Yogurt is the new rice

Yogurt just beat rice to become my new number one comfort food, at least for now. For a southern Chinese girl, that means a lot. It is our habit to eat rice in every meal, and it is a part of our lives.

Recently I started to have frequent upset stomach. No matter what I ate - home-made or otherwise - my stomach would be unsettled afterwards especially after lunches. Other than that my health was fine: I kept exercising, had normal sleep, and no other abnormal problems.

I pondered about it for a while, read some books about healthy-whole food diet, but couldn't find any answers there. I even thought about seeing medical help.

Last weekend we went shop at the local Indian market. I looked at the pint size plain yogurt in the refrigerator and wondered if that would help to calm my stomach. Well, yogurt is basic, so it can't be any harm. So I bought a pine of plain yogurt and just to try it out.

I never really like yogurts, because most of them were too sweet. The plain yogurt wasn't very bad. I ate 3-5 table spoons of plain yogurt everyday for the last few days, and amazingly, my stomach was fine ever since! I could even eat at restaurants and no problem. It worked like magic.

Indian buffets always include some kind of yogurt side dishes, and as a habit, my Indian friends always eat it to to accompany their food. Now I know the reason for it and I will eat yogurt everyday religiously.

There is a reason why people say yogurt is a super food.

Guru

Ask me what Jack has been up to last month.

He has been setting up a home media server. He used PLEX as the media server software running on a Mac Mini, Drobo as a data storage (a fancy disk drive), a new A/V receiver to connect these pieces together along with our TV set, DVD player and speakers. In addition there are totally 3 Ethernet hubs having physical connections to various hardware, and 5 2 terra-byte internal hard drives to the Drobo. He went under the house a couple of times to drill holes into the bedrooms, office and living room to hard wire the ethernet cables to the equipments.

After the hardwares and software were setup, he loaded movies to the hard drive - we have over 400 DVDs, and he was done with half. He has been troubleshooting the quality of the streamed movies, so he went online to join the PLEX user's forum. He had so many problems streaming movies onto the TV. First the video was OK, but the audio didn't come up, then both the video and audio were normal, but they were out of sync. Then the video quality had to be improved. Those were the most frustrating problems, so he often said he had to consult the "Gurus".

Up to last Monday, he posted 15 questions and (self) answers to the forum. So on Monday morning when we were having our coffee, he proudly announced that he was promoted from a "Newbie" to a "Member" on the forum.

"You mean they label your seniority on your posts?" I asked. I think it sounded very much like geeks would do.

"Yes." He explained that after "members", there were "dedicated members", and "developers" and then the "Gurus".

A compliment

Jack gave me the best compliment on Monday night when we drove to the gym. He said, "one of the most attractive things about living in the Bay Area is there are so many different good restaurants where we can go for good food. Now that your cooking is so good, it is not much of a concern anymore, because you can always cook good food anywhere you go."

The Blog Name

I have to change the name of my blog "My state of chaos", or at least qualify it, as my life is not at all chaos comparing to what is happening at work, in the city, state, and the country in which I live, or the rest of this world. I can only compare my state with myself, or with the state I prefer to be in, which is such a smaller scale comparatively.

I'd like to keep the peace within myself, and cherish what I have at this moment.

What is a satisfying life?

I felt that I wrote about food and eating too much, so I must add a new non-food related posting on the top of my blog. This is just a rhetorical question.

Emotionally and intellectually fulfilled

Around good friends and lover

Eating and entertaining well

Continue to explore the unknown

Grow emotionally

Maintain good health and a flexible, pain-free body

Be productive and creative

Yummy Kung Pao Chicken

I made kung pao chicken last night, and it was the best ever. Here are some tricks I found.

My version of Kung Pao has a lot of vegetables - why not take advantage of cooking at home and put all of our favorite things in one dish?

Cube the following veggies:

1 green pepper,

1 red pepper,

1 jalapeno,

some celeries,

some mushrooms,

1 onion,

mince garlic (as always),

Cube some chicken, making sure to trim the fat.

Cooking steps:

1. (Trick #1) Stir-fried the vegetables with peanut oil, but don't cook them too well. Place the cooked vegetables in a bowl, then clean the wok.
2. (Trick #2) Stir-fried the chicken meat, making sure the chicken is well done.
3. Mix the vegetables and chicken together and spice with salt, pepper, kung pao sauce (Lee Kum Kee brand), and spicy sauce to taste.
4. (Trick #3) Heat some hot oil in a small frying pan in medium heat, then add some chilly flakes and a handful of peanuts to the frying pan. Cook the peanuts for 5 seconds.
5. Mix the peanuts with the chicken.

The good thing about cooking this way is, the vegetable is not over cook, and adding the spiced peanuts would add extra spice to the dish. Also, don't cook the garlic for too long, add it in on step 3.

Since Jack helped on the peanuts and he enjoyed the food a lot, he insisted it was our kung pao. I think it is good for him to have a sense of ownership to this dish.

Jake's 2nd birthday

Yesterday it was sunny, and we took the opportunity to take the doggies out for a walk at 3rd even though the temperature was in the 40's. It was Jake's 2nd birthday, so we bought a double cheeseburger for Jake and a cheeseburger for Amy from Burger King. The doggies enjoyed the burgers at the parking lot. I let Amy lick the mustard off my fingers, but she wasn't interested. After the burgers, we all went to the north end where we launched the kites. They were so happy, because they didn't go there for a long time.

Jake was bouncing around on the path, jumping up and down trying to get his favorite orange ball from Jack. Amy swam which was her favorite. Sometimes she quietly swam after the ducks, and when she crept up to them, they smartly flew away a few feet just to tease her. When we got to the north end, we let the doggies ran and swam to their hearts content. It was my favorite to watch the doggies having fun.

The pups slept in the car on the way back home. Jake put his head on Amy's back, and he took up most of the back seat. We gave them each a piece of dog bone when we got home, and they were very quiet the rest of the evening.

This morning we heard sirens from Highway 1, and we heard Jake howling at the patio. I sneaked out to the kitchen and saw Jake standing in the patio doing his howling thing. Instead of howling at the moon, he was howling at the ambulance. Even though he was doing this adult and masculine thing, he still looked very cute like a puppy. I still remember a 6 pound fuzzy puppy who wiggles and kicks around when I tickle him on the belly, who nip me with his pointy puppy teeth and slept for hours afterwards.