Once again, New York

Warning: heavily loaded with pictures :)

I went to NYC during labor day weekend to meet up with my high school classmate and my other 2 friends from college. It's pretty awesome thinking that the four of us came from different countries!

Surprisingly, with all the skyscrapers and glass windows all over the town I could still find a street market!

It's not a surprise that NYC is called the melting pot of the world. The street market festival, running two blocks from 5th Avenue to 7th Avenue, on 52nd Street, is filled with goods and food from multiple cultural backgrounds.

Roasted corn is worth $3. How expensive! Back in U of I I could get 2 cobs for $1. Well, I guess it's another form of "Welcome to New York" sign.

According to my friend, this dish is called dolma. It's a vegetarian dish comprising of rice and pickles inside. I think of it as a sour, mini meatless lo mai kai.

Spices, herbs and tea leaves

Food shaped magnets!

Spanish food

Churros!

Went to a karaoke place called Chorus at Korean Town. Happy hour is $20/h, normal price is $36. They have a good collection of songs :)

(I sang Luka Luka Night Fever while dancing)

In Korean Town there's a bakery called Paris Baguette and without knowing that it's pretty famous, I went there with my friend to grab some cakes.

Despite the name, it's actually a Korean-owned shop, so you'll see some Korean/Asian baked goods here too. They look awesome!

I bought this back to share them with my coworkers. Yum!

Isn't it pretty?

Very simple color combination but it looks very pretty. Very shibui? LOL

This is cute too!

They have small sized cake pieces. Perfect for me!

The strawberry cake is really good!

So does the berry cake

Next to Paris Baguette there's a place called Mandoo Bar. And hey, this is not a drinking bar. It sells mandoo (korean dumplings).

Freshly handmade.

When I saw this sign I thought Miss Korea is a person, but it's actually the name of the restaurant haha

We went in to a Korean cafe/restaurant where you can grab whatever you want and get them reheated in the microwave. Everything is self  service but because of that it's a great place to hang out (they won't chase you out no matter how long you've been sitting there eating a tiny bowl of kimchi fried rice)

The adventure goes on. People who know me should probably know that I'm a foodie. But aside from that I also tend to look out for strange things around.

Bicycle traffic light!? That's new to me!

Cake shaped birthday candle

 

Heavily artificial color loaded birthday cookies. I know it's somehow the trend in US to make giant cookies as a substitute for birthday cake but I still can't get used to the idea of it. A cake has to be.. a cake, not a cookie (to me) haha

Back to food, but it's a weird one. Icelandic yogurt called skyr. It's very thick and concentrated

And what's even newer, it's orange and ginger flavor. It's the first time I've seen this combination of flavors for yogurt!

McD in Chinatown. It's pronounced màidàngláo

I don't know if he's some sort of religious / cult practicioner but he's definitely doing something weird on the streets.

Weird road marks. Are those arrows? Like >> >> >>?

I find this graffiti somehow cute but disturbing..

Food truck is very common. They even have Kimchi Taco Truck!

There are people who decorate their emergency stairways

It's probably the same artist as the one who decorated this building's "wall".

And also, an Art Gallery Truck! So aside from the food trucks they also do art exhibitions on a truck.

And of course, the most stylish way of "homeless man sleeping on the street"

A very odd looking building. It's unique but it's just weird, as if a giant samurai came and slashed the building haphazardly.

The trip was fun. It seems like there is always something to see on every street. It's a very hectic city where people walk really fast you'd think they just received a news from a hospital saying that their relatives are in an accident and they need to immediately rush to the hospital. Aside from the tourists, which are very obvious because they have SLR cameras hanging on their necks, walk leisurely and tend to be pretty cheerful.

New York City, a good place to hang out but not a good place to spend my whole life there.

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Bento (another comeback)

Yes! Another bento. Although I feel that this bento, compared to the ones I did when I was attending university, is much more plain and boring.

I bought the cute sauce container (on the right of the top compartment) quite a while ago but I didn't have the chance to use them. Yesterday I tried filling one of them with chili sauce (which has close consistency to tomato ketchup).

It took me one whole hour to do it.

Why? Because the chili sauce is thick and the pipette that I have doesn't have enough sucking power. The pipette is probably more suitable for sauces with consistency similar to soy sauce. Then I tried transferring the chili sauce into a plastic sandwich bag and cut a tiny hole at the corner small enough to fit into the sauce container's neck.

It didn't work well.

Then I thought of squeezing the sauce container before pumping in the sauce. Just like how a pipette works: release any air within the container so it can "suck in" the sauce.

And it worked.

The bento is nothing fancy... just potato salad with carrot and green peas, steamed broccoli, cherry tomato, rice with akajisho (dried beefsteak plant) and wrapped in soy wrapper colored with beta carotene, and fried chicken breast cuts.

Plus the cute panda toothpicks, of course.

I brought this bento to work and ate it in front of my coworkers, and I was a little embarrassed because it seemed like their eyes were fixated on my bento as I eat.

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Instant Noodles: around the world 2

More instant noodles, because I love them even though I'm aware that they contain lots of MSG and the noodles are most often deep-fried than hot air-dried because it's cheaper to fry them.

As I mentioned in part 1 of the post, I like Shin Ramyun (Korean spicy noodle soup), but dislike the fact that it's packaged for 2 servings.

Inside the package is dried condiment (which you're supposed to cook along with the noodle) and soup base powder.

Aside from a noodle bowl, I rarely see any other instant noodles that are shaped round. Normally the noodles are shaped square/rectangle-ish. I have no idea how they make the noodle round, but I know (and have seen it directly) how they form the square/rectangle form.

I like chewy noodles, so I always cook instant noodles at least 30 seconds earlier than instructed on the package. As you eat the noodle in the soup, it's going to expand and soften. By the time I transfer the noodles into a bowl, it will be perfect to eat.

One time back in junior high school, I was traumatized by a very "health-conscious" (yes, I don't think it's the right term but I don't know how else I would describe her) camping mate. So basically she thinks everything has to be cooked well. She cooked it for 10 minutes, and when she told everyone to eat (I was already complaining to her by the time it reaches 3 minutes - the average cooking time for most instant noodles), the noodles were all soggy and soft and disgusting. On top of that, she added way too much water that the soup is tasteless.

I can understand the point, but when the water is boiling and the noodle is cooked, it should be fine to consume. It's actually fine to even consume instant noodles raw because technically the water activity is low enough to prevent microbial growth on the noodles, and that's why it's shelf stable.

Oh, and I'm also the type of person who adds egg into soup-based instant noodle. Yum. And there are several techniques to adding the egg. No, I'm serious. Do it wrongly and you have a cloudy, unappetizing looking soup that tastes weird, or curds of egg whites floating on the soup.

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