Steve Almond is a self-professed candy freak—he longs for the discontinued candies of his past and admits to stashing who knows how much candy in various nooks of his house. And so, he decides to write a book about candy, all the better to get access to various candymakers.

I'm not actually the biggest candy fan (give me plain dark chocolate any time of the day), but Almond makes these bars sound so good that I'm almost tempted to mail order them. He reminisces about candy from his childhood, rails against the Big Three of the candy world, and wishes there were more independent candy makers still around. However, thanks to prohibitively high stocking fees, it's nearly impossible for independent candy makers to get their products on chain store shelves, so many of them are stuck with a very limited regional audience.

Almond doesn't focus on the economics of candy making, nor of the colonialist implications some candy has (cacao), but it does appear in the book (the economics more than colonialist implications, though). Instead, he's incredibly good at describing various candy bars and how they're manufactured, from the very weird Twin Bing and Idaho Spud to the amazingly tasty-sounding Five Star Bar.

Also, it helps that he too dislikes dried coconut as much as me!

This isn't a particularly deep book, but Almond has a very distinctive and funny narrative voice (read a sample in Rachel's post, link below). It cheered me up reading it, which is really all I was asking for.

Links:
- rachelmanija's review

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Now that I am on DW and DW doesn't have a photo hosting service, I am experimenting with Flickr. Sadly, I can't figure out a way to embed individual pictures without going through all the code myself, which I am too lazy to do. (If anyone has a better suggestion, do let me know!)

Rat pictures - Old rat pictures from November on, including my last photos of Ren =(.

LA trip from 3/09

Pictures from Rachel and Yoon's visit back in July.

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Does anyone know the origins of "プリン" (flan)? I know パン is from Portuguese, but I remember being confused by プリン when I was there.

Now that Najika's in the prestigious Seika Academy to find her Flan Prince (as one does), she must battle all the people who think she has no place in the special class! Sadly, the battles are not literal, although there are a few cook-offs involved.

And then there is a plot twist at the end of volume 5/beginning of volume 6 that was extremely unexpected. It briefly made me think this would not be quite as typical of a shoujo cooking series as it seemed, but things appear to have gone back to normal by volume 7. Maybe.

( Spoilers are actually surprising )

I'm not reading for deep characterization or surprising plot. The assorted food battles and espousing of food philosophy—"Best ingredients! Fancy plating! Exquisite taste!" vs. "COOK FROM THE HEART!"—are what make the series for me, and as the series continues to talk about food a lot, I will continue to enjoy.

Also, I am now so hungry for omurice and Japanese curry! And Japanese-style Italian pasta with an egg on top!

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First: Help! I'm currently on Picasa trying to post some pictures... is there any way to get it to post all the pictures in the album with captions instead of a link to the album and/or an embedded slideshow? At least without my getting the link to each individual picture and copy-pasting?

(On Picasa because my LJ photos are nearly at the storage limit and I'm not planning on renewing my paid account and because I set up Flickr a long, long time ago and now cannot remember my username or password and am too annoyed to create a new Yahoo ID.)

Reply to this meme by yelling "Words!" and I will give you five words that remind me of you. Then post them in your LJ and explain what they mean to you. These were given to me by rachelmanija.

( Peas )

( Taiwan )

( Cracktastic )

( Food photography )

( Spiders )

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I had been planning on going to the Obon festival yesterday, but I've been not quite sick for the past few days and decided to sleep early instead. Alas, rather than doing so, I ended up reading L.J. Smith's The Secret Circle on both shewhohashope and rachelmanija's promptings.

Today was the farmers' market, in which I got the salmon spread that Rachel missed out on last week, but without the green onion slab! Seriously, the guy right in front of me bought the last loaf. Grrrrr. But! There are still stone fruits galore, and while one blueberry vendor's season is over, another's has just begun, so I still get them. And my tomato guy showed up! Either it's the beginning of his season, or I arrived too late for great selection, or both, but I left with only a small black brandywine and a lot of small purple cherokees. Still. TOMATOES!!!!!!

Alas, it seems like the cherry season here is winding down, and though I saw raspberries a few weeks ago, no more right now. However, my strawberry guys have boysenberries, which I was tempted by but didn't get.

Later today, rilina and thistleingrey came by, both with their own market goodies! Rilina brought tasty Afghani stuffed flatbread and sauces (my favorite was the yogurt), and thistleingrey brought over a multitude of more stone fruits. I stole a yellow cling peach for later and just devoured it—there was almost no blush to it, but it smelled and tasted amazing. Must find out what varietal it was!

Then we watched the first two episodes of Triple, which I have been anticipating since Rilina told me about it maybe half a year or so ago! So far, it is living up to expectations. It's not amazing, but most kdramas take a few episodes to get going, and I like the acting, the characters, and the overall tone of the show so far.

Also, I rediscovered that Kang Ji Hwan had been slated as the lead, a fact that had been completely irrelevant to me until I realized just today that Kang Ji Hwan is the lead in Capital Scandal. WOE! He is cute. Oh well! The guy currently playing in the lead seems very good as well.

In other news, my allergies still suck, as in, I start every morning at the office by sneezing 15 times or so (someone was counting). The sad thing is, this is me ON allergy meds. Also, as previously mentioned, I still feel like I'm coming down with something, and the finger Ren bit a while aback is starting to swell up for no reason I can tell. Maybe that means it will rain? In Bay Area? In summer? Who knows...

This entry was originally posted at http://oyceter.dreamwidth.org/850484.html. Please comment there using OpenID.

I went to my old library yesterday, and I knit and watched Project Runway S2 (hate Santino SO MUCH), and it was excellent and I had nothing due!

This morning, I went back to my old farmers' market for the first time in what feels like forever! I now have entirely too many peas, strawberries, blueberries, Garnet cherries, and a fruit tart. I tried some of the Bing cherries but wasn't overly impressed and don't particularly have an impression of the Raniers. There were also raspberries, although I passed those up, as well as very early peaches, which I also passed up.

I am eagerly awaiting the arrival of white corn, which is currently in Safeway.

The heat wave makes it not so fun to walk around, but I don't care! It's summer! I HAVE FRESH FRUIT!

I also got to see rilina and thistleingrey today, and we had a tasty brunch, cupcakes, and watched the first episode of Painter in the Wind. I don't think any of us have any idea what is going on, as I have failed as distinguishing nearly all the male characters and have no idea as to what rank everyone is and how they all interact with each other. Still, there has been cross-dressing, the requisite bathroom scene, jumping off cliffs, a tiger nature scene, shounen painting commentary, an animated brush painting of a half-naked guy, a painting competition in which people drag paint brushes nearly as tall as they are around a room, a woman scandalously going across the veil separating her from the guy, and a possibly cross-dressing ninja-type (is there a Korean equivalent of "ninja"?) person who has bangs emo-ly flopping over her (his? her dressed as him?) eye who seems like she belongs in a drama not about painting.

It was extremely fun, and I am looking forward to more!

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I found this to be very eye opening, but I also don't know much about global agriculture or environmental justice, so YMMV. I admit that I've been a bit skeptical of various environmental movements before, not because they're wrong, but because there are way too many examples of privileged white people espousing environmentalism while culturally appropriating and especially not thinking about how their movement fits in with other social justice movements. Patel specifically addresses these issues, especially in terms of class, colonization, and global agriculture.

Patel touches on a huge number of topics, from the rise of soy in everything we eat to high-fructose corn syrup to how big agricultural companies use genetically modified crops to control small farmers. But the central threads through the book are Patel's critique of the system that rewards big agricultural companies and the middlemen between farmers and consumers, how they are privileged over farmers and consumers, and his understanding of how this works globally. I find the last bit most helpful; Patel doesn't just look at the UK and the US, but focuses a lot on the Global South*. He also makes an effort to focus not just on the "big" players, but also on grassroots organizations and farmers themselves.

I had a problem with Sonia Shah's The Body Hunters, which is on big pharma, because I felt the focus was so much on those organizations that the people they were testing medicine on became a faceless crowd of victims. Patel does do this more in some chapters than others, but the sense I got from his writing was that he's worked very closely with the farmers he's writing about. As such, they come across as people, not victims. It also helps that he continually returns to solutions that small farmers and consumers have come up with; he focuses on how they help themselves, not on how the same international organizations that contributed to the poverty of the Global South are "saving" them.

One thing I took away from this book and others I've been reading (ex. Conquest, Dragon Ladies) is the power of bottom-up movements, how important it is for movements to focus on the people who are the most oppressed and have the least power in the system, because it generally seems easier to start there and end up with solutions that benefit everyone, whereas going from top-down tends to generate solutions that help those on top, but overlooks those on the bottom, particularly people who suffer more than one oppression. For example, feminism's focus on middle-class white women, the male focus in a lot of anti-racism and LGBTQ movements, etc. Of course, this is not saying that those of us who are more privileged should just not do anything, but just that we cannot center movements on the more privileged. I am still trying to figure out how to apply all this to my own attempts at social change and to IBARW, but right now, I have more questions than answers.

Anyway, highly recommended and very eye opening for me.

Links:
- furyofvissarion's review
- sanguinity's review


Note: Patel uses the term "people of colour" to describe non-white people (he is from the UK). I can't tell if this is only in the US edition, because it preserves the British spelling of "colour." I also can't remember if Patel footnoted or explained this usage or not; I, uh, already returned it to the library.

* He notes that he prefers this term over "developing countries" or "third-world countries." I have the same problems he does with the prior two terms, and I like that "Global South" does not sound like it is passing judgment, but I think it may overlook countries in the Northern hemisphere that also suffer the effects of colonization.

Have arrived in LA! There were thankfully no major mishaps, although this is definitely the first time I have been on an airplane with hot pink lighting.

We have already had egg salad and roast beef sandwiches at Clementine, discovered I am FINALLY going to be around for Clementine's delicious-sounding grilled cheese month, eaten chocolate lava cakes at Beard Papas, and snarked at an episode of Project Runway.

Future plans: meet up with yhlee, seajules, and sartorias, watch the many HK action and/or wuxia movies we rented (Red Cliff 1, Ashes of Time Redux, Touch of Zen), eat Korean food and gelato, watch kdramas, Vampire Knight Guilty and SCC, and lots more.

Yay!

More from my Taiwan trip! This batch has a lot more food pictures, yay, and also, a very random zebra ass.

( Giant picture )

Note: Woe, I am not in Taiwan right now =(. Currently there is less food and more scenery, but that will change in latter posts. Most of these are taken from a trip we made to Yilan, which is on the upper east side of Taiwan.

( Giant pictures )

(林珉萱 - 雞排公主)

Brain currently too jetlagged for coherent post on cultural appropriation. Here, have fluffy manhua about chicken instead!

Also, because I miraculously remembered my propensity to forget character names, I wrote them down before I returned the manhua!

... alas, I left the post-it in Taiwan. Of course. Thank goodness for online summaries...

Tao Yong Xin goes to a school that has a club for everything, and she's the president of the Fried Chicken* Club, which has two other members. But! The guitar playing club is trying to take over their club space, and as a means of bargaining, Yong Xin manages to get the teacher responsible for club stuff to promise to give them back their space... if only she can convince the troublesome playboy hero Zhou Yu Xi to join! But woe, he hates fried chicken!

This totally cracked me up and I love it, but as I'm sure you have all figured out, I am endlessly delighted by high-school shoujo and food, particularly when the two are combined! My favorite bits in this are when the heroine and her two friends (the two other members of the club) wax rhapsodic about the joys of fried chicken, over and over and over again. Oh, also, the hero hates all fried chicken, except the fried chicken the heroine makes. Of course.

One of the heroine's friends gets extremely good grades and is very cute. But as school gossip goes, she's apparently been seen fixated on a fried chicken vendor's pot of boiling oil. The other friend is very cute, but talks about fried chicken nonstop. And school gossip says the heroine herself is also very cute, but she's *gasp* been known to turn down a guy because she loves her fried chicken more!

My favorite line of dialogue is Yong Xin telling Yu Xi, "Oh, you're actually pretty nice! If I were any other girl, I'm sure I would fall head over heels for you! ... But I love fried chicken too much for that!"

Possibly there will be more character development and plot in latter volumes, but honestly, I do not care as long as they keep talking about fried chicken. Also, the art is good!


* Fried chicken here is actually not the US kind, but Taiwan 香雞排 (xiang ji pai), which is a kind of deep-fried chicken steak, probably pounded thin, with some kind of spice mix on top. It's usually sold in street stands, and they're really tasty.

Wow, I'm late in writing things up! This year's Thanksgiving was held at the apartment of one of my sister's friends; my sister, her two friends, and I made most of the food. Thankfully, this year we did not have to battle lumpy cream or curtains as oven mitts, but there were other catastrophes instead!

I took the opportunity to make salty egg and pumpkin (really kabocha squash, but Chinese doesn't seem to distinguish between pumpkin and squash). Alas, this resulted in my nearly chopping off my finger... twice! The first time, I escaped with only a bit of skin nicked, but the second time, the knife went fairly deep, I bled all over the place, and my sister and her friend had to make an emergency run to see what drug stores were open on Thanksgiving to buy rubbing alcohol and bandaids. Gah. I think this is not my year, medically. At least I now have a scar on my left index finger to match the rat bite scar on my right index finger?

After we ate dinner, I went back to the kitchen to attempt lemon souffle! I know I can make chocolate souffle fairly consistently (at least, when I remember to turn on the oven...), but I haven't tried any other kind. Of course, there weren't enough ramekins or ramekins of the right kind. And my sister's friend's apartment was woefully underequipped. ("Do you have a spatula?" "Uh. We have a wooden rice scooper." "How about a zester?" "Zester...?" "... A grater then?" "Er...")

I would like to note that making lemon zest without a grater is extremely annoying and I nearly sliced off another bit of finger while doing so.

When I started my recipe, I melted some butter over the stove and started stirring in 3/4 cups of flour. As it clumped and started turning into what presumably would be roux, my sister's friend C turned to me and asked, "Er. Are you sure it's supposed to look like this?"

"Maybe I add more liquid later?" I asked. After we had stirred in a cup or so of milk, only to have it be rapidly soaked up by the flour with no noticeable difference in texture, I decided there may have been some mistake. I mean, I know the souffle is thick, but that doesn't mean it should be solid! I couldn't find the recipe online, so I eventually had to go for a new recipe.

Thankfully, the souffles ended up doing well... or at least 75% of them! The fourth souffle had deflated into a sad, slightly lemony hockey puck, and while the texture was somewhat cake-like, it was dense, unflavorful, and not at all light and fluffy with melty lemon curd at the bottom like the rest.

Every single time I make souffle, I wonder why I go through all the trouble, because really, can flavored batter and egg whites taste so good as the make it worth the effort? And every time I take a successful souffle out of the oven, I remember why I do it (aside from the challenge and ensuing self-congratulations, of course, provided that I turn on the oven...). The lemon souffles were delightfully light and delicate on top, with a tiny crust of caramelized sugar (from buttering and sugaring the insides of the ramekins), and the texture gradually gets denser and more liquid until you get to the bottom, which is rich and buttery and eggy and very much like a hot lemon curd. They are amazing, and I am going to try them again for Christmas.

... Of course, this will be very interesting, as I have no idea as to how equipped or underequipped our kitchen is for making French desserts. And we have no ramekins. And I will have to convert everything to metric.

But this time, I will turn on the oven and only put in a teaspoon or so of flour!

( Giant Thanksgiving pictures )

( Giant rat pictures )

After living in China for a few years, Jen Lin-Liu decides to take a class in Chinese cooking and ends up interning at fancy restaurants and noodle stands, all the while dealing with class, gender, and race in a rapidly changing nation. The book's a combination of memoir, food journalism, and China studies, and it includes recipes.

My very favorite parts were, of course, about the food, particularly Lin-Liu's stint as a noodle-maker, in which she worked at a street-side shaved noodle stand! Though I also loved a look at the fancy Shanghainese restaurant she later interned at, part of me wished she had done a working tour of many different street stands and/or small, hole-in-the-wall restaurants. But mostly, I loved reading about making dumplings, the quest for the perfect xiao long bao in Shanghai, discovering Huaiyang cuisine, and adventurous eating. She tries dog, yes, but the meal that probably takes the cake is one that serves penis in everything. I got the impression that the meals including dog and penis and whatnot were considered weird by Chinese standards as well, whereas ones including offal or various internal organs or fish heads are not. I am guessing this holds in Taiwan as well, as I do not know anyone who's eaten the first two and many people who have eaten the latter, myself included.

Also, fish head is tasty.

The bits when the author learns more about China's history and the aftermath of the Communist Revolution were interesting to me, but slightly less so, possibly because I've heard a lot of stories of the Cultural Revolution growing up, and possibly because I was just in Shanghai this summer. I do like the way she writes things up, but there's always the barrier of her Chinese-American childhood and class, as even her paltry salary as a journalist in China put her solidly in the upper-middle class. The class issues are particularly emphasized when she is in cooking class, as it's a vocational class for an non-prestigious, difficult job.

She also writes about migrants from more rural areas coming to Beijing to try to make it and how they're frequently talked about like immigrants (legal and illegal) are talked about in the US. And, well, there's a lot of stuff in the book. There was an incidence of ablism that was disturbing, and there's the class thing, but I did think that Lin-Liu was trying to think about these issues, as well as think about her own role as a Chinese-American woman living in China.

And did I mention the food? Reading this made me so hungry and homesick that I went through old trip photos to drool.

1. I think I am renaming the rats so that the brown rat is Ed-rat and the white hooded one is Al-rat. They're both still very shy, but the brown one runs around and sniffs at everything and jumps away and jumps back again and runs around more when the white one likes snoozing under the blankets until dragged out by his brother or me. They are still so adorable!



2. I have finally started taking advantage of academic library access! JSTOR! BAS! Access to back issues of Publisher's Weekly! I already have several books out on ILL so I can try and catch up with manga scholarship, particularly anything that focuses on gender.



3. Any book recs for books by POC about food? Fictional or non-fictional is fine, have already read Fortune Cookie Chronicles, Serve the People, and plan on reading Madhur Jaffrey and David Masumoto.



4. East Bay people! Tell me about your favorite restaurants!

I note that the title refers to Chez Panisse and rats as two separate topics, not rats in Chez Panisse!

rachelmanija and I decided to splurge and go to Chez Panisse while she was visiting me, and while it was expensive, it was also really, really good.

( Giant food pictures )

The last two pictures of Ren were taken by my roommate, who has a much fancier camera than I do. I am hoping to trick her into taking beautiful photographs of my knitting! And alas, these pictures of Bya are the last ones =(.

( Giant rat pictures )

My gallery title lies, but I was too lazy to make a new gallery for my very few Sausalito pictures, which are from back when oracne visited in August.

( Giant Sausalito and NY pictures )

In addition to the Indian dance troupes and Step Afrika, I also got to see Ologundê, some of Bonga & The Vodou Drums of Haiti, and Doug Elkins' Fraulein Maria, courtesy of Lincoln Center Out of Doors. Again, I am a big fan of free programming! Sadly, I have very little impression of Ologunde and Bonga, as they performed on a very sunny Sunday afternoon, right about when food coma and laziness from heat hit. My sister and I ended up leaving halfway through because we couldn't find shade.

Doug Elkins' Fraulein Maria is an interesting take on The Sound of Music, in which he choreographs modern dance pieces to all the songs from the movie. What I liked best was how Maria was actually played by three dancers—a young woman who looked a bit like Julie Andrews, a young Asian woman, and a young man (POC). The three dancers would be onstage simultaneously, and I imagined it as Maria arguing with herself or consulting with herself. Liesl was played by a man who didn't have a dancer's physique, and the rest of the children and nuns and etc. were played by dancers irrespective of gender. I very much liked the notion of the casting, and it makes a point as to how iconic the movie is—as long as the costuming is right, it doesn't really matter who's playing whom. Unfortunately, the audience would snicker whenever two men danced together romantically, which I found annoying. I wish the Liesl/Franz scene weren't played for laughs, given the cross-dressing and gender-bending (also, Franz was played by a black guy). I noticed the lesbian couples on stage didn't get laughed at.

Other favorite bits from the show were the hip-hopping Mother Superior and watching dancers give signature moves to all the notes of the scale for "Do Re Mi."

And I saw Wicked (my birthday present from my sister!), which was cool and which I need to write up eventually before I forget everything.

Lee begins the book by telling the story of an unprecedented number of winners for a lottery, all of whom had gotten their winning numbers off of fortune cookies. She goes on to examine Chinese food, although despite what the title says, it's more American Chinese food, with occasional forays into other diasporan Chinese foods. Hopefully no one here is surprised to learn that American Chinese food classics such as fortunes cookies, chop suey, and General Tso's chicken aren't very Chinese at all, in that they were born in the USA. On the other hand, Lee argues that you can't define them as un-Chinese. (Although fortune cookies were actually invented by some Japanese Americans, which I hadn't known.)

Since I am a snob, I still refuse to think of most Chinese food in the US as actual Chinese food, despite Lee's arguments. And she does note that Chinese food in the US is sweeter, saltier, and deep fried more often than Chinese food from Hong Kong, China, and Taiwan, along with noting that it's somewhat sanitized for USian taste—no bones, no gristle, no dark meat, no strange body parts.

I have to admit, the breezy tone ended up being off-putting for me, along with the lack of depth, although the book may be more interesting to someone who doesn't know about the differences between American Chinese food and Chinese/Hong Kong-ese/Taiwanese Chinese food (Lee distinguishes between food from China/HK/Taiwan and food from anywhere else). I also had a hard time reading some of the history because the breezy tone often goes along with history, and that history mostly consists of Japanese internment (or why Chinese Americans ended up marketing the fortune cookie instead of its Japanese-American inventors), the Chinese Exclusion Act, illegal immigration, and other fun things. On the other hand, I did not know that Chinese delivery men are frequently robbed, beaten, and/or killed on the job, so I did learn that.

Lee seems to be more apolitical than anything, though of course "apolitical" is still a political choice. Still, because of that, I wanted a different kind of examination of Chinese food in the US, one that doesn't necessarily conclude that the changes it went through were good, but I also have a great deal of vested interest, thanks to being made fun of for what I eat.

Lots of pictures of food (unsurprising), one of bad parking, and a few of the Hello Kitty gate at the airport!

( Giant pictures, mostly of food )

Sigh. I want to go back to Taiwan now.

Alas, I am not in Shanghai, just months late in posting these.

I'd been to Shanghai once before, about six some years ago. It was on the same trip I'd visited Hong Kong on, but when I returned this year, Hong Kong was largely the same, very recognizable, whereas Shanghai had completely changed. Everything there is under construction: subway lines, department stores, sky-high apartment complexes, the next Tallest Building Ever. Everything is being torn down: labyrinths of courtyards and alleyways, old houses and neighborhoods. Things are half-done, like the maglev train going from the new airport to somewhere in the middle of Pudong, but the city is growing so quickly, that soon, it won't be the middle of anywhere anymore.

There are expats everywhere, lots of rich investors buying the newly-built apartments that many of the locals still can't afford. In many ways, it feels a lot like Taiwan did fifteen years ago, when you couldn't depend on clean bathrooms or toilet paper (and still can't always, but it's so much better now), when going to a US chain was still a status symbol (only in Shanghai, it's Japanese and Taiwanese chains as well).

My mom said that the city is trying to finish everything for the 2010 World Expo, and it's so odd to realize that visiting the city next year or two years later means visiting an entirely different city all together.

( Giant pictures of Shanghai )

Alas, I am not still in Hong Kong, though I really wish I were. Instead, I am about two months late in posting these pictures!

ETA: apologies for some of the smudgy photos; I hadn't realized I had a fingerprint on my lens for about ten pictures or so.

( Giant pictures of Hong Kong )