I’ve been struggling to get the light the way I really want it in my kitchen for filming cooking videos. The ideal light is always sometime between late morning and early afternoon; after that, all these shadows start forming and it becomes very unflattering to do video. But then our handyman friend suggested tilting the living room ceiling lights to face into the kitchen and tilted some. As I was shooting chicken enchiladas today, I realized that there is still a bright yellow tint after the sun sets… and I wasn’t really thrilled with the close up shots of my enchiladas. They look too yellow and warm, which means I’ll need to figure out how much color editing I’d be able to do to correct this.

Chris then proceeded to move a few more of the living room ceiling lights into the kitchen, which is actually a good thing because we never want the living room that bright anyway. Now, the kitchen looks like a studio for shooting! And the light would be accurate to show the color of the enchiladas or anything else.

Given that our Seamless app has converted into Grubhub for our corporate accounts where we get a daily $20 credit to use, the number of options has increased exponentially since this switch; I can’t even count how many new places I now have access to at work that I didn’t even know I could order from! So today, I tried a Georgian place not too far away from the office. For $11, I ordered khinkali, which are Georgian dumplings with a thick, handmade skin, normally filled with a ground meat mixture. I rarely get to eat Georgian food; the last time I had it was in July, when I was in Rego Park seeing off my friend moving to Hong Kong, and we had a delicious Georgian feast together. I excitedly waited for my dumplings to arrive.

And, arrive they did. A teeny tiny box of… three dumplings. That’s three dumplings for $11. Really? That’s all I get?! While they were quite delicious, they weren’t particularly large, and it was just sad to see these three little blobs in my box alone. “Is that all you got?” my colleague said, looking over with a wrinkled brow at my box.

Welp. That was the first and last time I’m ordering from there. Delicious? Yes. Good value? Absolutely, heck no.

Autumn officially started a couple of weeks ago, but the temperatures didn’t really start dipping into the “I need to wear a jacket in the morning” feeling until this week. I resisted it on Monday, when it was definitely jacket weather, but I rebelled and left the house only wearing a thin cotton cardigan on top… and then really regretted it and wear my office hoodie home. I go through this same phase every year when summer has ended and autumn is pushing its way into my life: I resist, resist, resist, and then cave in.

The only things keeping me going are what’s keeping me productive: autumn baking and cooking, as well as video editing and my channel. Autumn is a great time for baking with all the squash and spices, so it is a good time to experiment again.

If you know me at all, you will know I absolutely hate picky eaters. As a child of a certain age, it’s passable because you’re a child and your taste buds are still developing, but an adult, it is not. You maybe get 3-5 different things you’re allowed to hate and can refuse to eat, and then after that, your tastes in food are pretty much just dead to me; I could never take you seriously for any food advice, opinions, or recommendations. Because as an adult, it is a choice to be picky. It is a choice to be close minded to new things, new ideas, new foods, new cultures’ foods that you’ve never had before. Unless you have serious food allergies or a disease that prevents you from trying new things, it’s just a childish choice to me.

So I was sitting at the lunch table today, listening to a new colleague go on and on about how picky of an eater he is, that picky eating is a “personality trait” and that he can’t stand ground meat, but he’d happily eat a burger or a meatball “because in one, it’s all put together, and in the other, it’s just all crumbled all over the place.” I could feel my blood pressure go up. He was literally sitting there, thriving on all this attention he was getting, this grown white man, having nearly every person around the lunch table poke and prod, ask him “what about this?” and “will you eat that?” His face was truly priceless. I don’t know what made him more excited: the attention he was getting from his pickiness or his actual pickiness not being completely shat on by someone like me.

I’m an adult. And part of being an adult is remembering to think before we speak. So, instead of saying anything, I chose to simply leave the lunch table. I can’t be around ignorant talk, nor can I be around reinforcement of ignorance. This is the exact kind of person I really do not want to spend any time around at all.

I wonder if I’d be able to access data for exactly how many people in a given week come to New York for work. And then after I look at the data for that, I’d really like to understand of the number of people who travel to New York for work whether that travel was actually necessary for real business purposes, or if it was justified as fluffy internal meetings or accompanying supposed direct reports on their customer meetings. Regardless, New York is a hot place to visit, and it’s an even hotter place to visit when you’re not traveling on your own dime.

I cannot even count the number of “fluffy” BS visits I’ve heard of at companies where I’ve worked when people just wanted an excuse to travel to New York, so they made them up. The most recent one was for a supposed “internal” training that would have lasted an hour… and could easily have been done over a video and screen-share meeting.

So oftentimes now, when I hear that someone is coming to New York for “business” purposes, I usually just chuckle to myself and think, “Sureeeee they are.”

Two days in a row, and I went back to Queens. Yesterday, it was to pick up groceries and Indian desserts in Jackson Heights, and today, it was to pick up Mexican dried chilies and cheese at a Mexican grocery store in Corona, which is known for having a very diverse Latino population, many of whom are Mexican, plus to meet friends for Isan Thai food in Woodside.

When I first moved to New York City and lived in Elmhurst, Queens, I heard everyone telling me that no Mexican people live in New York City, that there was no good Mexican food. Then, I went to areas like Jackson Heights and Corona (and Sunset Park in Brooklyn) and realized exactly how wrong everyone was. What people generalized in their meaning was that perhaps there weren’t a lot of authentic Mexican restaurants or Mexican immigrants living in Manhattan... because apparently, New York City revolves around Manhattan, and most people never even think to venture out to outer boroughs like Queens except when transiting to and from the two major New York City airports. Part of me wonders if that is just due to sheer ignorance, a lack of curiosity, or just a complete dismissal of true immigrant communities like Corona. You can’t really discover anything new unless you actively make the decision to choose to seek newness out. Newness does not simply show up on your doorstep or in your neighborhood and scream, “Hey! Look at me! I’m here to cater as a new experience to you!”

Jackson Heights is one of my absolute favorite neighborhoods in Queens… or well, all of New York City, really. To me, it represents exactly how multicultural and delicious New York City is; one block, you’re surrounded by sari and 24-carat gold shops selling South Indian goods, fragrant of rose water and cardamom; the next block, you are fully inundated by Mexican, Colombian, Venezuelan, and Peruvian restaurants and bakeries. Two blocks down, there’s a string of Filipino restaurants. Then, there’s a Korean grocery store. And as if it couldn’t get even more diverse, you stumble upon an Argentinian steakhouse that is across the street from several Thai restaurants representing four different regions of Thailand. It’s a cultural explorer’s paradise.

I went out to Jackson Heights after work today to pick up a bunch of groceries in preparation for cooking this weekend, plus some Indian sweets at my favorite Indian dessert shop. What is always comical to me is the little smiles that are exchanged by the Indian workers at Patel Brothers, the major Indian grocery store there, as they watch me walk through the aisles of the store. They see me, an East Asian person, picking through Indian vegetables, different bags of legumes, various whole and ground spices, and I can imagine what they are thinking: what is this Chinese girl going to do with all this stuff? Does she even know what she is looking at? Is she learnt enough to prepare these the right way? I hope she doesn’t mess it all up and waste the ingredients!

Don’t worry, peeps. I know what I’m doing. In fact, I could probably school you all in it since I’m willing to bet that in your generation, you wouldn’t even know what to do with these spices if they were handed to you, as you likely think cooking is a woman’s job, and hence you rely on your wives to cook. It’s all good. I got you.

I organized the second volunteer event with my office for the Coalition for the Homeless this late afternoon after getting so much positive feedback from our first event here back in June. We had six volunteers sign up to represent our New York City office, and it was a very efficient and fulfilling event. Although three months had passed, I actually recognized some of the people coming in to collect food, which made me a little bit sad.

However, there was one person who was volunteering with us who gave me some hope. This man seemed a bit awkward and shy in the beginning, and he asked me how I found this organization, so I told him, and I asked him the same question. He responded, saying he personally benefited from this organization and collected dinners from here for a while until he was finally able to get back on his feet again, so he feels indebted to the Coalition for the Homeless and wanted to give back some of what he got. As such, he volunteers at least once a week for a few hours to show to others that there really can be some light at the end of the tunnel.

The colleagues who heard this story and I all exchanged smiles. No, not everyone is “mooching” off the system. No, no one wants to be homeless or “in need.” Sometimes, everyone just needs a little help and support along the way, and that’s what organizations and volunteer efforts like this are for. This made me feel hopeful as I took my long walk back home.

The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines the term “anal-retentive” as this:

anal-re·​ten·​tive | \ ˈā-nᵊl-ri-ˈten-tiv

variants:  or anal retentive

often used in nontechnical contexts to describe someone as extremely or excessively neat, careful, or precise.

Well… that sounds like a pretty good description of me, particularly when it comes to house cleanliness… and now transferred into the realm of video editing. I suppose that anal retentiveness does lend itself well to tasks like editing in general, whether it is text (school journalism in my past life) or in video (current outside of work life). It also serves people well who need precision, and people who like to bake require precision. Yep, it actually does fit me now in more ways than I really want to admit.

What I did not actively think about when I started shooting my food videos is that I would inadvertently be schooling and critiquing myself on my public speaking abilities. Granted, speaking in front of a lens or camera is very, very different than speaking in front of an audience or in front of friends, but I started noticing all these annoying little things I would do that I never would have thought about unless I watched myself speak: the way I move my eyes to the side (which could potentially make someone doubt how credible I am); the excessive “so….” and “um” filler words. I actually do not say “like” as a filler word almost at all, which I was quite self-satisfied about, if I had to be fully honest. It completely makes sense why in every public speaking workshop I’ve either heard of or done myself, they strongly encourage or even require you to film yourself speaking, then to watch yourself, critique yourself, and try to improve on your little ticks.

So what did I actually do the last few days in my editing that probably was a wee bit too anal retentive? I went through my entire series of clips for each video I shot and removed nearly every “um” that I could comfortably take out without making it seem awkward. That was super anal, super retentive, but quite comforting in the end. And to prevent myself from having to torture myself in that way again, instead of saying “um” in current and future videos I will shoot, I will pause or take a breath every time I feel an urge to say “um.” I need to remember to speak slower and to space out my words more. That also helps with editing.

I think that sounds like a good plan.

I feel like I am constantly consuming new information, and sometimes, it can be a bit exhausting. Sometimes, though, educational information can also be fun, as well, and good to help others understand things they may not have previously known before. One of the many podcasts that I’ve been listening to in the last year has been the Deliciously Ella podcast. Ella Mills is a British plant-based food writer and entrepreneur who has a London deli as well as a plant-based eating cookbook. Seven-plus years ago, the idea of “vegan” and “plant-based” seemed annoying to me, as so many delicious things exist in cultures across the word, so why would we need substitutes for already delicious and amazing things? But as I’ve read more and more about greenhouse gas emissions, climate change, the environmental impact of animal products, as well as their negative implications on our health, I realized that maybe reducing the amount of animal-based products I eat isn’t such a bad idea after all. It was Michael Pollan who once said: “Eat food — not too much; mostly plants.” I will always be a happy omnivore who won’t give up her Peking duck or pho, but that doesn’t mean that I won’t want to incorporate more plant-based foods into my diet and eat a little less meat.

Her latest episode on “How to Have a Healthy Gut” was especially interesting to me, as it discussed that so much of what people perceive as food allergies or celiac/gluten-intolerant diseases is actually a result of their bodies being overly stressed and thus rejecting the foods they could normally eat. So perhaps if one day, you are anxious from a work presentation you have to deliver and eat a banana, then immediately throw up, the reason you vomited is not that the banana actually was the cause, but rather that the stress in your gut affected how you ultimately digested that banana. The gut is truly the center of everything in our bodies whether we realize it or not, and that’s why it’s even more important in today’s high-speed, high-stress environments to focus on self-care, whether that means doing some form of meditation, yoga, exercise, or even just practicing breathing deeply to find a sense of calm and stillness in our lives. It really cannot be overstated, especially when you *think* you are getting sick from foods that are not actually making you sick at all. I wish that people would slow down a bit and instead of blaming the foods for these types of ailments to instead think about the lives they are leading and how they can either calm or slow down.

The other interesting thing the “gut doctor” who was interviewed in the podcast noted is that to have a well-rounded gut, each of us should be targeting to eat a variety of different foods (obvious, but oftentimes a challenge), but as a general goal, seek to eat about 30 different plant-based foods each week. So while it can be an easy routine or habit to always fall on whole wheat, spinach, tomatoes, or the same type of lentils, to instead mix it up: add wild rice or quinoa, mix some Swiss chard, kale, or red cabbage into your spinach. Roast some onions and chop some avocado to eat with your tomatoes. Vary up the usual green lentils with some red lentils or chickpeas. This would also include the little things you may even forget about, such as the sautéed garlic in your stir-fry, chia seeds, flaxseeds, a handful of cashews or walnuts, a few squeezes of lime, etc.

I was intrigued by the target “30” number and counted how many I had eaten in the last three days. I was at 33! How crazy!