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Leang Chaing

Sales Operations Manager

I plan weekends, vacations, and destinations all around where next to eat. My idea of a good saturday consists of unofficial food crawls interspersed with cocktails and a couple of parks as pit stops. There are often times I think I exist only to consume a la Unicron, and I'm fine with that.

Location: New York
Favorite foods: I'm a sucker for battered and deep-fried anything, but tend to gravitate more towards the foods I grew up on - Chinese with Vietnamese/ Thai / Cambodian influences. Get me some banh xeo or salted plum and I'm a happy camper.
Last bite on earth: Lamb's eyes - so that at least I can say I've tried it before I died because that's pretty much one of two conditions I'll eat it.

Comments

5 Surprising Ways Baking Soda Can Improve Your Cooking

@Richard in Jax Baking soda with shrimp has been used in Chinese cuisine for ages and a lot of the specific applications are in dishes where delicacy is crucial - har gow (crystal shrimp dumplings) comes to mind. I've never had an issue with a tinny taste, especially when you use it sparingly.

We Aged Eggnog for 1 Year to See if It's Worth the Wait

So this gives us 3 months to age our nogs for the holidays :)

The Best (and Worst) of Times for Japanese Wagyu Beef in the US

@coreenm found this list on the interwebs.

— 212 Steakhouse Restaurant, New York, NY

— Alexander’s Steakhouse-Cupertino, Cupertino, CA

— Alexander’s Steakhouse-San Francisco Restaurant, San Francisco, CA

— SLS Las Vegas – Bazaar Meat by José Andrés Restaurant, Las Vegas, NV

— Jean Georges Steakhouse, Aria Resort and Casino, Las Vegas, NV

— Nick & Sam’s Restaurant, Dallas, TX

— Wynn Las Vegas – SW Steakhouse Restaurant, Las Vegas, NV

— Teppanyaki Ginza Onodera, Honolulu, HI

Meet Me at Moe's: 9 Fictional Restaurants and Bars We Wish Were Real

@VeganWithaYoYo I tried getting a reservation at Dorsia, but the fictional wait was killing me.

The Vegan Experience: Welcome to Year 5

I find Chinese (Hunan, Szechuan, Cantonese) dishes to be very vegan friendly since they build flavors through a lot of aromatics and sauces, which can be founded conveniently jarred in local Chinatowns. The vegan Dan Dan noodles are pretty indistinguishable and not that much more work than the traditional.

The Comfort Food Diaries: All I Want Are Some Potato Skins

@scaramoche if you actually finished the post you'd realize that the Times Square scene was a memory and that Keith is the Senior Features Editor of Serious Eats :)

The Comfort Food Diaries: Confessions of a Bed Eater

He he dirty

Cookie Science: Why Cream Butter and Sugar?

Yay welcome back Stella! Always love reading your articles :)

Why Cookbook Clubs Should Be the New Way We Entertain

Who wants to set up a cookbook club in NYC? Totally serious.

The Best Things I Ate in Taiwan

via GIPHY

This Week at Serious Eats World Headquarters

The picture of Robyn looks like an American Apparel ad.

This Week at Serious Eats World Headquarters

Great I look like Lucille.

Kenji's Best Fast Food Awards (A Totally Biased, Completely Incomplete List)

@AndroidUser According to PETA's website they are.

http://www.peta.org/living/food/chain-restaurants/

How to Make Light and Tender Potato Gnocchi

You and Kate are too cute.

Our Vegan Month Progress: Week 3, Checking Privilege and Staying the Course

@AndroidUser We did cook for ourselves on some nights. My mom just didn't feel comfortable leaving us to "fend for ourselves" and always tried to have something on the table for us to eat even if it was steamed chicken and rice. I'm sure that's a sentiment many parents feel.

I don't think my or Lemonfair's statements preclude the difficulties of healthy options vegan/vegetarian/omni diets, but by definition veganism is an extreme. Compared to other diets, you're more limited with your options, of which the substitutions for meat and dairy have a high premium due to costs of labor, lack of subsidies, smaller economies of scale, etc.

I'd recommend trying to go full vegan at least once in your life -- it's easy to have vegan/vegetarian meals and make assumptions on how easy it would be to do it full-time, but cutting animal products out entirely is a different matter, especially during transition. I'm only now starting to get over my psychological addiction, but you can get some pretty intense hunger pangs during the day since we're rely pretty heavily on meat and dairy for a mental sense of satisfaction. In a sense it's a cognitive distraction. Studies show that those in the cycle of poverty are trapped due to the mental tolls they endure on a daily basis, creating a feedback loop as the weight piles on -- adding more would be counterproductive.

It's a privilege for me to be able to do this or go on a juice cleanse and have the job security to work at less than 100% for a few days and not be fired or penalized in any way. Anytime when we can actively make decisions about our nutrition, it's a privilege.

@calicook - thanks for the recommendation! I'll check out the recipes!

@bf It was at an "Irish" pub in Connecticut; the rings were beer battered and the waitress to the best of her knowledge told me they didn't have any egg. I'm putting faith in her that she wasn't lying about the ingredients to stop the barrage of questions :)

Hey Chef, What Savory Dishes Can I Make With Chocolate?

@SilentRhetoric For the 3rd date with my boyfriend, I made a vanilla bean risotto with sea scallops and brown butter with great success. I think you just need to think of vanilla as a spice and experiment. Buy them in bulk online and you can do some inexpensive tests!

This Week at Serious Eats World Headquarters

Want to hear cruelty? Max asks, nay pleads, all of us to name our 3 favorite cheeses. The NEXT day Vicky comes in with all of them in tow to photograph and sample.

I swear we're on Vegan Survivor or something.

Sorry, New York; Why Los Angeles is the Best Pastrami City in America

Mexican Tamale Pie (Tamal de Cazuela): All the Flavor of Tamales With a Fraction of the Work

@sheilal I use Evernote to keep track of all my recipes. There's a Firefox/Chrome extension you can download to instantly import any webpage to your notebooks -- it even gets rid of the sidebar units on SE and keeps only the text/primary image!

Mexican Tamale Pie (Tamal de Cazuela): All the Flavor of Tamales With a Fraction of the Work

Totally going to veganize this for Vegan month coming up! Thanks Daniel :D

This Week at Serious Eats World Headquarters

@canyr12 Since there seems to be some interest I might write it up and put it on the site :)

@sourdough Thanks! After seeing Kenji's writeup on tempering chocolate I knew I had to make these.

@heddylamar - that's definitely not supposed to happen! Right now we shouldn't be running any full-screen ads and I'll look into it since it seems like a bad/malfunctioning ad. If you see it again can you take a screenshot and email it to support@seriouseats.com? It'll really help with tracing the source since we don't work directly with Forbes and Economist.