Food, Red Cliff, knitting, and Ooku picture!

[oyceter]

Even more random things:

1. I forgot how noisy summers here are; the cicadas hum day and night, the buzz so constant that it becomes background noise after a few minutes. I remember how much I laughed when New Jersey was making a big deal over cicada season there, which apparently only happens once every seventeen years. They can have the cicadas!

Comments

[chomiji]

Re cicadas in the Garden State: Naaah, they have cicadas every year, just like we do in MD. You can hear them singing all the time. But periodically, there's a population burst, and there are so many that you can't walk without stepping on the poor, pitiful, horrid things (more than you ever wanted to know about this topic right here). This phenomenon doesn't occur in the Western U.S.

That pork-and-water-chestnut ball in soup looks quite like a matzah ball!

[telophase]

If the Taiwanese cicadas are anything like the Japanese ones they are so loud THAT YOU ALMOST HAVE TO TALK LIKE THIS TO BE HEARD OVER THEM! I'm used to cicadas, because they have them in the area of Texas I live in, but the sheer volume surprised me there. :D

[tavella]

And the noise! You can't even talk outside at times, it's just a wall of sound.

[chomiji]

Yeah, I am guessing the cicada population in Taiwan is up there, since you can hear them all the time and they're so amazingly loud! It's this constant wall of MIN MIN MIN MIIIIIIIIIIN.

[laurashapiro]

OMG FOOD. ::dies:: It all looks so gorgeous! I have to go have Chinese food for lunch now, but it'll be nothing like this, I'm sure.

What's the blue noodly thing in the sukiyaki? I didn't think there was any blue food!

Re the weird vegetable: it's romanesco broccoli, and it's super tender and tasty. One of my favorite varieties.

[oyceter]

I knew my flist could identify randomly photographed vegetables!

The blue noodly thing isn't actually blue; it's usually a milky white. I'm guessing the camera flash caught the blue undertones? It's something called ju rou (konjac? Or so Google says?), which is this sort of crunchy, jelly-ish thing made from konjac starch.

[laurashapiro]

::googles konjac::

Oh, I think I've had that stuff! Always wondered what it was. (: Pity it's not actually blue, though. (:

[rilina]

I tried making tonkatsu at home for the first time the other day. It was a so-so effort, but still yummy. (Hard to go that wrong when deep frying is involved.)

By the way, the Korean food porn drama Gourmet is finally airing! I haven't had a chance to ahem yet, but it's gotten a really good review over at Dramabeans. I spent a good amount of time salivating over the screencaps.

[oyceter]

Tonkatsu! Btw, I am still trying to find the char sui recipe, which is, of course, on the one handout that I managed to misplace...

[vom_marlowe]

I am very hungry now!! I especially want that chicken thigh....and the katsu curry...and the fried things...and the...

I've seen that weird vegetable in one of my seed catalogs--ornamental or alien brocoli/cauliflower thing.

I once had to imitate cicada song for my Ancient Greek class. We were reading Plato and he talks about cicada song, and my prof had never heard it. There I was, droning up and down. *laughs*

[oyceter]

Heeeee! I love my flist for being able to ID different types of broccoli and for imitating cicadas!

[magicnoire]

*drools all over food*