I decided to make some tea eggs using quail eggs because, well, I love miniature food.
Quail eggs are easy to find – back when I was a grad student, I would go to UC Davis meat lab and get a flat of 30 or so for $3 or $4. Now I just go to Ranch 99.
You start off by boiling the eggs whole (in clear water or the broth) until they’re somewhat solid enough to crack. Cracking will create the marbled look.
Once they’re cracked, simmer them in a broth of tea leaves (I like using black teas, like oolong), salt, star anise, cloves, coriander seeds (pretty much the solid versions of the ingredients in 5-spice powder), a bit of sugar. You can add soy sauce to make is really dark and murky. I like to add spicy peppers to the mixture too, but didn’t this time because there would be kids eating them. I like to simmer the eggs for a few hours and then let them sit and cool in the goop for another few hours.
Wish I had a chicken egg here to show how tiny and cute quail eggs are, but maybe the star anise can provide a size reference.
For variation, you can use leftover broth from beef noodle soup or five spice beef and leave out the tea. Add more salt/pepper, etc to taste.
Over Thanksgiving break, I was struck with a powerful desire for strawberry shortcake, or strawberry fruit cake, or an Asian style fruit cake brought by one I saw in Stanford Shopping center. Of course, I knew as a western style bakery, they wouldn’t have exactly what I was looking for. I wasn’t TOO picky – I simply wanted a small slice of a moist cake with light frosting that wasn’t too sweet and some fresh fruit. Mike was nice enough to indulge me as we searched. As luck would have it, all the Asian bakeries I went to either didn’t have the cake I wanted or only had it available as a whole cake. So I settled.
My first concession came at La Patisserie, a bakery close to the Marukai supermarket in Cupertino. I saw a green tea mousse cake, albeit with mango mousse on top. For some people, mango mousse is a plus, but I personally am not fond of mango flavored confections or pastries. And then I saw the lemon mousse with raspberries. Raspberry, strawberry… both are berries, I thought, so I gave these a try.
I was a little disappointed. The green tea mousse didn’t have the matcha taste I was looking for and the mango mousse was just OK. The lemon mousse was delicious and I love raspberries, but it wasn’t the strawberry cake I wanted.
The next day, we tried yet another Asian market. (At this point, we’d visited Marukai, La Patisserie, and Ranch 99.) NO luck. My precious strawberry cake and fruit cake were both sold out. Bah.
On the last day, before we left for Davis, I gave up and returned to Stanford shopping center. I went to La Baguette and Cocola and picked up a strawberry cake from each. And a hazelnut mousse cake. I can’t resist hazelnut.
The hazelnut was nothing too special, but it was good. The strawberry shortcake from La Baguette was my preferred cake of the two strawberry ones.
It was fluffy, light, not incredibly sweet – but there wasn’t enough strawberry to it. I was rather happy with it though.
Cocola Bakery’s strawberry fruit cake was visually stunning, but it wasn’t as delicious as it looked. The green marzipan with a bit of chocolate ruined it for me, I think. I was in the mood for light, fluffy and fruity, and the marzipan made it too heavy. In addition, the entire thing was a bit on the sweet side for me.
Verdict: La Baguette wins hands down, but the strawberry fruit cake from a small asian bakery in SF near Tom’s place and Satura’s strawberry shortcake are definitely superior. I’ll have to brave the downtown Palo Alto traffic to get some Satura cake over Christmas.
This quest may be complete, but I must re-do it to get complete satisfaction.
I spent a lot more time than usual this year in Palo Alto over winter break because my cousin was visiting and Grace came for a second visit. (Personally, I think Grace should just give up the East Coast and move over here so she can eat yogurt and good asian food all the time…)
We tried out Little Sheep Hot Pot, which I’d been looking forward to for a very long time because of the promise of hot pot (duh) and 羊肉串 (lamb skewers). The hot pot was Mongolian style, supposedly, so it didn’t have the 麻辣 flavor that I’ve been craving. However, this did make the broth very drinkable. I despair of ever finding the sichuan hot pot that will make me hate and love my meal at the same time in this country.
Mike and I did the usual food visits – pho, beef noodles, sichuan, etc. My cousin, Grace and I watched K-dramas by night and went out to eat (always on the lookout for the perfect pot of 水煮鱼) and shop during the day. Not to mention, worst of all, I’ve fallen to the wiles of Torchlight.
All this means I wasn’t as productive in my own work as I wanted to be, although I did spend some time at Parc before Grace came. There’s a lot I need to do in January. It’s going to be a pretty short amount of time to do all the writing and data crunching that needs to be done in time for the Feb deadlines, but what’s life without challenges?
I think I’m too cynical to make resolutions, but I will endeavor to be a better grad student and graduate before I’m too old to remember anything before grad school.
Some UCD student organization was showing an actual porn on campus (the most expensive one ever made, apparently) last night. I decided I would make one of the cheapest porns ever on my own… food porn, that is. :)
I wrapped some bacon around several stalks of asparagus that had been seasoned with black pepper and baked it for ~12-15 minutes. Mmm….
According to Daviswiki, there will be a Mikuni’s occupying the space where Fuzio used to be. Humina humina. Lest you brush this off as undue excitement, I leave you with some images of a very satisfying meal at Mikuni’s.
An old podcasts of A Way With Words pointed me to Free Rice, which is one of these flashcard type sites that help you memorize things. The special thing about this site is that every correct answer gets 20 grains of rice donated to people who need it through the UN World Food program. This is one site that I will add to my ad-block white list.
Yesterday I went to SF Market in Sacramento to get a small bass. Poor little fish… it didn’t know what was coming to it. It got clubbed it to death, scaled, and gutted before being dumped in two layers of plastic bags. Steamed sea bass is surprisingly easy to make. Chopping up the garlic and green onions took the most time. I have to say that handling that fish, with its beady little eye staring and mouth slightly agape, was a little disconcerting. I apologized to the fish as I was cutting into it so I could stuff some garlic and ginger in its side. I apologized when I tried to lop off its head, but in the end I kept its head on. There’s something weird about handling a creature in its near entirety. I think it’s the eyes that make it creepy.
The end result was pretty good. Fresh fish tastes so much better than the overpriced frozen filets they sell in the seafood department of grocery stores. I took a picture, but my camera’s out of batteries so it’ll be a while until I post it.
