Or 鳳梨酥 in Chinese, is a Taiwanese pastry and dessert. It it my favorite Taiwanese food item for sure. I usually ask people traveling to Los Angeles from Taiwan to bring some. The last time I was in Taiwan, I went to the main store for ChiaTe and bought four big boxes to bring back with me.

I was just texting with a coworker. He is visiting Hong Kong and currently transiting in Taoyuan airport. I asked him to bring some pineapple cake on his return trip. Everyone has their own favorite brand, but I asked him to bring some from Sunny Hill. In the US, I can get it online, but it is super expensive.

This is on Weee! for $2.60 each piece. They also have pineapple cake from ChiaTe but it is a third party seller so the price is even crazier.

The cakes from good brands have very short “best by” dates. When I brought four boxes back from Taiwan, I had to hand them out quickly before everything expired. I see cheap pineapple cakes at the local Asian market, but they must have been shipped here on ocean containers and likely contain a lot of preservatives. It is still a delicacy when I can get fresh pineapple cake from a good brand from Taiwan.

This is my dinner tonight. Ignore the fact that I was just looking at an Instagram post of two coworkers eating gourmet food in Seoul, and thinking how sad my life is. I do not have a steamer, so I was using my fancy rice cooker, which has a steam mode.

I believe the instructions on the box were not geared towards a rice cooker because it said to steam for twelve minutes. I loaded up the rice cooker with water and put the frozen shu mai into the food plate. Just to be safe, I set the timer for fifteen minutes. Well, after fifteen minutes, the rice cooker shut off, and the shu mai were still slightly frozen. Not cold, but frozen. I restarted the rice cooker for another twenty minutes and I am patiently waiting.

==========

I was asked by my coworkers if I wanted to join them on their trip to Korea. One coworker went for a wedding, and the other visited Japan first. I originally thought I was going to Taiwan during Christmas for a wedding, but that fell through. Now my highlight for the holidays will be nine days of dog sitting as my sister’s family visits the in-laws.

Not counting the four units of Humalog I shot at 6:00 am, I shot a total of 42 units today. So far, I only had a protein shake for breakfast and a chicken sandwich at Islands for lunch at 1:30 pm. Since SPR, I have not had French fries that often so maybe my glucose is a reaction to that? The glucose spike from lunch did not start until an hour after the meal and got as high as 360 on the meter. I did not save a screenshot but did input the reading into the inpen app, which suggested ten units. I shot 14 units instead and finally did the readings start to fall. I just checked again at 8:30 pm and it was still really high at 270 so I shot 14 units again. I have not had anything to eat since 2:00 pm. Since I am not hungry, I think I will skip dinner to see if I can get my glucose levels back to normal.

Since the SPR program ended at the end of September, I have held my weight steady. I was worried that I would rebound and gain back all the weight I lost in Q3 while on the program. However, since the program ended, my blood sugar has been extremely sensitive to carbohydrates, and it has been difficult to control with insulin shots.

Here is an example from yesterday. I went to sleep around 10:00 pm. for no apparent reason, my blood sugar began to rise at 3:00 am. The increase was slow at first but then a high glucose alarm woke me up at 6:00 am. I have not eaten anything since the night before. At that time, I shot fourteen units of Humalog and went back to sleep. When I woke up again at 9:00 am, my blood sugar was back down to 93.

What is going on? This happens during the day as well. I would measure my blood sugar, inject insulin as instructed by the inpen app or a manual sliding scale, and yet my blood sugar would seem to increase faster than the insulin can handle. The levels would eventually come back down, but after a huge spike in the CGM reading. If I try to chase the glucose high with more insulin, that often leads to low blood sugar, something enough for me to feel physically. I did bring this up to my endocrinologist and she agrees that I may be more sensitive to carbs after a diet program that had minimal carb intake.

I thought after the program, I could mix in some rice/bread/pasta once or twice a week. However, it does not look like it is practical since each time my blood sugar would go crazy like above.

A friend posted on Instagram that she finally tried a smoothie from Erewhon. For those that do not know, Erewhon is a market chain in Los Angeles that makes Whole Foods look like a 99-cent store. I jokingly asked her if it was a $30 smoothie, and she said I was close.

$22! That seems very expensive for a smoothie. If you look at the ingredients list, the word “organic” shows up eleven times. That is $2 per original ingredient. My friend said it was pretty good. I have been making smoothies at home for the past ten weeks for my diet/exercise program with frozen fruit from Costco. I probably spent less than 50 cents per cup. Probably not all “organic” though.

Costco is selling baijiu.

Baijiu literally means white liquor and it is an evil tasing liquor from China. Typically, baijiu is distilled from sorghum, but other grains can be used, like rice or wheat. It has really high alcohol content, often over 50%. I have not seen the brands that Costco is selling. The most famous brand out there is Maotai:

I tried baijiu several times in China, usually during business dinners. It tastes horrible and burns. I image it would be like drinking acetone or paint thinner.

Since my parents moved out, I have been doing a lot of microwave cooking. Purely by accident, I found out this week that you can preprogram power and time settings if the heating instructions requires it. On my microwave (Panasonic), you first set the power level followed by the cook time. If you hit the power level button again, you can put in another power/time combination and the microwave will continue cooking/heating using the second set of settings.

For example, I get these Jimmy Dean breakfast sandwiches that require a defrost program and a heating program. I used to do them separately, one after the other. Now, I can set 30% power and 90 seconds immediately followed by 100% power and 50 seconds then walk away. Of course, I do not get to flip the sandwich, but it came out fine.

In addition, I like the croissant sandwiches better than the muffin ones. They have the same content: sausage, egg, and cheese, but the muffins become chewy and hard to bite when heated in a microwave.

Nutritional information if anyone is interested:

I started ordering from Amazon Fresh about a year ago. I typically just go to my local Albertsons since it is near my house. I only order from Amazon Fresh when I am buying Amazon branded groceries, like their chips. Previously, you only needed to order $35 to receive free delivery. When I tried to put in an order today, I saw that Amazon raised delivery costs by a lot. Now you need to order $150 to receive free delivery. For orders less than $150, the costs are:

• $100-$150: $4
• $50-$100: $7
• <$50: $10

I would also tip 10% on my orders, even if that makes Amazon Fresh products more expensive than Albertsons. With the higher delivery costs, my $40 order is now costing 35% more than buying similar products in person. It is nice to get groceries delivered, but it is not worth the additional cost for me. Amazon should be saving money on storefronts and logistics and should pass some of that savings to its customers, who already pay $140/year for Prime membership.

I guess I will have to make the three-minute drive to Albertsons later today.

I do not cook that much. When I was still married, I did cook more often since my ex-wife did not like to cook. We also ate out a lot. Now, ever since my parents moved out, I rarely cook. Meals are a combination of take-out, eating at work, food from parents, or frozen food. Thank God for canned soup and frozen dumplings.

On days when I do go into the office, I often start thinking about whether I should stay after 7:00 pm and get food from the work cafeteria, or leave and pick something up on the way home. Most times, I would leave the office, ponder several fast food options, then go home empty handed. Sometimes I will heat up something, but often I just crash and fall asleep as soon as I get home. For example, I left work early at about 1:30 pm. I did not eat lunch yet and I contemplated about four or five places to stop on the way home. As usual, I just kept driving and ended up at home without any food. I still have not eaten anything (it is almost 5:00 pm) so I guess I will just wait a bit longer and eat dinner.

Life just feels so disorganized however.

While I was dog sitting at my sister’s house, I only got take-out food twice. Excluding meals at work, almost everything else I ate was frozen. My mom had bought several bags of frozen dumplings, so I had them for dinner often. I went through a bag of fifty, eating ten at a time, so that accounted for five meals.

These were made by some lady in her home, and these have just pork and napa cabbage as the filling. Evidently, my mom has been buying dumplings from her for over thirty years. She usually sells to restaurants but will take large orders from ordinary people. Currently, the paster from my parents’ church would place a large order, and individuals would pick them up at his house. I believe they are ~$20 for a bag of fifty. That is a decent price, and the dumplings are bigger than those you get in the supermarket. I have three more bags and one bag of wontons, so that will last me a few months.

Since my sister is out of town (hence the dog sitting), my parents and I had early Christmas dinner tonight. I ordered dinner from Darya Restaurant in Orange. There are a lot of Persian restaurants named Darya and the name seems to mean wealthy. We ordered our typical chicken kabob, though my mom decided to try shrimp this time.

The food was good. My JP Morgan investment guy took me to lunch there a few months ago. It is more expensive than Panini Kabob Grill, however. Our dinner cost about $75; it would have been $50 at Panini.

There was no salad included, though the shrimp entree was supposed to include it. They gave us some thin flatbread/tortilla instead. There was a lot of rice, and I was able to pack a decent lunch for tomorrow.

==========

I ate the leftovers this morning for breakfast and like what happened at work last week, I threw up some of it up after eating. IIRC, there was a lot of coughing both times so maybe that is the trigger. I only threw up about the last three bites, but it still sucked. There were no food issues last night, and I packed the leftovers right away. I ate the rest of the food after resting a bit.

I turned 54 today. When I was younger and relatively healthy, my ex-wife and I joked that we only want to live until 50 since growing old sucks. Well, after a divorce, heart bypass surgery, dialysis, and a kidney transplant, I am still alive.

Several years ago, our family decided to forgo gifts for birthdays. Instead, we would just gather and have dinner and cake. For today, my parents got some dishes from a nearby Chinese restaurant, and my sister-in-law bought an ice cream cake from Dairy Queen. I was quite surprised since I thought DQ went out of business years ago, and ice cream cakes come from Baskin Robbins. The last time I was inside a DQ store was probably more than 40 years ago in Mississauga.

The cake was quite good. After we ate, there was still about 40% of the cake leftover so I brought it home. I will have to cut thin slices and slowly eat it over the next week to avoid a sugar high.