Fashion capital

Because Milan is known to be one of the fashion capitals of the world, a bit of me expected everyone in Milan to be hyper fashion conscious, impeccably dressed, and the women to be more heavily made up. I didn’t really find this to be the case walking around today, but I did notice that a lot of women were wearing high heeled boots. When I think of Chinatowns in any city across the world, the first thing I imagine is a whole slew of restaurants, both the dingy hole-in-the-walls, the family restaurants, and a sprinkling of higher end, banquet-style restaurants. In Milan Chinatown as we walked up and down the streets, it certainly seemed as though there were far more clothing, accessory, and custom-made clothing stores than restaurants of any type. We also ran into a lot of outlets and little stores claiming to sell designer names at reduced prices. We walked into one outlet, and after a bit of looking at what they had, I got immediately exhausted and wanted to leave. Shopping for clothes is always overwhelming and annoying to me. This is why I wish I had a personal shopper to do all my shopping and ensure everything fit correctly. I hate trying on clothes and deciding whether things match or look good on me or not, and when faced with a massive outlet store, instead of getting excited, I get more frustrated by all the options.

Away from home for the holidays…again

It’s the first time since I’ve started working and told colleagues I won’t be going home for Thanksgiving when no one has asked me why I’m not going home. I haven’t been home for Thanksgiving since 2003 actually, so that’s quite a long time ago now – 14 years. Maybe my colleagues now just get that I like travel and that I see my family at other times of the year. Or maybe they just don’t care. That’s fine, too. I’d never enjoyed the insinuations that I don’t care about my family just because I don’t see them at Thanksgiving; it’s such an oversimplification of a relationship that is far more complicated than a random U.S. holiday.

Honestly, I like not seeing my family (immediate plus extended) for the major holidays of the year. I remember it always being stressful for Christmas when I’d come home during my school breaks and my early years in New York. My parents would always pick a fight with me and Ed about things like the gifts we were giving our cousins or cousins’ kids, what food I was making and if I served it to my dad first, who refused to eat with us. It was too much drama, and other than the food and seeing my brother, I never really cared about any of it at all. I rather have a Thanksgiving meal with my New York friends. There’s never really any drama other than the occasional disagreement about whether the Civil War was about economics or slavery (I think we realize… it was about BOTH), and I can enjoy the food and the company and not worry about someone yelling at me after.

Thanksgiving cooking frenzy

Around this time of year, people around the U.S. are often spending time writing out their grocery lists, planning what they are going to make for Thanksgiving, which is oftentimes one of the only times of the year they actually cook. It’s actually a bit comical that some people choose this to be the one time of year when they not only cook, but for whatever reason feel compelled to showcase their culinary abilities that are otherwise not used the rest of the year. And thus, they feel like they need to impress their house guests.

The funniest thing about major eating/family gathering events like Thanksgiving and Christmas is that oftentimes, people will still go for the usual favorites that are not particularly impressive presentation-wise, but simply are reliable, comfortable, and rib-stickingly delicious. While we hosted our friends for our early Thanksgiving meal tonight, we noticed that what seemed to go the fastest of all the dishes was the roasted garlic mashed potatoes. You’d hardly consider mashed potatoes an impressive dish, nor is it particularly time consuming to make, but in general, people just love it.

The dark meat on the tandoori turkey also went much faster than the white meat. Even as we encouraged our friends to take leftover food home since we’ll be leaving for Europe tomorrow, the white meat was what we mostly had left over for ourselves to freezer for food when we come back the week after Thanksgiving. It’s further proof that dark meat is the best, and people know it whether they are willing to admit it out loud or not.

Tandoori turkey

This always seems to happen whenever I’m preparing food for a big event; something tends to go wrong, and I need to salvage what I have to make something edible. I was prepared to make this tandoori turkey recipe with this spiced yogurt marinade for the 12.66-pound organic turkey I got. The recipe calls for a roasting bag, which I’d never used before, so I ordered a pack and opened it up tonight, Well, just as I imagined, the oven-safe plastic seemed a bit flimsy, and I was worried about the weight of the turkey, in addition to the yogurt marinade, which is over four cups of liquid. Lo and behold, just as I am coating the turkey with the tandoori marinade, the bag breaks, and about a half cup of the marinade spills out onto my kitchen counter. What a mess.

Unless this turkey is the best turkey of my life, I’m never using this recipe again. Either that, or I need to get much sturdier roasting bags.

Dietary restrictions

My colleague and I are menu planning for our team’s offsite retreat, which will be an hour and a half south of San Francisco the last week of November. We’re in charge of planning and buying all the food and ingredients we’ll be using. And I begrudgingly posted on our team Slack channel and asked if anyone had any dietary restrictions. Luckily, in our team of 16 people, only two people do: one person cannot eat dairy, and another is a vegetarian who eats seafood.

Asking about dietary restrictions is always, for me, a courtesy thing, but honestly, I really don’t want to ask it unless you are absolutely positive that you have an allergy. I just want to make what I want to make; so why can’t you just eat it and be grateful that someone spent time making it for you?

 

Food planning

I had a tea break this afternoon with my colleague visiting from Amsterdam, who is originally from New York City and was here for a work offsite this week. We follow each other on Instagram, and so she oftentimes sees my Instagram story posts about food prep and cooking and said she even shares some of the videos with her husband. “Look! Yvonne roasts and even grinds her own spice mixes! Even your mom doesn’t do that!” She tells him.

She asked me how much planning I typically do for food whenever I am cooking. I told her that I spend so much time thinking about food and what I am going to make next that my own husband sometimes asks me if that’s all I ever think about. I told her that I usually am thinking at least a week in advance, so if I want something spur of the moment, it’s a bit hard unless I know I already have certain items stocked in my pantry or freezer. She said it’s more difficult for her to do that in Amsterdam given the types of markets around her, so if she needs certain ingredients, she needs to trek out of her way to grab them; they won’t always be at her local markets. I get why people don’t cook more than they do on average in cities like New York; there’s no real incentive to unless you really enjoy it, and not everyone is willing to go out of their way to buy spices or egg noodles the way I am. I actually enjoy that process. I just think it would be better if more people were cognizant of what’s in their food and what goes into making it. We should all be aware of the things we’re putting in our bodies.

Turning down freebies

The level of laziness I observe every day is so frustrating sometimes… even when it comes to things that are literally free to people if they just spent five minutes to get something done. I’m lucky to work at a company now that pays for my transportation costs to and from work, which typically amounts to a monthly subway card that today, is valued at $121.50. It’s a pretty nice savings to have, but to my shock, I have a number of colleagues who have never set theirs up, and they’ve been here for over a year. Why would they not do this? They made excuses like… “I didn’t know where to find the information” (maybe just ask someone?), “I hadn’t thought about doing it” (lazy), “I forgot about it” (you forgot about free money? Really?).

It reminds me of the topic at one of our weekly meetings where we discussed giving free services to customers for a month, and our leadership team just couldn’t understand why people would turn down free services. Well, at the end of the day, even if you give free services to someone, they still need to do something to set that up, and oftentimes, people are too lazy to do even that. Taking action seems to be happening less and less as time goes on.

Downsizing and still not diverse

Last week, we lost five of our employees in our office. We’re gaining a new employee soon, but she’ll be a remote employee who won’t be working out of our office. She may not be adding to the racial diversity of our office, but at least she is adding another occasional female to the office.

For the longest time, everyone on our enterprise east sales team has been a white male. We didn’t even have one female… until now. When I was in high school, I used to blend in because I went to a school that was probably 80 percent Chinese. Now, I kind of stand out because I’m one of just a few women and one of just a few non-white employees.

Chinatown market customers

One thing I’ve noticed in my most recent trips to Hong Kong Supermarket in Manhattan Chinatown is that every time I peruse the aisles, I seem to encounter more and more non-Asian customers. When I first moved here back in 2008 and would shop in any Asian area, whether it was in Elmhurst or in Manhattan Chinatown, it was very rare to see non-Asian shoppers picking up produce or jars of pickled and preserved vegetables. Now, I actually regularly encounter white customers with little shopping lists or photos on their phones in hand, trying to find authentic Sichuanese pepper and a specific type of Chinese green for a stir-fry. Others shop by looking at Chinese characters that they don’t know how to read, but recognize the strokes in an attempt to identify whether they are choosing the right jar. It gives me hope that despite all the racism I read about that has been made more “justified” by having President Dipshit in the White House that people really are still trying to branch out and experience cultures other than their own. And the easiest way to do that is through food.

Grinding spices

I spent this morning gathering all the different spices I’d need to make two different spice mix powders, tandoori masala and garam masala. Probably no one I know has all the ingredients right in their pantry to make these items at home, but I’ve been gathering these things over the last year and keeping them fresh in the fridge. They even came with us on our move from the Upper East Side; not a single spice got tossed out. To freshen them up, I toasted them over the stove before grinding them to a pulp to then store in glass containers until I’m ready to use them for my long-awaited tandoori roasted turkey for our early Thanksgiving party.

The unfortunate part about grinding and toasting potent spices in your apartment is that… well, in smaller spaces, the odors tend to stick a lot more. We went out for the evening and came home to an entire house that smelled… Indian, and not necessarily in a good way. We enjoy Indian food and flavors and scents… but not on our walls and all over our living room. I ended up having to boil vinegar twice to get the smells to un-stick.