Sometimes a man just wants to sit in the sun and enjoy a bag of cheese rings, a can of macadamia-flavored canned coffee, and a Vietnamese desert cup.
The desert cup was a bit of a trip. The white fungus gave it a crunchy tripe-like texture, while the longan and Chinese apple gave it the taste of elementary school style canned fruit. And the seaweed, while vaguely resembling boiled apple peels, infused the concoction with a vaguely fishy scent.
And did I mention the gelatinous cubes of agar on the bottom?
Later in the day, unable to contain myself, I broke into the Chiz Curls.
It’s always good to see that Cheetos have a thousand cultural permutations.
Another desert cup thing that I found sitting out unrefrigerated at the MT Supermarket. It contained tapioca pudding, fruit and the obligatory seaweed.
Sweetened seaweed. Why isn’t that in more deserts?
La Mexicana, good for some breakfast tacos, followed by breakfast pastries.
Once you resign yourself to the fact that Mexican pastries will never be as sweet as their Northern counterparts, you appreciate them for being flaky and buttery.
I’m also resigning myself to beans as a desert food. Here’s some frozen bean mochi.
The tender and gooey rice dough hid a pocket of sweet beans, while the sesame seeds gave it a nutty crunch.
On impulse I bought a bag of brightly colored tapioca chips, only to find that they were completely inedible. The tapioca created a waxy, transparent film that was as hard and as unyielding as a plastic model of a P-51 Mustang. After some googling research, I tried dropping the tapioca chips in hot oil, and a magnificent transformation occurred.
What was once impervious, crackled, puffed, and swelled to become chips that were as crunchy as they were greasy.
I’ve been eating the tapioca chips with a small stash of ready-to-eat Indian meals. I’ve blogged about these before, they’re a complete traditional dish in a foil pack.
If I had a pantry full of these (which is actually within my financial means, they’re that cheap), civilization could collapse and I would be living in luxury while the zombies ate the rest of you fools.
That would give me the time to work on my budding betel nut addiction. I found a Bangladeshi market that sells pan leaves, the alchemical missing ingredient that turns betel-nut supari from menthol-tasting breath freshener into an exotic and unregulated stimulant.
The first time I chewed a pan and betel nut wad, my mouth filled with a gush of flavorful saliva, and then I worked for four hours straight and crashed into a dreamless sleep.
From a Korean market, some un-seasoned bacon.
There was no salt and no smoke flavor. Which is to say it tasted just like pork, but it looked like bacon.
I finally figured out how to make gorditas (which is Spanish for "little fatty").
You fry up some masa in patties that are two or three times as thick as a normal corn tortilla. You can add some oil to the masa and to the pan itself to give the gorditas a bit of a crunch.
Then you just slice open a pocket and add your favorite breakfast taco fillings. It’s the perfect blending of a sandwich, pita pocket, and taco!
