MEI JAN HONG SINGAPORE BEEF & PORK JERKY, RICHMOND

What do M&M's and Beef Jerky have in common?

They were both prominently on display at Aberdeen Mall.  The M&M's were not edible though.

Singapore Beef, Pork, Salmon and Chicken Jerky can be purchased FOR CASH ONLY!
See that sign?  They’re not kidding.

Located on the ground floor of Aberdeen Centre Mall, this jerky place moved from one side of the mall to this more central location.  They are hopping busy now.  You can watch them tending the jerky pieces on their grill as they add that nice black char to each piece.

My MIL thought the jerky too sweet but we like it that way so happily took her pound of soft sweet Pork jerky.

You can order your jerky “spicy”, “soft”, “crunchy” or “sweet”.  

I’ve purchased much jerky here before and Bib loves the soft, sweet pork jerky.  I found they also vacuum pack for transportation  overseas.  I asked for some this a few weeks ago to take as “Canadian gifts”  to California.  Since they produced salmon jerky in Canada,  I figured it was Canadian enough.  Hee!

In the central court area next to the fountain at Aberdeen Centre was this display of M&M’s.  Yes,  each of those little M&M candies is adhered together to form this Sphinx.  There are also Egyptian-themed mosaics and pictures all around the area depicting the "Boy King" and M&M styled Egyptian art.

Hieroglyphics written in M&M's.  Neat, eh?

Live music and belly dancers entertained the crowds.  This woman was spinning and moving so fast, my little iPhone4 lens wasn’t fast enough to catch her well.

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RECCHIUTI CONFECTIONS, FERRY BUILDING SAN FRANCISCO

Rose Caramel. 


One bite of this Recchiuti confection and I knew it was quality stuff.

See that one lonely square of Fleur de sel caramel from my bag of many that didn’t get squished in my carry on luggage (it’s the little square with the white diagonal lines at each corner)?  They were very tasty squished anyway.



Funny thing about squished chocolates.  For some reason, there is impetus in me to eat them quickly.  I pop them in my mouth without  hesitation because their beauty is marred.  I save the prettiest confections for last, to be savoured slowly.  I linger over perfectly beautiful desserts. 

On our recent trip to San Francisco I was given a big goodie bag of confections from  my cousin from the Recchiuti Confections shop that we visited in the Ferry Building.

Only now have I gotten around to tasting the different chocolates I brought home to Vancouver and boy are they delicious! 

Marshmallows


The Vanilla bean marshmallows had that hand-cut home-crafted look.  My daughters inhaled them.   They saved a few for a playdate…and their girlfriends inhaled them as well.  They received sticky thumbs up all around.

Smores bites.


These were covered in dark chocolate and the little square of graham cracker rested on the bottom of the marshmallow. 

Rose Caramel


“Delicate rose geranium oil swirled into light, buttery caramel. Cast in a white chocolate couverture and capped with bittersweet chocolate”.

Recchiuti Confections, located in the Ferry Building in San Francisco is a chocolate lover’s paradise.  There were specialty chocolates for wine pairing, beautiful custom chocolates and other chocolate-related paraphernalia.  They seemed to specialize in chocolate covered fleur de sel caramels and marshmallows.
Thank you Sylvia for introducing me to these gorgeous chocolates!  You have good taste!

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JELLY BELLY FACTORY, FAIRFIELD, CALIFORNIA

Belly Flops, from the Jelly Belly Factory in Fairfield, California

Each visitor to the factory tour receives a bag of jelly bellies upon leaving the factory.  The factory requires you to wear their little paper hats during the tour and does not allow photography of the factory facilities.  You can take pictures of the shop and surrounding area though.

In the Jelly Belly shop, I found these interesting jelly beans.  They’re like those energy drinks, except they’re in jelly belly form.  How cool is that?  I bought a few to see if they’d give me “quick energy”.  I imagine the sugar would be doing that anyway, right?

I was tempted to purchase a whole whack of useless jelly belly paraphernalia, but the nagging thought of my bursting luggage made me reconsider.  I settled on something useful:  Jelly Belly hand sanitizing gel.  I also purchased Chocolate covered jelly bellies (not chocolate flavoured but coated in real dark chocolate!), 1/2 a pound of "birthday cake" flavoured jelly bellies (which taste like frosting) and a pound of pink jelly bellies that I hand-selected because the girls always want only pink jelly bellies and leave the rest to me. Apparently, the favourite flavour is buttered popcorn.  I figured I’d be getting some of those in my bag of Belly Flops.  The Belly Flops are just jelly belly rejects that have been bagged for purchase and they’re all mixed up depending on what flops were produced.

We used our GPS to get to the Jelly Belly Factory.  Boy was that thing useful on our trip.  I highly recommend you use one if you travel to parts unknown. 

In front of the factory was a cute VW bug with Jelly Belly decor all over it.  Several transport vehicles also had the Jelly Belly characters and logos plastered all over them too.  We thought they were cool.

Inside the factory, there is a cafeteria where you can order Jelly Belly shaped pizza. 

If you look up while you’re in the huge lineup for the factory tours…and believe me, you’ll be waiting for a while, you’ll notice Jelly Belly decor and mosaic pictures created by jelly bellies being glued together onto a canvas to create an image.  The best ones are the images of Ronald Reagan and Elvis, I think.

These are actual individual jelly bellies of different colours/flavours glued down in a mosaic to create the image.  Neat, eh?

At the Sample Bar, you can try any of the flavours you are interested in before you buy. 

I saw this cute cupcake made of jelly bellies and couldn’t resist taking a pic of it.

The Jelly Belly Factory Tour is a great activity for kids.  The tour is about 40 minutes long.  The lineup for the tour is just about as long.  You can purchase Belly Flops, unique flavours, mix and match or buy case lots of one flavour only.  It truly is an amazing place.  It smells of sugar and fun and is a definite must see if you are in the area.  On a previous trip to the Jelly Belly Factory, I also went on a Beer Factory Tour.  It’s good if you don’t have kids tagging along in that case and this was B.C. (Before Children).    There’s a Budweiser Factory in Fairfield that gives tours and tastings and that was a good excursion too.

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ZOKU VIETNAMESE COFFEE POPS

Vietnamese Coffee Ice Pops!

Make some good Vietnamese coffee.  I used my Espresso machine to pump out some strong coffee.  Then I mixed in some condensed milk to sweeten.

I poured it into my pre-chilled Zoku Ice Pops maker and waited the requisite 7-9 minutes. 

The pops easily popped out with the super-duper orange tool that you twist to remove the pops from the mold. 

They were refreshing and a quick treat on a hot day! Not for the kiddies!

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LEE’S DONUTS, GRANVILLE ISLAND MARKET

Lee’s Donut holes, glazed.  6/6

Who hasn’t had a Lee’s Donut?

If you haven’t been to Granville Island, and you haven’t peered through the market windows to watch the freshly made doughnuts coming out of the hot fat being dipped into their glazes; if you haven’t smelled the sweet, yeasty hot doughnuts coming fresh from the kitchen and you haven’t been tempted to buy every single different kind of doughnut in the display, then I feel a little sorry for you.

You must go.

Go see. 

Watch the doughnut man craft the doughnuts through the glass window and see him handily dip those piping hot rings of heavenly sweet fried goodness into the huge vats of sticky glaze.    You’ll salivate.    You’ll succumb, and rightfully so.




Then head on over to the fresh fruit displays, brimming with tropical and local fruit piled into carefully stacked pyramids.  Taste the samples and spend $30 on a few boxes of vibrant berries and verdant veggies.  Sticker shock doesn’t seem to immediately come into play when the produce look so good.


We watched these street performers for a while and sent the kiddies with some good hard cash to pay them.  I like how they made snide comments about how even unemployed children are coming up to pay for the performance while adults are stealthily stealing away without as much as a tip! heehee


Yes, those are real flames shooting out of her sneakers!  If that’s not worth at least 5 bucks, I don’t know what is.

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DRAGON BALL TEA HOUSE

Pearl Milk Tea with Jelly.  Rating:  6/6

Fresh Watermelon slush with bubbles.  Rating:  6/6

I know, I know.  Bubble Tea is carcinogenic.  What with the preservatives in the tapioca pearls (not that plain ol’ tapioca is itself bad) and the carcinogenic Taiwanese emulsifiers employed in the ingredients used to make these delicious concoctions, you’d think I wouldn’t drink these things. 

Well, it must be what a smoker feels like…though I have never smoked in my life, to crave one of these on a hot day.

We knowingly eat too much junk food, and reassure ourselves that “in moderation” things will be okay.
 
Oh who knows. 

I was raised on enriched white Sunbeam bread spread with butter and sprinkled with white granulated sugar , KFC, McDonald’s, Tang, Swanson T.V. Dinners, Church’s Chicken and Lee Kum Kee Oyster Sauce and white rice.  I ate the melamine-spiked White Rabbit Candies.  I ingested those carcinogenic Bo Chai Yuen when I was feeling ill.  I don’t doubt that I have overindulged “in moderation” over my lifetime.  Despite eating plenty of veggies, nuts, berries, fish and seeds; drinking green tea everyday and running or exercising especially prior to children, I wonder what that threshold is.

Hey, I  maintain a food blog.  Just looking over my pictures, I can see I have eaten a good deal of carbs…especially on the weekends.   Sure I give most of the sweets away.  But eating out—who knows what those restaurants are putting in my food?

So, a bubble tea once in a while I guess is a drop in the bucket.

I’ve always known the dangers of Bubble Tea, but now with the new information about all the other carcinogens in the other ingredients besides the bubbles, I am too wary to frequent my favourite Bubble Tea house.  Check out the Canadian  Government list here.

I suppose though, I could order a fresh fruit slush, WITHOUT bubbles (preservatives not approved by the Canadian Govt), milk powder (plastics),and  jelly (preservatives again), I’ll be okay.

Geesh.

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CONDENSED MILK LOVE: POUND CAKE AND WHITE RABBIT CANDY

Remember these? I'm waxing nostalgic these days.
 In the good ol’ days when I visited my grandma, I would get to eat these caramel-like candies.  The White Rabbit Candies that I remembered in the 70’s are exactly the same today.  The rice paper wrapper used to bother me and I’d pick it off before popping them in my mouth.  Now, I don’t care.  It doesn’t taste like anything really.  It dissolves into nothingness.

I recently rediscovered these iconic Chinese candies.  As I remembered, they taste exactly like Condensed Milk! I love the flavour of condensed milk.  The texture of the candy is not unlike a caramel.  However it’s not a caramel…it’s sweet and milky.   Surprisingly, the nutritional information at the back indicates that eating one or two isn’t going to damage your waistline too much.  However, I can see eating a whole bag as a problem.

This is a perfect fix when I get my condensed milk cravings and when I don’t have time to make my favourite Condensed Milk Pound Cake.  Do try the Pound Cake recipe if you have time though…it’s a winner!

Just in case you have time on your hands, here’s the recipe for Condensed Milk Pound Cake. 

If you don't have time to make the Condensed Milk Pound Cake recipe, see my post on Condensed Milk Toast!



CONDENSED MILK POUND CAKE
from Pichet Ong's Sweet Spot
[my adaptations to the recipe & techniques are in brackets]

Makes one 8 1/2 -x- 4 1/2 inch cake, about 12 servings
1 cup (8 oz/226 g unsalted butter, at room temperature, plus more for greasing the pan
1 1/3 cups (7 oz/200g) all purpose flour
3/4 tsp baking powder
1/2 cup (3 3/4 oz/ 106g) sugar
1 vanilla bean, chopped, or 2 tsp vanilla extract
1/2 tsp salt
3/4 cup (8 oz/239g) sweetened condensed milk
3 large eggs

• Preheat the oven to 325° F.
  
• Generously butter an 8 1/2 x 4 1/2 - inch loaf pan and set aside.
  
• Sift together the flour and baking powder and set aside.
  
• Put the sugar and the chopped vanilla bean, if using, in the bowl of a food processor fitted with the metal blade and pulse until the vanilla bean is finely ground. Sift through a fine-mesh sieve and return the sugar mixture to the food processor. If not using the vanilla bean, just put the sugar in the processor. [I buzzed the sugar and vanilla bean in my Bullet]
  
• Add the butter and salt and process until light and fluffy, about 2 minutes, scraping down the sides and bottom of the bowl occasionally. Add the condensed milk and pulse until well incorporated, about 15 times, scraping down the sides of the bowl once. [I used the stand mixer and the beater attachment to beat the butter, salt and ground vanilla sugar mixture until fluffy. Then I added the condensed milk and beat until combined]
  
• Add the sifted dry ingredients and pulse until no traces of flour remain, about 10 times. Add the eggs and pulse just until combined, about 5 times. Scrape down the sides and bottom of the bowl, add the vanilla extract, if using, and finish mixing by hand to fully incorporate the eggs. [Add the dry ingredients to the mixing bowl and beat until combined. Then, add all the eggs and continue beating until thoroughly incorporated.]
  
• Transfer the batter to the prepared loaf pan. Bake until the top is dark golden brown and a tester inserted in the center comes out clean, about 1 hour. Cool completely in the loaf pan on a rack, then unmould. [I baked my pound cake for one hour 20 minutes!]

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IDIOT’S GUIDE TO MAKING CONDENSED MILK TOAST

I know.  The title says it all.

Step #1: Go to an Asian Bakery and buy a Pullman-style bread…any will do.  It’s square and super soft.  I chose this Whole Wheat Flax version from T and T.   Actually any good quality white bread will do if you can’t find Asian Pullman bread.

Step #2:  Lightly toast your bread. 

Step #3: Spread butter or margarine on the toast.

Step #4:  Take a huge spoonful of Condensed Milk and drizzle it all over your buttered toast. 
Enjoy. 

Condensed Milk Toast:  it’s what my girls crave and it’s almost as satisfying as having CAKE!
If you want cake, or simply love Condensed Milk, try reading my Condensed Milk Love post.

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