Sucky Sweet Life

BURUBON is a famous Japanese food company. One of my favorite snacks (among many!) from this company is "Gato- Raisin" (ガトーレーズン). It is probably French: Gateau Raisin, maybe? I don't know if I spelled this correctly :P There is raisin and cream between the soft buttery cookies. The package of this snack hasn't changed much. It is purple like below and with picture of these yummy cookies. Like lots of Japanese snacks, this snack isn't too sweet. Sweetness of this, based on how I feel, is raisin > cookie > cream . A Japanese / Asian grocery store near you should sell this snack (it has to!) but if you don't find one, I found this Amazon link for you. Enjoy!

Long time no see! I'm back! March last year, I have started to write about snacks I buy and desserts I make as a new hobby after I decided to change my team. I got so busy in a few months and stopped munching Japanese snacks, baking and updating the blog. Instead, I just ate lots and lots of donuts (Krispy Kreme &  Stans Donut Shop ).  Now, I switched the team again so I resume my hobby. Today, I'm introducing "Noriten". It is super crunchy and thick Tempra chips. The chips are made of flour and eggs (basically Tempra dough ingredients). The black thing is seaweed. One side is covered with seaweed and the other side is Tempra dough.   The one my daughter is holding is from Marukai Market . I just buy whatever brand available in the store. Here's a brand I've never tried from Amazon ( original flavor ). You can try it out and let me know how it is! Because I have two kids so I usually buy original flavor (soy sauce based). However, you can ...

Have you ever tried sticky rice (glutenous rice) with mango in Thai restaurant? Isn't it delicious? I'm not from Thailand so I don't know the authentic recipe for this dessert. However, I reverse engineered and here's my super simple recipe for how to make it. You need the following. Sticky rice (sweet rice)  1 cup Coconut milk 4 tbsp Cane sugar 1 ~ 2 tbsp (depends your preference) Fresh mango 1 count  Step 1: Soak sticky rice with water for couple hours. I usually do it overnight. Step 2: Cook sticky rice in rice cooker (1 cup rice = water little below 1 cup line) Step 3: Once rice is cooked, add 1 ~ 2 tbsp of sugar and 4 tbsp of coconut milk. Mix it. Step 4: Let it cool. My family likes it to be warm. Step 5: At the same time, slice your fresh mango by peeling the skin off. Put mango slice on top of the sticky rice. Enjoy and you are welcome!

Bonjour! It has been a week since I last updated my blog. My life keeps being "sucky" with annoying corporate job. It is even worse when I get sick - ouch! Today, I finally regained a little bit energy to write about my favorite rice cracker - "Yukinoyado" 雪の宿  . "Yukinoyado" translates to snow lodge. Rice cracker is light weight, crunchy Asian cracker made of rice. You can absolutely taste rice in these snacks. It is also very very crunchy so it makes a very loud sound when you bite into it. There are variety of flavors available for rice cracker such as sweet soy sauce flavor, salt flavor, seaweed flavor. My absolute favorite since kid is "Yukinoyado". There's milky sugar candy (resemble snow fall) coated on top of lightly salted rice cracker. When you put it into your mouth, you taste strong sweetness with salty flavor. After you start munching on the cracker part, you taste mix of saltiness and sweetness evenly. Since rice cracker i...

I often encounter naive people who talk about how everything will become disaster if the person leaves the team. That's only true for someone who's very specialized in something (researcher, professor etc). However, at a commercial company, most of us is doing non-creative, repeatable tasks. This means that everyone is easily replaceable.  I'm sorry if this has never occurred to you. Please recall what you do at work.  You compose an email You call a meeting You execute your core competency (project plan, product manage, coding etc) You communicate with stakeholders  You coordinate sh*tty work Your replacement might not be as efficient as you at day one but eventually, the person will get there - acquire same knowledge as you do. That's how a company works. Y our team / company will run totally fine without you. That's not an exception for me either and I 'm totally fine with that part because anyone can do my job just fine, seriously. Note that I wi...

The weather in Bay Area has been weird for the last couple weeks. One weekend, you thought Spring finally arrived but then the temperature immediately dropped to 50s (10 Celsius) the following week (in the morning). This weekend was the same again. It has been chilly for the last two days but this Saturday, it suddenly hit 80s (26 Celsius) during the day. My kids and I were not dressed properly for the temperature when we went to a park and we had to escape back to home in less than one hour! Anyway, although I don't eat ice cream often, when it gets hot, I won't say no to ice cream. I am very particular about my ice cream. I like Haagen-Dazs (strawberry flavor, rum raisin flavor, vanilla flavor, almond chocolate ice cream bar) and  Tillamook (only discovered this recently and only tried strawberry flavor). I also stop by gourmet ice cream shop once a while. However, my absolute favorite ever since I was a kid is mochi  ice cream - " Yukimi-daifuku ". It direc...

Everyone must have seen or heard of " Pocky " biscuit before. Surprisingly, it is actually sold at Target in Bay Area (ethnic food aisle section). You can also find this snack very easily at many small Asian supermarkets around the country. When I was little, I ate these quite often as afternoon snack. I like plain chocolate flavor. Other flavor - meh. The correct way (in my opinion) to eat these is to bite about 0.3mm (0.01inch?) fast and sequentially - crunch crunch crunch. I used to compete with my classmates to see who can eat faster! Strawberry Pocky - Double Dip Version! There are many kind of Pocky flavor and many types of Pocky in Japan. Today, I'd like to introduce you a double dip version - Pocky ダブル禁断の二度がけチョコ (it reads "double kindan no nidogake choco"). It also translates to "forbidden double dip chocolate". As you can see from the package that my daughter is holding, the chocolate part is quite thick (it claims to have 3.2 times ...