Category Archives: Crazy stories

I’m 100% Vietnamese.  Ok, I’m actually 75% Vietnamese and 25% Chinese, but for all intents and purposes, consider me 100% Vietnamese.  This means that I love myself a mango.  For as long as I can remember, my mother would buy a flat of mangoes from Chinatown every weekend while they were in season.  Unripe, green mangoes were marinated in fish sauce for a savory dish, or pickled in rice wine vinegar with a little Thai chili and eaten as a snack or an accompaniment for sweet and savory beef.  Ripe mangoes were diced for dessert and you grabbed the 2^nd best utensil in the world after chopsticks from the little plastic toothpick (What? Everyone didn’t have one of those?).  In the morning, mangoes went into the blender for smoothies (maybe that’s where I get it from) and my brother and I rejoiced at not being forced to down another soft-boiled egg.  Sure, soft-boiled eggs sound great now, but when every other 7 year-old gets Cap’n Crunch and you’re sucking down runny eggs, it gets a little annoying.

You get the point, then – my childhood ran on a mango-powered engine.   Continue reading →

You read my first post and laughed.  Most likely, you thought I was self-deprecating and exaggerating a tad.  Fine, both are true, but read on and tell me that I’m not (at least partially) covered with a rain cloud!

I love food.  Actually, I’m obsessed with eating, which I think is a negative thing vs. the positive “love of food” spin.  As soon as I finish eating one meal/snack, I start thinking about what I crave next.  Recently, I took a job in the library at the culinary school where I work, effectively reducing my physical activity to almost nothing.  So I went from constantly running up and down four flights of stairs and never sitting to hours on end spent on my rather significant rump.  Basically, my metabolism took a nosedive while my eating never slowed. Continue reading →