Culinary Adventures In K-Town

One of my favorite places to eat out when I feel depressed is the row of Korean restaurants on 32nd street. My life seems to be saturated with tsures lately, so I dragged my wife there on Monday.

That area is known as K-Town, Koreatown or Little Korea even though it’s just one city block (32nd between Broadway and 5th). It’s a very interesting place. Towering over it is the Empire State Building.

The street is composed mostly of traditional Korean restaurants,

gleaming cafes (I wish I could have some bubble tea or other types of the sweet sweet goodness that they sell there)

and other businesses sprinkled in between.

What I usually go for is Korean BBQ. It works like this: you sit at a special table with a fire pit in the middle. The waiter places hot coals into it with a well practiced movement. Every time I see that maneuver I think about how much their insurance must cost them. Then they bring you your choice of raw meat, seafood or vegetables and you proceed to grill it. You also get a ton of little side dishes, souses and very fresh lettuce leaves to wrap your grilled food in.

I really like food wrapped in lettuce. I even thought about opening a little street vendor cart selling lettuce wraps. Lettuce wraps in my opinion are much better than burgers. They are Atkins friendly too.

Korean BBQ is not extremely cheap – expect to pay $15-20 per dish (and even though you don’t get a lot of meat, combined with side dishes and lettuce it’s a filling meal). You also have to order at least two dishes to be seated at the grill table. I highly recommend marinated tongue.

Another unusual food that I tried there is raw beef. It’s very fresh and is served marinated and very cold. Great stuff.

Now I Know Where Sinner Programmers Go When They Die

writing in smashing :

~ You are searched thoroughly at the end of every shift. You can’t put your coat on until you’re outside the store, and a manager has to search it first. Once outside, you’re patted down and may be asked to remove your shoes to make sure you’re not hiding any jewelry.

~ Being “friends” with anyone you work with is frowned upon, …

~ Any shopping bags/personal belongings/reading material/clothes discovered by the district manager will be thrown out immediately.
~ No “ethnic food” may be eaten on your break because it makes the store smell bad. You may only eat food that does not smell like anything.
~ No one with piercings or tattoos may be hired.
~ Avoid hiring anyone who is “aesthetically unpleasant” (e.g. ugly, fat, deformed, etc.) because they don’t “project the appropriate image”

WML : How to Good-Bye Obesity: Heart Rate Training. Malarkey? or Effective Way?

I am a hardened veteran of the battle of the bulge. There are a lot of factors working against me — genetic predisposition, laziness, sedentary lifestyle. Yet still, from time to time I wage a war on fat, and often enough come out victorious. I despise people who say that you should like your body the way it is. Body image hate is A-Ok in my book.

Generally I spent most of my life in various states of obesity. But three times I managed to bring my weight down to normal. The first time was when my parents signed me up for summer gym classes. Calisthenics and running 5 times a week for a whole summer really slimmed me down. Unfortunately the very charismatic coach we had ended up getting drafted into the Soviet army, and without motivation I stopped exercising and started gaining weight again. Then my dad got me into a tennis class. I got in only because he was a chief engineer in charge of building the stadium which housed the tennis courts where we played. I sucked at playing tennis, but by the time I left the Soviet Union my weight was back to normal.

American food, stress and more stress took it’s toll during my high school years. Still, one summer I took a gym class during summer school and took to running 10-12 laps around the stadium every day. My weight was back to normal again. But then I’ve got a job at Nathan’s Famous and gained a lot of weight eating free hot dogs and fries.

I never had any luck with diets up until now. Surprisingly enough Atkins diet really works. But of course it’s not enough. In fact, I lost 30 pounds and stalled. But then suggested that I try heart rate training.

There’s this company called Polar. They make very accurate pulse rate monitors. These monitors consist of two parts: a transmitter strap that goes around your chest and a watch which picks up the wireless signal from the transmitter.

The device continuously monitors your pulse so that you can adjust your effort level to stay in the fat burning zone. Luckily treadmills in the gym that our corporate overlord and beloved billionaire tyrant built for us already have Polar receivers inside. And as it turned out the gym attendants have transmitters available on request. You just punch in the desired heart rate and the treadmill adjusts to you. It also accurately calculates calories burned. And the overhead monitors are tuned into various Fox channels. Simpsons while working out — what could be better?

Running with heart rate monitor is just amazing. You don’t get too tired, but you know that you are exerting yourself just enough to burn fat. It’s very motivating. To keep myself further motivated I think I’ll buy myself an iPod when I loose another 10 lb.

If you were wondering, the subject line is a reference to the title of this book.

Diner

Missed my bus stop today (why don’t the bus operators announce all stops?) while reading. Since I was in that area anyway, decided to pick up some food from this really cool diner. It’s built in really cool 70s style.

Looks like some sort of an alien spaceship, that diner.

Senor Developer

My job title is Senior Web Developer or something to that effect. On of my managers at iXL joked that it’s really just a typo on my business card, and it should say Señor Developer. Har har.

In any case, I think I found a perfect food commensurate with my station:

This kind of reminded me about a story somebody told me about a graphics designer that worked at iXL. This designer dude liked to get really into his “creative process”. When somebody wanted to talk to him, he would ignore that person or try to chase that person away from his octapod. You see – he was CREAAATING! He was very creative all right. At one point he was working on a website for Lucent. And he spent a lot of time creating logo images. Boy, was he pissed when the client was very unhappy with the result. On his version of the logo “Lucent” became “Lucentè”. Lucent-ey. But he still could not understand why that was wrong.

By the way, I’ve heard some disgruntled programmers refer to the red circle on the logo as “bloody asshole”.

The One True Way of Making Tea

I think that I know 95% of all there is to know about making an ideal espresso. I even know the only half-, nay, quarter-acceptable drink in Starbucks. “Cafe Americano” – espresso diluted with water. But I know next to nothing about making a good cup of tea.

I remember something I’ve read in Bros. Strugatskie’s novel about some really Zen way of boiling water for making tea, but I could not find any good references on the web. I did find two interesting links though:

A Nice Cup of Tea by George Orwell
and
Rec.food.drink.tea FAQ

Hmm. In Russia, a common method of making tea is to make a concentrated tea infusion in a small teapot and then dilute it with water. I still do this sometimes. But I think a better method is to take a big teapot and make tea of drinking concentration in it. I guess I’ll get a big teapot and try that.

Take me out container / Take me out with the crowd

Here is something that I wanted to get for a long time. Hinged foam take-out containers.

They are easy to open, portable, don’t spoil the taste of the food like aluminum containers, don’t take up much room in the fridge.
This way I can cook enough food for a few days, put it in these containers and pop them into the fridge.

They are also good for storing fish filets :)

The General Theory of Tso’s Chicken

Ok, here I am ranting again about food not allowed by my low carb diet.

General Tso’s chicken. Mmmmm. Deep fried chicken cubes in sweet and spicy sauce. Droool.

Ok, if I can’t have it, I can at least finally find out who is this general and why the dish is named after him. Luckily I am not the first one to ask myself that question. Well, trusty google gave me some answers, but very few things are completely clear.

Is it an ancient Szechuan dish called “ancestor meeting place chicken” or was it “It was invented in the mid-1970s, in NYC, by one Chef Peng”? Probably the second.

General Tso seems to have been a real military general. My theory was that it’s genral in the sense of “concerned with, applicable to, or affecting the whole or every member of a class or category”, as opposed to “special”. Anyways, his specialty (huh, huh I made a pun) was Chinese and Muslim rebellion crushing. But were his “.. operations were carried out while he suffered from recurring bouts of malaria and dysentery”? Has he “… flunked the official court exams three times, a terrible disgrace …” or did he have a ” ..successful career as a scholar-administrator”? Was the chicken named so because “…General Tso […] had the top leaders of the Nian Rebellion executed with the proverbial “death of 10,000 cuts”[…] ” or just in admiration?

And how many puns can be made by people writing articles about the good general and his dish? Try to count in the following articles (which I qoted in my post):
Tso What?
Who Was General Tso And Why Are We Eating His Chicken?