Veritasty: Truthfully Delicious

Cheerio, dear readers! My bad for the very long hiatus this time.  The thing is, your Veritasty friends had been cavorting (also working full time jobs, etc. etc.) around London and other faraway locales from late September last year to right after the new year.  We're back home in New York now and swamped with work and life, but finally decided to carve out some time to share our absolutely delightful journey, both food-related and otherwise, for the last few months.  Here's our series that I'm going to call...The Great British Partake-Off!!  Part one of many... London A little backstory: Alex got an opportunity to work abroad in his company's London office, and they were going to put him in corporate housing for free.  So, Sandra decided to take full advantage of this opportunity and move there as well. Practically everyone in my family thought I was taking a sabbatical and going to London for vacation, but on the contrary I actually worked harder...

Happy 5th birthday to us!  Another year, another brilliant trip to Pig Island.  As always, we're very grateful to Jimmy Carbone and his team at Food Karma for organizing this event and being gracious hosts.  I would have loved for it to be about twenty degrees cooler and a bit more overcast; it was sweltering and I came home with a pretty gnarly tan!  But no matter, the plentiful food and drink were still enjoyable. In past years , I've tried to pinpoint a recurring theme or motif that inspired the chefs: last year we saw a lot of chicharrones and pork rinds, whereas past years there were lots of tacos or sliders.  I think this year's theme was a little broader and more international: fusion pork dishes. One of the standouts was a sandwich from Hudson & Charles of pickled pork shoulder in a banana calamansi BBQ sauce.  We spoke to the chefs, who told us calamansi is a citrus fruit like a cross between lime and orange, commonly...

After seeing more branches of my family tree in Jiangmen than I ever have in my life, we sojourned by bus to Hong Kong. Hong Kong is about a 4 hour bus ride away, considering you have to stop in Shenzhen to go through customs and immigration.  One of the most interesting things I saw here was the groups of commuter students.  And by students, I mean six year old schoolchildren.  While we lugged our suitcases off the bus, into the customs building, and waited on lines, we saw herds of kids dressed in matching school uniforms and bright bookbags and ID badges running through the building to get from the Shenzhen side to the Hong Kong side, and vice versa.  My dad said these were kids who lived on either the mainland China or the Hong Kong side and had to commute to and from school every day on the opposite side. Wild!  I thought it was bad just passing through once and waiting on lines and getting my passport stamped and all that, but these kids had to do it at...

Chinese geography is still fairly confusing to me, even after I've been to these places.  The next stop on our trip was Jiangmen, which is still part of the Guangdong province about an hour and a half away from Guangzhou by car.  My dad's older brother picked us up in a car to take us to Jiangmen.  It turns out my uncle is kind of a big deal: he is a history professor at Wuyi University, the major university in Jiangmen.  He's been involved with getting UNESCO World Heritage status for several historic villages nearby and sometimes the local TV stations interview him about local history and culture (my dad gets Chinese TV on satellite and he'll sometimes holler at me to come over to see my uncle on TV). A lot of people from Jiangmen eventually wound up in San Francisco and New York City during the main waves of immigration in the late 1800s and 1990s. We arrived at the Palace International Hotel in Jiangmen, which conveniently had several restaurants ...