Thai Food!!

I have been craving for Thai food again. On Thursday, I made pad thai using the Thai Kitchen brand. I never used this brand before until I got a Thai cookbook (called Simply Thai) and wanted to make green curry. I was going all over the place looking for green curry paste. I always passed by the Thai Kitchen brand because it just looked cheesy... You know... Not authentic. But because of my craving, I bought it and made the green curry with eggplant. That's how they make it at one of my favorite Thai places: Saladang in Pasadena. Anyways, it was so good! I made it again another time; and again tonight. It turned out that my sister makes them, too. But she said that she makes it with chicken and potatoes. And she cooks all the ingredients first and then mixes it with the curry. So I tried that today. It came out pretty good. The color... Not so much. I think cooking the eggplant ahead of time may have been a bad idea because the dark purple color kinda made the curry unpleasantly dark. I like serving the curry in the fondue set. It makes it more special.
So what was I talking about? Oh, the pad thai. It came out pretty good. I think next time I need to drain out the juice from the shrimp and chicken that I added to the noodle. It make the noodle kinda mushy. Also, I would squeeze some lime juice on it and some extra spiciness. The Thai Kitchen pad thai sauce just needed that punch in flavor. I wish I took a photo of it!

Well, tomorrow, I'm going to use the leftover rice noodles and make Spicy Thai Noodles and the Chicken Coconut Soup from the Simply Thai cookbook. I'm hoping that by looking at the ingredients for the Spicy Thai Noodle that it is the recipe for pad kee mao. It's my husband's favorite Thai noodle dish. The best place that makes this is Thai Basil in Fullerton. It's our other favorite Thai place. We compare all Thai places in the Bay Area to this one. Each time we're in town, we try to go. It's always good there. The last time we went was for New Year's Eve. We tried a new dish with eggplant, tofu, and basil. It was so good!! We also had their coconut soup. It was very yummy. We have been really into the coconut soup. I love the lemongrass flavor in it. So that's why I'm going to make it tomorrow.

Thai Basil's Eggplant & Tofu with Basil - I can't remember what it's called. So yummy!!

The Pad Kee Mao with pork.

The Lemongrass Coconut Soup.

Long Time, No Blog

Oh my... I haven't blogged since September?! That's so bad. I've been taking photos of this and that to put up on here, but just never really had the time or got too lazy to. I even started a little crafty project for fun. I started making Christmas ornaments out of felt. Never finished them, but that's okay. I'll put them up on here another day.

I went back home for Thanksgiving. We had our usual family dinner with the traditional turkey and the fixings, plus the Japanese dishes. We always invite our family friends. It was weird because one of us "kids" actually had their first child. Anyways, I don't have any photos of the food we had that night. We always get too busy. But we were able to take a photo of our Black Friday Sushi and Tempura Dinner we had. It was my sister and her husband's idea. It was a lot of work. We were doing all we can until our mom came home to do her magic and get the dinner prepared and completed. It was a scary night for us. Not because of the amount of food, but because our dad got lymph-node infection during the middle of dinner. It looked like his left cheek fell down to his neck. He's fine. Just needed to take antibiotics.

Then, for Christmas, I actually went gambling at Pechanga with my parents. It was fun and weird at the same time. I was sitting in the back seat of the car with my parents driving. I felt like such a little girl. Anyways, we had our Christmas family dinner on the 29th because that's when everyone was able to get together. We did a tempura dinner that night. We all decided that tempura dinners aren't such a good idea because it got cold. It's better to do warm dishes with tempura as one of them. Not ALL tempura. We even tried tempura-ing (my sister's new word) avocados. Someone recommended it. It wasn't that great. We also bacon-wrapped some asparagus and tempura-ed those, too. Those were better. But I'm too lazy to do that again. Plus, the asparagus were expensive. Then, we did our Secret Santa thing. It was so much fun. My Secret Santa turned out to be my dad. He got me the water boiling thermos thingy. I still don't know what they're called. I love it. Makes me drink more tea instead of soda. It's healthier.

Ladybug Gift Decor

I got my friend a little gift for her "BIG THREE-OH". The store clerk put a ribbon on the box, but it just looked so plain. So I added a ladybug sitting on a leaf to the ribbon. I made it out of felt and added the line and spots on it with black embroidery floss. I'm quite proud of the antennae I added to the head. That's also made of the embroidery floss.

Quail Eggs

I went home during the Labor Day weekend and guess what I had? Yup, quail eggs. My family has an aviary with parakeets and four little Button Quails that my brother got my sister for her birthday. One male quail with three females. My sister named them Hugh Heffner, Holly, Bridget, and Kendra. Cute, huh? So, when I went home, I checked on Hugh and his girls. Hee hee! I love saying that. I took a photo of two of the girls. Anyways, we don't know which ones are laying the eggs, but they've been laying these really cute speckled brown and blue eggs. My mom boiled them and I had a few. Just tasted like regular eggs.

Stirred Egg Soup

I made another Amy Kaneko recipe. The Stirred Egg Soup. I only skimmed the recipe and made a mistake of over-stirring the egg in the bowl and then stirring again in the pot. I knew I did it wrong immediately because it came out in clumps. The egg should have come in long thin strands. My mom makes a similar soup and she makes it in those long thin strands. Ooops. Well, the soup was still yummy. It's just chicken stock, salt to taste, a touch of sake, a lightly stirred egg, and chopped green onion. You can add sesame oil to it as well, but since I'm not to eat anything greasy or spicy this whole week, I didn't add it.

I'm doing okay since the food poisoning except when I eat. My body has rejected everything I've eaten so far. But I'm so hungry and need nutrition in me that I thought I would try this soup.

I fear that it was not successful... I can feel the pain and gurgling in my stomach... Wahh!! :(

Pain in My Tummy

That's me in the emergency room.

These little succulent morsels are probably what got me there. But we will never know for sure.

This is what I taught my hubby to make for me today. Okayu (rice porridge usually served when you're sick) with umeboshi (pickled plum).

Let's see... Without going into the embarassing details... On Monday starting after lunch and up through bedtime, my stomach wasn't feeling that great. Earlier that evening, we decided to go to Luka's Taproom and Lounge. We've been there a few times for only cockails. Our friends told us that you can get one dollar oysters every Monday there. So we decided to go and try their entrees as well. The entrees weren't good. But the oysters were so good. We ordered a half dozen more, in fact. Our only complaint was that they were not all consistent sizes. There were puny ones that should have only been charged fifty cents!

Then, the next day on Tuesday, my husband and I headed out to the city to check out the cute stores on Hayes St. in Hayes Valley and then go to the Giant Robot store in Haight-Ashbury. When we were shopping on Hayes St., I spotted Patxi's Chicago Pizza. I was so excited because my friend told me about how it's supposed to be the rival of East Bay's Zachary's Chicago Pizza. So, I wanted to try it. We went there around 3pm and ordered a slice each of the spinach and mushroom deep-dish pizza. It was a lot less gloppier than Zachary's. And I was able to taste the flavor of the spinach. Overall, it was good, but I think I still crave for Zachary's. I don't know what it is. I think I'll have to go to Zachary's and try again. Hee hee!

Oops. Better stop with the food commentary. So anyhow, maybe around 5pm when we were in Haight-Ashbury, I had to go to the bathroom. Didn't feel too urgent, but I had this pain in my stomach like the squeezing pain you get when you have the stomach flu. So, right then, I thought that something's not right with me. As we finally headed home, we made a stop at the San Francisco Shopping Center to use the restroom before hopping onto BART to head back to Oakland. The squeezing pain kept occuring once in awhile, but it was nothing compared to the urgency of needing a restroom once I was waiting for BART. I was so miserable on BART and then the walk back to the apartment was excruciating! Once I got to the apartment, I ran for the bathroom. After that was all over, that squeezing pain just became worse. It was sharp and would stab me several times and then stop for awhile and start again. It was worse than the pain from the flu. It was so bad that I felt the saliva coming to the sides of my mouth so that I felt like vomiting. So then, Hubby took me to the emergency room.

I was tested and asked questions by the nurses and the doctor. Basically he found nothing wrong with me. He said that it's one of those things where we will never know what it is that caused this. He said that it may be food poisoning even though Hubby ate everything I did. He said that it's normal to have a thousand people eating the same contaminated food and half the people would be fine and the other half get sick. So, I got 2 cold bags of fluids put in me since I was so dehydrated. He said that that would relieve the pain in my stomach since it was so empty. I feel a lot better today. I still get the squeezing pain once in awhile, but it's a lot tolerable. The funny thing is, my mother-in-law called yesterday before we headed out to the city to ask if we were feeling fine; she knew we had eaten oysters. She had heard that oysters were recalled in Washington so she was concerned for us. At the time she called, I was fine. Oh! Another funny thing is that while we were at ER, there was a 3.2 earthquake! The epicenter was right there in Oakland.

I emailed the friends who recommended Luka's Monday $1 Oysters and Patxi's pizza the photos of me in ER. Hee hee. Giving them a hard time for their recommendations. *wink wink* So, I think out of all the things we've had, it had to be the oysters. I don't think I'll have $1 oysters anymore. I'll only eat it if maybe I fish it out of clear waters myself during peak safe and yummy season. And no dolphin better have pee-ed on it!

My hubby just told me a funny thing. He said that he was worried for me because if anything were to happen to me last night, I wouldn't have finished "Harry Potter". Hahahahaha! Yes, he is so right!

Ici Ice Cream

I've passed by this ice cream store several times on my way to a pet bird store on the same street. It's very cute and I always check to see what flavors they have. It's by a Chez Panisse protege named Mary Canales. They have sorbets and ice creams with adventurous flavors like habenero or raspberry lemon and verbena. She uses fresh, in season ingredients so it's constantly changing. It's a bit pricey but the sign says that the ice cream is made there on site. There's always a customer in there getting ice cream. This time, my husband and I couldn't ignore it. We saw many people walking around with ice cream in their hands and the line was going out the door. And it was such a beautiful warm day - perfect ice cream weather. So, when we passed by it a second time, we stood in line. Maybe it's because I will finally start working soon that splurging on fancy handmade ice cream didn't seem like a bad idea. I only later remembered to take a photo of the ice cream. That's why the ice cream is half eaten. I got green tea flavor. Not an original flavor but my test was to see if she gets it right. It didn't have the typical matcha color but the flavor and texture was spot on. Yum!! And I got mine on a cone. The cone had a surprise for me. There was chocolate at the end of it. Hubby got candied lime and orange ice cream. I had a taste and it was too tart for me, but he liked it. I'll definitely try other flavors again especially since it didn't give me a stomachache. *Wink* Check out the review and photos of the beautiful ice cream creations on Yelp.com. Just type in "Ici" and it's located in Berkeley.