D.I.Y #2 - onigiri

Oh!nigiri!1!  

Have you ever been watching an anime and seen the characters chowing down on onigiri and thought, damn that looks good!  I want some, but how do I make them?  Here’s how!

What are onigiri?  Basically, onigiri are rice balls with a filling (fish or picked vegetables, wrapped in seaweed for easy handling.  They are especially delicious grilled, as the rice gets nice and crispy.  That’s all – rice and filling.  I’m 90% sure the compact hand-held aspect (and cute shapes) add even more to the flavor.  The cuter a food is, the more delicious, right?

Ingredients

 1. Fresh, hot steaming rice.  You can mix some sushi vinegar in it if you like, although that is a bit untraditional.  The rice must be hot and steaming, or else it won’t stick together.

 2. Filling of your choice.  I’ve used some lightly salted salmon as the filling for mine, you can choose your own to taste.  If it is meat, pre-cook your meat and cut into small pieces.

To assemble:

1. Onigiri making is easier with molds, but you can use your hands to make triangular shapes as well.  Fill up the mold half way with the rice and insert a piece of meat.

2. cover with rice and compress

3 Flip out onto a plate.

That’s it!  Between each ball rinse out your mold in cold, salted water (and also your hands) to keep the next ball from sticking.  The salt in the water will add a bit of flavor.   Wrap and seaweed and enjoy!

I like my rice crispy so I decided to grill these. I whipped up a quick sauce of 1/3 soy sauce, 1/3 sesame seed oil, and 1/3 mirin.  Maybe there was some vinegar in there too.  Brush some onto each side of the onigiri and throw it on the grill…

(If you don’t have a grill, broiling also works pretty decently too.)

Lastly, proceed to stuff into your face, and enjoy! :D

Public places, lonely spaces

Last weekend I took a crack-of-dawn flight up to Canada to visit some family. In a favor that trumps all favors, my lovely roommate dropped me off at the airport about 4:45 am (meaning we got up at 3:30 after staying up really late watching Bring It On – probably a foolish idea). 4:45 am is an interesting time to see an airport.

I’ve always had a fascination with being at a place normally bustling with people during the deserted off hours. I think it started with school playgrounds during the middle of summer, my parents’ ice cream store after closing, even your own home in the wee hours of the night. It’s like seeing someone you know only from work on the weekends in a T shirt and shorts playing football in the park with their kids (or your teacher at the grocery store – what, you have a LIFE outside of how I know you? What is this third dimension you have?)

The airport is particularly interesting to me since it for the sole purpose of moving people from one place to another. When I think of an airport I think about excitement, joy - because I'm always trave

ling on vacation or really happy to be home. When it's empty you realize that all the feelings you have associated with a place were brought there only by you to fill that space. What does it do when no one is around?

For me it's somewhere between beautiful, sad, and eerie - seeing a secret face. When you're the only other person there it's rather intimate.

There’s another Doris Cheung out there from Vancouver who already did a whole series of photographers about places like airports with know people so I’ll refrain from making a dramatic, symbolic statement with an art exhibit and just leave you with these. I think 3 am would be an even better time, and if I only had a tripod…

This one is my favorite...taken when rushing to my proper terminal! It seems awfully symbolic to me but I will leave it to you all to find whatever meaning you like. :) I think the lighting could go moodier, but that's just me - although there's something about the slow shutter speed-drenched with light look that draws me too since I know it's pitch black outside!

For a full album view of the pictures I took, the link is here.

http://picasaweb.google.com/cheungd/SFO2009#

And in a case of life imitating art, I found out that the West End of Vancouver (Stanley Park, I think?) looks just like that famous Seurat painting that is always getting parodied, Un dimanche après-midi à l'Île de la Grande Jatte:

I just need a few people with umbrellas and that's it!

Indian Springs Spa

I have not-too-surprising confession: I love being pampered.

I used to think that spas were waste of money. A frugal Asian upbringing combined with equal parts being a tomboy and being plain poor influenced me growing up. Then I went for my first massage, courtesy of a gift certificate. Wow. From then on it was downhill for me; body scrubs, deep tissue massages, pedicures, manicures, actual salon haircuts instead of Supercuts...things that would horrify my mother with how much they cost and level of decadence.

Let me tell you though, massages and pampering are nice. Being good to yourself really makes you feel…good. It isn’t all about looking better although a pedicure will bring my toes from ugly straight to cute; it’s about taking care of yourself and liking yourself enough to know that you deserve it. And if you can get a lot of girlfriends to go with you to a spa day, so much the better.

Which leads me to the most perfect day in recent memory. – a trip to Indian Springs Spa in Calistoga to celebrate DJ’s recent graduation from Berkeley with Masters in Public Policy. (We wouldn’t be good friends if we let her go alone!) Calistoga is renowned for mud baths, mineral baths, and hot springs; Indian Springs features lovely spa treatments in addition to an Olympic sized swimming pool fed by said hot springs.

Maybe it was overeagerness on our part, but my roommates and I arrived in Napa about two hours early. But happily that meant we had plenty of time to load up on goodies from Bouchon Bakery. (Speaking of decadent. Thomas Keller decides he needs bread for French Laundry and just opens a bakery?) A beautiful bakery has the effect of reducing me to near tears, and my brain to quivering mush because it’s just so pretty and I want to eat everything. And the early hour (arriving at 8 am at Bouchon!) with insufficient coffee perhaps confused us further resulting in our buying enough pastries to feed our friends x3. But who could say no to glazed fruit tarts, pecan sticky buns, and éclairs? Stronger women than us have tried and failed. (That’s a lie. No one truly tries to resist!)

Once at Indian Springs, we settled in by the pool to snack (gorge) on baked goods, relax, and await our mud baths.

About those mud baths. There’s nothing like unexpected communal nudity to bring you and your friends closer together. I had been expecting a private or semi-private room with slate tile floors, candles, and darkness. But of course, this is mud we’re talking about. The attendants led pairs of us in turn to a white industrial shower room and proceeded to:

1. strip us of our bathrobes
2. rinse us
3. help us into the mud baths and cover us with mud
4. help us out
5. rinse us again
6. drop us into mineral baths
7. and then herd us to the steam room.

If it sounds a little disconcerting, it was – especially in not knowing what to expect and having a friend pop her head out of the shower to giggle “You’re naked!” (Thanks, DJ. You gave me a heart attack.)

Mud also gets…in places. It was a sticky, gooey experience, but really quite fun! I went off on a teeny fantasy about being a dinosaur in the La Brea tar pits after, but basically stopped thinking after being soaked and steamed to emerge wobbly legged and very VERY relaxed. Nothing going on in my brain after that! Just in time for soaking up some sun by the pool.

All in all, a perfect day. Spas might be an occasional splurge but all I can say is – decadence, come on over.

Here’s a link to pics from day:
http://picasaweb.google.com/cheungd/IndianSprings2009#