Are mandarins in Chinese chicken salad a regional thing? I’ve never heard of that before.
I remember what those canned mandrarins taste like. So different from fresh you might not guess they were the same fruit.
Canned pineapple’s necessary for a lot of jello salad recipes since fresh pineapple interferes with the gelatin setting.
Lol a region in the US probably but we love it just the same.
Cottage cheese and sour cream were always Knudsen growing up! used to love licking the spoon with a touch of salt! lol maybe that is one of my happiest bites
eating this at the moment from California chicken cafe!
CCC is exactly what came to mind, lol. I had the Chinese Chicken Salad Wrap w/Mandarins a couple days ago. 
Jun Won Dak’s Samgye-Tang is my happiest thing to sip on at the moment. I can’t get it off my mind 
Possibly can be a weekly comfort meal.
•••
삼계탕 // SAMYE-TANG
Korean Penicillin (Ginseng Chicken Soup)
18oz Cornish hen stuffed with sweet rice, chestnut, garlic and dried jujube, server whole in our special brothThe broth is made with a special blend of herbs that builds your immune system, boosts energy, and aids in digestion
Tasty food that is good for your health should receive more love. Be kind to your body… sometimes
Every time our family goes on vacation the first place we go to eat is Yong Dong Tofu in Diamond Bar. We’re generally coming from places where we don’t eat Korean food so we’re craving something spicy and comforting. The best bite is the first spoonful of spicy soondoobu with rice. Can’t wait for this bite later today after our flight back from Mexico.
An upgraded version is Modernist Cuisine’s take in which the Kraft sauce is approximated by melting reasonable quality cheese in a simmering sodium citrate solution. It has the texture and tang of the Kraft Dinner minus the industrial processing.
I have sodium citrate sitting in the pantry, but have yet to really use it to its full potential. The problem is, most folks ALREADY HAVE a great source of sodium citrate. American cheese. A single slice of American cheese thrown in to a little milk and melted down probably has enough emulsifiers in it to melt down most any combination of other cheeses you’d care to sauce-ify, no roux or starchy pasta water needed.
So, what the heck DO I do with this sodium citrate? And does anyone have any particularly good cheese combinations?
Ooo. Perfect. Thanks!
I don’t have enough sodium citrate to make the modernist Mac n cheese but I’m going to try throwing in a slice of American cheese to see if I can get a better consistency. Wish me luck.
Egullet has a Sodom citrate calculator on their front page btw. If you want to create your own recipes
Putting a piece of chocolate from Godiva (free sample from their store) between my girlfriend’s lips, and biting half from there. This is the happiest bite in my life so far. 
I will not link to it, but emulsifiers and ‘Sodom’ bring to mind Dan Savage’s neologism of ‘santorum’.
Google at your own risk.
The challenge I’ve found with sodium citrate is that the cheese is liquid when what I want is a creamy dip or sauce.
Happiness, as of late, has been seeing the people I miss, love, and care for.
My kind of happiness is also well packed in this tiny coffee ice cream, which is no longer available at my usual super market… it’s so priceless for me, personally.
To the easy things within my reach, when they’re gone for good, I suddenly realized how much I love them. Happiness is simply a feeling within your own heart, where the price tags, comparisons and judgements don’t really matter. It’s all for the feels 
Not as hard to find as the ice cream above, but I had a bite of this a few weeks ago and it reminded me of my grandma’s woonsen noodles. She passed away in the middle of last year so anything connecting to her would make me tear up a little. It’s tasty because Ryan made it, also because I mixed it well when chef Ryan told me to 
Speaking of Needle, I recall the first weekend in September when Ryan bought back his HK French toast with peanut butter.
That god damn toast made me cry in my car missing my grandpa that very afternoon… I didn’t tell anyone that I was sipping on their HK milk tea, which tasted like my highschool days, and cried, at full speed. Probably the best cry I’ve had last year. Emotions and memories from many oceans apart snowballing under the heat of summer in LA… It was so strange.
My grandpa used to eat warm, fresh baguette with peanut butter and a little sprinkle of sugar, which has nothing to do with HK French toast. But that was the only memory associated with peanut butter on bread in my childhood memories about grandpa. His curious grandchild only took a tiny bite and run off to play whenever he made his snack…
So I tried it disregarding the fact that I’m neither crazy about French toast nor peanut butter or bread (please just ignore me, I’m lame!)
The taste of peanut butter from that crazy Needle toast kicked me back to thinking of my grandpa that day. Somehow a thing I would never crave for nor think I would enjoy became so tasty because it got me closer to the memories and the person I miss so much…
Sometimes, I take things very personal and it’s okay.
At least the connections and feelings are real xoxo
Thanks so much for letting us know about those lovely ice cream cups! We last got them at California Market. We really liked the sweet cream one in addition to the Coffee.
