Christmas for my family is all about eating. Ok, any get together with my family is about eating. On this particular christmas, we pretty much ate from 2pm until we left. It’s non-stop grazing, from beginning until end. My aunt loves to make spinach dip.

Kimchi pajeon… regular pajeon is good, but kimchi pajeon is so much better! This particular batch was amazing.

We had regular non-spicy pajeon too. We’re a small peoples, but we eat lots!

My aunt always makes shrimp tempura, so we had more of these freakishly large shrimp from the costco.

She had proper tempura batter this time, instead of the chicken batter she used last time. Who doesn’t love deep fried shrimp? My mom eats the shrimp tails. So does my uncle. I do not! She says it’s full of calcium. I’d rather drink milk or take supplements!

I made a special request for these chinese dumplings. My aunt buys them at a local chinese restaurants, and she can buy them frozen. They are shrimp and chive dumplings. These were still super tasty, but they had transformed from shrimp and chive dumplings into chive and shrimp dumplings. Whereas they were mostly shrimp with a hint of chive before, these new ones were mostly chive with a couple of tiny miniscule shrimp in them. It was seriously disappointing, but still delicious. I guess it’s just a sign of the times!

Since I have an unhealthy like for ddukpokki, my mom had picked some up the day before and heated it up. It was pretty good for store bought stuff.

After all the grazing, we did have a proper “dinner” later on. We had some japchae, some random veggie banchan, kimchi, of course, and a whole crapload of meat.

These shortribs really should be grilled, so grilled they were! Snow was still all over the place, and definitely on the back deck, but my uncle had shoveled himself a little path to the grill. And with full snow garb on, he cooked these babies up. And they were particularly good!

My cousin brought a pie! Not just any pie folks, but a sweet potato pie that had a layer of pecan pie on top! Whoo! Super sweet as all get out, but I still enjoyed it.

I headed off to vegas for a short work-related visit. For our first night there, we had a rough time finding food. We went to the Rio to eat at an italian place that C had been to before, but when we got there, we found out it was no longer there. So then we walked to a different italian place there, but it was too expensive and the advertisements for the restaurant were too creepy. Several other places we tried to go to were already closed. This is why we resorted to eating at Mah Jong. It’s a fast food chinese spot. I went with the beef chow fun. It was ok. The hot and sour soup was awful. It’s hard to describe why it was so bad, but it was neither hot nor sour nor good. And this food was horribly overpriced as well, for less than mediocre chinese. I like the Rio, but not for this place!

I was totally hankering for some noodle soup the other day, so I dragged T along to Sang Kee for a quick dinner. He’d never been there before. Can you believe that? And he lives down the street from me. And I’ve been to Sang Kee way too many times.
T ordered the salmon with black bean sauce. If you want to eat right away, never ever order this dish. It took FOREVER for our food to come out, because they had to cook this. I saw people get seated way after we did, and they got all of their food before we got ours. It was depressing. Especially because we were both starving. Watching everyone else eat and get their food, even though they sat and ordered way after us, was very upsetting.
When I go to Sang Kee, I’m beyond predictable. I get the noodle soup with roast pork and dumplings. But there’s no reason for me to stray. I was craving noodle soup, so that’s just what I got. And it’s good every single time. It’s a big portion with tons of delicious roasted pork and just the right amount of dumplings. And with some veg too, so it makes me feel a bit on the healthier side.

Service was ok, as usual. And also as usualy, this place was pretty darn busy. It was a weekday too. But it doesn’t really matter when you show up. It’s always busy here. But there’s good reason, because it’s always good food, big portions, at very reasonable prices. I’m so lucky I live so close to this place.