Bring Chinese cooking to your kitchen after your travels

by Jamie Rhein on

If you are traveling from China and want to replicate some of the tastes at home, Jen Lin Liu, author of Serve the People: A Stir-fried Journey through China, has some tips.

She presented them in a very speedy cooking lesson segment on The Today Show that I caught yesterday morning. Lin-Liu is a Chinese American living in China who moved there to learn more about Chinese cooking.

Here’s what Liu said. For spices, the staples are salt, pepper and sugar. Sugar is an important ingredient because it balances out the salt and pepper. Liu said it’s a yin and yang kind of thing.

Also there are two kinds of soy sauces that she uses: light and dark. The dark is actually a lighter flavor than the light, but both are used-from what I gathered, in the same dish.

Her main utensil is a meat cleaver which she uses for everything-even paring apples. As Liu demonstrated, the cleaver is handy for picking up food and dumping it into the wok for stir-frying. She also uses it to smash vegetables, a technique that releases some of the flavor. A spatula is used for turning whatever is cooking.

The corn starch that is used to thicken the sauce was put into the meat marinade.

One question that came up was the way Chinese food tastes different in the United States, than in China. One reason she gave was that the ingredients were fresher in China. People go to the fresh market every day and buy only what they will cook that day.

My husband’s greatest pleasure when we lived in Singapore was going to the market in the morning on Saturdays or Sundays. He would come back, arms full. Unlike me, he loves to cook.

One thing I enjoyed about this segment and Jen Lin Liu’s brand of cooking is that it looks easy to replicate. The cook book just came out just last month. I’m tempted to buy it. After all, I think we already have a clever tucked back in a kitchen drawer somewhere. I’ll recognize it when I see it.

Here’s a link to the video where Liu demonstrates her techniques.

Behind the Olympics: How to hack NBC and watch the Games on your schedule

by Jerry Guo on

If you’re an rabid Olympic hawk like me–and there seems to be plenty of other people with almost as much free time on their hands–then you were probably incensed NBC didn’t show the historic opening ceremony live last Friday.

To help you get around the 12-hour time gap, here’s a quick run-down of how you can watch all your favorite events live.

First are the up and up options.

  • NBC has the exclusive rights to broadcast in the US, which means you can’t switch channels to ABC or CBS. Some of the events are broadcast live, notably swimming, but their online counterpart has some 3,000 hours of on-demand video and 4 live streams. Personally, I wasn’t very impressed–had lots of difficulty in tracking down the stream for the epic USA-China basketball showdown.

On the fuzzy side:

  • There’s plenty of free grub out there for anyone lucky enough not to be American (i.e. under NBC’s dominion). The Canadians have CBC, the Brits have BBC, and the Chinese have CCTV, which all offer streaming online coverage.
  • To get around the “geo-limits”, you’ll have to use a proxy–a virtual router that tricks whatever site into thinking you’re from a particular country. My favorite is freeproxy, while proxy.org is a clearinghouse for different sites.

The not exactly legal:

  • The most popular option for getting high-quality videos is to go Peer-to-Peer, in which you connect directly to other users for the content. The best program here, with by far the most videos, is BitTorrent, especially good for vids of the spectacular opening ceremony.
  • Other options include Sopcast, with its Olympic-geared channels, and TVU Networks, which is good to have around for sports after the Olympics are over.

Galley Gossip: There’s more to Miami than La Carreta

by Heather Poole on

“There’s more to Miami than La Carreta,” said the well dressed passenger seated in 9D, the seat directly in front of my jump seat, as we slowly climbed to our cruising altitude.

“Oh I don’t know about that!” I laughed, as I loosened my seat belt so I could lean into the aisle and see why the woman three rows back kept waving her hands at me.

“The seat belt sign is on,” I told the woman as I pointed to the ceiling, at the illuminated seat belt sign, after she had asked if she could go to the restroom. “I’ll let you know when it’s safe to get up.”

NOTE: If the flight attendant is still sitting in the jump seat, you should certainly be seated in your seat. It’s not safe to get up yet.

The passenger wearing the nice suit seated directly in front of me just shook his head. Then he looked at the handsome guy with the longish hair from Chile sitting beside him and said, “tell Heather there’s more to Miami than La Carreta!”

The Chilean just smiled at me sweetly, so I smiled back. I don’t think he even knew what we were talking about. But the father and son team from the Dominican Republic wearing matching New York Yankee ball caps across the aisle from the Chilean knew exactly what the stylish one and I were talking about, because in unison they cried, “there’s more to Miami!”

Now this conversation began right after the passenger, the well dressed one, had asked “Do you fly to Miami often?”

“No. Not really,” I said. “Not if I can help it. I can’t even remember the last time I had a layover in Miami.” Then I went on to explain why I’m not a fan of the New York – Miami trips, which had more to do with the Miami International Airport than Miami itself.

“I think you need to give Miami another shot. It’s a fantastic city!” he interrupted.

I’m sure it is. But how would I know? Long gone are the days when I can actually do something on my layover other than shower, eat, and sleep. You see my Miami is not his Miami – the sexy exciting international Miami. Oh no. My Miami is a four hour sit at the airport between flights. My Miami is wearing a navy blue polyester dress and sweating my you know what off as my hair begins to frizz because of the heat and humidity inside the airport terminal. My Miami is swarms of passengers carrying too much heavy luggage wrapped in plastic. My Miami is a plane full of scantily dressed passengers who get angry as soon as they realize we don’t have blankets on board. My Miami originates from New York. Enough said?

I explained this to the well dressed passenger after the flight attendant working in first class made the announcement that it was safe to use electronic devices. Of course the woman three rows back who had waved her hands at me earlier began waving the hands again.

“Not yet. Soon,” I told her as I pointed to the seat belt sign again.

The woman began to crawl over her seatmate anyway.

I shook my head and yanked on my own harness straps for emphasis. “I’ll come get you when it’s safe.”

She sat back down.

Turning my attention back to the well dressed one, I added that even though the New York – Miami route isn’t my favorite trip, I do get excited, probably a little too excited, about one thing – La Caretta.

La Caretta is a popular Cuban restaurant located in concourse D outside of security. Apparently, according to the well dressed one, La Carreta has several locations in the city of Miami, but, as you know, I only have time to go to the one located at the airport. Trust me, it’s worth leaving the secured area for the food at La Caretta, no matter how long the lines.

White rice and black beans with a sprinkling of onions and cilantro and a side of beef picadillo and plantains, that’s what I order each and every time I pass through town. The best part about La Carreta, besides the good food, are the reasonable prices. The large portions aren’t bad, either. Don’t you know I can eat it all – it’s that good!

Of course, after La Carreta it’s off to Versailles for a cafe con leche.

La Carreta is as close to the city of Miami as I get these days. And I imagine it will be a very long time before flight crews see long layovers again. So when someone tells me there’s more to Miami than La Carreta, I am forced to disagree. For me, and other flight attendants, La Carreta is the light at the end of the tunnel, especially when you’re working the New York – Miami route.

Doctor turned over to FBI for trying to use front toilet in aircraft

by Abha Malpani on

A 65-year old Indian urologist was turned over to the FBI after he tried to visit the toilet in the front of the airline.

The first time the doctor tried to use the toilet on the Southwest flight, it was occupied by the captain, so he went back to his seat. When he saw the captain come out, he got up to go again when he was pushed back into his seat by airline staff. Apparently this was because it looked like he was trying to get near the cockpit, which is against the law if the cockpit is not secure.

This was explained to the doctor, however, when the plane landed there were police waiting there for him. He was handcuffed and taken to a detention center where they took his mugshots and fingerprints. Post a night in the detention center alongside 43 other accused people, the doctor was taken to court and asked to plead guilty to misdemeanor assault and pay a fine of $2,500.

Not knowing what to do and to avoid costly court proceedings, the doctor decided to plead guilty.

How crazy and paranoiac is this whole situation!? To me it looks like an old man on his way to a medical conference in Las Vegas attempts to use the bathroom on a flight and the next thing you know he’s been marked a criminal and is in court pleading guilty to an assault accusation.

Why couldn’t the airline staff just request him to use another bathroom on the plane? Why all this drama? Even if it was a case of racial discrimination post 9/11, it went far beyond reason. The poor guy must be traumatized and I don’t blame him.

Southwest Airlines defends how it handled the situation; they saw the old man as a potential threat because he wanted to get close to the cockpit. Excuse me, but that’s where the toilet was! The airline customer service sent him a compensatory letter with a $100 voucher for the next flight he takes on Southwest.

He is suing the airline for humiliation and arrest.

Other tales from the skies
Amazing and insane stories from a real-life flight attendant and co-pilot

Check out 15 of the world’s strangest theme restaurants

by Jeffrey White on


I admit, I’ve never been the biggest fan of theme restaurants.

This is an opinion no doubt hardened by a few visits to medieval theme restaurants in Boston and Prague over the years, punctuated as they were with ridiculous performances and barely edible food. Theme restaurants always have seemed to me long on kitsch and short on that most basic of restaurant foundations: good food.

But I’d easily make an exception for any of these 15 wacky theme restaurants that the good people over at WebUrbanist have put together. Clearly, my thinking of how far such a place can go to deliver something truly unusual has been pretty lame.

Sure, there are a few Gothic places on the list, including one in Tokyo decked out completely in red, to resemble, one assumes, the inside of an artery (complete with red blood cells painted on the walls and floor).

But there are others that seem really worth a visit, if only to see (A.) whether such a place really exists or (B.) the strange juxtaposition of the restaurant’s theme and the reality outside its walls. Consider, for example, Buns & Guns in Beirut, a restaurant born out of the 2006 war with Israel, with such menu items as “M16 Carbine meat sandwiches” and “mortar burgers.”

Faithful readers of Matthew Firestone’s Big in Japan dispatches know just how strange a place Japan can be, so it’s not surprising that four of these odd theme restaurants are in Tokyo. There’s a restaurant with a vampire theme, a chain of restaurants fashioned to resemble Catholic churches and one restaurant in which diners can order an edible human body, delivered whole to their table whereby they cut into it like surgeons (scalpels are provided) and fish out edible organs.

In Beijing you can dine in total darkness in the Stygian-themed Pitch Black (wait staff wear night goggles). In Truskavets, Ukraine, you can dine in a large coffin. In Manila, you can patronize the Hobbit House, where the staff are all little people.

Some on the list have since closed or changed their names, their themes having proved, well, a tad unworkable. Case in point: An ill-conceived restaurant in Mumbai meant to pay homage to Adolf Hitler.

The weirdest on the list? We can debate, but my vote goes to a restaurant called Modern Toilet in Taipei, Taiwan, where diners sit on toilets and eat soups, meat dishes and fecal-looking ice cream out of miniature commodes and drink out of small urinals. Who thinks this stuff up?

No list like this is exhaustive, of course. Know of any other strange theme restaurants? Drop us a line.