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Twitter and Food…

Posted in American, Korean, Los Angeles, Mexican, Miscellaneous/Quirky, News Headlines, Restaurant, street food, Technology, Travel on April 15, 2009| 4 Comments »

I haven’t even upgraded my iPod to an iTouch (I have an old iPod Mini) nor have I purchased a new laptop in many years. I have only just upgraded my mobile phone that includes a good camera, MP3 and internet capability but I can barely keep up with technology.

Twitter is, of course, the new micro-blogging site where you can tell the world every minute detail of your thoughts and doings at any given time. I signed up for an account the other day but I’m still wondering how to incorporate it into my life. So far, the only way that Twitter seems useful to me is if you use it on the go with your mobile phone but it’s definitely not made for stay-at-home mothers. Twitter’s usefulness in the food industry is a different story especially when restaurants update their menus and their whereabouts to all their following fans. This is especially useful if a restaurant’s location changes nightly such as a taco truck in Los Angeles.

NPR (National Public Radio) in the U.S. did an article on Kogi, the Korean-Mexican mobile restaurant (aka Taco Truck) in L.A. In the article Tweeting Food Truck Draws L.A.’s Hungry Crowds, writer Ben Bergman talks about how Kogi’s success is owed largely from their fans following Twitter to track where Kogi will be parked on a particular night and what specials there are each evening. Apparently, there are over 8,000 people following Kogi on Twitter and since joining Twitter over a week ago, I also became a Kogi follower even though I live nowhere NEAR L.A. and am not planning a trip there anytime soon. I am following Kogi just in case I get to go to L.A. within the year and use my cool phone to track them down one evening. I have to say that the combination of Mexican and Korean – two of my most favourite foods (apart from Japanese) makes me want to hop on the next plane to try their tacos.

Looks like old-fashioned food reviews in newspapers are not going to be the only influence on a food business anymore – seems like technology has caught up with networking sights such as Facebook and Twitter and to keep up with the trends and to attract future crowds, we have to keep our minds open and sharpened to the latest marketing tool. But I have to admit, even though I’m not exactly old, it is truly exhausting keeping up.

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Insects Anyone?

Posted in Asian, Bangkok, Birds, Bugs, Deep-Fried Food, Snacks, street food, Travel, tagged Andrew Zimmerman, Anthony Bourdain, Bangkok, Chatuchak, Eating Bugs, entomology, entomorphogy, Fried Bugs, Fried Cockroaches, silkworm cocoons on November 8, 2008| 6 Comments »

A vast array of fried bugs in Bangkok

Roaches at least 3 inches long and fried small birds

Sorry for the lack of posts – traveled a total of over 7 wks (mostly to visit friends and family) and can’t seem to quite recover yet. It doesn’t help that I just started a new full-time job so I’m exhausted as hell. Do you know how hard it is to go through thousands of photos to chose a few to post on a blog? Anyway, enough about me…

Whenever Andrew Zimmerman or Anthony Bourdain go on their tours of Asia, you always see them eating some type of insect so I was really hoping to find some form of cooked insect in Thailand. I was lucky to find this woman, who had a stand on one edge of the Chatuchak Weekend Market in Bangkok and I was quite excited that the variety was so immense! From what I can make out, there are silkworm cocoons, grasshoppers, crickets, and some beetle larvae in the first photo. In the second photo, in the foreground, are the most gigantic cockroaches I’ve ever seen and behind them, looks like some type of small bird (think it’s a chicken that’s not quite mature yet)!! At first I thought that those fried birds were fried bats…all of the items were deep-fried to a golden crisp and nicely garnished with green stuff (pretty sure it’s green onions).

I have had fried beetle larvae (the white ones that look like caterpillars) before, piping hot actually, and even watched crawling ones get plonked into hot oil and ate them soon after! Where the heck was this? Well, this was the last class in the entomology course I took at UC Davis. What did they taste like? French fries.

I was just not that adventurous and the heat (being about 38C and 80%+ humidity) definitely did not help. I just know that even though those huge cockroaches are deep fried, they will probably be a bit…squishy inside – yuck. I don’t mind handling them but eating them…that’s another story.

(Hey Jin, you would’ve been screaming so loudly!! haha)

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Street Stalls, Bangkok

Posted in Asian, Bangkok, Snacks, street food, Travel, tagged Bangkok street food, street food, street stalls on October 10, 2008| 5 Comments »

Traditional stalls set up near a KFC & McDonald's

I am not a wimp but my gut isn’t what it used to be. I went to Bangkok with EVERY intention on actually eating food off street stalls because they are often very tasty and authentic. Some of my best memories of eating throughout Mexico were the dodgy-looking tacos, ice creams and grilled corns from street stalls. The main reason why I didn’t eat at many of the stalls in Bangkok is because of the absolutely scary and appauling food-safety conditions. Let me remind you that it was very hot, (over 35C and over 90% humidity) and it was rainy season and so often, I’d walk by street stalls with bowls of meat sitting out in the hot sun for god knows how long!! Or, if it looked decently clean, I’d see the bucket of stagnant water that they were washing their crockery and cutlery in (not to mention they reuse wooden chopsticks) and realized that they didn’t refresh the washing water very often. Yuck! Also, because it was the very beginning of my around-the-world trip, I honestly didn’t want severe gastro problems so early on (especially since my next flight was 13 hrs to London).

I made a rule for myself that I would only eat something at a street stall if it wasn’t on washed crockery and only if it was piping hot when I purchased it. So, grilled & marinated chicken skewers qualified under that category and they were awesome! So juicy and tasty and it cost about $0.20 each and they were piping hot off the grill. One of the things that I couldn’t resist buying were cold drinks and fresh juices from the street vendors, especially during those scorching days. We bought thin popsicles, frozen in the most interesting manner (see picture) to refresh ourselves and the Thai iced tea flavor popsicles were fantastic! We also ate a lot of sweets off street stalls – among them, grilled sticky rice and banana wrapped in banana leaf and fried peanut crackers.

Popsicle freezer...ingenious especially since it was so hot out!

Some of the tastiest and juiciest chicken skewers!

At the Chatuchak weekend market, a noodle stall almost called me to sit down because it looked really good. In the middle of each table, there were large mounds of shredded cabbage and other vegetables piled in bowls and wondered what it was for. I soon saw that the raw veggies (as much as you like it seemed) were to be added into your hot soup (kind of like Pho). Problem was, they offered NO tongs so that diners were licking their forks and then diving into the veggies and double-dipping! New bowls of veggies weren’t provided to the next customer – they were simply refreshed with more veg.

Mounds of veggies on table...

One of the scariest things I saw being sold by the side of the street was sushi. It looked entirely homemade, in a large tupperware container and sold with ZERO refrigeration. People were still buying them from the vendor and that really amazed me. The average Thai person must have very different flora in their gut to be able to withstand all the gastrointestinal onslaught from foodborne diseases!