Hey All:

If you had been reading chowtimes.com via a feed reader, could you please remove your old subscription and resubscribe again? I am going to discontinue the old URL address and use a new one which is this: http://chowtimes.com/feed/

Thanks, Ben

This office selection is a bit more filling. At least there is a sandwich. You will notice that Suanne generally packs my snacks and lunches in threes. I think the constant is always a snack and something fruity.

For lunch today it is another Krispy Fruit snack, a Dole Fruit Parfaits and something I look forward to, a English Muffin Sandwich.

We bought the English Muffin Sandwiches from Costco. We had been buying a lot of these kind of microwaveable lunches from Costco in Bellingham. The selection in the Costco in the US is more wider than what we find in the Costco in Vancouver.

The English Muffin Sandwiches cames in a box of ten and in two flavours:

• Bacon, Egg and Cheese
• Sausage, Egg and Cheese

Each of them had 390 calories. So, it was not too bad, I guess. It is equivalent to McDonald’s McMuffin breakfast sandwiches.

The microwave instructions is quite complicated. There are quite a number of steps. Here are the steps:

1. Remove sandwich from wrapper.
2. Separate the meat and egg from the rest of the sandwich and heat:
   • For Sausage & Egg: 80 seconds.
   • For Bacon & Egg: 50 seconds.
3. Place the meat and egg back in the sandwich between the cheese slices and English muffins.
4. Microwave for another 35 seconds.
5. Turn sandwich over and microwave for another 35 seconds.

Despite the multi-step instructions, the result was pretty good and taste almost like Mickey D’s Mc Muffins. It is not at all dry and was pretty moist. I like it.

For dessert, it was the Dole Fruit Parfaits. It has real fruit on top of a smooth layer of deliciously light creme. The cream layer taste like vanilla yogurt.

I love the Krispy Fruit tubes from Krispy Kernels. They have a good variety of nuts and fruits. Again, we bought these in Costco. I munch on them all morning long and does a good job of staving away the hunger pangs until lunch time.

This may come to you as a shock but really, this is what I normally have for “lunch” almost everyday. People in my office do at times is a bit taken aback at what I had. I generally snack throughout the day. Suanne will prep different things for me every morning before I go to work.

So, breakfasts and lunches are generally light for me.

For this day, I had French Twists, beef jerky and a banana. I start snacking normally at about 10AM when I start feeling hungry. I’ll have a twist, followed by a piece of jerky and hour later and then the banana …

We bought the French Twists from Costco. It comes in two flavours and it’s sweet and light. This seems like a healthy snack from the packaging. I like it … it’s tasty.

Here are some words from the founder we found on their site:

At the age of 42, I suffered a major heart attack. After bypass surgery, my doctors instructed me to limit my cholesterol intake, to exercise more, and to stay within the Heart Association’s recommended diet. To stay committed to a healthier lifestyle, my diet needed some excitement. As a sweet lover, I searched for a treat that I could enjoy without guilt. After months of experimentation, the Original French Twist was born. Layer upon layer of puff pastry dough sprinkled with cinnamony sweet goodness. The only things we have left out are cholesterol, eggs, butter, and yeast.

The French Twist can be frozen in their bag if desired. Just let them defrost to room temperature before eating.

We had blogged about this beef jerky before. This one came from Polly who often gives us packets of Jerkies to try. You know, I don’t think we had ever bought Soo Jerkies before and all the jerkies we had was from Polly. The most popular jerkies in Vancouver is Soo Jerkies which has a factory in Richmond near Steveston.

Banana is a great source of Vitamin C and fiber. We always had a bunch of banana at home. It’s not always eaten and when it gets too ripe, Suanne uses that for baking. Most bananas that we have in Canada is from Ecuador who is the largest exporter of bananas in the world. Ecuador supplies a whopping 30% of the world’s export market.

Bear with me for one more day. I have a few more things to share with all of you before I embark on the Office Lunches series proper. Yesterday, I showed you my desk. Today, I am going to show a bit around the office. I’ll stay off sensitive areas, of course.

Being an aviation systems company, there are lots of plastic plane models all over the office. We get them from the airlines we support. I wish I had one but I don’t. If there is one I really covet, it is the Singapore Airline’s Airbus 380. I guess I could buy one myself but they are really expensive, like $50 bucks or so.

The office has an almost great view from the north side of the building. I said almost because there is this two residential building that is blocking the view of the north shore mountains. I am proud of our north shore mountains because on a clear and bright day, the mountains never fail to make every new visitor to Vancouver drop their jaw.

The snow this year had been a lot more then the past previous years but I think we had seen the last of them already. I am so looking forward to spring and spending more time outdoors.

We have a small kitchenette, if you can call it a kitchenette. I don’t wanna complain but it is often quite messy. The sink always have dirty dishes, cups or cutlery in it. Most people are neat and cleans up after themselves but a handful does not. Let’s see, we have a fridge, a dishwasher, a kettle, a toaster, and two microwaves.

It’s quite well equipped but we keep on losing cutlery. We just had a brand new set a few months ago and what I can see now is a couple of spoons and forks. Some people must have stashed in in their desk and forgot about it.

Just a month ago, we found that someone had food in their drawer for months. It created a huge stink throughout the office when it was discovered and someone opened up the plastic bag containing the bad food. Yucks! Made me throw up.

We love our coffee machine — errr, espresso machine. I remembered that it was a big deal when this was first bought and how the previous boss raved over the fact it costs $2000. It is fully automatic … grinds the beans only when you want a brew and makes all kinds of coffee. The only thing this can’t do is to discard the ground coffee.

I used to have several cups a day and my favourite is the latte. I don’t drink coffee here anymore. Wanted to cut down on this stuff and have water instead.

The office is pretty good … well except for the washroom. Firstly there are only ONE stall for the men’s in the entire floor. I don’t know how they plan this at all. That is not my pet peeve.

My pet peeve is that the sensor is super-sensitive. It flushes by itself every time you twitch a muscle. It is supposed to flush only after use. You can imagine how annoying this is when it flushes five times doing your business. The splashes gets your bum quite wet too. You know what I mean.

Some smart alec (don’t know who) creatively stuck a “Windows Vista” logo on the sensor unit. I thought it was kind of funny.

There is a technique around not getting yourself flushed five times. I know it’s crude but it works.

Tomorrow, I’ll tell you about food … honest.

Some of you know me … and can read me like a book already. For one, I like doing a series on things related to food. So, starting today I am going to start on a new series of “Office Lunches”. It’ll be all about the lunches (if you could call them lunches at all!!) that I had over three weeks. I really hope you all will find it interesting.

I’ll start off the series the next couple of days introducing to you the place where I had my lunches. Oh yeah, I had most of my lunches at my desk and it’s because I had so much to do in the office, I often only have time to grab a quick 5 minute bite.

I have a two desk cubicle all by myself. I love the location of my cubicle because it is secluded and have quite a lot of privacy. I wish I have an office but am just a small fry. Anyway, I am only about 50% at my desk most of the time because I will either be in the meeting rooms or going about tracking folks down.

The company uses HP machines exclusively. I like my notebook which I hack at it almost everyday in the year. The one you see there is a loaner (almost similar model) because mine is under repair because the monitor hinge came off from the casing(!). They decided to repair it instead of issuing me a new one because it not yet past it’s due date.

While at my desk, I connect it to an old-fashioned monitor and make it my extended desktop. I actually work faster with dual monitors. I also have a wireless mouse which I carry it all over the office with the notebook — I hate the touch pad. For some reason, I cannot get used to it.

I have a Cisco IP phone. This is the best phones I had ever used. I mean, it does everything except make the coffee. Most importantly the voice quality is miles better than any previous phones I had ever used. I spend a lot of time on the phone … long distance to our offices in other cities. IP phones saves the company lots of money especially when we have offices all over the world.

My favourite is the headphone. It is super sensitive and clear. When I take calls from my desk, I can be 100% sure the other side can hear me loud and clear. He he he … even when I am in a conference call, I don’t even have to speak real loud and my voice from the headset can overpower the others that makes people stop on their track.

Oh, I think I have a cool ringtone too … it’s exactly the same ringtone from the series “24″. You know, the CTU? Jack Bauer? The CTU uses the same type of phone.

I have my own easel (sp?) with flip charts. It really helps in clarifying discussions. I think most people can relate to ideas, concepts, etc visually. So, I make it a point to write or draw on the flip chart that we can always go back to in case we need to. Unlike whiteboards, once erased, they’re gone.

I like my calendar. It is neat and best of all, it does what I term as a “rolling” calendar. First, it is eraseable and comes with magnetized erasable markers. The weekly calendar strips are also magnetized which I can roll off each week once it’s over. Four weeks ahead is good enough for me to see at high-level what is going on. You can’t put a lot of info here but it does the job.

On the desk is two little toys that I don’t pay much attention to anymore. The rubber stress ball is a souvenir from my ex-company. That is pretty much all I got from being outsourced to Accenture!! I leave it on my desk and many people who come by just could not help but pick it up and squeeze it while talking to me.

Then there is this little 3-minute hour glass. I get interrupted quite often at work. It could get very disruptive. I used to go hide in the meeting rooms or somewhere else each time I wanted peace to get my stuff done. That did not work anymore because everyone had figured out where to track me down. So, I resorted at some time to the hours glass … people would come by asking if they could have a minute with me and I told them, I’ll give them 3 minutes … and flip over the hour glass in front of them. It was funny but it did not work at all. If you want I can sell that to you for $1.

Most people knows that only Ben uses the small yellow writing pad. I go all around the office with this, jotting down every important note because I have such lousy memory. Also, most people knows that I am the only one who uses the 4-color BIC pens. It’s really useful in writing notes and being able to differentiate what is what when the whole page gets busy.

The company issues us coffee mugs but they are so puny. I got this larger one from our supplier which is much bigger. I used to drink lots of coffee at work but for a long time now it is only water I take.

I also have a one of a kind pewter pen holder. I used to work in a manufacturing company called Royal Selangor who makes these sort of stuff. This pen holder has a motif of dragons and is a prototype which never saw production. I rescued that from the melting pot.

There are other books on the table. These two had been there for ages. I read perhaps two chapters. I am like that. I get lots of books and only about 20% of them gets read from cover to cover. :-)

Then there is the Bible of the Project Management profession. It’s called the PMBOK (pronounced as pim-bok) which is the definitive guide to project management. If you aspire to be a PM and if there is one book you want to read, it’s this.

I had all kinds of notes that pin up on the walls of the cubicle. This one is a simple self made time conversion which I used to convert time zones. For the life of me, I could never do time zone conversion mentally and always had to rely on this handy list. I used to have to deal with BOTH London and Singapore at the same time and it’s a nightmare, I tell you. London is 8 hours ahead of Vancouver and Singapore is 8 hours the other side. So, I used to have to get on calls at 11PM at night and then go work normal office hours. These days, it’s more saner because it is just Atlanta and London I had to deal with.

I also had some little reminders that I make up over the years. They are as useful today as it was the first time I come across them. Click on the picture if you want to have a clearer read of it.

The plant was handpicked and nurtured by Suanne. I am pretty proud of this because it is so packed with leaves. Not only that …

… it is so long that I extended it to the other side of my cubicle which currently is empty.

Tomorrow, I will share with you some other things about my office before I launch on my “office lunches” series proper.

Whew! It took us an entire weekend to migrate chowtimes to Wordpress. We know it is still rough around the edges but the good thing is we’re back in business. We will take the next few weeks to cleanup the odds and ends.

If you had bookmarked any of our internal pages, please note that they will not work anymore. This is because WordPress names pages different from MovableType and we decided that it is best adopting fully what WordPress does.

Oh … ignore the corvette on the header page. We’ll fix that later on to something more foody.

Enjoy!
Suanne and Ben

Update 27Jan 7pm: Alright … I think we got it all figured out now. Chowtimes.com will start to go dark anytime soon. The go-dark period will likely be 24-72 hours. The site is temporarily up at http://chowtimes.26miler.com. When you see a “corvette” you will know that the migration to WordPress had been completed. (blowing a bye kiss to MovableType!)

Update 26Jan 5pm: We got going again. We have created an interim site here if you want to have a sneak peak. Migrating all our photos will take a long time … estimated 7 hrs. We’ve got more pictures than we thought we had!

Update 26Jan 5am: Sigh … this is going to take longer than I thought! Am utterly stuck at this and working out the steps with my new hosting’s support. Stay tuned.

Hi All:

Suanne and I will start migrating chowtimes.com from MovableType to WordPress starting tonight. If all goes well, you will not notice any difference except that when we are done, you will see a new look and feel of the site.

It’s a complex move for us because we had not done it before. However, we felt that we must migrate it sooner or later because we were so impressed with what WordPress could do better and easier than what we can do on MovableType. We should be be done by end of day Saturday. Wish us luck!

So, to tide you guys over for the next little while, I want to announce to chowtimes reader my new blog … http://26miler.com. I hope you will enjoy it as much as you had on chowtimes. It is a chronicle of my attempt to complete (notice that I did not say run) the marathon this year.

Ben and Suanne

Karen brought a couple of her vinegar and oil for us to taste as she did not have to prepare much for the community meal the next day. Basically, she’ll made the Chili in Indian Sauce for the community meal entree and salad for the sides. We helped Karen to wash and chop two big boxes of greens to be used for salad the next day. The food bank also donated two large platters of cookies for the community meal and that takes care of the dessert.

Karen brought a couple of oil and vinegar for us to taste and she also shared a few vinagrette dressing recipes with us. Here are what we tasted:

A sherry vinegar which has quite a strong sour taste. A lemon infused olive oil which has a very nice lemon flavour. A balsamic vinegar which is mellow and smooth, not too sour. The grape seed oil does not have any flavour in it which is very good for cooking because of its neutral taste.

We also compares the oil with an ordinary olive. We did the tasting with some bread. Bing a typical Chinese who do not serve salad at home, I have very little knowledge of vinegar and oil. When I walk into a gourmet store with racks of vinegar and oil, I’m just lost. Anyway, it is a good experience to taste some of these vinegar and oil which I have never used before. So, what is your favourite vinegar and oil?

continue reading "Vinegar and Oil Tasting"

This is about the first meal we had in 2008. It is a dim sum breakfast we had with the families of Polly & Vincent and Wai Bing and KC. This dim sum breakfast is actually the continuation of our New year Eve celebration together. The previous day we went to Wai Bing’s house to usher in the new year. We had a simple and great home cooked meal, chatted till past midnight, went home to sleep and then met up again for dim sum the next morning.

Between New Year Eve and New Year Day, gosh, we must have chatted for 14 hours in all (Wai Bing, Polly, you do the math … is that right?). I did not realize we had so much to talk about. Over bottles of Guiness Stouts, We talked about normal stuff … you know, like … what you would do if you win the Super-7 (Wai Bing would buy an entire townhouse complex and give each one of us an unit, hurray!), educating the ladies on benefits of investing on a HDTV for the house, plans for next year … and other normal stuff.

Sorry … I digressed.

The Golden Dynasty Seafood Restaurant is where we went to. Although Suanne and I know of this place, we had never been in these before. It is located on a strip mall on 8360 Granville Ave in Richmond. It is where Rogers is, if you know the neighborhood.

One thing you will undoubtedly find … parking is very limited. I guess this is what happens when a certain business (this restaurant) dominates the business on this small area. Almost all the parking lots are all marked for specific businesses. If you can’t find parking right up front, drive over to the back of the strip mall. There are plenty there.

Golden Dynasty is a one of the larger and busiest dim sum restaurants in Richmond. They are big and can cater to wedding dinners too. The place was absolutely packed when we were there but we had no problem getting a table since Wai Bing had already made the reservation before hand.

I think the popularity of this place is due to its price. Their dim sums are categorized as small, medium or big but they all costs the same, $2.30. The quality is not bad too. There are specials which costs a bit more (see menu above).

I like dim sum restaurants where they cart around the dim sum to your table for selection. It’s good to be able to see what you’re ordering, especially for us who do not read Chinese. We had two or three servings of each dim sum … below.

The Steamed Prawn Rice Rolls was very smooth. Best eaten when steamy hot.

This is some kind of Deep Fried Wonton.

Suanne called this the Char Siu So. It’s a pastry with Char Siu fillings.

This is another dim sum with char siu fillings. It’s called Charn Pau (Baked Char Siu Bun) in Cantonese.

The Sin Juk Guen (Fresh Bean Curd Rolls) — love this a lot.

Everyone should try this very chewy Braised Cow Stomach.

Then we had the steamed Squid with few small To Fu Puff thrown in it. It does not look great … looked like it was yesterday’s dim sum.

We also had Wu Gok (Deep Fried Yam Dumpling) — not my favourite but Vincent loves this. He ordered 3 plates of this.

This is a Deep Fried Dumpling … oh … with red bean fillings? *shrugs*

We came across the Pineapple Bun again. Arkensen & Nanzaro loved this. Their Pineapple Bun are the mini version of those we had in Lido.

Everyone’s favourite … Siu Mai (Pork Dumpling with Fish Roe). If you have dim sum, you must have this … and don’t ask what is in it … just eat it and I am sure you will like it.

The Har Gau (Steamed Prawn Dumpling) is another very common dim sum item. I never did like Har Gau’s a lot.

The Fung Jau is translated as the Phoenix Claws. A fancy name for chicken feet or formally known as Braised Chicken Feet in Garlic and Black Bean Sauce. I get a kick watching my non-Chinese friends eat this — most would not even touch it. But seriously, this is great!

You can’t see it from the picture above. What is submerged under the congee is century eggs (or thousand year old eggs). In Cantonese, this is called the Pei Dan Sau Yok Juk or in Suanne’s translation, the Thousand Year Old Egg and Lean Pork Porridge.

The Steamed Chicken Bun is the favourites of the kids. Pretty ho-hum. Char Siu buns are better but we did come across it when they wheeled their carts over.

And finally, the Glutinous (or Sticky) Rice Wrap.

The total bill came to $80 for 3 families of 12 people (including kids). Not bad, huh?

I’ll blog about dim sum and Ben’s version of etiquette of eating in a Cantonese (dim sum) restaurant tomorrow. How does that sound?

Well … we’re a few days late but it’s better late than never. Chowtimes.com turned two a few days ago and just in the nick of time too … our little visits counter hit 200,000. For Suanne and I, it’s a milestone that we had been hoping to reach before the blog turns two.

Suanne and I actually drove around Richmond looking for a cake to celebrate at 8:45PM. We wanted to look for one of those fluffy fruity cakes from Chinese bakeries. We went to quite a few places — most bakeries were closed at the hour of the day. We eventually remembered that the Osaka Supermarket at the Yaohan Mall had a bakery.

We simply love fruit black forest cakes like these … lots of freshly cut colourful fruits on top. These cakes are very airy and fluffy. Does anyone know how these kind of cakes are made … especially how they are made so airy and light?

Not sure about you, but for us, we don’t feel guilty eating such fruity black forest cake. After all, fruits are healthy food. Agree.