November 2010
2 posts
Moved!
Stanfood is now at thestanfood.com.
2 tags
Pizza and Macarons in Berkeley
Saturday morning, I went up to Berkeley to interview two Korean families for my thesis. Korean children are the cutest little people ever, so my morning was already perked up just from working with them, and when the families invited me to stay for lunch, my day was pretty much made - a home-cooked Korean meal with two lovely families?! I like research.
The meal was simple and delicious - a...
October 2010
2 posts
6 tags
"Meats", Sweet Potato Man, and the Sausage Inferno
Soo…I’ve been really busy. Between school, work, and job-hunting, I haven’t had much free time to keep up here, but I’ll try to start writing more again, it’s good for me. And for you.
Friday night, a bunch of us took Yi’s friend from high school out to dinner at Garden Fresh, the vegan Chinese restaurant. Despite it being Friday night, we managed to get a...
Something amazing is coming.
Stay tuned.
September 2010
5 posts
2 tags
Oh. It's time for school.
Thursday, we moved from our box house to Jerry, so I spent most of Wednesday running around to get everything ready.
One thing I needed was a new duvet cover, so I drove out to Bed, Bath & Beyond, all ready for some crazy bedroom sheet shopping. There was construction on San Antonio Road, so I was already mildly frustrated by the time I pulled into the plaza where BB&B was, and when I got...
4 tags
The love of baguettes (and fake meats)
Today, I drove to San Jose to get some recordings for my thesis, which pretty much just involved me playing with adorable Asian children. The little dude who opened the door when I got to the house just went and hugged me right there without even knowing who I was - all together now, AWWWWW. So anyway, that went really well. Yay.
We finished up around 2:30, by which point I was pretty hungry, as...
5 tags
Levy's Jewish Rye
The morning after the last dinner party, I went to the Hobee’s in Town & Country for breakfast with Ali. It was my first time at Hobee’s, and Ali was pumping up the blueberry coffee cake (which comes as a side to almost every dish), so I took her advice and had the coffee cake with my chicken-apple sausages, eggs, and home fries. Taking terrible pictures/not taking pictures at all...
1 tag
Last Dinner Party.
I was completely terrible at taking pictures of things at this dinner, so…yeah. MY B.
One of my favorite parts about living in the Box House this summer has been having big (and little) dinner parties. Steaks, Momofuku dinner, Cheddar Bay crab boil, Gilroy dinner; these dinner parties let me play at being a cook and gave me an excuse to buy and try things that I wouldn’t have done for...
2 tags
Do not order the Skip's Scramble.
Despite what my friends might try to tell you, I’m from Syracuse. I was born there, lived there for my entire life before Stanford, and I bleed orange.
Last night, when I saw that Man vs. Food was having its Syracuse episode, I was all over it - I decked myself out head to toe in orange, ran outside into a blizzard and built a Jim Boeheim snowman, put “What You Know About Math”*...
August 2010
6 posts
4 tags
Eat Real. Eat Korean. Nn-ch nn-ch nn-ch.
Once upon a time, Miriam sent out an email to the Gilroy Garlic Festival-ers to let us know about the Eat Real Street Food Festival that was coming up.
Street food?! I LOVE STREET FOOD! I was in, everyone else was in, and it looked like the weekend was going to be pretty solid.
And then we thought about making the trip out to Oakland really worth it, deciding to spend the night in SF and go...
3 tags
Sandwiches and James Franco
I think we can all agree that sandwiches are kind of awesome. It’s not really the portability that gets me, because I’m usually sitting down anyway when I’m enjoying a sandwich, but rather the made-in-heaven marriage of bread and filling that makes for endless parties in your mouth, their simplicity and unfussiness, the satisfying feeling of getting a bit of every part of a dish...
1 tag
Cooking by the book
When I cook, I’m all about experimenting and adjusting as I go, but when it comes to baking, Stephanie knows what’s up:
See, I’d love to be able to start throwing crazy shit in my mixes and to play around with ratios, but since I’m still working on developing my baking sense, for now, whenever I come across a delicious-sounding recipe, I tend to follow it pretty...
3 tags
I don't want no cake on my birthday, I want my...
The title of this post comes from Birthday by Flo Rida. What a boss, eating cake every day and not getting fat.
Carnitas, lengua, and pupusas, oh my…
On my birthday, my friend James moved in with us, and being a scholar and a gentleman, he decided to buy me dinner. I was feeling like having Mexican, and James also needed to buy sheets for his bed, so we decided to go to Rincon Sabroso,...
1 tag
Butter. Mochi.
Mochi’s pretty awesome.
You know what makes everything better? Butter.
So what do you get when you combine mochi and butter?
PARTY IN YO MOUTH, AKA BUTTER MOCHI.
I recently found out about this Hawaiian specialty, seeing it described as a custard-flavored mochi. Now, I don’t know about you, but custard’s pretty much the shit, and now I could have it in mochi form? Whoa. Then...
5 tags
Chickens Don't Clap: Jang Su Jang, Back A Yard,...
Now that I’m working full-time, I get really excited about weekends.
When 6 o’clock rolls around on Friday, I jump up from my desk, shout “WOOHOO! IT’S THE WEEKEND!” then barrel over any co-workers standing between me and the door. I’m extreme like that.
Yeah, weekends are pretty awesome. I finally get to have a good night’s sleep, relax, get some...
July 2010
8 posts
3 tags
Five Guys, Five Girls, and Five Bites from the...
All I did last weekend was eat. A real Fatty McFatFat sort of weekend. Good times.
Five Guys
Friday, I went up to Fremont to get burgers at the newly opened Five Guys. Five Guys is like the East Coast version of In-N-Out (and won the Serious Eats poll for the best fast food hamburger), and while I’d only had it once before, I remembered it being better than In-N-Out:
I was making a...
1 tag
Boiling crab
Warning: The following post contains graphic images of crabs; if you’re as freaked out by crabs as I am or if seeing crabs being prepared for a boil isn’t your thing, you might want to avoid this post…
Jono and I had been thinking about having a crab boil for a while, so last night, we picked up four giant Dungeness crabs from Ranch 99 and invited our friends James and Matt over...
2 tags
Corn dogs, slutty cakes, and ugly baguettes
Saturday, we decided to take advantage of the beautiful weather by going to Santa Cruz. Chilling at the beach, eating fried things on the boardwalk, maybe riding a sketchy carnival ride or two - summer things, you know?
Unfortunately, the weather decided it would be fun to mess with us, so while it was sunny and high 70s in Stanford when we left, Santa Cruz was grey, windy, and extremely chilly...
1 tag
Wetsuit Muffins
Last night, I was searching for a recipe that didn’t involve lots of butter (we were low, and I didn’t want to go to Safeway just to buy butter) when I came across a recipe for cinnamon roll muffins.
All of the deliciousness of a cinnamon roll, stuffed into a cute muffin package? COULD IT BE DONE???
The recipe started out simple enough.
Flour, 1/3 cup sugar, salt, yeast, milk,...
2 tags
Reno-knead Bread: A Huge Tiny Mistake
About a week ago, I bought a lovely Lodge cast-iron dutch oven, mostly so I could bake bread in it. While it’s been around for a couple years now, I’d only just tried Jim Lahey’s no-knead baking this summer, badly burning my cheap ceramic pot on my first attempt. I didn’t want to risk burning the pot even more, so because it’s my quest to eventually make something...
1 tag
Dinner Party
Given that we had a long holiday weekend and I had a bit of extra time on my hands, I decided to have a mini-dinner party and invited my friends Miriam, Erica, and Ming over for dinner on Saturday night. I’d recently borrowed the Momofuku cookbook from Palo Alto library and I thought that the recipes looked both delicious and doable, so I decided to bang out a few of the more summery-looking...
1 tag
It's Peanut Butter Jelly Time
When I came across Jim Lahey’s recipe for no-knead peanut butter and jelly bread, I nearly keeled over in amazement. Two of my favorite things - bread, and pb&j - combined into one??? YOU CRAZY JIM LAHEY, YOU CRAZY. BUT I LIKE YOU FOR THAT. I took me two months to actually getting around to making it…I’m stupid.
After combining all the ingredients (flour, yeast, salt,...
2 tags
Some Summer Cookin'
I’m staying in a nice little house right off-campus this summer, and freed from a mandatory meal plan, we’ve been cooking and baking and laughing and cornholing. Everyone except Buster, that is.
James’ Wheel O’ Cheese
Our friend James bought us eight blocks of Fontina cheese. Too much Fontina cheese.
Housewarming Party Snacks:
Candied peanuts (David Lebovitz)
...
December 2009
4 posts
I’ll be in Paris for the next three months so stanfood won’t be updated again for a long while, sorry! Until I get back, you can follow me at stanfoodabroad.tumblr.com as I eat French things.
3 tags
Mondo Mandu - Zazang, Santa Clara
Every once in a while, I just have to get some jajangmyeon.
I had the jajangmyeon at Tong Soon Garden during the summer,and while they serve a fine bowl of jajangmyeon, it was a little on the pricey side (for jajangmyeon) and so I thought I’d try somewhere different.
So, I looked for other restaurants serving jajangmyeon, and one name instantly jumped out and clobbered me over the face...
5 tags
Oh ha, I forgot all about this - Villa 08,...
Yeah…this is three months late.
I think it was September? My incredibly strenuous summer of research was winding down, and our friends Sam and Ali had just returned from their own busy summers, so we decided to look forward to the new school year by going out to eat, as you do. When we went to Ramen House Ryowa for my birthday, I’d noticed a Chinese seafood buffet next door, and so we...
2 tags
When I'm feeling sick I stop feeling sick and...
Back in middle school and high school, I would never get sick during when I had school. My ability to show up to work day after day was Cal Ripken Jr.-esque, and if my non-competitive school had handed out attendance awards I surely would have collected a bundle of them. The downside of being so awesome was that somehow I would consistently get sick during breaks, as if my body was delaying the...
November 2009
1 post
3 tags
墙洞村 - Sam Wo Restaurant, San Francisco
It’s been a while.
I’m sorry it’s been so long since the last post, this quarter I haven’t gone out to restaurants as much because I’m trying to save money so that I have lots to spend on food next quarter, when I am in…Paris! Baguettes and macarons all day long, that’s what’s going down January to March, brace yourself Stanfood.
But back to the...
September 2009
4 posts
3 tags
Tong Soon Garden, Santa Clara
A couple weeks ago, I was craving jajangmyeon. It’d been a very, very long time since I’d had any, and my last memory of jajangmyeon was the Chinese zha jiang mian that I’d tried at a university cafeteria during our orchestra’s China tour, not the real thing. So, on Labor Day, I took a bus down to Santa Clara/Sunnyvale, which I knew was a Korean-heavy area and likely to...
1 tag
IKEA Restaurant, East Palo Alto
When my friend Sam told me that a grand meal of Swedish meatballs could be had at IKEA, I was understandably skeptical. Surely she was pulling my leg in trying to convince me that a furniture store had a restaurant selling Swedish meatballs, and if they did have such a restaurant, there was no way that they could be very good. But, I trust Sam on matters of food and I was hoping to buy a...
1 tag
Always get the pancakes - Stacks', Menlo Park
The last time I went to Stacks’, I didn’t order pancakes and ended up with an extremely disappointing order of steak and eggs. Fool me once, shame on me, fool me - I can’t get fooled again. Or so I thought.
This time around, I knew I was going to order some delicious pancakes, and so that’s exactly what I did.
I split a large stack (3 pancakes) of banana macadamia nut...
Long Overdue - Speederia Pizzeria, San Carlos
Until last Thursday, I hadn’t had a great slice of pizza at Stanford. In the two years I’ve been here, I’ve had okay California-style pizza and sometimes I get strange cravings for Treehouse pizza, but every New York-style slice I tried was just no good. Too thick, too small, balance of sauce and cheese not right - the Peninsula fails at New York-style pizza. I’m from...
August 2009
5 posts
4 tags
Come on food, shift, shift back to good again -...
This is a very late post.
On Friday the 14th we went to Hot Pot City. I Takeru Kobayashi’d my way through a mountain of beef balls but left the HPC feeling surprisingly well, an excellent change from the disgustingly stuffed feeling I normally get after an all-you-can-eat challenge.
On Saturday the 15th I woke up feeling miserable. Bloated, urpy, I just didn’t want to think about...
4 tags
Invitingly mediocre - Hot Pot City, Milpitas
This week was the last week that the summer session students were at Stanford, so we decided to have a nice dinner to say goodbye to our new friends Kanghee, Xingyi, and Vicky. Matt had been wanting hot pot for a long time, despite repeated warnings from James that he would just be disappointed, and so Friday night we made the long drive to Milpitas to eat at Hot Pot City.
Hot Pot City. Hot Pot...
4 tags
I don't want no cake on my birthday, I want my...
A Korean tradition is to eat miyeok guk on one’s birthday. While I don’t particularly like miyeok guk (it sort of reminds me of something that Charlie Bucket would eat, a thin, watery soup), I thought perhaps I should respect tradition for my 20th birthday. I was going to go out with friends for a birthday dinner, and of course, being the birthday boy, I was given the privilege of...
2 tags
Things with silly names - Pasta?, Palo Alto
One of my favorite books growing up was The Westing Game. I thought it was a marvelous book, and one of the many little things I loved from the book was the idea of a Chinese restaurant on the top floor of your apartment building. How awesome would it be to just walk up a couple flights to have delicious spareribs whenever you wanted? But, ouy, the restaurant’s name. When Ms. Wexler...
3 tags
Learn Chinese - China House, Mountain View
Last week, my dad was at Stanford for a conference, and, as you do when your parents are visiting, we went out for dinner. Four days in a row. I never turn down quality food with family I haven’t seen in a while, but oof, four days in a row, I was a bit puffy at the end of the week.
Anyhow, the first night we went to Palace Korean BBQ in Sunnyvale, which was fine, but I forgot to take...
July 2009
8 posts
2 tags
Low expectations, and still disappointed -...
When I was little, my favorite restaurant was Olive Garden. To my youthful, inexperienced self, there was nothing better than the unlimited salad, hot breadsticks, and heaping portions of pasta that Olive Garden served. Now, I’m older and know better than to waste my money on the limp salad and characterless pasta that Olive Garden puts out (although, I must admit, I’m still partial to...
The Gilroy Garlic Festival
We drove to Gilroy.
It seemed like everyone was going to Gilroy today.
A one hour drive stretched out into a two hour drive.
We finally made it to the Gilroy Garlic Festival, delicious garlic perfuming the air.
So hungry!
So much to eat!
I opted for a Combo Plate to get a sampling of garlicky food. Mushrooms in a garlic oil sauce, penne with pesto, calamari, garlic bread, and a...
2 tags
San Jose Asians love their seafood - The Boiling...
Yesterday, we decided to go to The Boiling Crab in San Jose. I had read on Yelp that the wait at The Boiling Crab would be terrible if we arrived much later than 6:00, so we left Stanford at 4:45, hoping to sneak in ahead of the rush. Unfortunately, this placed us right in the middle of rush hour, and we ended up reaching The Boiling Crab around 5:45, a little later than we would have liked,...
3 tags
More than food - Totoro, Mountain View
I like to think about food. I read food blogs, restaurant reviews, and cookbooks in my spare time, daydream about memorable meals and things I want to eat, think about what I’m currently eating and why it tastes so good. But there are some special meals where I’m able to stop my thinking from getting in the way of my enjoyment of the meal, and even if the food isn’t all that,...
2 tags
Dreaming of Dim Sum - Asian Pearl, Fremont
I had quite the dream last night. I was walking around a Vietnamese-Jewish town - not a town divided amongst Vietnamese and Jewish people, but a town of Vietnamese Jews. And in this town, I was searching for dim sum.
I know what you want to ask: “how does Tim come up with these marvelously creative fantasies?” Well heyo, I can explain exactly how my brain created this magical...
4 tags
Black Broth and Kimchi - Maru Ichi, Mountain View
I love noodles. Noodles, noodles, noodles. Here it goes down, down into my belly. Spaghetti, linguini, Japanese ramen, pho, pasta salad, Korean instant spicy ramyon - hooray for noodles! Last night, I was thinking about the Taiwanese beef noodle soup I ate last week, and I decided I really wanted noodles. I started looking on Yelp for Asian noodle places in the area, and I found two ramen places...
1 tag
Banana bread is hard work
Last week, I was watching the latest episode of Weeds, snacking on Goldfish and drinking water - (relatively) healthy snacking. During one scene, Andy was making banana bread when Nancy came into the house and said, “mm, that smells incredible.” Smells incredible?! To hell with healthy snacking! I hurled my Goldfish against the wall in frustration that I didn’t have banana bread,...
4 tags
Cupertino - A&J Restaurant (Ban Mu Yuan)
Growing up in Syracuse, my exposure to Asian food was limited. We had Korean frequently, with my mom cooking at home and our family going out to a couple Korean restaurants every now and then, and like any American family, we ate take-out Chinese, but that was about it. Being in California has been super for many reasons, but one big reason is the variety and quality of food here, and Asian...
June 2009
5 posts
2 tags
Menlo Park - Stacks'
Since coming to Stanford, I’ve been hella into brunch. Breakfast food is awesome to begin with, and when you get to roll out of bed at 11, walk sleepily to the servery in your pyjamas, and then eat as much breakfast food as you want, how is that not the best thing in the world? French toast, pancakes, pastries, donuts, cereal, oatmeal (whatup carbs), eggs, fruit, lunchy food - yes!
This...
4 tags
Mountain View - Sushi 85
Yesterday I went to Tofu House and loved their painfully delicious sundubu jjigae. Today I had another painful eating experience, but unlike the jjigae, it was not a so-painful-it’s-good experience, but an I-am-quite-literally-going-to-explode-and-die experience. All-you-can-eat sushi.
You might remember that I went to Hokkaido Seafood Buffet with my friends during spring quarter. Before...
2 tags
Palo Alto - Tofu House
I eat Asian food a lot at Stanford. Chinese food in the dining halls, Chopstix at Tressider, Thai Cafe, and netappetit on campus, and sushi, Thai, dim sum, ramen, pho off-campus. I eat a lot of Asian food, but I never seem to eat Korean food - what a shame! Part of it might be that Korean food’s just harder to get into than Chinese, Japanese, Thai food, especially Korean food that’s...
1 tag
"Hunger is the best pickle" - Benny Franklin
Everything tastes so good when you’re hungry, no? Examples:
When you’re camping, packaged hot dogs taste amazing because you’ve gotten so hungry from fiddling around with your little burner which takes forever to cook the dogs - mmmm!
When you’ve just finished a long Little League game and are a hot mess, the Capri Suns and cookies that someone’s mom brings are the...
3 tags
Palo Alto - Sushi House
This entire week, I had been craving sushi. Our super chef Raj was going all out for our last week of meals - giant garlic shrimp (AMAZING), bread pudding (best dessert at Stanford), chicken fingers (just like Stern Late Nite!), decadent mac ‘n cheese, ribs, a big beautiful barbeque on the last day of school - and it was all great, but by the end of the week I just wanted something clean and...