Category Archives: Friends

The elusive chai I keep chasing in NYC

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Ever since I had my very first sip of chai as a high schooler, I was in love. There are many delicious hot drinks you can have, but I think chai — the Indian spiced milky tea, not just tea, is one of the most comforting ones. There was a period several years ago when I splurged a bit and would buy The Chai Box chai (their Punjaban Party blend is my all-time favorite!), but that ended up becoming very expensive. So, I decided to start trying to blend my own. It’s actually worked out pretty well: I’ve gotten to the point where I add just enough ginger, cardamom, fennel, and clove to my tea (mostly CTC, with a little Ceylon BOPF) and have been able to replicate the exact flavor I want. The chai is always double boiled; it’s not chai to me unless it’s double boiled. And I add about half a teaspoon of sugar per cup of liquid to help even out any bitterness that comes from the tea being so vigorously boiled.

Unfortunately for me, I have yet to identify a single place in New York City that makes chai the way I want it. I’ve found places in Melbourne that do it with the flavor I want, but not here. Kolkata Chai, which has expanded quite a bit, is good, but the flavor is still not the way I want it. The flavor I am chasing is like the one we had all over India, which definitely leans toward Punjabi style chai, like The Chai Box’s Punjaban Party blend. The biggest problem is that the chai made at shops all over here are just too strong on the cinnamon. Cinnamon is fine in chai, but I find it very overpowering to the point where I pretty much never add it to my own at home. I want a dominant ginger and cardamom flavor, first and foremost, with fennel and clove humming in the background. That’s my perfect cup of chai.

While I was at my friend’s house yesterday, she made all of us chai. She said it was mostly ginger, with a “hint” of cardamom. And it was absolutely delicious. I would personally prefer more cardamom, but I was just extremely thrilled and touched that anyone would take the time to double boil chai for me. In that moment of sipping it with the strong flavor of freshly grated ginger, it suddenly dawned on me that this was the very first time anyone has taken the time to double boil chai for me — ever . And I just felt so much gratitude in that moment.

Today, I took Kaia out on a play date to the Brooklyn Children’s Museum with our neighbor friend and her son. We had lunch together at an Indian-ish cafe nearby that I had been wanting to try. Even though I had that delicious homemade ginger chai yesterday, I still wanted more chai today (well, I want it every day, but that’s not realistic). So I ordered the signature masala chai at the cafe. It came out… and once again, it was too cinnamony. It was not as cinnamony as the last place I went to for chai in the Lower East Side, but it was just too much cinnamon. And then someone topped it with even more ground cinnamon just before it was handed to me! Can these places please stop doing this…?

I will keep trying and searching because I refuse to give up hope that my perfect cup exists out there in some shop in New York City. But in the meantime, I will also continue making my own perfect cup of chai at home about once a week. I deserve that little time for myself to indulge.

Hanging out in a real house in New York City

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Other than the Sambal Lady’s almost-annual backyard cookout event, Chris and I have never really been in a real house in the city limits of New York. I’ve been to some very spacious, near palatial condos and co-ops owned by much older Wellesley alums when I used to attend college alumnae events more often, but even then, they were still apartment buildings — not standalone houses. I know no one who owns a brownstone or full-family house in New York City. If someone I know owns a house nearby, it’s likely in Staten Island, Long Island, Westchester, or New Jersey. To date, no one I personally know, am related to, or am friends with owns a real house in New York City. People can barely afford apartments here, so who can really afford a standalone house?

Today, for the first time in my almost 18 years of being here, I visited a friend at her actual house that she moved into about 1.5 years ago, just shortly before we met. She invited the three of us over for a close friends get-together, which we subsequently found out was for one of the friend’s birthdays. The home is a standalone house in Prospect Lefferts Garden, Brooklyn — a four-bedroom, three-bath home with backyard and a backyard patio. There are four levels in the home, and before they moved in, it was gut renovated with mostly new flooring and appliances. As we got the house tour and I marveled over all the interesting fixtures, paintings, and knick-knacks in the house, I just kept thinking how impressive it is that they own a real house in New York City. They have clearly done well for themselves, and I could see their personalities and little touches of each of them all over the home. It felt very welcoming and homely.

One of the questions I asked my friend, given that previously, she’d always lived in an apartment, was obvious (at least, for me): how the heck do she and her husband manage the cleaning? I live in a two-bedroom, two-bathroom apartment in Manhattan, and I already find the cleaning so infuriating: I wipe the dust off the toilet tank in the beginning of the morning. By the end of the day, if I were to run my finger across that same tank surface, there would be a tiny layer of dust! The dust is just never ending in New York!

Prior to moving to New York, she lived in various countries, and her family always had hired help. She was never expected to clean; the most she said she ever did was make sure clothes were removed from areas like her bed or sofas. So she said the answer was obvious: hired help! Every other week, she has a housekeeper come and spend almost the whole day cleaning the house, from top to bottom, floor to floor. She said it would be completely untenable otherwise because they’d just be constantly cleaning everything.

The more house, the more cleaning; I know that sounds a bit crazy that I’d think of that first, but this is what happens when you have an anal-retentive clean person looking at the sheer size of this space…

When your child-free friend befriends your child

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I invited a friend over for dinner tonight. She’s about to start a new job, so her schedule will soon no longer be as flexible as it once was to hang out with me. Plus, she wanted to try some of my fancy Chinese vinegars I got from Mala Market before forking the money over to buy some for herself, so I thought it would be a good time to have her over. I made Malaysian chicken satays with peanut sauce and sliced cucumbers, coconut rice, a Vietnamese cabbage salad, steamed beets, and roasted Georgian eggplant rolls with walnut paste (with my khmeli suneli!). It was a pretty tasty pan-Asian meal that everyone enjoyed.

Even though my friend is child-free and has pretty much decided she doesn’t want kids, she actually really enjoys spending time with littles. Not too long ago, she actually taught muay thai to young kids (mostly elementary school through high school) age, so she says she really enjoys the energy and honesty they bring. She says she enjoys kids, but just doesn’t want any of her own — that’s fair enough and pretty easy to understand. My friend spent a good amount of time entertaining Kaia before our Lunar New Year party began a couple weeks ago, so Kaia still remembered this auntie, and was very excited that she was coming over for dinner. Kaia practiced some martial arts moves with our friend, and also made sure she got her cardio workout in by chasing her back and forth in the apartment. Kaia was so pooped by the time our friend left that she passed out within minutes. The next morning, she kept asking about this auntie — how she got home, where she went, etc.

I’m lucky that most of my child-free friends genuinely enjoy spending time with Kaia and humoring her demanding, occasionally princessy side. A lot of people around my age complain about the child-free friends they have, saying they don’t want to spend time with their kids and just don’t enjoy children at all. I get that. But it’s also nice when your friends accept that your child is part of your life, and sometimes, hanging out with you also means by default at times, they’ll also have to hang out with your kid. I love that Kaia is building these relationships with my friends in my life — she has no idea how lucky she is to have so many aunties and uncles, not blood related, who care about her so much.

“It’s okay. You can buy me another one.”

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Being a parent has endless infuriating moments, like the table toppling over yesterday at the cafe with two hot drinks, but it also is balanced by endless sweet moments, as well, that make me gush and feel so thankful for the privilege of being a parent. Lucky me — since she was a baby, Kaia has always loved endless cuddles and kisses. She is extremely affectionate and loves being touched. One of my friends lamented to me that neither of her daughters leta her cuddle with her, that they actively avoid it and try to get out of their mom’s arms when she attempts to hold them. So every time Chris grumbles about Kaia’s moments of neediness, I always remind him that we should be grateful that our little one is so openly loving and affectionate. One day sooner than we think, she will want to have nothing to do with us in public, and will certainly not let us cuddle with her.

Like all little kids, she is slowly but surely growing into a big kid. And she’s demonstrating a greater understanding of how things work. For example, she knows that if we want to go to the bakery next door to her school that mama needs to have cash in order to buy bao (Double Crispy is cash-only, like most Chinatown bakeries). She also knows that when packages arrive, they are either gifts, or they are things that mama and daddy paid money for. End understanding: things cost money. When one of my friends came to visit in January, she presented Kaia with a new gift: a Disney princess necklace beading kit. Kaia was really excited, as she thoroughly enjoyed the beading stations for endless necklaces at Space Club the two times we went last year. This afternoon, we were beading the necklaces together and probably putting too many beads on the necklaces when it dawned on her that we would not have enough beads for all five necklaces; we had enough for about four. She started frowning when she realized the dilemma we were in. How could we finish beading a fifth necklace?

“It’s okay,” Kaia said finally with a little smile on her face. “Auntie Rebecca will buy us more beads the next time she comes.”

I couldn’t help but laugh out loud when Kaia said this. She started laughing and giggling nonstop when I laughed. But we laughed for different reasons: she loves it when we laugh and always wants to join in on the fun. I was laughing because I found it quite presumptuous that she just assumes that when Auntie Rebecca comes next that she will buy her beads — or anything at all! It’s almost as though she thinks that her mere existence grants her some endless stream of gifts from her endless aunties and uncles!

Flattery with food

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Everyone loves it when people take their suggestions. It’s an unspoken compliment or flattery, to do or take up something that someone has suggested. In the past, I’ve always gotten annoyed when i’ve spent time putting together travel lists for people who ask for my suggestions about a given city or country, and then they barely look at my list and say they did other things. Now, I don’t do a single thing custom for anyone because of that since that takes time, which is a valuable commodity. If they want to see my travel suggestions, I will just give them my OneNote dump for the location, and they can sift through it themselves.

But in the last 10-15 years, I’ve had people take my suggestions on endless things, whether it’s restaurants, cities/countries to visit, or specific lesser known places or dishes to eat. I always get excited about this every single time, and I love hearing about their thoughts after they’ve experienced said thing. But now, it seems like I’ve been influencing friends to cook things, and that makes me super thrilled.

In the last year, I’ve had friends and colleagues make toddler baked goods I’ve made for Kaia. They’ve made chilis and soups I’ve made. One friend made the almond cookies I made for my last two Lunar New Year parties. Just last week, I was raving to a friend about a high protein peanut noodle (there’s a whole block of silken tofu in it!) dish I made, and then the next day, she went ahead and made it, agreeing that it was delicious. This same friend is saving the black sesame swirled pumpkin nian gao recipe for a future family gathering. And she was asking me for tips on how to best steam fish, and what my steaming setup was like. She said she usually roasts or bakes, but because of my steamed fish dish from the Lunar New Year party, she wants to start incorporating more steamed fish into her diet.

This was like music to my ears. I told her about my steamer setup and how I steam different things. She told me that she actually broke her little metal steamer rack, so I offered to go to Chinatown and pick one up for her (after all, I am there five days a week to pick up Kaia). I think with food, the best compliment is not necessarily the compliment of the food itself, but it’s when people liked your dish so much that they not only asked for the recipe/how to make it, but also went ahead and made plans to make it, and made it. That is the kind of flattery I love.

The little klepto friend at our Lunar New Year party

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Giving hong bao/li xi/red envelopes/pockets/packets is a Lunar New Year tradition, one that I don’t really practice as an adult outside of my Lunar New Year party, if I had to be honest. My parents and our wider family are further away, so it’s not like my cousins’ kids are close by (or close in relationship) where I’d see them often enough and give them hong bao. I remember receiving lots of hong bao very frequently as a young child, especially by my grandma’s friends and our very extended older relatives who would stop by during Chinese New Year, bearing lots of gifts and eating all the traditional foods. I stopped receiving hong bao regularly once my mom converted to Jehovah’s Witnesses. But traditionally, the way it works is that children receive hong bao from the older generations. Then once you become an adult, you can continue receiving them until you get married. As an adult, you’re expected to give to the younger generation. But once you get married, you are expected to give to younger friends/relatives who are not married, as well as the younger generation. In some families, once you start working, you’re expected to give a hong bao to your parents, but alas, my parents don’t celebrate, so…

I prepared a hong bao for all three kids who came to our Lunar New Year party. As a child, I remember until I was old/mature enough to be “trusted” with money, my mom would allow me to first receive the hong bao in my hand, then after I thanked the giver, she’d quickly snatch it away for safe keeping until we got home, fearing I’d lose the money. Unfortunately, when I handed out the hong bao to the kids at the party, the parents did not always follow this (smart) practice my mom did, and they let the kids play with the hong bao. Well, one child called S took H’s hong bao, opened it, and then took the money for herself. When H and his mom left our place, she told me that H had two hong bao originally, but one of them disappeared. After we finished cleaning the place after all our guests left, I found H’s hong bao, but it was empty. I asked Kaia if she knew where H’s money went. She very matter-of-factly responded that S had taken the money out of H’s hong bao. I still couldn’t find any loose cash after looking everywhere in the house.

So I texted S’s dad and asked how much money she came home with. I told him the context that Kaia had shared, though I wasn’t sure if I could fully believe her given her age/level of maturity. He went to go check. And lo and behold, he snapped a photo of not two bills S was supposed to have, but THREE, including the one I was supposed to give H.

I didn’t realize that we had a little klepto toddler friend among us.

Live and learn, parent friends: take your children’s hong bao before they start opening the envelopes and stealing the contents from each others’!

Tardiness in friends

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At a previous company, I once worked with a sales leader I really respected. Although I am not in sales, I oftentimes listened to his team talks and abided by his advice. Countless times, I can remember what he said repeatedly about showing up to customer meetings: “If you are not 15 minutes early, then you are 15 minutes late.” To him, if you showed up for a 9am meeting at 8:59 or 9am, you were already late and losing the damn deal.

There’s some truth in this advice, and not just in business, but also with lower stakes situations, such as when you are meeting up with friends or other loved ones. You want to make a good impression, stay on good footing with those you care about, and ultimately, show some respect. When you set a meeting time, you are dedicating this time to this person, and thus you are respecting that they chose to set aside this time out of their busy day just for you.

I used to be the jerk who would be late fairly regularly to non-work-related events. In my early 20s, when I’d say I would meet with a friend at 6:30pm, in my head, I’d give myself a 15-minute window of “grace.” This was never spoken. I never told any friend this. But I figured I could get there by 6:45 and it would totally be fine. Sometimes, I’d arrive early or on time. But oftentimes, I was 10-15 minutes late. And finally one day, Chris called me out on it and said it was rude, said we agreed on a meeting time, and that I needed to respect that. Sheepishly, I admitted he was right. With that, plus the influence of work, since then, I make it a point to show up to meetups about 10-15 minutes early now, assuming I am not crunched for time by things out of my control (like work meetings that might run over). And that gave me the liberty (and permission) to start calling out other friends who would show up late to agreed meetups. It’s had a “trickle-across” effect: a couple friends who would usually be late are now almost always either early or on time. Now, the majority of my friends are always on time.

Well, that’s with the exception of one friend, who is notoriously late all the time. She has shown up to 1:1 meetups with me late by 10-30 minutes. Last year, she came to lunch with us late by almost an hour; Chris was infuriated. She came to my 40th birthday party late by 1.5 hours. And then this past Sunday, she came over an hour late to my Lunar New Year party.

“Being late is just a sign of disrespect,” Chris insisted as he grumbled about her. “Would she show up late to a work event or a workout class? I doubt it. So it’s not like she’s not capable; she just doesn’t respect her friends enough to be on time.”

I texted her about 10 minutes before she showed up on Sunday, asking if she was almost here (this is 50 minutes after the stated start time of my party on the Paperless Post invitation). Everyone else was already here; we were all waiting for her to arrive. When she came through the door with her husband, she saw my text as Chris took their coats, and she had said almost defensively to my text, “Well, we’re coming from far away.” Well, “far away” is all relative: we had friends come from Staten Island, New Jersey, and similar parts of Brooklyn, and they were all early or relatively on time, unless they had told us in advance they had to be late for some reason or another. With her, we had zero communication. And she clearly didn’t do the due diligence of looking at the start time, then backing out based on Google Maps how long it would take them to get to our place via public transit the way a logical person would.

Another friend was complaining to me about people who are perpetually late. “What, do they think an event start time is just a suggestion?” she asked me.

Although I’ve already called this friend out on being repeatedly late a number of times, I have a feeling that I’m going to have to confront her about it more seriously at some point soon because when I think of the sheer number of times she’s been late, it’s exactly what Chris says: it’s just a huge disrespect. Everyone is “busy,” but no one is too busy to constantly be late all the time and disrespect people they supposedly care about.

Lunar New Year gifts this year

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Every year I throw my Lunar New Year party, I try to do things a little bit differently to make it better, different, or more special with the food. This year, I made some more intricate Vietnamese dishes. I also created food labels for everything, even marking the ones that were vegetarian or contained pork/mushrooms/shrimp (for people with allergies to those foods). That’s partly to make my life easier with questions on ingredients/what the dishes are, so I don’t have to re-explain myself a dozen times, and so that people know what they’re eating right away. But what I wasn’t quite expecting this year is that the gifts we got were extra special, nice, or fun!

Kaia received several generous hong bao from friends, as it’s a cultural tradition that the older generation should give hong bao/li xi to the younger generation. One of my friends gave me a small money tree several weeks in advance for Lunar New Year party hosting. A third friend drove all the way from New Jersey down to Manhattan Chinatown to a popular (and pricey!) Malaysian jerky shop to get us an entire pound of pork jerky. She also gave us a couple boxes of bean-based pastas, a single orange for good luck (haha), and some homemade lentil-based breads she’d just baked. Another friend brought beautifully boxed and individually wrapped Japanese Yoku Moku “cigare” biscuits, plus an entire box of sumo citrus! I love sumo citrus, but they are quite expensive, so we rarely buy them. Originating in Japan, Sumo citrus are actually not an orange, per se, but a cross between satsuma, mandarin, and navel oranges. We even got a bottle of Veuve Clicquot. A friend who recently came back from India brought us a framed Madhubani painting, which is a style of painting traditionally done by women from her dad’s old village in Bihar. And then there was the most bougie gift of all that Chris’s friend gave me, perfectly wrapped in glittery pink wrapping paper: a Williams Sonoma gold and white ceramic dragon candle, made especially for Lunar New Year. I placed the candle, alongside my 3D cherry blossom birthday card from a friend, in our dining area to display them both. That huge gold candle definitely is the most flashy, showy thing I own to date now…

Year of the Fire Horse Lunar New Year Party

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Today, we had a Lunar New Year party of 17 friends who came to feast on 12 different dishes that I made! It was our largest group hosted yet. We had 16 people, but then a friend of Chris decided last minute he could come. Chris asked if I had enough food. I had a mini panic in my head last night, but I figured that I could always supplement with additional dumplings I had cooked and frozen that were originally meant for future use.

Well, there was way more than enough food; I was actually shocked by the amount of food we had left over, which just means that we’ll have more to eat (and less need for me to cook!) for this week. This year, in true form, I “upleveled” and tried out some new recipes, did my usual trusted staples, and also added more Vietnamese dishes (which were quite labor-intensive!) to the line-up. After prepping for two weeks and deciding on this menu about a month ago, this is what I made:

Starters:

Banh it tran – Vietnamese (Hue) sticky rice dumplings filled with mashed mung bean and minced pork, topped with scallion oil, fried shallots, and served with nuoc cham

Banh bot loc – Vietnamese (Hue) banana leaf steamed tapioca dumplings stuffed with shrimp , served with nuoc cham

[Do chua – pickled carrot and daikon (for both dumplings above, plus thit kho as a palate cleanser/much needed acidic hit)]

Luo bo gao – Chinese pan fried radish cake with Chinese sausage, shiitake mushrooms, and shredded scallops

Mains:

Thit kho – Vietnamese coconut water braised pork ribs with eggs

Nuo mi fan – Chinese sticky rice with Chinese sausage, cha siu, shredded scallops, shiitake mushrooms

Dan Dan noodles

Steamed wild black sea bass with ginger and scallion

Blanched yu choy greens with black vinegar sauce and crispy garlic

Buddha’s Delight / Luo han zhai: Stir fried (12!) vegetables with mung bean noodles

Desserts:

Black sesame swirled pumpkin nian gao

Chinese almond cookies

Black sesame tang yuan

Food is one of my love languages. I love feeding people I love. I love it when people discover new foods and enjoy them, and I love when they discover new foods they enjoy because of me. And I love it when people love the food I make them. One friend discovered she loved lotus root and the different tofu products in my zhai dish; she also loved the do chua/pickled carrot and daikon for my Vietnamese dishes. Another friend was obsessed over the savory-sweet flavor that the coconut water gave my thit kho/pork ribs. A friend who came for the first time said she couldn’t get enough of my steamed fish and how flavorful it was. A friend also was excited to have my black sesame tang yuan again — this is someone who is self-professed about being anti-dessert, but loves these sticky rice balls of “not too sweet” black sesame filling.

It’s definitely a lot of thought and work to put into this party, but I love every bit of it. I love the lead up, the food prep, the last minute bits that have to be cooked, the chaos that ensues with the kids coming in. And I always end the evening, after lots of cleaning and washing, with a happy and warm heart.

Friends reunion and health scares

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Today, I had a midday meet-up with a college friend who was in town for her kids’ winter break. They came into the city to have a quick midday snack with me before driving back up to Boston. Her kids are obsessed with the American Dream Mall, so they visit about once a year during a school break. I’ve been able to see her both last year and the year before for dinner while I was in Boston for work, but both times, it was just herself. This time, I got to see not just her, but her husband and all three of their kids! The last time I saw her husband was before they even got married. And I was excited to meet all three of her mini-mes today.

The two older kids were very sweet and affectionate and prompted addressed me as “Auntie Yvonne,” giving me a hug, and making sure I knew how old each of them were. The youngest one was 15 months, and he was like a quiet little koala. This is my “go big or go home” friend when it comes to kids: she always said she either wanted zero kids or a LOT of kids. And so now she’s got three. And just before I was going to ask if they were considering a fourth (because this time last year, she told me she and her husband seriously were talking about trying for a fourth!), she told me that they are officially stopping at three because their number 3 child had a very tumultuous first 15 months on earth, with getting RSV at two months and rhino virus at four months; both required multiple night-long hospitalizations. And then just before Thanksgiving (and his first birthday), he started vomiting, and his stool was coming out with blood. They found out that he had intussusception, which is a medical condition where one of his intestines slid into another part of his intestine; they said the most common way to understand what’s happening is to think about how a telescope slides its way in and out. It was a result of having multiple back to back viral infections — poor little guy. And the only way to resolve this was to have him do surgery where the surgeons would cut him open and manually pull the intestine out of each other. Luckily, no parts of the intestine had died (this is a real fear if it’s caught too late), and he made a quick recovery. This little one-year-old was out of the hospital, post-operation, after just a one night stay! In retrospect, they said they really had it good: their first child never got sick and was super easy as a baby and toddler; their second child got sick occasionally but was also pretty chill. This third child, as is evident, keeps giving them one scare after the next!

I think about these crazy situations that can come up that are completely out of our control, and I’m just so thankful that Kaia has, to date, been pretty healthy (and fingers crossed, this continues). I don’t know how I could stomach a situation like my friend’s third child had — to think of a tiny little baby needing to be cut open for surgery just makes me want to cry my eyes out. My friend and her husband are definitely troopers in their own right — and the most fertile couple I am friends with, by far!