Pho Spices

While I was in Scotland visiting Scotch’s parents, my father-in-law (FIL) wanted to learn more about Chinese and Vietnamese cooking. Being avid readers of my blog (they are so sweet and supportive!), he mentioned that he was very keen on learning how to make Pho – the Vietnamese rice noodle soup – that he had read about in my recent post on my mom’s Vietnamese kitchen.

I’ve made Pho a couple of times in Dubai and once for a dinner party and have always had to drive to one market for the bulk of the ingredients (Carrefour or Waitrose), another market for the 1/4-inch rice noodles (Geant because I like the brand that they stock), and yet another market (Sunflower in Karama) for the Asian basil.

There was one unforgettable incident, where a store stocked carrot, spinach, and pumpkin flavored rice noodles, but not the PLAIN ONES! I nearly lost it in the store since I needed the noodles for that night and had already driven to the far reaches of Dubai and back. I ended up buying Pad Thai noodles and just discarded the flavoring packets.

If I had ever complained about the challenges of finding Pho ingredients in Dubai, I take it all back after experiencing the obstacles that awaited me in Dunbar, Scotland, the beautiful sea-side town where the my in-laws live. The birthplace of conservationist John Muir, Dunbar is also known as “Sunny Dunny” because it is the sunniest town in the UK.

We commenced Operation Pho Noodle Soup the day before my FIL and I were to serve the Pho. We headed out to purchase all the ingredients so that we could preempt any last-minute surprises on the actual day of cooking. We drove to North Berwick, which Scotch described to me as “two houses bigger than Dunbar,” because it might have a better selection of meat and produce.

I find most small towns in Scotland to be very charming and North Berwick was no exception. We meandered in and out of tiny shops, window browsing through displays of country furniture, specialty toys, and sea-inspired artwork.

By the time we arrived at the butcher shop, we were so focused on the current night’s dinner of pan-fried sirloin and rib-eye steaks that we left the shop with nothing but steaks. As we strolled towards the beautiful sea where we debated on walking back to the car via land or beach route I suddenly remembered that we were supposed to also buy beef bones for the Pho stock!

Back we went to the butcher’s, re-crossing streets that I still didn’t know whether to look to the left, or to the right for oncoming traffic. I decided it would be safest to look both ways – really fast! – causing Scotch to tease me about looking both ways on a one-way street. Ah well, better safe than sorry.

Back at the butcher’s I asked if they had oxtails but the answer was, “I don’t think so.” So we settled on regular beef bones but they were massive and the butcher wasn’t able to cut them into chunks. I hesitated at first but we were told they were free and to take them anyway.

Free?! Is it the norm to give bones away for free in Scotland? I certainly have never been offered free bones for stock. So WOO–HOO!

Except that they were kind of difficult to fit into the largest pot that my FIL had:

Boiling Massive Beef Bones to Make Pho Stock

My brain must have been really clouded by jet lag because as we were driving away from North Berwick and the butcher shop, I suddenly remembered that I had forgotten the braising meat for the Pho stock and the thinly sliced beef for the finished soup.

Whoops x 1.

We were on our way to a Tesco supermarket so I was hoping to pick up those items there. We didn’t manage to find any braising meat nor thinly sliced steak but did manage to get bean sprouts, limes, cilantro, and scallions. Asian basil was, unfortunately, nowhere to be found.

FIL said we could probably get some Asian Basil in Edinburgh (a rhetorical statement as none of us had any intention of making the long drive there). At that point, I wished I had brought some from my mom’s veg garden.

It wasn’t until we got home that I finally decided that sleep deprivation (I was functioning on one hour of sleep in the last 36 hours) was really wreaking havoc on my brain because I remembered yet another ingredient I had forgotten to pick up at the store – RICE NOODLES!

Yep, who forgets rice noodles for a rice noodle soup? Moi.

Whoops x 2.

The next day, while the beef bones and spices were simmering in the stock pot, FIL and I drove to a nearby grocery store, Asda, in search of rice noodles, hoisin sauce (which I’d also forgoten to pick up the day before), fillet steak, and more fish sauce (FIL only had a few tablespoons left and one should always have fish sauce in the house ).

We didn’t have much of a selection at Asda so we picked up what we could find – Blue Dragon Fish Sauce, a Hoisin stir-fry sauce (not quite what I was looking for and tasted marginally like Hoisin sauce but better than nothing), and “Thai Style Ribbon Noodles” (which I assume is the English supermarket translation of “Pad Thai”) to substitue for the Pho noodles.

These noodles were pre-cooked and vacuum-packed but had a slick oily coating on them which I rinsed away with hot boiling water.

Pho sauces and noodles

We didn’t find any pre-sliced beef (like carparccio) so we bought fillet steak to slice up ourselves which is often what my mom does anyway. I put them in the freezer to harden a little and thus facilitate slicing, intending to leave them there for only 10-15 minutes but I totally forgot about them and after 45 minutes they were too frozen to slice.

Whoops x 3.

FIL put them in the microwave to defrost which ended up softening them back to original texture but he did a great job at slicing them as thin as he could. Since the raw beef slices are placed on the noodles and then cooked by the hot stock that is ladled on top of it, the thinner the beef, the easier it is to cook.

Fillet Steak

I ended up simmering the bones for 4 hours because I kept feeling that the stock was too light in flavor – it needed to be stronger. Maybe because the bones were so huge and there wasn’t a lot of surface area?

My recipe called for 1/4 cup fish sauce. I tasted the Blue Dragon one we bought at Asda and it was rather bland but very salty. So I minimized the amount of salt I used in the broth and had to triple the amount of fish sauce before I felt that the taste was anywhere close to perfect.

One thing I learned from my mom is that when using soy sauce or fish sauce which are both salty, sugar must be added to balance out the taste. I ended up using 3-4 tablespoons of sugar before I felt that it was balanced.

Pho Stock Simmering Away

Cilantro, bean sprouts, scallions, raw thinly sliced onions, red chillis, and limes were used for the garnish. Again, I couldn’t find Asian basil but that is typically added to Pho as well.

Fresh herbs, chillis, and limes

The noodles were placed at the bottom of the bowl. If using dried rice sticks, be sure to soften them up in boiling water as per the packet directions just as you would cook dried pasta noodles.

Next I layered the beef (it is usually placed last in the bowl but I was worried it wouldn’t be cooked enough being thicker than usual), then the remaining garnish except for the limes.

Prepping the bowls of Pho

Hot beef stock was then ladled into each bowl.

Because all the ingredients are placed raw in the bowl, the stock has to be very hot to be able to quickly cook the meat and garnish. The vegetables won’t completely soften but will retain their crunchy texture and have a nice half-cooked half-raw flavor.

Ladling the hot stock

Finally, an important squeeze of lime is added at the very end.

Final touch - a squeeze of lime

I was pleased with the final result and Scotch said that the taste was close to what it was supposed to be given what I had to work with. It took him years before he appreciated the subtleties of Vietnamese cooking and Chinese soups (home-made versions, not the restaurant stuff) which he at first found to be bland and boring.

He grew up on heavy cream-based soups and hearty stews so having Pho was like the initial shock of suddenly switching from full-fat milk to fat-free.

In the end there were 3 emptied bowls out of 4. My mother-in-law is not a fan of seafood so I can imagine that the fish sauce may have been too strong and overpowering.

Operation Pho Noodle Soup: Completed!

I was happy to showcase this Vietnamese dish to my in-laws and hope that they truly enjoyed it and will recreate the recipe when I am gone.

Vietnamese cuisine may at first seem daunting to cook at home as the techniques and ingredients can seem rather foreign. In areas where some of the ingredients cannot be obtained, a little effort has to be made to either drive to a larger market or to purchase on-line.

But I can tell you that I have done it in a small seaside town of Dunbar so you can too!

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This is my contribution to Delicious Vietnam, a monthly blogging event celebrating Vietnamese cuisine created by A Food Lovers Journey and Ravenous Couple.

This month’s Delicious Vietnam #17 is hosted by Phuoc from Phuoc’n'delicious.

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Pho

5.0 from 1 reviews

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Recipe type: main

Author: ginger

Prep time: 15 mins

Cook time: 4 hours

Total time: 4 hours 15 mins

Serves: 4

Pho is a Vietnamese rice noodle soup made with beef stock simmered for hours with star anise, cloves, cinnamon, onion and ginger. It is served with sliced raw beef, garnished with fresh Asian herbs, and finished off with a squeeze of lime.

Ingredients

• For the broth:
• 4 pounds beef bones, preferably with marrow; cut into 2-inch pieces
• 1 pound stewing beef (chuck, brisket, etc), rinsed, cut into 2″ cubes
• 1 3-inch piece of ginger, peeled, cut into chunks
• 1 large onion, halved and peeled
• 1/4 cup fish sauce
• 6 whole star anise
• 4 whole cloves
• 1 3-inch cinnamon stick
• 2 Tablespoons sugar
• salt and pepper to taste
• For the garnish:
• 1 pound 1/4-inch rice noodles
• 2 bunches scallions, thinly sliced
• 1/2 cup tightly packed fresh cilantro leaves, chopped
• 1/2 cup Asian basil leaves
• 1 cup mung bean sprouts
• 1/2 yellow onion, very thinly sliced
• 1 large lime, cut into wedges
• 1/2 pound beef (flank, sirloin, filet mignon), trimmed of fat and sliced very thin across the grain
• Hoisin sauce for dipping the meat
• Hot chilies, sliced or Sriracha sauce (optional)

Instructions

1. Place the beef bones and stewing meat into a large stockpot and add enough water to cover. Bring to a full boil and simmer for 5 minutes. Discard the water and gently rinse the meat and bones. Return the meat and bones to the pot and cover with 2 quarts (2 liters) of fresh, cold water. This process will give you a cleaner and clearer broth.
2. Bring the stock to boil again over high heat and then reduce to a simmer. Allow to simmer for 10 minutes and skim any scum that surfaces.
3. Add the remaining broth ingredients, cover and simmer for 1.5 to 2 hours, occasionally skimming any scum that surfaces. Remove the stewing meat and once the meat is cool enough to handle, slice thinly and place in the fridge for later use.
4. Simmer the broth for another 1.5 hours and carefully strain through a fine sieve. Remove any remaining tendon from the bones, slice thinly and set aside in the fridge with the cooked beef.
5. De-fat the stock by skimming the fat from the surface with a spoon or ladle. (I sometimes use a fat separator to retain as much of the stock as possible.)
6. Add the fish sauce, then the sugar, salt and pepper to taste.
7. Arrange the cilantro, scallions, bean sprouts, onions, Asian basil, lime wedges, and chillis on a large plate in separate piles. Place the hoisin sauce in small dipping bowls as a condiment for the meat.
8. Prepare the rice noodles, drain and divide among the bowls.
9. Just before serving, return the broth to a full boil.
10. Place the raw sliced onions, the reserved cooked meat and tendon, and the slices of raw beef over the noodles in each bowl.
11. Carefully ladle the boiling broth over all the ingredients in the serving bowls. The raw beef should be submerged in the broth to cook properly.
12. Serve immediately, along with the garnish and hoisin sauce.

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2.1.7

Related posts:

1. Kimchi Udon Chicken Soup
2. Wee Scotch Gets Mushroom Soup in His Eye
3. Vietnamese Chicken Curry Soup (Ca Ri Ga) – Make it Your Own!
4. Mom’s Vietnamese Sweet and Sour Soup
5. Are you freaking kidding me?

Summers in Dubai can be difficult for many Dubai dads as their wives and kids abandon them for cooler climates where the children can play and run around outdoors without worry of heat exhaustion and where the moms aren’t drenched in sweat within minutes of stepping out of air-conditioned homes.

Wee Scotch and I have escaped to New York for the last 7 weeks to stay with my parents and we have now made it safe and sound to Scotland to visit my in-laws.

Scotch decided to join us at the last minute and flew in from Dubai. The look of joy and recognition on Wee Scotch’s face when he spotted his “Da-Da” at the airport was just priceless.

Wee Scotch bowling Scotch over with hugs and kisses

The weather has been in our favor with bright sunny skies with the occasional rain shower only in the late evenings and early mornings. It never got warmer than 65°F (18°C) but having always been in Scotland during winter weather, I’ll take that over snow and freezing temperatures any day.

So far, the week has been full of eating wonderful Scottish meals and of course visiting family and friends. I can’t believe the week is already over as tomorrow we will be hopping back on a plane and settling back into our Dubai home.

Related posts:

1. Ginger and Scotch Clams with Asian Basil
2. Inaugural Week, Day 4 – Ginger and Scotch Haggis
3. Ginger and Scotch Inaugural Post – Whisky Chicken Soup
4. Inaugural Week, Day 7 – Ginger and Scotch Ice Cream
5. Wee Scotch Loves His Sugar Daddy

The sun is shining brightly through blue skies today and there are a few clouds but no storm nor hurricane sighting. Hoping Wee Scotch and I will finally make it onto our flight to Scotland tonight.

I had a nice surprise yesterday. While Skyping with Scotch, he revealed that he had bought a last-minute ticket from Dubai to Edinburgh so he will be joining us at his parents. I grabbed Wee Scotch and we did a victory dance – WooHoo!

Scotch misses his son (and me too, I hope!) very much and it has been 5 long weeks since we last saw each other. But Wee Scotch hasn’t forgotten his dad – every day we wake up and I point at a picture of Scotch and I ask, “Who’s that?” to which Wee Scotch smiles and enthusiastically replies in his cute toddler voice, “Dat’s da-da! Dat’s da-da!”

In my last post I talked about my mom’s vegetable and herb garden. She often makes decisions on what meals to prepare based on what is abundantly growing in her garden. My grandma and aunts in Brooklyn are regular benefactors of any surplus herbs.

Asian Basil (also known as Thai Basil)

One day, mom came home with Costco-size Littleneck clams and noticed that she had tons of Asian basil that needed to be picked before the plants flowered or bolted to seed.

So instead of preparing the clams with her usual black bean sauce (which is very popular in Chinese restaurants and in our household), she whipped up a different kind of sauce to pair with the Asian basil.

Baseball Clams – “Strike! You’re Out!”

I wanted to show Wee Scotch what clams were and gave him a few to play with. At first he tried to lick them (yuck!), then bite them (too hard), and so he assumed they were not food but some sort of funny-shaped ball.

He finally decided on using them for his pitching practice. Since we’ve been back in the States, he’s been watching baseball on TV and looks like he’s picked up some new moves.

"Home Run!"

Those poor clams didn’t stand a chance in the hands of a 20-month old toddler. We returned them to my mom all cracked but still usable.

(I just realized that Wee Scotch isn’t wearing any pants in these photos! He was being potty trained at the time and only wore pants and diapers during nap times.)

Anyway, back to the clam recipe.

Mom made a simple stir-fry using a soy and oyster sauce mixture thickened with corn starch. She normally adds Cognac or Whisky for extra flavor but this can be left out if not desired.

The clams were small this season but juicy as they absorbed the stir-fry sauce very well. I enjoyed the clams with the salty-sweet sauce on its own but even more so with the Asian basil which added a level of freshness to the dish. I couldn’t get enough.

Here is a slideshow of the preparation and cooking process:

Enjoy!

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Ginger and Scotch Clams with Asian Basil

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Recipe type: Appetizer

Author: ginger

Prep time: 30 mins

Cook time: 10 mins

Total time: 40 mins

Serves: 4

Littleneck clams stir-fried in a Ginger and Scotch sauce and tossed with fragrant Asian Basil.

Ingredients

• 5 lbs Littleneck clams
• 3 Tablespoons vegetable oil
• 3 cloves garlic, finely diced
• thumb-size piece of ginger, finely diced
• 2 cups of loosely packed Asian basil
• Sauce Mixture
• 1 Tablespoon Scotch Whisky
• 1 Tablespoon oyster sauce
• 1 Tablespoon soy sauce
• 1 Tablespoon cornstarch
• 1 Tablespoon sugar
• 1/4 cup water

Instructions

1. Rinse the clams and soak them in a large container of cold fresh water for at least 30 minutes, then drain.
2. Bring a large pot of water to boil and add the clams. Simmer clams for about 5 minutes until they open. Remove opened clams with slotted spoon.
3. Continue to boil any clams that haven’t opened but discard if they remain closed even after additional minutes of boiling. Save the broth for making stock or discard.
4. Combine all the sauce ingredients and mix well.
5. In a large pan or wok, heat the oil over medium-high heat until very hot. Add the garlic and ginger and swirl them around in the oil for about 10 seconds or until they start to color on the edges.
6. Quickly add the sauce mixture and stir it in with the oil.
7. Toss in the Asian basil.
8. Add the clams and gently mix so that the sauce coats all the clams.
9. Remove from heat and serve immediately.

Notes

Boiling the clams in a separate pot of water helps to keep the finished dish free of any sand or grit that may not have been filtered out during the soaking process.

We usually have the clams as appetizers but I like to eat mine over jasmine rice to soak up all the delicious sauce.

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2.1.7

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Related posts:

1. Thai Basil, Taro, and Sugarcane
2. Inaugural Week, Day 5 – Ginger and Scotch Chilli Prawns
3. Inaugural Week, Day 3 – Ginger and Scotch Pork Ribs
4. Asian Grocery Stores in Dubai
5. Inaugural Week, Day 2 – Ginger and Scotch Chicken Wings

My annual summer visit to my parents in NY and to escape the scorching Dubai heat is coming to an end. It was supposed to have ended last Saturday but Hurricane Irene extended it for another week.

So Wee Scotch and I had one more week of spending quality time with my parents. One more week of visiting family in other boroughs. And maybe I’ll even have one more “last night out” in the city with my friends.

Last week, I spent what I thought was “last night out” with a casual dinner at Southern Hospitality BBQ on the Upper East Side before moving on to accidental debauchery (that’s my story and I’m sticking to it). Damn you Jägermeister!

Hangovers are never fun but they seem exponentially more painful in my 30s than in my 20s. I think I’ll skip the shots this time around.

An extra week at home also meant one more week of my mom’s home cooking and comfort food. Although we are ethnically Chinese, my parents were born and raised in Vietnam until they fled Saigon in their late 20s to come to America. So Vietnamese cuisine was and still is a very large part of their food repertoire.

Some of the highly requested meals from my mom by my sisters and myself include soup – lots of soup. I love the warming and comforting feeling of soup and growing up we often had it with dinner five nights out of seven. Chinese and Vietnamese soups are made from simple broths and are often clear or translucent in color. As opposed to stews or cream soups that Scotch is more used to.

I love it when my mom makes Pho, a rice noodle soup made with beef stock simmered for hours with star anise, cloves, cinnamon, onion and ginger.

Pho

Raw, thinly sliced onions and bean sprouts are placed in a bowl with the rice noodles (we prefer the 1/4-inch thick noodles) and then the piping hot broth is poured on top which cooks some of the rawness out of the onions and bean sprouts but they still retain their crunchy texture and flavor.

Finally it is topped with fresh herbs like Asian basil from my mom’s garden and finished with a squeeze of lime and sriracha hot sauce.

Some other ingredients that my mom will often include are beef tendon balls (fully cooked) and beef carpaccio (added just before the broth is poured into serving bowls essentially cooking the beef as well).

The spices make the soup nicely fragrant and the raw ingredients added just before serving gives it a fresh and light taste.

The other soup I often request is my mom’s Vietnamese Sour Soup, which I raved about in a previous post here and how I tried to improve it but miserably failed.

Vietnamese Sour Soup

Well, it turns out that the major, and most important, improvement that I needed to make was to use home-made broth instead of plain water or stock cubes (I was doing both to save time and this was before I discovered how easy it was to make chicken broth).

This is one soup that doesn’t require a long simmer so once you have all the ingredients at hand, just toss them in the broth and the soup is ready as soon as the shrimp (or other protein) are cooked.

I love all the flavors that the different ingredients impart on this soup: from the sweetness of the pineapples, and the tartness of the lemons and tomatoes, to the spiciness of the chilli peppers. We serve it over thin rice noodles or jasmine rice. Sometimes I slurp the soup right out of the pot before it even makes it to the dining table.

For these soups and more, my mom uses ingredients from her own garden. She spends most of her mornings tending to it and the results are bundles and bundles of fresh herbs for her daily cooking.

Vietnamese herbs - rau dap ca (left) and rau ram (right)

“Rau dap ca” and “Rau Ram” are two of my mom’s favorite herbs but can be difficult to find in the stores unless she goes to a Vietnamese market. Both can be used in Vietnamese salads and we like to include them in our summer rolls

Rau dap ca has a flavor that I can only describe as fishy, but in a leafy sort of way….because, well, it’s a leaf.

Rau Ram, also known as Vietnamese coriander, has hints of coriander and citrus. I have a hard time describing it beyond that because the flavor is quite unique and you’ll have to taste it for yourself one day to find out. It grows close to the ground like spearmint and can spread far if not contained.

"Bac ha" - used in Vietnamese sour soup

“Bac ha” is a vegetable that my mom grows so that she can use it in her Vietnamese sour soup. It is related to the taro plant but only the stems are used, not the bulb nor the leaves. When cooked, the stems are spongy in texture and absorb the flavors of the dish it is prepared in.

Clockwise from top left: Recao, Asian Basil, Purple Perilla, Spearmint, Garlic Chives

She still has recao (also known as culantro, ngò gai, sawtooth herb, or stinking herb) that I brought back for her from when I lived in Puerto Rico where the plants grew like weeds in my garden. It’s an annual plant that grows back every year but in my mom’s garden, it’s not as bushy or leafy as in the hot humid Caribbean air.

Clockwise from top left: Cucumber, Thyme, Cherry Tomatoes, Sweet Basil, Tomatoes

She’s grown so many cucumber plants that my dad sometimes takes some to work to munch on instead of his usual apples or bananas. He even shares them with co-workers. There should be a saying, “a cucumber a day…”

Our house cat sunning in the garden

Wee Scotch “helps” my mom with the gardening every morning and as his reward he gets first dibs on all the ripened cherry tomatoes.

“May-to! May-to!” he excitedly exclaims every day as he points at the plump red fruit, expectantly looking at my mom.

My mom often tells me how Wee Scotch is a smart cookie – he knows that there is one particular tomato plant that has sour “may-tos” and he will refuse to eat from that plant if he sees that my mom has harvested a tomato from there.

He can’t seem to get enough of “may-tos”. He’ll stuff 3 or 4 into his mouth at one time, making himself look like a chipmunk.

Sweet and juicy, the tomatoes always burst in his mouth with a popping sound and the seeds will squirt out and inevitably end up all over his clothes and the floor.

When there is an abundance of herbs, my mom will buy some pork belly and shrimp to make Vietnamese Summer Rolls.

I don’t know where the term “summer” rolls came from but I would imagine it’s to distinguish these rolls which are made with moistened rice paper to it’s more greasier cousin, the “spring” roll.

For these rolls, my mom uses many different herbs from her garden, some of which she only knows the Vietnamese name for.

When I make these in Dubai, I use what I can source: spearmint, which is widely available (though not as fragrant as the varietal from mom’s garden), and Asian basil and garlic chives, which I get from the Thai grocery store in Karama.

Vietnamese Summer Rolls

This summer, my mom also showed me how to make a different kind of summer roll called, bì cuon, which incorporates shredded pork and shredded pork skin mixed with roasted rice powder.

I can never pronounce Vietnamese properly so for this dish, I just say “bacon” which sounds similar enough and well, both are pork based so easy to remember.

Shredded Pork and Shredded Pork Skin Mixed with Roasted Rice Powder

I’ve never seen anyone roll a summer roll except my mom so I’d be interested to know if other people assemble theirs similarly.

Vietnamese Summer Rolls

She always starts with (1) the rice noodle as the base layer and this time she nested a cucumber next to the noodles. Then she (2) places all the fresh herbs on top of the rice noodles and sprinkles the pork mixture in front. She then (3) begins the wrapping process by encompassing the noodles and the herbs in one rolling motion, then folds in the two sides and continues to carefully roll so as not to break or burst the rice paper. Finally, (4) the summer roll is all rolled up and read to be eaten…

…but first it was to be dipped in Vietnamese fish sauce (aka Nuoc Mam Cham) to enhance and bring out all the flavors of the summer roll.

Wee Scotch never misses out on an opportunity to eat so we made him his own roll with just shrimp and pork belly with a little bit of rice noodles and no herbs.

Wee Scotch and Summer Roll

He picked out all the rice noodles and threw them on the floor (and he refuses to eat his vegetables if he sees that there is meat around). Wee Tyke.

As Wee Scotch and I prepare to say goodbye to my parents, I will miss not only the food but the pleasure of being around family and old friends again. I hope that it won’t be another year until we are back…

Related posts:

1. Mom’s Vietnamese Sweet and Sour Soup
2. Vietnamese Chicken Curry Soup (Ca Ri Ga) – Make it Your Own!
3. Make Your Own Vietnamese Curry Powder
4. May Garden Update
5. My Garden

Scotch and I didn’t pay our Dubai electricity bill for over 8 months and inevitably our electricity was cut off. This happened just a few months ago.

We did make a few attempts to pay our bills so it wasn’t from complete lack of trying. It’s just that the Dubai online payment system would time-out at the credit card processing page each and every time we tried to pay.

After each unsuccessful attempt, I just threw the bill away in frustration and didn’t think about it until the next bill arrived.

Fast forward 8 months later, Wee Scotch is napping and I’m blogging at my computer when suddenly the laptop screen dimmed and all the white noise in the apartment abruptly stopped and it became dead quiet. Uh-Oh!

It took about 48 hours for the power to be turned back on and we had to resort to candles to illuminate the house and take-out for dinner since our stove was also electric.

I refrained from opening the fridge too much but the next morning, an idea suddenly dawned on me.

The electricity in our apartment was cut off, but there was still electricity in the rest of the building.

So I grabbed an extension cord from the storage room, went outside of our apartment, plugged one end of the cord into the hallway socket, and then went back into my apartment and plugged the other end into the fridge.

Voila! Electricity problem solved! Well, sort of.

While the fridge was being powered by one hallway socket, I used the other sockets to charge my iPhone and laptop, and another one to run the electric kettle. I may have even pirated internet.

Wee Scotch in his PJs and Investigating What Mama is Up To

Is that what it’s like to be a squatter?

When Hurricane Irene reached us in NYC, it was already downgraded to a tropical storm. But the winds were strong enough to knock down a tree on my street which caused a blackout for my entire block.

The "Before Photo" of my Parents' Yard (it normally doesn't have clams in it).

As I went to bed on Friday night, the heavy rains that had started earlier quickly turned into torrential downpours, lightning and thunder filled the skies and set off car alarms, ferocious winds forcefully blew trees back and forth and howled all night long. Many times I thought, “Maybe I shouldn’t be sleeping right underneath a window?”

I should take better precautions next time. Especially after a friend of mine in Queens sent me this photo of a tree that had fallen against her apartment and only inches away from crashing into her bedroom window:

Tree Down in Queens from Tropical Storm Irene

The morning after the storm, I woke up to a lot of branches, leaves and other plant debris scattered all over houses, streets, and cars. We escaped any physical damage to our house but some of the homes around us had major flooding in their basements from the groundwater seeping up and the sound of generators pumping out water could be heard up and down the street. One lady was running the pump using her car’s DC outlet.

It continued to rain most of the morning. By afternoon the sun had come out but it was still terribly windy. So windy that we could not keep our windows open to enjoy the cool, breezy air because they are the type that open outwards and the wind kept banging them open-closed, open-closed, threatening to bust them out of their hinges.

The "After Photo" of my Parents' Yard (littered with tree branches, debris and leaves).

My parent’s stove was powered by gas so we didn’t have to resort to take-out but for the 30+ hours that we were without electricity, I kept having this weird urge to plug an extension cord into a hallway socket to power the fridge.

I wasn’t the only one with this idea – I saw an orange extension cord come out of a nearby house, snake diagonally across the street, and plugged into an outdoor outlet two houses further down…how did they have power? More importantly, can I plug my cord into theirs too?

I have friends and family up and down the East Coast that are still without power so I feel extremely lucky that ours was restored relatively quickly.

Aside from the power outage, Irene also caused a major disruption to my travel plans. Wee Scotch and I were supposed to fly to Scotland on Saturday evening to spend two weeks with my in-laws but of course the flight was cancelled.

I was pretty much all packed by Friday and was keeping my fingers crossed that I could fly out Saturday evening since Hurricane Irene wasn’t expected in our area until late late Saturday.

Still hoping for the best, I checked in on-line 24 hours before my flight but within a few hours I had already received an email from my airline that the flight was cancelled.

The next morning, after being on hold with Expedia and British Airways for more hours than I thought was possible, the next available flight that they could book me on was the following Saturday so that meant one more week in New York.

Spending more time in NY certainly isn’t bad, but I had my mind already set on leaving and for a change of pace. My parents were of course ecstatic to have Wee Scotch for one more week.

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