Dairy

DUSTY CHEDDAR POTATO CROQUETTE

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“A SEQUEL OF CHICK-FLICK POPCORNS…”

I couldn’t stop thinking about the color orange.

Not thinking about orange after the revelation of homemade cheese powder for this white cheesy popcorns, is like ignoring the bigger and prettier elephant in the room.  You know you thought the same.  So let’s just take a moment to put this unnatural, unhealthy, un-anything-you-should-really-eat-or-let-alone-making-at-home idea aside, before we can get back to eating real foods.

Shall we?  A sequel of our chick-flick popcorns – the orange stuff that would make cardboard taste good.

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HELLO, ÇILBIR

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“FORGET EGGS BENEDICT… THERE’S A
NEW BRUNCH CRAZE IN TOWN”

The sleep-bugs are hitting me like a brick today…

Maybe because I fought to stay up last night after Jason pulled a long work-night, and prepared him this as a very inappropriate thing to eat at 2 AM.  I can be a very irresponsible wife sometimes.  Lighting looks weird but hey, that’s the best midnight can do.

But the more pressing matter, besides the fact that I’m slowly murdering my husband (who helplessly squeezed out these words, “Is yogurt… fattening?” through his feeding mumbles…), is have you heard about this?

Çilbir.

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BLUEBERRY SLAB-MUFFIN FRENCH TOAST

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Actually… I was saving this post for another time.  Because first of all, something borderline “sweet” and similarly “French-toasty” had already taken the space next door.  And secondly, it hasn’t exactly left yet.  Yeah, so to avoid the suspicion of repetition, I was going to let this one ferment in my draft-box for a bit until you turn bubbly and matured for it.

However… shit happened.

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A WRONG AND IRRESPONSIBLE SANDWICH

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We’ve all heard about this growing up, that the adult life is all about responsibilities.  “Pfff, whatever…” I said.  I mean what does that even mean, really?  As if kids don’t got no responsibility, like I hadn’t already been tying my own shoes, wearing my painful braises, and attending my designated school every morning where I dealt with mean kids on my own like any accountable, dutiful children since seven.  Think I did all those for fun?  I was doing good for my own greater good.  Responsibility.  You know?  In fact, it seems that my whole life so far has been a reversed testimony for such statement.

As I am slowly coming to terms that my diligent, responsible life had took its last dying breath the moment… I became an adult.

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TIRAMISU CHURRO + WARM COFFEE CUSTARD

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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.

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THANKSGIVING ROUX BREAD

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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.

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THE WEST LAKE HYBRID

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You know… as someone who’s been gutting dead animals… chopping things… hacking and hammering in the kitchen for the past 15 years, I pride myself for the fact that I seldom, and I mean rarely burn or hurt myself inside my ruling domain.  No, it isn’t because I’m more masterful at wielding heavy machineries, but because I have a deeply-rooted, intolerated fear for pain which led to a full spectrum of obsessive precautions before any hazardous conducts in the kitchen.  But… just before I sat down for a chat with you, I though, hey, maybe it was a good idea to first finish slicing those mathafuckin’ fibrous and tough galangals for easy freezing… just to check it off my list…

Well, just like that, there goes my left middle-finger now looking tragically like a tissue paper and tape-wrapped lollipop, summer strawberry flavour.  You see?  You see me waving my middle finger in 360º just so you can see clearly?  Especially at you, galangals.

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HOLY CRAPPED HOLLANDAISE

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I’m sure it happens to everybody.  I know, self-assuringly, that I’m not alone on this…  I’m sure that once in a while, we all come across a recipe, a “trick” really, that gets us so excited we forget to reasonably doubt and then it fails on such an epic proportion that we quiver at the sight of the kitchen doorway for a week.  Say it is so.

Well… even so, two days ago, when my cold lingered on and my eyes were so dry from the medication that they were about to crack open, it just wasn’t… really wasn’t the best time for this to happen.

And yet it so did.  Three times it did.

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THE HOT TRIPLETS

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I’m shouting out to you in the middle of the Pacific Ocean!!  Warm waves… creamy white sands… waving palm trees… oh wait oops, are you cold there?  Don’t say I’m not nice.  Here, drink this, what I call the hot triplets.  Oh, and it goes with this, the sweet buttah sandwich.  Both are mutations from my favorites of Hong Kong’s popular “tea room” culture.  Maybe I’ll chat more about it when I get back but right now, I have more important things to get to…  See ya!

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(RE)MODEL BAKERY’S ENGLISH MUFFIN

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Oh I don’t feel bad telling you this… I don’t.  In just 2 days, I will be packing my bikinis, loading up the sunscreens and dragging my waxed legs across the Pacific to the realm where no toxic fume blackens my lungs and shameless line-cutter haunts my footsteps!  Aloha~ HAWAII, here I come!  Gimme a hug gimme a hug please!  Oooh I can almost taste the air of freedom… where real earth should feel like… where I don’t fantasize plotting the murder of anyone… of every day… of every minute… (Hear that?  The dude who spitted next to my feet in the restaurant dies-dies-dies so gruesomely it sounds like an unicorn-pony lullaby…).  Where I can be the non-mental me again you see?!!  Oh please do it now!!  Eject me out of China right now!  Cannonball me outta here!

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FAKE CHOCOLATE CAKE + REAL BANANA BUTTERCREAM

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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.

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spicy cheesy. gochujang spaghetti

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The wee-light of early morning started seeping in through the curtain, adding to my sense of unease particular to someone who knew she had done wrong and was most certainly about to get caught.  Jason’s morning-siren promptly started barking at 6:30 (no, really, the alarm is a dog barking…) and was ignored for 5 minutes as usual until eventually, he turned over and witnessed my crime scene.  Like the most gasping moment in a horror movie, an unsightly picture of an irresponsible grown-up, holding her i-pad with an earphone giggling like an idiot, secretly pulling a marathon on… a new-found television series.  ALL NIGHT and 18 episodes in, not even of something socially excusable like Game of Thrones, or House of Cards to demonstrate depth, but a retarded high-school version of True Blood with a name too embarrassing to even pronounce… VaVampire Diaries!  God!  Just hang me by the neck!

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