 While turkey, mashed potatoes and green bean casserole (which I haven’t had in years and REALLY want some) make up the traditional Thanksgiving feast, I will keep up the tradition of posting something different for Thanksgiving (like duck and avocado pie). Not necessarily better, just something different, because no Thanksgiving dinner is the same, right? 🙂 So here it is: the fried chicken stuffed with fried sweet rice at Yum’s Bistro in Fremont. Known on the menu as “crispy chicken with flavored sweet rice”. The sweet rice (sticky rice) with diced bits of Chinese sausage, chicken, shrimp and mushroom are made into fried rice the normal way, then stuffed into the chicken skin – a fully intact continuous chicken skin from head to leg – which is then fried or broiled. How they skin the chicken, I’m not too sure, this dish may only be feasible to make at home if you’re a chef… but it looks interesting, and it tastes GREAT. Continue reading Stuffed chicken at Yum’s Bistro
 Yangzhou fried rice, kimchi fried rice, chicken and salt cod fried rice, whatever-that’s-in-your-refrigerator fried rice…I love it all. Fried rice is the ultimate comfort food – it’s filling, healthy-ish (if you put in a lot of vegetables), and just hits the spot every time. Perhaps the best thing about fried rice is how easy it is to make at home! As someone who is still really learning how to cook, trying out a new recipe usually means that I’ll be spending anywhere from 30min – 2 hours in the kitchen (actually sometimes it takes me 30min just to prep everything because of my lack of knife skills). So for me, when I want a quick meal because I need to get back to reading or studying, or just because I don’t feel like devoting that much time to cooking, my go-to is always making fried rice. It usually takes me 15-20 minutes to cook fried rice at the most and while it probably is not the healthiest meal to eat every day, I usually end up making some kind of stir fry or fried rice at least 3-4 times a week because of how easy it is. Also, since […]
Continue reading Why I Love Fried Rice
 Pineapple fried rice, with tomato, eggs, cashew nut, onion, pork, and the highlight: raisin. So simple. So good. I’m not crazy about Thai food, but this is the first time in a month that a meal tastes better than my expectation. Welcome back, Appetite!
 Don’t know about you, but after I empty out my bank shopping in Union Square, it doesn’t sound right to pick up an $80 tab at one of those restaurants with a uniformed man at the door greeting every passerby and making us feel bad for not dining with them. So as much as I wanted to have frog legs and duck tongues or something not-so-homey of sort, we ducked into this rabbit hole in the wall called Bangkok Noodles & Thai BBQ, under Hotel Union Square and next to some equally tiny sport clothing shop. It is truly, truly, a hole in the wall. But nobody seemed to mind. We had to walk sideway to weave pass the single line of sitting and standing people from the door through a short hall (if the thing between the wall and the divider to the kitchen can be called a hall) to get a table for two. This cookery is the epitome of land conservation. There’s just enough space for one foot at a time between the rows of tables. When the place is packed, like the time I was there, strangers practically sit together, […]
Continue reading Bangkok Noodles & Thai BBQ – The cheapest deal near Union Square
 Vietnamese When asked about Vietnamese food, Americans usually think of phở busily churned out in small noodle houses crowded with plastic chairs and formica tables. Naturally, since most immigrants gather in their community, the variety of traditional food can only circulate in specific areas. A small fraction of the people have settled in a predominantly American neighborhood long enough and are acquainted with the system enough to set up a business, but they often target the young customers with adventurous taste. Meanwhile, most young customers can only afford low price, hence phở and other easily-made noodle dishes make their way to the top. Careful circumspection would show that pasta alla carbonara requires no more effort than bún thịt nướng, so is it just a matter of gaudy names, flashy advertisement, and aging familiarity that brought one into fancy menus but not the other? By no means do I want to sound like a snob, but every now and then I get cravings for a nice dinner in a restaurant aptly labeled “restaurant”. Ladles of this melting cheese and mounts of that grated cheese just no longer light the candle. A retouch of Far Eastern eloquence […]
Continue reading Le Regal – Old food, new taste
 It’s a little hard to tell what the name of this place really is. Yelp says “Da Nang Krungthep Thai Cuisine”. Their little receipt says “Muang Thai Restaurant”. Chowhound disagrees. I’ll go with the name they have on the yellow sign in front. But one thing I do know is it’s busy, even on a drizzly Berkeley Sunday afternoon, and all for a good reason: its good taste. The good taste extends beyond the food. As Mudpie put it, the interior is “well spaced”. Tables aren’t too closed together to make us talking uncomfortably for fear that the next table could hear. Nice real (not fake) flowers, mini bamboos on the room divider, wooden stools near the window for lone diners. The middle-aged host brought us our orders with a genuine smile and a friendly warning: it’s spicy, so add this chili sauce only if you like really spicy food. We sure took his advice. The kao pad namh (fried rice with sausage and kai-lan), despite its innocent look and without the sauce, burns. Continue reading Multi-name Thai Cuisine
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