Past Travel - Food

I've been VERY nostalgic today. It could be that it's because I'm avoiding the trials and tribulations of my thesis or I am sick and I want to comfort myself with nicer, healthier and easier times. Or a mixture of the two. But I went looking back at old food photos I've taken over the last four or five years now. I want to share my food experiences from my travels with you. My 2 blog visitors. I hope you enjoy them as I have.

I guess I should start with the oldest first and move my way closer to the present?

Spring 2009 - Ireland and UK 

In 2009, I experienced my first real trip away from home. I went to Ireland and the UK with my brother. Mainly focused in Dublin and London. We stayed in the rather ghetto part of Dublin on the cheap and then took the ferry into Liverpool and a train to London. Was a good experience and my first real taste of being abroad (China with my mom doesn't count).

Of course we tried the obligatory fish and chips. Well, I tried chicken and chips. My brother had the fish and chips. It was at the "best" fish and chips shop in Dublin...somehow I doubt it but you never know.

We had even more fried food there, a nice Uncle Ben's chicken sandwich - I mean Uncle Ben's Cabin, why not? Sadly it tasted exactly how it looked. Fried, greasy and not what I expected from Uncle Ben.

 After finding out that Irish food was pretty bland and getting tired of fried foods we tried the Wagamama in Ireland, a chain Japanese restaurant. Which, was OK. We were quite honestly too poor to afford to dine out in Ireland.

But there were some saving graces about Irish food. For instance Irish stew really does rock. The Guinness made it all the better.

 Once we arrived in London we knew that Chinese restaurants and Asian restaurants in general were the cheapest way to dine without dying on fastfood. So we had some awesome Ramen in Chinatown. Ramen eventually became a theme for me as I travelled.

We aslo discovered that they have BBQ cuttle fish along with Peking duck. Who knew?

For the trip in total I learned a few things. For example, Lays potato chips are called Walkers in the UK and Ireland and the Irish drink a lot more beer than I first thought.

Oh! and never order lasagna in Ireland, it's too much cheese. I never knew that was a thing, but it is. There can be too much cheese.

Winter 2009 - UK and Canada

After my first trip to Ireland and the UK I caught the traveling bug. During the winter of that year I went back to London to see all the extra things and dragged along my beautiful friend. 

 We tried English Tea. It was nice, we also shared a full English breakfast, which was enormous.

 We had awesome desserts. I remember a very awesome profiteroles in chocolate sauce. We even had a tiramisu made for us by an Italian man, who was living at the B&B we stayed at. Actually, I think it was already made but he served it to us.  We also had lots of pub food and lots of beer too.

 We tried digestive cookies

 And saw humorous signs and handome men

Once again, we knew the importance of ramen and beer. 

Forgot to mention we also enjoyed our fair share of Kinder Eggs and candies.

The Dark Times 2009 - Canada

 So on our flight home we were ment to fly home with a layover in Calgary Canada. There was a massive snow storm though. So the airline suggested we go to Regina, which landed us in Regina for roughly 4 days and up until Christmas day. It really was a Christmas miracle that we made it home, considering there was talk about flights being grounded till New Years. 

 During that time we ate donuts and drank coffee from Tim Hortons and became chummy with the flight staff, especially Dale. We also found out that Canadians are the nicest people on Earth, learned some Canadianisms, eh and got offered cookies from strangers, places to stay and booze. Sadly it was a very hectic time and there was a hockey championships in the city!!! And of course there was 3 plus feet of snow and -26 C degrees out which made it impossible to leave.

 So we ate pizza and watched movies a lot of the time. Though I do remember a Canadian waitress who was quite nice...

Eventually we made it home! YAY! I believe it was at 7 pm and we were over joyed! It's a bit sad that we lost all our Canadianisms though.

Here's a picture of our predicament and all the boarding passes we accumulated due to the booking and rebooking process!

2010 Spring - San Francisco Bay Area

The horrible experience of being locked down in Canada didn't scare me away from traveling though! In the spring of 2010 I went to San Francisco for 4 days before moving along south towards LA to see my sister. While I was there I was able to meet one of my favorite people in the world Carlos!

I saw bread baked as animals!

Had some Thai food, enjoyed some awesome drinks and saw the wonderful sights. 

Dun...dun...duuuuun...I'm going to leave the rest of 2010 and 2011 for another post. Do let me know if this is boring or if you want to see more. Not sure why that would matter much though. I'll probably do it anyhow. 

Kimchi Dumplings

I made kimchi dumplings today with the kimchi I made earlier this month! This was concocted the way I always make things...I threw everything I had on hand and thought would be nice together. It yielded 25 dumplings.

 For this recipe I used:

• 1/2 cup of kimchi (my home made kimchi was very salty so I didn't add any salt to mine.)
• Roughly 450 grams of ground pork
• Dumpling skins
• 1 carrot
• 3 cloves of garlic
• Minced onion 
• sprinkling of white pepper
• About a table spoon of sesame oil

Once all the ingredients were assembled I mixed it all together...

Put about 1 1/2 tablespoons of the mixture into the dumpling wrappers and used my mom's ancient Chinese crumpling technique. A super nifty friend helped me make a few of them, they turned out beautifully too.  

Steamed them for 15-20 minutes, and pan fried them

This is the end result and I also made a semi-sweet dipping sauce with soy sauce, vinegar (I'm partial to using balsamic now, but at home in CO I use rice vinegar), sesame oil, garlic, ginger, chili oil and a teaspoon of sugar.

This isn't how I normally make my dumplings but this is how I made kimchi dumplings today. Normally I use a mixture of nappa cabbage and kimchi but I didn't go to the store today...But they turned out rather good. I wish there was more veg in it though. Often times I omit the onion and put in about a teaspoon of ginger and green onions.

Farmer's Markets

I love farmer's markets! The Netherlands has a load of out door markets and bazaars and I absolutely love them. Being poor and a student means I don't have much time or money to put into things like food or travel...so having a farmer's market near me is probably the best thing in the world. I go every other Saturday to Noordermarkt which is a flea market near where I live now but every Saturday they sell organic produce.

I was so lucky and got all of this for 3.70 euros.
5 kiwis - one of them exploded on my way home
5 clementines or as they like to call it here mandrins
3 Avocados
Chili peppers
and a Thai cooking package with lemon grass, baby corn, thai chilis, and galangal root - which I've never used before. Turns out it's bitter. Who knew?

I ended up making this with the curry mix package

It had one can of coconut milk, a can of bamboo shoots, a red bell pepper, 2 red chili peppers, 3 thai chili peppers, a table spoon or so of lemon juice, chicken, thai red curry paste and the Thai mix. I wish I had thai basil leaves for this though. It was good but not as good as it could've been. It also ended up being too spicy and not complex in flavor.

This is what I ended up using for the curry.

 Of course I made some kick ass guacamole. Easy to make and delicious.

Lo Bak Go

So I made Lo Bak Go with the left over daikon radish from making kimchi. Lo Bak Go for those of you who don't know is sort of savory turnip cake. It often has dried seafood and bits of Chinese sausage mixed in with shredded turnip. It's very popular dish for Dim Sum. It is often sliced into 3" x 2" rectangles, pan fried and served with hoisin sauce and sometimes sambal. I followed my recipe very closely to this. The lady that demonstrates the cooking is a very serious looking Taiwanese woman. She really reminds me of one of my mother's friends. I think she would beat me if she found out that mine didn't set properly. Anyways, wikipedia might help you more with understanding what Lo Bak Go is. 

So, these are some of the main ingredients you need for Lo Bak Go. Daikon radish, and rice flour are the backbone of Lo Bak Go and a necessity; everything else is basically a filling. Most of the time Lo Bak Go filling consists of Chinese sausage, dried shrimp, dried scallops, Chinese mushrooms and green onions. I used Chinese sausage (which is a really fatty dry sausage. It has a slightly sweet and salty taste.), dried shrimp, shiitake mushrooms and green onions.

For this recipe I used:
1 daikon radish. It was probably around 5lbs
4 Chinese sausage links, diced
4 stalks of green onion, white and green bits
8 shiitake mushrooms
200 grams of rice flour
50 grams of corn starch
250 ml of warm water
2 1/2 teaspoons of salt
1 1/2 teaspoons of sugar
1 cube of chicken bouillon
1/2 pepper

You should soak the dried shrimp at least an hour before use so that it can soften up. You should also rehydrate the mushrooms if you use them dry. I minced them up into small bits and also shredded the daikon. I also like some big chunks of daikon too so I saved 1/5 of the daikon in rough match sticks.

Next, I stir fried all the minced ingredients. Usually you start with the meat and then add the veg. After about 3-4 minutes when things start to get a caramelized I add in the daikon. It maybe more beneficial to do the daikon separately and then add the filling back in. I don't know.

Next, I mixed the rice flour, corn starch and water together. Then I added it to the filling. It ended up looking like papier-mâché.

After it was all mixed I poured it into a cake mold and steamed it for about 2 hours. You're meant to steam it until you can poke it with a toothpick or a skew and it comes out clean. That however didn't happen for me...I think I had my mixture a bit off. I always fail with rice flour.

So after it steams, you're meant to cool it down until it becomes firm. You then cut it into 3" x 2" rectangles and then pan fry the pieces. Serve with hoisin sauce and sambal and you have Chinese turnip cakes.

-Next time I think I'll just leave it for my mom to make. It tasted really nice, but a bit too gooey. Anyways, cheers guys. You successfully coerced me into writing a second post.

First post - Kimchee

Hello all!


This is my first and possibly only blog post. Hopefully it's good.

I made Kimchi today! Kimchi is a fermented vegetable dish that is a staple to Korean food. It's too expensive to buy in The Netherlands, like most foods. So, I decided to make it myself. Most kimchi is made with nappa cabbage but it can be made with a variety of vegetables. 

As you can see I made mine with nappa cabbage as well, I chopped it up in about 1 1/2 chunks. I also used daikon radish, carrots and green onions for pickling. The fish sauce, chili peppers, garlic and ginger were all for the pickle seasoning (pickling sauce). I also used rice flour, sugar and water to make a paste so that the seasoning would cling to the vegetables. 

First, I had one head of nappa cabbage that I chopped up, washed in cold water and then drained. After draining I salted the cabbage (about 1 cup of kosher salt) and mixed it throughout nappa and let it sit for about 1 1/2 to 2 hours so the cabbage would lose its water content.

During that time I started to make the sauce for the seasoning. I started with 1 cup of water and 1/6 cup of rice flour, mixing it on medium - low heat for 5 minutes until the mixture got thick and sticky. This is how it looked. I also added about a 1/2 table spoon of sugar to the mixture right before I took it off the heat. It's really a runny mixture until it hits about 2 minutes and starts boiling then it gets really goopey. After it became really sticky I let it cool down completely.

 I also minced about 1/2 cup of garlic (1/2 head of garlic) and 1 inch of ginger into a large container. I could only find a large pot to mix everything in.

 Next I combined my ginger/garlic mixture with the rice flour mixture and added 1/3 cup of fish sauce.

 Next was 1 cup of Chili flakes

 Mixed those until it looked like chili vomit

 I then sliced the carrot and daikon that I'd add in with the cabbage into match sticks

I got a really big daikon. I think I'll make Lo Bak Go (turnip cake) with it tomorrow...

 And just sliced the green onion.

 Next I rinsed the cabbage. You're supposed to do it really well. The kitchen was a bit of a mess and I fear I didn't give the cabbage the attention it needed. My kimchi was too salty. SO I suggest you don't fuck around with this step. Really rinse this cabbage!

 I then put everything into the pot...

 Mixed it all.

And this is what I got.