Tag: food

It’s my birthday, where’s my free shit

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

If you’re one of my zero readers and have known me for while, you probably know that I don’t make much of a deal of my birthday at all.  The lower the expectations I have for them, the less I can be disappointed if they’re not met, so I typically try to treat them like any other day of the year, except people typically try to be a little bit nicer to me.

However, the one area in which I do have expectations are the litany of companies in which I have accounts with, or they at least have my email address in exchange for offers, news and occasional free shit; when my birthday rolls around, yeah, I am expecting some free shit, in the realm of some free and/or discounted food.  Even if everyone I know makes me feel inconsequential and invisible on my own birthday, I can still usually take solace in the fact that I can wander off and get a free meal or cobble together some free food from all the places where I’ve willingly volunteered some personal information with.

That is until this year, where it seems like everywhere where I’d hoped to have gotten any sort of offers from, have been circling the wagons and playing defense with free birthday shit.  This isn’t to say that nobody’s giving away anything, it’s just the shit that has been offered, if anything at all, have been way less impressive than in previous years, and at this point, it doesn’t appear that I’m going to be able to fill my stomach on free food, unless I want to go into a diabetic coma afterward.

A few years ago, my favorite burrito joint in the city used to straight up offer up a free burrito on my birthday, one that I always went out of my way to cash in, because fuck who am I to turn down a free Willy’s burrito?  A year ago, it was a 50% off burrito, which I still redeemed, because fuck who am I to turn down a discounted Willy’s burrito?  However, this year, at the 11th hour I might add, the email finally comes with this year’s offer, and it’s for but just a free side guacamole or side queso, and I’m like wtf.  Chips are inconsequential when it comes to my desired burrito meal, and this year there’s no burrito at all attached to the offer.  Pass

Other restaurants where I frequent enough to have apps on my phone, because I embarrassingly order from them frequent enough to warrant it, all I’m getting are offers for free desserts.  I mean, I have a ridiculously high status with Chick Fil-A, and they’ve yet to give me fucking anything at all, and I’m wondering if they’re going to spring something up on my actual birthday, as if I weren’t trying to plot out my day to maximize how much free shit I can redeem.

You know it’s bad when Starbucks is the only company to offer up something of decent value, which is the customary free drink, no strings except that it can only be redeemed on the actual birthday instead of the week, or the month of, as it used to be in the past.  Of course I’m going to redeem this one, seeing as how this year I have the luxury of my birthday falling on my work from home day, so there is even the remote possibility I might be able to chill at a Starbucks to enjoy my free drink while working remotely.

Otherwise, all the other companies in which I’d hoped there would’ve been free shit, all fucking fail.  I don’t ask for a lot in my life, and I don’t have a tremendous want for any material things.  All I really want on my birthday is some free food and not get aggravated too much, because anything else is mostly unreasonable and likely to not happen and disappoint me, and I don’t want to be disappointed on my birthday, no matter how much I try to tell myself to treat it like any other day.

F for all the companies that I generally pour my money into that won’t give me anything substantial on my birthday.  You’re all disappointments with your stinginess.

One of those my age is catching up with me moments

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I participated in this hot chicken tenders eating contest, because it was hosted by Willy’s, basically my favorite eatery in the entire city of Atlanta metropolitan area.  This is the same company in which I became the self-proclaimed Burrito King™ of Atlanta when I won a promotion they had where I had to visit and make a transaction at all 28 Willy’s locations within a 30-day span which I accomplished in four.

Well, the Willy who created my favorite burrito joint got into hot chicken, and has been slowly expanding his restaurant portfolio into the hot chicken game, opening a location of one of his new ventures not terribly far from where I am.  And then I saw that there would be a hot chicken tender eating contest, and I thought to myself, no better way to flex on the small world of Willy’s than to go and win another contest.

After all, being Korean gives me a natural +10 in spicy food tolerance, and what the fuck do white people know about spicy food anyway, so I figured it would be a layup to roll in, crush three hot chicken tenders in the span of six minutes and walk away with a little bit of swag.  Honestly, the photo on their wall of winners was probably the most important prize of all, because when it comes to fat guy accolades, showing my superiority at spice tolerance is something that I wouldn’t mind flexing on all the pleebs who can’t handle heat.

Anyway, I came, went and saw, and much like I knew I could, crushed the three hot chicken tenders in six minutes and walked away a winner.  This wasn’t a contest where there was a last man standing, but basically series of waves, where 10 people take the challenge on at a time.  Six people bounced in the first wave, and I was a part of the second wave where another five people dropped out from the heat.  I didn’t stick around for the third wave, because I had already proven my point.

Howlin’ Willy’s hot chicken was definitely among the higher tiers of spicy I’ve ever had in my life, but I will maintain that it was still not the spiciest thing I’d ever eaten either; that distinction goes to some nuclear pork I had in Seoul, where mythical then-gf and I had to tap and waste the food, and the retribution was fairly immediate.  But as for Willy’s, I definitely felt the heat through the challenge, but I was able to make it through without much difficulty.  The heat was slow acting, but after it burns, it burns off quickly, and before I left the shopping center, I was already back to feeling fine.

That is until the remainder of the day progressed, and I started to get hit with what I’m guessing was the mother of heartburn.  I don’t really know, because I really didn’t know what heartburn was supposed to feel like.  It wasn’t like indigestion pain, but just this really dull ache in my stomach that made me want to stop whatever it was I was doing, and just put myself into a position where I could apply pressure to my gut or be in a folded position where the pressure would alleviate.

Effectively, the rest of my day was ruined, because I couldn’t really get comfortable, and it impacted my ability to be present with my kids and physically competent to operate at a normal level.  I crushed a bunch of Tums hoping it would help, and I don’t think it really did.  After the kids were down, I ran to the store to get some Pepto, since the thought of something coating my insides was an appealing one, and by the time I went to bed, I probably downed a quarter of the bottle.

I’d never felt more relieved when the indigestion did hit, because it was finally giving my body the opportunity to purge the hot chicken from my body and not to get too graphic but boy did it feel as hot evacuating the body as it did burning my mouth earlier in the day.

Fortunately, a night’s sleep seemed to cure what ailed me, but before going to bed, I expressed that I felt a lot of regret for participating in a fairly meaningless contest, even if it was held by Willy’s.  The prizes were minimal, but the punishment I put onto my 40+ year old body was pretty vicious.

At first, I was just wondering if this was just my body reacting to ghost pepper, something I don’t really think I’d ever had before.  But the reality is more likely that this was a stark reminder of how I’m not the 25-year old that could eat whatever I wanted and shrug it off within hours.  Lesson learned that this was a situation where I could’ve been smarter and erred on the side of not punishing my body for a pretty useless reason.  Even for Willy’s, no matter how much of a fan I am of the brand.

The city’s most baller taco parties for the less fortunate

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

That’s what I’d want to do if I had the manpower, time, cooking acumen, multitasking ability and most importantly, didn’t have to sweat the whole needing to work for a living thing.

I volunteered for a charity event at work, because sometimes I just want to get the fuck out of the office, and honestly I do like doing charity work, so it’s a win-win getting to do something that makes my soul feel a little less droll, but at the same time doing it under the banner of work, so I get out of the office and it makes me look good all the same.

It was for the Atlanta Community Food Bank’s pantry center out in Bumfuck Stone Mountain, South Carolina; admittedly, I didn’t really look much at the details of the event, so firstly I failed to see that it was in Stone Mountain instead of their main offices in West Midtown next to the Fulton County jail, but also since I’d done volunteer work for ACFB before in the past, I also assumed it would’ve been more manual labor of packing boxes or unloading pallets or something of a similar nature.

No, the pantry center is kind of cool, in the sense that it’s set up to look like a tiny grocery store, where needy families can make appointments to come and “shop” for donated food, in the name of preserving their dignity and giving them the opportunity to feel like they’re shopping instead of being handed handouts.  My task during my shift was to keep watch over the freezer area, to make sure people weren’t taking more than they were allowed to, as well as making sure the shelves were well stocked.

Obviously, I wasn’t going to be a hardass on people who needed this kind of service, so if there was the occasional person who grabbed a second package of frozen meat or pouch of lunch meat, I wasn’t going to say anything, and at the end of the shift, we had serve 75 families and donated about 6,000 lbs. of food, so as far as I’m concerned, I like the idea that we’re helping impoverished people as well as preventing a tremendous amount of food waste.

However, while on my shift, I couldn’t help but notice that the majority of the food stuffs we had on the shelves on this particular day, man, could we have thrown such a banging taco party if we were to just cook up all of the available food and distribute it to the homeless or give it out to low-income areas where people might be hungry.

Tons of chicken and beef products were in the freezers; at or past their marked expiration dates, but if they were thawed and cooked that day, it wouldn’t be a problem.  There were pallets of taco kits, so all the meat could be seasoned and doled out in crispy corn shells.  Cans of beans, pinto and refried were in massive quantities, and some Whole Foods somewhere donated an endless amount of bags of blue corn tortilla chips.

Needless to say, plenty of ingredients for a baller taco party were on hand, and I was thinking during my shift that if I were like a more ambitious type or something, what I’d want to do is just take all of the meat and taco kids and tortilla chips in the pantry that day, cook up a ridiculous amount of tacos, and be that guy that goes around the city giving away taco meals to homeless people, or title-1 school kids or anyone in the city that is hungry, needs a little food assistance or just wants to get together to share tacos for a greater cause.

It’s definitely one of those ideas that only those with time, manpower and not needing to sweat the need to work for wages could accomplish, but hey, there are worse ideas to ponder about when you’re trying to do something good in the world.

Year four of forever

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

And just like that, #1 is four years old.

Throughout my own parenting journey, one of the most heard things I’ve been told is to not blink or take any time for granted, because it’ll all be over in the blink of an eye and the kids will be grown and be pains in my ass before I know it, and I’ll wonder where the time went when they were still in diapers and couldn’t do anything for themselves.

Honestly, I think I’ve done a pretty good job of not taking my time for granted, and I’m so often reflecting on the past and I think in this age where everyone has phones and cameras on their phones and it’s fairly possible to chronicle our lives through photographs, that it makes it easier to have a visual reference to reflect with as we can simply just open up our photos app and scroll through time.  That, and the fact that I’ve also been a prodigious brogger for more than half my life at this point, and I’ve always got the means to not only look back in time and reflect, but to also read my very own words to recall specifically where I was throughout the journey of life.

I’ll often times just stop and watch my kids doing the things they do, and marvel at the state they’re in now, as opposed to when they were babies or infants or toddlers, because it’s just incredible watching someone else’s journey through life, through the eyes of a spectator, and of course being their father, I’ve literally seen just about every single day of their lives.

I think it’s safe to say that I’m the first face they see in the morning, about 99% of their lives, I make the vast majority of their meals, and I put a tremendous amount of physical and time effort into my kids regularly.  There are times in which it feels like a lot of work, but I don’t regret any bit of it, and I take a tremendous amount of pride in trying to be the best dad I possibly can be.  There’s nothing I won’t do for my children, and the only thing I really care about at all is being a good dad.

But #1 being four years old, that’s still mind-blowing to process, even though I know the day is coming.  It’s just so hard to fathom that it’s literally been four years since she came into existence five weeks early, right at the on-set of COVID and the (majority) of the entire (intelligent) world shutting themselves into isolation.  Being born so early, she was whisked away into the NICU and stayed there for two weeks, while mythical wife and I had no idea what was really going on with her health, the world, coronavirus and everything else because so much was going on concurrently right then.

Looking at her now, it’s hard to believe she was ever considered an at-risk baby that had to be connected to a heart monitor for the first four months of her life, because within six months, we stopped referring to her as “adjusted age” and never looked back.  She’s a strong, healthy four-year-old that’s ridiculously smart, thoughtful, and brings joy to my life on a daily basis.

She’s fully potty-trained, never has any accidents, knows all her numbers and letters, has demonstrated some rudimentary reading ability, and I have a feeling math will come fairly natural to her, as she’s apparently understanding the processes of basic arithmetic, even if she doesn’t know what the words addition or subtraction mean yet.

She remembers damn near everything, and is so quick to remind me of when she thinks I’ve screwed something up, and seems to be able to recall things from the past now, which shows her budding brain being able to store and recollect memories, and even going to sleep, she always remembers to remind me of what she wanted for breakfast the night before.

Not a day goes by where she and/or her sister isn’t the brightest light of my entire day, whether it’s by making me laugh, something sweet they do or say, or just the happy peace I feel when I watch them doing kid things.  So I’m happy to do whatever it takes to bring happiness to their lives… like taking a cake decorating class, so that I could make my child a triple-layered chocolate cake with buttercream and a dark chocolate drip ganache.  But even if it’s basically pure trash food, it’s also a symbol of growth for my child in that her original severe intolerance to eggs has dissipated over time, and she can at least handle having it in baked goods or cooked into things.

Still not going to give her a straight up omelet or scrambled eggs, but considering I still can’t eat those things without considerable punishment, who knows if she’ll ever fully grow out of it, or be as limited as I am.  Only time will tell, and hopefully there will be many more decades of years to bear witness to what happens next.

Wendy’s surging real hard to alienate customers

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Scorched earth: starting in 2025, Wendy’s to explore surge pricing, where food costs dynamically change based on varying conditions; time, weather, demand

The knee-jerk reactions of the collective internet are probably exactly what anyone with a sensible brain would expect; full of bile, resentment, disdain, and a whole lot of declarations of never going to Wendy’s again, among other hard statements most feel comfortable spouting off on the internet without.  And absolutely nothing positive or with any hint of praise because nobody is in the 1% of greedy fucks who make these kinds of choices.

And who can really blame anyone for being disappointed and furious over this kind of announcement?  Fast food exists because it’s supposed to be cheap, predictable, reliable to exist, and not something where anyone rolling up to a Wendy’s has to think about not knowing what prices they’re going to see on the menu.

It goes without saying that this is a 100% cash grab, because everyone knows consumers aren’t going to be seeing “the low end” of the pricing model beyond perhaps those weird 30-minute windows in between breakfast and lunch time and lunch time and dinner, and that’s only if the weather conditions aren’t remotely hazardous.  Store personnel probably won’t be seeing any sort of monetary benefit to financial fluctuation, and in fact when some locations actually start losing business due to this reckless idea, their jobs will be where the difference in earnings will be made up from.

Unsurprisingly, most everyone knows it, and those who do, all hate it.  It’s flagrant greed and complete disregard for consumers, whose stress levels are already ratcheted up to the moon due to the completely imbalanced escalations of inflation versus wages.

Now I like Wendy’s food, there’s a reason why they’re one of the few burger joints that still manages to thrive, at least in the Atlanta area.  Burger Kings a few and far between locations, McDonalds is widely regarded as somehow unhealthier than Wendy’s, and there just aren’t enough Dairy Queens to compete against Wendy’s it seems.  Five Guys are already branded being egregiously priced, but at least they don’t (yet) flex their prices based on time and weather conditions.

But the thing is, I go to Wendy’s as frequently as I go to McDonald’s, which is to say practically never.  At least where I am, all the Wendy’s are completely staffed with the dregs of the dregs of society, and they’re completely unreliable, drive-thru lines wrapped around the building, that is if they didn’t decide to close up shop at 8:30 pm when they’re supposed to be Open Late.™  And the last few times I’ve actually eaten their food, as tasty as it is, my body definitely regretted it when I’m waking up at 2-3 am because my digestive system is revolting.

So I’m not concerned with my conviction at being able to further avoid Wendy’s if and when this bullshit surging comes to my area, because I don’t like late night toilet runs that aren’t on my own terms, but I still understand all the salt and all the rage and all the resentment towards the company all the same upon this news coming to light.

Aside from the obvious cash grab that this is, it’s also an obvious phishing expedition; Wendy’s looking for markets where they can hike up costs, based on the markets whose numbers don’t seem to be affected in customer order numbers regardless of price surging.  So probably big cities full of people with deep pockets, where people already spend like they’re out of touch with the classes in a position lower than their own, will inevitably have their general costs raised permanently, because make no mistake, surge pricing will inevitably come to an end, once Wendy’s realizes the maximum price points every region could sustain while not losing too many customers.

So as much as I’d love to see this become the beginning of the end for the company as a whole, and we’ll see some Wendy’s burn to the ground as if there were a Black Lives Matter demonstration going tits up outside them, it’s unfortunately going to end up with a shitty fast food company getting all the information they need in order to jack up their costs and ultimately make even moar money, while the Americans that have no choice but to sustain themselves on fast food, suffer even more.

The work trip

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

My job is sending me out to California to attend the Adobe MAX conference in Los Angeles. This is pretty cool because I can’t ever say that I’ve been on a work trip such as this before in my life; the last time I skipped town for a work function, it was to like Macon, Georgia where maybe like 12 people from various other satellite offices could meet my entire office when I worked for the state.

But yeah, work trip to California where they’re paying for the flights and the hotel.  You’d think I’d be more excited for this as it’s at the same time a little bit of a forced break from parenting, but I’m not treating this like it’s going to be the greatest experience of my life or anything.  It’s still a conference full of other graphic designers and creative types, and most of my zero readers probably know I have a bit of an eyeroll-ey contentious feeling towards that demographic.

Maybe it’s just that I’ve been doing it for so long that I think most of the bullshit high-up creatives say is full of shit and made up word fluff, or maybe I’m envious of the next generation of creatives and the talent that they bring to the table or maybe a little of both.  But the idea of being a conference full of these types isn’t necessarily my first preference of people to surround myself with, but that’s also probably me just being a curmudgeon about everything that’s usually the norm.

Honestly, the thing I’m looking forward to the most probably shouldn’t be any surprise, but it’s some of the potential food options I’ve scouted out.  Years of seeing drive-by reels of restaurants that usually anywhere but in Atlanta are now within reach, at least for ones found in downtown Los Angeles, or as the kids say, DTLA.  Yeah, I’ve found a few that are within reasonable distance to where I’m staying at, and as god as my witness, it’s my time to get my hands on shit like hot Cheetos loaded quesaritos, twice-wrapped burritos and trash can nachos.

However this isn’t to say that I’m completely no-selling MAX.  Instead of coasting through the event and scheduling nothing but layup workshops of shit in my wheelhouse, I’ve deliberately gone out of my way to schedule as many workshops and seminars of the things I’m not as versed in, so that I can actually maybe learn some shit and get on the path to some career advancement.

All the same, as a whole I really am looking forward to this trip as I’m nearing embarkation.  It’ll be nice to have a little bit of purely alone time, eat some trash I’ve always wanted to try and maybe I’ll learn something useful.

Dad Brog (#121): When we do what our parents did

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

#2 is sick and honestly in perspective it hasn’t been nearly as terrible as it’s been in the years past with the girls getting sick all the time.  Perhaps the world has kind of caught up to the backlog of colds, flus and other gross ailments and bugs.  Perhaps my kids’ immune systems have grown stronger from the onslaughts of colds, flus and other gross ailments and bugs over their short existences.  Maybe both.

Back to the point though, my youngest is sick right now, and it’s never easy on the soul as a parent when your kid is struggling through fever, discomfort and a body in revolt.  Nothing wants to be kept down, but she needs to stay hydrated, but consuming anything too fast results in it coming back up, so it’s a delicate game of trying to feed slow and steady so she doesn’t starve, but not too much lest it all comes back up and defeats the purpose.

Feed a cold, starve a fever, is what I always remember hearing.  I sure as heck didn’t really feel like eating when I was ailing just days prior.

Regardless, I felt it was probably best to keep any foods simple and stay away from the dairy and yogurts that my kids tend to eat when things are normal, but the options weren’t that many at my house which hasn’t yet fully reset and restocked since we returned from vacation.

That being said, given the circumstances of #2’s condition, I decided to take a page out of my mom’s book and take a stab at making jook (죽) which is basically a porridge made out of rice, or as lesser Asians know it as congee.  It was something my mom often made for me when I was a kid and suffering from keeping anything complex down, and I had memories of just how soothing it could be when you weren’t feeling well.

It also didn’t help-actually helped that I woke up at 5:30 this morning for no real reason, so I had an adequate amount of time to simmer and render down the rice and liquid before the kids woke up, and make a halfway passable 죽.  The real question mark was going to be, would my kids like it?  They’re at a finicky eating stage in life currently, but they do like it when I make fried rice, so there’s a chance that they might like rice in a different presentation, right??

Fortunately, after some morning snuggles, an explanation that the following recipe is something that halmoni (grandma) made for me when I was a kid, and I was going to make it for her, #2 actually ended up liking the 죽, much to my joyful satisfaction.  I mean, it’s basically mushy rice in a porridge consistency, and it takes to the same flavors as any ordinary rice.  So with a drop or two of soy sauce to give it some flavor, it has the same taste, but also goes down really smooth and is easy to digest, and I’m hoping that the pot of the 죽 I made can last another day or two and by then I hope she’s all better.

Unsurprisingly, #1 saw what her sister was eating and was curious, and turns out that she thought it was pretty good as well.  Great knowledge to have for when inevitably she gets sick too, that both my kids like the same stuff that I liked when I was a kid, and it does make me happy to do something like my mom did for me, for my own kids when they’re sick.