In the earlier part of December, I went on another business trip to Asia. This time together with my dad. It was a meeting-packed couple of weeks, with a few Christmas parties, and even one wedding banquet. Suffice it to say, there was plenty of eating going around. As usual, most of the pictures that I grabbed with my phone were of tasty food items.

Keeping with my latest travel posts, here are some things I learned this time around:

• If your suite doesn’t have a wall/door partition, it doesn’t really make a difference (knew this already, just a reality reminder).
• Extra large binder clips work great to close curtains tight to avoid annoying light distractions (particularly when overcoming jetlag).
• Charismatic Methodist churches do exist, and yes, they do speak in tongues.
• When a morning meeting is scheduled, confirm if food is involved, otherwise, you WILL end up being a hobbit and eating two breakfasts.
• When shopping for clothes in Asia, try EVERYTHING on. You may be of Asian descent, but it doesn’t mean anything will fit like it is supposed to.
• Earthquakes in Taiwan are common. What’s annoying is when they disrupt the HSR schedule and you are stuck in another city away from your hotel room and luggage.
• I involuntarily (see previous point) confirmed that I still get violently dizzy when riding on Taiwan’s bus commuters. Next time, can we just get a room for the night.
• I may be wimpy, but Yong Kang’s beef noodles are too greasy and spicy for my taste.

This latest business trip lasted 12 days and was a little different from past trips. Instead of conducting meetings in multiple cities in each country, we had centralized training camps in Malaysia and Taiwan. The result was that I did not have to spend as much time traveling from city to city and still got to meet with our managers and top sales people from each country.

Here are some things I learned:

• Take a picture of your hotel room number, because you WILL forget after a day of meetings.
• Laksa in Malaysia is not the same as in Singapore.
• Google Maps, especially Street View, is your friend. I saved so much time by looking up locations ahead of time and not having to wander around.
• Meeting up with friends (outside of work) keeps me grounded and accountable.
• Sulfur hot springs smell like durian, and now I know I don’t care for either.
• Traditional Taiwanese breakfast places are disappearing from Taipei Downtown.
• Google Translate can’t help you translate offline documents (at least not yet), particularly restaurant menus and subway maps.
• Next time I go to Yangmingshan, I bring a bike! Whether it’s paved or dirt, it’s bound to be a good ride all the way down.
• Ximending is worth checking out, especially for hard-to-find Japanese mecha models.
• New favorite dessert place, MeetFresh, tasty old-style shaved ice.
• Jetlag is more than just the physiological adjustment, there’s also the social, emotional and psychological.

Over the course of the last year, I’ve been gaining some weight to the point where my clothes were a little too tight for comfort. In the past few years, I’ve settled on a pretty good exercise regimen where I was primarily working out to improve my mountain biking rides, which kept me at a steady and healthy weight. Unfortunately, I must finally succumb to the truth that my age has caught up to me and my metabolism has slowed down to the point where I have to do more.

In addition to regular exercise, I had been controlling my intake and learning to enjoy the quality of my meals more than the quantity. But alas, all good things come to an end, and I have undertaken my first diet.

Part of the inspiration came from the latest product campaign in our Southeast Asia market called VIVA Vibrant Pack which was launched during my last Asia trip. The other piece of motivation came from a bet that I entered into with couple of mountain biking buddies (including Elijah). We gave ourselves one month to see who would lose the most weight as a percentage of starting weight. The loser has to buy dinner.

The sad and honest truth is that this is a permanent change in my body’s metabolism, and dieting or a more strict control of my diet will now become part of my daily life. So this diet is just a starting phase into finding a new balance of my diet and exercise to maintain a healthy equilibrium.

Lately, I have been trying oatmeal for breakfast. I don’t know where this interest came from, maybe it’s just because I’m getting older and my taste is changing, and also because I am looking for something healthier to eat for breakfast which is not so heavy. Anyways, after trying different versions of oatmeal in restaurants and at home (instant), I have a better idea of what kind of oatmeal I like and how to top it, which is with brown sugar and some raisins or currants. My favorite part is putting the brown sugar in and seeing it melt, yum.

And guess what, while trying to find a picture of oatmeal, I ran across the fact that January is National Oatmeal Month. The amusing fact is that they chose January because it is statistically the one month that people eat the most oatmeal, which could be because it’s in the middle of winter and we’re all looking for something warm to eat.

So I guess I could say that I was just picking up on this cultural food phenomenon or it could be my tiny brain finally succumbing to all the subliminal or blatant marketing messages. Either way, it’s still delicious, or as Alton Brown would say, “Good Eats”.

I have now made dinner on Christmas Eve for three years in a row. I think that finally makes it a tradition. Considering this is the only meal I make each year, I think this is a tradition that I can stick with. Unfortunately, I have to get in the habit of reviewing my past posts because I certainly would have benefited from looking at lessons learned from 2005′s cooking experience, since I repeated two of the mistakes that I made last year (meat thermometer and taking pictures).

This year, I decided to make stuffed breast of veal, spinach fritatta and mushroom, sausage risotto. I’ve been trying to do more shopping at Trader Joe’s (I just think it’s a cool store with interesting stuff and usually decent prices) and found most of the ingredients that I was looking for except for the veal breast. Unfortunately, I didn’t have time to head over to Bristol Farms (they have the best meat section in the area, of course at a price premium), so decided to check out Gelson’s (I went once before to the Newport Beach store, and wasn’t impressed, I should have learned my lesson). Suffice it to say, I was sorely disappointed with their selection. They most certainly did not have veal breast and they practically didn’t have any veal cuts at all. I finally settled on my backup and got pork chops cut in a row.

The risotto turned out fine, practice makes perfect, it’s just that since I only cook once a year, it takes a couple of years to actually practice . The fritatta turned out pretty good too, except that it was slightly burnt, since I nearly forgot it was in the oven on broil, just a bit overly crispy, but still good. As for the stuffed pork chops, the stuffing turned out fine (interesting use of raisins), but I think I still need practice cooking thicker cuts of meat with the bone in, because even though the meat on the outside was good, near the bone was still too rare. I did remember to sear the outside of the meat this time and that seemed to help to keep it juicy, but I think I need to let it cook longer at the end to finish the meat all the way through. Gotta get that meat thermometer and some better cuts of meat.

In the end, the judgment still lies with the ‘users’, the girls liked the risotto and the fritatta, and at least no one got stomchaches from the pork chop, which still tasted good, just should have been more done . Until next Christmas…

We usually just give each other anniversary cards (handwritten, of course) and we don’t always exchange anniversary gifts, but this year, Rebecca gave me this crystal cross which replaces a gold one that I lost a couple of years back. It’s perfect, I guess I always felt something was kind of missing since I lost the original cross (not that there was any significant spiritual meaning there), but it was something that I had worn for a long time. And of course, Rebecca knew exactly what to get me and what I would appreciate. I love how as our marriage grows, we get to know each other more and more. Hehe, I guess it’s like port, it gets better with age!

Rebecca and I went up to Santa Barbara for the weekend (sans kids). It was a relaxing time where we were able to re-connect after my trip to Asia and refresh our relationship and catchup on paused conversations. Rebecca has posted most of what we did over on her xanga/winkipinki_mom. So I won’t repeat what she has already mentioned. Just fill in some of my own thoughts and details.

For my geeky story of the weekend (not the TV story):
While we were shopping at the outlets, I discovered one thing that the Sony store is good for (and it’s not to purchase any of their overpriced goods). For some reason, my list of restaurants did not get synchronized to my Exchange account, so for my last stop, I went into the Stony store and jumped online one of their computer display models and logged onto Outlook Web Access so that I could grab my restaurant list off of my Outlook notes and e-mail it to myself. Problem solved. Thanks Sony .Food
We’ve been to Santa Barbara few times now, and we have found some restaurants that we enjoyed. So this trip, we re-visited one, and tried two new ones:

• Opal: new American cuisine with some local Santa Barbara flavor. The food was good, they had some unique and creative recipes, and better yet, it wasn’t expensive. A nice touch was that I had made reservations for dinner, but we ended up getting into town a little late, so I called ahead to let them know. And they still saved us a nice table in front.
• Tupelo Junction: we have been to this restaurant for breakfast a couple of times before, and each time, the restaurant has moved to a different location. The food is country / southwestern, and there isn’t anything like it that I know of in Orange County. Yummy breakfast scrambles.
• Bouchon: we went to this restaurant after our day of wine tasting, which was somewhat unfortunate, because this place specializes in localized french recipes paired with local wines. Regardless, we enjoyed a great meal with some great service. And I don’t care what those food nazis think, the foie gras was delicious.

Wine
This was our first time wine tasting and we certainly enjoyed ourselves. We learned a few lessons and tricks along the way that we will be sure to apply in future tastings, such as you don’t have to drink all of the wine and bring our own cheese and crackers.

• Daniel Gehrs: this tasting-room was actually in the small town of Los Olivos where a lot of wineries in the area have their tasting-rooms so that people don’t have to drive all the way out to the actual wineries. This was our first stop because it just happened to be the first one along Los Olivos one main strip. The proprietor was very friendly and informative, especially as he showed us newbies how it was done. I also got my first taste of Port, mmmm-yum.
• Fess Parker: we decided to get out of town and go to some actual wineries. This is the biggest and one of the more well-known in the area. I figure since this was our first time, we might as well start out with one that was experienced and well-established. Turns out that it was nice but nothing spectacular.
• Zaca Mesa: this was another winery that I found in my last-minute wine-tasting research. It didn’t look like much was we drove up, but we changed our minds as we drove to the back and walked in. The proprietor was very enthusiastic about wines and helped us to understand the differences that winemakers emphasize in their own wines. This was the only place that we ended up buying a bottle, 2003 Z Three. We’ll have to think of a good occasion to enjoy this.

• CLIF Mojo Bar – Mountain Mix Flavor: I use these as my universal snack, food of last resort, emergency food (when there’s nothing else good to eat), and even sweet fix. I used to like the Roasted Peanut, but for some reason it started to smell like the peanuts had gone bad, so I had to switch.
• Vitamin Water: These are great chilled or not (except for the dragonfruit flavor which is good chilled, otherwise tastes like diluted cough syrup). Unfortunately, I can’t drink this for my exercise hydration because it uses fructose for sweetening and after some personal testing I determined that I am one of those that have a “negative reaction” to too much fructose.
• Virgil’s Root Beer: my brother-in-law Gordon gave us some great root beer when we were visiting in Taiwan one year and since then I’ve been totally jealous to find something as good here in the US. Well, thanks to Trader Joe’s, we can now enjoy our own great root beer.
• Mike’s Hard Lemonade: this was the first alcoholic beverage that I actually enjoyed and has since led me down the path of imbibing.
• Ricola Original Herb Cough Drops: I hate coughing, it drives me crazy. So finding cough drops that work is a huge deal when I’m sick (you can ask Rebecca). Before, the only cough drops that would work were these ones from Taiwan made from a Chinese cough syrup called Pi Pa Gao. Fortunately, for our sanity, we tried Ricola (I actually got two different flavors to see which worked better) which are much easier to find around town.
• Cepacol Lozenges: these were recommended by Sophia a few years back, and they are my “big guns” when I have a sore throat or can’t stop coughing. Topical anesthetic for my throat, ooh, so nice.
• Maximum Strength Contac Cold+Flu: confession, when I have the flu, I am not a nice person to be a round. These will knock me out so that I can sleep and won’t make everyone around me as miserable as I feel.
• Clarks Shoes: ever since I bought my first pair of Clarks at Off Broadway Shoes, I’ve been hooked. It’s like their model 7 1/2M is using my foot as its mold. And their designs look good too.
• KCRW Radio: I love this radio station. It’s got NPR as well as great music. Not like my commute is all that long, but I sure miss it when we are driving outside of SoCal.

This is more like my daily living list. I have a more techie list, but that’s for another day. I’m sure there are some others, but these are what I could think up. If you guys think of any others or have your own lists, make sure to let me know in the comments.