Do you have things that you tried and tried and tried making, and it. Just. Doesn't. Work? In the kitchen, I call them my culinary nemesis, and they can be summed up by two words, "chewy" and "layers". You whisper these words to my ears in the middle of the night
The problem with me as a recipe dreamer hallucinater during the still-ongoing Thanksgiving carnival is that every year, in utter rudeness, I always feel like leaving the table even before the turkey makes it out of the oven. Evidently from my premature and inappropriate blabbering of the X'mas blend coffee bars in last November while the whole town was still chattering about tweaking pumpkin pies to death, to now this uncooperative side-tracking dessert that doesn't even rhyme with "ies" and " akes", it is obviously true. I have no table-side manners. Now before I leave, pass me the damn stuffings. If you think that I have zero patience, nor the skills to time a topic in order to be well received, you're
For the innocent sake of running an adequate food-blog, I've been slowly sucked down to a rabbit hole passing the disorienting stage of flying pies and falling biscuits, deep down to the world of cultivating gas-farting micro-organism on my kitchen counter (quite deep when you actually think about it). My falling journey has brought to you and myself, things I wouldn't even think of doing just a little shy of 2 years ago, things like palm sugar brioche, dreamy Hokkaido milk toast, Taiwanese gua bao, Roman Bonci's pizza, creamy carbonara pizza, clarified butter English muffin, pillow beignets and this rocking potato roll. If I look into the mirror right now I wouldn't recognize myself. But however close I thought I was getting to the end of it, being awaken to the real world where people actually just buy this stuff (yeah
As a reluctant and often times struggling home-baker, I have an unfounded, persistent, borderline sickening obsession with making biscuits and scones. Nobody in the family eats them but me really (it isn't saying much when you scan through all members in the family). I have to endure the look of lostness and concealed disappointment in Jason's eyes every time he comes home to the smell of butter and sugar, and yet I put myself through it often (yes everything is about me). They aren't the most foolproof things to bake either, evidently from the ghost of dead doughs past that still lingers in the apartment. So I don't know, I guess they just feel so much more earnest than cookies and cakes, a warmer and friendlier thing to break over a conversation or a cup of tea
Season-transitioning flu
I recently landed in a couple of situations where I had to articulate the idea of my blog, a sales-pitch so to speak. The effort quickly brought brightened realizations to myself that whatever effort I made to explain the original vision or benchmark that I set out for when I started doing this, is now tainted with contradictions. A derailment, so to speak. As an Asian with a defining family food-culture to grow up on, who then spent her life 50/50 in North America and Asia, it was easy
Oh I don't feel bad telling you this
Last few days were a nightmarish montage of my extended kitchen-agony. Three whole days covered in a choking dust of flour with smudgy grease from a beastly amount of butter and sugary stickiness haunting my finger tips. Electrical outlets being pushed to a near brink of melt-down and an unprepared dishwasher running past its adrenaline threshold into a disoriented state of ecstasy. After three nights of stress-induced binge eating, two stone-tough should muscle groups and one extremely cranked neck which all ended in a final coma that took place in a dark and questionable foot-massage parlor, despite nature's best effort to stop me, I said I'd make a cake. Well