Category Archives: Food

Tofu “noodles”

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As someone who is half (Cantonese) Chinese, I have probably done the most experimentation with my vast country’s food in last ten years than I have at any other point of my life. For those in the know and who are interested, Chinese cuisine’s endless variety and regional cuisines have been spotlighted a lot more, and because of this, demand for those ingredients has increased. So while amazing online sites like Mala Market exist, even our local Hong Kong Supermarket in Manhattan Chinatown stocks a lot of these rarer ingredients now. I feel like a lot of my food experimenting in the kitchen has just begun!

Before we ended our daily double commutes to Chinatown for Kaia’s preschool years (still a little sad and wistful this has come to an end…), I started stocking up on a lot of freezer and pantry items since I knew the daily access would be gone soon. A few of the things I stocked up on for the freezer were pressed tofu and tofu “noodles.” The “noodles” are pressed tofu strips that have been wound up into flat balls, waiting to be unraveled, cut, and blanched. These are not only tasty with a nice springy texture, but they are also extremely high in protein; an 85-gram serving is already 23 grams of complete plant-based protein!

I made them today using a Sichuanese method as a cold salad. The dish is known as “Three-Sliver Vegetable and Tofu Salad With Chili Oil Dressing” (Hóngyóu Sānsī, 红油三丝), which I got from Xueci Cheng, this Sichuanese recipe developer I’ve been following. It’s a really easy dish once you have the chili oil made. You mix a couple additional ingredients into the chili oil (soy sauce, sugar, sesame oil, a pinch of salt) and whisk it. Then you add it to a plate of finely julienned and salted carrot and cucumbers (drained of excess liquid from the salting) and the tofu strips. I didn’t have the patience to finely slice the tofu strips into tiny noodles, but maybe i will try again next time. Then you add more chili oil on top, toss, and finish with minced cilantro. It was a nice, crunchy, chewy, spicy salad!

I really enjoyed this tofu salad. I’ve already added these tofu “noodles” to my list of things to buy again when I am in Chinatown next!

The roasted duck is bubbling and scenting up the house

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We are currently about 15 minutes away from a fully finished, whole roast duck. The entire house smells like a combination of five-spice blend and duck fat. I have already drained off over a cup of duck fat from the pan. From my office area, I can hear the duck’s fat bubbling off into the bottom of the roasting pan. I am eager to see how crispy my duck skin has gotten and how much of the fat has been rendered from the skin!

Assuming this is successful, I wonder if we will get lucky at our next Costco run (next month!) and score yet another reasonably priced whole duck to roast! Then I can really put my duck skills into repeat practice!

**Several hours later**

Okay, so I got the leg and thigh right: the skin was flavorful and crispy while the meat was juicy and tender. The breast is really where the challenge is. Even with two heat settings, 325 F for 75 minutes and a 425 F blast for 15 minutes, the breasts still had not rendered out enough fat to get crispy; they actually seemed annoyingly flabby. So I let the whole duck rest for about 30 minutes. Then I carved it… Okay, fine. I didn’t really carve it. I kind of butchered it and messed it up. A lot of the skin tore off. Rib bones got stuck to the breast. I am a pretty sloppy whole chicken carver, but this duck was even more challenging and frustrating! ChatGPT gave this explanation for why this was more frustrating: “Duck is trickier to carve than chicken because the breast sits tightly against a broad rib cage and the skin is thinner and more delicate. The easiest way to stop tearing it is to stop thinking of it as ‘slicing meat off the carcass’ and instead remove each breast as one whole piece first.” I guess I will have to heed that advice next time… If I decide to brave out a whole duck roasting experience again.

I still managed to have two separate and mostly in tact breast pieces with their skin on top. I took both pieces and laid them down in a hot, un-oiled carbon steel pan to render out more fat and crisp up the skin. The result was pretty good. But I have a feeling I would have done a better job if I had just carved up the duck into separate raw pieces to begin with, “confited” the legs, and seared the breasts the way we did in my duck cooking class Chris got me over three years ago. I’ll consider that for next time.

The cleanup was a little miserable to put it lightly. Duck grease got pretty much everywhere and made its way all over the stove, all the counters, on dishes that didn’t even have duck, all over the sink and faucets. Of course, it splattered in the oven, but luckily not as much as I had feared. I was able to clean most of it off easily with a mix of baking soda, soap, water, and elbow grease. I may try this one or two more times just for the experience and challenge, but I can see clearly now why duck is one of those dishes that people leave to the pros. Even if you do get it mostly right, like I did this time, the cleanup is so freaking annoying and time consuming. I am currently soaking my oven mitts now because the duck grease is caked on so badly!

The entire apartment also smells like duck fat; it doesn’t matter what room I am in. This may be okay for now, but tomorrow, I may change my mind.

Teaching my child about food, how it’s grown, how to prepare it, and how to cook it

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Years ago, a friend of mine who has never been into cooking, does not like to cook, and rarely cooks, said that he found cooking to be a very dissatisfying task.

“You spend all this time and energy on cooking, and then within minutes if not seconds, it’s all gone!” he said to me. “You have nothing to show for!”

I smiled. I told him this was one of many, many reasons I found cooking so inherently satisfying. I did not want it to stay with me as a “thing” forever. I wanted to make it, enjoy the process and flavor (and hopefully the health benefits), and then be done with it and move on to the next food. Back then, I was already extremely anti-clutter, so the idea of having lots of “things” piling up in my house was absolutely not something that would bring me joy. Here’s one hobby I’ve always superficially thought about but know I’d unlikely ever get into because it would inevitably make me accumulate lots of things: pottery and ceramics. This seems fun, challenging, and therapeutic, but I don’t need endless ceramics in my house!

As with growing and harvesting your own food, cooking food makes you more connected with what you’re eating. It forces you to think more critically about what you are putting into your body and why. There’s also some creativity involved with food preparation and cooking that can be fun. As most health guidances will tell you, what you put into your body (EAT!) is a huge contributing factor to your health, more so than exercise, so if you have control over it, why would you not try to optimize for both flavor and health?

Kaia has had an interest in cooking and baking on and off since she was a baby. Many times as a baby, she’d watch me cook from her high chair. Then as she was able to stand on her step stool and be in the kitchen with me as she got bigger, she’d help me with simple tasks like stirring, folding, pouring, and simple cutting (with kid-safe knives). She’s not always interested in helping out, though, as at the end of the day, she is a child. But as of late, she’s been asking more “why” questions about food prep, and I’ve really enjoyed it. At just over 4.5 years old, she’s still very much into her vegetables, particularly her Asian greens.

“Mama, what vegetable is that?” Kaia asked this morning as I washed some red mustard greens I picked up at the Greenmarket on Friday.

“These are called red mustard greens,” I replied. “These are very good and in season!”

Kaia frowned. “I don’t want to eat red mustard greens! I want bok choy! Can you make some bok choy for me?”

“Pookster, Mama doesn’t have bok choy today,” I said to her in my stern voice. “We have red mustard greens that are very fresh, and I’m going to cook them. I can show you how to make them so you can see they are yummy. You want to see?”

“No, no no!” Kaia insisted, running away. “I want bok choy! I don’t want to try red mustard greens! I don’t like them!”

I’ve told her more times than I can count that she cannot not like something she has never had. But as per usual, she ignored me. So instead, I feigned ignorance and continued to heat up my wok.

Kaia eventually walked back over to the kitchen and got on her tippy toes to see what was in my wok. Tentatively with curious big eyes, she asked, “Can I see what you’re cooking?”

“Yes, can you go get your step stool so you can watch?” I suggested to her, as I added some oil to the hot wok.

She obediently grabbed her step stool from the bathroom, dragged it over to the front of the stove, asked me to stabilize the legs, and climbed up to watch every step of the cooking process. In minutes, the cooking was all done: we had stir fried red mustard greens flavored with garlic, a touch of soy sauce, and rice vinegar. Then came her favorite part.

“Can I taste?” Kaia asked me, smiling. “I want the stem first!”

My Kaia Pookie has always loved the stems, ever since she was a baby. So I picked out a stem with my tongs and placed it into her wide open mouth. “Oooooh, this is so delicious!” she said happily. “Can I have a leaf now, please?”

She ate a few bites of red mustard green leaves, and then I told her she had to wait until lunch time to eat more. Kaia was so happy about her red mustard greens after watching me make it.

I want Kaia to have a healthy relationship with food, and to respect how it’s grown, prepared, and cooked. One thing I say a lot to her, which she does and does not like is, “Good food takes time.” So far, I think she’s on a pretty good track.

Eating less as we age

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The more I read about health and fitness into my 40s and 50s, the more pretty much all the sources say that we need to eat more protein… and likely less carbs. As we age into our late 30s and early 40s, the loss of muscle mass naturally accelerates, and for optimal health and fitness, we’re supposed to counteract that by increasing protein consumption and strength training. The frustrating part about this, though, is that these recommendations come at a time when our appetites just naturally start to decrease. For years, I just never ate much breakfast at all on the weekdays because I didn’t have the appetite upon waking. Now with my increased focus on body recomposition, I have to force myself to eat some form of (high protein) breakfast, otherwise I will just never hit my protein target for the day. And the only way I can eat breakfast is by drinking it through a smoothie, otherwise I just start feeling too bloated or stuffed.

When traveling, and especially while in San Francisco with my parents (really, my mom!), we eat a lot of carbs. It’s not necessarily a “bad” thing because these are all the things that are either homemade or are bought with love by my parents because they know I like these things. But I tend to eat a lot more carbs than I normally do, which means I just feel fuller… all the time, and especially in the last few years in my late 30s. While here, I also remember things I like that are really good in San Francisco that I just don’t have in New York (like my beloved scallion bao!). So since I’m not back that often, I want to enjoy them while I am here. But at the end of the day, I can only eat so much before I just feel too stuffed.

Let’s take today: we ate breakfast at the Westin St. Francis hotel lounge, where I tried to eat a higher protein breakfast by focusing on scrambled eggs, egg white bites with mushrooms and spinach, and French-style yogurt. Later in the morning, we went to Dandelion Chocolate Factory, where Chris had a chocolate milk, I had a chocolate “nibby” horchata, and we shared (with Kaia) a chocolate canele. Then we walked a few blocks and had half of a pistachio baklava each (generous samples!) at Baklava Story. Forty minutes later, we shared a super burrito at El Farolito along with a passion fruit agua fresca.

At that point, I realized that there was very little chance I’d eat anything substantial for dinner that evening. We picked up some pupusas in the Mission for Kaia to eat on the ride back to the hotel. Come dinner time, we had a few nibbles at the hotel lounge again, finished the leftover pieces of bean/cheese/pork pupusa that Kaia did not want, and shared a single slice of emerald beaut plum raspberry crumble pie from Three Babes Bakeshop (that was a truly excellent slice of pie in every possible way!). And that wrapped up our eating for the day. Yes, these foods, even the beverages, are far richer than we’d normally eat on a day to day basis back home in New York. But when you think of the sheer quantity of food we ate in this day, it really wasn’t that much. Once upon a time, I could easily eat an entire super burrito from El Farolito in a single sitting all by myself. But alas, those days are now in my past.

Today ends our 2-year streak of going to Manhattan Chinatown almost every weekday

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I knew today would be a bittersweet day for all of us given that it’s Kaia’s last day of summer camp at her school for the last two years in Chinatown. Tomorrow, we fly out to San Francisco, so while I wanted to get some takeout for our last evening, I knew I needed it to keep well in the freezer since we’d likely have leftovers. So after my haircut this afternoon, I walked down from the East Village to Chinatown to several locations to mark the end of an era for us:

  1. Super Taste: The divey, hole-in-the-wall Lanzhou restaurant on Eldridge Street that churns out some of my favorite dumplings and noodles in all of New York City. It was shocking to me that this tiny place, where my friend and I used to go in the early 2010s for casual and cheap dinner catch-ups, had completely blown up because of foodie influencers. It used to be very quiet, discreet, with mostly Chinese people speaking Chinese in it. Now every time I pass it, there’s a line of people of all backgrounds waiting! They’ve also expanded their menu quite a bit. Somehow, they still manage to keep their prices relatively low. Tonight, I picked up two orders of dumplings (“open mouth” fried pork and chive dumplings and zhong shui jiao, Sichuanese style fat dumplings) — 20 dumplings total for just $13! Crazy cheap for 2026, and still so, so good!
  2. Kuih Cafe: Honestly, I’ve neglected this place for the last couple of years. I was one of her original customers when she first opened in February 2020, right before the pandemic almost ended the world. This used to be a regualr stop on my Chinatown list when I’d bring back lots of little things from lots of businesses to try. I was scared, given the timing of her tiny storefront opening, that her business wouldn’t make it. Now 6.5 years in, she has a very, very loyal following with people of all backgrounds and tourists from all over the world lining up to get some of her goodies. And she’s only open three day a week — Friday through Sunday! Veronica focuses on desserts mostly (kuih and Southeast Asian style cakes), but she used to do savory dishes that I enjoyed. It had been a long time since I’d come, so she did not recognize me. This visit, I ordered the pandan mochi waffle with a taro kaya filling. I asked for the kaya on the side since I’d be transporting it home and didn’t want to get it soggy. She looked down her nose at me and asked why I wanted it on the side. When I explained this, she looked relieved (probably didn’t want to hear a story about some picky eaters who didn’t want the kaya!), then instructed me to either oven toast or air-fry the waffle promptly when I got home to maximize the texture. This mochi waffle with the taro kaya was so delicious. The textural contrast between the crunchy waffle outside, the chewy mochi inside, and the soft, sticky taro kaya was super addictive. The pandan was really fragrant. Chris only had a bite because he said he was too full from dinner, but he missed out a lot! Kaia wanted the waffle by itself after she had one taste of the taro kaya and said, “That is for adults!” Then she kept nibbling on the waffle, mumbling between bites, “Tasty! So good! So yummy!” I feel like I need to go back here more. I was behind a woman in line who pre-ordered her Mid-Autumn Moon Festival mooncakes. Maybe this is the year I actually splurge and buy them? Chris isn’t a mooncake fan, but I’m sure I could get Kaia to eat them. The only one she’d previously enjoyed was a red bean one that came straight from Malaysia courtesy of the Sambal Lady!
  3. Hay Hay Roasted: Chris asked for roasted meats, so he got roasted meat. I stopped by this little restaurant on Mott to pick up their honey-roasted cha siu. It’s a little more expensive than Green Garden Village depending on the day (Green Garden’s pricing is always fluctuating), but their lean cuts are very, very lean. And the honey flavor is subtle but done really well. I also appreciate that service is very fast, efficient, and friendly.

And then after a stop at Hong Kong Supermarket to stock up on oyster sauce (the current bottle in my fridge is only a quarter full — gasp!), I picked up Pookster, stopped by a street kiosk to let her buy a surprise end-of-summer gift she’d been asking me about since June — a K-Pop Demon Hunters themed pushy game (no idea what these things are called…), and then off we went home!

I still have too many bookmarks for the Chinatown/Lower East Side area that I haven’t gotten to. Now when I go down there, inevitably every time I come home, my shoulders will be heavy carrying a lot of goodies back, just like the way it was pre Kaia being in preschool.

Chinese yam, pork, and carrot soup – a Cantonese soup standby

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It’s a bittersweet week this week for us, as it’s Kaia’s last week at summer camp at the same school in Chinatown for the last two years. She spent 3K and 4K/Pre-K at this Chinese immersion, dual language school, as part of New York City’s UPK program. It’s been a gift (and quite the savings…!) to not have to pay for school for the last two years, other than after-care fees and summer camp. What this also means is that this is our last week having daily trips to Chinatown… a very sad reality I have to spend time mourning. So I started going through my list of things to stock up on and also remembered a couple of things I wanted to make with fresh ingredients while I still have easy access to them.

This year, I was able to achieve my goal of making soups more frequently. According to TCM, soup is a nourishing component of a meal. In Chinese culture, it’s often noted that a complete meal should be “san cai yi tang” (三菜一汤), or three meat/protein/vegetable dishes and one soup, served alongside rice. I had a lot of bone broth in the fridge I made from chicken wings and chicken feet I got from Chinatown. And I ended up using it today with Chinese yam (or huai shan), pork shoulder (also from Chinatown!), carrots, red dates, ginger, goji berries, and shiitake mushrooms. Chinese yam is a pretty traditional Chinese vegetable. It’s used both fresh and dried; today, I bought it fresh for this soup. It’s considered a nourishing root vegetable that supports digestion, stabilizes blood sugar, and boosts overall vitality. I remember my grandma using it in soups growing up. The texture once cooked is almost like taro. When Chinese yam is raw and fresh, the stalks are long, hard, and thin. It has a really tough brown skin with lots of “hair” on it — definitely not the first vegetable you’d pick up when adventuring to explore new produce, as it’s on the “ugly” or even borderline “scary” looking side. And once you peel the skin off, the white flesh is hard to grasp firmly, as it becomes very sticky and gummy. On the plus side, the fresh root has active digestive enzymes; supposedly when you have mucus, it can help clear it for you!

So I made this soup today. I even served it for Chris and me with a tiny little shallow dish of high quality aged soy sauce for dipping the shredded pork pieces into — super traditional and like we had it growing up. And inhaling the familiar aromas and eating it really did remind me of home — at least, the happier parts. It’s funny that it’s taken me to age 40 to really understand and appreciate how much love and care my grandma put into all the soups she made for us almost every single day. I actually cannot remember a day living with her when there was not a huge pot of traditional Chinese soup on the stove!

And while I dipped some pieces of pork shoulder into the soy sauce, I could also faintly remember watching Ed try to fish out the biggest, most tender pieces of pork out of the stock pot so that he could eagerly dip and eat them himself. I always just ate and drank what was served to me and didn’t care about which pieces I got. Most of my happiest childhood memories are tied to food.

Eight more days of almost-daily access to Chinatown

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We knew the time was going to come, but as I get older, the time seems to pass by too quickly. After today, we have just eight more weekdays of taking Kaia down to Chinatown for summer camp. In September, she will be starting at her new K-8 school walking distance from us, and so there will be no reason to go to Chinatown every day anymore. It’s funny to think how just before she started 3K, part of me was dreading having to do this commute daily. But after a week, it just became part of our routine. And I loved having easy access to all my Asian groceries. I never had to plan in advance all my lists of sauces, condiments, produce, noodles, canned goods, etc., that I needed because on a whim, I could pick it up within just a few blocks of her school. I am really going to miss this, as I will also miss the convenient access to great restaurants that I relied on for Friday takeout. I will miss having easy access to Green Garden Village for last minute cha siu, roasted duck, crispy pork belly, and soy sauce chicken. I will also miss having Asian vegetables every single week. And for the summer time, no one does it better than the Vietnamese fruit ladies at Mulberry Street off of Canal for lychees, rambutans, longans, and other exotic Asian fruit we love.

I already started making a list of sauces and dried goods I need to stock up on before we end our daily trips to Chinatown. So far, I have already picked up replacement bottles of light soy sauce, fish sauce, and fermented bean curd. I put a bag of pressed five-spiced tofu in the freezer for future use. I also got some more dried noodles, canned bamboo shoots, and brown jasmine rice. I still need to get a new bottle of aged Shaoxing wine, medium grain white rice, plus extra dried and canned goods. And for backup freezer food, I need to pick up a bag of frozen pork/chive dumplings and several zongzi. There’s so much to stock up on!

Who knows — after Kaia starts at her new school, I may find a reason to take a trip down to Chinatown every other week or so just to buy groceries and takeout. Well, why not?

Xia pi 虾皮 aka “shrimp skin”

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Although I’ve been cooking since I was a teen, I am most definitely always learning about new ingredients, techniques, dishes, and recipes. When it comes to ingredients, it can get really overwhelming even in a single cuisine. Chinese cuisine could easily be hundreds of different cuisines across the entire country. Although “Eight Great Traditions” of cuisines are recognized across China, I still think this is simplifying the country too much given exactly how large it is and how many influences different parts have given their neighboring countries.

For a long while in the back of my mind, I’d been wanting to buy some xia pi 虾皮 or literally “shrimp skin” when translated into English. These are not actually shrimp skins, but are teeny tiny translucent sun-dried shrimp, just a bit bigger than a peppercorn, that are used as a savory, umami-rich condiment in Chinese cooking. They add a strong, salty sea flavor to dishes like soups and stir-fries. Given its strong umami flavor, they can replace salt in a dish and would definitely require you reduce any added salt/soy sauce to a dish. And because these shrimp are sun-dried, they make for great long-term storage in your fridge or freezer, and can even be used directly from the freezer and added to stocks and stir-fries. I got reminded of xia pi again when I was at the Elmhurst Chinese supermarket I used to frequent when living in the area yesterday. I saw them in packs of half a pound in the refrigerator section and decided that today I’d finally buy some and use. I am looking forward to adding them to near-future soups, vegetable stir-fries, and even an omelet.

I love discovering and trying out new ingredients to make. But I definitely need to balance it with all my other seemingly endless ingredients at home! This is definitely a “first world” problem or challenge, but at least it’s a fun one!

Broken eggs

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Early on in my days living on my own post college, I would be *that* person at the supermarket, opening up the egg carton and removing every single egg, checking its bottom to ensure that there were no cracks. If you buy and eat eggs, you know that cracks in eggs are quite common, and some of them are so tiny that if you do not inspect them closely, you may actually miss one! So whenever I am shopping to buy eggs, I do this exact practice, every single time. I do not care that it takes a little bit longer. I definitely have never cared when I see people looking at me. Because in the worst case scenario, you realize you have a cracked egg. It may even be contaminated. Are you going to go all the way back to the store for a refund? Or, will you just suck it up, eat the egg (and risk getting sick), or just toss it and accept it as a sunk cost?

I hate food waste. It totally infuriates me. When I think of wasting food, all I think about is my mom constantly telling Ed and me when we were kids that she grew up barely having enough plain rice to eat, and that my dad went to sleep hungry many nights. Sometimes, he even ate spoiled leftover food and got food poisoning. So, you can bet that a) I don’t want to waste the food and b) I definitely do not want to waste the money, or the time it takes to return and exchange.

So Chris brought home a carton of eggs from Whole Foods yesterday where three of the eggs were cracked. I realized this when I carefully lowered two of them into boiling water to make boiled eggs yesterday, and both immediately ballooned white into my boiling water. I immediately knew this was not user error. Then, I went to inspect the rest of the carton and found a third egg bubbling with its white oozing out. So, off to Whole Foods I went to return them today. And I wanted an exchange. So, I went to the eggs section and carefully lifted every single egg out of the carton to inspect them. As I did this, another potential egg buyer, noticing what i was doing, decided that she would also inspect each of the egg bottoms while I did this. And then, we looked at each other, made eye contact, and I gave a little head nod of approval. She gets it.

I did the exchange swiftly. The cashier didn’t seem to mind and was totally unfazed. Now, I get all 18 of my eggs fully in tact.

Peanut punch in Trinidad and Tobago

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When traveling, amongst a whole host of things I love learning is finding out what different foods, drinks, and condiments people love in other cities and countries that are different from what I have been exposed to. Everyone’s “normal” around the world is very different, and it’s fascinating to learn about. Pepper sauce is huge throughout the Caribbean, with different types of peppers and seasoning combinations in every place. In Barbados, one of our Uber drivers told us they have a hot sauce so hot that they use just “one drop” of it on their food, and it’s enough for good flavor AND some heat that will set your mouth on fire. The same driver told us that they have another hot sauce that is glaringly hot that many locals don’t even touch it. Colloquially and locally, they call it… the n-word sauce (I mean, he said it; we didn’t!). While in St. Lucia, we tried a few different restaurant variations of pepper sauce that were both very different from each other, but both with very rich, distinct flavor. And at our Port of Spain, Trinidad hotel, the pepper sauce was FIERY. We asked what peppers were in it, and our server at breakfast said it had scotch bonnets (which we figured) and chocolate moruga peppers, which are one step down from one of the hottest peppers on earth — the scorpion pepper.

One thing I noticed at multiple shops, convenience stores, and supermarkets while in Trinidad was peanut punch. It seemed to be pretty mcuh everywhere, and I even saw some people on the street drinking from containers that had “peanut punch” on the label. So one night when we went out for doubles and quick drinks to take back to the hotel, I grabbed a single-serving bottle of peanut punch just to try it. It tastes like you’d imagine: peanutty and milky, but very, very sweet — almost too sweet! The surprising thing was that there was another ingredient I wasn’t expecting: whey protein powder! It was the fourth ngredient listed on the label after peanuts, water, and sugar. Unfortunately, this is more of a “treat” drink than a body builder or workout fanatic’s drink, as the sugar content is far too high on this to be considered a regular protein drink. But I could see a variation of this (with a fraction of the sugar) being a good protein add in one’s diet. The “high protein” lifestyle is one that I’m slowly but surely adapting to in my 40s, so this is always top of mind for me now even when I’m not vocal about it.