Category Archives: Love
March 2, 2013 A Valentine’s Day After Valentine’s Day
Yufei and I celebrated Valentine’s Day on the Monday after this year, and it was fantastic! I made us brunch with pancakes, eggs, toast, and chocolate covered strawberries in the morning:
Yufei got me flowers. Aww…
And at night we went out to Dixie for dinner. We had a voucher for a 5-course dinner with wine pairings for two, which was a great deal. The restaurant is located in the Presidio, surrounded by trees. It was dark when we got there, but I can imagine that it’s a pretty setting. The interiors of the restaurant was warmly lit. It was also really spacious, which I liked, and we got seated in a booth.
The kinds of food they serve I guess can be classified as new American with a southern twist. We started off with some canapés, which included hush puppies, deviled eggs, cured ham, and pickled okra.
The first course was a sunchoke panna cotta with smoked oysters, crispy fried brussel sprouts leaves & dandelions. Since Yufei does not eat shellfish, they made his without oysters. We were a little disappointed that they did not substitute something for the oysters, but oh well.
It was an interesting dish, unlike anything I’ve ever had before. I liked the crispy brussel sprout leaves, which kind of reminded my of kale chips. It was an interesting blend of textures and flavors. In the back of the photo you can also see their bread service of the night, a wild rive lavash flatbread served with black eyed peas. It was really good!
The next course was acorn grits with a soft poached egg, duck skin crackling and sea urchin butter. This time they replaced the sea urchin butter with regular butter for Yufei.
I should have taken the photo a few second earlier before the butter shavings all melted. They looked really pretty. It was a pretty good dish, not too memorable though.
Here are the first of the two wine pairings, a sparkling wine and a sherry. The last wine we got was a Malbec (not shown).
The next course was my favorite, the chicken fried quail with king trumpet mushrooms, spiced pecans, and bourbon butter. It was crispy and delicious and left me wanting more. But it was a 5-course meal after all so I guess the serving size was perfect.
And the final savory course for the night, grass fed beef with a red wine, mushroom & coffee sauce.
This was Yufei’s favorite course (not surprising since he’s a big fan of beef). I don’t really eat a lot of red meat but the portion was small and I enjoyed it. It was tender and pretty flavorful.
After the savory courses, we were presented with a small citrus granita palate cleaner before dessert. I kind of wanted a full serving of this, haha. So sweet and refreshing!
The dessert course, a banana foster soufflé with malted milk chocolate ice cream.
It was a nice light dessert to finish the meal. The little espresso cup the soufflé came in was too cute!
The meal overall was very good. The food was great and the service was very attentive. We tipped generously and even with the voucher, it was a pretty expensive meal. Everything was great, but I’m not sure if I would pay full price to come again.
After we got back home, we exchanged our presents for each other. Yufei got me chocolate truffles and these super cute foldable figures of us from foldable.me! Aren’t they adorable and funny? (Foldable Yufei is even wearing the same purple shirt as in the previous picture!)
Thanks to Yufei for spending this awesome day with me celebrating our 5th Valentine’s Day togehter :)
Tags: brunch, cooking, dessert, dinner, food, love, san francisco, southern, wine
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- Posted under Fashion, General, Love, San Francisco
February 18, 2013 Mani Monday – Heart of Gold
Since we didn’t have time last week, Yufei and I decided to celebrate a late Valentine’s Day today. So I decided to do something a little more special with my nails. This mani is inspired by this tutorial. The colors I used are Dark Red, Blush, and Golden Goddess by e.l.f. I also did not have washi tape and just used masking tape for the heart stencil. I’m super happy with how this turned out!
What do you think? Did anyone do a special Valentine’s mani? Show me!
PS: I realize that the last three posts I’ve done over the last three weeks have just been my weekly manicures. Oops. I will have more variety of posts coming up, I promise!
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- Posted under Beauty, Love
November 28, 2012 Half Moon Bay
For our 4 year anniversary last month, Yufei and I decided to go to Half Moon Bay for a nice little weekend getaway. I had just come back from New York and really welcomed the trip. We drove down from San Francisco on Friday morning. The drive was along the coast and the view was absolutely beautiful. We stopped by the Taco Bell in Pacifica for lunch – most scenic fast food restaurant ever! We also made a stop at another beach along the highway and took some photos.
We stayed at the gorgeous Mill Rose Inn, which was just so lovely. They had a beautiful garden full of blooming roses!
After checking in and dropping off our stuff, we went out for a walk in downtown Half Moon Bay. It’s such a cute little town! We were just in time for the annual pumpkin festival that was happening that weekend. We saw California’s biggest pumpkin:
The thing was humongous! Definitely can see it being turned into Cinderella’s carriage – ha! After walking around and getting ice cream, we drove to the beach.
We hung out at the beach for a while, then went back to the inn to rest a bit and watch a DVD. The inn provides tons of DVD’s that you can borrow and play on the TV’s in the rooms. Then it was dinnertime. I made a reservation at Cetrella, a restaurant within walking distant. It was a very nice place, great ambiance, with a live piano player and singer. Food and service were both excellent as well. It was very dark in the restaurant so I couldn’t really take photos (didn’t want to be that annoying person who keeps using flash).
After dinner, we walked back to the inn, which was equally magical at night. They had all these lights on their trees in the backyard – reminds me of Christmas!
The next morning, we had breakfast in the dining room (you can also choose to have it delivered to your room). They served champagne as well as a really yummy orange banana smoothie.
For food there was a pumpkin crumble, frittata, this nutty banana toast, and watermelon.
After breakfast we checked out, put our bags in the car, and went downtown to check out the art and pumpkin festival. There sure were a lot of people flooding into this tiny town! There were booths with artists and merchants selling their goods, food stands, etc. There was also a Halloween parade, where we saw this amazing Spongebob costume:
We had to get back in the early afternoon because I had work in the evening (boo). We had a wonderful time in Half Moon Bay; the weather was gorgeous, the Mill Rose Inn was lovely, dinner was decadent, we got to visit the festival, and most importantly, we got to spend it with each other and celebrate our 4 years together!
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- Posted under Food, Love, Places, Travel
August 28, 2011 Yufei turns 21!
For the first time in more than 2 and a half years together, I was finally able to celebrate Yufei’s birthday with him! For the last 2 years, we were always half a globe from each other on the special day – first me in China and him in Canada, then me in Austria and him in New York. But this year we’re finally together in San Francisco! So of course we had to celebrate – with lots of delicious food!
After sleeping in until a luxuriously late hour, which is highly suggested for one’s birthday, we got ready and headed to Burma Superstar, one of an oddly large number of Burmese restaurants in the city. Neither of us had had Burmese food before, but I really wanted to try it out, so I took Yufei there for lunch. The place had great reviews online, and there was a line when we got there at past 1pm on a Monday morning – this place better be good! After about 20 minutes, we got seated in a corner of the restaurant.
We started with chicken samusas and a Burmese salad:
The sambusas were nice and hot and crispy and we both liked them. The salad had an interesting freshness to it, which I enjoyed more than Yufei. For our mains, Yufei got the nan gyi dok noodles, with flour noodles instead of rice noodles:
It had a nice coconut curry sauce and was really good! I stole a lot from Yufei’s plate. I got a Burnese chicken curry dish with tan poi rice:
The curry was delicious and the rice was very interesting – it had huge raisins in it! I’m always adamant about having dessert, so even though we were both quite full, we ordered a fried banana and ice cream dessert to share:
Which was a good call because it was so yummy! After lunch we decided to go to Golden Gate Park since we were nearby. We visited the California Academy of Sciences first (we are such nerds), where they had this really cool green roof:
The museum itself was pretty cool, but we ran out of time before they closed so we didn’t get to see everything. We walked around the park for a bit and then went to to Japanese tea garden.
It was quite a lovely place, but a little too crowded when we were there, which kind of takes away the serenity of the garden. But it was still a nice place to spend an afternoon. By then it was starting to get late and we hopped on a bus to go to dinner. I had made reservations at Frascati, a Mediterranean style bistro on Russian Hill. We were greeted warmly upon arrival, and they even wished Yufei a happy birthday (always a good sign when they actually pay attention to what you mention during the reservation). We were seated upstairs, which is smaller and more private than the first floor. We started with a couple of appetizers, the gnocchi and the duck confit salad:
Both were delicious! The salad had quite a lot of duck in it, which was great. And of course since we’re finally both legal, we each had a glass of chardonnay with our meal. Yufei ordered the duck breast for his main:
And I had the wild California salmon:
Both dishes were fantastic! And of course, we had to have dessert again at dinner, so Yufei got the affogato and I had the blueberry cobbler. Yufei’s dessert came with a birthday candle, which got blown out since it was a little drafty, but our server did his best trying to re-light it (and it was on the house!).
The meal was absolutely wonderful, the service was great, and we both had an excellent time. We were much too full and a little tired to go through with plans of hitting a bar, so we just walked home and watched a movie on the couch. It was a a day well spent – and I hope that I’ll be able to spend many more of Yufei’s birthdays like this!
Tags: birthday, burmese, dessert, dinner, food, love, lunch, museums, parks, san francisco, sea food, travel
May 16, 2011 Another rant from my quarter-life crisis
A lot of people probably reach a point in their lives where they feel like everyone around them is getting engaged or married except for them. It’s probably normal. If you’re like 30 years old. This is happening to me now. AND I’M ONLY FRICKIN’ 21. What on earth?!
Starting only a few months after graduating high school (and even before), little hearts started to pop up occasionally on my Facebook feed, notifying me that such-and-such acquaintance is getting engaged. At first I was like, okay, I know a lot of people, there are bound to be some that are starting to get there. But then in this past year it’s just been crazy. Two days in a row now someone has gotten engaged. And let me just day that these are all people who are younger than me or within 4 years older than me. I can’t even count the number of people my age who are either engaged or married on both hands anymore.
How do I feel about this? I’m not sure. Just to be clear, I am not judging these people for getting married so young. On the contrary, I’m quite glad that they’ve found their happiness so early in life, and it gives me hope in love. But on the other hand, I’d be lying if I said that it wasn’t freaking me out just a little bit. And I’m not even sure why. I mean, I have a wonderful boyfriend of 2 and a half years, so it’s not like I’m feeling desperate in my love life. And I have no intention of getting married before I’m at least 25. I don’t even have a degree yet! Heck, I haven’t even finished the Core! How are these people who aren’t even legal to drink in the States ready to get married?! It sometimes boggles my mind. All these people make me feel like at this point in life, I SHOULD be ready for this huge thing in life. But I’m not. It feels so so far away and foreign. And to think that these people that I went to high school with just a few years earlier are already there is just… such a strange feeling.
I know it’s ridiculous to feel this… pressure or whatever it is that I’m feeling, but I can’t help it. And it makes no sense because I neither want nor am ready for what they have right now. Maybe it just adds to my overall panic about my future in general. Maybe because I know I want to have some sense of where my career is going before I get married, and since I have no clue of the former at the moment, people who already have the latter figured out make me feel years behind. (Ugh. My parents just called me down to have the “what are you planning to do after graduation?” conversation. Which is not helping anything. Seriously people, it’s freaking me out.) Yeah, that sounds about right.
So… I don’t really have a conclusion to this post. I just had to write it down to let go of some of the frustration and it actually helped me come to a reasonable explanation to why I was feeling the way I was (I HATE feeling crappy and not know why). So… yay? Anyway. A happier post shall follow tomorrow.
March 7, 2011 Seven random things about me
Oh dear. It’s been a while since I did anything with this blog. I’ll just blame it on midterms and internship stress…
Anyways, so I’m a terrible person and I should have done this ages ago, but the lovely Erin from Spreading the Sunshine had tagged me quite a while ago with a Stylish Blogger Award!
Yay! :) Go check out Erin’s blog for sure because it is awesome! I get to share 7 things about myself with the award, so here goes!
1. The nicest compliment I’ve ever gotten was when a girl in my art class said that I had “princess eyes” when I first got contacts. I have no idea what she meant, but it made me so happy :)
2. I love soundtracks. I really really do. My favorites include Amélie and Kill Bill, and my most recent obsession is the soundtrack to The Social Network. So so good. Got me through studying for several of my midterms so far! Here are a few of my favorite tracks!
Probably my absolute favorite:
I have to include the scene with this music! So intense, gives me goosebumps!
3. I’ve always wanted to be a redhead. I think they’re just the coolest. This is influenced by awesome redheads in fiction (Anne of Green Gables, the Weasleys, etc.), gorgeous celebrities redhead (like Amy Adams and Isla Fisher), and amazing redheads I know in real life. Sigh… envy.
4.. I absolutely cannot stand it when people crack their knuckles or bite their nails. I sat next to a girl in this class last semester who bit her nails THE ENTIRE CLASS every single class. She’d take notes with one hand and chew on the fingers of the other hand. Even when I sat somewhere else I can still see her and it still irks me so frickin’ much. Same with knuckle cracking. Do it somewhere else where I can’t see/hear you please!
5. I can’t fall asleep if there’s something that’s not done to a point where I’m satisfied with it. It’s really annoying as I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had to get out of bed and finish my homework to some point I feel like a natural stopping point, work on a drawing until I was happy with it, finish reading a chapter of a novel, or even reply to some thread on an internet forum because I feel like I have to make my point come across.
6. The most romantic thing anyone has ever done for me was when Yufei made me a birthday message out of fallen leaves on the lawn in front of my dorm building during freshman year. He stayed up all night working on it just so that I can see it on the morning of my birthday. Sigh… how can anything top that?
7. I have very strange snacking habits. I like eating dry ramen with seasoning, peanut butter and my favorite hot sauce out of the jar, dry cereal, and other random things I find in my cupboard/fridge.
And there you go! I will be back once I make it through this week (last week before Spring Break!).
February 17, 2011 Valentine
This Valentine’s Day, there was:
A delicious dinner for two made by Yufei
Beautiful roses for me
A pair of hand painted canvas sneaker for Yufei
And a wooden heart shaped jewelery box filled with too cute to eat chocolates for me!
<3
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- Posted under Art/Design, DIY, Food, Love
