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November 12, 2003
Silly, Silly Rabbits and Beef for Dessert
Sometimes, people can get damn silly about breeding certain species of animals. This is an excellent example. How long do you think these rabbits would last in the wild? I'm thinking about a few days.
How much beef do you consume a year? Americans eat a lot of beef. The beef farmers do not think it's enough, though. So much that they went through the trouble of inventing a new food product, cheesy beef fries. In an Illuminati sense, I'm wondering if there's a secret affiliation between beef farmers and cardiologists? I especially like the following quote by the National Cattlemen's Beef Association:
We want beef in dessert if we can get it there.
Posted by Kathy at 01:23 PM | Permalink
November 07, 2003
Mmm... Chinese Dumplings
There are no restaurants around where I live that serve good, homestyle Chinese dumplings. Most restaurants use fatty pork, and very little vegetables, if at all. This makes the dumplings taste greasy and completely unbalanced. However, Chinese dumplings mean a lot more than just delicious food to most Chinese-Americans. As Amy Tan put it in this article, dumplings serve as a means for families and friends to bond. That is certainly the case among my family and friends. When I was growing up, no one ever taught me how to make dumplings. I guess I just learned by observation. There's no set recipe either. I learned to approximate amounts of flour, water, meat, and vegetables by sight, touch, and smell. In my family, dumplings provide a sense of history.
My paternal grandparents were wealthy business owners when the Communist Revolution took place in China. My grandfather was a wanted man by the Communists. In order to survive, they had to somehow escape to Taiwan. The story that was told to me was that they paid almost all the money they had to a Nationalist soldier who was willing to give his uniform to my grandfather so that he could masquerade as a Nationlist soldier and board the military ship to Taiwan. Once my grandparents arrived in Taiwan, they started rebuilding their lives. One of the ways they accomplished this was by selling Chinese dumplings. Their business was very successful. Their secret to tasty dumplings? A now five generation old non-recipe. I say non-recipe because we just don't take measuring cups out to throw ingredients together. I mean, what respectable cook does THAT? I'll be the first to admit that I do use measuring cups for most things I cook, but I never do to make our family dumplings.
Family recipes notwithstanding, I have made these dumplings for friends who tell me years later that they use my family's dumplings as a standard to compare all other dumplings against, and that they still haven't found a better dumpling. However, this is not the point of making dumplings. I don't want to be the next Emeril Lagasse. Getting together with family and friends to make dumplings creates an instant air of cameraderie. Everything that's stressful in life seems to disappear for a while. People feel more like sharing personal stories. This is what makes dumpling making interesting and fun. I'll mention that I once got together with a whole bunch of Chinese-American friends that I grew up with to make dumplings. There were about fourteen of us, and we formed one big assembly line. Being the geeks we all were, we had engineers, both in manufacturing and quality assurance. If the specifications for the dumplings were not right, the QA engineers would send it back to manufacturing for reworking. So, picture a bunch of friends flanking both sides of a long table, sharing jokes and making good food. I think we ended up making four hundred dumplings that evening. We sure enjoyed eating them.
Posted by Kathy at 01:29 PM | Permalink
November 05, 2003
Cool Matrix Movie Party, and the Worst Album Covers Ever!
A big storm passed by here today. Wouldn't you know it, just happens to pass by when we're supposed to get landscaping done today. I've been looking forward to getting the landscaping done, since our front yard has very little in the way of plants. So now it'll have to wait until tomorrow or Friday, depending on the landscapers' schedules.
Don Bailey had another one of his wonderful big movie release parties today. See my May 15 weblog for what this means. Today's movie was of course, The Matrix Revolutions. This movie was supposed to provide closure for the trilogy series. I must say that I'm still not sure if the movie has given me that sense of closure. It seems that maybe too many things are left open for interpretation. I could argue that leaving conclusions to the imagination and creativity of the watcher is a good thing, but we also all like well-justified endings in stories. In case you're wondering if I'm going to spoil the ending for you, I will not. Go watch the movie and let me know what you think. I did really like the martial arts fight scenes, though. I'm just not satisfied with some of the explanations of the movie plot. It would have been cool to have seen more of the Merovingian and some of his other programs.
Have you ever bought a CD based on the cover? I know you're probably thinking along the lines of "you can't judge a book by its cover". Or can you? Check out some of the worse album covers ever. Hehe.
Posted by Kathy at 01:32 PM | Permalink