As of the past weekend, my entire family have been scheming what to cook and eat for Lunar or Chinese New Year. Coincidentally, Chinese New Year falls on the same date as Valentine’s Day this year.
Proofed, filled buns; Brushing on egg
Anyway, as we’re planning out loud what we can do and must do for tradition and for the sake of ambition of tackling dishes we’ve never done. Going along with the latter, my dad and I collaborated the effort of baking cha siu bao-style buns (aka baked Chinese BBQ pork buns) except we’ve replaced the pork filling with house ground sirloin beef. We are planning to do the real cha siu bao around next week so we won’t ruin his delicious roast pork. (Trust me, you haven’t lived ’til you tried my dad’s pork. Unless you don’t like or can’t eat pork, that’s a different story.) The meat filling must be cooked prior to filling it in your bun. We flavored the ground beef with ginger, garlic, and scallions (all finely chopped) and flavored with oyster sauce and black pepper. Let it cool to room temp and proceed working with your large glob of fermented bread dough.
After kneading, cutting the dough, rolling them out like dumplings, filling, wrapping, and proofing (as in letting the buns rise and get puffy), I brush them on with a beaten whole egg. The reason behind the latter is to give the buns a nice glazed look and it helps the browning (caramelizing) process while it’s baking away in the oven.
Cooling
What pleasantly surprised me was the fact that these buns actually look…pretty and edible. For some strange reason, I tend to be afraid of baking buns more than a loaf of bread. At any rate, they look gloriously golden brown with a beautiful sheen.
Innards, done two ways
When the buns were chomped by the teeth or cut with a knife, a gentle steam exudes from them, releasing the incredible scent of meat, garlic and a gentle hint of scallion. These were tasty. The modifications I have to do next time is to increase the oven temperature I used and shorten the baking time.
It’s just one of those mornings when I have to get up at 4:30 AM and start cranking out breakfast. I know it’s an insane time for most of you to get up that early but if you have a demanding mother who requests you to bake this as the last home baked breakfast for your younger brother before he goes back to college, you have to do it. Trust me. Living with a mom who can start World War III for the smallest things isn’t worth the fight.
Are you worth my sleep time?
So, I started prepping my usual go-to bread, my variation of Rose Levy Beranbaum’s cinnamon raisin loaf, the night before. (What I’ve altered from her recipe was replacing the cinnamon spiral with sweetened, flaked coconut, soaked the raisins, and made the dough a bit sweeter). I shaped it, proofed it, and placed the loaves in the refrigerator overnight. Thankfully, my mom’s willing to take out the loaves from the fridge around 3 AM since she’s usually having her early morning food cravings.
I popped these babies in the oven around 5. When the loaves are about three-fourths baked through, the entire house smells like toasted coconut. Besides the fact that it made me hungry, it woke up my sleepy-headed father who wouldn’t normally wake up until 7:30.
Hmmm…maybe you’re ain’t so bad after all
Innards
At least my efforts weren’t wasted: my mom’s happy about this loaf since she likes soft bread; my dad’s happy just to eat fresh baked bread and my brother liked it because it’s tasty. I’m just happy because everyone’s happy with the food (I also baked a batch of cranberry orange muffins), have my morning cup of coffee, and GO TO SLEEP.
Note: If you want to jump to the review of my lunch at Del Posto Enoteca, click here
I’m summarizing my old stuff since it’s not really notable, per se. What I’m referring to were my visit to Macaron Cafe (which you can start viewing photos and my comments on them from here) and a lunch at Balthazar at their bar since there weren’t any tables available when I visited that afternoon (those food photos start here).
Just to sum it up, the macarons from Macaron Cafe were hit-or-miss but it’s really inexpensive. From what was available that morning: cranberry, chocolate, and key lime (which I bought one of each), the best of the three was the key lime but a far cry from Pierre Herme’s heavenly macarons. They’re the size of my palm (about 3 1/2 inches) for $2. It’s the cheapest in the city so far.
For the past week, I had three midterms and a ten-page paper due, all crammed within four days. I was suffering with stress that I want to scream in vexation due to my aching head. Isn’t college life just awesome? At least I survived the roughest week and there’s a little sprinkling of tests for the next two weeks, which the last one would be two days before my birthday. At least my professors spared me of pain and torture on that day. Thankfully.
On Monday, I didn’t get a chance to eat breakfast at home, so I head over to Bouchon for the sake of having something before I pass out in class due to low blood sugar levels and my need for caffeine since I stayed up ’til 1 AM; having 4 1/2 hours of sleep isn’t fun.
I know…I said I’ll stop going to Bouchon but then again, they’re kind of my savior for the week since my stressed mind doesn’t want to think where I could eat as well as where I haven’t been to.
On Saturday, Robyn invited me and a bunch of her friends to her extremely belated birthday dinner (since her birthday was on late August). I honestly have to say, this was my highly anticipated event of the season. I mean, you’re hanging out with the coolest and funnest food bloggers and her friends, and eating a huge hunk of pork, which will be spoken about later. On another note why I am saying it’s a highly anticipated event it’s because it’s my first time eating at Momofuku Ssäm for dinner; I hang my head down in shame for being the smallest minority who is a New Yorker, foodie, and a food blogger. It’s an embarrassment.
Since I was free around 3 PM, I texted and called Robyn if she’s out in the city before the dinner, she called me and said yes, she’s already visiting one of her friends at work in SoHo. She’s planning to meet another friend, Alex (who happened to be a vegetarian) soon, at the Spring Street stop. As I hauled my butt downtown, there’s a huge confusion in the subways where the E train doesn’t take the normal route of going to Spring Street and the C train goes express, (which I took since the announcement from the conductor of the E train said so earlier) and ended up in the Canal Street stop, where it borderlines TriBeca and Chinatown. Ugh, Don’t I just love the subways systems here…
Yay! I’m done with the LSATs…just oh, a little under 7 hours ago (approximately 2:30 PM, NY time it was over). I have to say, whoever took that test has my sympathies since that was the worst testing experience I ever had in my life. Seven hours stuck in the same building (the Metropolitan Pavillion in Chelsea for me); the same stark white, frigid (temperature-wise) room with over 100 people taking a freakin’ test for the aspiration of becoming a lawyer. Jesus, I hope I did well before I’ll have to shoot myself (mentally), pay another $123, and do it again in December 1st. I really don’t want to do it again and go through that torture. Despite the fact I still haven’t filled out my law school applications yet…UUGH! The paperwork never ends.
Well, I survived the past week fairly well despite being sick for a little more than half of that week (that I mentioned to you on the last post) and managed to lose weight unintentionally. I guess stress does that to me… So, back to what this blog’s mainly about: FOOD. I’m going to talk about what I’ve visited and eaten back two weeks ago starting on September 16th. Jeez, that was eons ago! Continue reading “I’m Back! Also A Recap of Two Weeks Ago (Part 1)” »
I know some of you who have visited my Flickr photostream, I’ve put up photos of Tia Pol before Big Booty Bread but I’m saving that for another post. So, here’s another round of food.
Last Saturday, I went to brunch at Resto. You might be wondering, why the heck do I want to go to a Belgian restaurant for? I just wanted to try their burger since I’ve read many publications indicating that they have an awesome burger that is on par with my beloved Shake Shack burger.
Last week, technically last Friday, was my dad’s birthday. I was a bit belated in celebrating his birthday since I was working that day and all I said to him was, “Happy Birthday.” What I did to make up for the lack of presents or anything to commemorate the day of his birth was to bake for breakfast. Yep, he loves bread and sweets as much as I do except he doesn’t love chocolate like my mom does.
Anyways, I ending up baking a batch of vanilla sugar encrusted, grapefruit-cranberry muffins and about two dozens of my interpretation of the traditional mantou. To my readers who are bakers, the recipe for the muffins will be at the end of the post.
Cranberry confetti on the batter; yellow hue from the zest sitting in the milk
This is to back track everything that has happened the entire week or so. Starting with some homemade bread.
I made this bread before I actually ate out with my aunt (the one who’s visiting from Hong Kong) from my earlier post, at Chung Moo Roo but since I don’t really have a real recipe for you to write about except that it’s a very close derivative of Rose Levy Beranbaum’s Cinnamon Raisin Bread from The Bread Bible except that I used whole wheat flour (about 15 – 20% total) to make it healthy.
My aunt is somewhat of a health conscious person, so that’s why I did that. However, I did make it a bit “bad” by making a barely sweetened chocolate paste for the swirl portion of the bread. All I did was use about 1/2 cup of unsweetened Valhrona cocoa powder, 3 tablespoons of granulated sugar and 3 tablespoons of melted butter and mix it up to a paste and let it solidify to a paste.
Here’s the before and after baking photos: Unbaked loaf
This is the second, separate post for something that has taken 6 1/2 hours of hanging out with a lot of my girlfriends. This post will be about the fooding portion of the day; the macaron hunt was the previous one. Got it? Good.
Sunday morning was the plan that Robyn and I have our macaron hunt/fooding for the past few weeks. The insane thing I told her and all of my friends was that we’re going to meet at Silver Moon Bakery by 9 AM! As preposterous as it is for me to get my behind from Queens and trek all the way up to the Upper West Side, at least Robyn lives closer since she lives on Murray (or Curry) Hill. I should apologize to most of all my five other friends who also came from Bayside and Jamaica, Queens and especially to Helen, who is from Staten Island. Helen told me that the S.I. ferry only comes once at the top of every hour.
Anyways, I met Helen first since she got there about 8:15 and we just chat in McDonald’s (she was also hungry for a parfait), until it was about 8:45, and walked to Silver Moon Bakery.
