There’s a perfectly good explanation for my absence & the belatedness of this Ma Belle Vie / A Day in the Life post: I was in Bogotá, Colombia for a gorgeous destination wedding. Those pictures may actually appear in the gallery before any of my previous photos from the holidays of 2014. DAVIDsTEA ran a really fun promotion on St. Patrick’s Day, which meant its downtown location was really packed. Can you guess what got so many people jammed into the store? Free tea if you’re wearing green. The line was out the door & people were stoked about getting free teas just for wearing a bit of green. It didn’t matter if the customers were homeless, foreigners, non-tea drinkers, long time customers, or randoms strangely demanding for “regular tea”–we carry over 150 teas, so what in the world is “regular” tea??–we served them all! Hot or iced, sweetened or unsweetened, free teas were served. The best part of my job is talking about tea & showing people that it can be for everyone, you just have to give it a chance.
Food I Ate
This Ma Belle Vie is a little different from others because I’m combining it with Georgina’s A Day in the Life Linkup. Well, to be honest, it’s really not that different. I captured photos from morning until night, however I couldn’t exactly document what happened after we returned to the hotel because that Hand Grenade knocked me out. I hadn’t felt that horrible in a long time, so lesson learned: don’t take on an entire Hand Grenade if you can barely handle more than 5 shots of hard liquor.
On February 19th, Josh attended the 56th Annual Convention of the International Studies held in New Orleans & flew me out for our 2 Year Anniversary. It was my first time in Louisiana & also my first time in New Orleans aka The Big Easy. This city has experienced a lot of tragedy & hardship in 2005 when Hurricane Katrina drowned 80% of the city, due to a major engineering mishap: the levees designed to protect the city against major hurricanes failed. Thousands of people were displaced, lost their homes, lives, businesses, & many were trapped in their own homes when the waters rushed in. Since then, the city has slowly, but surely recuperated. Tourism is very much alive & Mardi Gras is still a much celebrated event. Our trip to NOLA was a week after Mardi Gras, so most of the city still looked like the day after a frat party, but I chose not to photograph the trash. I don’t want to depict the city’s disheveled appearance, hoping to highlight the wonderful mixing of various cultures, food, & architecture. New Orleans is appropriately named America’s most unique city & while it might be a far cry from Paris, Amsterdam, London, or Bern, it is still such a worthy visit. There is no other city in all of the US like it & the culture & food is phenomenal. It’s a perfect blend of Southern comfort, Caribbean & Spanish flavors, & most notably, French influence. NOLA is a pescetarian’s dream come true: seafood for days. It’s also a great hub for meat eaters & veggie lovers alike.
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A fellow food blogger friend of mine, Daniela of Food Recipes HQ, said she really enjoyed seeing my travel photos–her food photography & travel photographs are also beautiful, so this is a huge compliment–& a fellow photo journal blogger buddy, Cat of Silent White, was inspired by my last Ma Belle Vie post, & made her own. I figured it was best to follow up my Mushroom Mapo Tofu recipe with another Ma Belle Vie post. For those of you who haven’t seen this before, “Ma Belle Vie” is a category of posts cataloguing my day in photographs from when I wake up until I go to bed. I forgot to take photos of our night, but I can assure you, Josh & I take dental hygiene seriously – rest assured, we did brush our teeth before sleeping, despite the lack of photographs to prove it.
Click the first photograph & use the arrows on the center left or right to navigate through our day. These photos were taken at the end of summer in August when I flew with Josh to help him settle into Florida. I’ll be back with a Vietnamese noodle recipe, wait & see!
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I just wanted to thank all of you who wished me well on my move to Boston. In the world of food blogging, it’s really quite rare that people will actually read what you write, so I’m thankful to those that take the time to read my blurbs. While many of you might be a bunch of internet strangers, I appreciate the generosity & support you’ve shown me as my blog & academic career continue to move forward. Here are a bunch of pictures of food I ate &/or made that I forgot to put up. For more posts on pictures of food I ate, explore my Foodie Fridays category.
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Let’s welcome August with a noteworthy appetizer recipe & some other foodie pictures! I’m completely behind on editing & uploading all the pictures I have on my SD cards, so one of these days there’ll just be a post with a bunch of pictures & guess what? YOU’RE GONNA ENJOY IT…maybe. So, let’s talk about my new recipe that I obnoxiously named “Sensational”. Look, I can feel your eyeballs rolling out of your orbital fossa, but bear with me – the catchier the title, the more likely someone will check out the recipe. What makes this recipe so sensational? KEWPIE MAYO, duh, obvi, like srsly how is dat even a q?? In all seriousness doe, the combination of Kewpie mayonnaise, sesame oil, masago, & imitation crabmeat really bakes well atop New Zealand green mussels. The umami is strong with this one & I think that if you love shellfish, this is a great recipe for you to try out. It’s actually not too expensive to make given that you have sesame oil, ponzu sauce, sesame seeds, & Kewpie already. Who would have that already? People who love to make Japanese food, gosh. If you love Japanese food, invest in those ingredients; you’ll find that they are used in many recipes.