Supermeow!

Doug called Christian last night wondering if we wanted to get together for dinner tonight, which we figured sure, what the hey. Doug’s request was for Chinese because he wanted pork fried rice. In thinking about places to go, I read about a Szechuan place in Malden called FuLoon. It got a Best of Boston award from Boston Magazine in 2009 (i.e. last year). In the same way that I found out about Chau Chow City from Boston Magazine, so I have now learned of FuLoon! The menu sounded really interesting, and reading more reviews made it sound like something we all definitely wanted to try, so off to Malden we went in the midst of a horrible rainstorm. We were seated quickly and took off our stinky, wet overcoats. I’d made some notes beforehand of stuff that I wanted to try, specifically garlic chicken wings, JingDu pork pancake, and wok baked beef. I also wanted dumplings because hey, dumplings. Who doesn’t like dumplings? Christian got pepper steak, Doug got tea smoked duck and pork fried rice. The first thing to come out were the dumplings. They may have been Chinese Spaghetti Factory dumplings, they may not have been; I don’t care if they weren’t made fresh right there because they were very good, came with a nice dipping sauce. The next thing to come out was the chicken wings, and holy crap, let me tell you something, those garlic chicken wings were a very wise choice. An enormous platter of fried wings covered in fried minced garlic, sichuan peppercorns, black beans, and dried red peppers. It was suggested to us by the hostess that we put the garlic on our rice. Holy moly. I could eat that on anything. The pork pancake was wonderful and was more or less like the way I’d seen it described: a scallion pancake stuffed with pork dumpling filling. That was served with black vinegar, also fantastic. The wok baked beef was as good as claimed, but I really enjoyed the black pepper steak that Christian got, which was super-tender all nestled on a bed of sauteed onion, all covered in black pepper. I didn’t try the duck, so no comment; it came with four little steamed buns, and I ate one of the buns, which reminded me a little of a communion wafer. The pork fried rice was nice and light and contained no magenta pieces of pork, but instead tender little slivers of pork with egg, bean sprout, and onion. Iron Chef Chen Kenichi would be proud. It was all-around fantastic, and I look forward to going again and trying something else. I believe the hype!

Last week at work, I learned how to make Wordpress themes. Yeah, cutting-edge. Bleeding-edge, I daresay. Anyhow, I may try to apply this knowledge to this blog. That nobody reads but me. SIGH…

The things taking up the majority of my time aside from work are the Anime Boston program guide and preparing for a panel at said event in April. I’m doing some light copyediting/proofreading for the guide with my favoritest collaborator Nicole. Nicole is someone that I reckon has a potentially huge future as a designer and commentator on all things cute. For reals. She’s a crackerjack-aces graphic designer to boot, and I have learned a lot from her. It’s been fun working on the program guide with her.

The panel presentation (you know, it’s not a panel discussion in that there is anyone other than me making the presentation, but anime conventions stick to that terminology – this is really a lecture) is on the topic of science and technology as presented in the video game franchise Metal Gear Solid. I’ll talk about some of the stuff and how close/far we are from actually achieving some of the things they talk about or use (and you may be surprised to hear how plausible some of these things are). Research is going well. One neat thing that happened in the past week is my former boss publishing some recent results that directly tie into my topic matter, so it’ll be fun to get to talk about that. The technology parts dealing with stuff like electronic devices and whatnot aren’t much of a problem for me to find out about and understand (as it’s what my workplace does and finally, after 10 years, do I finally start to understand what happens there). The life-sciences aspects are trickier and I am relying on my husband, a top scientician, to help me sound somewhat credible when talking about genetics.

We had some hamburger cutlet curry last night, making use of the last of the curry I cooked earlier in the week. As often happens, we had a bunch of rice left over, so I whipped up some rice balls, aka onigiri, aka samgak kimbap, using one of Maangchi’s fantastic recipes. Maangchi has yet to steer me wrong. I made my own kimchi after Christmas and I really think it’s got to be some of the best kimchi I have ever tasted and I will owe this to her recipe and accompanying video that made it very achievable. It’s a long process, but I’d not say it’s hard. It’s something to do when you’ve got a day off or a half-day from your usual obligations. Anyhow, yeah, let’s get to the gettin’.

I had some canned salmon that I bought a while ago for these very purposes, so I decided to swap the tuna in her recipe for salmon. This recipe couldn’t be easier to follow. There’s a good reason why you’ll see these made for little kids in trendy hipster bento lunchboxes photographed/blogged about by hipster parents online. It’s something you could do with kids. It was just as tasty to do this with salmon as tuna, what a shock. My eyes wandered to some of the sardines I’ve got lying around… I’m going to have to try that next…