Oh hey, there’s a blog here.

A recent e-mail notice of a comment I received reminded me that, …hey! I have a blog!

So, to anyone who reads my blog or is now reading my blog, I apologise for the wait. I will try to get back to updating if time allows. I’ve done a lot more with food since my last post, so I have quite a lot to update with.

Unfortunately, though, my camera is out of batteries. I may just stop by and pick some up in the next few days.

So, yes. Until my next post, my fellow foodies!

Decenter Photos

Yeah, yeah — “decenter” isn’t a word. Okay, “more decent.” Happy now? “More Decent Photos.”

Anyway, I managed to get my hands on some new batteries over the weekend, so there won’t be any more crap cellphone photos on here. For a while, anyway. Here are my bento lunches from the past two days:

Here you can see my handmade sushi again, which didn’t turn out so well. They weren’t very tasty, either — all they had inside were carrot and cucumber sticks. Dipped in Dollar Tree soy sauce, which is pretty gross in the first place, they’re less than a delicacy. Anyway, I’ve also got a couple pickles and some leftover cucumber and carrot sticks. For some reason, the cucumber sticks tasted nasty, too. Maybe I just have the power to make things taste bad without doing anything to them.

In the other container is a little fruit salad (mandarin oranges, apple chunks, and peach chunks) covered up by my pretty starfruit slices. That actually ended up tasting pretty good. And of course, my little onigiri is tucked in beside it, still a part of the mandarin-orange-filled series. I’m out of mandarin oranges, now, so hopefully I can come up with something more interesting to put inside next time.

On the top, you can see my container full of Dollar Tree soy sauce that seems to be becoming progressively more nasty. I’ve got a 100-calorie pack-full of fudge cookies and the last of the mandarin orange onigiri in there, as well. On the bottom is the rest of my crapsushi and yet more apple chunks and mandarin oranges. I imagine I’m starting to repeat myself… I need to find more interesting things to pack.

Anyhoodles, I made some tuna helper for me and the folks tonight… Not much to say other than it wasn’t bad. Ate a pint of Ben and Jerry’s Stephen Colbert’s Americone Dream ice cream on Sunday, of which I want more. I made some coconut macaroons in Foods on Friday. They stuck to the aluminum foil and weren’t fully golden brown on the outside due to time constraints, but they were delicious. I also ate at the local Tokyo Buffet with my best friend over the weekend, which is probably my current favorite place to eat. I’m writing a review of it for the school newspaper, so there’ll probably be more on that later.

Well, that’s enough outta me. G’bye!

Tofu Mishap

Howdy, doodies. I’ve got a couple new bentos for you this morning. This blog is turning into a bento based one right in front of my eyes; I can’t stop it. I’ll post other things, I promise!

I should be getting batteries for my digital camera, soon. The photos are still poor quality, but they’ll be better than cell phone snapshots, I’ll tell ya that. Anyway, here are the bentos:

Top: Strip of seaweed (purchased at Walmart in the international isle; they have wasabi and miso soup mix, too), plastic fork; Left: Mandarin orange salad with chicken shreds (very easy and very yummy); Right: pickles and banana pepper slices, rice noodles for salad, Long John Silver’s malt vinegar packet, salmon onigiri

Left: Mandarin orange salad with rice noodles, little hand-made cucumber and carrot sushis (my first sushi, and looking at them up  close, it’s quite obvious), onigiri with mandarin orange center (I was rushing, couldn’t think of anything else); Right: Apple chunks, soy sauce container, leftover cucumber and carrot sticks from sushi, (nasty) Dollar-Tree-soy-sauce-marinated tofu; Bottom: The usual nori strip and sauce packet or two

So about my nasty tofu. The tofu itself was fine; did what it was supposed to, absorbed the flavor. I got it at the same local Asian market that I got my glutinous rice from. However, marinating it overnight in a soy sauce/sugar mix was not wonderfully planned out. Yeah, nasty. I’m the kind of person who almost always eats everything I have in front of me, and there were definately some leftover chunks to throw out. A few of my poor friends grabbed some bites — I tried to warn them!

Take this lesson from me: don’t marinate tofu overnight in Dollar Tree-bought soy sauce and sugar. Just don’t do that.

Moving on. A few nights ago, I made dinner again. This time: pasta and meatballs (it was going to be spaghetti and meatballs, but we seemed to have no spaghetti in the pantry, and had to make do with curly pasta). I got a nice Tyler Florence recipe from FoodNetwork.com for the meatballs, but just used storebought pasta and sauce. Guess I should’ve made nice sauce, too, but we only had stuff for the meatballs, to my knowledge.

Anyway, they were pretty good. Not incredible, but they didn’t completely fall apart or anything like that. I don’t wanna post the recipe and claim it’s mine, since I got it online, so I’ll just post a link: http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/tyler-florence/spaghetti-and-meatballs-recipe/index.html

I omitted the mozerella in the center, ’cause we didn’t have any on hand, and didn’t make the sauce he has on there. It’s relatively easy and worth trying — just make sure you have an oven-safe skillet before you start.

Well, that’s all I’ll go on about for this morning. Seeya foodies.

New Bento Box

Hello again ever-bodah!

As I said in my last post, I just got my new bento box in the mail. I’ve taken it to school the past two days, keeping it together with a hairband I got at the Dollar Tree. I have to stretch it long ways ’cause it’s too big, and I’m too poor to buy proper straps.

Anyway, here are the photos from the past two days of what I’ve brought for lunch:

Left: Steamed stir-fry veggies with La Choy rice noodles; Right: container of soy sauce, mandarin oranges, grapes, and a canned-salmon onigiri in plastic wrap. I forgot my strip of seaweed for this day.

Left: Mandarin orange salad (mandarin oranges and lettuce) and container full of Walmart brand fudge cookies; Right: Two pickles, banana pepper slices, two packets of Long Jhon Silver’s malt vinegar (for my onigiri; just an experiment that ended tastily), and same kind of onigiri as above; Top: strip of seaweed for onigiri (I remembered it!), making use of the chopsticks compartment.

There’s not much else to be said, really. Well, I made a nice dinner two nights ago. It was a box recipe of some sort of pepper chicken, that was basically sweet and sour chicken but spicier. I really should’ve taken some photos; then again, it wouldn’t look very appetizing with my cell phone camera.

Anyhow, it was quite delicious, if I do say so myself. My dad loved it, and he’s usually pretty picky and honest about his taste. You know how the breading is on chicken you get at Chinese take-out places? It was like that! I’ve never managed to do that before. Everything in the box could basically be bought individually from a store: cornstarch, rice, the sauce. I’m thinking, next time we have chicken laying around, I’ll make some sweet and sour chicken the same way, just substituting the sauce. If I do and it turns out, I’ll post the recipe on here.

I’ll stop yacking your ear off, now. Tomorrow in Food’s class we make chocolate chip cookies — I’ll let you know how that goes!

My First Post

Hello and welcome to Moo Goo Gai Panda! This blog will be completely dedicated to food, its tastiness, and my experiences with its tastiness (or perhaps yuckiness). I could say more, but I will leave it to you to see what I’m all about as this blog starts gets rolling.

For my first post, I’d like to say a few things about my most recent food obsession: bento.

I’ve always been a geek about Asian things. My parents tell me all the time that I was born in the wrong country. Recently, I’ve been seeing things online about these bento boxes, and I’ve become interested.

Basically, bento boxes are these little lunch boxes from Japan. We all know American food proportions are way too large — and that’s one reason bento is great. You can fit just the right amount of food in the compact containers.

Also, bento is all about being creative in your lunch-packing. It only takes a little bit of time in the morning before school, and I get to have something to look forward to during the day.

Lately, I’ve been packing bento-style lunches in tupperware containers, as practice for the bento box I ordered online:

Top: Jasmine rice covered in seaweed flakes; Bottom: banana half, apple chunks, and several starfruit slices

Top: Jasmine rice mixed with tuna and seaweed strips; bottom: apple and watermelon chunks with a starfruit slice

Top: Jasmine rice mixed with tuna; bottom: steamed carrots and green beans covered in melted cheese (not my greatest idea ever)

Top left: Plastic salsa sample cup washed out and filled with soy sauce; Top Right: Onigiri made with Thai glutinous rice and filled with salmon mixed in mustard and mayo (strip of seaweed wrapped in plastic wrap for the onigiri, so as not to get moist and icky, sits on top); Bottom: Steamed stir-fry veggies

I apologise for the crap quality of these photos; they were taken by my cellphone. I’m poor and don’t have batteries for my actual camera right now, so until I get some, I’ll be posting crap photos for a while.

Anyway, most of these probably cost under $1 each. For the very last one, every item except for the glutinous rice could be bought at the Dollar Tree. I got the glutinous rice at an Asian Grocery I recently found nearby.

Anyway, I got that bento I mentioned earlier today in the mail, and I’m going to be using it for lunch tomorrow. You know what that means? Cellular food photos for you! Yay!

This is a photo of the bento:

Comment if you have any questions, comments, or suggestions. Whatever you need. Bye bye ~