Food and Star Trek and Food

Back in Thailand for a day of fun.

My uncle took us to an awesome buffet today for lunch. They had a ton of gourmet-looking food from all different parts of the world, people to pull your chair out and push it in when you sit down, people to fold your napkin and place it nicely on the chair when you get up for more food, and the most amazing gourmet dessert bar I’ve seen. I tried more types of cakes and parfaits and more traditional Thai desserts today than I’ve had in the entire trip thus far.

Afterward, we went to the mall movie theatre and discovered that they were still showing Star Trek. After watching it, I can understand what all the excitement and hype was about… I was very, very, very impressed. One of the best movie experiences I’ve had in recent memory… at least since Wall-E. Yay for CMU-grad Spock. Also, I missed Randy Pausch’s cameo… anyone know where it was?

Afterward my uncle introduced us to the tastiness that is Crepe Cake… basically a few dozen layers of crepe and whipped cream, topped with strawberry sauce. They also had thai tea cake, which is likewise amazingly tasty. Om nom nom nom.

Tomorrow will be a trip to my aunt’s orchid orchard followed by more buffet dinner (Japanese, this time). The day after will be food with my uncle… or whatever you call the son of your grandmother’s sister. The following day will be flying home to San Francisco. I get back Saturday afternoon (before I leave from Hong Kong, actually… yay timezones).

Food

On Sunday we took a day trip to see the Sriarcha Tiger Zoo and Mini Siam, which was interesting.
On Monday we left to head to spend a night in the forest (which was absolutely beautiful in the morning) and to the Cha Am beach (which is where I am now).

However, the best part of the trip has been the food… now that my fix for fruit has been satiated, I’ve been able to satisfy my cravings for main dishes… Thai grilled chicken, som tum, roti, (real) pad thai… om nom nom nom.

I swear, I am going to return to America about 50 pounds heavier.

Also, my aunt’s laptop has a Thai keyboard. Awesome.
-????

Greetings from Hong Kong

I’m sitting in the Hong Kong airport right now waiting for the flight to Thailand. I have no idea what time it is… my internal clock is so screwed up right now. The flight last night left SFO 1:40 AM or so, and they pretty much immediately served dinner (as it was dinnertime in Hong Kong). After eating, I wasn’t particularly tired anymore, so I watched a movie (the Benjamin Button one, which was kind of weird but decent), eventually falling asleep. Woke up at some other hour (not sure when, exactly) and watched Milk and played games and had breakfast, and then we landed. I think the time here is around 7 AM, but my body is generally very confused since it thinks its around 4 PM but I just woke up (and the sun just came up).

The flight was uneventful. The food was decent… dinner was a beef and tomato stew with veggie mashed potatoes, smoked salmon, potato salad, and pear cheesecake. Breakfast was a croissant with egg and canadian bacon, yogurt, and fruit. There was also plenty of ramen and peanuts. I hope they serve a second breakfast on the Thailand leg. Food is tasty.

I brought along my mostly-broken camera with my mostly-broken lens, which is resulting in rather interesting photos as I can’t shoot at high shutter speeds, nor focus at faraway things (and certainly not at infinity). The goal is to get them repaired in Thailand (assuming repairs are significantly cheaper there), use it for photos, and give it to my parents so I can buy my new D90 in the US once I return.

Whee.

Bleh MSN and Breadcake!

Your little bit of stupidness today comes courtesy of MSN Messenger.
When you add someone to your blocked list, you are apparently also adding them to your contact list. What this means is that, if you block sufficient numbers of people, you can’t add people anymore.
This by itself wouldn’t be too terrible… except you actually can’t delete people from your blocked list. This basically means that, once you block someone, that space on your “contact list” is filled forever. (At least, it is if you are using any normal MSN client to connect, since you can unblock and such, but can’t actually delete entries through the UI.)
Bleh.
Fortunately, I found this tool that will do it for you… but since MSN imposes additional limits on things, you can only remove 40 blocked SNs at once and have to keep resubmitting the page to clean everything out.

Today’s adventure in baking is breadcake.
I had a ton of bread crusts from making finger sandwiches this morning. I decided to try a culinary experiment with them, and it actually turned out really good. Em says it reminds her of cinnamon bread mixed with french toast, which makes sense because it shares most of those ingredients.

Crusts from 1/2 loaf of bread
4 eggs
1/4 cup milk
Cinnamon and sugar to taste

Beat eggs and mix in milk, cinnamon, and sugar. Rip bread crusts into tiny pieces and gradually mix in until crusts are thoroughly coated. Place mixture into small baking container and bake at 375 degrees for 35 minutes. Let cool and slice. Serve with honey.


Also, as promised, here are two of the new Student Wars v2 cards with the redesigned templates: Tim’s FA character card and the new Attachment card type (this particular one attaches to GPA cards).

Today was also the Bay to Breakers parade, which was quite interesting. I have a ton of photos from it, which will eventually be posted to photos 2.

Moar foods

I made salsa chicken today. It’s really easy: bake a chicken breast at 350 for 25 minutes. Place on a microwave-safe plate, douse in salsa of your choice, and lay thin strips of cheddar across. Microwave for 30 seconds to melt the cheese and heat the salsa. Nom nom. Tasty and pretty, since the cheese gives it stripes.

I also made the blackberry muffins again so I could take some into work tomorrow. I cut the blackberries into thirds (crosswise, so each piece is a little disc) and they came out much better. I also got one less muffin out of the process, but this makes sense, since there is less room for air when you don’t have lots of whole blackberries in each muffin. I topped each one with a whole blackberry and they look rather nice, as well.

I made french toast for breakfast. It always surprises me how simple such things are to make (muffins, pancakes, omelettes/breakfast sandwiches, french toast) and how much of a premium they can fetch in grocery stores or restaurants ($1.25 for a preservative-laden muffin?! $5 for an omelette?!). Besides, cooking is fun and tasty.

Today Dan and I went to see the How Weird fair (which, appropriately, is on Howard street). It was rather tiny, but amusing… there were 5 or 6 different DJs in various areas, arranged such that their music never overlapped. There were also a bunch of weirdly dressed people. Overall, it was smaller than I think either of us were expecting, but still interesting. I just wish I had taken my camera and attempted to shoot with it :P

Mmm food.