wagashi - mizu yoke

Slightly late by 4 days, the first legit wagashi that I made!

mizu yokan, recipe via Just One Cookbook

I decided to be good and not alter the recipe in any way, and it turned out fantastic. Especially the texture which has been my previous struggle with agar-agar setting too hard, not a problem here. Good sweetness with just the koshi-an, will be even less fancy and just stir in the salt next time instead of garnishing.
Also happy that I got the flash to work well filling in the shadows.

Time to get some sesame paste *u*
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weight of sadness

On a slight Big Bang kick this week:

gommage

It's been soup weather these couple of days, winter is finally setting in.

 vegetable miso soup

My SOP for the bare minimum miso soup is currently:

1. Brown awase (mixed) miso and the white parts of a green onion (woah now I understand why its called a scallion in other places) with sesame oil.
2. Add water, a glug of fish sauce and cook for some time. Usually I cook an egg in the same pot so it'd be the time it takes to bring the pot with egg to a boil + 5min. Meanwhile clean and chop the vegetable.
3. Take out egg, put in vegetables along with green parts of green onion and cook until soft. I've been converted to liking soft vegetables in soup.
4. Consume with joy.

kimchi tuna stew with my radish pickles (so yummy!) and other stir-fried Chinese vegetable

The radish kimchi turned out to be quite salty, unsure of how to remediate. Also gotta use up my pickled kale stems...and all the meat stocked up in my freezer "orz

...

Other heavy food for the cold weather:

 roast meat, beef ver. 

The link is mores for myself because I never remember the oven temperature and google search does a poor job crawling this blog.

cabbage gratin that I've basically turned into pizza-style

Not as good as I remember making it in Atlanta...probably because there's not even cheese this time.
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offset

Today has been a challenging day, by which I mean its been an accumulation of small annoyances.

I was woken up at 9:23 by the realization that I forgot to submit an assignment that was due at 9...except we're allowed to miss three submissions without a penalty. So logically this is not a big deal. But it felt so irritating because of sunken cost (of not even that much, 2hr?). Is it sunken cost though? I've clearly learned from doing that assignment, which is a gain to myself; and haven't loss any marks from not submitting it. Goes to show the abysmal progress I've made decoupling my well-being from grades.

Then I forget to bring back my pot from Jeff's...again.
Also left my headphones there.

Which resulted in a miserable time CADing. Not having music was only partially responsible since I was able to borrow a pair. My productivity was fairly low since I haven't touched AutoCAD since Atlanta and has forgotten how to draft efficiently. Though for how much I complain about CAD, I don't actually dislike the task. Specializing in energy modelling is feasible still.

Some positives to balance the day out:

• Nice dinner at Pren-up, one more thing on Trello done
• Nice chat with professor on UK vs US grad schools

....

I wonder if there's a greater number of posts tagged with the combination of (schoolANDrant) or (foodANDphotolog)

At the very least it seems like most people are equally as overloaded. That or chill af, have not met someone not at an extreme yet.

get out

This week's study music is sort of fitting:

napkins

There's been a lot of eating out lately, which is great but need to cook more to maintain sanity.

It only took half a year to cross Dakgalbi off our trello list, a fair criticism to myself since I only wanted to go if bundled with a haircut. Fish cake soup is a smart accompaniment.

Spicy Mafia is too conveniently located, plus they have quail eggs! Their signature soup is legit.

Winterlicious at Bodega with Ang and Eleanor, only been 2 years since our last meal together. One more restaurant crossed off on Baldwin, one with good bread to boot. The terrine is quite good, as well as the desserts (perks of eating with a group is sampling all of the desserts).
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pile

YS order right on CNY, am looking forward to when I can enjoy this. These two weeks are very crazy.

Basically a lot of wu liang pu er and some red & black tea for the winter that's becoming miserable. I've buried the stacks of cakes in my mom's closet in hopes that they'll survive the years, though will probably ask my dad to take them back to Chengdu since the climate is much more conducive to aging.