Where did I go?

I didn't think that I would ever be writing a post about why my blog post has gone from a consistent 3 posts a week to coming out at a snail pace. Am I lacking materials to write about? Nope. Have I gone hungry since? Gosh no! In fact I think I gained a few pounds. :(

Then what is causing this to happen? Well, I got the highly anticipated game "Spore" a few weeks back. This was a game that I, among many others, have been waiting for for a few years. After I broke the seal on the box and installed it into my computer, my life has since come to a screeching halt. If you don't know what Spore is but you know what The Sims are, well, they were both created by the same person, Will Wright. He is a game developing genius! Although he did not design most of The Sims 2, and is not designing The Sims 3, he certainly gave birth to this extremely addicting game franchise.

Spore is a very simple game, but it sure produces a lot of entertainment for me. If you read my profile, it did say that I LOVE games!!! Unfortunately, there are too many things to do, and since Spore is a new toy, it is getting most of my attention. I will write again, just after I finish Spore. Got to go conquer the world, and be the alpha dog on my planet now!

San Francisco - Golden Gate Bakery and a little good deed

Near the corner of Grant and Jackson Street in San Francisco's Chinatown lies this marvelous little shop called the Golden Gate Bakery. Even before I was born, my family would always visit this bakery every time they were in the city, and twenty somewhat years later, I still can't keep myself away from their yummy goodies.

The Golden Gate Bakery is arguably one of the best Chinese bakery in the U.S. and although they are also famous for their lotus moon cake, I primarily go here for their other famous baked good: the Chinese egg custard tart! I can't say much about the moon cake, but they definitely have the best egg custard tart around, it's even better than the ones I had when I lived in Taiwan. So believe me, they're GOOD!

Majority of the time you'll see a bunch of people outside the bakery, shifting their feet, waiting in line for a chance to get into the bakery before the custard tarts run out. If you don't see a line then most likely they are on vacation or it's near closing time. We were lucky enough to get there before a huge line formed up so I can get my hands on some of those amazing tarts.

While we were waiting, I overheard this guy standing in front of us tell his friends that the egg custard tart here is good (which I agree), but he also said that egg custard tarts are good anywhere because they are all made from a similar recipe (He is so wrong!). I couldn't believe what I just heard! But I took a deep breath and suppressed my urge of tapping on his shoulder to ask him what is wrong with his taste buds, and why is he standing in line at this bakery instead of buying his custard tart from a bakery down the street where there is no wait

If you also share his opinion or if you had an egg custard tart at a dim sum place and didn't think much of it, then you must try the egg custard tart from Golden Gate bakery. The outside crust resembles a pastry shell and is light, flaky, not at all oily, and the filling is so soft and delicate. They come fresh from the oven and you just can't stop smiling after you bite into it. I could probably eat 6 of them in one sitting, and I would have if I didn't have to share them with my family.

The egg custard tart is $1.35/tart (if I remember correctly) which is sort of on the expensive side, but it's worth every penny! If you actually are able to make your way there, be sure you know what you want to get by the time you reach the counter, cause these ladies don't mess around; there are minimal customer service here and they want to get the line moving. They'll indulge a few questions here and there, but if you don't make up your mind soon, they might just pass you up to help the next customer till you're ready.

When we were walking back to our car, we passed by this old Chinese lady and she was going through the trash can and drinking the milk tea that someone had just threw away. The sight of that just breaks my heart and although my dad would never agree with what I did, I stopped and took out one of the tart and gave it to her. My dad would say that when you give to the needy, they will never think it is enough or they just want to get drugs and alcohol, so we're actually not helping them. I really disagree with his view, sure there are people who are into drugs and alcohol, but there are also a lot of people who are just down on their luck and need a helping hand. I wish I could've done more for the old lady, but hopefully the egg custard tart will at least fill her tummy a little bit.

Hunger Awareness

I took a photo of this hunger awareness ad when we were driving down one of the streets in San Francisco. I guess judging from my blog I can't really claim I am the 5th person huh?

I am fortunate enough that I never had to go hungry in my life so far, no matter how much of a tough time my family been through, or how little I have to live on when I was in college, I never had to go to bed hungry. I always feel really bad for those that are down on their luck, do not have a home, and just long for a warm meal every so often, so even though I don't have much, I try to do what I can: buy a meal for the homeless sometimes, donate food to food banks, and another really fun one is to go on FreeRice.com

A lot of you probably already been on FreeRice.com and if you're like me, you get addicted to it once you start playing. If you have not heard of this site, you can play vocabulary, math, chemistry, art and language games, and for each answer you get right, they donate 20 grains of rice to the UN World food program to help end world hunger.

The amount of time it took me to finish this blog post, I have donated 500 grains of rice by playing the French vocab game, and I don't even know French! I know we will probably never be able to end world hunger, but each and every one of us can do a little something to help another less fortunate person. You don't need to have a lot, just need a heart and a will, so go have fun and you can also help put some food on someone else's dinner plate!

San Francisco - Imperial Palace Restaurant

Lychee Garden on Powell Street in San Francisco's Chinatown used to be THE place that we go for our semi-weekly weekend dim sum meal, however, when they decided to stop serving dim sum a few months back and left us high and dry without our dim sum fix, our searched had once again continued for the perfect dim sum place.

If you don't know what dim sum is, the way I like to explain it is to think of it as a Chinese buffet where they bring the food to your table, or Brazilian BBQ except you can't eat till you explode for one low price. Or if you eat sushi, it's very much like a floating sushi bar but larger; the whole restaurant is the bar, the food is on a cart and people push it around the restaurant and pass by your table.

My bf saw Imperial Palace on the Travel Channel the other day and was itching to go try it; after a little research it turns out that the predecessor of this location was the Golden Dragon Restuarant where the Chinese gang shooting took place back in 1977, but since I am here to talk about food and not to give a history lesson, you can find some more info on wiki if you would like to read more about what happened to the Golden Dragon.

So in order to become our regular dim sum spot, there are only three criteria that needs to be met: service, taste, and value. Hmm... come to think of it, this is the same criteria how I judge most restaurant, I should probably elaborate a little.

At dim sum places, especially those with the push carts, the way I judge service is essentially how fast the food find our table. I don't need a five star restaurant service at a dim sum place, I don't need someone to check in on us every 5 minutes to see how we're doing, but I would like to see a food cart pass by us every 5 minutes (more or less).

In this case, Imperial Palace failed it miserably. This was truly an odd sight to see! A push cart dim sum place with no one pushing the carts full of food! There were two carts full of food at the back of the dining room just sitting there for 15 minutes! (upper picture, and that lady was not serving food yet)

I was not quite sure of the reasoning behind this; maybe they were being very considerate of their patrons and were waiting for the food to cool down so we won't burn the roof of our mouth? Or maybe this place is self-service and we just didn't know it cause we're new here. Wait, wait, I have another idea... or maybe... just maybe they are not quite organized and there was some poor management going on, cause we saw the restaurant manager go to the back and broke up a conversation between two ladies, pointing fingers, kind of upset, and then the carts started to roll out. Hmm.... well, I'll let you be the judge of that.

Ha gar and shu mai

The taste for the food is debatable. For me the shrimp dumpling (ha gaw) and the Cantonese style radish cake taste decent, it's not the best, but it's pretty good, however the rest of the dishes were a little bland to me. If you ask my bf's dad though, he thought the food was pretty good and tasty. He especially liked the spare ribs at this place, and to us that says a lot, cause most of the spare ribs at the dim sum places we go to doesn't meet his standard, not even our once upon a time favorite, Lychee Garden.

Spare ribs and radish cake

BBQ pork bun and long rice noodle stuffed with shrimp

As for the value, it was not too bad. There were a bit of variety for the dishes. Each small dish was $2.20, medium $2.80, and large dishes were $3.20. For the three of us, the bill came to be a little under $40.00 and we had some food to take back home.

The dining experience at the Imperial Palace was a bit of a hit and miss. I have to say that there were quite a bit of local Chinese patrons in the restaurant, so to a person other than myself and my bf, this place might be a pretty good place to go, but for me the quest must go on.

If you're a person who never had dim sum before and might want to try it, I would strongly recommend the shrimp dumpling (ha gaw), pork dumpling (shu mai), and "steamed" BBQ pork bun to start as those are the staples, and order anything else that interests you. Dim sum might not be for everyone, but it can definitely be a fun and unique dining experience.