Cotton-Pickin’ Days

…both the Marks & Spencer strawberries Marv picked up this morning and Stephen himself.

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My favorite vegetable by far is zucchini. I’ll eat it in any form – zucchini bread, stir-fried zucchini, boiled zucchini, microwaved zucchini,….

In Richland, Washington back in the early 1980’s, neighbors would dump brown paper grocery bags full of zucchini at people’s front doors. Their harvests were so abundant they had no idea what to do with it except to stealthily dispose of it on someone else. Americans have heard of all this before and most have experienced it first hand. It’s a common American story. I don’t know if this still goes on what with fear of domestic terrorism, neighborhood psychos and so forth.

Going from such abundance to having barely any was unimaginable but that’s exactly what it was like when I lived in Asia from 1998-2006. In Vietnam, I had to ask my helper to go to the market where they sold imported vegetables and fruit. There, she’d find zucchini for several times the price of local vegetables and would come home clucking over it.

Now we’re in London where zucchini is easy to find and I still haven’t made a loaf of zucchini bread. I don’t know what I’ve been waiting for but it’s going to be zucchini season soon! If anybody has any spare zucchini, I’ll take it.

This town is so friendly you have to lock your car to prevent people from filling it with zucchini.
~Bob Bell, The Zucchini Zone

What’s your favorite vegetable?

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The Institute of Medicine has issued new guidelines for the kinds of food American kids will be offered at school.

• Lots of fruits, vegetables, whole grains, and low-fat dairy foods.
• None can be more than 200 calories per serving.
• Foods have to be low in fat, saturated fat, sodium, sugar, and have no added caffeine.

In the UK, the School Food Trust emphasizes the same. Here are a few notes from a newsletter Stephen brought hom from his primary school where he eats lunch every day.

• Sausages and chicken nuggets are completely organic and free from artificial additives.
• Fish fingers are made from whole cod fillet.
• Fresh fruit, yoghurt and cheese and biscuits are available daily as an alternative to dessert. (Stephen often eats these instead of “dessert.”)

Most interestingly, they’ve removed sandwiches from the menu! When Stephen first started school, he would tell me he ate a chicken sandwich for lunch every single gosh darned day. Then suddenly, he began telling me that he ate macaroni, fish cake, cold pasta, baked potato, and all sorts of other stuff he normally would never try. Whoopee! The main reason I like having him eat lunch at school is to get him to try different things and FINALLY he was doing it! Could the cooks have read my mind?

continue reading

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Generally speaking, I don’t have a weird relationship with food. I eat pretty much whatever I want within reason. I’m not allergic to anything and I don’t deny myself anything I really want to enjoy. The only problem I have with food is…I don’t like to eat in front of people I don’t know very well.

When I was in college, I never ever went down to the food hall on my own. And if I didn’t have anyone to eat with, I would sometimes go down to get some food to bring back up to my room or I would simply skip the meal. Even now, I don’t like dining alone in public. Having a coffee and something to eat in the morning at Starbucks all by myself is more than enough adventure for me. And I never just sit there and eat, I always have a magazine or the paper to read.

So, I have a confession.

*BIG BREATH*

I don’t like breakfast meetings. I don’t like lunch meetings. I don’t like dinner meetings.

I never eat the food served at seminars. I never go to something just because of the free food.

I’m way too self-conscious to eat properly and always manage to spill something, choke, or get food stuck between my teeth. Food is too messy and involved for me to be able to talk and act intelligently at the same time.

But, I can’t avoid it. So I’m making a list of safe foods to eat at meetings with people I don’t know very well and who I’m trying to impress.

1. Soup
2. Quiche
3. Pasta (but not spaghetti because it’s too hard to control)
4. Risotto
5. Fish (no beef or chicken because it gets stuck between your teeth)
6. Cake

Got any other safe food suggestions for me?

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Who says guys don’t know how to cook? My brother-in-law’s male cousins got together this Thanksgiving and made a turducken. You’re not alone if you’ve never heard of turduckens. They consist of a chicken in a duck in a turkey PLUS stuffing.

Stuffed duck with chicken inside lying on top of the turkey (L), finished turducken laid out on the table
Click for a larger image.

IMPRESSIVE!!! The whole thing took NINE hours to bake not to mention all the prep time.

I’ve got to find some way to wrangle myself an invitation next time or maybe order a ready-made one from Amazon.com.

Update: Watch professionals make a turducken in this video.

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For the sole purpose of participating in National Standinaqueue Day, I took my mother-in-law to London’s famous roast duck restaurant, Four Seasons. Unfortunately, the famous queues that you can stand in on weekends were nowhere to be found. Ah well. Can’t complain especially after I ate until I was ready to pop!

We were still there early enough to make a short queue of five to commemorate the event.

Four Seasons Restaurant
83 Queensway, Bayswater, London W2 3RL
020-7229-4320
noon to 11:15 pm (Mon-Sat), noon to 10:45 pm (Sundays)

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With Stephen running a fever, it was pretty hard to be cheery today. But I’ll go ahead and keep up with this Happiness Diary.

A list of the good food I enjoyed today

1. Roasted Korean seaweed esp. the way I prepared it at lunch – a bowl of steamed rice topped with ripped up seaweed with two eggs over easy on top drizzled with soy sauce. YUM!!
2. Brownies
3. Mature cheddar cheese with melba toast
4. Lime Coke
5. Scallops
6. Spinach

What was the most delicious thing you ate today?

From netmums.com.

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Stephen’s favorite foods are usually sweet: strawberry trifle, gummy candies, and fruit (thankfully). Marv and I have unwillingly and unwittingly passed on our sweet tooth to him.

When I concocted this weird little broccoli and nori seaweed noodle soup, I figured he probably wouldn’t like it much. First of all, he doesn’t usually like soup and second, it’s got a lot of green in it. Little did I know that he would looooove it. So, I thought I’d share the recipe in case anyone else wanted to try something new.

Ingredients

2-3 cups of water or chicken broth for boiling pasta
3-5 pieces broccoli florets (frozen ok)
2 handfuls of pasta shells or other small size pasta
3 x 3 inch piece of flavored nori seaweed like the kind you can eat for a snack
Chicken bouillon seasoning if you didn’t use chicken broth
Salt

Cooking Instructions

1. Boil water/chicken broth
2. Add broccoli and pasta. Cook according to time on pasta package (usually 5-6 minutes).
3. Add chicken bouillon seasoning if you used water. About 1 teaspoonful is usually enough.
4. When broccoli and pasta are cooked, tear nori seaweed into small pieces and add to soup. The nori will get very soft and mushy.
5. Add salt to taste. (I usually don’t have to because it is already flavorful enough.)

It’s not the most beautiful soup but Stephen can eat a big bowlful and asks for more. Let me know what you and your kids think!

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Marv and I are homebodies so we’ve never been the type to go out except on weekends. Pre-Stephen, we used to dine out at fairly nice restaurants at least once or twice a week. Now, our usual routine is to rush through brunch at Giraffe, an eclectic family restaurant with reasonably priced world cuisine.

So I was pretty amazed when Scott, a fellow b5media blogger, told me about his list of restaurants in Kansas City with free or discount meals. He has listed more than 20 restaurants organized by days of the week and although Scott tells me they haven’t tried them all, they definitely plan to.

For me, it’s a balance between my dislike of cooking and my dislike of having to desperately entertain Stephen at a restaurant. It’s a no-win situation. I guess it’s left to other braver souls like Scott to check out the kids meals for us. Their pre-toddler, Avery, must be a little angel!

The best solution for us is delivery. In Vietnam, we ordered delivery several times a week (maybe I shouldn’t be telling you this!) but in London, the selection is limited to Indian, Chinese, Thai, and pizza. Sadly, I can only tolerate this about once a month. Fortunately, we can tolerate my cooking more frequently than that.

If you’re energetic enough to check out the restaurants in your city with kids in tow, Scott is inviting other parents to make a similar list. Visit his blog for more details on how to join in.

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Vacations are a great excuse for letting loose with both behavior and diet. My sister and her husband have been visiting London this week and while I can’t say they have acted with any less care, I have certainly lived as if I were the one on vacation.

This past weekend, after lunch at Pizza Al Rollo* (higly recommended!) in Richmond and a walk on the River Thames, we went by the supermarket Tesco. Lo and behold, they had a full display case of Krispy Kreme donuts (or doughnuts if you will)! I haven’t seen those since our last visit to the U.S. last Fall. I immediately grabbed a box of a dozen assorted right on the spot for almost $14 USD. A total rip-off considering my brother-in-law told me that they sell for as little as $4 a dozen in the U.S.

Doesn’t matter! We’re in a vacation frame of mind. Over the last four days, I’ve inhaled about eight of the dozen with Marv and Stephen eating the others. I even tried pan frying them with a little butter as Christina advised and toasting them in the oven. Couldn’t get any more sinful, bad for the arteries, and indulgent at around 2500 calories total. Good thing we’ve been out and about sightseeing although I’m still surprised I fit in my jeans.

Doesn’t take much for me to drop all pretense at a sensible diet. My sis and her husband are off to Italy today where I hope they’ll stuff themselves to the gills as all vacationers should. I know I would if I were there.

*Pizza Al Rollo is at 20 Hill Street, Richmond, Surrey, TW9 1TM, Tel: 020-8940-8951
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In keeping with my campaign to get Wanadoo/Orange to fix my broadband, it has been 2 months and 4 days since I lost broadband in London, UK. Yesterday, I emailed the Internet Services Providers’ Association, UK for help.

Technorati Tags: wanadoo, orange, broadband

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