Irresistible Green Tea Treat!

To make it special, I am going to share and introduce my unexpected treat from I got from the Japanese grocery store yesterday. Ta-da! It is the green tea kitkat chocolate bar. There are twelve mini bars in one packet. They are lightly scented with green tea smell when you first opened the package.

Kitkat is famous chocolate snack all over the world, especially in Asia. They have more than twenty flavors and the most common one is milk chocolate. The company, Nestle, often release special edition flavors. The green tea flavor is one of them! It is very difficult to find the flavor that you want in the United States. 

They are in light green color. For the nutrition fact, they are 64 calories per one packet with two bars in a bag.

You may see a few small layers of wafer and chocolate are infused within each bar. I am not a big fan of milk chocolate, but the green tea flavor is not as sweet as the milk chocolate flavor. They are quite pricey online. I remember seeing a packet cost thirteen dollars, which is way too expensive for a packet of chocolate! So better get them in store.

They are super hard to find it in town. I got this in the mountain view Nijiya supermarket. You may try to find them in other Japanese grocery store such as Mitsuwa or Marukai. Try this snack if you are a chocolate fan or a green tea freak just like me! 

Nijiya Supermarket 

143 East El Camino Real, Mountain View, CA 94040.

Please find the podcast version at "Irresistible Green Tea Treat!"

Puffy Pastry: Croissant

Carbohydrates is our basic nutrients need for human body. Besides rice and noodles, we may obtain it from bread. I am going to introduce Croissant, one of the pastries from Paris Baguette, a famous Korean bakery. Paris Baguette has two locations in the Bay Area. There is one in Santa Clara and I went to the Palo Alto downtown location. They offer indoor and outdoor seatings. This is outside of the bakery.  

A slightly sweetened top and strong butter flavor is what you may expect from Croissant. The history of this pastry is quite vague, but it is originated from Vienna instead of France. It started as a crescent shaped cookie and was named "kipferl" or "kipfel". Moreover, there are a few myths about how croissant came to the world and The Battle of Vienna is one of them. Europeans love to take one croissant and match with a cup of tea or coffee to form their continental breakfast.

This bakery's croissant seems to be more healthy to me. You would not find greasy stains left on your face after finish the whole thing.


Want to have the best taste out of a croissant? You may put it in a toaster oven for about forty five seconds to one minute to make the surface more crispy. Be sure not to over heat it. 

There are a handful of bread, cake and pastry selections in Paris Baguette. My personal favorites are custard bread, sweet potato bread and milk pudding.

                                                                                           















This is the storefront. They use blue and white as their store signature colors. Some of the stores offer indoor and outdoor seatings for customers to try the baking goods fresh right after their purchase. 









If you are interested to try croissant or other pastries, you may want to visit Paris Baguette!

Paris Baguette

Address: 383 University Ave, Palo Alto, CA 94301

Please find the podcast version by clicking "Puffy Pastry: Croissant".

Chill With A Fulfilling Brunch!

You can create a leisure lifestyle in San Francisco even though it is a busy city. Start your day with a nice and satisfying brunch is one of your options! It is a good method to get your taste buds active during the day! Zazie is a French restaurant located in Cole Valley, a quiet neighborhood without heavy traffic. 
The restaurant has more than 1,900 reviews and four out of five star scale on Yelp, the famous food guide review website. Breakfast serves from 8am to 2:30pm on weekdays and 9am to 3pm on weekend. I went with my friend, Angela, who visits San Francisco for the first time. We arrived the restaurant at around 1pm on Monday. It was pretty busy. 
"Take any seats you want!" a waitress said with a cheerful smile. The restaurant has indoor and outdoor seating. We got the indoor seats, but there are small beams of warm sunlight flashing from the roof top. The environment is perfect for chilling with food and chats! 




Gingerbread pancakes is served with bosc pears, lemon curd and syrup. When the pancakes arrived, the sweet scent of lemon curd and pears came directly towards me! The pears are soft, but still crunchy! It is my first time trying gingerbread flavor pancake. I did not regret trying it because it does taste special! The pancake texture is not very fluffy, yet  it is rather slightly chewy. Sliced a small bite with the bosc pears and dip with lemon curd, food texture and mixed flavors are combined instantly!


We ordered a La Mer, which is two egg benedict served with hand picked dungeness crabs, haas avocado and green onions. I am a big fan of egg benedict. They are made with english muffin, a pouched egg and hollandaise sauce. It often goes with one of the following ingredients: ham, turkey, smoked salmon or portobello mushrooms.

This is a close up of the pouched egg. You can see the egg yolk is still soft instead of hard boiled. When you sliced up the egg, the egg yolk will pour out the liquid. You may dip it with the rest of the ingredients to create a great taste in your mouth. The crab meat are very fresh and sweet. There are no shells, which means the chief really pays effort in preparing this course! For the side, it comes with either potatoes or salad. They uses red potatoes, which contains more nutrients than yellow ones. It is cooked in a raw method, with a hinge of olive oil, salt and pepper. I prefer dipping some ketchup, since I found them a little too fresh for me.





It took about ten to fifteen minutes for all the food to come, but it is worth to wait. Zazie is a very considerate restaurant. It provides one to three eggs choices for the egg benedict and one to three pieces of pancakes with three different prices. Customers can choose the portion according to how much food they want. Of course, it benefits for customers who love to share and try more food combination within a meal! Who said only alarm clock can wake a person up? A brunch can act as an awesome wake up call for everyone's body!  

In addition, their plates have beautiful designs, which makes the overall appearance look even better! For those who are driving to Zazie, there are plenty of street parking available around the restaurant. Most of them are free for two hours. Bon Appetit! 


Zazie
Address: 941 Cole Street, San Francisco, CA 94117

I have created a podcast for this post. Please click "Chilling With A Fulfilling Brunch" for the audio version! 

Hidden Canton Sweet Treats

Some people love to have dessert after dinner. I am among one of them. Instead of having ice cream or heavy cheesecake, Canton style dessert is one of my lighter choice.100% Healthy Dessert in Millbrae has a wide selection of desserts.  Today, I am going to recommend three of them to all of you. 

1) Tofu Flower (豆腐花) is one of the famous Chinese dessert in Canton province. This is one of the best I have ever tried in California. It is steamed silken tofu pudding served with ginger sugar syrup. The little wood bucket appears to make it more authentic because traditionally tofu flower is served in big wooden buckets!  In Asia, most places serve it with yellow brown powdered sugar tastes even better than sugar syrup! There are some variations in Taiwan and China as they love to add different toppings on it to make a larger selection for customers!

2)  A liquid dessert with sago, citrus, mago chunks and mango juice is called Yeung Chi Gum Lo (楊枝甘露) in Cantonese. It is a Hong Kong style dessert and has been popular for more than twenty years. You may find this dessert no matter small or franchise dessert stores in Hong Kong. It is a pity that there are no Philippines mango sold in the United States. You will never go wrong with a cold mango dessert during summer in the bay. One downside is that, most dessert stores in the States uses Mexican mangos. Mangos from Philippines are sweeter and taste a lot better than Mexican ones. 

3) Steam milk and sesame pudding. This combination is refreshing yet not too sweet. The soft texture of milk mix together with sesame is unexpectedly good!















These are just three desserts from their menu. Try their egg puffs and other desserts as well. They also serve noodles or rice for those who want to have a proper meal before getting some dessert. If Millbrae is too far for you, there is another location in the Sunset area, but the Millbrae store is less crowded. Who said desserts cannot be healthy? 100% Healthy Dessert might change your mind!

100% Healthy Dessert
Address: 328 Broadway, Millbrae, CA 94031

D.I.Y Yam Fries!

Have you ever crave for something for more than two weeks? Sweet potato fries flies across my mind lately. Instead of dinning outside at burger places or restaurants, I decided to try making some by myself. I went on grocery shopping and got myself some yam since I could not find sweet potatoes around. Yam and sweet potato are not only being refer to different things, but to Americans they seemed to be the same. Although they are similar root vegetables, there are some difference between them. The difference between sweet potato and yam is their species and color. Sweet potato tends to have an orange interior color and larger in size, while yam is has a light yellow interior color and smaller than sweet potato. The nutrion benefits of yam is listed here. According to some bloggers, they find that yam is slightly sweeter than sweet potato too.

I did try to search some recipes before I started the process. Most of them use Paprika and Cumin, which are used as food coloring and herbs respectively on the fries. Since I do not have them at my apartment, I just skip them and start making my own version oven baked yam fries.

Ingredients:
5 pieces of yam
1 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon pepper
1 tablespoon corn starch
 3 tablespoon olive oil

Other materials:
1 baking pan
parchment paper or aluminum foil

*Preheat oven to 400F.

Here are the steps:

 1) Rinse the yam under running water throughly.

2) Use a knife to cut off the head and ends of the yam followed by peeling off their skin.

Tip: You may use a peeler or a knife to do so, but I found that using a knife is faster and easier to handle.

3) Rinse them again after peeling off the skin. Then, cut them into small chunks or desirable sizes.

4) Take out the baking pan or tra. Place a parchment paper or aluminum foil on top. Spread 2 tablespoon of olive oil on it and put aside.

5) Take a ziploc bag and place the sliced yam in it.

 6) Add 1 to 2 tablespoon of olive oil in it and mix well. 

7) Add salt, pepper and corn starch into the bag and mix well.

8) Line the sliced yam pieces onto the baking tray.

Tip: Remember to leave some space in between each piece of yam in order to make them fully cooked.  

9) Bake fore 12-15 minutes then flip the fries to the other side. Turn down the oven temperature to 300F and bake for another 5-10 minutes.

Here comes the final product. Serve it hot with your favorite dipping sauce. Mine is ketchup!

This is an easy and healthy snack to treat yourself or share with friends. Everything is done and ready to serve within 40 minutes. This is kind of an untypical baked yam fries (without the orange color), but it tastes good! Who said that doing something alone cannot be fun? This is how I spent my Saturday evening. I wish you all a happy weekend!

Favorite Dessert From Your Home Country?

Custard egg tart is my favorite dessert from my home country! You may find tons of chinese dessert in Hong Kong. If you pay your visit, from small bakeries to franchise ones, you will always spot custard egg tart. There are two types of shells. It is either in a crunchy fluffy shell or in a butter cookie shell. The egg custard is the spirit of the egg tart. Silky smooth egg custard is sweet but not too sugary, which brings out a hinge of the good egg smell. 

Cannot fly to Hong Kong? If you are able to visit San Francisco Chinatown, go try the Golden Gate Bakery. It is a well known bakery open by the Cantonese that sells awesome egg custard tart. By the way, they uses the crunchy fluffy shell. Since they are famous, avoid the long lines if it is traveling season. 

I have shared my favorite dessert from my home country. Now it is your turn to tell me what is your favorite dessert in your country? Give us a brief description of how it looks and tastes like. 

For reference: 

Golden Gate Bakery

1029 Grant Ave, San Francisco, CA 94133

B is for Breakfast!

Since young, parents and teachers are telling us that breakfast is good for our health. Some said it makes us dumb if we do not eat breakfast. Whether it is true or not, it is the first meal of the day. And most of all, the essential meal to provide us with energy to get our busy day to go properly or at least get our body to function well.
I came across The JoAnn's Cafe on Yelp. As my friends are leaving for summer vacation, we went there for breakfast after they check in in San Francisco International Airport. We went to The JoAnn's Cafe since it is only about a ten minute drive from the airport. It is a small cafe that serves American breakfast. When you first step in, you can smell the sausage, bacon and eggs around the air. There are plenty of choices from the menu.

I ordered the traditional Joann's special. It comes with 2 eggs, a choice of meat (sausage patty), potatoes.















It also comes with a fruit cup and a choice of toast or muffin. I got a blueberry muffin and it is huge!



















Besides of getting coffee, they also serve really good hot chocolate.

To me, this is a full big breakfast. It fills me up for almost the whole day! Whenever I have a big breakfast, it seems like that day will be more positive. Do pay a visit if you go nearby SFO or pass by the Peninsula. You may find street parking just right outside the cafe.

JoAnn's Cafe:
1131 El Camino Real, South San Francisco, CA 94080.

Call It My Favorite: Green Tea Cheesecake

It was a gloomy afternoon. Instead of going out, it is good to making a quicke dessert. I decided to make something sweet but not too heavy. Green Tea cheesecake is what I was looking for. Wait a minute, is that the green tea we drink from tea bags or tea powder? Yes, you are correct! We are using green tea powder for this recipe. Green tea has numerous benefits to human body. It helps to reduce the possibility of getting heart disease and cancer as well as to lower cholesterol. Of course to diet people, it is a news because it burns fat. The only negative thing is it contains caffeine.

Here comes the Green Tea Cheesecake Recipe:

Ingredients:
2 eggs
1 box of cream cheese
Half cube of butter (from one quarter)
60 grams flour
50 grams sugar
100 ml Soy milk
2 teaspoon green tea powder

Baking tool: 7 inch baking pan

Preparation:
1) Preheat the oven to 350F.
2) Grease the cake tin with butter.

 Step 1:
Beat the cream cheese and sugar until they mixed well and become fluffy.

Step 2:
Whisk the eggs until they turn into light yellow color then set aside.

 Step 3:
Get ready 100 ml of soy milk. Then add the soy milk to a microwaveable bowl or container. Heat it up for 1 minute.

 Step 4:
Take out the bowl and immediately add two teaspoons of green tea powder in it. Stir it until most of the crumbles disappeared then set aside.

Step 5:
Sieve the flour then add it into the cream cheese mixture.  

Step 6:
Reheat the half cube of butter for half minute then add the melted butter into the cream cheese mixture.

Step 7:
Take a whisk to mix all ingredients well.

Step 8:
Take the green tea soy milk mixture and use a drainer to drain the excess big particles.

Tip: Divide it up to mix two to three times allows the cake mixture to become more even.

Step 9:
Take the whisk and gently do a final mix.

Step 10: Take the butter greased cake tin and add in the cake mixture.

Step 11:
Place the cake tin into the oven. Put a pan filled with water underneath the cake and bake for 25 minutes.

After 25 minutes, take out the water pan and continue to bake the cake until solid for about 10 to 15 minutes.

Step 12:
Use a toothpick to check if the cake is settled or not. If there is no sticky mixture on the toothpick, you may now remove the cake tin and cool down the cake. 










Step 13:
After the cake cools down completely, place it in the refrigerator for 3 hours before serving. 

I got the green tea powder from a japanese grocery store. It is about $10 USD for one packet. Feel free to choose whatever brand you like.

From preparation to finishing baking, it took me about one hour. The cool down takes about 1 hour to 1.5 hours depending on how quickly it cools. According to my friends, they prefer with a graham biscuit crust underneath it. I am a big fan of green tea products. If you like green tea and cheesecake, give it a try because you will never regret trying this mouthwatering dessert.