The egg rolls came first. I took one bite and decided I didn’t like them. They tasted sour to me, in a bad way. I tried them without the fish sauce dipping sauce, and it was still sour. J thought so too. The ground pork inside didn’t taste like pork at all.

Next came my pho. Now, I’m don’t consider myself to be a picky eater, but this pho was just not good. The flavor of the soup was off. It didn’t taste like beef bones simmered for 20 hours, instead it tasted like pho seasoning powder in water. The rear steak was cut too thick and and wasn’t cooked fully by the broth.

J thought the BBQ pork was oddly flavored, and just wasn’t good.

I don’t know whether our taste buds were adversely affected by the egg rolls, or some sort of seasoning was put into each of these dishes, we just didn’t like the flavor of any of them. I guess the one upside is the owner and server seemed to be really nice. If I had to give it a rating as on Yelp, I’d give it just one star for the decent service.

Through a string of blogs (鱼宝的厨房 to Fresh from the Oven to Baking Bites), I reached this particular recipe. I love, love nutella and just couldn’t resist this recipe.

You will need (12 cupcakes)

10 Tbsp. of butter, room temperature
3/4 cup sugar
3 large eggs, room temperature
1/2 Tsp. Vanilla extract
1 3/4 cups sifted all purpose flour
1/4 Tsp. salt
2 Tsp. baking powder
Nutella, 12 Tsp. (1 Tsp. for each cupcake)

Preheat oven to 325F. Line muffin pan with paper cups.

Cream the butter and sugar. (I used the paddle attachment on my KitchenAid Mixer, which can be used for the whole process.) Add the eggs in one at a time, mix well. Add vanilla extract. Finally stir in the flour, salt and baking powder.

Scoop the batter into the lined cups 3/4 full. Top each cake with 1 Tsp. of Nutella. Swirl Nutella in with a toothpick, make sure to fold a bit of batter up over the Nutella.

Bake for 20 minutes or until a toothpick comes up clean. Cool on wire rack.

I tried one after it had cooled down. The cupcake tasted dry, but the Nutella topping was oily. It was kinda weird combination. I think next time I bake this I will have to add some milk to the batter to make it thinner and smoother.

Here’s the nutritional information just in case you are curious (from NutritionData).

equal amounts of light soy sauce, dark soy sauce and oyster sauce (about 3 tbsp each)
2 tbsp. of sesame oil
6 gloves of garlic (I love garlic, if you don’t you don’t have to put any)
sprinkle in some black pepper, and dried ginger powder

I marinaded the chicken wings in the fridge over night. I normally would just bake the wings in the oven at 350 for about 1 hour. This time, I remembered Alton Brown’s recipe for making buffalo chicken wings. I figured that was a good method to try.

I first steamed this wings in my little rice cooker which had a steamer top. I steamed them whole for about 15 minutes. Then I took out the wings and patted them dry with paper towel and cut the wings into their individual section. I kept the tips because I love the skin and the cartilage (you can get rid of them of course). Then I put the pieces on a cooling rack on top of a paper towel lined baking sheet. These wings then dried in the fridge for about 1 hour. I replaced the paper towel with parchment paper. The wings then were cooked in the oven for 20 minutes each side at about 425 degree.

I also reduced the marinade on the stovetop to a very thick sauce. After the wings finished cooking, I brushed on the sauce.

The wings turned out fantastically. A lot of fat had drained out during the steaming process, and even more was baked out in the oven. The skin was crispy, the meat was tender, the garlic mellowed out in the sauce and it was a sweet and salty flavor almost like teriyaki but much better. You’ll definitely have to give this recipe a try.

To make a good sauce, you gotta start with a good base. I love LiuBiJu brand dry bean paste sauce. LiuBiJu is a famous Chinese brand that’s been around for roughly 500 years. They are know for making sauces and pickled veggies. If you can’t find this, you can find other black bean paste in metal tins or even Korean style black bean sauce works too.

Ingredients:
For the sauce:
1 bag Bean Paste Sauce
1/2 pound ground pork (the fattier kind if you have a choice)
1 stalk green scallion, julienned
1 tbsp. oil
1 glove of garlic

To serve the noodle:
1 serving of noodle
1/2 cucumber, julienned
handful of bean sprouts
1 glove of garlic

To make it:

1. Heat up oil in pan on medium high heat, put in the scallion, cook until fragrant. Add the ground pork, break it up while cooking, and cook on medium heat until the pork is almost cooked.
2. Add in the bean paste sauce, add 2 cups of water, stir to dissolve cook on medium heat until it start to boil.
3. Turn the heat down to low and simmer the sauce for about 10 minutes or until the sauce thickens to a pasta sauce consistency. Make sure you stir it constantly so the sauce doesn’t stick to the bottom of the pan and burn. Add some pressed garlic at the end and stir.
4. Boil the noodles, and also blanch the bean sprouts. Run both under cold water.
5. Put the noodle in a bowl, put in some sauce, put in the cucumber and some pressed garlic. Mix and enjoy!

LiuBiJu dry bean paste sauce. I found this in a Chinese supermarket in NJ. You can find this in many stores. They also have a wet version, which is more runny. If you are using that just make sure you aren’t adding as much water when cooking.


Cooked Pork

Cooked sauce. This picture’s color is a little off, the sauce is a dark brown color.

This is the noodle I like. It’s a Korean brand freshly made noodle. Make sure you buy the wide one. They also freeze well. I normally will portion them and put them into zip lock bags and they keep in the freezer for a line time.

Serve with some cucumber and bean sprouts, and I like to top off with fresh garlic and some Chinese black vinegar.

Mix and slurp!

Soy milk:

1 cup of soy beans. Soak them in 6 cups of water overnight. The soy beans will expand quite a bit, to probably three cups. Next morning, for each cup of soaked soy beans, add 2 cups of water, and blend it up fine in a blender.

After the white, and there is not more solid soy beans, strain the liquid through a cheesecloth lined strainer, make sure to squeeze out all of the liquid. The solid that’s left over is actually very nutritious too. It can be make into pancakes, or cakes, or bread. Repeat the blending until all the beans have been used. Heat the liquid until it boils, then turn down the heat and let it simmer for 10 minutes. Make sure you cook it long enough, apparently the uncooked soy bean might cause food poisoning. Also don’t just leave the pot along, the milk foams a lot.

I like adding a little sugar to my soy milk. But I only do it when I’m drinking it. Not to the pot all at once. That way the soy milk lasts a little longer in the fridge, for about a week.

Fried Donut:

1 cup of milk
2 cup bread flour
1 Tbsp. baking powder
1 Tsp. salt
1/2 Tsp. baking soda
Vegetable oil

Put milk in a large measuring cup, warm it up in the microwave. Add baker power, salt, and baking soda, mix well. There will be quite a bit of foam. Add the liquid to the bread flour and mix the dough well. Knead the dough until it’s smooth, add a bit of oil to your hands so the dough doesn’t stick. Cover it well and keep it overnight in room temperature.

Next morning, roll the dough out so it’s about 1 inch thick. Cut into about 1 by 3 inches. Put two pieces together and make a mark in the middle using a chopstick or a knife. In a large pot, heat some oil on medium high, about 350 I think. Take a piece of the doublet, stretch it out and then drop it into oil. Once it’s golden and floating it’s ready.



I know it’s the not the most healthy breakfast, but I just love it, brings back lots of memories. I like breaking the donuts in piece and soak them in my soy milk.

The sandwich was wonderful. The fried chicken was not greasy at all. It was just the right texture, with the skin crispy and yummy, and tasting almost like baked chicken with coating. The cole slaw was different than the normal mayo filled version I’m used to. It had a very clean, pickle flavor, with just a bit of thinly slice pepper in it to provide the right spiciness. The cole slaw also provided the needed moisture to the sandwich. Overall, it’s just good. Also, despite the term “fried” the sandwich actually tasted very healthy. I know, isn’t that weird? Must be all that cabbage.

And oh, I got to try a bit of my coworker’s free cookie. The ginger cookie was spicy and chewy, just like it should be. I’ll definitely be back for more.

This was the best picture I could get. We were eating outside and it was windy, and apparently iPhone doesn’t like windy conditions for its camera.

Add to the flour the boiling water, mixing with chopsticks. Then add the cold water. Use some vegetable oil on your hands while kneading because the dough is very sticky.

Knead until dough is smooth. Cover with saran wrap, let rest for about half an hour.

Separate the dough to three piece. Cover the other two while working with the first one. Roll the dough to pretty thin, brush with sesame oil and sprinkle salt and chopped up green onion.

Fold the dough up to about 3 inches thick.

Fold the ends in toward each other, until you get an rectangle.

Roll it out once again.

Cook on medium heat with about 1/2 tbsp of oil in the pan, with the cover on. Cook just until both sides look done, about 3 minutes per side.

After it’s done, cut it into triangles and eat!

This is a very simple cake to make. It has a faint honey flavor and it’s very light and almost spongy.

You’ll need:

3 Eggs
5 Tbsp. sugar
1 Tbsp. honey
1 Tbsp. sweet Mirin cooking wine
1 Tbsp. vegetable oil
1/8 Tsp. white vinegar
1/2 cup all purpose flour

1. Separate the egg yolks and whites. Mix 1 tbsp. of sugar with the egg yolks. Whisk well.
2. Add honey, mirin cooking wine, oil, and 1/4 cup flour in order to the egg yolk mixture, and mix well.
3. Add vinegar and the rest 4 tbsp sugar to the egg whites and whisk with a hand held mixer until it develops a stiff peak.
4. Fold 1/3 of the egg white mixture into the egg yolk mixture. Add rest of the flour. Fold. Add rest of whisked egg white. Make sure you fold in the egg white and not just mix it really hard, otherwise the air will escape and the cake will no longer be light.
5. Pour the cake batter into a parchment paper lined bread pan. Bake inside another baking pan filled with hot water at 350F for about 35 minute. If the top gets brown too quickly you can also cover it with foil while the cake cooks through.

First up is Creations Desserts. J and I went to check it out a long time ago. The chain (许留山) is very very popular in Hong Kong, and has started doing business in mainland China as well as in Taiwan. I think they are most famous for their various mango desserts.

I ordered the bird’s nest with mixed fruit, with sago in mango juice. It was pretty good. It was very refreshing. It wasn’t overly sweet, I think I’d like it more in a hot and humid weather, not so much in cold and windy San Francisco. J had the mango juice, and a scoop of mango ice cream. I thought the juice was good, but it wasn’t really full of mango flavor, which just might be because we went in March, and mangos tend not be in season during that time. Overall I thought it was a decent place. My only problem would be the price. For the three items we had, I think we spend about $12 dollars. It just seemed too much. I know they will stay in business because people will either try it out of curiosity, or they are from Hong Kong and this reminds them of home. Nonetheless, I think the price should come down a little bit.

Next dessert place was in New York. It’s called Pink Berry, which is a L.A. based chain. It was on L.A. times claimed as the frozen yogurt that cause a thousand parking tickets. I, really, really loved this. I had the green tea flavored frozen yogurt, with strawberries, raspberries and mango. The frozen yogurt had a slight green tea flavor, but a rather strong yogurt taste. I’m so used to frozen yogurt tasting like soft serve/low fat ice cream. This one was really different, and it was good! I’ll definitely go back again. Oh, and this is not that cheap either. This little thing will set you back about $5, but it’s so worth it.

The third place is called BreakTime Desserts. It’s located in Cupertino inside the Wolfe Ranch 99 shopping center. I ordered their sweet tofu (豆腐花). It was delicious. The syrup had just the right amount of sugar and ginger taste in it. The tofu’s soft and slurpy. They have a lot mango based desserts too (I’m noticing a trend here). I didn’t get to take a picture of my dessert, so you’ll have to check it out yourself. There are a lot of restaurant choices, as well as huge asian grocery store, Chinese book store and tea store in the same shopping center, you definitely should check it out if you’ve never been.

The restaurant is decorated very nicely, with lots of stuff made of bamboo, and nice big lanterns hanging from the ceiling. It feels very asian, if you know what I mean.

But I was there for the food, B and I took a long time deciding what to get. We finally decided on: spring rolls, shaken beef, and fried banana from the prefix menu, and then the daily special lobster salad, roast whole crab and garlic noodle. Like the waiter said, we went all out. Our excuse was that this was the tenth anniversary of us meeting and becoming best friends, thus we needed to start celebrate. I have to say, I was very satisfied after the meal. I would’ve been very satisfied if I had just the crab and garlic noodle.

Our drinks. B had a glass of wine, syrah I think. I had a Kalista martini (not sure I’m spelling the name right), very yummy.

Spring rolls, and the lobster salad. Spring rolls were really fresh, with no pork in it as how it is most of the time. They were refreshing. But the lobster salad, oh the lobster salad. It had a miso vinaigrette which I thought was really great. B thought there should’ve been more type of veggies. It consisted mostly of salad greens, with a few cherry tomatoes, and mango. That was the only bad part about this salad, the mango. The mango was quite unripe, and didn’t provide the bite or the right taste to the salad. And the lobster, we had a huge portion of the lobster (probably explains why this dish was as expensive as some of the entrees) and it was tender and fresh and oh just so heavenly.

A close shot of the lobster claw meat. It was so tasty!

Shaken beef (sorry about the blurry picture). It was pretty good, the beef cubes were really tender. I thought it was just a bit too salty, but B really liked it and she took the leftover home for lunch.

Isn’t that cute! It’s the set up for the crab enjoyment. We also got two huge bowls with lots of paper napkins in them to dispose the shells and wipe our fingers occasionally.

Ta da, here’s the crab. We ordered the roast one, with garlic. It was so yummy. I think I probably ate 2/3 of the crab. This was a huge crab, all the legs were full of meat. It was definitely the best dish out of them all. It was pretty expensive ($36), but it was definitely a nice treat.

And here’s the famous garlic noodle. It was really good too. The garlic flavor perfused nicely into the dish. My only complain was that the serving size was too small.

A bowl of empty shells, and that’s all from just me.

Sorry I forgot to take pictures of the dessert. The friend banana was actually pretty good. I actually had a piece, even though I don’t normally eat bananas. It tasted not as banana-y, didn’t have that weird aftertaste in my mouth.

We got served warm towels after we finished the entree, before dessert. They were definitely needed. My hands were so messy. Oh, we also had bibs put on by the waiter before we started with the crab. Get the bib when the waiter ask you, the crab is very messy to eat. It’s definitely the most popular dish. I think every table had a plate of crab. A table next to us with four people, three of them each had a crab in front of them. I think I could eat an entire one if I didn’t have the appetizers and the beef dish. Next time, I’ll be going to their original family restaurant out in the Sunset district to have the crab and garlic noodle. I can’t wait!