Let’s start with:

Gingerbread

As much as I do enjoy gingerbread, I am allergic to its primary ingredient: the ginger.

My best friend in primary school used to hold annual gingerbread house parties around Christmastime. Awesome, right? It was. Unfortunately, that high concentration of sugar inevitably prompted dogs to come sniffing about; a dog ate my completed gingerbread contraption all three times afterward (it was after those incidents that I learned never to leave food unattended, lest it end up in the possession of dogs or … ‘friends’). While they may have technically saved me from anaphylaxis … I’d also really liked to have tried some.

Yo Mama

I still prefer Yo Mama to Berrygood. The original flavour at Yo Mama is tangier, and they’re more generous with their toppings, if not with their yoghurt (the dreaded hole!). And the logo is cuter.

The first time I was taken to Yo Mama, I was so happy I couldn’t eat for several seconds. Several looooong seconds that enabled Charmaine to get a head start on the fro-yo.

The evident bite marks in the fro-yo may somewhat contradict my tale, but those most likely belong to Charmaine or something.

Kimchi

According to my cravings list, in which I tally up all the cravings I’ve had since February ’09, I have had four intense cravings for kimchi. This fermented vegetable is apparently one of the top 5 healthiest foods in the world … and is really yummy. Especially from

Yoshinoya.

Despite there being only one vegetarian entrée on the menu, Yoshinoya is that incredible and rightfully earns a place of glory as the temporary screensaver on my phone:

The one time I needed it, the screensaver failed to load. But that’s what it should look like.

By all means feel free to view the above as a Christmas wishlist.

I also spent the past few days decorating my wall with horse posters kindly donated by some kind stranger German stream:

This is an incomplete Wall o’ Horse, but just a few posters shy of the completed version.

It took me a couple of days to complete … as you might (not) have noticed, everything is perfectly straight. Pictured above is also my very favourite fridge magnet; one depicting ‘The Laws of Straightness’. I’m pleased to announce that I’ve followed all the laws to the T.

It was about Fro-Yo.

Now before you gape in shock at the above oxymoron, or make any immediate judgments about the cool rather unusual subject of my dream, I ask you to first listen to this scarring subconscious encounter.

I was buying fro-yo. I guess this was Yo Mama instead of Berry Good, because I only ordered two toppings for $40 instead of three. The specific TNC at which I purchased this cup of oral delight was much less important to me than the actual cup itself, clearly.

The shopkeeper was unpleasant, unlike Aileen from Berry Good. Once, she gave me extra fro-yo when I onsidered buying a second cup of ‘Indulge’. AND I got an extra stamp, which meant one less to go before I get a free cup of fro-yo using my Berry Good card. Yeah as you can see, we’re pretty tight, Aileen and I. But evil virtual Aileen wasn’t like that. She grouchily scooped the swirls of fro-yo into the cup, and the moment she was finished, I knew she was spooning too little. According to my experience, the tip of the swirl has to at least reach 5cm above the rim of the cup. This one didn’t even go beyond it. Fuming at the injustice of her rationing, I complained vociferously.

However, little did I anticipate that she would respond with further bitterness. She snapped, “What toppings do you want?” “Oreo bits.” I immediately replied. However, the oreo bits weren’t well grounded, so they fell like bat droppings on my elegant white swirls of yummyness. The sight was most disquieting. Letting go, I ordered my second topping.

Now, you have to understand this- I was dreaming. I wasn’t in control of my decisions. The dream dictated the course of events. Perhaps it was out of some inexplicable desire to try out something new, or perhaps I just simply lost my marbles. Either way, I didn’t pick strawberries. Strawberries and oreos. It’s ALWAYS strawberries and oreos. But no, before I knew it, my hand directed itself towards some nutty granola bits. And before I could come to terms with this horrific revelation, iLeen 2.0 (hahahah get it) had already shoved the flakes of annihilation into my helpless cup.

It was terrible.

What was even worse was that, I WOKE UP before I got to eat my fro-yo. MY VIRTUAL FRO-YO! VIRTUAL $40 WASTED ON FRO-YO LEFT UNEATEN! 

I wonder what fro-yo would taste like in dreams.

I’m gonna chime “fro-yo, fro-yo…” before I go to sleep tonight.

That’s right.

This would’ve been an inspiring post detailing the grueling yet gratifying victory of our hockey match (have you noticed that many of my posts begin like this? hmmm), except we didn’t really have one. SIS refused to show – too intimidated by our continuous losing streak, perhaps? – so we had a satisfying 3-point, 5-goal walkover. Although we did play a friendly match versus DGS, winning 6-0 in under twenty minutes. That’s right. With 8 players infield. Everything’s down there on the match card (or … not), and it feels damn good to win for once.

But anyway, back to my original point; this isn’t going to be a post about hockey. Instead, I thought I’d blog about another love of mine – and further contribute to the growing Food category at the same time.

After that hockey match, we took a $88 cab down to Pier 3, and, subsequently, to the Circle-K nearby. Hannah marched right down to the magazine section, while I browsed around and wandered over to the ice cream freezer. That’s when I saw it – the ice cream pancake.

Now, I don’t think anyone currently reading this will fully grasp the intensity of this revelation. So, to do you all a favour, I did a quick Google search for ‘ice cream pancake’ – only to reveal pages upon pages full of useless images like the following:

Don’t let your mouth water yet. Pathetic. Seriously, what is that?

No. My pancake was more like this:

A sandwich with two pancakes is clearly superior, no? I think the sparkles in particular set it off nicely.

I tapped out about six texts calmly explaining the situation to Charmaine and Graeme. To be honest, it was cheap and didn’t even taste that good – but that’s beside the point. THE POINT is that, well, most people (myself included) would be happy with your everyday ice cream sandwich. But no, some mastermind out there didn’t think it was good enough and contrived a variation – in the form of a PANCAKE – in retaliation. Good on you, dodgy Chinese company.

Random quote on the ferry this evening:

There are some exceptions to this common phenomenon we call a mooncake. The two most cited are the Haagen Dazs ice cream mooncakes and the Peninsula custard mooncake.

But how is a surreptitiously molded piece of ice cream, covered in chocolate, anything close to a mooncake? In fact, how is it anything other than what it is, a piece of chocolate covered ice cream, with a mango sorbet as a filling in some cases? I understand many non-traditional forms of mooncakes exist, with fillings ranging from ham to tiramisu, but many a time they’ve managed to incorporate traditional elements – such as a flaky crust or even the modernly accepted “snow-skin” crust. But one common theme they’ve retained is a sense of price v product. A box of four Haagen Dazs “mooncakes” costs HK$209, at discount. You could get 1 tub of ice cream per “mooncake” at that price. Tub, please.

The Peninsular mooncake, on the other hand, is quite lovely indeed. It is small and bite-sized, but appropiately so with a solidified custard filling – any larger and it would be overkill. It has a deliciously aromatic, slightly salty smell, and the innards tastes like the condensed brother of the ??? (steamed bun with milk custard filling) . A box of 8 costs HK$198, which I thought was ridiculously expensive until I incurred the Haagen Dazs version. Still, the hotel’s mooncakes sell out early every year. They also donate HK$10 to charity for every box they sell, which is a nice and thoughtful advertising gesture – certainly better than nothing at all. 

What can you buy with $12.90HKD?

Today, I came to find the answer to that the hard way.

Like any other school day, I was again mulling over the snacks section in Wellcome debating over what to get as an after lunch snack. Today, the milk candy spoke to me. But of course, as audiences of the competitive, multi-market world today, it would not come as much of a surprise that there was unfortunately more than one brand of milk candy on display atop the calorie-laden shelves. One says, “I’m cheaper!”, while the other shouts, “You’ve never tried me before!” Believe me, it was definitely a tough call. Then, a man of trouble comes along. He, by the name of Clifford, unknowingly invades into my little inner banter and exclaims, “GET THIS ONE! IT TASTES SOOO GOOD!” So of course, swayed by peer influence, I got it- even though it was at least 3 dollars more expensive than the other brand. Even though it had a bug-eyed girl with an awkward straw hat staring out of its tin can. Even though ALL THE ELEMENTS WERE AGAINST IT.

And? I knew I should have trusted my instincts. Upon spending at least 5 minutes trying to pry the scotch tape off of the opening, I finally managed to open the battered tin lid just to find that there were only a disappointing 10 PIECES wrapped in INDIVIDUAL PLASTIC WRAPPER with identical scary-farmer-girls printed on them, which were placed inside ANOTHER plastic wrapper curled up to fit inside that deceiving pothole of a tincan.

How frustrating. Not only were there merely 10 pieces of milk candy in that tin can of chicanery, they had also ineffectively wrapped each individual candy in 3 LAYERS of protection. Plastic, plastic, and aluminium. That’s A LOT of resources invested into 10 sodding pieces of candy- that by the way, didn’t even taste that good! It was definitely not worth its price- I paid $12.90HKD for 10 pieces of artificial milk candy that probably cost less than 20 cents to make. So in consuming 2 whole dollars worth of candy, am I suppose to accept that I probably spent 3 more dollars on the complete exploitation of resources of this company, and another 7 dollars just to look at the ridiculously creepy cartoon farmer girl grinning back at me from its conniving aluminium surface?

I was outraged.

I hereby I cry out on behalf of all the victims of this despicable deception and trickery, that we shall stand up to this evilness! In fraternity and sorority we stand! Against the forces of overpriced food we stand! Against the wastage of resources for the creation of unpleasant cartoon characters we stand!

…

So I suppose what I’m really trying to say is, don’t buy Peko-chan milk candy.

I couldn’t find the blue version that I bought today, but this should give you sufficient visual pollution warning.

Apparently, it’s NFL tradition that a team’s rookie should take the rest of the team out to dinner, and without fail, this is what Larry English did.

Lucky waiter.

Then I stumbled upon this:

“For your average person, getting take-out from your favorite local eatery usually means spending between $25 and $50 for a restaurant prepared meal in the comfort of your own home. Hip-Hop mogul Kanye West put a whole new spin on expensive take-out when he recently ordered a meal for a meeting in New York City. No, he didn’t choose one of the thousands of ethnic options readily available to him in Manhattan, he wanted take-out from Wales.

The Welsh restaurant called British Raj serves Indian cuisine and agreed to deliver the expensive take-out for seven people from Wales to New York City on Wednesday March 7th. West and his cohorts dined on Raj’s cuisine at the after-party for a Snoop Dog concert in London a short time ago. Usually the restaurant delivers to a three-mile radius from its location, with London being close to 150 miles away, West may have gotten the wrong idea about their delivery habits.

Nonetheless, Raj agreed to deliver the meal for a cost of $3,900. This figure was reached by estimating the income of the restaurant for a two day period, the amount of time the executive chef, Kaysor Ahmed will be gone escorting the meal to New York City. The most expensive take-out meal will not be handed over by your average delivery boy. As mentioned before, the executive chef of the restaurant will be totally involved in the delivery by preparing, cooling, shrink-wrapping, and finally packaging the meal in dry ice before flying with it across the Atlantic when he will be constantly monitoring the temperature.

triangular golden greatness

The menu for the most expensive take-out meal includes specially prepared fish, vegetables, chapatti breads, and onion bhajees. This meal would cost about $40 per person to eat in the actual restaurant.” (http://most-expensive.net/)

 And there are 850 million people estimated to be undernourished (United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization)…..

 _______________________________________________

On music, I’ve rediscovered a great mix a good Swiss / French friend introduced me to back in Cape Town.

It’s Red Light Paris by Swiss DJ Joachim Garraud and French David Guetta.

“So as you struggle to catch the rhythm with your feet… ask yourself… can you dance to my beat beat beat beat…”

Yes yes, here I finally am! Real sorry about last week, a friend Alan was leaving to Canada for uni and so a bunch of us were out till pretty late for dinner by which time the other 6 amazing people decided I was just being too much of a procrastinator and put JJ on instead. But enough about that – oh I’m Charmaine by the way, your Monday blogger, though most people call me Char now, because an extra syllable is just soooo much of a hassle.

Anyway, I suppose I didn’t do a very good job of introducing myself in my profile (you can see for yourself if you REALLY want) so here’s a few things you should probably be expecting from my blogs to give you a better idea of who I am, because well, profiles kind of seriously bore me. So:

a) Reading my posts will probably sound a little too similar to the now famous site fmylife.com because I’m just a real ditz that way. Embarrassing stories and FAIL moments are my specialty.

b) I LOVE FOOD. Hence, I will talk about food as much as I want. You know what really cheered me up the other day? I read in the Bible that there are going to be FEASTS in Heaven, and I got really happy. Besides, Heaven’s supposed to be perfection x infinity, so imagine how absolutely AMAZING the food there will be!!

c) I’m an arts person, so don’t expect me to ever understand computer language – it is like a foreign dialect to me. Which is largely why this blog is so awesome, because you get people like Lil and people like me, who are different in every possible way and still manage to be great friends.

That’s PRETTY much all you need to know for now. You’ll figure it out along the way. Hope you’ve enjoyed this post as much as I’ve enjoyed looking at the picture of Yo Mama fro-yo attached to this. Should you be interested, the toppings are Oreo bits, fruity pebbles, strawberries and gummy bears. (the BEST combo EVER! … in my opinion.)