Milk Tea Heaven

Boba milk tea has sort of taken the US by storm. In the past decade, boba places have cropped up all over the place. For me, a majority of them are lackluster; often they're cloyingly sweet, the boba is tasteless and/or the boba has the wrong texture. After I moved out of Irvine, a new plaza popped up a mile away from my old apartment complex. In this plaza, an 85° Bakery appeared and Asians all over Southern California rejoiced. This bakery is famous on the other side of the world with locations in Taiwan (where it originates), China, Australia and Irvine, CA. Rumors are a new one is opening in Rowland Heights soon, which is great news!

Like Sprinkles, there is usually a huge line outside this bakery. I've once stood in it for an hour to buy freshly baked goods and boba milk tea. There is typically a bakery bouncer (lol) that stands at the door and lets people in little by little. Once inside, you grab a tray, a pair of tongs and go to town. If you ever go here, be prepared to jostle with finicky foodies, old Asian women and the occasional out of place non-Asian person for the fresh baked goods. There are constantly new platters of pastries being brought out that are often snatched up before the worker has a chance to set it down on a shelf -- I'm not exaggerating here. It's a bad thing to have a favorite pastry here because it's a crapshoot whether that particular pastry will be there when you get inside or not. They probably have 40 different varieties of baked pastries (not counting the pastry case shown below) you can buy and I've tried about 15 of them. If you take a peek into the back kitchen, you'll see ~10 cooks bustling around throwing things in giant ovens and giant racks of dough ready to be baked. The staff is super friendly and will always go in the back to check if your favorite pastry is coming out of the oven any time soon. Unfortunately, most of the time the answer is, "It won't be ready until later tonight :(." For the record, my favorite pastry is the little Japanese cream bun thing. It looks like a small round bao with a white swirl (like a naruto) on top.



It's no secret I don't eat fruit, if you know me. If you don't know me and you just balked, I'll explain some other time. As you can see from the picture above, everything has fruit. That's how Chinese pastries roll. A majority of the celebrations I went to as a child I couldn't eat dessert. That combined with my mom never serving dessert at home (it's not traditional for Chinese people to do that, it's not that she's mean!), I don't have a very large sweet tooth. I know this is quite a different story than Willy Wonka, at least in the new movie, I don't remember how the original one went. If you're balking again because you know how much I like to bake, then you must not know that I rarely eat what I bake. All that fruit talk aside, I was still always amazed at how beautiful Chinese pastries were, especially the ones at 85° Bakery. I know this sounds like some sort of Yelp review, but I urge anyone in Southern California to try this bakery out!

Oh ya! Back to the boba. It's ridiculously good here! The milk tea is sweetened perfectly (except for that one time they forgot to put sugar in mine...) and the boba has just the right amount of chew and flavor. You'd be surprised how much boba has no flavor. Yuck.

Please go here. And buy me a Japanese cream bun. Thanks <3

Food And Red Envelopes

Every January/February, the relatives blow into town from overseas and we meet up for Chinese New Year dinner. As there is a lack of any good Chinese restaurants in Southern California, we tend to go to East Gourmet Seafood Restaurant for every occasion.



This was part of the spread from this year's feast. I am very partial to "spicy salt and pepper pork chops" (I'm not quite sure what they're called in English) and lettuce wraps, so I was pleased to see they landed on the table. We started off the meal with Peking duck <3 and ended it with red bean dessert. All in all, it was nice to see my family. The red envelopes were nice, too. I was reluctant to go since I had to DVR the Pro-Bowl, but in the end I'm glad I hoofed it out to Rosemead to dine and catch up.

I'm aware that Chinese New Year isn't until February 3 this year, but gung hay fat choy in advance.

After Several Years

I've always loved food, but hunting down delicious places to eat didn't become an obsession until after college (having a steady paycheck and more free time helps!). I lived in Yorba Linda for the first 18 years of my life and recently moved back after spending time in Irvine (yay!) and West LA (ew!). I had heard about Rosine's Mediterranean Cafe back when I was still in my teen years (pause for wistful thoughts of youth and not needing anti-aging cream). The extent of my culinary palette at this point was CHINESE FOOD, AMERICAN FOOD and ITALIAN. All I knew about Mediterranean food was that hummus was delicious and pita bread was tasty. I first had Greek food from a private chef in London (tiny living room converted into private restaurant, old Greek wife cooking in kitchen, old Greek husband serving, celebrity autographs and pictures plastered all over the walls) and came away knowing I loved hummus. In college, I started going to Daphne's and slowly got introduced to gyros, baklava, pilaf and the like. After college, Zankou's Chicken and Chicken Dijon fell onto my food radar and broadly categorized "Mediterranean Food" became one of my favorites.

As to be expected, when I moved home I knew I had to visit Rosine's.



This is their shawarma plate. I actually got rotisserie chicken with wheat pilaf and hummus, but the picture came out funny, so I'm going with the shawarma picture instead. There's a salad and tabbouleh at the back of the plate. The best part of the meal was the garlic sauce (of Zankou's fame) that came with the chicken. I soon ran out of chicken and pita and pilaf to eat it with and resorted to eating it straight from the small ramekin it came in. Eight hours later, my mom came in my room and asked me why it smelled so strongly of garlic. I blushed and told her to go away and acted like I had no idea. Then I ran to the bathroom and brushed my teeth and used mouthwash... again. It was worth it.

Now I want more garlic sauce. Hummus will have to step aside because garlic sauce is winning! ):

Books > Me

I've been falling horrifically behind on my reading as of late. Yesterday, I had to return The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest, Cloud Atlas and Freedom because I couldn't renew them further. When I try to read lately my mind just sort of drifts off to random thoughts and I end up re-reading passages over and over. Part of me is thinking that the books I'm reading just aren't grabbing my attention. I read a bit of The Fellowship of the Ring yesterday and got through a few pages without falling asleep, so maybe I just need to return to the fantasy (nerd lol) genre for a bit.



This is the plaque outside the Yorba Linda Public Library, which was pretty much my second home as a child. I frequented this place 2-3 times a week and almost always had the maximum number of books checked out (35). I volunteered here starting from fifth grade all the way through school where I eventually became a "VIP" volunteer (Volunteer Internship Program) and headed up all the other summer volunteers. I remember when I was reading to a child and he peed in my lap. Good times. I got paid $100 that summer for 100 hours of work or something weird like that. My name is still immortalized on a plaque on the second floor, haha. Small triumphs in my life.

I have three library cards (Santa Monica Public Library, Los Angeles Library System and the Yorba Linda Public Library). Oh, I guess I have a card to the Newport Beach Library too, but I think I owe them money so let's not remind them of that. What kind of place charges $1 a day per book when it's overdue?! That's blasphemy. I think YLPL charged 10 cents per day per book with a grace period when I was a young'n. I digress. The point I was trying to make is despite all the libraries I've frequented in my life, my favorite is still always the Yorba Linda Public Library. I remember when they remodeled it to the two-story structure it is now and for a year or so the library was confined to a portable trailer (a PORTAKABIN?). There's just something so homey and nice about it. It isn't weirdly stiff and lifeless (I feel the Newport and Santa Monica ones are sometimes) and there aren't hobos laying around outside asking you for money. I'll always feel at home there. I still have my first library card I got when I was 4ish with my name scrawled in blue Sharpie. I think I'll hang onto that thing forever.

Ailing

Either the Santa Ana winds are bringing particles to destroy my sinuses or I'm coming down with a cold. As such, I don't have much energy to summarize the goings-on of my day.

But here's a picture of my currently messy bedside table:



I forgot I made that tea. I'm going to drink that tea now. And finish watching this episode of American Idol then pass out in my bed. The bed that is next to the bedside table.

The Tikka Obsession Continues

After watching roughly ten hours of television yesterday (7ish House episodes, 2 Arrested Development episodes, The Biggest Loser, Chopped, 2 cooking shows), I decided that I would be more productive today. Hasty to jump too quickly into things, I set two goals for myself. Take care of some EDD stuff and make chicken tikka masala for dinner.

I lolled about and finished season one of Arrested Development before making a list and heading out to gather my ingredients.



Ta-da! This is the finished product. After importing this onto my computer I realized it's the blurriest photo ever. I had a few snaps of the ingredients I used but it just didn't seem to do the post justice. After all, I can't brag about my tikka masala and show you a bottle of coriander and cumin. I'm feeling quite pleased with myself and know I could replicate this recipe pretty quickly now. I still have a lot of left over yogurt and cilantro kicking around in the fridge, so I'll be tikka-ing a bit more in the next week or two. I was really reluctant to cook since the kitchen was a mess (I had to do dishes for 15 minutes before starting to cook) and I couldn't find my Le Creuset (my mom just puts things away and then loses them), but in the end I'm glad I did. Turning out a great dish is always satisfying and I can now go to bed tonight without feeling like I completely wasted another day.

While I was upstairs snapping a photo of my bowl, my confused dad spooned some sauce and chicken on top of a piece of garlic naan and tried eating it that way before I rescued him and told him there was rice and served him up a bowl properly. He then asked if he was supposed to eat the whole dish with his hands. /facepalm I'm hoping my mom figures it out a little more quickly when she comes home.

The next Glee BluRay came from Netflix today. I know how I'll be finishing off my day! Toodles (:

My Favorite Piece of Furniture

This is my Robin bookshelf from Ikea. My mom and I bought it roughly half my lifetime ago. We lugged it home from Ikea Tustin -- now a Best Buy -- and built it together. A total mother-daughter bonding moment, if I do say so myself. It's housed some of my most beloved belongings over the years.

At age 13, my Animorphs books stood proudly on those shelves. A few years later, Sweet Valley books joined the ranks. Soon, hefty Harry Potter hardcovers came along. Then school required classics hopped on. In the dorms, my bookshelf couldn't come with me, but a year later when moving into my first apartment, I dragged it from home to Irvine. I put CDs (lol Yellowcard) and various framed photographs on the shelves then. A year later, I moved into a different apartment and the bookshelf graced the area between my bedroom and the bathroom. I started owning DVDs at this point and those took the top shelf with old textbooks falling below. After college, I had no room for my bookshelf so it went home for a few years where my mother stole it for her room and put weird finance books on it.

Since moving back home in December, my first duty was to reclaim my bookshelf for my room. Finance books were dropped to the floor and good ol' Robin and I were reunited. Filling up bookshelves is always my favorite part of unpacking and it's the favorite thing in my room (sorry TV, sorry bed!). Every time my glance falls upon it, I smile because it embodies me. Sure it's a mess and it's overcrowded and my picture doesn't even show the bottom shelf (it's full of cookbooks) or the top (Harry Potter books and Drew Brees); nonetheless, I love it.



Stonewall is hiding on this bookshelf. I sort of think of it as Where's Waldo, but Where's Stonewall? If you can't find him in under 5 seconds, you should probably have your eyes checked.

My video game collection takes up the top shelf. The second shelf has two of my favorite cookbooks -- Mad Hungry and new classic family dinners -- I keep at eye level (I have to stoop down to the bottom shelf for the rest of my collection). Random books I own clutter the rest of that shelf as well as the one below it. The OC complete DVD collection sits hiding behind a makeup bags. DVDs (House, Gilmore Girls, Family Guy, Desperate Housewives -- I'm trying to sell the last two!) make up a majority of the fourth shelf along with a stack of manga I'm trying to sell on Glyde.com. The last visible shelf has my beloved collection of Everyday Food magazines, my BluRay collection and my DS games.

In retrospect, maybe this isn't fully indicative of ME, I have way more stuff in my room and plenty of things I hold near and dear aren't on these shelves, but I like to think of it as a snapshot of what makes me me.

PS: I've been in my room watching House, M.D. all day. I have a slight case of room fever.