kingdom of dumplings

This past weekend, we discovered this delightful joint in the Sunset — a nondescript little store maybe 15 feet wide and 40 feet deep? — adorably dubbed the Kingdom of Dumplings.  They keep a chatty flock of little old Chinese ladies in the back of the room who sit around a small folding table industriously wrapping dumplings (a gleeful reminder of afternoons when my mommy and aunties and I wrap trays of wonton for big family dinners), which they flash freeze then sell in packs of fifteen or twenty.  They have a considerable assortment — wonton with a variety of fillings, potstickers, even 小龍飽 (a rather precious, Shanghainese sort of soup dumpling).  I can’t say they were spectacular (I have to say ours are yummier, but I guess that’s not surprising), but the fact that you can buy fresh-made freeze-packs of dumplings sure is.

cakewalk

So finally–! My entrée into the world of cakes, after a long interlude on the back burner.  We went to LA for Labor Day, where my lovely aunties had a surprise birthday party at Fraîche ready in waiting for Daddy. Anyways, I found the recipe for this chocolate pistachio & marzipan petit-four cake at Smitten Kitchen, and baked it for Daddy’s birthday, very covertly schlepping it down by plane.  It only occurred to me partway through that a three-layer cake was probably a little daunting for my very first cake bake, but it was actually simpler than I thought and turned out spectacularly.  And it was perfect — nice pistachio cakes separated by layers of chocolate ganache, homemade marzipan and apricot preserves.

letterpress

At the core of my addictive stationery craze lies letterpress — so organically, deliciously lovely.  If only books were still printed in letterpress…!   And while I was looking for custom letterpress printing online, I found this little documentary short on letterpress.  It’s exceptionally beautiful.

 

echinoidea

Here’s another curio from my trip to LA — uni soup during the HKSA Foundation dinner at the Bonaventure.  I find it rather interesting that the wikipedia page on sea urchins mentions that “sea urchins are harvested and served as a delicacy” but declines to elaborate any further gastronomically.  Anyways, apparently they’re in the Echinoidea class of critters, which also includes sand dollars (saw these at Monterey Bay and was tickled pink), sea biscuits (really — sea biscuits?!!) and heart urchins!

a red sun rises…

I spent a lovely weekend in LA, and news of the wildfires near Montecito broke just shortly before our flight down Friday morning. 22,000 acres and over 800 houses (though apparently not Oprah’s) have burned in LA, Santa Barbara, Riverside and Orange counties: not exactly delightful. I did, however, finally discover that there’s a lot of heft behind the words that J.R. Tolkien wrote for the elf Legolas: “A red sun rises…blood has been spilled this night.”  Smoke, for some reason (this reason apparently being that particles, smoke invariably far more strongly so than even normal LA smog, scatter sunlight on its path to your eye.  This path is longer when the sun is lower in the sky, so we see more of the red wavelengths that are longer and thus less affected by particles; and the effect is enhanced by smoke and smog), turns setting or rising suns red.  Given that, for the large majority of the human timeline, battles have come hand in hand with fire and smoke, it makes sense that a smoky sky (and a red sun) would signal battle and its attendant bloodletting.  Something new. Every day.

less work per word…

 

…was the slogan that IBM used in its early print ads for electric typewriters.  Watching the opening scenes of Atonement last week stoked my type fetish and I got my typewriter (a 1939 Royal Portable) back out from the shelves beneath my iMac — a odd juxtaposition, I know.  Have been typing letters at an industrious clip since, then caught it in this great slant of light when I had it out to type a birthday card during lunch.  Lovely!

the itty bitty cake

Back in August, when I was exploring cakes to make for Daddy’s birthday party in LA (a long overdue post that is coming shortly — I promise) I found the recipe for this cake on Smitten Kitchen that was deemed a must for all chocolate-and-peanut-butter lovers.  That would be Mommy.  So when she came to visit this weekend, I baked her her own itty bitty, four-inch, triple-layer chocolate peanut-butter cake.  Note: itty bitty four-inch cakes require a (successful) search for itty bitty four-inch cakepans.  

le petit tour du porc (i)

Recently, I finally made 鹹菜肉絲 — one of my (many) favorite Chinese home-cooked dishes growing up and which, for some odd reason, I’ve never made yet myself.  The four characters, translated literally, mean “salty vegetables” and “strips of meat”, though I think the actual term is “雪菜” (lit. “snow vegetables”).  In any case, this dish involves pork stir-fried with chopped pieces of preserved (and very salty) veggies.  And it’s delicious with rice or these yummy udon noodles.

water-locks

I saw (and sailed through) my first water lock last month while visiting Chicago (another first-time experience).  It was quite a trip, even though the water level change was only about 18 in. (by contrast, the Pedro Miguel lock in the Panamal Canal has a lift of about 31 ft.; the canal lifts ships up a total elevation of 85 ft. across all its locks).  Apparently, while most locks are constructed to make water transport across varying elevations possible sans detour, the driving force behind the construction of the Chicago Harbor Lock was instead a deep and vehemently expressed concern of other towns on Lake Michigan that reversing the flow of the Chicago River (completed in 1900 via the construction of a 28 mi. canal, followed later by two more artificial rivers) would “drain all the water out of Lake Michigan.”

teatime

A few Saturdays ago, I met my coworker L. for afternoon tea at the small but charming English Rose — a tea room just off Main Street that we’ve been meaning to explore for months now.  We were delighted to find that the place was bright and airy, filled with happy but not rowdy tea-partiers (reservations are a good call) including a family celebrating the birthday of one small boy, daintily and thoughtfully decorated, old-fashioned and — as we’d hoped and hoped — one that served clotted cream with their scones!