Bento #2

A little bit of old, a little bit of new.




I got a tamagoyaki pan. This was my first go at making tamagoyaki (the rolled up egg). It was actually very easy. The pan got hot and cooked the mixture quickly. And i was surprised how easy it was to roll up the egg in the pan. Instead of traditional Japanese tamagoyaki, I mixed my egg with sweet chili paste. ^_^

Tier 1: mixed rice and smoked salmon pieces (for flavoring)
Tier 2: tamagoyaki, edamame, mushrooms, and a grape tomato
Tier 3: Taiwanese spinach, baked yam "homefries"

- ^_^

My First Bento!

On impulse, I went to Daiso (the Japanese version of a dollar store) and bought 2 bento boxes. This is the one I used today for lunch.

Pretty! :-)




So... According to LunchInABox.net, my bento size should be about 500mL of food. This box in total is 490mL. And it didn't seem like enough food to get full off of. Even my coworkers said it looked like a snack bento, not lunch. Lol. Not sure what that says about the size of the bento or perhaps the size of normal American portions.

Anyways... I had fun putting together this lunch box this morning and will probably do more in thee future. :-)

For your knowledge:
Tier 1: Mixed-grain Rice
Tier 2: Mushrooms, Asparagus, and Baked Yam "home fries"
Tier 3: Taiwanese fried chicken (from the bubble tea shop!) Taiwanese spinach, and some pickled carrots dividing the two.

Cookind Day: Stuffed Hamburger

Watching cooking shows always makes me want to cook something myself. This time it was Master Chef, where I watched the entire 1st season in 24 hrs. The dishes weren't all very complex (some were) and some of the challenges were outright easy (I think I could have won the "name all 25 ingredients" contest hands down...), but the dishes looked absolutely delicious. The challenge that drove my latest craving: the hamburger.

While I have a high appreciation for good restaurants, sometimes the best version of a food can be found at home. I haven't found a worthy burger around town yet (although Jack's Prime has an amazing Wine Country Burger that I love) so I decided this would be the dish to make at home. :-)

I've never made one in the house before, but thought I'd give it a go. Hamburgers for me are generally an outdoor drill ordeal, but since I live in a balcony-less studio apartment, I guess I'll have to live with the grease splatters and hamburger smells for awhile.

I made the burger the way my mom loves it: pure ground beef patty stuffed with cheese and mushrooms. My mom would put bacon in there are times too, but I chose to opt out because I thought it would be too much.

The appeal of stuffing a burger instead of putting the toppings on top:

The cheese, mushrooms, (and bacon) add moisture-rich foods to the center of the burger. This helps to avoid drying the burger out from overcooking. As the burger cooks, the cheese melts, the mushrooms steam, and the bacon starts sheddings its greasy fat. Unless you completely burn the patty, you will have a juicy burger almost always.

As indulgence, with the greasy run-off from the burger, I used it to toast the bun. Add salad and tomatoes and there is the yummy burger!



For the side, I steamed asparagus and mushrooms with Italian seasoning, olive oil, salt, pepper, and a dash of white truffle oil.

I go lay down and have a food coma now.

-^_^

Wordpress vs. Blogger

I think I might switch to Wordpress soon.

Blogger is nice, but I find it a little too limiting. And I find it friggin hilarious a friend and I have the same background setup. Plus my comic blog is being run by Wordpress and I guess I like the malleability and cleanliness of the layout more. It's more in my control. And there are TONs of templates for the lazy people (like me) to mess with.

Just Playing....

It's been awhile since I just drew something digitally for fun.


I decided to play with pattersn out of laziness. It was fun, and I liked the outcome. Actually, what I don't like is the face. I thought I'd draw something anime-ish, just for ole-time's sake. But I dislike it. :\

Paper Texture [Link]
Cloth Texture [Link]

Hello again.

Working on a comic has made me start to read more webcomics as of late.

I found one that really interested me the other day on Deviant Art (Yes, I have an account. No, I'm not very active) that really impressed me enough to share.


Knite: Chapter 1 by `yuumei on deviantART

It's called Knite, a Flash-based webmanga about a boy who flies kites with christmas lights attached to create stars in a polluted sky. I thought the idea of it very romantic. What's interesting though, is the little blurbs after each chapter, where the author, Yuumei, explains how these things in her story relate to situations in China, where the story takes place.

Even the title is a mixture of words in both Chinese and English. It mixes the English words, "knight" and "kite", and the Simplified Chinese word (the form of Chinese used in mainland China) for "wind".

It's really well thought-out and poetically put together, it seems. The characters have an interesting relationship and I really hope this writer finishes this comic and doesn't let it simply fade away, as most web-comics tend to do.

Comic is Starting Up

Haha. Delayed post. I'm clearly not consistent with this thing, but I bet it's partially because I work on other things instead.

My contract is coming to an end, much sooner than it seems (January 11, 2011) because of the holiday season (although, I am not sure how holidays work in my company since our outsourced team doesn't share the same holidays). But I'm going home for Christmas, so I will be taking a well-deserved break then.

I've learned if you work too hard too consistently, burnout becomes a continual state. Which is not healthy. I think I started to lose the reasons I was doing anything related to games or California, but going home for Thanksgiving really helped clear my head and get away from the work stress. Going back on Monday should be better, even if there is already a line of meetings waiting for me. :-P

In the meantime, I am hunting for my next job. Anyone need a game producer with experience working in web and with outsourcing teams?

I started making a comic as a hobby/side project. Right now I'm in the planning phase, writing out the plot, making sure I get the story flow correct and the characters defined. Next step is figuring out how I want to display this, draw, and update. Maybe it seems weird to be planning out so much, but something frequent with web comics that I dislike is people going on haitus or deciding somewhere in the middle of the comic that they don't like where it's going so decide to start over. I'm sure there are many varying reasons to this, some of which can't be avoided, but I'd like my comic to have a completion date and a consistent update of pages at regular intervals. So for now, I am making sure the story is solid enough for me to start drawing pages for web viewing. Having a plan helps me stay committed to this too, instead of letting my changing life get in the way.

As a producer too, planning suits me well, anyways. :-P

Truth be told it feels kinda funny writing this comic. I don't usually let others know I like writing fantasy (oh yeah, this is going to be a fantasy comic. It's an idea that has floated in my brain for awhile now so I figured, why not? Let's do it ^_^) so it feels silly thinking I'm going to be sharing it online in public soon.

Anyways, updates later.

^_^

Should I start a comic?

Whoo! Site is almost done! All that is left is putting up my ETC projects (of course, I leave out the most important work from my portfolio site upgrade) and changing the UI of this blog to match that of my website.

If you want to check out what's been done, please look at www.tingchen.net. :-)

My contract at EA ends in January 2011. :-( It's a bit of a bummer b/c I really love my teammates here, but I guess the time to move on always comes. In either case, I'm currently on the hunt for my next job, looking in areas like LA, Salt Lake City, and San Francisco. The nice thing about being single and fresh from college is that moving around is really only a matter of furniture and lease agreements. I kind of like the adventure in switching homes and being able to pick up and leave so quickly. Kind of. Part of me wants to find a place to set up camp for longer than 6 months, which is probably why my latest apartment, I've bought some of the more frivolous items, like a a digital piano :D, even though I don't know if I am going to be staying here past December. Still, I suppose the moving is somewhat feeding the travel bug in me at least.

With all this focus on work and finding more work and then finding living space and etc etc... I've completely neglected the hobbies which I used to love back in college (undergrad. During my Art School days). It's good that my biggest passion, games, has become my career, but being a constant thinker, I get restless not having personal projects to do. I'm thinking about getting back in to drawing comics. Or do some indie game development on my own. I'm not sure yet. They both seem fun and rewarding, but also incredibly time-consuming and requiring dedication, 2 things which I can't guarantee at this moment.

Another personal question: Why is it all my interests involve being alone? I should be more social, I think. I mean, I'm living in the SF Bay Area and I rarely go to the city. Or even out in general. Either too busy or too tired. :\

Beef Bourguignon

I hear so many people talk about this dish, especially since the film "Julie & Julia" and Julia Child's beef bourguignon recipe. I only had this dish once in my life, and I remembered not thinking it was all that great, but I wanted to give it a go myself in case that one time was caused by a cooking slip-up.

Beef bourguignon has a lot of precise steps and takes many hours, although not all recipes agree on these details. But I was lazy and considering much of the cooking time is just sitting in a pot and simmering, I didn't see why people didn't use a slow cooker on this dish.

So I cooked the bacon to get the fat, seared the beef in the fat, then stuck everything and a whole bottle of wine in the slow cooker.



The stew came out more soupy than I would have hoped, but I don't think that has anything to do with my method of cooking. Perhaps I put too much liquid in the pot? In either case, it was absolutely delicious. The wine flavor worked really well with the bay leaves, thyme, and parsley and everything blended together into a really awesome taste. So even though it didn't come out in to a creamy stew like it should have, it came out very well, I think.

- ^_^

Redwood Forest

I've been meaning to walk in a redwood forest ever since I moved up to the SF Bay Area and today I decided on impulse would be the day I went. So I typed in Google "Redwood forest", picked the closest one, and went.

The closest redwood forest to go to was Huddart Park. To be honest, it was kind of dull and uneventful.



While the trees were pretty, I felt kind of bored walking on the trails. Nothing really led anywhere and all the paths just sort of wound around the area. I would have enjoyed the scenery more if I wasn't always looking on the ground for horse manure and getting nervous about the bugs or my footing on the dirt and rocks. I kind of wished there was some sort of destination to reach, like a temple or a vantage point. But this is America and I don't think we have temples atop mountains, although I did see this giant white cross in the distance when I drove to the park. Also, I think this park's trails were more for horseback riding than foot travel, despite what the brochure said. Perhaps I picked the wrong park. I mean, whoever heard of having to PAY to go to the park? There was a $5 per car fee to enter the park.

- ^_^

Affogato

I'm Meeting Becky today for dinner, which is a rare moment considering she lives all the way in Las Vegas. I am so glad we were able to make a dinner meet-up work out while she was here for the weekend.

I left my apartment early to accommodate for the long train ride getting to the city and the walk/bus ride of getting to the restaurant (The Stinking Rose, a garlic restaurant), but then as I exited the door, I impulsively decided to drive. Now that I'm here, I almost wish I hasn't acted so impulsively as this will cost me double what traveling would have coated otherwise. And I arrived really early. -_-"

In the meantime, I decided to stop in this cafe I randomly found called Cafe Greco. And decided to try this lovely concoction: an affogato, which was another impulsive item of the day.






I had only heard of affogato from Kitchen Confidential. As I have now learned, affogato is an espresso with gelato. So if you like coffee ice cream, this would be the more decadent version. It's wonderful.

I sometimes wonder if I could live in the city and I still don't know the answer. The hustle and bustle of so many people makes the place so lively but at the same time, a bit too chaotic for me. I am not one for crowds.

But a good thing about San Francisco and cities in general is places like these where you can just order a drink and take a seat outside.

Cafe Greco is in North Beach, which is where Little Italy and Chinatown border each other.

- ^_^

Time for Cheap Living?

I want to see if I can live on $100/wk. In SF Bay area. This excludes housing/rent costs, the bills related, and tuition debt. So pretty much includes food, travel, and miscellaneous items.

That seems like a lot... But after living here for almost a year now, I think it will be a challenge. Here goes.


- ^_^

Bike!

I fixed my bike today. ^_^
All by myself. ^_^

And did it by removing 2 parts. ^_^

So here is the story:

I got this bike from a guy off of Craigslist who was selling it for $80, which after my research, is pretty cheap in this area. He was advertising it as a Miyata Street Runner hybrid, which intrigued me. Turns out, the bike may have originally started as a Miyata hybrid, but it had seen the shop and the replacement of several parts. In essence, only the frame was Miyata. But, as a non-bike enthusiast who just wants something cheap to ride to work, I paid him $60 and took it off his hands. It was in good condition for it's age.

Unfortunately, 1 month later and the thing breaks. Not terribly, though. I decided to take a stab at mech work. ^_^

As i found out through tinkering, The problem was that my rear-bike wheel had snapped slightly off it's hinge, causing it to run against the frame, making it impossible to move the bike anywhere. Pushing the back wheel back on its hinge and tightening the screws seemed to solve this for the most part, but I noticed that the wheel still touched the frame slightly. Hence why I mentioned the bike shop replacement parts. These wheels were not hybrid wheels and were too thick for the space between the frame's bars.

So I removed these metal brackets in the hinge whose sole purpose seemed to be to push the wheel forward (if I have removed something vital, someone tell me!). There was no significant effect to the gears or breaks, so tightened everything up. That whirring noise I used to hear when riding? Apparently that was the back wheel brushing up against the frame. No more noise anymore. ^_^

Unfortunately, it still takes me some effort to ride long distance. I blame my fitness level. :P


- ^_^

Indoor garden

My roommate, Nadia, and I have been trying to grow an indoor herb garden for the past month. We started from seeds (mostly because I think it's a really awesome surprise to see a sprout pop up from a pot of what used to be nothing. And then something huge develop from what used to be a little speck dropped in dirt). While the basil has flourished well enough for us to split the plant in to 2 pots, the rosemary and thyme haven't grown much bigger than sprouts. Since I woke up 7 am on a Sunday (more like 4 am and by 7 I couldn't stay in bed any longer. I was REALLY sleepy last night. My bike broke so I had to really work out to get home yesterday so when it go dark I decided to crash early), I decided to visit the plant nursery nearby. Thus I learned that perennial herbs like rosemary and thyme need a year to grow to harvest stage from seeds. So I bought some starter plants to replace our sprouts. 1 rosemary and 1 mint (after standing in front of the herbs for awhile, I realized that I don't usually use thyme all that much. Whereas mint just smells awesome ^_^).

So now our indoor herb garden consists of rosemary, basil, mint, green onion, and 2 starters of cherry tomato and peas (I want to see if I can grow these ^_^).


Meanwhile, I got impulsive and bought a bonsai. As if I don't have enough to take care of. But I remembered seeing a maple bonsai tree and finding it so impressive how beautiful the tiny leaves looked. So I thought I'd give it a go. I got a bonsai starter, pot, and pebbles to mix in the soil (apparently bonsais thrive best when the soil is very coarse and allows water to flow through easily). I don't know anything about the aesthetics of bonsai cutting, but the starter looked like it could use some love and care. It had dead leaves, some deformed, and kind of twisting in to itself in several areas to create a kind of mess. Well, this is the first go at trimming:



It's still kinda messy, but better than before. At least all the dead parts have been removed. I figure, once I let it grow more, I'll know more about where to cut to make it flow nicely.

Oh and I also bought fertilizer. I thought I could go without it, but apparently when grown in pots, plants only have a limited amount of soil to grab their nutrients from. Without nature's flow and insects, they need other aid. I got this seaweed extract fertilizer that the saleslady as the garden nursery recommended.

Puffs!

I bought a pancake puffs pan! You know, the one "as seen on TV" advertising pancake puffs as the new fun thing to cook ball-shaped foods. For breakfast.

Except. It's not all that new.

I knew of this before because of the savory takoyaki of Japan. But apparently, the Dutch have their own sweet version. Ableskivers. That's the kind of pan I got.

For only $12, this pan is of great quality, although small. Still cast iron pan. Nice.

My first test run of this was using the leftover empanada filling and making a quick liquidy mix of bisquik, soy milk, and an egg. And adding a little of this Mexican cheese I bought that was slightly salty. The result tasted better than the dumpling skin empanadas. :)


I also added my roommate's cornmeal because I wanted that texture.

I will try again in the future with cornmeal and hot dog bits.


- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

Davidson's White Tea

I never did write about my disheartening trip to my favorite tea store in Chinatown a few weeks back. In a nutshell though, I went to Red Blossom Tea Company with the specific statement and intent of buying a white tea, but they wouldn't let me try their samples and tried to push the most expensive one on me. Basically they were dismissive and seemingly uninterested in helping me select a tea to purchase. I did write a disappointed review on Yelp.com and the store owner did apologize, so they get some credit back, but that was rude, even for a Chinese store.

Anyways, the reason I bring this up is because this eventually led me to purchase the white tea that I wanted to talk about.

I bought 1 lb of organic silver needle white tea from Davidson Tea Co. at, believe it or not, Amazon.com. It came in a brown paperbag sealed with one of those fold-in twisties. Like the way coffee is sealed. I just tried some today and it was light, sweet and of great quality white.

The price was the coolest part: $45. ^_^

It actually baffles me a bit why their white tea would be so cheap, but then again, I did believe we pay too much here in the US for tea. It could be the other stores are overcharging.... (after all, if this tea is organic, the price should be even higher, right?).

Who would have guessed? For all the high-end tea stores out there, the best deal for great quality is at Amazon.com.

Fake Empanadas

Cooking adventure #3: empanadas

These are so faked. Any Latino would probably balk at the idea, but they were fun. The recipe? Meat, seasoning, onion, some mexican cheese, and dumpling skins!

I took as much of the cooking time out as I could by using dumpling skins and pan-frying the dish. My roommate had told me before of Giada using dumpling skins as a substitute for ravioli making. The result was delicious, if not actually empanadas. Next time I will try to bake instead of pan-fry.

Pan-Fried Curry Rice Balls

Food adventure #2.

Dinner tonight was leftover curry from a few weeks back (don't worry, it was frozen in a tupperware container and recooked on the stove). I still managed to have leftovers, so got in to an experimental mood with the remains.

Pan-fried rice balls.

I got the idea from seeing instructions awhile back for yaki onigiri. This was kind of the same, except it was curry and rice mixed together.

The consistency was thick, but I was worried about it falling apart in the oil, so I added some flour to the mixture. I used my roommate's Venezuelan corn meal, which had a consistency of white flour but made of, obviously, corn (I couldn't find our bag of all-purpose flour, so had to substitute).

To make sure there was an outer "crust", I coated each ball in more of that Venezuelan corn meal. Then into the pan it went.

I pan-fried (as opposed to deep frying) it in order to attempt SOME level of healthiness, rotating it every now and then to make sure every side was getting cooked (the nice thing about the flour I found out was that the white color made it easy to tell which side hadn't touched the oil yet). I'm pretty sure this is probably still just as unhealthy, but still. Yum.

This may end up being a way I get rid of extra curries from now on! Although, next time, I may add peas or corn or some small-cut-up vegetables.

These are going in my lunchboxes for the next few days. ^_^

Chinese Bakery-Style Cake

Whew. Been awhile, hasn't it?

The thing is, with having a 40hr/wk (minimum) job and a 2nd project and dealing with daily life (insurance? taxes? car maintenance? how does the average joe do it all and still have time for the more adventurous things?), and then the NDAs preventing me from talking about what I do with most of my time, having anything to write about is difficult.

So let me interest you in one of my hobbies: cooking!

This was an impulsive decision. I don't usually bake and I've never done something like this before. I made a cake yesterday, which tasted a lot better than it looked. It was one of those Chinese bakery cakes, light, fluffy, and moist with lots of fruit. I don't have an electric beater, so to make this cake, I had to whip everything... by HAND. Never EVER make meringue by hand. You'll get there, but omg it hurts after awhile. A lot of love went in to this....

I got the recipe for this cake from Lucy Zhang's blog. She makes a lot of delicious-looking things, but this one got me especially excited. I don't have a huge love of American-style cakes because they seem so heavy and too sweet. Asian-bakery cakes feel light and just the right amount of sweet to feel refreshing. It was surprising to learn how little was actually in this cake (it's not healthy, but not terrible for you either)! I mean... 1 cake that fed 8 people (small slices, mind you) had only 3/4 cup of flour and a little less than 1 cup of sugar. I suppose the big count was the eggs, which was 6, but if you think about it, each person ate less than 1. For a cake, this is awesome, but oh so much work! I think I understand when Asian Bakeries charge $20-$30 for a standard-sized cake now. Much respect to bakers.

The frosting was whipped cream. Since this was my first cake, I didn't know better but now I do. Whipped cream does not equal whipped cream frosting. Hence the melted look.

As for fruit, I added peaches, nectarines, blackberries, and strawberries. Next time, I may go a little more traditional and use melon and strawberries (no kiwi for me...).

La Mar

Last weekend my roommate Nadia, her sister Tatyana, and I went to La Mar in San Francisco for some Peruvian ceviche. It is completely unfortunate I didn't even think to take pictures.

With the exception of a ceviche salad I had at the Apple cafeteria, this was the first time I got to eat ceviche. I sort of knew what to expect from watching Bourdain and Zimmerman on the travel channel. But for this trip, I let Nadia and Tatyana take lead and do the ordering, given their expertise. ^_^

If you've eaten sushi, then ceviche is no different in terms of the "gross factor". It is essentially raw seafood that has been "cooked" by marinating it in lemon juice and onion. The acid supposedly kills the bacteria that would otherwise be harmful.

La Mar is really nice. We sat at this lounge-like table in the bar area, which suited us. We each got an order of ceviche and shared an appetizer of empanadas and a dessert sampler. Expensive, of course, but I think well worth it for the special trip it was. I think anyone from Peru or Panama would balk at the prices, but then, the atmosphere was really good too.

I was really surprised how full I was from just eating the ceviche. We didn't even bother with the entrees we were so full.

Funny thing though. I went to the bathroom there and it was like complete night and day between the environment in the restaurant and the bathroom. The bathroom looked like it had no place belonging to as nice a restaurant as La Mar and it almost made me suspicious of the restaurant (sanitation of a bathroom should be a measurement of the sanitation of the restaurant, I think. Everyone there has to use the bathroom at some point). But then as I walked out, thinking "man, maybe this restaurant isn't as awesome as it is pretending to be" I see this sign by the door that says that the bathroom exists b/c of historic preservation. And in my head I go "ah... I see." The plaque answered the question in my head. Guess they knew. :P