Why do people say “Bei zhing” and not “Bei jing?”  Not only does pronouncing Beijing as “Bei jing” make more sense because that’s how it’s spelled in the Romanized form, “Bei jing” actually sounds more like how Beijing natives pronounce the name of their city.  Where did this “Bei zhing” come from?  Are they incorrectly trying to sound more correct?  Or more French?

I love a good cheesy Olympics athlete story.  Dara Torres is 41 and competing to qualify for the Olympics, 24 years after her first trip to the LA Olympics in 1984.  Competing against people that could barely walk or who weren’t even born during her first Olympics trip.  She volunteers for urine and blood tests to prove that she is not doping.  And her times now are faster than her times from 24 years ago.  In fact, she set her personal best tonight in the semifinals of the 100 M freestyle race, qualifying for the finals in 2nd place.  That’s spectacularly amazing.

From a NYTimes article from Nov 07:

Wakes up bright in a cake made of strawberry?
Livin right in a cake made of strawberry?
Strawberry Shortcake, wouldn’t ya know.

And me too!

I love Strawberry Shortcake!  The original Strawberry Shortcake, not the current tarted up version.  I think that I like thinking of people (and myself) as fruits and fruity desserts! 

I went with a fruity and fun crew to pick our own strawberries last weekend at Swanton Berry Farms near Santa Cruz.

We had a lot of fun picking strawberries.  Exhibit A:

And we also snuck in a few bites to keep ourselves full of energy.  And to do some quality control to make sure we were picking the best strawberries.  Exhibit B:

And the picking fun was enhanced by a little competition.  Exhibit C:

In addition to the informal competition, we had three official contests (photos from top -> bottom) biggest strawberry, ugliest strawberry, and best strawberry.  The winner of each category got to keep (and pay for!) all the entries in that category.

Which ones would you have voted for?

It’s time for me to brag a little… I won the best strawberry category!  Can you tell which one it is?  Although, I did pick at least twice as many strawberries as other people.  But I also was pretty stringent with only picking the very best ones.  So my “best strawberry” was really the best of the best, with a lot of bests.

We also rewarded ourselves after all of our hard work!  “White velvet” cupcakes with white chocolate chips and whipped cream with a little bit of strawberry jam to stabilize it.

And the yumminess didn’t stop there.  Here’s a run-down of the strawberry feasting that I’ve been doing:

• oatmeal (stone cut) with brown sugar, Straus milk, and strawberries
• strawberry shortcake!  Christina aka Plum Puddin’ shared some shortcake that she made.  Yummy!)
• sesame bagel with cream cheese and… strawberries.  A better bagel would have improved this greatly, but what can you do when you haven’t moved back to NY yet?  The bagel matters less when you’ve got yummy strawberries.
• strawberry lime ice cream!  This is my new favorite flavor of ice cream.  I made a double batch because I knew that it would be yummy and one batch wouldn’t be enough.  To get the lime flavor, I steeped the lime zest in the milk/cream and macerated the strawberries in lime juice.
• strawberry sorbet
• just plain strawberries.  Ha, “just” strawberries.  “Just” the most delicious and lovingly picked strawberries ever!
• brownies with whipped cream and strawberries

The strawberries would have also made great smoothies and milk shakes.  And Mark aka Huckleberry Pie and I love getting donuts and slicing them in half and putting sliced strawberries inside and eating it like a sweet sandwich.  Tim aka Philbert Wormly III (sorry, the Strawberry shortcake world is like the inverse of the Smurfs world with very few male characters and mostly female characters, so I had to resort to using the worm) says that he’s going to make strawberry milk (milk blended with strawberries and maybe a little sugar).  That sounds really yummy too!

My fruity friends, it sounds like we’re going to have to go pick more strawberries!

Games and chores in a cake made of strawberry?
Strawberry Shortcake, wouldn’t ya know.

My sister got me this gift, but I told her not to mail it to me because it would be too much trouble for her and I’d just pick it up from her next time I saw her.  Then she decided that she wouldn’t tell me what it was, even after my birthday had passed.  I should have known to establish the terms of the agreement first.  But it turns out that it’s all renegotiable.

I suggested to her that I would get her birthday present now (her birthday is in December) but I’d wait until six months after her birthday to give it to her.  So then she agreed to tell me what it was, with photos and I would give my gift to her on time.  But she said that it would take a long time for her to do this.  This is why, the best powerpoint gift ever (click on the image to see the slideshow):

My other sister is giving an awesome gift too - she’s flying out to see my exit talk.  And she’s going to accompany me to the French Laundry!  Okay, maybe that one is partly selfish.

Not Tuan and An’s cat.  Penne pasta.  The sauce was actually the yummiest part.  Butter, garlic, morels, milk, flour for thickening, cherries, and a little manchego cheese.  We mopped it all up!  I love how the sauce turned purple.  Mmmmm, so delicious.  Morels are magic.

I also wound up making strawberry jam out of those frozen strawberries.  And ate a lot of PBJ sandwiches.  As I’m getting older, it’s good to have opportunities to make you feel young again!

I love Mark and Joshua and Katee on SYTYCD.  They make me smile.  And laugh.  And I love their dancing.

Afghan bread - bolani - and spreads from the Alemany farmers’ market (and you can see the pomelos in the background).  We froze one bread for him to take back to Boston.  I hope it went through okay.

Oatmeal (steel cut) with peaches and Straus (yummy!) milk.  Whole milk!

Gary is now a Burma Superstar!

And finally, he finished off a few scoops of Bi-Rite ice cream. Gary’s showing how sad he is that the ice cream is gone.

Those were all the yummy things.  We also had an adventure with strawberries.  Gary doesn’t like berries, but I thought that maybe eating a strawberry fresh from California instead of nasty East Coast berries could change his mind.  But he’s more stubborn with berries than he is with oatmeal and mangos and peaches and flossing.  I sliced a bunch of strawberries and picked the most delicious one for him to try.  These weren’t the best strawberries I’ve ever had, but they were up there.  This is how much he enjoyed it:

You should appreciate my honesty.  I could have posted a photo like this one and then reported how Gary now loves strawberries:

But he’s pretty sharp and he probably would have found out about my scam, if I had attempted it.

Thanks for visiting and keeping me on my toes!

I went to Pagolac (Yelp, Menupages) in the Tenderloin last night with a fun crew of dinner eaters.  We were in San Francisco, but throughout the whole dining experience, I kept having all these flashbacks to being in Vietnam.  It was an unusually warm night for San Francisco, so that helped.  The rest of the effect is probably from the comfortable, unpretentious atmosphere inside and from the great food.  One result of all this good Vietnam food and the Vietnamness was that I had this flash of worry when one dessert came with ice: “Oh no, we forgot to ask for no ice!  We can’t eat this.” While this is a common thought when traveling in places like SE Asia, I don’t usually have that instinctive reaction in the U.S.  (I should note that this reaction wasn’t because the place looked unsanitary… I think it was because I felt like I was away from home.)  Also, when passing through the tiny, cramped kitchen in the back, because it was extra hot back there, I felt like I was a kitchen in Taiwan or Vietnam or another hot Asian country.

More about the food:  pretty much everything was great.  I especially liked the imperial rolls (with taro inside!).  There was also a really interesting noodle (fat rice noodles) dish with dried shredded pork, coconut milk, and other toppings.  Anything wrapped up in rice paper with noodles, herbs and greens, and fish sauce (assembled ourselves) was great.  The imperial rolls were really yummy eaten this way as was a shrimp ball wrapped around sugar cane.  Such a symbiotic relationship with the sugar cane and the shrimp - both components come out way tastier when cooked together.  (You’re supposed to chew the sugar cane to get the juice out rather than chew to swallow.  But if you’d like a little bit more fiber in your life, it can be eaten, as we all witnessed last night.  Mark, thanks for the demo!)  The best dessert we had was this rice pudding and taro dessert - it also had coconut milk.  It was so warm and pleasant and comforting and yummy!

I’d recommend staying away from the ice cream because while it was flavorful, the texture wasn’t great.  There are way more yummy things to eat at Pagolac so there’s no need to order the ice cream, in my opinion.

I haven’t reviewed the dishes and pottery of a restaurant in a while, probably because I haven’t seen anything memorable.  But Pagolac had some great pieces.  They had this one black bowl with pale yellow flowers carved to look like they were scattered on the inside of the bowl - really pretty.  And they had this four-sided teapot with an amazing glaze job - a tenmoku-like (black/copper/red) top, a narrow yellow band, and most of the base was blue.  The different glazes all flowed together and it was very fiery and organic at the same time.

Happy travels!

Congratulations to all the newly married and newly licensed couples in California! Have long and happy and healthy marriages!

As for those counties in California that have stopped performing ceremonies to protest the legalization of same sex marriages: Shame on you! This is the sort of thing that bratty kids do. Like when I was younger, I was on a swim team and at the end of the season, they gave everyone a blue gym bag. My younger sister wanted the bag and I must have been forced to give it to her. Rather than give it to her, I cut the bag up with a pair of scissors. So she couldn’t use it. Neither could I. I’m more mature now. And I realize now that if I didn’t cut that bag up, I could still use it now. And she could use it as well.

Maybe something positive can come out of these “protests.” Maybe there are some people have not supported same sex marriage in the past, but if they experience more hurdles to getting married themselves, they will understand what it has been like for same sex couples. And what it is still like for same sex couples in most of the U.S. These counties haven’t completely banned marriages or the issuing of licenses, so it may take more for people to come around to realizing what it is like to have rights given to others and then denied to them.

Kudos to those ministers who will show up outside the Kern county clerk’s office and perform marriage ceremonies anyway. That’s awesome!

A really cute video that I saw posted on Cute Overload. I wouldn’t post a video unless it were really great. So this video must be great. Even the title by itself is great: An Eye for Annai:

Chinese-style pancakes with squash

These aren’t like scallion pancakes that require you to make a flour-water dough and then roll the dough out and then roll it up to roll it out again. Lots of rolling. That’s how you get the layers. If I make that sometime, I’ll write a post about it w/ photos.

But we’re not talking about those kinds of pancakes. These are just eggs, flour, water, salt, white pepper. I don’t really measure anything - I just play with the ratios until I get a consistency that I like, that is a little runnier than a typical American pancake batter.  I threw in some grated white zucchini (I first salted it, let it sit, and then squeezed excess water out - it helps me control the moisture in the final batter). You can also use scallions, carrots, and other things that grate easily and that cook pretty fast. Then you just cook them up like American pancakes.

They come out really soft and tender, with crispy edges.

I also made a dipping sauce - soy sauce, rice wine vinegar, red pepper flakes, sugar.

Our fridge is too cold (maybe that’s related to the ant story). So we had some strawberries that got frozen. Any suggestions for what I can do with them? Jam? Sauce? Something else?

You’ve probably heard these stats before. From a NYTimes article about division of labor in couples:

“Social scientists know in remarkable detail what goes on in the average American home. And they have calculated with great precision how little has changed in the roles of men and women… break out the couples in which both husband and wife have full-time paying jobs. There, the wife does 28 hours of housework and the husband, 16. Just shy of two to one, which makes no sense at all.

The lopsided ratio holds true however you construct and deconstruct a family. “Working class, middle class, upper class, it stays at two to one,” says Sampson Lee Blair, an associate professor of sociology at the University at Buffalo who studies the division of labor in families.”

And then later on in the same article, there’s this stat that I haven’t seen before:

“Lesbian parents, gay parents and heterosexual fathers all look the same on paper when it comes to cooking and cleaning — they all report doing between 6 and 10 hours a week.”

Assuming these numbers are all based on sound and controlled studies, I can see two possible scenarios for all these conclusions to make sense together.

1. Heterosexual households are cleaner than same sex households because these households see 50% more housework.
2. Heterosexual fathers (I’m using fathers because the stat in the article refers to fathers) contribute more net dirtiness to a household and that negates the extra housecleaning done by heterosexual mothers.

(It’s also possible that heterosexual mothers are less efficient with their housework, but I find that an unlikely explanation for a number of reasons - women probably are trained more from a young age to do housework; lesbian parents and gay parents don’t do different amounts of housework; if women have more time pressures, they’ll likely have more pressure to be more efficient.)

Are there any studies on the relative cleanliness of different households? That would be a way to see which scenario is true. I have a hunch that the prize is behind door #2, but I’m not going to say anything for sure or why I have this hunch until there’s more info. Anybody who knows of such a study or is willing to conduct one?

Is the list of explanations longer than 2?

This is actually a really interesting article with a lot of other interesting points. I’ll probably wind up posting more entries about this article. But if you want to check it out before I get to writing those entries, I highly recommend it.