Chinese.

Plagued by health foods, last monday seemed like a dream for me. I woke up and there was this miraculous text from heaven (actually from my classmates) saying that we were going to Ongpin, a small china town-esque place here in the Philippines. Dragging myself out of bed and to the place, I was astounded to realize that we were gonna have nice, normal Chinese food. Little did I know that I was gonna get all that and more.

Now living in the city, the only Chinese food I get is Chao-fan (fried rice), siomai (dimsum), siopao (pork buns), and all the regular stuff. When I got to Ongpin, I was in awe and I felt like an alien.

this first picture is, believe it or not, Fukien Rice. It's so smothered in toppings, you can't see the rice.

<-- this is regular siomai. these are the HUGE siomais I encountered -->











The pictures do not give the difference justice so let me just say that one huge siomai is roughly the equivalent of the three normal ones.



this is a lollipop, though not your average lollipop. it's sweet, of course, but if you look closer, you'll find that it has something in the middle we call 'Champoy'. It's extremely salty and has a slight bitter taste. Mixed together, it's an awesome combination. I wouldn't be too crazy about chomping on the sweet part though. It's VERY sticky.






next, we reached a bakery shop. I was in heaven. All the sweets were half the normal price back where I came from. And they tasted heavenly.




Well, that's it for now. I'm planning to go back to Ongpin and savor other stuff, so you guys wait for those next posts.

-R

It All Started When..

As a girl of nineteen, i had a love-hate relationship with my weighing scale. Simply put, it meant that if my weight was on 112, i loved my scale and kept going back to it. If it went up to 120, I practically threw it out the window. Seeing as how my weighing scale became a victim of a very abusive relationship, my mom offered me a whole list of diets. Of course, being a quite undisciplined teenager, I went on the diets for a while but would sneak in more than the occasional cake, ice cream, or both. Along with other normal food, like junk food, icing, candies, chocolates, etc. Having a particularly peculiar addiction to white chocolate (I can finish a whole block. BLOCK, not bar. go to your local baking supplies store to see it. it's around half a pound in weight.), it was needless to say that my weighing scale was stuck in that relationship. It had a breakthrough though, one day.

It all started when dad got pretty sick and had to go one this diet that shall remain nameless. I remember the fateful day quite well, for it was my birthday. I just got home from an eat-all-you-can restaurant and was ready to abuse my scale. Little did I know that the break-up my scale was probably praying for was at hand. I went home and mom dropped the bomb. We were all going on a diet. If you watch anime, you'd probably envision me standing and the ground i'm standing on cracking and opening, allowing me to fall into oblivion. Darkness crept around me, entrapping my sweet dreams of fluffy buttercream icing clouds, white chocolate fountains, nacho and cheese dip houses, and much, much more.

~Fast forwarding time.~

I opened our refridgerator one night in hopes of finding something made out of simple sugars, real meat or anything that is normal for a girl of 19 to eat. What I found in our refridgerator was sugarless peanut butter, veggie meat, and other food I can't even pronounce. The last straw was the peanut butter. I LOVE peanut butter and to have it taste like card board was sacrilege.

So here's what I had to put up with today:

Breakfast:

Green Smoothies:

100 grams of veggies
(combi of: cabbage and spinach)
huge ripe bananas
half glass of alkaline water

Place all ingredients in a blender with enough water to make the smoothie liquid enough to drink through a straw if desired, and blend until smooth. (Fiber Cleanse, B-Flax-D(TM), or freshly ground flax seed could be added during the blending.)

Lunch:
carrot spring rolls. basically, my mom's trying to deceive us into thinking that ground up carrot can taste like meat if you roll it up like a spring roll with a piece of cheese in the middle and fry it. not so bad, really. but it DOES NOT taste like meat.

Dinner:

Dinner's always a joy because we're all too poofed from all the preparations for lunch and breakfast, so we usually have normal food.

But tonight, we didn't have canned food. Mom decided that we would all have the smoothies once again.