Rice weevil found in my Rooster brand fragrant rice. Imported from Thailand. Photo by Don Tai
Appearing in our fragrant rice, these rice weevils. I saw a dead one in recently cooked rice. This one was alive as I was scooping rice out. The are 2mm long and crawl.
We buy Rooster brand jasmine rice, or fragrant rice, from Thailand. Apparently they can survive for up to 2 years, but are killed by heat of 60C for 15 minutes, which my rice cooker certainly does. Apparently they are harmless.
Beets clearly beats Beats, especially if you like to eat sweets. Beets, or 甜菜 tiancai, in Chinese, are obviously a sweet (the chinese character 甜 means sweet) vegetable.
I nuked a couple for 8 minutes, peeled the skin and they were sweet. The water is blood red.
Beets, bookending a fake copy of Beats. Photo by Don Tai
Don Tai and his Sony DSC-H2, Zoodles and Meat Ball Pasta Sauce, Toronto, Canada. Photo by Don Tai.
Compare, we are, of Big Weed’s new iPhone SE vs my 2009 Sony DSC-H2, shooting in the same light, location, time, date and subject: Zoodles in Meat Ball Pasta Sauce.
Yesterday I had cooked beef meat balls in a tomato pasta sauce. Today I spiralized zucchini into pasta, hence the zoodles shootout. Making zoodles literally takes seconds and you need not cook them. BTW both of us thought the uncooked zoodles and pasta sauce, heated in the microwave for 50 seconds, were a great wheat noodle substitute.
Bought yesterday, I did, a Starfrit Spiralizer. Since Little Weed wanted to see how it worked his first choice, of course, was french fries.
Spiralized white potato was really simple to do. It looks but does not taste like pasta spaghetti. Photo by Don Tai, Toronto, Canada
I used the smallest shoestring blade, the spaghetti size, which turned out to be too small. Potatoes need a larger sized tube. It took only 8 minutes in my deep fryer but came out acceptably. There are shoestring french fry recipies out there that are baked rather than deep fried. I’ll try that next.
Mulberries, we have in the backyard, compliments of our large black mulberry tree. With it comes the mulberry mess. Well, you either frown or you make the best of the situation. In this case: mulberry sorbet.
It started as a sproutlet at the side of our house. I was unsure if it was actually a mulberry as there were 3 or 4 different types of leaves growing from the same plant. I thought it was, so transplanted it to a sunny location and waited 4 years until it started fruiting. It has been going strong ever since.
Black mulberry fruit, Toronto, Canada, are messy to pick but delicious. Photo 1 by Don Tai
Every year our black mulberry tree, of the genus family Moraceae, shoots out new branches, which bear fruit the next year. This tree is consistent, and the fruit is very good.
Chinese people have a connection to the mulberry tree. Long ago white mulberry leaves were fed to silkworms in order to produce silk. Therefore the mulberry plant was forbidden to export from China.
Seven bamboo utensils, 3 spatulas, 3 spoons and maybe a pasta scooper, purchased in Toronto, Canada. What are their purposes and why so many? I will think about them. Photo by Don Tai
Mum offered me some spoons, which I did not really think about. After all, what is there to now about spoons. As with all simple things in life, they are not so simple once you dig into them. How many types of spoons can there be? Lots. What the purpose of the spoon with the round hole in it?
This Oster meat slicer model 319-66 is not professional but does the job well enough. It is a little hard to adjust and clean, but was inexpensive.
Big Boss likes to stir fry, and so if I cut the meat too thickly, I catch hell. Yes, small but terrifying, and I am not talking about the knife. We want fresh meat sliced very thinly for Chinese stir fry, or for Korean hot pot. Thin enough to be translucent. How do you do this with fresh meat? Buy pork loin, drain liquids, cut in half, freeze, slice with meat slicer, and then if you wish, vacuum seal in small bags, then refreeze.
Think, you would, that two brands of yogurt that are both 0% milk fat, that they would taste the same. But oh no, they taste very different. We usually buy Yoplait Source Zero yogurt, but there was a sale at our local Chinese store on Astro Original with 0% m.f., so I bought some. It turns out the Astro is terribly sweet, and for good reason: at 12 g of sugar, or 1 tablespoon, it has 3 times the sugar than Source Zero. We won’t be fooled again by Astro Original.
Spare time, I had, and wanted to see where someone was physically located in China. The place is a small town on the border of Shanxi and Inner Mongolia, on the Yellow River. What were the odds that I could find her exact location and get a satellite photo of her building?
I started using Google Maps, which was pretty helpful. Considering that Google is not allowed in China, they still had maps of the small city and specifically the 1km section of road that interested me. The sat photo showed great detail, as you can see, but the roads from the diagram did not coordinate very well with the sat map. In fact they were really so far off that some roads went underwater, like tunnels.
