France posts on Food in Mouth
One of the benefits of marrying someone who is very different from me is that there are new food items to grow to love. Kouign Amann is a buttery pastry with crispy bits. It’s sweet and literally means butter cake. Far Breton is a cake with a consistency like a stiff flan, and it has dried prunes scattered within the cake. I never had any idea these two things existed until wifey came into the picture…. [Continue reading]
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September 30, 2015 at 1:54 am
One of those things that Americans rarely think about is what would it look like when some other entity supplants our dominance. If there’s one thing that born-here Americans have that naturalized Americans don’t have, and other humans of the world don’t have, I think that is it. In the States, GM used to dominate car sales and now world wide they’re behind Toyota and Volkswagon. Fast food is something that Murica dominates as well in terms of cultural power, as I’ve seen some gigantic KFC stores in France that look bigger than any store in the U.S. The thing is, there aren’t that many of them. McDonalds obviously dominates, but number two is a brand called Quick…. [Continue reading]
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September 26, 2015 at 3:33 pm
I made some jiaozi dumplings for my in-laws this summer in Brittany. The wrapper was hand made, and the filling came from pork sausage. Surprisingly, in their small French town we were able to get our hands on Chinese cabbage. So it turned out decently well, considering it was my fourth time making jiaozi wrappers from scratch. I shared a picture of it on facebook and someone asked why I used sausage meat squeezed from casings. The reason was that as Americans, we’re used to certain cuts being available at the meat counter in the supermarket, and if you’re lucky to live near a Chinatown, you also see what an Asian store has. In France it’s not the same. You want spare ribs? Good luck. Babyback ribs? Shrink wrapped and marinated in sauce already. Ground pork? Not so widely available. Sausage? Everywhere…. [Continue reading]
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September 15, 2015 at 10:56 am
One the things you learn as an immigrant is that the American dream is fucking bullshit, and white people see you as not white. I been thinking about it recently and I think really, the immigrant experience is only suited for poor folks. Obviously it works for middle class and rich folks too, but mostly it’s an utility for the poor. If you think in the mindset of “I don’t care what kinda shitty job I have, as long as my kids grow up in America, it’s all good and they can go to college.” Obviously it’s possible that the chain doesn’t work well and the kids still struggle. But I think there might be middle class folks from other countries contemplating it and even though they’ll never see my blog… DON’T DO IT. THE IMMIGRANT EXPERIENCE SUCKS UNLESS YOU’RE POOR IN A POOR COUNTRY.
I started thinking about it because they said one of the associates in the whole Charlie Hebdo saga grew up as a petty criminal. And I automatically think that the smartest kid in class, regardless of immigrant or not, doesn’t do this shit. Some whiz kid with an app that makes money doesn’t do petty robbery. One, yes I know the dudes were just mad crazy. Only crazy people do shit like that. But two, the immigrant experience definitely did not work for those dudes. I mean, if they were six-figure developers at Google Paris, they wouldn’t be doing this crazy shit…. [Continue reading]
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January 12, 2015 at 11:48 pm
If there’s one French food item that I think should be easy for most Asians to really love, it’s escargot. The reason is that escargot is kind of a texture dish, which you normally don’t see in French cooking. Snails don’t taste like much, I don’t think, but they are transformed into something awesome when you add butter, garlic, and parsley in the correct proportions. Just like how a Chinese guy might order some tripe at dim sum, it’s kind of the same thing. The item simply is a sauce delivery vehicle…. [Continue reading]
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December 30, 2014 at 7:18 am
I am a dad now! It’s only been about a month, and it’s as surreal to write that now was it was when my son first came into the world. Being… [more]
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February 29, 2016 at 2:27 am 
For the food loving couple that’s hobbled by the exclamation of, “I’m getting too old for this,” there’s some usefulness in food courts…. [more]
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January 10, 2016 at 1:12 am 
When the semester cycles to an end, my brain basically cannot fit everything all in, and that’s why the blog has really suffered. My plan for the… [more]
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December 31, 2015 at 8:39 pm 
The other day wifey and I woke up at 3 am and took the train into the city. Weather had not yet turned cold. It wasn’t the kind of wind that would… [more]
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November 30, 2015 at 9:54 pm 
Sometimes wifey and I have serious adult conversations, such as when she told me a child at school had lice and we might have to comb each other’s… [more]
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October 29, 2015 at 8:53 pm