Hard-boiled: Soy sauce eggs and tea eggs

This past Lunar New Year was, for me, one of my least festive and most lonely. Without my family or any Asian-minded friends around me in Colorado, there was little to do in way of celebration but hang around in my apartment doing homework, wishing there was a parade I could go to or a feast I could attend instead. The only thing I could think of that would be a little out of the ordinary and manageable for a single girl in the kitchen was to make a batch of tea eggs.

There's no reason for tea eggs to be a special occasion recipe, however—the process is dead easy and the ingredient list is simple. I tried to follow Jaden's directions over at Steamy Kitchen, but because I had to leave out the cinnamon stick and star anise (I still haven't stocked my spice rack), in the end I only had black tea, soy sauce, and sugar in my brew. The flavor was different but still good.

After hard-boiling the eggs, lightly cracking their shells with a heavy spoon, simmering them in the tea and soy sauce for two hours, and letting them steep overnight, this is how they looked. More than anything else, I love the beautiful pattern that appears all over the egg once you peel them. Like stained glass, or a drunken spiderweb of sorts, no? Considering these were marinated for so long, they are actually a bit pale—I could have cracked the shells harder to let more of the tea and soy sauce seep in.

Looks aside, the paleness also meant they were bland, so later I peeled all of the remaining eggs and plopped them directly into the tea marinade. After bringing the mixture to a boil, I let them simmer for another hour before taking them off the heat.

It's funny, but Jen at Use Real Butter just wrote a post about eating soy sauce eggs as a kid, which I totally identified with…as a kid I too was ridiculed about the shade of my lunch egg, and found it terribly humiliating when my oddly hued specimen was greeted with a chorus of ewwwws. After the first time, I stopped eating them in public. But you can see how little I care now; I let these eggs become a deep, warm brown. Without their shells hindering the absorption of the tea and soy sauce, their flavor increased by leaps and bounds. Next to dumplings, half a pomelo, and some stir-fried chicken and napa cabbage, these soy/tea eggs were the perfect thing for my solo Lunar New Year's meal.

Maki-making at home

So I'm pretty proud of myself for this one: I started making my own California rolls! Ever since I realized I could pretty easily keep all the ingredients I need on hand, this Americanized maki recipe has gone into regular rotation. Krab sticks can be frozen; unripe avocados last for weeks in the fridge; sushi rice, nori, sugar, and rice vinegar all keep in the pantry.

The method is about the same as when I made avocado maki. Mix freshly cooked sushi rice with a bit of rice vinegar and sugar (about seven ounces of rice is good for two rolls) and let it cool; spread half the seasoned rice over one full sheet of nori; lay avocado slices (about one quarter) and a krab stick (split in two, lengthwise) across the middle, and roll it all up using a mat (or if you're like me, your fingers). Lay the roll seam-side down, slice into eight pieces with a sharp knife, and repeat. Have wasabi and soy sauce for dipping on the side.

By the way, two rolls makes a really substantial meal, so depending on my appetite I often cut down on the amount of rice. (For some reason I can't bring myself to make just one roll at a time.) And while my kitchen is definitely no Sushi Yasuda or Masa, making this stuff at home means I can wean myself off of buying supermarket or takeout sushi in moments of desperation.

After all, here's the cost breakdown:

Two sheets of nori, $0.125 ($7.99 for a pack of fifty)
Half an avocado, $0.50 ($1.00 for one)
Two sticks of krab, $1.00 ($4.00 for pack of eight)
One-third cup uncooked sushi rice/about seven ounces cooked, $0.25 (estimated, I paid $5.00 for a five pound bag)
Sugar and rice vinegar, $0.10 (estimated)
Soy sauce, $0.10 (estimated)
Wasabi, $0.10 (estimated, a "family size" tube was about $2.50)

TOTAL: $2.18 for two rolls/sixteen pieces*
*And if you're curious, that comes out to about 485 calories and 11 grams of fat.

Compare that to five or six bucks per pack of eight for takeout California rolls, and I save myself about eight or ten dollars every time I have a maki jones. Yes!

On the right foot with Wild Boar

…aaaand jumping right into the new semester. Just a few days after arriving back on campus from break, I cozied up to a pumpkin muffin and mug of coffee at Wild Boar, fortifying myself for an afternoon of proofreading and fiction critiques. Muffin, thumbs up; not enough time to adjust before the assignments flood in, thumbs down.

Coopersmiths, after an East Coast return

MC was kind enough to pick up KS and I from the airport in Denver when we arrived, and once we got back into Fort Collins we headed straight for Coopersmith's. It's always weird coming back from a long trip or being away from someplace for a while, and having lunch together before parting ways was a brilliant move to ease that feeling of oddity.

For my meal I asked for the "High Plains" beef brisket sandwich, which was a moderately tender pile of sliced beef on a hoagie roll, smothered in grilled onions and barbecue sauce. There were also pretty good wedge fries, which were crisp on the outside and pleasantly mealy within.

And of course we shared a pitcher, in this case one of Cappy's Hop Top, a nitrogenated pale ale with a bag of actual hops for each glass. The flavor of the hops got overwhelming after a while though, and because the nitrogen process gave the beer smaller bubbles it edged on tasting flat. We'd probably get something else next time, but still it was great to have a beer after being on a plane all morning.

Bidding farewell with a bountiful breakfast

At the end of break, the morning I flew back out to Colorado, I enjoyed an early breakfast with my family before my parents drove me to the airport. With a leftover bit of pork and a handful of scallions my dad mixed up the filling for some homemade pan-fried buns, which he prepared that morning. There was also pan-fried taro and turnip cake, kaya (coconut jam) on toast courtesy of my brother, orange and pomelo wedges, and a large pot of jasmine peony tea. It was one of the nicest send-off breakfasts that I can remember.

An early Lunar New Year feast

The day before I flew back to Colorado, my brother and I went with our parents to an early Lunar New Year celebration at their friend's house in Long Island. It ended up being a huge potluck with all of the members of an alumni association that they give ballroom dance lessons to, and there was a ton of food.

Here's the plate I filled from the table. Yes, those veggie dumplings are a pretty horrifying shade of green, and the Peking duck buns (someone got a tray of them from Corner 28, in Flushing) were dried out, but like all potlucks there was also a good mix of other items. I felt pretty happy about having a chance to celebrate the new year with my family, even if it was a week early.

Let's be friends forever.

This is purely a post to give kudos to JL and LB of FoodMayhem, who when they invite you over to dinner will be excellent hosts that will wine and dine you in style. TL and I made our way over to their apartment and were greeted by a full table of homemade lox, grilled salmon skin, sliced salami, turkey meatballs in puttanesca sauce, shrimp in garlic and chili oil, and a pear, feta, and orzo salad. TL and I also brought over a wedge of Humboldt Fog and wheel of Camembert from Murray's Cheese, which turned out to be a serendipitous choice for the meal. We all had a great time putting together different combinations from the spread to eat atop chunks of crusty homemade bread, which is pretty much my favorite way of eating. And TL went to town on the salmon, since he's a Vancouver boy separated from his fish, and all.

After several rounds of Rock Band, too, there was dessert: chocolate-cappuccino cheesecake squares, the recipe for which you can find here. JL did a beautiful job decorating the squares, and she decorated each of our plates with a curlicue of whipped cream, too, before serving. Should you ever get an invitation to dine at the FoodMayhem household, make sure you don't pass it up.

A solo dumpling-off: Tasty Dumpling and Fried Dumpling

I didn't mean to eat ten dumplings at once, I swear. It's just that when I first walked into Tasty Dumpling on Mulberry Street, the place was entirely filled with high school kids chowing down, which made sitting down with a plateful of the porky morsels impossible. So I walked around the corner to Fried Dumpling on Mosco Street, where amid more kids stuffing their faces there was a single spot at the counter open.

I asked for five fried dumplings and a milk tea, which cost me a buck-fifty altogether (a dollar for the dumplings, fifty cents for the tea). But when I opened up the styrofoam container to dig in, I found that the dumplings were barely browned and cold, hardly the ideal. These dumplings were definitely not in their prime.

The tea, also, was a disgrace—more lukewarm milk with a bit of sugar and tea color than a decent hot cup. And I managed to spill half of it down the front of my coat while juggling my purse and grocery bags while walking out of the place. I regretted the mess on my coat, but not the loss of my tea.

So when I passed Tasty Dumpling again on my way back and saw that the place had cleared out, I couldn't help but take advantage of the sudden table room. I put down my dollar-twenty-five and was rewarded with five large, crisp-bottomed dumplings, piping hot and squirting pork juice with every bite. They would have been worth the wait, had I only had the patience. There's a lesson in there for sure: Hold out for the good stuff!