Pork bone and daikon soup – a traditional Chinese soup

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Growing up in a Chinese household, soup was always considered the cure for everything. Have a headache? Drink soup. Ate too much fried food and feel “hot” inside? Drink soup. Caught the flu? Drink soup. Recovering from a sickness? Drink soup. “Drink soup” is the solution to literally all of your life’s problems as summed up by my paternal grandma, my aunt, and my mom.

Now that I am in my late 30s, I realize how much I took for granted all the delicious soups I grew up with, whether they were made by my grandma, my aunt, or my mom. Some soups were simple and straightforward and could be done in an hour or so. Others would be simmering on the stove overnight or for two to three days. I never knew how much time or effort they took since I was never involved in making them; I just got to enjoy them piping hot and ladled into a bowl for me. As with all kids, sometimes I even got annoyed with the elder women in my life for always rushing me to drink my soup. But when I look back, this is just the way they all communicated love when they did not have the words to do so.

Occasionally, I am reminded of the soups and flavors. Sometimes it’s via a restaurant that has a “free soup,” and I take one sip and get blown away because it’s like I saw a flashback of my grandma. That happened in the last year when Chris got takeout from China Xiang near Times Square, and the complimentary soup with a takeout order was a pork bone soup that was super milky in appearance, but just tasted so familiar to me. Other times, it’s via food blogs I skim or Instagram reels I watch where people are going “back to basics” with Chinese home cooking. And so that’s why I’ve decided that this year, I want to be more intentional with soup making. In a traditional Chinese or Vietnamese household, there would be a soup to begin every meal, along with 3-4 different dishes to eat with your rice. I don’t have the time or desire to do this entire show every single day when we eat at home, but I do want to make it more regular than just once every few months. So more frequent soup making is going to be a little cooking goal of mine. I’ve already started it by buying pork bones for $2.49/pound at Whole Foods yesterday and bringing them home to make a traditional pork bone and daikon soup. The taste of plucking off super tender, fall-off-the-bone pork made me feel right at home. Chris called this soup “gnawing soup” because I told him he was expected to gnaw/eat the meat off the pork bones. But I consider this “homey” and comforting. And I hope Kaia embraces this all, as well.

Teeth grinding, tooth sensitivity, and dental hell

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I went to the dentist’s office this morning because I’ve been having extreme cold sensitivity on three of my top teeth. This all started in September, but gradually got worse and worse as we headed into December. During our cold early morning photo shoot on Brighton Beach our first week in Melbourne, it hurt me every single time I smiled with my teeth exposed with the cold wind hitting my teeth. In many outdoor photos, especially while in Japan, I just smiled without my teeth because I wanted to avoid any unnecessary tooth pain. That’s how desperate I was getting with the cold sensitivity. This past week, I couldn’t even eat room temperature fruit (grapes were not fun; apples were horrendous biting into) without wincing. So I ended up eating far less fruit than I’d normally eat.

The dentist asked me about my symptoms, tested a couple teeth by blowing cold air onto them and asking for my (not so pleasant) reaction. Then, he took x-rays of the teeth to see how bad the enamel had worn away due to my grinding. The good news, he said, is that the enamel had not worn away to the point of exposing the pulp; that would require a root canal and a crown. In my case, he said he was confident that I could simply have one to two treatments of a desensitizer (like a medication) on top of my teeth, and I’d be fine in the end. I might still have some sensitivity, but it wouldn’t be anywhere as bad as it had been in the last week.

So we took the conservative treatment. I had the desensitizer applied with two coats, and when I went home, I did notice that eating fruit wasn’t as scary of an action. But it only made me hope and hope that my wine cork strategy for stopping my grinding would be fruitful. And in between, the new mouth guard I’d get would help more.

Settling in and thinking about 2024

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We’ve been back for about a week from our four-plus weeks of travel. As always, it’s a bit of a whirlwind from the beginning to the end. The end is always sad, not just because our travels are over, but also because we are returning to a Northern Hemisphere winter. And while that winter may have been relatively mild over the last few years, it’s still what it is, which is… WINTER. That means it’s cold, the heater will need to be on, the apartment will be dry, and we will have seasonal sadness at the short days, long nights, and cold temperatures. The reality is that January in the Northern Hemisphere is always bleak. The festivities and excitement around Christmas and New Year’s have ended. And everyone is getting back into their usual routine for the new year.

I hate to be trite about it, but one goal that has been a goal since September is trying to lose the excess weight I gained as a result of weaning off breastfeeding/pumping. I’m about five pounds off of where I want to be to get back to pre-pregnancy weight. So while I’ve never had a new year’s goal to lose weight, this time around, I actually do… it’s just that it happens to coincide with a new year.

I’m also trying to stop grinding my teeth at night… which is a hard goal, but one I’m attempting with “natural” methods. I’d been wearing a mouth guard for years, but I recently realized that it was digging in my gums and possibly making defects in my gums and teeth. I had a new mouth guard made and am having it adjusted so that it’s comfortable. But a mouth guard doesn’t prevent you from grinding; it simply protects against tooth damage from grinding. And the grinding has been having negative effects on me this last year: I have extreme cold sensitivity in three of my top teeth to the point where I can barely talk outside in this cold weather and not have my teeth hurt. The dentists are planning to apply a desensitizing treatment to those teeth tomorrow.

A tip that my childhood dentist gave me years ago to prevent the problem of grinding was to put a wine cork in between my front teeth and hold it there for 10-20 minutes before bedtime. I’d follow it with a jaw joint massage for a minute or so. This would supposedly relieve any jaw tension (we all have jaw tension) and prevent my jaws from wanting to clamp down while I’m sleeping and thus subconscious. I’ve been trying that since we came back from our trip, and I do notice that my jaw seems less tense when I wake up.

Other little goals I have this year: I want to make more soup, which also means making a lot of the traditional soups I grew up with, that I took for granted, that my grandma used to make. I’m sourcing places to find pork and beef bones to help out with this goal. Soup is nourishing for the soul, and especially during a cold winter, but I also want Kaia to be able to appreciate traditional Chinese and Vietnamese flavors in the form of this nourishing liquid. I also want to explore more Taiwanese cooking, regional Chinese cooking, and Vietnamese cooking. I’d like to start cooking for friends more the way I used to before the pandemic and before Pookster was born. We’ll likely just need to shift to lunch time parties rather than dinner parties given Pookster’s sleeping schedule, but we shall see how it goes.

I also want to start doing more activities with Kaia now that she’s getting older, more nimble, and has increasing awareness of her surroundings. I’d like to take her to the zoo, the aquarium, and do more arts and crafts and cooking. I’m looking forward to the day when she can help meal prep with me and have already bookmarked some toddler-safe practice knives on our Amazon list.

I still have my usual goal of reading about one book a month. January is a cold, hibernating month, so I tend to read the most books this month most years. I’ve already finished one book this month — a mystery/thriller novel called A Quiet Place by Seicho Matsumoto. I decided on a Japanese author so that I could relive the sounds and sights of Japan.

More goals and things to do will follow, but these have been what’s on my mind for now.

Souvenirs from travels and the evolution over time

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Eleven years ago, when I first went to Melbourne and stayed at my in-laws’ home, I marveled over their large collection of souvenirs that they’d collected during their travels over their 40-plus years. The souvenirs ranged from the small, cute, antique items, like the little ones you could place in a glass curio cabinet, to the larger, more impactful pieces, like a Japanese cuckoo clock that has a very intense time precision, to paintings and glass sculptures collected during visits to different countries around the world. There’s even a gorgeous Wedgwood Wild Strawberries collection of bone china they had shipped back to Melbourne that they picked up while in England during Chris’s youth. I always take a look at the Wild Strawberries collection every time I visit. Each illustration of strawberry, leaves, and vines are hand-painted. And the pieces are all painted with a genuine gold rim; they are truly pieces of art.

And usually while I am standing by this glass cabinet and staring at the Wedgwood Wild Strawberries bone china, one or both of Chris’s parents will come over and recount the time they purchased this fragile, gorgeous set. After, they will also comment that they don’t use it “nearly enough,” and be unable to recall the last time they took it out to use. This always made me sad: they probably spent a small fortune on something so beautiful and intricately made. Yet since it’s rarely used, no one is actually enjoying it or getting a return on that investment they made decades before. The Wedgwood china set just sits there, dust-free in a glass display case in their dining room.

For a short period when I was younger, I also liked to collect little cute items to eventually display in my home when I returned from my travels. When I was really young, I used to be told that one day when I got married, I could pick out my own wedding china set, and hopefully, someone would be generous enough to purchase it for me and my future husband off our wedding registry (that never happened; we had no wedding registry, and the man I ended up marrying had zero interest in any bone china set). Now, though, during travels, we rarely buy anything that is not a consumable to take home (e.g. food or beverage; tea!). The only real thing we make sure to get before we leave a new place is a magnet to add to our boards of magnets documenting our travels. We don’t have much space living in a small Manhattan apartment. We also don’t like clutter.

And the thing is: while I do love looking at all my in-laws collected items over the years every time I go back to their home, I realize that while I enjoy it, one day when they are gone, who will appreciate these items as much as they did? Their sons do not appreciate most of them and just look at them as piled up clutter. But why would they appreciate them? They didn’t collect these items on their own travels, so they have less or no meaning to them. As for me, I might appreciate them, but I will unlikely have the space to care and keep them all. These are all items that they collected as momentos of their travels, purchased with money that they worked hard to earn. These items are almost symbolic of all their hard work, as well as their parents’ generation of hard work, before them. So while many in my generation may see our parents as hoarders, whether that’s of antique items or even toilet paper, maybe the way our parents see them is as an embodiment of what they worked their whole lives to build. And perhaps they see our generation as a generation of people who don’t appreciate their hard work and is merely quick to write off and throw away embodiments of it.

JAL Business Class flying: the doting flight attendants who adore your toddler

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Japan Airlines will always be on the top of the top lists for me in terms of best in-flight experiences. In a culture that very much values hospitality and caring for others, it’s no wonder that JAL would prioritize the customer experience.

Now traveling with a young child, we get to see how the flight attendants fawn over her and give her the star treatment in flight. On our way from Melbourne to Tokyo, Kaia got offered pretty much every single toy in the JAL toy box (when she was originally told to choose just one…) simply because the flight attendants kept passing by her and gushing over how cute she was. While they did have a kids’ menu, Kaia didn’t really get to enjoy it. Instead, on the flight over, we ended up eating it as part of our appetizer, on top of the kaiseki style Japanese meals we were already indulging in.

On our way back to New York, Kaia was out pretty much the entire time. Although they didn’t have to, the flight attendants kept checking in on me to see if she might need to be woken up to eat. While they did try to prepare a little katsu sandwich for her, I ended up eating part of it since she was really out like a light. They still insisted on checking in and gave me some milk in case she decided to wake up during the landing and wanted something to drink.

American Airlines or any other U.S.-based carrier for that matter will never be able to come close to the level of customer service that JAL does. In fact, when you fly on American, they barely take any notice of your children, much less have separate kids meals just for them. They definitely would not be checking in on your child if they were zonked out the whole flight (as if they would care if your child starved or not?). But it’s one of the reasons I love JAL and love flying on Asian airlines. In Asia, there’s a sense of caring amongst the community that just doesn’t exist in the West.

Delicious hojicha (roasted green tea) things

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Years ago, a friend went to Japan for a holiday and came back. I asked him how his trip was and if he had gotten his matcha-everything fix. He beamed and said he loved his trip (because how could he not?). But to answer my matcha question, while matcha was clearly delicious (and increasing in popularity here in the States in literally every food and beverage type imaginable then), he told me that his food prediction was that the future was hojicha, not matcha! Matcha would soon be old hat, and the future IS hojicha!

Fast forward to the present day, and I still see very little to no hojicha-flavored anything here in New York, with the exception of a handful of Asian/Japanese spots as well as bubble tea cafes. Matcha is still ubiquitous even at non-Asian eateries and cafes. And we have a 2-year-old girl who is nicknamed “Hoji” after “hojicha” thanks to Chris’s unconventional name preferences. So while hojicha is not necessarily the future for food in the U.S. just yet, I did notice quite a number of hojicha flavored things during this trip in Japan.

Hojicha was always a top option for tea everywhere we went. At the fancy tea cafe Nakamura Tokichi, where we went for our last sit-down meal while in Tokyo, the welcome, complimentary pot of tea had premium whole leaf hojicha in a high-end tea bag meant to be re-steeped multiple times. They had various hojicha desserts, including a hojicha float and hojicha jelly (which we ordered!). And as a final farewell from Japan on our Japan Airlines flight back to New York, the last dessert I had in flight was a beautiful, silky smooth hojicha milk custard.

We love hojicha everything and would welcome hojicha as a mainstream flavor here in New York. But I’m not sure even New York is quite ready for it yet.

Some examples of thoughtful hospitality while traveling

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When traveling, whether it’s for business or pleasure, you never quite feel like you are “at home” because, well, you are not at home. But it’s the hospitality team’s job to make you feel like you are “at home” and as comfortable as possible. Granted, they’re probably not going to greet you at the end of each day at your hotel with a bow and/or a foot rub, but I suppose that certainly would be a welcome treat.

Over the course of my travels, I’ve been lucky to have experienced a lot of really great hospitality across many cities, states, countries, and continents. These are some recent examples that have really stood out:

At check-in at our Osaka hotel, the staff knew that we were traveling with a young child, so they presented us with a gift bag just for her, which had a cute Japanese character on it, with a similar theme on a toddler tooth brush and matching slippers.

On New Year’s Eve (and in light of New Year’s Day, which is Japan’s biggest holiday of the year), the Osaka hotel left us a small boxed gift on our desk of a painted gold dragon with a little bell inside. It’s meant to be a New Year’s gift; as with Lunar New Year, it’s a common time that the Japanese give gifts.

One night, I returned to our Tokyo hotel to realize that the water kettle, which I had used to make tea the previous night, was topped up with water. I remember I had emptied the remaining water the morning before, so clearly, housekeeping recognized that I had used the kettle and wanted to save me of this tiny chore when I returned from our day out. They also left me extra bags of hojicha (roasted green tea), which they had checked I had used. This seems like such a small thing to do, but I was so surprised and touched by this!

Our Tokyo hotel also knew we were traveling with a toddler, so they made sure to leave Pookster a cute baby toothbrush with baby toothpaste a few nights of our stay.

The Tokyo hotel also gave us a diaper pail to store soiled diapers and keep the odors at bay. Alas, the pail wasn’t strong enough, so we still had to discard of the poop diapers separately, but it was still a very thoughtful gesture!

A few times after we have checked into hotels, including in Europe, the front desk staff have called us to ask if everything is where it should be and if the room is to our liking, plus if we have needed anything else that would make our stay more pleasurable.

I work in a different type of customer service, and as anyone in this type of role knows, customer service is NOT an easy job. But in hospitality, it’s the seemingly little gestures that can make a hotel stay so memorable and amazing.

Omiyage – “souvenirs” or “gifts” from Japan

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Chris’s cousin and her husband have been living in Chiba, just outside Tokyo, for the last six months while studying a ministry course at a local university. As their time is coming to an end, they are trying to give away as many of their temporary dorm items as possible, while also buying as much “omiyage” as possible.

“Omiyage” is a Japanese word for “souvenirs” or “gifts,” for when you return back to your home after travels. This practice seems to span a number of cultures. The couple of times I went to China and and Vietnam, I was also expected to bring home gifts for all family members.

The Japanese take the practice of “omiyage,” and gift giving in general, pretty seriously. Gift giving is a way to show gratitude to those you care about or are indebted to, and also a way to display appreciation for those you love and respect. In general, gifting money is not something the Japanese do (I guess they’re not as green-hungry as the Chinese, haha), so the act of giving actual things is of utmost importance and a sign of respect/love. Granted, I’ll admit ignorance and say that I have not visited every Asian country, but from what I have observed in my last almost 38 years is that when the Japanese give gifts, they give gifts. All gift items need to be displayed beautifully (for when you are in the process of choosing what to buy while in the endless Japanese department stores or food halls), wrapped and packaged beautifully, and presented just so. This is probably why the gift boxes for food items, for example, is so detailed and beautiful: while shopping, not only do you typically see a model of what the contents in a box are on display, but if it is a cookie or cake that you are buying, they even show you a very accurate model of what the inside (the innards!!) of the cake/cookie look like when cut in half! Now, if that isn’t precision, then I do not know what is!

On Saturday, our last day in Japan, we spent a few hours in Ginza, a popular shopping district in Tokyo. There, we visited a food basement, where I perused and got googly-eyed over endless delicious Japanese snacks and treats, as well as Japanese teas. I knew I wanted to purchase some tea as gifts and for myself. So I went to two different tea stands, had tastings, and enjoyed tea banter with my English/broken Japanese and the friendly salesperson’s Japanese/broken English, along with the helpful technological assistance of language translation mobile apps. Other than obvious words I would know, such as the major Japanese tea types (matcha, hojicha, gyokuro, sencha), as I was getting ready to pay, I also recognized yet another Japanese word: omiyage! She was asking me which of the items I purchased would be gifts. I quickly told her, and she rushed to very carefully wrap one of the boxes, creasing each edge, and taped the sides so meticulously. Not only this, but she also included extra handled gift bags so that once I got home, I could even present the gorgeously wrapped box in a handled bag with the a design matching the wrapping paper for the boxed gift. The next tea shop I went to did exactly that again, except they gave me even MORE handled bags and gifting pouches to ensure that if I changed my mind about which items to give as gifts, I could still beautifully present an omiyage to a loved or respected person.

Well, that is service and gift culture to the max. Environmentalists may argue that this is all wasteful and contributes to the needless destruction of trees and forests, that it adds to our ever growing climate change problem. But I would say that the gifting culture of Japan could build bridges and create relationships for those of us still remaining in a burning world.

Fun things at the Japan Airlines First Class Lounge at Haneda International Airport in Tokyo

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To go back to New York, we went to Haneda this time instead of Narita. It was a much shorter and cheaper journey to get there, and once we did, we went through security and immigration and ended up at the Japan Airlines First Class lounge for a quick meal and shower before getting on our flight.

There were some fun things we liked at the lounge, including the automated wet towel dispenser, which when you press it, it dispenses a cold, tightly coiled wet towel for you to use to wipe your hands or face. This was especially helpful cleaning Pookster up after her very messy pasta meal.

The second fun thing that I enjoyed was the automated beer dispenser. A number of different local Japanese beers were available on tap, so once you placed your beer glass in the glass holder and pressed the appropriate dispensing button, the machine would tip your glass ever so slightly (and securely), fill it with beer to just the right level, without any over foaming/head on top, and then tilt it back down so that you could retrieve the glass. It was the perfect pour!

These cute little perks and privileges were fun to enjoy in our last few hours in Japan. It only made me want to come back sooner!

Tempura at Tempura Hisago in Akihabara

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Tempura is one of those things that most people love, and it’s for obvious reasons: it is DEEP FRIED food. It’s a common Japanese dish that is usually made up of different types of seafood and vegetables that have been coated in a light, thin batter, then deep fried. If you get cheap tempura, you can expect the batter to be heavier, and if you get heavenly, delicious tempura, you can expect that the batter is super thin, yet results in a crunchy, crispy exterior coating. And the oil will be barely detectable.

Since tempura is common, it’s typically at any Japanese restaurant you will go to, assuming they do not just specialize in one thing (e.g. sushi, onigiri, ramen, katsu). But finding really notable, drool-worthy tempura is a bit of a challenge pretty much anywhere outside of Japan. Years ago, when I discovered a Japanese restaurant that specializes in tempura that opened here in New York, Chris scoffed at it when I told him it had one Michelin star.

“Tempura is so easy to fuck up,” he retorted. “Why would I have questionable tempura here (in New York City) and pay a lot of money for it when I can just fly to Japan and KNOW that it’s going to be good?”

And so, I suppose that’s what we did. We flew to Japan. And this time, we would eat tempura. So, tempura at Tempura Hisago it was for our last dinner on our second Japan trip together. Chris’s cousin and her husband dined with us, and we got a set menu, which included assorted seafood and veggie tempura, red miso soup, a rice bowl, various pickled vegetables (tsukemono), salad, your choice of alcoholic beverage, and a yuzu sorbet at the end. Once you place your order, all the food is made to order. There are chefs in the back of the restaurant that you can watch who are frying all your tempura right there. You can hear the sizzle of the oil, though somehow you cannot smell it. And when they bring the tempura over to you, it’s super hot and fresh. The tempura is served lined by parchment paper on plates, and when you remove the pieces, the tempura is so well drained that there is barely any oil remaining at all! The tempura was perfect: super lightly battered, with every bite nice and crispy. The seafood was cooked well with no rubberiness, and the vegetables were soft and tender.

And the value was excellent, as well: for all that food, which certainly made all of us full, we spent about $20 USD/person. We will miss this quality at these price levels.