It 'tastes' like home to me

Hello wonderful followers of I Ate Everything!  I am still in amazement that I have been given the auspicious privilege of guest blogging on this fine site.   For a little intro… My name is Aubrey and I am a recent convert into the wonderful world of blogs… (I’m still very much a newbie).  I spent last year with Stephanie (and 3 other fabulous women) in East Asia where my palette was opened to delightful foods and flavors beyond my wildest imagination.  

Under Steph’s great influence my travels have begun to resemble more of an “Eating Asia” exploration of culture and less of the “hotspot marathon method” that I had previously employed.  Though I have had my share of ‘exotic fare’ – and often pride myself on seeking out the craziest of ‘local flavors’ (donkey hot pot, home-cooked scorpions, lamb brain…) -for this edition, I’d like to stick with something a little more familiar.

back from the days where we made our own scorpos for dinner

When you live 13 time zones away from home, it’s important to find a way to settle in and feel at ‘home’ in your new environment.  Yes, often times that does come in the form of a 35 cent McDonald’s ice cream cone, (stop judging… they are delightful!) but more often than not, for me it is a steamy hot, wonderfully fresh bowl of la mian (拉面).  Literally meaning ‘pulled noodles,’ this deliciously simple ‘noodle soup’ is my happy place.  Last year there was a restaurant not 2 min from our front door.  But this year I was devastated by severe la mian withdrawals…. Until heaven smiled down on me and opened up a noodle shop right across the street!  (resulting in untold happiness!!)

especially tasty with a mound of la jiao (red pepper)

As with everything in life, change is inevitable. Oh strange new world.  My old comforts of Inn n’ Out and Taco Tuesday have been replaced by la mian and gai fan (stir fried goodness heaped on a massive plate of rice).  

gai mian (goodness heaped on noodles)

true to my southwest roots, nothing would be complete without the 'heat'

I take comfort in seeing the same pensive grandfather sitting by the tree outside my apartment complex… 

and I always smile at the ladies playing cards in front of the street food vendors.  

This is my home… these are my familiar flavors…   With one slurp wonderful memories of friends, dancing, laughing and living flood my mind.  How sweet the taste of simple noodles!

In keeping with Stephanie’s questions to ponder… What tastes like home to you? 

PS- thanks for this opportunity Steph, but we're all very anxious to have you back!  :)

kentucky fried comfort

One of the challenges of living in East Asia, for me, was keeping my head up when things got rough. There would be days when I would feel so beaten and broken down, days when it felt like my language teacher chewed me up and spit me out for breakfast because I couldn't construct a sentence using the character 把, days when I missed the bus because someone cut in front of me in "line" again, days when I would unwittingly step in some freshly manufactured baby poo on the sidewalk, days when I couldn't get rid of the sensation of pollution on me because it was clinging to my eyelids and my clothes and the insides of my nose and throat. (I know I talk about East Asia as much as humanly possible on this blog (in generally positive tones) because I am still processing my experience (high fives to slow processors!), but lest you be deceived--living in East Asia was NOT a daily bright sunshiney walk in the park by any means.)

My friends and I, being of the remarkably adaptable human species, quickly found out what we needed to do to survive a bad day. Sometimes it would be a simple bottle of Coke or a popsicle if it was hot outside. Midway through the year we found that one supermarket carried those little cakey powdered sugar or chocolate frosted donuts (yeah, you know the ones, the transfatty gems), and those also contained remarkable healing powers. I was quite partial to the 35 cent McDonald's ice cream cones and, unashamedly, KFC's egg custard tarts. I know, I know, shake your head mournfully if it helps you get it out of your system. Some of you believe the C in KFC stands for cruelty, still others think it means chicken...I think crazy (good) would work, or even charisma because geez louise, I was drawn to these things like a moth to the flame. I went all over town, scoping out the best ones--KFC would always come out on top, like magic. I have no idea how they did that!

This I do know: one bite of an egg tart can, in an instant, take me back to childhood (countless Saturdays spent dim summing it up in the Bay Area) and East Asia (where they served as a Band-Aid for a bad day, celebration of a good day, and all other things in between) simultaneously. Smooth, creamy, bright yellow custard + buttery, crumbly crust = pure magic in tart form. One of my ultimate comfort foods. C is for comfort.

Egg Custard Tarts
adapted from Baking Bites (I want to make everything Nicole writes about!)

a disclaimer: if you're not used to working with this type of dough, you may consider these slightly labor intensive to make (I found them to be a little time consuming) but that does not detract from their deliciousness at all!

Preheat oven to 350.

crust:
1 3/4 cups flour
3 tbp sugar
1/4 tsp salt
1/2 cup butter, chilled and cut into cubes
1 egg

In a food processor, pulse the flour, sugar, and salt together to combine. Add the butter and pulse until the dough looks sandy. Blend the egg in--now it should look like wet sand. Pour everything into a ziploc bag and press the crumbs together into a cohesive dough. Chill dough in fridge for at least 15 minutes. Press equal sections of dough into muffin tins, 2/3 of the way up. Square off the tops with your finger so that the filling doesn't run out when you pour it in.

filling:

1/2 c sugar
4 egg yolks
2/3 c milk

In a bowl with a spout, whisk sugar and egg yolks together until sugar is mostly dissolved. Whisk in milk. (You will be tempted to do this while the crust dough is chilling, but I would advise not to do that because the milk separated from the rest in a weird way and never really recombined again...) Pour into dough-lined muffin tins and bake for 25ish minutes until the center jiggles just a teensy bit. Cool in pan.

Makes 10-12 egg tarts.

(You may have noticed that I made baby ones too because I thought they'd be really cute, but they turned out weird for me (and pressing the dough into the mini muffin pan took forever), so I'd stick with the big ones.)

Your question: What's a comfort food of yours?

coming full dumpling

First off, happy Christmas "to you and yours" (this little phrase is so strange and apart from this entry, I will never use it)! This was an interesting holiday as I remembered how wholly different it was from last year (we topped off our celebration with Christmas day all-you-can-eat Korean BBQ. Oh yeah!). It came and went very quietly this year but not without ponderings on the subject of our celebrations: a poor unwed teenage girl giving birth in a stanky barn to a baby who would one day grow up to love and save and change the world for good. God's love, revealed to us.

The parallels between this life and my East Asia life continue to be striking. I had a poignant Christmas Eve day as mom and I prepped potstickers for dinner, a tradition now several years running. (Just a year ago, we were eating dumplings at our neighbor's place for winter solstice, a tradition in the north.) Mom commented that while I still made a messy job of it, my potsticker stuffing speed has gotten a lot faster, which I had to attribute to the mothers and grandmothers of East Asia.

Making dumplings (potstickers being a subset) is like a national pastime for the women of East Asia. It is super labor intensive, but somehow, all know how to make them impeccably. You would think that constructing them would be fairly simple, but spoon, pleat, pleat, twist is surprisingly difficult. I will not claim that I ever got the hang of it, but I did manage to eat a whole lot of them while I was there. What were you expecting? This blog is aptly named. (sidenote: It is my dearest hope that every foreigner in Asia has at least one opportunity to try to make dumplings at some grandmother's house, subsequently get laughed out of the kitchen due to awful foreigner dumpling folding skills, and then proceed to get stuffed with said dumplings for dinner. I can eat 50 in one sitting!)

Some throwback photos from the spring at my friend's grand-uncle & aunt's place...yes, dumplings.

You can tell some of these were made by me..the ones with green filling sticking out the top.

                                     

Grand-aunt's hands, rolling out dumpling dough and going a million miles a minute! 

As I connect all the dots in my head, I realize that I can't ever fully escape East Asia because it lives on in photos, in this blog, in my memories, and very importantly, through food. With our Christmas Eve potsticker tradition, it seems like I have come full circle (or dumpling, if you're feeling punny), and I look forward to the next one, where I will undoubtedly pick up new questions and answers, insights, lessons, and (hopefully!) more hope.

these are a few of my favorite things

All right. I'll just be honest with the 2 of you who read this thing. Life has slowed down a loooooot since I returned home, not necessarily in a bad way, but definitely in a less-than-constantly-blogworthy sort of way. (Although come to think of it, don't I get to dictate what happens here, and can't skilled writers spin the mundane into the fabulous? How do I get to this point? Oh yes, of course. Practice. Write some more. And some more. And then again.)

(In case you're wondering, my mind does go there (there meaning this vein of internal conversation) pretty regularly. I think it has a lot to do with this transitory period of being a twentysomething and questioning myself daily about where I want to be in life and what I want to do in life and what are my life goals anyway? As Joy the Baker would say, holy heck! It's enough to make a girl crazy.)

The other day I was reminiscing about all the crazy things I ate in Asia. (Remembering is a good way to bring my mind back to the way things were.) I started out tame with duck brain and mooncake the size of my head.

By November I was tackling scorpions.

Winter break brought the fish eye episode in Kuala Lumpur (ps I know Kathryn has a photo of me mid-fish eye chew...where is it?!)

East Asia then got too boring, food wise (totally kidding) but we moved on to the wild lands of Central Asia, which brought the sickest thing I've consumed to date. I do not joke or overexaggerate. Fermented horse milk. I know. You're sitting there, completely stunned and kind of sick to your stomach just thinking about it. I'll create you a word picture, since Blogger and I are still at odds with each other and posting pictures is just too much work for it right now (seriously, someone please help me with the tech part).

As I was saying. Our Central Asian friends are cheering us on as we all sat around this large table high in the mountains. All the foreigners got a bowl full of something creamy, white, and intensely sour scented. All the way down the hatch it was pungent, sour, bitter, and still creamy, and I wanted to gag as I considered how long it had been fermenting outside. At the end, a smoky aftertaste, but not like pleasant gouda/sausage smoky. Nasty smoky. Why would this drink even taste smoky? Oh, I'm sorry. I forgot to mention this is the national, and probably regional drink of Central Asia. Why would the national drink taste smoky? Why would aforementioned drink have such widespread appeal? Why on a chilly August mountain night would we be subjected to such torture by our Central Asian hosts?!

This, like all the things mentioned above (minus the fish eye, that was for my BC point), was eaten/drunk in the name of love/being polite guests in new cultures. I don't get that experience anymore, and sadly enough, I miss it. I miss it much more than these Georgia font blog words can express.

we danced everywhere!

In case you haven't seen this yet...a peek into our world and then some!




(an offshoot of the incredibly famous Where the Hell Is Matt? video.)

All of the locals' stares, sweaty clothing changes, and weary feet by the end were totally worth it!

Your favorite location?

springing forth

Friends! Spring has been here just a few short weeks...and I couldn't be happier. Some snapshots of what spring in East Asia looks like...

The poor trees! The spring wind blew them so far sideways. Our city is situated in a valley surrounded by mountains, so it's like living in a constant wind tunnel. Yay?


This picture is pretty blurry, but at the same time it's just so quintessentially Jena...

Umbrellas upon umbrellas after an unexpected late March snowfall!

Happy Gerber daisies outside of my favorite coffee shop in the main square.

Friends really enjoy dressing alike. I personally am enjoying their coordinating high top pink Converses! Who wants to go in with me on matching Converses?!

A couple weeks ago, we visited a different city, and my friend ordered us these. Snails. Ummm...right. I've done scorpions and countless other questionable looking food products, but these things were GROSS. Nothing even close to that elegant French escargot ish. You're supposed to jab the exposed interior part with a toothpick, then slowly pull out the little darling. All twisty and intestinal looking, probably because it's actually a digestive tract of sorts. No pictures of that because everyone's hands were covered in snail guts. Yum...

home sweet east asia

7 hotels/hostels, 1 night on a sleeper bus, 1 night in an airport, 2 nights in a sleeper train, and 72 showerless hours later, we're home!!! 3 countries in 3 weeks. More, as always, to come.

(credit to Aubrey for the stats)

methods of transport

Sometimes when comparing different places, one might be led into thinking that due to some surface-level shared qualities (they both have great hole-in-the-wall sushi joints! Their residents are so friendly to visitors!), said places might actually resemble each other.

This is not one of those instances. Whether I am aware of it or not, I keep a running mental log of observations of my new surroundings and how it compares to Modesto, Berkeley. If I were still a developmental psychology student, I would discuss the use of schemata (fancy term for mental categories) and how so many things here don't fit into my previously established schemata. They are that different.

This resembles nothing I've ever ridden before, save that John Deere junior year of high school. Introducing...the "tiny automated rickshaw" (my words) or alternatively, a "ghetto lawnmower" (Aubrey's). There are illegal taxis here called "hei che(s)" (literally black car)...this here thing is several steps down from that.


And a photo with the driver for good measure.


And in case all of you were wondering, this is how dogs roll around here.

So. No secrets here, but a big reason why I started this blog was to have a place to tell y'all about our amazing trip around Southeast Asia! (I then realized that this country itself has a ton of blog-worthy material...) I leave early Tuesday morning, but hopefully I will be able to quickly update from fun places! And when I return...prepare yourselves. In the meantime, who wants to be my technical support? I tried to upload a video of our lawnmower ride, but to no avail.

the first step

Inaugural post! This should be epic. Anyway, the purpose of this blog is to document my life in a organized way so that the grandkids have something to laugh about later. Focus of this blog: a lot about things I eat, since 10 minutes into my waking day I have usually figured out breakfast and am tackling lunch and dinner. But there will also be all the little stories and random thoughts that come with living in a foreign country...I can't write on food alone. Can I?

So let's get started! I've been in East Asia now for over 4 months. The language continues to be difficult. The people continue to be unflappably friendly and go miles (or kilometers, I guess) out of their way to make sure we are happy and wearing enough clothing. I continue to learn my new land. It is at turns confusing, inscrutable, completely different from anything I've ever known, and at times strangely familiar. It brings me so much joy when I am able to call it home, temporary though it is. And while I think I have a lot to teach these people, the reality is that I still have so much yet to learn.

Food Lesson #1: freshness counts!

One of the absolute joys of living in this country is the people's insistence on buying nothing but the freshest food for their meals. I mean, I come from the US, where we buy mangoes in December shipped from tropical places. The US, while it encompasses many traits, is absolutely not a tropical country, especially in December. So here is an example of daily eye candy on what we call "our food alley", which is a mere stone's throw from our apartment:

I believe these contain some sort of pork and green vegetable.

A husband and wife team run this dumpling cart. He rolls out the dough and oversees the cooking; she stuffs the little 饺子. In case anyone was wondering, I am so very fond of these. Also, I am fond of how they lay the dumplings out in concentric circles in the giant cast-iron pan for neatness.

These were photographed on the stairway of my apartment...I had to capture them before I ate them for lunch!They are transported in what I like to call the ubiquitous plastic bag. If you grab absolutely any food to go in this city, it automatically comes in a small and impossibly thin plastic bag that can't be good for the environment. I've learned to let that go a little bit this year.

note to self: get serious about blogging this year