I made a stir-fry last night, with tofu, my first time cooking tofu, and sai fun (bean noodles) – I had no idea these things expanded as much as they do! I made way too much of them. So, because of the ethnic origin of the recipe, I ate my meal with chopsticks. I like eating with chopsticks. I thought of them as extensions of my fingers, and what I was really doing was eating the food with my hands, except using finger extenders to keep my fingers clean and allow me to handle the hot food without the fear of burning myself.

Eating with your hands is a much more visceral, if not always tidy, enterprise. Like anything, it takes some getting used to, and it’s not for everone. That’s something else, though, I wanted to post just about chopsticks today.

I think that a lot of people have trouble using chopsticks, but they’re really not that difficult to use once you get the hang of how they work. I took the image above from this website, but I also found this one that gave a good tutorial on how to use the utensils. Now, read it, and then take what you’ve learned to a local Asian restaurant near you. Practice makes perfect!

Oh yeah, and the overall impression from my meal? Didn’t really like it all that much. Don’t get me wrong, I still ate all of it, of course (“waste not, want not” … well, I might have wasted some of the six pounds of sai fun that I made by accident.) I don’t think that my dislike was the fault of the tofu, I just think that the recipe was a bit boring. I’m not really a fan of the bean noodles either. They were too slimy in texture. I think that I’ll stick with rice.

Oh yeah, Happy Birthday, Mike R! Welcome to other side of 30!

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