Zachary's Event - Blupdate

My poor blog. Abandoned to cyberspace for months. Again. But enough people have bothered me, a couple even going so far as to text me weekly (Winnie) and invite me to blog update events on Facebook (Zachary). My normal update day is supposed to be Thursday, but I have conceded to update today...at least for now. I hate Mondays. Especially ones that are particularly stressful and when I am starting to get sick.

To try to combat getting sick, I have been consuming lots of vitamins, both through artificial means, vitamin drinks and bars and such, and natural means, lots of fruits and juice. None of which are very exciting to blog about, particularly those energy bars. Yuck. I only like to blog about delicious foods. Though the fruit and juice has been ok.

I wouldn't even know where to begin with my backlog of food photos and fun events, so I will just focus on what I ate this weekend, as well as today, besides the aforementioned vitamins.

Saturday we slept in late and around noon went to meet some friends at a salad and soup buffet chain that's common around here called Sweet Tomatoes. I made a ridiculously big salad that had everything in it that people don't normally put together in a salad. I also did not use any salad dressing because I'm still barely a fan of salad, let alone salad dressing.

Blogger is not allowing me to upload my salad photo at this time. However, it is just that. A photo of a salad with lots of pasta and crackers added to it.

For dinner I was feeling tired and trying not to think about the JLPT test on Sunday, so Matt asked a friend for Chinese takeout recommendation and we wound up going to Koong's Chinese Restaurant in Milpitas.


Delicious. Mongolian beef, shrimp with vegetables in brown sauce, and crab rangoon. Good Chinese take-out and reasonably priced. Next time I will order one of their dinner sets with soup.

Sunday I just had energy bars and drinks to try and survive the awful Japan Language Proficiency Test (n2) and then had Saturday's Chinese leftovers.

And we're back to today.

For lunch I ate with my coworkers in the cafeteria- while I was still unemployed, Cisco finally finished building the cafeteria in my building. It isn't bad, for what it is. Various dishes a la carte and others as a buffet at a set weight price. Definitely an improvement over Kaufman (my college cafeteria, for those unfamiliar with its delicacies). I had customized soft tacos for what feels like the 20th time as well as an orzo based dish which I didn't really care for. No photos yet...maybe if I'm sneaky I can get a few with my phone next time.

Dinner I was feeling silly (cold? work burnout?) so I had Matt buy Mickey Mouse chicken nuggets from Target, for two reasons. First was to try them - they were recently rated among the best chicken nuggets in Consumer Reports both for taste and nutrition. Second was because I was planning on playing Epic Mickey tonight! And I did! Such a weird game for modern Disney. Kind of dark, kind of trippy. Aside from their iconic shape, the chicken nuggets weren't nearly as unusual.

Still pretty good though. I think I still prefer Trader Joe's, but these are definitely healthier. And they go better with tonkatsu sauce.

Also, one of the few times I will use an image that is not mine, here is a photo of the Epic Mickey cover from Wikipedia (copyright Disney Interactive Studios) :


I'm enjoying it so far mostly because of the Disney history and imaginative designs, but as all the reviews I have read have said so far, the camera angles in this game are atrocious and deadly.

All right. Bedtime for me, and my first day working all day from home tomorrow. Good night.

Yum, pizza.

New York City pizza. Pretty self explanatory. It is delicious. I may do some explaining tomorrow anyway, along with some more photos. But not tonight. I've had a rough past week and today was no exception. I'm going to go dream about this nice slice of cheese pizza now:


Yum. Good night.

X-cellent food in NYC! (aka "x" is an annoying letter in the English language)

I think I will have to again scribe a fairly concise blog entry tonight. My nerves are all strained from Cisco and just having to wait on incidents that could decide a decent part of my immediate future is causing me to yo-yo from wound up high anxiety to extreme exhaustion. Today my supervisor and three other people in my area (though those three are on a different budget than I am) learned that they were being let go at the end of the month. However, nothing whatsoever has been said to any of my four coworkers or me. We are silently going crazy and would really like to just hear anything tomorrow, be it good or bad, just simply to know what's going on. Once we learn we are naturally going to eat out to celebrate either the miraculous last minute save of our jobs (for another 3 months or so) or our triumphant escape from Cisco to move on to better and brighter opportunities.

Until that happens, it is time for more NYC meals.

Moving right along to my dinner on April 22nd, I was finally able to meet with my cousin Ann who lives in Manhattan and works at the New York Public Library as a legal assistant. I'll dig up a photo of her later as the best ones were all taken on her camera and are hidden somewhere in my e-mail. My next culinary experience was to be a Japanese restaurant by the name of Katsu-hama, a restaurant that specializes in one of my favorite dishes; they served all sorts of Katsu, or Japanese cutlets.


Ah...tabetai (I want to eat it). While this restaurant was probably not run by Japanese owners, this was still easily some of the best tonkatsu (pork cutlet) I have ever had either in the US or in Japan and it wasn't that expensive either. The restaurant was small, but neatly arranged, and I felt that how they arranged the meal was also a nice, Japanesque touch. They brought out beautiful plates like this one, but also served our sake in a small box filled with water and flower petals, and had us crush fresh sesame seeds for our sauce. While katsu is fried and my stomach had been feeling queasy all throughout my time in NYC, this was a fantastic meal where both my taste buds and stomach went home happy.

Or rather I should say, they both were so thrilled that they decided I needed to continue on my journey to attempt to completely satisfy them, as well as fulfill another pilgrimage of my family's culinary traditions in NYC, and like Katz's Delicatessen, easily one of my favorite places on the face of the earth as I have experienced it so far. So my cousin and I moved on to this mysterious place in the East Village...

I love bakeries. Real bakeries, not the supermarket or Little Debbie's kind. The traditional family owned kind where all baked goods are made day of (or are sold at a significant discount) and there is no use of sodium benzoate, artificial flavors or colors, or, god forbid, dough conditioners of any kind. I find this kind of bakery to be very rare in the US, because they are difficult to run as a business, minimally appreciated outside of the cities, and then probably hurt even more by the recession as they are considered more of a luxury item than the much cheaper mass market products at the nearby grocery store. However, despite all of that Veniero's Pasticceria & Caffé has managed to survive since 1894. There are many other very good bakeries in NYC (the Chelsea Market from a previous post contains some), but Veniero's, which focuses primarily but not exclusively on Italian style desserts, has become a family favorite. I literally dream about their pies and cookies and I have no pictures except for this one because I ate everything else so fast.

I'll have to find the exact name for it but this berry and apricot tart was out of this world amazing. Paired with some light coffee, it was the perfect dessert to end a good day in NYC. I already want to go back there to eat more...

Wieners!

Yes, today's entry is about hot dogs. But not just any hot dogs, Katz's hot dogs. Delicious.


Katz's Delicatessen is a kosher delicatessen and cafeteria style restaurant located on Houston (pronounced "house - ton") St. It is fairly old and famous and is a setting in a number of movies as well as being one of those places that celebrities like to go to on occasion so that the restaurant can take a photo of them sitting there. Obviously you can order a lot more than hot dogs for your meal - they are also well known for their pastrami sandwiches and salami among many other items. It has just become a family traditional to eat the hot dogs and drink Dr. Brown's soda. Also they are some of the cheapest items on the menu and probably make up one of the best tasting budget meals in this part of the city.



Katz's keeps their costs down by offering cafeteria style service and seating. You order whatever you like at the counter, the worker writes on your ticket what you ordered, you pick up your food, and you go to look for somewhere to sit down. You pay after eating on your way out. As Katz's is very popular, the place is usually crazy and you will almost inevitably wind up sitting with some strangers. I actually like this part a lot. I sat with an older lady from Hawaii who was stuck in NYC after her flight to Europe was canceled because of the ash cloud. We had a good discussion about life, work, men, politics, Chicago, etc and she gave me her fries because she couldn't finish them. From talking to her I also learned that Obama's motorcade had passed by only minutes before I arrived. I had indeed been wondering why the area was swarming with police - at least it was for a good reason.

I consider this one of my favorite places in the world to eat at, especially since I love deli food and hot dogs, so it is highly highly recommended should you ever venture out to NYC. And send me a salami, please.

Variety is the spice of life you know...

Today is the long awaited first official entry on my New York City trip from April of this year and some of the delicious cuisine I ate there. NYC is of course world renowned for its food, from some of the best low key street food and hidden local spots to literally some of the most expensive four starred places to eat on the planet. The amount of restaurants and cafes and bars and is simply ridiculous - you could easily spend over a lifetime in that city without eating at the same place twice. The variety is also incredibly extensive, as seen in this nice map here of the different types of restaurants that dominate each zip code of the five NYC boroughs according to the Village Voice. All of this is fairly overwhelming, and as a result, while I definitely try and eat at a new place each time I go, I also find myself falling back on old reliable places that it has become kind of a traditional for myself and my family to visit every single time. They're always good.

On my first day, Wednesday April 21st , I was pretty jet-lagged from taking a red eye flight from San Jose to LaGuardia, so didn't do much. After checking into my interesting budget hotel the Jane, I took a nap, called one of my cousins who lives in NYC, and eventually decided I was hungry enough to find something in the area to eat. I had unnaturally good luck on this entire trip despite it being planned last minute and during a time of personal crisis, so of course my hotel was only a few minutes away from one of my favorite food related places to visit in NYC - The Chelsea Market. I'd first learned about it a few years ago when one of my cousins took my Dad, brother and I to inspect their artisan bread shop. I could probably spend an entire entry or more on The Chelsea Market alone, and I may in the future, but basically it is an old Nabisco factory converted into high end apartments and such, and on the first floor is an array of vendors selling all types of food; a miniature NYC condensed into one floor with a very industrial feel given its history. It truly makes for a very unique experience, and on top of that you can get a decent meal for a good price. I opted for the simply named "Chelsea Thai" and had their version of crispy chicken with broccoli.

It wasn't bad - a little heavy for me since my stomach hadn't settled yet, but the broccoli was fresh, the Jasmine rice tasted like it was supposed to, and the chicken had a very unique flavor that I still can't quite place. Definitely neither the most authentic nor the best Thai I've ever had but for the price and the atmosphere, not bad at all.

Seems I failed to take any other photos of the Chelsea Market...hm...instead, here is a photo of the view from my room on the 4th floor of the Jane.
I may have been staying in a budget hotel, but I was still in the trendy West Village area, and I could actually see the Statue of Liberty from my windows. I was pretty excited.

Well, that was what I did Thursday at any rate and I think covering all the things I ate in NYC is going to take more than one post if I want any sleep, so further meals will have to wait to allow me to state the obvious: to be continued...

Ugh

Well, Winnie is still sick, so she gets a free pass on her blog updates until she recovers, but I am going to try and sneak in another entry on time before I get too tired.

First, some non-food related issues I would like to get out of my system before the food appreciation begins. It's just that lately it seems that life does not like me very much. Hence the stomach problems and the entry being titled "ugh". Earlier this week, on Monday, between job recruiters calling and the usual stress at work, I was distracted enough that I managed to misplace my Motorola Droid. It was a very bad time to lose my cell phone. I had just spent the past few days actively applying for jobs and sending out resumes. I was fortunate to have a Cisco employee find it and turn it in to the lost and found the next day, but I was not a happy person for about 16 hours.

Despite all of that I did still successfully schedule an interview with a recruiter for earlier today, which went fine, but about 15 minutes before my interview I discovered that there was a gigantic hole in my skirt. I was able to finagle my skirt into still looking decent by changing the hole into a slit on the side of one leg...however, the length of that slit was really not appropriate for an interview. Maybe for a club or evening dance, but definitely not an interview. Oh well. I recognize these are small gripes, but the timing was just so bad for both of my problems that it led to decent amounts of stress and frustration on my part. And this is why it is important to take time to relax and eat delicious things.

Immediately after the interview, I met Matt at a restaurant, Honba Sushi, and ate this Tonkatsu (pork cutlet). It wasn't bad, pretty light actually, and I felt much better afterward.

This was a delicious and messy gyro with tzatziki from a nearby nicely inexpensive Greek place that my coworker Bing recommended. We ate outside as the weather was nice.


Bing and I have kind of become lunch partners now as we try to go to lots of new places as an excuse to take a long lunch and escape Cisco for a while. Next week we're going to try and go to have southern Shanghai style Chinese food.

My coworkers and I also find excuses to take a break from work while at the office as well. Earlier this week we had cheesecake to celebrate one coworker's birthday, and today we had more traditional cake to celebrate the birthday of another coworker, Olga. I've been told she kind of looks like me, but I don't know.

I'm sure Cisco appreciates me putting photos of some of their office space and lockers on my blog. The cake was from a local Chinese bakery and absolutely delicious. Fantastic batter and lightly whipped icing. Good strawberries too.

Okay, I'm pretty tired now and the cat wants her food, so I think that's a pretty good update of what's been going on with me lately. New York City photos should be next week. Good night.

Traveling

Okay, it's time for another irregularly scheduled update.

Recently, my stomach has been very very bad, I guess from stress at work, so I haven't been eating out as much, and when I do, it tends to be very mild and simple things such as sandwiches. I love sandwiches, but unless they are a particularly unusual sandwich or I am trying to highlight an certain attribute (like for any I may have posted before) I usually devour them before even thinking about taking out the camera. So probably not much in the way of new eating out/cooking pictures until I fix my stomach issues which is fine, as I have hundreds of much more interesting food photos to talk about.

Today's theme is traveling. When people go traveling, regardless of their budget, there is often an special emphasis on the food that is eaten during that time. One of the main categories in any travel guide highlights local places to eat and famous cuisine for the chosen area of travel. A traveler might eat out beyond their normal means at a very fancy restaurant just for fun, try to eat at the small places the locals eat at, or even eat at home with the locals themselves. All are excellent ways to discover new culinary experiences.

Logic would dictate that I should write about my most recent travels as an example for my blog, but as the New York City photos still need some sorting, it is with some excitement that I bring you my next featured meals...from the beautiful state of Maine! When my dad, brother and I went up to Richmond, Maine to visit my cousins Alex, Maryliyn and Alex Jr. From the summer of 2008.

I thought I had lost all of these photos because I could not for the life of me figure out where I had saved them, but one day my brother miraculously discovered that I had saved them on his mini-SD card that he usually uses for his GPS unit. After that was lost, and found again, he finally e-mailed them to me. The reason I wanted these so badly?

This:
What Maine is famous for. Succulent lobster, caught the day before, cooked the same day by my cousin Alex who is an excellent chef, and eaten with the traditional tools and bib. Delicious.

Lots of lobster. Yum.

Another restaurant I would like to feature also had excellent seafood, like these shrimp,

but was also unique in that you could dock your boat near the restaurant instead of parking your car. Which is what we did using my cousin's boat, the Palm Beach.

The blue building in the background to the left is the restaurant. The boat in the foreground with the people standing next to it is the Palm Beach. This was actually from the town of Bath and we were headed back on the Kennebec River because it was starting to rain hard (but not storm).

Here are some scenic photos of the Atlantic Ocean from a beach in Maine.


Beautiful, right? But extremely cold water, even this late in summer (end of July).

I could go on and on about how excellent the food is in Maine and what a great time I had there and how it was one of my best summer vacations ever but I think will save some parts for another entry when I go back, as I most certainly will someday. Have a good night.

So much eating out...

I'm not even going to try to come up with an excuse for what happened to my blog this past month...it would take too long. But a friend and I are both going to try and post at least one entry in our blogs every week to see if that doesn't help us both update more regularly.

My next reflecting series is also going to have to wait until I find the correct SD card and I'd rather summarize the past few weeks using recent pictures of food anyway.
So this entry is instead brought to you by the letter S.

Sonoma Chicken Coop


On Saturday, May 22nd, my Uncle Bill and Aunt A'delle from Sacramento, CA came down to San Jose to celebrate my birthday (actual date May 31st, but I already had plans for that day). They picked the primarily California based chain Sonoma Chicken Coop. It wasn't bad - I'd heard it was expensive, but for this area, I really thought their prices were pretty good. This was one of their specials for dinner that day - the Thai Peanut Chicken Wrap. I was really full from earlier that day from eating at...Applebee's I believe, so I wanted something lighter and this was perfect. Tender chicken, lots of vegetables, jasmine rice, and a nice peanut sauce made for a solid if less traditional American chicken restaurant entry. I think the rest of my party had Italian style dishes.

Steak

This steak represents the 2nd most expensive meal I have ever had and paid for by myself. This meal also included mashed potatos, wine, and Italian seltzer (don't ask), but as it was eaten at a Morton's the Steakhouse I believe it is fair to concentrate exclusively on the steak. This was their small (yes, small) rib-eye, cooked medium rare and it was a very very good steak. I actually can't say outright that it was the best steak I have ever had because of this grocery store called Dorothy Lane Market and their steak...but it is now very very high up there on my list. I went with a bunch of Matt's friends during Memorial Day weekend, along with one Japanese guest that was there for that weekend's FanimeCon. My Japanese is getting so bad though...
Worth going once for the atmosphere, service, company, and food, but I think it will be a while before I go to this expensive of a restaurant again. Or at least until I find a better job or something.

Sushi

Since people seem to like photos of sushi, here is another one. One of my-coworkers, Bing, and I eat out together practically every day now as an excuse to escape the horribly depressing Cisco environment. This is where we went for on Monday, June 7 - a pretty good sushi place called Sen Dai Sushi. A small place, but apparently always busy, we shared these two delicious and reasonably priced sushi rolls there and also ran into some current and former co-workers there, two of whom are still at Cisco, but no longer with our department. It was a good lunch.

Okay, I think that was a pretty good update entry for now. I might try and find some people pictures to accompany these food pictures, but it is getting late and I still have "work" tomorrow. Good night!

Reflecting Part 1

After yesterday's very personal blog entry, I decided I wanted to dedicate this next series of entries to my coworkers at Cisco, my godmother in NYC, and others who have kept me sane and well fed over the past couple of months. I may not have time to finish this particular part until later this afternoon as I believe some current and former coworkers and I are going out to lunch again today.

These first parts will catalog my eating excursions (besides Bocce ball) with my coworkers. Fortunately for me, most of my coworkers are as interested in global cuisine as I am, so I have eaten at a good variety of places since arriving at Cisco - some expensive and fancy, some very cheap and casual. Very shortly after I was hired, I was invited to a holiday gift swap with my female coworkers which took place at the nearby Pasta Pomodoro. http://www.pastapomodoro.com/ They are a chain native to California that serves Italian and seafood dishes.

Penne with tomato sauce and cheese and stuff. It was okay. Kind of overpriced for basic pasta - I can probably make it better and for a lot less than the restaurant price.


Some of my coworkers then. Everyone but Eve (far left) is still here...for now. I didn't even know anyone's name for a while...I am so bad with names. Next to Eve is Bing, then Valentina, then Olga, and on the very right side is Lia.

For my gift swap Olga and I wound up having each others names, and I received a very nice wine set (bottle opener and 4 stoppers) while I gave her some Christmas cookie baking sets and a puzzle, which wound up working very well because she was planning on visiting and baking with her young nieces later that day. I still have and use the wine set.

I guess I will feature one restaurant/event/day so this will be in more parts than I originally planned, but I guess this gives each one its own time to shine and me a way to update more regularly and efficiently. Until tomorrow then...

Questioning

Well, it's been a while again. I was so ready for a return to writing regularly after that last short mobile post, but then so many things in my life changed. Some people prefer to update quickly as events unfold; a desire made easier with the advent of forums such as Facebook and Twitter, but I prefer to let everything finish and calm down so I have time to reflect and look back on everything as a whole. I haven't felt emotionally comfortable with writing what has happened to me in the past couple of months, particularly when I find it a lot easier to write about success and fun food excursions rather than what right now feels like failure. I decided it was better that I wait until I really felt the need to write, and after going through what to say over and over again in my head, that has finally happened. As such, after making another long excuse for not writing again, I will give a quick update on my life.

On April 5th, after enjoying a wonderful week touring the bay area with my brother, Dad, and Matt, I returned to my job at Cisco Systems only to learn that the majority of my department was being outsourced overseas. I was probably going to lose my job by the end of April, just a few months after I had started. I was devastated, and along with most of my coworkers, began to go through the five stages of grief. I even refused to believe my Japanese co-worker, Sakura, the first day because everything just seemed so sudden and unreal, even though looking back, it is not uncommon at all these days for tech jobs to be outsourced to cheaper labor markets.

Then, on April 15th, Matt and I decided that our relationship was not working particularly well and that we should end it. I know I have been immensely private during this relationship, so while this was not a surprise to me, it may have been or still be to some of my friends. We had not been doing well at all; neither of us had been happy or even feeling much like a couple for quite a while. I had even previously spoken to my dad just a couple days before the 15th to tell him I didn't think this relationship would last much longer. My dad said to give it time, so I had been, but ultimately Matt brought it up before I had even decided when might be best. There really is no best time to do it anyway. To answer the inevitable question of why we broke up, without going into ranting specifics, suffice to say that we currently have very different goals in life and that we both feel we have a lot of things we need to accomplish before settling into a relationship where we are unsure of the future of said relationship.

Hopefully this will clarify some of my statements and actions on Facebook about being lost and single. I don't really mind being single and I am still on good terms with Matt, it was just a lot to go through between that and the fear of losing my job at Cisco. I decided to handle my mounting stress in the ways I know best - by traveling and eating good food. One day after Matt and I broke up, I booked a flight to visit New York City for four days to reflect, eat lots of delicious food, tour unique places, and go shopping in Soho. More to come on that later. After returning to San Jose, I learned that Cisco had extended my and some of my coworkers' contracts by three months, until the end of July. We all promptly spent the entire last weeks of April partying and eating out every single day. I felt like I was back in college. More to come on that later as well. I don't particularly feel that this serious blog entry should feature mood-lightening food.

So, as my entry title states, lately I have been questioning everything, particularly who I am as a person and where I want to go in life from here. I know that in the long run when I look back I probably will say that coming out here wasn't a complete failure. I have been learning a lot about myself, I am gaining experience at Cisco, meeting lots of new people and so on, but right now I am just kind of frustrated at everything and still mostly lost. However, things could be a lot worse in life - I still have my job at Cisco, and I am still living with Matt until the end of July when both our apartment contract and my work contract come up. And most importantly I have still found plenty of time to enjoy parts of my life, even if they are the simple events of talking to my supportive friends and family, seeing a movie, going places with coworkers, and of course, eating and cooking lots of good food.

My adventures with food return tomorrow morning. Featuring NYC pizza and local San Jose/Milpitas restaurants! Stay tuned.

Pixel Pipe

I'm trying out this application for Android called PixelPipe that always me to send blog posts and photos from my phone, but I'm using the free version, so I'm not sure how well it works. Since St. Patrick's Day is on a Wednesday, we celebrated early with Matt's parents with some homemade, traditional food. It was filling, warm, and delicious.

*update* So, seems PixelPipelite is great for uploading pictures to the blog, but not so great for posts. I'm going to look into some other applications for blogging on the go, but otherwise I can probably just use the browser, or wait until I get home. *end update*

Oops?

Sometimes I really don't care much for real life. Particularly that horrible truth that just about everyone seems to run into eventually - if I don't have a job, I don't have enough money to do all the things I want to do. But if I get a job, and I do earn the money, then I don't have enough time for those things anymore. And I definitely don't have enough money for everything. But if I get a better job with more money, than I have even less time...the circle of real life would continue. Ugh.

That was basically just a long winded excuse as to why I haven't updated my blog in a month...I was doing it at work (my computer and internet speed are both faster there), but now that I have been there a couple of months, they have discovered that I am decently competent and have started assigning me more work and training me for different work. Work that requires actual thought, instead of just mindlessly organizing data. So I haven't had time there like I used to. And the rest of life was already busy.

However, during the past busy month, I obviously still found time to eat and eat well. That is one thing I refuse to give up. I don't care much for instant and fast food, so I have been compromising on other things I would normally do to make time to cook full meals or eat at delicious restaurants.

Or, in the case of today, to go well out of town in the hope of finding something delicious to eat or drink and somewhere fun to explore. Today Matt and I went with his parents to Napa Valley to celebrate the birthday of one of their long time family friends. I had met these family friends over last Thanksgiving dinner, so they were nice enough to invite me as well. We all got up early this morning to take one of those wine tour charter buses all the way up past Napa onto Calistoga and finally stopped to tour and eat at a winery called "Castello di Amorosa."

I've only ever been to a few standard wineries before, but if you can guess from the first Italian word in the name, this one was very different from a normal winery in California. Very, very different.


That's the entrance.



There's one of its towers. And even a moat.

According to our energetic tour guides, this winery was built by an very successful Italian American winemaker to replicate, as closely as possible with modern California building codes still kept in mind, an Italian castle from the 13th century. I have yet to go to an authentic Italian castle, so I cannot say if I felt if he succeeded or not, but this still made for one heck of a unique experience. I did not expect to find a Renaissance style castle in Napa Valley, California, let alone one used for a vineyard, storage and bottling facility.

I took so many photos, but since this is a food blog and not a castle blog, I will just include a few more of them before getting to the main course.



View from the castle.

Main dining hall. We didn't eat here, but I guess the Governator and some other famous politicans have.

17th century replica of an Iron Maiden in the castle dungeon.

Okay, here is the room we ate in for lunch. Long tables, gigantic wooden chairs, and lots of Renaissance era styled art. The food was served as main course buffet style, and after a dessert, and of course, with however much red or white wine from their two chosen estate wines that you wanted. The wine, as hoped, was really good. I don't have any photos of it specifically because I was much too busy drinking it. While none of our party of four (Matt, myself, and his parents) bought any of the red or white served with dinner, we did spring for some of the delicious dessert wine we had sampled during a wine tasting earlier as part of the tour.

This food looks delicious right? Well, actually it was kind of a disappointment, considering how accommodating everything had been up to this point. All of the food was cold. Really, really cold. I guess it was for effect and to be gourmet, but as the room was already rather cold from a lack of utilities (the builder was going for authenticity remember) I found this aspect of the food less than appealing. Add that to my personal preference for most of my meat (aside from certain fish and tapas) to be warm, and also the opinion that I thought a lot of the dishes tried to be overly gourmet by loading on the variety of seasonings, and I wound up mostly eating the rolls and drinking wine.

I guess next time I want a really good meal in Napa or Calistoga I should go to a restaurant instead of a winery, but as this was all prearranged for the birthday party and also completely paid for, I probably shouldn't complain too much. The food wasn't bad; I was just expecting better.



Dessert by contrast was absolutely delicious. Chocolate and hazelnut cake from a local bakery and small but exquisite fruit tarts.

While I was worried this would be an awkward event considering I had met the hosts only once, it is always amazing how social people can become after the wine starts flowing...but even without that I actually had a really good time. I definitely want to go back to Napa and Calistoga in the future, and maybe even go on more winery tours, though I wonder if any of them can live up to the experience that was the Castello di Amorosa.

(oh, and if anyone was wondering about that last random post of a photo of a cat...seems my cat, Anna, got a hold of my phone/the phone became possessed and was posting stuff to Blogger via one of the applications I have installed. I did not eat her, will not be eating her ever, and hopefully that will not happen again)

Nina Plays Bocce Ball?

As my friend Zachary pointed out to me today, lately I haven't had time to cook as much, so my food photos trend largely towards meals eaten in restaurants or even that last post about the food my boyfriend made. Sadly, that is the reality of the working life. Although I actually have quite a bit of free time at work (case in point now, as I blog at my desk), I usually don't get home until 6pm or later, and as I am someone who is used to an early supper, by that time I am famished. I don't like cooking anything complicated when I'm really tired and hungry as I find I tend to rush the process and make mistakes or have accidents. I know plenty of people who do cook elaborate meals after a long hard day of work and find that to be very therapeutic, but until I get used to having a full time job I just don't think that's for me. So, probably not too many photos of my actual home cooked food until the weekend or a vacation break or something. Although, I did make homemade mapo tofu sauce yesterday! But as indicated by today's title, mapo tofu is clearly not the main topic for today's entry.

Work may have detracted a bit from my cooking experience, but I do not believe it caused any compromises in the quality of my eating experiences. In fact, last week my temp agency, Buxton Consulting, paid for all of my group to eat an entire Italian buffet at this restaurant and bocce ball place, Campo Di Bocce of Los Gatos, for a "team building experience." I hope they do this again - it was great.


First course - appetizer (whatever it is in Italian, I forget) - breaded calamari.

Main course - buffet style, but it was a personal buffet set out only for our group, so it was fresh, warm, and delicious. Bread accompanying salmon, beef, fettuccine alfredo, spaghetti with meat sauce...they were nothing especially gourmet, but well done, satisfying dishes nevertheless.

Third course - dessert- Cannoli! After stuffing myself during the buffet part and drinking lots of red wine (also paid for by Buxton), I am not entirely sure how I had room for dessert, but this cannoli was excellent and I managed somehow.

Finally, after eating and drinking and bonding over the food and wine, my coworkers and I were split up into teams to attempt to play Bocce ball. While I am not going to write out all the rules for this traditional Italian game (here is the wikipedia link - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bocce_ball), the basic idea is you want to bowl a bigger ball as close to the smaller ball as you can, and you want to get as many balls closer to it than the other team has.

This is at close as I made it that entire night, which I thought was pretty good (though it got knocked away by the other team during their next turn).

Watching the court.

"Passionately discussing" which team got it closer. They even provided tape measures, because sometimes the human brain is not so good at judging really similar distances.

Anyway, stories of homemade mapo tofu sauce are going to have to wait until later as I want to get out of the office before 6; I just thought I would share my culinary adventures that my company actually paid for. And yes, I also got paid as well. What a life.

Matt cooked!

While I clearly enjoy cooking or I wouldn't have this blog, I have always believed in both of the parties in a relationship sharing all the necessary household stuff, including cooking. Especially now that I work basically just as much as he does, I was getting frustrated with almost always being the one to turn on the stove/oven/microwave right after getting home. It's not that he had never offered either, it's more that whenever he offered, it was almost inevitably the same two things - macaroni and cheese or pasta with canned tomato sauce. While I am a fan of both, I crave variety in my life and there are a lot of dishes I love a lot more. But finally, yesterday my boyfriend expanded his repertoire to include one of them - miso soup.

Delicious. I love miso soup. For those who aren't familiar with it, it is a traditional Japanese soup with a dashi (we used katsuobushi, or bonito in English, a type of fish, but other types of soup stock can be used) base, soybean paste (miso), and we added tofu, wakame (seaweed), and green onions. All these ingredients can be found at your local Asian grocery store.

The other dish is mostly comprised of what has been saving us those nights we are both too tired to do much of anything - Trader Joe's frozen vegetables and chicken. Definitely the supermarket with the highest quality frozen foods hands down, and one of the places I missed the most while in Japan.

Anyway, hopefully my boyfriend will be cooking more as I firmly believe he is capable of cooking different delicious things if he practices. I think his parents even picked up on my desire for this, because they bought him not one, but two cookbooks for his birthday, which I thought was great. However, as cooking is still something I think I enjoy more than he does right now, I figure I can live with compromises on not completely sharing the cooking (such as him washing the dishes, which he usually does) and concentrating on expanding my own food repertoire. What to cook next...

Let's Go Sharks?

Today was my boyfriend's 26th birthday. To celebrate we went with a couple of his friends to a Sharks (NHL team) game. It was my first time to a hockey game ever, and I liked it more than baseball (based on a minor league game in San Jose). It was very flashy and fast. But the Sharks lost. 4-2 to the Detroit Red Wings. Oh well.

Of course, like most sports patrons, I had something to eat during the game. We wisely ate beforehand at a Togo's (a sandwich chain) to avoid most of the overpriced options, but I had a bad craving for french fries. Luckily they were relatively cheap and fresh.


My delicious and cheap Togo's sandwich before the game

The HP Pavilion Stadium (seats over 17,000 people -the game tonight was sold out too)


Warning! Flying pucks!

My fries!

I meant to take some pictures of the outside of the building and him with his friends, but I was tired and I forgot. I am sure I will find a way to deviously take photos of those same friends for this blog in the near future though...

As a random side note, the company my boyfriend works for, Brocade, sponsors a Sharks' zamboni. Great place for advertising, even if it was pretty ridiculous looking.

Finally, to celebrate my boyfriend's birthday with the appropriate traditional food, here is a photo of the birthday cake his parents bought him from a local grocery store. It was carrot cake with cream cheese icing. Very tasty, but so rich that to eat to any more than just a small piece was immediately stomach ache inducing.

The birthday boy with his cake,

And a close up of the nicely decorated cake.

All right, I think that was a pretty meaty post as I managed to update on time (more or less) and continue to blog regularly as I said I would. Considering how late it is here I think I did pretty well. Until the next post (soon if not tomorrow), have a good night!

Kaetta (I returned)

Okay, that was a ridiculously long break from blogging here, but that's just life sometimes. For those of you whom I have talked via FB, LJ, or, the phone (yes, the phone) I have probably already sufficiently updated you on the events in my life, but for those of you whom I have neglected, I will provide a quick run through of the past few months of my life.

Since my last entry I have gone to Japan (as indicated in that last entry), spent all of my savings (in Japan), took the JLPT 2, gone to some crazy job interviews, successfully landed a job from one of those interviews, adopted a cat, received my first smart phone as a Christmas gift, traveled around the bay area, restored some of my savings, started receiving student loan bills, gone shopping for various things, and naturally eaten a lot of food. Delicious photo worthy food that I have been saving for my return to my blog.

And so, without further ado, the entry of the day - sushi.

Right across the street where my boyfriend and I live is a strip mall with various stores, including this sushi place with the ridiculous name of Cha-Cha Sushi. It's pretty small and we weren't sure if it would be any good or not, but this restaurant had some of the best sushi rolls I'd ever had. Yes, some of their creations were not traditional at all, but all the ingredients were fresh and delicious and they didn't charge me a fortune to have unagi (eel) with one of mine. The staff was also very very nice. Now I know why that place is always busy (it is one of the highest rated sushi places in San Jose, CA on Yelp actually) and Matt and I have already been craving to go back.

Strangely enough, despite it being one of the most naturally photogenic of foods, I do not seem to have any other recent photos of sushi. I guess that is simply a testament to how fast I usually eat my sushi, especially if it is coming from a boat or a conveyor belt. I will try and take more. But for now, another culinary surprise will be revealed when I update (no long breaks this time!) tomorrow.