tofu bánh mì and bubble tea

i have finally perfected one of my favorite meals and am so excited to share it with you! i work in a part of portland where there is are myriad asian restaurants and grocery stores. at least once a week i make the short trek with co-workers to best baguette for a sandwich and some bubble tea. i will leave that job with a healthy (?) addiction to bubble tea and after about five attempts making it in my kitchen and i think i’ve nailed it.

when i first heard of bánh mì i was very skeptical. asian food on a baguette. what?! how can those two foods be put together and make sense? but the origins offer an obvious explanation; vietnam was colonized by the french. for over a century france is there shoving its moral and religious values on the native people, taxing them, profiting from opium and alcohol trading, and eventually exploiting the natural resources of the area. only to leave once they’ve created the conditions that will lead to the vietnam war and the arguable genocide of a people.

this sandwich, like many others, is a legacy of colonialism. it makes me wonder what a free exchange of cultures would look like rather than the dominant culture appropriating things (and selling things like the “navajo hipster panty”). this sandwich is also so damn good. it’s a bit conflicting when prefaced with that history.

fish schmear with chips

oops. i left you alone again for a month.

i’m actually getting quite bad at this. i made the best peppermint brownies.. and didn’t take a photo. we had delicious yellow curry last night.. no photograpic evidence (hopefully i’ll remember when we have leftovers). i have a bunch of food that i’ve taken pictures of but its so far back i don’t know that i’ll remember the recipe.

my new years resolution is to figure out how to maintain productivity with my new work schedule. its strange that i was used to getting home around 7:30 and now that i get home around 5 (sometimes 4:30!) i seem to have less time to do things. and its not that i have less time! i just haven’t figured out how to come home, unwind for an hour, and get back at it: make dinner, go to a rally, do the dishes. about all i can muster is making sure i have breakfast, lunch, and clothes laid out for the next day so i can sleep in as long as possible.

chocolate coconut granola

continuing the ride on the granola train.. this is one of my favorites of the flavored variety because i’m not hugely into throwing a bunch of pie spices into my oats. add a chopped up banana to this and you’re in tropical breakfast heaven.

i created this recipe years ago when i was in college and fell in love with kashi’s coco beach cereal. this version is just as delicious but cheaper and probably healthier. because i don’t document my recipes well (until now with this blog!) i didn’t add quite enough cocoa powder but i changed the amount listed in this recipe so you won’t have the same problem.

what i have learned about food blogging

this adventure in food blogging will be four months old tomorrow. today wordpress informed me i have published my fiftieth post, i.e. recipe, so i say i’m not doing too bad sharing my kitchen with you. that works out to about a post every two and a half days (though we know in reality i post like mad on the weekends and am eerily silent during the weekdays).

initially i thought starting a food blog would be primarily about sharing my recipes with you. i recently was updating some html codes in earlier posts to make them all coherent (something i have learned much about since june) and i realized i wasn’t much of a sharer—a couple paragraphs about the recipe and onto the directions! now share my day, my stolen bike, my awesome farmer’s market buys, and now the fruit fly problem at our house that has persisted into october! (what?!)

there are a few other things i’ve learned about food blogging as i’ve skimmed the surface of this world (in no particular order). hopefully in time i’ll get into the thick of it.

“bubbie’s” pickles

today the alaskan and portlandian in me converged. i put on my xtra-tuffs and rain gear to bike down to the farmer’s market. but not just to shop around for groceries, i had a mission to get as many pickling cucumbers as i could.

i ended up biking home with six pounds of little cukes ready to turn into pickles. i’m sorry this recipe is coming so late in the year with cucumber season at its end. finding these cukes was a challenge as there was only one booth that was selling them and i took their whole stash. but never fear, you can use the widely available english cucumbers to make spears or chips if the tiny variety isn’t available to you.

i hope that you all by now have had the privilege of eating a bubbie’s pickle. they are by far the best pickle out there on the market. i’m not sure why but it might have to do with the fact that rather than using the quick pickling method of using vinegar, these pickles go old school and are fermented. the bonus is that your pickled will be among the best you have ever eaten, maybe even better than bubbie’s. the negative is that is takes at least a couple weeks until you can eat them. but it’s worth every second. you can also try them along their journey and choose when they are just right, participating in your little science experiment.