Random Tidbits: May - June

Grandma Tea's jang (aka lo mai gai, nom asom, sticky rice with mung beans and pork) is the best in our extended family. Nobody can make it taste as good.


I typically don't go crazy over them like Lucy. But on one particular day, I fried up some of Mom's batch of jang and had it for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Perhaps I was lazy to make anything else. Perhaps.





We had a large spread of food during one of our extended family dinners last month. Before that, Mom tried out a new batch of ham chim peng. They were still quite dense. I think that we need some double-acting baking powder or just give the dough more time to rise before frying.


Lucy helped make the prahok khati (aka minced pork curry with anchovies). It's different from gapit pao, which is made without the anchovies. We ate the prahok khati with sliced cucumbers and rice.


There was also salt and pepper shrimp and a large hot pot of samlor maju (Cambodian sour soup) with skate. My aunt also brought over bo kho.



We ended up having leftovers of a few things. Since we had some bo kho, I soaked some noodles and had it for lunch the following day. My aunt added her homemade spice blend in addition to the bo kho seasonings, which made it more fragrant and spicy.



We started to plant some herbs in our garden. This was the basil plants after a few days of being close to the flowers -- they got snacked on by little critters! That's my basil! I don't know youuuu!



How about some homemade baozi? Mom woke up super early and decided to make some. She experimented with adding canned beans and chickpeas. It tasted fine to me.





For Andrew's birthday dinner, Mom made a layered mung bean dessert called banh da long in Vietnamese. She made two types: one was softer than the other.



I had lunch with CA the day after. We opted to share the condensed milk brick toast at My Sweet Tea for dessert. When it arrived, we were both glad that we shared one order. We thought it was too much but then proceeded to inhale it in under five minutes. Woops.

The rain still hung around Ottawa. It wasn't as hard as the torrential rain we had the evening before, but it still rained hard, although it was brief.

We had a BBQ pork rib dinner. The pork ribs were baked in the oven for about two hours before getting a turn on the BBQ. We made a sauce using the pan drippings, onions, sugar, ketchup, and BBQ sauce.




Lucy and Jimmy brought some chocolate cake. We couldn't finish it, despite the pot of strong jasmine tea. The cake reminds Lucy and I of Matilda. Oh gerd, where's Mrs. Trunchbull? I definitely added some peanut butter to my slices of cake afterwards. It tasted like a peanut butter cup, except that the proportions were the other way around: more chocolate than peanut. It was so good!