Hmong New Year report

Yeah, Hmong New Year! Did not roll with a crew this year, just my wonderful husband, who is my favorite accomplice for eating adventures. What more solid foundation could a marriage be built on? That's some bomb-ass Hmong sausage. Nice lemongrass flavor, and the meat was very finely chopped, so you didn't get those not-always-appetizing big chunks of fat. We also got the pork chop/rib thingy that comes all cleavered up. Both came with Hmong chile, which is mostly just chilies and fish sauce. What more do you need?

 

I was not going to get papaya salad, but then we got in a line for a place that had Kao Poon (which is a soup) that they advertised as "Changmai style". That intrigued me and the picture didn't reveal much about what it actually was. Then as we waited...and waited...and realized that everyone in line was there for the papaya salad. The woman in front of us told us it was rumored to be the best. A woman in back of us said she had waited an hour the day before and was now back for more. I am not a huge papaya salad lover, but we had to try it. And no one seemed to be getting the kao poon anyways. Guess what? It was truly the best papaya salad I've ever had. I don't know the difference, but the fish sauce had lots of little crab bits in it, and they also put an intense amount of lime. And a substance that was either sugar or a sugar/MSG mixture. I vote for the mixture because it was so savory. Yum!

 



 How rad are these Hmong novelty tees? The blow me one is for some instrument, and the Hmong Bong is, IDK, another instrument? Something that you smoke ceremonially? There were a lot of people selling herb and stick bundles that looked to be for ceremonial burning.

This year marked my second straight year of leaving my phone in the car, so not many pictures. These are cute ladies doing the cute ball toss ritual.

 

Oh man, what about that story about James Deen, the porn star? You following that? I have always agreed with something I read that James Deen is like a 4 in the regular world but a 9 or 10 in the porn world, and he's Jewish, too! But sounds like he is a rapist, crappy!

Hmong New Year!!

I almost forgot about it! That's how crazy distracted I am, mostly by work in my new #officelyfe #meetinglyfe

 

That's right, this weekend at Cal Expo (and Friday), just when you don't want to be eating a bunch, there's an event with the best festival food around. Make sure to go! It is awesome. Better even than a meeting that ends early. Hell, better than when a meeting you are dreading gets CANCELLED.

so mad

One month later, and only anger has brought me out of blogging retirement. Anger against....Thai Basil. Seriously, fuck that place!!! The only reason I was going to eat Thai in my neighborhood was because I was going to see A Doll's House at CapStage with my mom and didn't have much time. So, my thoughts turned to Coconut. Which is our local spot, which has a funny pseudo-focus on craft beer and had bottles of Blind Pig at one point. It's really popular. It was mysteriously closed, which turned out to be due to a rodent infestation. Sooooo....right across the street is Thai Basil. The menu is weird and not appealing. I knew pad thai was a no no because odds were it would be cloyingly sweet. The only place I like pad thai is Asian Café. We got a shrimp and chicken spicy noodle salad, fried egg rolls (like I said, not a lot on the menu sounded good), a curry with eggplant, and a green curry of some boring kind with tofu.  The food took quite a while. It was loud in there, because the place is so inexplicably popular.

 

Our noodle salad was just...ugly. Soupy sauce, had TWO SHRIMP in it (served to a table of three). A few sad herbs tossed in, including a big chunk of cilantro with long stem. The green curry was basically soup. Tasteless soup with not much in it. The rice was even dry and not tasty. The whole thing was just bullshit. And the kicker? Subtracting the beer - our meal was like 60 bucks before tip! It wasn't even particularly filling. I have not had a meal make me that angry since the Head and I went to the Dime, and that was like, two years ago or more.

 

A Doll's House was good - it's very long. The woman playing Nora was fucking great. I need to read the play. I'm confused by how weak the supporting characters were, and can't tell if it was because of the adaptation. Of course they had to fuck with the era, and set it in the late 1940s instead of the 1870s, which I think weakened the radical punch of it. At least they didn't make it post-apocalyptic like they did Macbeth!!! Still CapStage is on a roll with their first two plays of the season. I guess the article about Mr. Burns is going to be on the cover of American Theater, which is a really big deal in the theater community.