A Family Affair Gangnam Style; Auntie Lana Extraordinaire; The Chrissie Post

OK, so I didn't get to write about the good cheer before the New Year, but now the post is here!

Christmas has always been a family affair- my mom and dad always drive up to the Bay Area, we usually spend Christmas Eve with my mom's friend who she's known since she was 8 (Crazay, right?), and then we sleep at my Auntie Lana and Uncle Ed's place in Danville while Santa sneaks in and drops off some neatly packaged presents by the fireplace. Then we go to San Francisco for a Christmas feast at my grandparent's house.

This past year has been full of changes though, including the passing of my grandfather, the occupancy of his flat by my cousin and myself, and the revealing of another cousin's girlfriend, so it made sense that this Christmas would be a bit different. Instead of having the festivities at my grandfather’s, my Auntie Lana invited everyone to her place, because it’s more spacious, her son’s girlfriend was visiting, and it was just easier for her to make dinner there. I’ve always been amazed by my Auntie Lana’s ability and dedication to making a full Christmas dinner every year. She organizes everything to the T, from the marinating of the meat to the setting of the tables. I never really appreciated it until this year though when her schedule got off kilter and she still plowed through, sacrificing some of her sleep to have everything ready for our giant family of 26 (it keeps growing due to the addition of girlfriends- all of my cousins are guys, so I’m quite excited to have some more estrogen around to balance the copious amounts of testosterone). Auntie Lana is the glue that keeps our family together, whether she’s spreading news and gossip to all of us about each other or she’s slicing 2 juicy, perfectly cooked prime ribs. Even though she sometimes gets a little snappy when things aren't going exactly as planned, her love for the whole family can be felt through her food and her cooking. Her capacity to care about all of us is extraordinary and I love her so much for it.

We all contributed a little to the menu as well. The cousins made a mouth-burning salsa with habanero peppers that was masochistically delicious, my Auntie Helen brought some butter-baked Chex Mix that I found dangerously addicting, Auntie Margaret made the traditional broccoli casserole with a Ritz-cracker topping, and my mom tossed together a scrumptiously crunchy mixture of butternut squash, string beans, and asparagus with browned shallots. As for me, I made a Mascarpone Cheesecake, tweaking a Giada de Laurentis recipe from the Food Network, with the help of yet another cousin’s girlfriend, Karen, whom I may add has her own food blog that’s quite worth checking out. The cheesecake was a hit! It’s so satisfying to take home an empty cake pan. I think the mascarpone really enhanced the creaminess of the normal cheesecake I usually make.

Finally, you may ask, why “A Family Affair Gangnam Style?” Well, during our family portrait photo shoot, the parents decided it’d be a fun idea to break out into Gangnam style horse-riding dance moves. I’d never seen them let loose all together like that. It was, to say the least, a momentous moment in our family’s history (considering all the drama that goes on) and I was savoring every second of it.

The Last Supper; Legend of the $250 Chocolate Chip Cookie Recipe; The Apocalyptic Post

This post is proof that I've survived the Mayan apocalypse muahah! Yes, I realize it was a bit silly of me to get anxious about the world ending on 12-21-12, but it got me thinking- what if something major does happen like this: http://www.hulu.com/watch/438003? What would I want to do, who would I want to be with when the world ended or I died? Answer: Eating delicious food with people I love and care about who also care about me.

Well, my parents weren’t coming up until 2 days after the apocalypse, so I contacted my old old friend Elissa- old because we’ve known each other since we were wee ones running around Disneyland while our parents slept on benches. Her father and my mother were college friends and roommates, so our families used to get together whenever possible. Elissa and I also went to the same university, but didn’t really hang out until after we graduated. We both live in San Francisco (10 minutes from each other actually, yay!) and work in Berkeley, so we’ve been able to meet up a lot this year and she’s been kind enough to invite me to her and her friends’ little shindigs every once in a while. She’s a hulaing, hip-hop dancing wonder woman and a generous, caring friend, so I always enjoy spending time with her.

Although she laughed at my apocalypse anxiety, she was quite accommodating and invited me over to make chocolate chip cookies. I had the idea to make bread and drink wine with it like Jesus in the Last Supper, but we realized making bread would take a long time and I don’t really drink wine anyway. So instead, I brought kombucha over and she concocted some delicious limoncello-amaretto drink and her mom fed us a beautiful, hearty meal that consisted of split pea soup with ham hock, focaccia bread from Liguria bakery I believe, some sausage, and salami. As we feasted on this “last supper,” her mom and dad were letting me in on some secret stories about my mom in her youth (drunken revelries, etc heheh) and showed me old pictures when she had long luscious locks and fake eyelashes.

Elissa's momma slicing sausage mmm.

Miss Mixologist at work.

Spinach getting ready for a flood of split pea soup.

The perfect apocalyptic meal.

 Then came the pre-apocalyptic cookie making. Elissa had heard of a recipe from Neiman Marcus that cost $250!! Well, of course we had to try this before the end of the world, so we busted out her kitchen aide and made 2 dozen Neiman Marcus chocolate chip cookies, half with toasted walnuts, half without. I’m not sure if they were worth $250, but they were certainly scrumptious! 

Photo taken by Elissa.

One black and white photo for dramatic effect. Photo taken by Elissa.

I'm so glad she's an architect and has a great eye for good photographic composition. Photo taken by Elissa.

$250 Dollah Babee!

Finally, I was invited to join their family tradition of watching A Sesame Street Christmas by the fireside. Elissa’s dad loves sesame street- he identifies with Ernie and shares somewhat of a resemblance to the rubber duck-loving character. As the day of the “apocalypse” drew to an end, I felt warm and safe and full of love, just like Big Bird on Christmas Day.

Uncle Glenn and his puppet doppelganger.

If the world had actually ended, I think I would’ve been ok with it. 

Faith; Rookie Writer; The Food-Free Post

So I’ve been considering different life paths I can venture down and one of them that I had actually wanted to pursue 5 or so years ago is journalism. I’ve always loved magazines for their usually succinct stories and articles and their visually captivating images. Recently I’ve been following an online magazine for young girls and women started by a 16 year-old wise beyond her years. It’s called Rookie Magazine and was created by Tavi Gevinson, a girl who began blogging at the ripe young age of 12. She started as a fashion blogger, but is now more interested in feminism, according to Bust Magazine. Anyone can submit to rookiemag.com though not everyone gets published, so I decided to try sending a little essay. I used to abhor writing essays and would drag out the writing process for as long as possible until the night before the deadline when I would speed-write my way to an unexpected A. Now, I actually enjoy writing and connect positive connotations to the word “essay.”  Perhaps this is because I can write about whatever I want now and the added pressure of getting a good grade is gone.

Anyhoo, this month’s theme for Rookie is Faith. A few nights ago, they were still asking for submissions- photos, essays, articles that pertained to the subject of religion, spirituality, etc. I wrote this piece late at night, listening to Rookie’s Gray Winter Days playlist, but the next day the call for submissions changed to the next month’s theme: Mythology. Ah well, I’d still like to share the essay, so here tis:

The Soul-Searchers

Paris, March 2010.

Waving from the other side of the security check at Charles de Gaulle airport, I watch as the shadow of a young man disappears with his suitcase following close behind and his “soul mate” sighing far behind.

How did these two come to the conclusion that they were “soul mates?” What are “soul mates” even? Do they actually exist or are they just romantic notions created for comfort and dramatic effect?

I’ve had two and a half years to ponder these questions and after much research and experience in the form of movies, TV shows, music, books, and conversations, I still have no real answers, but I do have some ideas.

Soul mate, n., a person ideally suited to another as a close friend or romantic partner. The key word in this apple dictionary definition is “ideally.” In my opinion, it definitely takes two idealistic people to believe in the possibility of being soul mates. All the cynical and/or practical people I’ve talked to dismiss the idea, laugh at it, or fail to even comprehend it. This young man I met in Paris, let’s call him J for the sake of privacy, was a devout liberal Roman Catholic. He attended Mass every Sunday even when he couldn’t completely understand the service in French, yet he was quite open-minded and never forceful with his beliefs. A self-proclaimed idealist and an aspiring architect, he internalized a moral architecture constructed from the building blocks of his Catholic upbringing and shaped by his own divine designs of what is good and what is not.

For some reason, I found myself attracted to his moral uprightness and intense faith in God and the Catholic Church, not to mention his kind face and fine physique. Though I myself was agnostic, I had always been interested in religions, having gone to Christian and Lutheran elementary schools and having taken a Comparative Religions class in high school. In trying to get to know him and his faith, I discovered that he had a girlfriend to whom he was wholeheartedly devoted, but who was on the other side of the Atlantic. One thing led to another and soon, he and I found ourselves deep in conversations about love, Buddhism, and the Bible. I had been reading a book called True Love by a Vietnamese-French Buddhist monk, Thich Nhat Hahn. Hahn spoke of many different kinds of love, but there was one that intrigued me most. As an idealistic and hopeless romantic, I was always searching for the ultimate love, a love that defied all boundaries, a love that couldn’t be fit into a category like motherly, brotherly, or loverly love. When I shared this idea of an ultimate love with J, he didn’t judge me at all but listened with an open heart and ear. He found that kind of love in God and Jesus and I thought I found it in him. That was a mistake. He told me I was his emotional and spiritual partner, his “soul mate,” but there was one little problem: he already had a partner who I’m sure was just as emotional. Being the naïve, inexperienced college junior that I was, I believed him with all my heart and soul when he said we would end up together, despite my awareness of his existing attachment. Granted, he did say he was having doubts about his relationship and was growing surer and surer about us, so my belief wasn’t based in complete naïveté.

Well, he went back to his girlfriend, didn’t break up with her, and let me cut off complete contact and connection with him without putting up a fight. At the time of the cut off, I felt the most intense pain I had ever experienced- my stomach twisted into millions and millions of knots, my heart tried to burst out of my body in order to escape the mental agony brimming over in my brain, and my soul was confused and disheveled by the huge rip that was left by the severing of our everything.

Two and a half years later, my stomach, heart, and soul have repaired themselves and have grown stronger than ever (Kelly Clarkson really is right when she belts “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger!”). I’ve fallen in love with other young men, dealt with and survived more broken hearts, and have learned a lot about what I want and need in a relationship.

It’s nice to know that I’ve met one of my soul mates, but I don’t believe he is my only one. Yes, we connected on a deep emotional and spiritual level and I’ll always be thankful for that, but there were other levels on which we didn’t connect, e.g. comical or cultural. I learned not to depend on one person for everything. If I have to depend on anyone, it should first and foremost be myself. That ultimate love I’ve been searching for may be the love one has for oneself, not self-centeredness or egoism, but compassion and faith in one’s own being. Once you can love your whole self, you can start to love others wholly and completely. That is my belief, but of course, like everything in life, it’s subject to change.

Sukiyaki Sonata; Master Chef Mama; The Down Home Post

This week, I went down south to the land they call LA to celebrate the birthday of one of my best friends, Marika. Like most people, I looked forward to also eating some of my mother's home cooking, mmm mmm mmm...

Now, my mom is one of the best cooks I know, having started at the ripe young age of six. Unfortunately, even though I begged and begged, she never really got the chance to teach me how to cook when I was younger. During this visit though, she was able to give me a quick lesson in how to make Sukiyaki… her way.

She started by sautéing sliced white onions in some vegetable oil. Once they softened a bit, she added pork cut specifically for Sukiyaki (thinly sliced) so that it curled up. Once the pork was cooked enough, she added medium-firm tofu and a soy-white pepper mixture and let that cook through. Then she mixed in some white enoki mushrooms and a little bit of “stinky tofu” (fermented bean curd) for texture and flavor. Finally, she sprinkled sliced green onions on top and served the Sukiyaki on white rice with Korean seaweed on the side. I only had a taste since I had to go to Marika’s birthday dinner, but my mom and dad took their hot, steaming bowls in front of the computer to watch their latest Korean soap opera obsession. I used to be totally uninterested, almost repulsed by those Korean soaps like "Winter Sonata," but (honestly) after dating a half Korean-half Japanese guy, I feel like I can tolerate them a little more. My interest in this guy also rekindled an interest in Asian culture and cuisine.

For some odd reason, I find cooking Chinese, Japanese, or Korean food intimidating and foreign. Perhaps this is because I’ve been a Europhile for a while and have focused mostly on European cuisines, e.g. French and Italian. Working at a tea court and being courted by an Asian male has brought me closer to my roots. I’m becoming more familiar with the wok and steamer and I am growing more and more interested in exploring Asian flavors in cooking, like sesame oil and rice vinegar.

European cuisine still holds a special place in my stomach’s heart, but right now I think it’s time to go home.

All photos taken with iPhone 5 because camera wasn't present.

Soul Food; Eating My Heart Out; The Love Post

“If music be the food of love, play on.” –William Shakespeare 

I’m sure many people’s automatic reactions to the titles of this post would be “Bleh, how mushy!” or “Gack, what is this overly sentimental bull-s***?” That would be MY automatic reaction anyway. I used to be quite mushy and overly sentimental though, so sometimes these lovey dovey subjects strike a chord in me...

Unable to cook with anyone this week, I instead spent two rainy days off watching the show “Call the Midwife” and making cheesecakes for work. Having weekdays off makes it difficult to meet with friends or plan anything fun for my free time. Thus, I started to get a bit down and out, feeling a pang of loneliness.“Call the Midwife” with its 1950’s love songs, mood music, and stories about birth and death may also have  triggered some emotional meltdown in me bringing up questions like “What is love?” “Have I loved fully, deeply, or enough?” and “Who loves me?” The last question may sound a bit self-centered, but sometimes it’s hard to remember how much the people around you care about you when they’re not actually around. So I called my mom since there’s no love like a mother’s love, but she thought I was irrationally freaking out and yelled at me to “Snap out of it” and “Grow up.” I could see why she thought that, seeing as I sounded like I was drowning in tears and snot.

Then I tried calling my close close friend, Marika, but got voicemail instead. Finally, I called a friend I met in Paris, who lives in Georgia- Hsiang-Ming. An architect by day and a musician by night, Hsiang-Ming has been someone I could talk to after months of no contact and feel like I only spoke with him yesterday.I really appreciated his patience and willingness to listen to me through all the tears and snot. I asked him about love and remembered how he had said he’d rather sacrifice his own life to save someone else’s, because he didn’t want to be selfish in thinking his life was more valuable than theirs. This may sound romantic, but he also meant he'd die to save friends and family. To my surprise, he even said he’d take a bullet (or a bus) for me. For some reason,that helped to calm me down. Knowing someone cares like that is like being embraced in a long, warm, all-enveloping hug, especially when one is feeling lonely and vulnerable.

But this also got me thinking about the “I’d die for you” kind of love. I don’t know if I’ve ever felt that for anyone, not even for my parents. I guess if it came down to it, and I had to choose between saving a loved one’s life or mine, I’d sacrifice my own, but if I put myself in a life or death situation, my automatic reaction would probably be to dodge the bullet.

I decided to break my silence with Ken and called to ask for his opinion on love. From the little time I spent with him, I got the sense that he was a mixture of romantic and realistic. He loved falling in love, but he didn’t waste time pining. When I asked him, he responded first with a general answer: “There are many kinds of love.” Yes, but what’s his kind? “Wishing someone well, hoping the best for them, wanting them to succeed.” Ok, and what about the “I’d die for you” kind of love? “Well, if you sacrifice your life for one person, that’s selfish, because what about the other people you love who love you? How will they feel when you’re gone? How can you love them and help them when you're dead?” Then he quoted a song lyric: “I’d die for you. Don’t die for me, live for me.” I thought that was quite an interesting point. It also relieved my worry about not loving someone to the point of being able to die for them.

I feel I’ve loved deeply and fully. Sometimes I’m not given the chance to continue loving that way and sometimes when given the chance, I don’t love that way enough. All I can hope to do is keep on learning to love, working on loving, and appreciate being loved.

I spent the rest of my time off playing the ukulele and singing music that hit just the right emotional notes and eased my loneliness. I’ll leave you with one of the songs that has always brought me out of my stormy cloud moods:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Jz706sJMjg

If music be the cure for loneliness, play on…

Hang On, Little Tomatoes!