Spanish cooking.



Anyway, it took me about 2 hours just chopping up the vegetables and peeling the shrimp and shredding the boiled chicken. My arms are still pretty sore and feels like I have been lifting weights.



Here are the colorful ingredients:



Green beans(cut diagonally and thin, not quite sure what that slicing method is called), carrots (julienned), and I almost forgot, one medium onion diced and four cloves of garlic (I love garlic)




Cabbage!




Snow peas cut in half diagonally and peeled whole shrimp (about half a pound)




Boiled chicken shredded by hand








Vermicelli - rice noodles and soy sauce (low sodium of course)




Here's the quick recipe:

Sautee the onions and garlic in 2 tbps vegetable oil (medium heat); once they are translucent, add the chicken and shrimp (or just shrimp for the pescetarian version). Once the shrimp is pinkish (which means its cooked), add about 3 tbps soy sauce (more if you want). Keep mixing them until the soy sauce is well infused with the ingredients. Add in about 3 cups of chicken stock and simmer for 2 minutes (to add more flavor, I usually add in chicken bouillon cube or powder). Then add in cabbage, green beans, snow peas, carrots, and celery. Cook until the vegetables are tender. I kinda like my veggies crispy, so I cook them for about 3-5 minutes in medium heat. Then finally add in and cook the noodles until all the liquids are absorbed by the noodles. I promise it is a fantastic recipe. It's my first favorite noodle dish next to chap chae, a sweet Korean noodle dish. Enjoy!

Quincy, Massachusetts - Kam Man International Market

Quincy - beaches, clam shacks, Blue Hills, and a shit load of Asians

Lucy, a British Filipina friend, introduced me to Kam Man International Market. When you walk in there, you feel like you're in China town. It's a massive super market that houses pretty much anything you need. They have a bank in there, a shop with herbs, bubble tea, DVD/CD store, utilities store, and the actual super market. It literally is a Super Market.

I'm a bit hungover today and I figured this place would be perfect to nourish me with all the food they have. I ate so much I actually feel a little sicker. But the food is nonetheless amazing.

Before I go into detail about today, let's re-visit last night and the cause of my hangover. My friend Puerto (that's not really her name, but that's what we call her since she's Dominican) and I decided that we should have a diva night in lieu of the diva playlist she put together (diva playlist consisted of Mariah Carey, Whitney Houston, Beyonce etc). We love themes so we referred to last night as diva night. The order of business was dinner, movie and drinks. So she came over with champagne, Pomegranate pucker, popcorn, chips, and salsa. We watched Hangover and drank the whole champagne proceeded to finish a bottle of Robert Mondavi Chardonnay. Drunk as skunks indeed. We laughed all night because the movie was hilarious and we couldn't stop cackling about this penguin getting assaulted by a seal (I know its supposed to be serious but come on, a confused pre-pubescent seal trying to have sex with a penguin is hilarious): http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7379554.stm


Oh, I forgot, we had girl scout cookies as well.

Back to Kam Man, first order of business was the hotdog wrapped in this sweet bun. Amazing indeed. Then I proceeded to eat a sesame ball with this sticky mung paste inside. Then I ordered white rice, sauteed garlic green beans, and fried fish. Everything else was good except for the fish.

Kam Man is a serious super market with:

Desserts and Pastries

Too cute to eat!

Roast Duck

A plethora of cooked dishes

Feet - you can get any type of feet you want like chicken feet or pigs hooves

Seafood

Fresh Produce

Lastly, I bought myself a meat cleaver (a whopping $10 meat cleaver, great price!) today to open the fresh coconuts I bought from Kam Man. I went to youtube.com and found an instructional video of how to open a coconut with a meat cleaver under five seconds. Well, it took me a good five minutes and it was messier than I expected but it was worth it!

London (circa January 2008)

London - city of sex, dancing, shopping, style, and drugs

What an intro! What more can you ask for. Not much of a post today as I barely took pictures of food while I was there. And more importantly, I didn't even try any of the local cuisines. I know, lame but I'm sure I'll be back there soon and I will for surely try the local food next time.

In the meantime, I am missing everything in London today. I'm sure it's cold there right now, but I miss the people, the shopping (although its super expensive), and the style. It's my second favorite city in the world!



If you ever visit, I bet you would miss these too:

Tracey Neull - great shoe display. Too bad everything in there was more than 300 pounds...

Camden - the punkish area of London. My friend said you don't want to go there at night by yourself, but during the day, this place is just fun.

People of London - As I mentioned in one of my previous posts, a part of my job is to seek trends in the global market place. London was a perfect place for it. People loved to get their pictures taken. The people I captured in my camera had this innate attitude that they are IT. They own the city because they look good.

This guy was the most interesting guy I took a picture of. When I asked him if I could take his photo, he said only if I pay him. I said no. Then he let me take his picture then asked "will you get tea with me?" in which I replied by thanking him and walking away.

Lastly, this is the only shot I got of food.

Tapas!!! Not sure what the place is called but it was on/near Marylbone High. It was amazing to say the least.

Maybe next time I go to the UK I will have myself a spotted dick...

California - (Circa 2009 this time last year)

California - In & Out and that's about it....



I love this place SOOOO Much




Work is super busy, but I have some travel plans coming up. It will be domestic restaurant travels in New England for awhile and Europe in April. Stay tuned for traveling foodie updates...

Lost ... very little time to blog

Lost - tropical island, monsters, fresh fruits, time travel, physics = the best show ever, therefore, I have 2.5 minutes to blog tonight. As the theme tonight is Lost, and they are always running around this tropical island eating fresh fruits, I have a massive craving for a coconut and a fresh papaya.

Papaya dessert (I think its pureed papaya with a bit of milk and ice) with cassis. Seriously, Brazilian's have it figured out!

Here's my random quick dinner for tonight.

Brown rice, plain omelette seasoned with Adobo Goya, and sauteed collard greens with garlic! Its my 15 minute meal since its Lost time!!!

Random, I know, but actually quite good and healthy.

Montreal (Circa August 2009)

Montreal - partying, strip clubs, shopping, and fabulous sushi.




As you keep reading my blog, you'll get to know that I have this crazy love affair with sushi. I would eat sushi every day, twice a day, maybe even three times a day if I could. There are a few sushi rules I do live by, like do not eat raw sushi on Mondays (but more about that later). As I was craving sushi today, I figured I'd re-visit one of my favorite sushi haven, Oishii Sushi in Montreal (Oishii Sushi277 Bernard Ouest Montreal, QC H2V 1T5, Canada http://www.oishii.ca/).


I visit Montreal often as I have family that live there. My cousin introduced me to Oishii almost two years ago. It's located about 10 minutes from downtown Montreal in a not quite so busy street. My cousin raved about this place, so I figured it must be good. Little did I know it would be one of my favorite places to eat sushi (I would make the exception to eat here on Mondays).


The first dish she had me try was black cod. Best way to describe it is: butter. The thing just melted like butter in my mouth! It came with this citrusy soy sauce and green onions on the side. This dish alone made me fall in love with the place.

My cousin and I ate that day like we weren't going to ever eat again. She's probably the only person I eat sushi with that would literally order a boat load of sushi without batting an eyelash. One of our first sushi dates, we ended up with one of those big boat dishes on our table with all eyes on us as the server laid our food on the table. I guess its pretty entertaining to watch two fit Asian girls eat as much sushi as possible. That's the beauty about sushi, you could eat an island full of it, and you would not ever feel disgusting (unless you ate bad sushi, then yeah, you'd feel pretty gross).

So the day we had one of our incredible sushi dates last summer, the dishes kept coming and we kept eating:

Fried sticky rice fried, topped with salmon and tuna sushi?

Fried Avocado Maki with a light soy/sesame sauce

Mystery dish but it's delicious nonetheless

Yin Yang - fried salmon and yellow tail (I think its yellow tail), with asparagus and a miso dipping sauce. Props with the presentation; its a true work of art.

Philadelphia Maki and Yellowtail - simple but nonetheless as special as the rest

Salmon/tuna, egg, crab stick, cucumber maki... whew! What a handful of stuff in a small green roll. And of course, we can't forget the miso sauce

Tuna Avocado Maki topped with a battered deep fried sweet potato piece! Ooh la la

Yup, we ate EVERYTHING!

But just because we ate everything, doesn't mean we didn't have room for dessert. Green tea cheesecake was divine. It has a crunchy sugary crust on top like you would see on a creme brulee. And did I mention the chocolate syrup?

Mmmm, it's 10:30 pm and I gradually worked myself up to an appetite. Oooh, but before I forget, I try not to eat sushi on Mondays as word has it that fresh fish is delivered on Tuesdays, however like I mentioned above, I would eat sushi on any given Monday in Oishii anytime. Til next time...