Red Bean Paradise

So if you've ever been through an asian grocery store, or an authentic Chinese place, area, people, whatever.. You might've heard of this infamous "red bean" stuff that we people use as dessert. Beans? For dessert?

Well to first start off, it shouldn't be THAATT weird of a concept. Beans are treated like a basic starch oftentimes. Their texture, mushiness (yuck) etc. And besides, JELLY BEANS? HEHEELLOOOOOO! Haha. And vanilla "bean"? So the concept of sweet/dessert with the word bean isn't completely unfounded and exists in even Western food culture. But back to my concept of a starch, many types of starches can be both savory and sweet. Rice pudding is a prime example.. since the basic flavor of rice is pretty simple and modifiable, adding some shuga n' spice is all that you need to kick it up to being a dessert. Same things with beans.

I grew up with red bean soup, Cantonese style, all my life. Its one of the standard desserts that they give out after Cantonese banquets, or something to have on the chill at home for whenever, or to mix into ice cream or milk to make a red bean ice drink. ANything to sweeten it up will do well. J even suggested putting it on greek yogurt.

But until recently, I only knew of it as some bean.. just as red bean. But apparently it has a real name: azuki beans! They're tiny and much smaller than typical beans (more on this later and its implications on the flavors), and are dark red like so:


So to make red bean soup, one washes the beans first, they're relatively clean to begin with, but just for good measure. Then let them soak in water for however long you like. The longer the better, just makes cooking time that much shorter (or maybe that's just a myth). Then into a big pot, with lots of water, and boil. Sooooo simple. BUT from how I learned, not through the hard way, but just being taught, you boil for several hours, more like simmer, until they reach the desired softness.. I like them as mushy as.. well.. cooked beans, but my mother likes a little chew, so you can actually feel like you're eating the bean. At that point, you add sugar to taste. I went through almost half a pound of sugar on my last batch, but it was big.

Another thing you might want to add is some sort of citrus peel. My mom adds orange peels, a little bit, supposedly to offset the unfortunate side effect of beans (you know.. GAS). Perhaps there's an interaction between the citric acid, or some other chemicals in the skin. I like zesting a lemon, finely mincing the zest, and tossing it in with the beans once they're a little more concentrated. It ends up being fairly sweet (to your taste of course) and interestingly, to me it doesn't taste like beans. My THEORY on this is the fact that these beans are so small, so their surface to volume ratio is much greater than normal beans. As a result, its the inner starchiness that gives the bean flavor, and because these have less, less bean flavor! Voila!

Yoochoy, choy sum.. hiza-wha?!?!?

Mothers always tell you to eat your vegetables in American culture right? Well, my mom always told me to eat my choy. Choy, in Cantonese (maybe other dialects as well), refers to most types of leafy greens that the we, Cantonese people, often steam. Well, its not so much steaming, but quickly boiling.. like parboiling without the cooking afterwards part. The use of really hot boiling water, and throwing washed and picked greens, like the above choy sum (literally, heart of the greens), until they're just cooked through yet still very tender and crisp, and quickly taking them out again. A light coating of "cooked oil" (my mother always made a huge pot of boiling oil, would fry up a bit of potatoes or garlic into it just for flavor, and then reserve the oil in a bottle specifically for use in this purpose), and soy sauce would complete the dish. It leads to a very pure taste in the greens, not at all overcooked, and leaves a lot of texture to be savoured. Unlike many Western cooked greans, they're not a mashed up pile of.. who knows what. No cheese, no excessive use of cream. Pure, simple, healthy. Its the Cantonese counterpart to a crisp salad, nutrition wise, and is often the primary side-dish to most meals.

I was surprised to find this at Korean grocery store.. not so much cause it would be an unlikely candidate of their produce department, but simply that I hadn't seen much of this at all since not living near Chinatown. On my receipt from HanAhReum, this was named yoochoy as well. Never seen it like that before, but perhaps... I looked it up on wikipedia, and apparently its sometimes referred to as yu choy sum, as a whole. Interesting...

Well, this was a half of my lunch.. I made more onigiri today as the starch component of my meal. This time instead of splitting the rice into 3 obscenely large triangles, I went with 4 and decorated each differently. No need for pictures, they were gone immediately :)

Why Splenda is Safe

I finally looked it up on Wikipedia, and this is why sucralose, or otherwise known as Splenda, is safe.

Safety

Sucralose has been accepted by several national and international food safety regulatory bodies, including the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), Joint Food and Agriculture Organization/World Health Organization Expert Committee on Food Additives, The European Union's Scientific Committee on Food, Health Protection Branch of Health and Welfare Canada and Food Standards Australia-New Zealand (FSANZ).The acceptable daily intake for sucralose is 5 mg / kg of body weight per day.

"In determining the safety of sucralose, FDA reviewed data from more than 110 studies in humans and animals. Many of the studies were designed to identify possible toxic effects including carcinogenic, reproductive and neurological effects. No such effects were found, and FDA's approval is based on the finding that sucralose is safe for human consumption." (FDA Talk Paper T98-16)

There is evidence that Sucralose can cause cancer. "Sucralose was weakly mutagenic in a mouse lymphoma mutation assay" (from DEPARTMENT OF HEALTH AND HUMAN SERVICES, Food and Drug Administration, 21 CFR Part 172, Docket No. 87F-0086 http://www.cfsan.fda.gov/~lrd/fr980403.html)

Concerns have also been raised about the effect of sucralose on the thymus gland, a gland that is important to the immune system. A report from NICNAS cites two studies on rats, both of which found "a significant decrease in mean thymus weight" at a certain dose.^[1] (These and other studies were considered by regulators before concluding that sucralose was safe.)

It should also be noted that the chlorine atoms are covalently bonded to the carbon atoms in the sucralose molecule, essentially making it a chlorocarbon. Many chlorocarbons are toxic; however, sucralose is unlike these chemicals because it is extremely poorly soluble in fat and does not store in fat like most chlorinated hydrocarbons. Sucralose does not break down or dechlorinate either.[1]

The bulk of sucralose ingested does not leave the GI tract and is directly excreted in the feces. The small amount that is absorbed from the GI tract is removed from the blood stream by the kidneys and excreted in the urine. Sucralose is digestible by a number of microorganisms and is broken down once released into the environment.

source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sucralose

But according to this following website, in which the above graphic was taken, splenda is oh-so-not-safe-because-it-contains-chlorine and is written by some hippie named Shirley.. :) source: http://www.shirleys-wellness-cafe.com/nutraswt.htm

It just pisses me off how people don't understand science and can make claims that something is unsafe based on scientific animal-modeled studies in which dosages are often 100-1000 times more than normal human consumption. Not only that, but they take those results out of context, for food safety tests have completely separate guidelines than toxicity level tests. EVERYTHING we eat has a certain toxicity and is consequently studied, and I have full confidence in the FDA for determining that sucralose is perfectly safe. Sure, no long term studies have been made regarding it, because it's only been in research for less than a few decades. But if it were a drug that would save your alcoholic hippie friends from killing their livers, would you wait for long-term results (postponing a much needed thing for half a century) before you released the drug, just to make sure it's safe, despite conclusive animal models and short term clinical trials that determine its safety?

In response to the thymus gland shrinking, well.. it naturally does that after you reach a certain age, and in response to weight loss as well. So naturally, one can say.. splenda causes severe weight loss and thymus shrinkage over time. OH NO! ;) Well, of course the rats were losing weight, it's calorie-free! WHatever their normal diets were, the calorie content of those sugars were being offset by splenda so naturally this would occur in studies. Noone's telling you to eat Splenda all day. And the fact that these were all taken into consideration before the FDA approved Splenda means the circumstances in which the studies were performed were not directly comparable to typical human consumption. Duh.

What BSt :) Get over your natural foods kicks, people. Food chemistry's where it's at.

My First Onigiri

I MADE MY FIRST ONIGIRI! This was my lunch today :P So with the Kokuho Rose medium grain white rice, I cooked it in my little rice cooker, mixed a bit of sushi rice vinegar, and folded it all in well. Then when it was cool, I wet my hands and formed these little triangles, and the whole time I couldn't help but exclaim to myself how cute they were :P THen I wrapped two of them in laver and well.. yum. I didn't feel like starting a new sheet of laver so I just sprinkled some nori fumi furikake on it.

Oh yeah, and I re-cooked some of my leftover beef stew to go along with it. I must say.. there wasn't much beef in it but that didn't really matter.

When You Were Young! New Killers!!!

Ah.. so poetic. The imagery in this music video is truly different, and although looks very traditional/old, it invokes a lot of timeless emotion that's out of the ordinary for music videos these days. Seeing this video really changed the meaning of the lyrics to me. Really refreshing. Adultery, what a lovely thing :)

HANAHREUM!!!!

I went to HanAhReum in Catonsville with J today. H-Mart (what they call it now apparently) is this big chain of big asian (more like Korean) supermarkets along the East Coast. They had so much good produce and I bought some choy sum and snow peas and super cheap chinese garlic. Dried udon noodles, chacharoni ramen, kokuho sushi rice, and rice vinegar for sushi. What's funny is that they call nori "laver".. I've never heard of it referred to as that before, but I got some of that too. Perhaps it's a Korean thing. Anyway, in addition to tofu, red bean daifuku, and pickled radishes.. I found these little fish wiener/sausages in the refridgerated section, and I was so intrigued by them that I bought them. I'll update when I finally decide to make them.... OH YEAH! and the most exciting part was that I found super cheap, frozen masago!!!!! Wow.. I really am on my way to bento boxing. Man, I should've brought my camera... but unfortch they didn't have any bento supplies there at H-Mart.

Then afterwards, the double T diner right across the intersection. I think the waiter was offended by the fact that we asked him if this was a Greek diner, and then consequently deciding out loud that the chicken souvlaki would be good there. Well, that's surely what I got and it was amazing. What disappointed me, however, was that in my mini-greek salad, there was definitely way more uncrumbled feta than there were vegetables. Naturally, I only ate about 3 of the blocks of feta and the rest of the veggies. But the souvlaki was really good. I really really wish I'd brought my camera.

They're OVER!

Never in my life have I had to deal with so many incompetent people for such an extended period of time. First.. those stupid other test takers, are so freakin' unassertive, they just stand there in line while the whole world passes them by, wondering if they should move forward.

ARgh.. and secondly, I was at the Wyndham from 7:15 AM until 6:40 PM. That's fucking ridiculous. They decided to throw all 200 of us in a big room, and then hand out each section of the exam individually, and only have 2 people doing it. I must've spent at least 3 hours sitting in that room, combined, just waiting for something to get picked up or something else to be passed out. Fucking retarded.

But it's over!

Octodogs!

Mmm.. yeah... so I've had a recent intrigue into the world of bento boxes, and apparently in the art of bento, cutting little hot doggies into cool shapes like squids and prawns and stuff, is pretty popular. But I ran across this American website that has this tool, called the OCTODOG maker, and it essentially turns it into this awesome thing...

Only the funniest part, was the instructions! Need I really say more?

But it's pretty awesome, go check it out!

http://www.octodog.net

New Title Image...

I'm trying to figure out how to put this pic up as my new title..



anyone know how?

Oooh, Can't Wait!

I've been watching too many of these.. types.. of movies lately, but I'm way excited for this one. It's more than sappy romance and shit. It's opening tomorrow at NYU and at the landmark in SF, but.. hopefully it'll come to something like the Charles soon.

The Conservative Agenda now has a Gay Son. Henry Kray is a young and sexually active student in college, fully enjoying his life on his own. However, things are not as convenient for his father, Jack Kray, a legendary right-wing Senator in a tight race for re-election. In a strategic political move, Senator Kray enlists Henry to be the “poster boy” for his campaign, hoping to attract the young vote. Unable to stand up to his father, Henry finds himself in a dilemma since he has yet to come out to his parents as a gay son. Henry's mother offers no refuge, as she has long been quiet and loyal, standing by her husband and his political career. With no one to turn to, Henry finds comfort in a stranger, a new friend named Anthony. But there is more to Anthony than Henry realizes. Anthony is a young activist determined to bring down the Senator and prevent his re-election. When Anthony discovers the truth behind the Senator's “poster boy” gimmick, he seizes the opportunity to expose the hypocrisy by getting close to Henry. However, complicating the situation, Anthony begins to develop a genuine relationship with Henry and is forced to choose loyalties between his cause and his new friend. Poster Boy is a timely and provocative story set against the explosive intersection of radical right-wing politics and increasing gay visibility. Inspired by the real-life story of lesbian Mary Cheney, daughter of conservative Vice President Dick Cheney, Poster Boy attempts to answer several volatile “what if” questions: What if you were the gay son of a right-wing Senator torn between family loyalty and your own moral compass? What if you were the wife of the Senator, having to choose between standing by your husband or standing by your own moral beliefs on truth, respect, and family? What if you were a gay activist holding a piece of information that would aid your cause but at the same time potentially hurt someone you have developed feelings for? Poster Boy is that exceptional film in 2006, a film unafraid to examine the stormy cultural wars that define the times in which we live.

http://posterboy-themovie.com

And while I'm at it, here's the trailer :P




Oh.. btw, I just noticed that in the movie Accepted, the initials for south harmon institute of technology, are S.H.I.T.... haha.. wow, am I that oblivious?

This is why I love where I live.

My grandmother, and the pescado en salsa. Amazing...

The whole sleugh of cousins, my brother, and I.

This is real Chinese Food...

Yeah.. she's actually wearing gold leggings. People these days..

Yup. It was awesome.

Mmmm.. real taquitos in Mountain View, right before Kelly Clarkson. The way real Mexican fare should be served: cheap, fast, intensely savory, and unfortunately slopped onto a plate.

Fresh fruit from the Cross St. Market.