Back on the blog

I originally started this blog three years ago when I was on maternity leave. I wrote for a living, and I didn’t want my skills to get rusty. But I wanted to write about something fun and something that I love. So I became a food blogger.

I knew I would never be a “serious” food blogger, especially after I attended the International Food Blogger Conference last year. I don’t write recipes, I don’t take beautiful food photos, and I definitely don’t blog on any kind of regular basis.

But that’s okay. This blog has always been a fun hobby for me. I enjoy writing about whatever I want—my latest collection of random food photos, “the official snack of hip hop,” or belated gratitude to my parents for cooking thousands of meals for my brother and me.

I haven’t posted to my blog in over seven months. That’s a long time—eons in the blogging world. It’s weird—I hadn’t stopped thinking about it. I continued to develop ideas for blog posts and took many photos, but I had lost my will to blog.

Food fails. Food saves.

After triumphantly declaring, “I think I finally know how to cook,” the food gods laughed, and I haven’t been able to make a successful meal since then.

Last week I had an epic food fail while making dinner for my husband and son. I was making a very basic meal that I’ve made dozens of times before–chicken adobo, steamed broccoli and white rice–and I got every single part of it wrong. My adobo was underseasoned, and the sauce had no depth. Worse still, I overcooked the chicken, so not only was the meat tasteless, it was dry. I left the covered pot of broccoli on the stove too long so instead of bright green, tender-crisp broccoli, I had barely edible mushiness. I couldn’t even handle using a rice cooker! I put too much rice in my small three-cup cooker and not enough water so it came out hard and undercooked.

Adobo has been called the national dish of the Philippines, and it’s the Filipino food that I make with any kind of regularity for my family. So I really hate when my adobo isn’t good, especially because it’s so simple. Put meat in a mixture of soy sauce, vinegar, garlic, onions and pepper, and slowly cook everything on the stove.

How could I get this wrong?

Life is a buffet

When I was a kid, my family rarely went out to dinner. We almost always ate at home. Even if my parents didn’t cook, we would get takeout instead of going somewhere.

On the rare occasion that we would go to dinner, we would wind up at Royal Fork, the local buffet restaurant. My older brother and I loved Royal Fork because we got to eat “American” food that our Filipino parents rarely or never made–things we only saw on TV.

Bourlaug, who saved millions from hunger, dead at 95

This morning on NPR, I heard an interesting story about Norman Bourlaug, the winner of the 1970 Nobel Peace Prize. He died Saturday at age 95.

Bourlaug was known as the father of the “green revolution,” which transformed agriculture through high-yield crop varieties and other innovations, helping to more than double world food production between 1960 and 1990. Many experts credit the green revolution with averting global famine during the second half of the 20th century and saving perhaps 1 billion lives.

Borlaug was one of only five people in history to score the feat of winning the Nobel Peace Prize, the US Presidential Medal of Freedom and the Congressional Gold Medal–placing him in the company of Martin Luther King Jr., Mother Teresa, Nelson Mandela and Elie Wiesel.

Googling for more information about Bourlaug, I came across a fascinating 1997 Atlantic Monthly article by Gregg Easterbrook–”Forgotten Benefactor of Humanity.”

Easterbrook starts the article by talking about the almost absolute lack of public recogntion in the United States of Bourlaug’s contributions to bettering the world and Western media’s role in this.

Though barely known in the country of his birth, elsewhere in the world Norman Borlaug is widely considered to be among the leading Americans of our age…Yet although he has led one of the century’s most accomplished lives, and done so in a meritorious cause, Borlaug has never received much public recognition in the United States, where it is often said that the young lack heroes to look up to. One reason is that Borlaug’s deeds are done in nations remote from the media spotlight: the Western press covers tragedy and strife in poor countries, but has little to say about progress there.

Bourlaug’s methods averted mass food shortages and famine most notably in Mexico, Indian, Pakistan in the 1960s. In recent years, Bourlaug tried to bring high-yield agriculture in sub-Saharan Africa, but large-scale success eluded him. In the Atlantic Monthly article, Easterbook suggests that Bourlaug lost support because of opposition from environmental groups. Easterbrook is highly critical of this. I bolded a phrase which really struck me.

Reflecting Western priorities, the debate about whether high-yield agriculture would be good for Africa is currently phrased mostly in environmental terms, not in terms of saving lives. By producing more food from less land, Borlaug argues, high-yield farming will preserve Africa’s wild habitats, which are now being depleted by slash-and-burn subsistence agriculture. Opponents argue that inorganic fertilizers and controlled irrigation will bring a new environmental stress to the one continent where the chemical-based approach to food production has yet to catch on. In this debate the moral imperative of food for the world’s malnourished — whether they “should” have been born or not, they must eat — stands in danger of being forgotten…

…Borlaug’s reaction to the [environmentalists'] campaign was anger. He says, “Some of the environmental lobbyists of the Western nations are the salt of the earth, but many of them are elitists. They’ve never experienced the physical sensation of hunger. They do their lobbying from comfortable office suites in Washington or Brussels. If they lived just one month amid the misery of the developing world, as I have for fifty years, they’d be crying out for tractors and fertilizer and irrigation canals and be outraged that fashionable elitists back home were trying to deny them these things.”

Today more than 1 billion people–mostly in the developing world– suffer from chronic hunger. Who will continue Bourlaug’s work? And are there still those who oppose it?

Lost in translation: wine coolers

My friend Thao didn’t go to the ends of the earth for love. She just went to Switzerland.

Her husband, Matthias, is Swiss and they live in Geneva, which is a long way from Seatle. I miss her terribly and was excited when Thao told me she, Matthias and Matthias’s parents, Helen and Hugo, were coming to Washington for Thanksgiving.

A couple days after turkey day, my husband and I had lunch with Thao, Matthias, Hugo and Helen to help polish off some leftovers.

There was turkey, prime rib, mashed potatoes, salad, pumpkin pie, and one thing that made me do a double take–one Bartles & Jaymes strawberry margarita wine cooler.

The wine cooler startled me because 1) Thao doesn’t really drink; 2) it seemed an odd thing to offer guests, especially your in-laws from Europe; and 3)there was only one wine cooler (they come in packs of four!)

I asked Thao about it, and she said nonchalantly, “Oh, my mom gave it to me with the rest of the leftovers.” I found this stranger still.

Matthias and his parents noticed my reaction and wanted to know what it was all about. It was a disconcerting experience to explain what a wine cooler is and why someone would want to drink one. I told them that a wine cooler was something that a “college-aged woman would drink.” I added that many young people in America tend to drink wine coolers when they first try alcohol because wine coolers are sweet and cheap. (During my own undergraduate years, I preferred to drink Boone’s Farm, a low-end fortified wine. Classy!)

I ask Matthias if there was a Swiss equivalent to the American wine cooler, and although I’m sure one exists (since most countries have some kind of cheap alcohol), none came to his mind.

I thought that I had conveyed that wine coolers weren’t really anyone’s drink of choice so I was surprised when Hugo said he wanted to sample some.

After the taste test, he said, “It’s too sweet, but it will help me sleep well during my siesta.”

I got to thinking about those Bartles & Jaymes commercials in the ’80s that featured two old guys and always ended with “Thank you for your support.” Here’s a funny one.

What I did on my summer vacation: Fear and loathing in rural America

This time last year, my husband and I were relaxing on the Hawaiian island of Maui, savoring fresh seafood, tropical fruit and the magical menu at Da Kitchen.

For our 2008 summer vacation, we decided to drive from Seattle to visit our friends Sarah and Damon in Salt Lake City. You may be wondering what could possess us to take a road trip while gas prices are at an all-time high. And why did we decide to go to Utah during the absolute hottest point of the summer? And were we insane to do take our infant son with us?

Sarah and Damon had moved to Utah last summer, and we missed them. Sarah had been back to visit, but Damon had yet to meet our newborn son. We were curious about Utah. My husband had been there many years ago for a short stay, but I had never been to the Beehive State. Basically what I knew about Utah was that a lot of Mormons lived there, the Sundance Film Festival was held in Park City, the skiing there was reportedly amazing, Salt Lake City’s NBA team was the Jazz, and the 2002 Winter Olympics were hosted there.

As to the timing, we wanted to celebrate my husband’s birthday with Sarah and Damon. He was born in July. The average temperature in Salt Lake City in July is 89 degrees. Seattle’s average high in July is 75 degrees.

So why not take a short 1 1/2 hour flight there? Why drive? My husband and I were driven to take a road trip by a romantic food notion. We wanted homemade chicken fried steak, real pie made fresh daily and roadside produce stands. We wanted food that was real and earthy–food that was made by cooks, not chefs or grown by farmers we could meet. We dreamed of finding truck stops and small town restaurants with delicious food that couldn’t be found in the city.

I’m sure these places exist, but we didn’t encounter them. The landscape was dominated by familiar golden arches, burger royalty, chicken colonels, pizza joints and Flying J gas stations and convenience stores.

My disappointment was that much more acute because of the level of risk I felt this road trip involved. To get to Utah, we drove through Eastern Washington, Eastern Oregon and Idaho. This part of America is overwhelmingly White, rural and remote.

Not exactly the safest place for an Asian American family to be traveling through.

I know it’s incredibly unfair to believe that most rural White Americans are racist and that rural areas are more violent, but I do. Most of my negative ideas about rural America come from mass media, but unfortunately, there plenty of real life examples that support my fears.

For example, in the 1930′s many Filipinos living in the central part of Washington state had repeatedly been threatened with lynching by their White neighbors. Sure that was 80 years ago. But as we drove through this area, I wondered if the descendents of those violent Whites were still living in Washington and if they had inherited their forefathers’ bigotry.

I was relieved when we encountered other people of color at rest stops. And I never thought I would be so happy to reach Boise, Idaho. I thought that if something happened to us in a city, our bodies should be discovered. Out in the middle of nowhere, we could just disappear.

Returning to the topic of our quest for good roadside food, my husband and I encountered the Redneck Cafe (pictured above) in Durkee, Oregon (population 195). We were intrigued by it and drove up to get a closer look, but we never got out of the car.

We discovered we would only go so far to find good food.

Is Filipino food embarrassing?

This is the question “side dish” raised on Chowhound’s Pacific Northwest board in 2002.

The post itself wasn’t very illuminating. The writer claimed that there’s a dearth of Filipino restaurants in Seattle because “Filipinos are the ultimate US wannabees” who are “more likely to open a Jewish deli or burger stand than a Filipino restaurant.” However, over the years, the post has gained an interesting array of comments.

Many posters agreed with the writer that Filipino food, especially the smell of it, is embarrassing. A number of people said embarrassment stemmed from the degradation of Filipino culture that came from colonization. Some claimed that Filipinos have no business sense, and that’s why there are no successful Filipino restaurants. Others simply said that Filipino food doesn’t appeal to the American palate.

The argument that most resonated with me is that Filipinos’ relationship with food is intensely personal. Every Filipino’s recipe for chicken adobo is different and delicious. But most Filipinos only want to eat their adobo, cooked their way.

In the Chowhound post, “missm2u” puts it this way:
“…maybe we don’t have that many restaurants becuz, like soul food, filipino food is very sophisticated and also personal and when it comes down to it, the pancit we like best is the one just like our mom (or dad) made when we were kidz…”

The idea of being embarrassed to eat Filipino food in public totally mystifies me. I’m a second-generation Filipino American, and I feel that this is mostly something first-generation Filipino immigrants experience. The way you feel about yourself manifests itself in your relationship to food. People who are embarrassed by what they eat are embarrassed about some aspect of themselves. I’ve been lucky enough not to have to endure too much ill treatment because of my ethnicity. I now other Filipinos have been taunted about their culture. If people keep taunting you about what you eat, it can be hard to enjoy your food much less feel proud of it.

So are there any good Filipino restaurants in Seattle? I ran across the Chowhound thread when I was researching Kawali Grill, a Filipino restaurant in South Seattle. I went there with my Chinese American husband and a big group of friends who are all Fil-Am.

We ordered a gang of dishes, planning to share everything. So we were disappointed when our food arrived and the portions were small. It was weird that you couldn’t share the entrees because Filipinos eat family style.

I ordered the fish escabeche, which is typically a whole fish fillet covered with a sauce made from onion, garlic, ginger, bell peppers, tomatoes, vinegar and lemon or lime juice. Some people like to make their sauce like bad Chinese restaurant sweet and sour sauce and put pineapples in it. I am not one of those people.

But whoever prepared my fish escabeche at Kawali Grill was! The sauce was not entirely unpleasant, but far too thick and goopy for me. I scraped most of it. The fish was perfectly cooked and tasted great with minimal sauce.

I did get a couple of bites of other dishes including: fresh lumpia, pandan fried chicken and pork inihaw. Hands down, the best dish was the pork inihaw (broiled pork marinated in vinegar, soy sauce, sugar, garlic and hot sauce).

Fried chicken pandan

Pork inihaw

I felt like there was too much ice in my halo halo dessert, which made it hard to mix (the whole point!) but that’s a minor quibble. The ube ice cream in the halo halo more than made up for it.

I want to try more of the dinner menu at Kawali Grill, and I definitely want to go there for breakfast. The restaurant serves a couple varities of Filipino silog breakfasts, which usally involves a fried egg on top of garlic fried rice and a side of meat.

I feel no shame in wanting that.

Eat all you can

I know nil about Polish food. So I was both excited and a little nervous to join my friend Lynn (whose ethnic background is Polish) at an all you can eat pierogi fest at Seattle’s Polish Home.

Pierogi are half-moon dumplings that are boiled and then sauteed in a pan with butter and onion. They contain sweet or savory fillings and are commonly eaten with a healthy dollop of sour cream.

The first pierogi I sampled were farmer’s cheese with potato and a variety simply labelled “MEAT.” I was unfamiliar with farmer’s cheese, which is made by pressing most of the moisture out of cottage cheese. It reminded me of ricotta, and when combined with mashed potato inside a pierogi, it was absolutely light and delicious.

I asked Lynn if she knew what kind of meat was in the MEAT pierogi. She had no idea but thought that maybe it was a combination of chicken and beef. When I cut one open and peered inside, the filling resembled canned tuna fish more than anything else. It looked flaky and stringy. Since I grew up in a household where potted meat is a major food group, I had no qualms about sampling the pierogi. However, eating the MEAT didn’t give me any other clues about what I was actually consuming. I would not be having seconds.

The next pierogi I tried were ones with sauerkraut and mushroom filling. I’m usally not a sauerkraut fan, but I loved this combination. I thought the kraut would have a strong vinegar taste, but it was sweet and mild.

I waited in the very long pierogi line twice, and each time they were completely out of the sweet pierogi. There were two flavors, blueberry and plum. The blueberry pierogi were especially popular. One little boy patiently stood in front of the empty blueberry pan for close to half an hour, waiting for a fresh batch. My friend Roxanne finally snagged me one, and it was worth the wait. I pierced it and watched the warm blueberry filing mingle with the dollop of sweet sour cream I had put on top of the pierogi. Yum.

It was refreshing to sample a food without any preconceptions about it. And I was lucky that the first pierogi I ever tried were fresh and handmade by home cooks. I’m Filipino American and used to being quizzed about my food and culture. This time I got to do the asking. Lynn and I talked about the origin of “Polock” jokes, Hitler’s extermination of Polish Jews and Catholics, how to make pierogi dough and much more. I enjoyed being exposed to Polish people and culture in such a unique food setting. I could definitely go back for more.

The cold truth

I went to bed late last night, and I had one of those moments of clarity that only come when I’m semiconscious at 1am. I realized that my lack of enthusiasm for the frozen yogurt trend might be connected to a significant event in my past.

I’ve only been fired once in my life, and it happened when I worked at a frozen yogurt shop.

The place was called Yogido’s, and it was in the food court of my local mall. I worked there when I was a junior in high school.

Yogido’s had a wacky premise. It sold frozen yogurt and…donuts. Hence the “clever” name. It also had a salad bar. I know–huh? We didn’t even make the donuts. The owners would buy a few dozen from the grocery store and bring them in to resell.

The weirdeness didn’t end there. Yogido’s was located next to a Mexican restaurant called Johnny Chilito’s. The two places were owned by the same people so I also worked there. (On a side note, who thinks, frozen yogurt and Mexican food–what a great business opportunity!)

The owners were a Korean couple, Mr. and Mrs. Ryu. When I interviewed for the job, the only questions I remember them asking me were “Are you Christian?” and “When will you go to church?” (They needed someone to work the Sunday morning shift.) I said I was Catholic and could attend mass on Saturdays (which I actually did do).

Mrs. Ryu was not a popular boss. Her last name was pronounced “roo” and some of the workers would call her “Kanga” behind her back. (Hey, remember we were in high school!) I despised working with Mrs. Ryu because I couldn’t understand a single word she said. I know I wrote a post blasting Food Network for dubbing Masaharu Morimoto, but I can understand him. Mrs. Ryu’s accent was so impenetrable, I couldn’t even guess what she was saying. She would tell me to do something, and I would ask “What did she say?” to my friend Kara through gritted teeth. (The irony of this is that Kara is white and could understand Mrs. Ryu while I, an Asian American, could not.)

One night I was working with Mrs. Ryu. She watched me scoop ice for a customer’s drink and said something to me. I knew she was giving me some kind of direction, but I had no idea what it was.

Frustrated, I muttered something like, “I know what I’m doing” in Mrs. Ryu’s general direction. She looked at me sharply, and I understood her then. It was my last night as one of her employees.

Sure enough, when I came to check the work schedule the next week, my name wasn’t on it. That was how the Ryus let you know you were fired.

Now that I’m older, I can see myself through Mrs. Ryu’s eyes. She probably thought I was a disrespectful girl who couldn’t listen. The thing is, nothing could be further from the truth. I’m a rule follower, a team player. I respect my elders and authority. I’ve always prided myself on my listening skills and my empathy for others.

But maybe this sense of my self only holds true if the situation is easy–if the person is likeable and seems to like me and seems to be like me.

Who thought frozen yogurt could cause so much introspection?!

Food Network missing key ingredient?

During February, Food Network ran a curious promo spot. It featured two of its newest personalities (pictured above) who said, “Hi, we’re Pat and Gina Neely, hosts of Down Home With the Neelys. Join us and Food Network as we celebrate Black History Month.”

Every time I saw the spot, it bothered me, but I couldn’t pinpoint exactly why. It finally came to me a few days ago. What exactly was the channel doing to celebrate Black History Month? Featuring classic African American recipes on its Web site? Examining George Washington Carver’s influence on food and agriculture? Highlighting the nation’s top black chefs? Uh, no.

Instead it ran this awkward promo that had the feeling of being put together at the last moment. It was like someone said, “Oh yeah, we have to do something for Black History Month. Anyone available?” (Cue chirping crickets.)

I watch Food Network constantly, but until now, I’ve never considered just how lacking in diversity it is. Sure, there are two or three shows hosted by black people, that one Latina lady and those gay guys. But by and large, Food Network’s leading personalities are mostly–as Dave Chappelle would say–white dudes. (Yes, I’m aware of Rachael Ray and the other ladies on the channel, but it’s still mostly dominated by men. )

In January, We Are Never Full wrote a post titled “News Shocker! Diversity Finally Comes to Food Network!” that discussed the Neelys and the cable channel’s pervasive whiteness. It also addressed something that I’ve also thought was weird and offensive–the use of dubbing for Japanese chef Masaharu Morimoto. (I’ve always found Jamie Oliver and his thick British accent harder to understand than Morimoto.)

“[The Food Network] completely degrades him every time he’s on Iron Chef by dubbing some dudes voice over his own. HE IS SPEAKING ENGLISH WHEN YOU DUB OVER HIM WITH ENGLISH!!!! I understand he has a strong accent, but at least let us hear the master speak. For fuck’s sake, degrade him a bit less by using subtitles. I wonder if this pisses him off?”

Should I be glad that that Food Network is trying to add some color to its programming with the Neelys and that it bothered to remember Black History Month? Sorry, this time there’s no “A” for effort.