Food = A Form Of Art Or Lifestyle?

Comforty Foodie by Stephanie Chiu is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at http://comfortyfoodie.blogspot.com/.

Time to do a little sum up! Comforty Foodie has provided some mouthwatering yet easy to accomplish homemade food recipes and food/restaurant reviews for the past few weeks. This is a little thank you note for all of you who take your time to look at this blog! Comfort food can actually be anything! My style is most of the time healthy (balanced diet that contains vegetables and fruits) and occasionally naughty (dessert or fatty food)!
No matter how stressful you are, remember enjoying food can be an excellent method to calm down or simply ease your bad mood! Food can be a form of art and lifestyle! Take some time to explore your own style!

Keep following me and have a nice summer folks!

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Cheers,

C. Foodie :)

 P.S. A homemade light start for Saturday lunch with smoke salmon, Reggiano cheese and romaine lettuce salad in Japanese style sesame dipping sauce pairing a cup of soy milk. Bon appetit!

Proudly Presents: Comfood Paradise!

Comforty Foodie by Stephanie Chiu is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at http://comfortyfoodie.blogspot.com/.

Summer time is good for an indulgence of cold food! Here comes the easy yet delicious homemade Japanese soba tutorial! Japanese soba is bucket wheat noodles. By dipping some sauce and mix with your favorite toppings, you will definitely find summer heat not that annoying. Please enjoy this very first video podcast brought to you by Comfood Paradise!

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!