Kitchen Wench

[Photo from Indradi Soemardjan/Wikipedia]

On Friday, Lee and I went out to eat Malaysian food at Penang in Bethesda. Penang is actually a small chain, and I’ve eaten at their restaurants in Chicago and New York. One of my favorite Malaysian dishes, which I first sampled at Penang in Chicago, is hollow vegetable (also known as water convolvulus) stirfried with chilies and shrimp paste (kang kung blachan). After some coaxing, Lee agreed to forgo beef in favor of this unknown vegetable.

However, when we attempted to order it, the waiter informed us that they didn’t have any hollow vegetable. We would have been satisfied with that answer, but the waiter went on to explain that kang kung has actually been banned in the US, which is why they don’t serve it anymore. Banned?! How can this be??? We ordered the beef rendang instead, and it was good, but no substitute for my beloved hollow vegetable. After dinner, I hit up the Google to find out if our waiter had been telling us the truth. Read the rest of this entry �

Well. This is kind of embarrassing. My apartment has a Jenn-Air glass top stove, and I’ve been having a hard time getting it as clean as the day I moved in. But, thanks to the power of the internets, I just spent my Saturday night reading the Southern Living message board’s “Cleaning Glass Top Stove” thread.

During this time, southern ladies with handles such as “emptynester” or “2kidsmom” offered their opinions on razor scrapers, discussed the merits of Ceramabryte vs. Weiman cream polishes, comiserated over annoying “MILs” (Southern Living speak for “mother in law”), and recounted tales of scraping off boiled-over hot pepper jelly.

I felt like I entered into a different place… a place where people say “ya’ll”, actually make their own jellies, and are delighted by grandchild-proof burner switches. And, while this has been very educational and will hopefully lead to a cleaner range, I think I might be turning into a 57 year old woman from Texas.

I’m not someone who often gets mistaken for another person. In fact, I think I can count on one hand the number of times someone has told me I looked like or mistaken me for someone else. So, it was rather upsetting to find out that I have a doppelganger: Kitchen Wench at The Tudor Shoppe.

Just kidding. About the wench costume anyway; mustard yellow is so not my color. But not about the doppelganger. In the big, bad, blogosphere, there is a another Kitchen Wench. And she clearly has a better digital camera than me. More disturbing still is that she is also Asian and her name also starts with a vowel.

Okay, the vowel thing really isn’t weird, but the other similarities are a little troubling. As I see it, there are still a few things left to redeem me.

1. She lives in Australia. Australia is far away. I am perfectly content letting someone else be the official kitchen wench of Australia.
2. I have the .com extension (which I waited a full year to to purchase because some lady was using it to park her defunct catering start-up).
3. It’s hard to photograph food when you live in a basement apartment.
4. My basement apartment is awesome.
5. If Slim Shady can do it, so can I.
6. And, most importantly, this girl probably doesn’t know I even exist.

I am sitting in my living room watching a Paula Dean marathon on the Food Network. My hope is that this festival of butter, eggs, mayonaise, and southern charm will culminate with “Paula’s European Vacation”, as I think that watching Paula eat her way across Europe for the first time will probably be fattening and entertaining.

I’ve been watching an awful lot of the Food Network lately, but the truth of the matter is, I haven’t cooked anything since those oatmeal cookies, save a delicious grilled Rachel sandwich. Ever since being spit out from my undergraduate institution last month, I’ve been trying to get my life reorganized for this rude entry into “The Real World.” Right now, that means being preoccupied with money (or lack thereof) until my first paycheck, as well as packing up everything I own in preparation for moving. This doesn’t leave me a lot of time or energy to cook, though I have obsessed over microwaves, glassware, and trying to fit a mandolin slicer into my check-in luggage.

Instead of creating, I have been consuming (albeit in moderation), but frankly, it’s just not the same. Good food is delicious, but I feel so… passive. And a little bit bored. Expect some changes in this blog in the upcoming weeks–it’s going to expand and change shape as I adjust to urban living, eating out on the cheap, dollar-streching, and cooking dinner for two most nights of the week. I’m pretty excited about getting back into a rhythm and getting creative–but that seems pretty far away at the moment.

In the meantime, it’s back to watching Paula find 101 uses for the canned biscuit.