*1256 - earlier that day ...

It's always a party in the Castro, even early on Saturday mornings.  Dance music as you rub sleep out of your eyes on an outdoor patio?  Sounds about right.

Delicious food as well!  Moules & frites, with chorizo.  Mmm.

 

Smoked salmon benedicts.

Happy to have D.

*1255 - Twin Peaks (again)

Twin Peaks has great (and very accessible) views of the city.

It's pretty easy to see why Market street is 'main street' in San Francisco--here you can see it travel all the way to the Ferry building and the bay.

From the top of Twin Peaks our neighborhood (Potrero Hill, pictured in the background here and known for its very steep streets) looks like a tiny little bump.  The hilly street blocks are lot more intimidating up close (I promise).

*1254 - nebulous potato thing

I've probably said it before but it's getting harder and harder to please me for brunch; I still love a good brunch, though.  I refuse to get scrambles or omelettes because I can make them so easily myself.  Pancakes are a breeze and french toast?  Even D makes a fierce french toast.

So what does that leave me?  Well, for one, the Nebulous Potato Thing (they refer to it as the "Thing" for short) at St Francis Fountain down the road from us.  I couldn't even really tell you what was in it!

 

It all made sense, very comforting and deliciously decadent, weighed like a satisfying brick in our tummies, as we staggered back up Potrero Hill.  It's also where we got inspiration for homemade Guinness ice cream floats.

*1253 - big wheels

A yearly event in SF: Bring Your Own Big Wheel.  I've seen some pretty crazy things in SF but this takes the cake.  The best part is that we found out the real windiest road in SF is not Lombard, but Vermont Street in Potrero, which happens to be a street or two away from where we live.  (The two streets were designed by the same architect.)

So what happens is that everyone brings a big wheel (plastic kid toys, no rubber wheels allowed), dresses up in an outrageous costume, lines up atop Vermont Street, and at the sound of a whistle, kicks off and hurtles down the street in groups of hundreds.  You can hear the roar of rumbling plastic wheels on concrete from afar.  Grown people on little plastic things meant for 2-year olds, probably drunk, tumbling over each other at 30 mph?  I can't believe this is legal but it was such a sight!

Just a small section of the spectator crowd

The starting line

These things aren't that easy to control, clearly!

*1252 - market research

I'm still a whole-hearted market research nerd, but sometimes I really wish I did more than help Fortune 500 companies earn more money from their consumers.  I try to think of it as enhancing everybody's consumer/business experiences because we're reducing risk, finding efficiencies, meeting people's needs ... but ultimately it always boils down to enhancing a company's bottom line.  I guess that is generally what many people's livelihoods are about (making money) but sometimes I wish I were saving lives, helping the unfortunate, inventing things that make the world a better place.

*1251 - vroom

So, I have a new hobby.  Just look at me in my peacoat and scarf and racing helmet.

 

Surprisingly convincing I dare say.  Well here is the real racer:

And off he goes!

  

It was a weird and scary experience watching from the sidelines for the first time but it was nice to watch D in his element.  He did really well too.  Proud of my lil racer :)

*1250 - DIY home improvement

My DIY home improvement project!  I really wanted to mount succulents on our living room wall but couldn't find an affordable, cute way to do so.  There were gorgeous wall-appropriate vases that were just too expensive, there were DIY tutorials for mounting mason jars onto the wall that were really cute but just too much work, and there were affordable wall vases that were just too ugly.  I needed a cheap but easy option.

And this turned out to be the perfect solution!

I got small little buckets (on Amazon, a dozen for $15), painted them roughly in our living room colors (yellow and grey) with paint we already had, filled the bottoms with pebbles, fill the middle with soil, got some tiny succulent cuttings from our garden, and popped them in.  D punched six nails into the wall, and we hung them up.  Total cost = $15, total time = under an hour.

Aren't they precious?  Looking at this picture from two weeks ago when I just hung them up (i.e. when they were freshly planted and rather droopy), and looking at them now, I realise the succulents really are growing!  Especially the middle yellow one; he's all spiky and vibrantly green now.  I love succulents because they are so idiot proof.

*1249 - need a vacation

Who's up for one?  I've been so consistently stressed at such a high level without break for months upon months, that now that I just switched projects and am experiencing a much-needed lull in terms of volume of work, I'm still unable to get out of panic mode and am constantly worrying, dreading, scurrying.  I think this just means I need a break, a real one, not like a "3 weeks in Singapore but working every other morning" one.

*1248 - sous vide diary: salmon

Not the most glamorous photo of salmon but done to my precise liking.  Can't have salmon done any other way now!


Brine first to reduce white albumin build-up and add flavor.  (I didn't do this long enough because you can still see the albumin.)  Then sous vide at 50 degrees Celsius, for about 15 minutes.  Sear off the skin in a smoking hot pan for a minute or two.  Voila!
The texture is always almost eerily perfect.  Imagine smooth, even creamy salmon, and so so moist.  Sprinkle of sea salt and squirt of lemon, and it's perfect.  

*1247 - roasted chicken

Being someone who loves cooking so much, it was pretty odd that I had never roasted a whole chicken by myself (I recall stuffing one for maybe Christmas when I was at home years ago).  Chanced upon whole chickens in Whole Foods one day and decided to give it a shot.  Me being me, I researched the art of baking chicken thoroughly before beginning.

Let it sit out of the fridge sitting up and pat with a paper towel so the skin dries out as much as possible.  We stuffed with lemon, garlic, and rosemary.  Lots of salt and pepper and olive oil/butter.  Get it under the skin and on the skin and in the cavity.  No need to truss.  Cook it breast down at 425F for about 2/3 of the time so that the fat from the dark meat on top drips into the white meat and moistens it.  At the end, sit it breast down for at least 15 minutes covered with foil again to let the moisture redistribute.  Best gravy ever made from the drippings, together with a bit of chicken stock.

 

Poka and EV watching the chicken cook together!

So beautiful!  It was delicious and the entire house smelled delicious too.  I also have a weakness for cooked lemon.

*1246 - friends

To those of you who
Have your friends a subway ride away, or
A taxi ride away, or a trot down the street, or
Work with a group of colleagues who at some point became your friends without you even realising it, or
Can pick up the phone and chat to friends in the same timezone, or
Can pick up the phone and whatsapp someone "casuarina prata tonight ok?", or
Bump into friends ever so often randomly on the streets of a little country, or
Have regular girls' night outs or weekend brunch buddies, or ...

Don't take all that for granted.

*1245 - subway

But of course the one week I am in NYC, the subway happens to shut down (or at least the line headed downtown).  Now I know what the streets of NYC look like minus trains: chaos.  Going to be remarkably late for work but at least I miraculously managed to squish myself onto bus.  Pretty harrowing.  At some point I seriously considered walking 60 blocks in heels, so I'm glad it didn't come to that.

I wonder how I used to survive without smartphones and google maps on the go to tell me what to do in an unfamiliar place!

*1244 - sous vide diary: eggs and steak

Back in culinary class in Cornell some 3, 4 years ago (oh my), we learnt about the chi chi method of cooking in gourmet restaurants: sous vide.  Literally meaning "vacuum" in French, it involves vacuum sealing your food (especially proteins), immersing in a circulating temperature-controlled water bath, at a fairly low temperature, for a fairly long time.  This results in very precise temperatures and very even cooking and no chance of overcooking.  When you grill a steak for example, you put it on a really hot grill and it cooks quickly from outside to in and you guess at when to pull it off the grill and hope for the best = very unforgiving.  For sous vide cooking, all you need to do is to find the temperature for that protein to cook the the precise doneness you want it to be at, no guessing involved.  It also results in perfect textures and is packed with moisture, and because you're vacuum sealing your food tightly with its seasonings sans air to get in the way, you don't have to marinate as long for an equal intensity of flavour.

The one thing that doesn't happen when things are sous vide cooked is that Maillard browning doesn't occur as there's no hot, dry, heat (this is culinary class theory that has stayed with me, woohoo), so at the end, you have to do the quickest, hottest sear possible to get that nice tasty crust without cooking it more as far as possible.

Anyhoo, my progressive (in the kitchen) brother decided to buy a professional sous vide machine for himself to replace his amateur home-cook version of the equipment, which now has fallen into my very willing and thankful lap!  It is essentially a temperature control probe that measures and regulates the temperature of a non-digital piece of cooking equipment, in this case, a large rice cooker.

Yes, my siblings and I are kitchen/food dorks.

My first experiment was the simplest way to embark on a sous vide journey--soft-boiled eggs.  I'm typically an egg snob so having perfectly cooked eggs is like heaven to me.  Every tenth of a degree results in a differently cooked egg, so I'm still trying to find my favorite temperature; at this point it's probably somewhere around 62.8 degrees C for one hour.  (Pictured above was my first attempt at 62.2 degrees C eggs--a teensy bit too runny for my liking; adjusting to 62.8 worked much better.)  Sous vide eggs are unbelievable in texture, it's like drinking egg in cream form.

Second experiment: steak.  56 degrees C for about 2 hours, length of time depends on fattiness of steak.  The steak was perfectly, evenly, juicily pink almost all the way through except for the very thin browned rim outside.  Unbelievable!

I'm a convert and cooking steak any other way would be unthinkable at this point.  I've never been very good at cooking steak the conventional way anyway so this works perfectly for me.

*1243 - homemade (healthier) potato chips

Amazing discovery.  One can make homemade potato chips in under ten minutes.

 

The amazing part is, these are not deep-fried but have a very similar texture.  Reduced mess, reduced calories, reduced reliance on excessive packaging and processed ickiness.  Equal yumminess, added customization, the only problem is that these go FAST.

Behold.  Microwaved potato chips.

Yes, microwaved.  I'm not a master of the microwave and would tend to choose oven/toaster over microwave whenever possible.  But I found this "recipe" and thought I would give it a shot.  It's not really a recipe, more of a set of instructions.

1. Grab a clean potato and slice it as thin as you possibly can.

2. Season with a drizzle of olive oil.  I also added fresh ground salt and pepper here.

3. Put a single layer on a plate.  Put in microwave on high for 2-3 min, turn over, and blast for 2-3 min more until just slightly browned (really depends on the microwave so just keep watching it).

4. Remove and let cool before eating because it continues to crisp up after it comes out of the microwave.

And that's really all there is to it.  Magical.

*1242 - swirls

D gave me the best Christmas present ever, it's going to be a tough one to beat.

My very own Kitchenaid :) :) :)

I've been baking an obnoxious amount of breads and sweets as a result but to D it's probably a win-win because he gets to enjoy the finished product too.

Themed baking last weekend: the swirl.

Cinnamon currant swirl wheat bread.

And blueberry/cranberry/lemon swirl cookies.




The trick to baking cookies for two is to freeze half of the raw cookie dough so you can have homemade, fresh baked cookies whenever you want.  Much better than baking a ton, having them go stale, and getting all jelat from trying to finish up so many of the same flavor.  Rationing them out is probably better for you too.

*1241 - poka in backyard

It's been a while since a Poka pic.  Here she is exploring our backyard, sniffing succulents:



Indoor cats tend to have a longer lifespan than outdoor cats so the choice was obvious for us to keep Poka indoors.  But we do like to let her out every once in a while under careful supervision so it stimulates her little brain as she explores a new environment and lets some energy out chasing insects and creepy crawlies.  It also turns out that she likes rolling in gravel and smearing her face in dirt.  For such an otherwise fastidiously clean animal, that seems rather odd.

*1240 - delivered

70+ slide report, from scratch, out the door.  Appendix soon to follow.  It is always hard to say but I might be alive again soon, fingers crossed.  And thank goodness I'm a data-loving dork because this would probably not have been worth it otherwise.

*1239 - caprese

This used to be one of my guilty late night pleasure in college--the classic caprese: fresh mozzarella, tomatoes, fresh chopped basil, olive oil, coarse salt, black pepper.

Fancy snack food, eh?

*1238 - nemo

Nemo is one of the reasons why I'm now in San Francisco.  Not to add to the misery that is on the other coast but I'm just not a winter type of girl.  (Exception: give me a snowboard and I might not complain as much.)

It's Chinese New Year and it's just as well that it has traditionally been nothing much more than an extended holiday for me and my family, given that we've got virtually no relatives with us in Singapore.  I haven't been home for CNY in five years anyway (holy moly that is a fifth of my lifetime).  And I must say that I have never been a fan of blaring shopping centre CNY music.

But still, occasions like this make me pause and consider how far away from my roots I have been drifting, on this side of the world worrying about the weirdass concepts of snow storms and filing taxes and nurturing Californian succulents and having no easy access to asian veggies besides baby bok choy and making friends in a city that isn't mine, a country that didn't grow up in the same way that I did.

It's really strange when I think about it.  It's been five years away from home.

*1237 - anime nerds

In approximately 4 days, D and I finished watching Steins;Gate.  Yes, there's a semicolon in the title; we think it indicates a pregnant pause between the two words when you say it out loud.