I like coriander (cilantro) in my dishes. However, Pizza Hut Japan introduced recently introduced a limited time “Too Much Coriander” pizza. I think it is too much since the taste of cilantro is overpowering and you will not taste anything else if you put that much on a pizza.
I still would like to try if it is available the next time I visit Japan.
My sister-in-law has the gene that makes cilantro taste like dish soap. She said this is what hell looks like.
Last year, I lent some money to my friend’s company. He returned the principle but wanted to give me around $800 of interest. I told him just to buy me some meals. He paid for a couple of lunches last week, but we decided to check out Tomahawk Tuesday at Fleming’s Steakhouse. Basically, you choose between bone-in steak or have them slice it for you. Additionally, you get two salads, two sides, and two desserts. The total cost for the meal is $150.
So, we went to the Fleming’s at Fashion Island in Newport Beach last night, and got the sliced porterhouse. It was expensive but everything was really good. At my insistence, we got the steak medium. The ribeye was great, but I think the filet was a bit overcooked. I probably should have gone with medium rare, but I really do not like chewy steak. The salads and the sides were really good, and dessert was great.
I went to a dinner last night at Honda-ya in Tustin. The group consisted of current coworkers and ex-coworkers. It is not really a reunion where people have not see each other in many years since four of us still work at the same company. Out of the six other people, three have worked for me in the past, and I have mentored two others outside of a direct-report relationship. After I retire, I will probably only keep in contact with this group, plus a hnadful more.
Honda-ya is a pretty good izakaya in Old Town Tustin. They do not take reservations so we got there before 5:00 pm to put our name down. We did get seated after a few minutes and stayed for about two hours. I said I would pay the bill and it came out to about $300 for seven people. The past time I did this, we only have four of us and the bill was almost $400. It was a lot of fun just to catch-up since I have been out of the office for almost three months.
I also tried a piece of sashimi. I had a bad experience many years ago when I threw up a piece of fresh tuna. It is not in the photo, but I had a piece of yellowtail belly. All I tased was the soy sauce. I also did not like the texture since it was kind of fatty. I could feel my gag reflex coming so I quickly swallow it and washed it down with lots of water. Oh well.
This was the last one in my two-week trial, and easily the worst tasting one. It was some kind of chicken salad and did not include many carbs. I ended up eating it with two whole wheat tortillas. I did not like the taste nor the texture of the food. Barely two stars out of five.
Anyway, I am done with Factor 75. Unless the long-term pricing is under $10 per meal with shipping, I will likely never order from them again.
Since I already cancelled my plan with Factor 75, I am posting the last three meals for completeness. The website also will not let me access my previous orders so I cannot post the website images and nutritional information. Both these meals were mediocre so about 2.5 to three stars.
Shrimp. All my meals so far have been with chicken as protein. There were only six medium shrimps, and they were overcooked in the microwave. There was garlic butter on top of each shrimp which melted during heating. You had to mix the entree side very well to coat the shrimp and pasta with the butter. The broccoli was again soggy and mushy.
The mashed potatoes were so salty that it was hard to eat. It reminded me of the soup at our work cafeteria; sometimes it was so salty that it burned your throat. Additionally, there is an interesting choice of vegetables with just mushrooms and nothing. I like mushrooms so it was fine with me. There was some shredded cabbage under the chicken too. The name of the meal was Dijon Chicken Thigh or something similar, so I expected some mustard taste, but it was overwhelming. I do not like mustard so I should have skipped this entree, but I did not look at most of the selections that week. Another reason why I chose to cancel the subscription.
One more meal left from my first order of twelve meals. It is some kind of chicken salad but there is no carbs. I need to buy some bread or tortilla to go with the meal.
Sigh. All these subscription deals make it difficult or tedious to leave. Since I have decided to stop ordering from Factor 75, I tried canceling my account online.
On the home screen, if you scroll to the bottom, there is a button to deactivate my plan.
If you click that, a pop-up window appears.
If you click on no thanks, you are brought to another screen with three chances to change your mind. I really do not like the $48.56 off comment because you must order three more times, or order about $300 of food and shipping to get that discount.
If you want to cancel anyway, another pop-up window asks for feedback and another chance to change your mind.
I chose something under Subscription Flexibility saying that I was just testing and not ready to commit. If you then click deactivate now, I believe your plan is closed, but you do get one more chance.
The deactivate my plan button is grayed out until you write something. However, it does say I have no more deliveries, so this page is probably optional. I will give them my overall comment, which is not worth the price per meal at six meals per week.
After all that, my account is finally deactivated. I do think the last step is optional, so you only must click on cancel four times. The $13.49 per serving for six meals per week does not include shipping. That adds almost $2 per meal since shipping is a flat $11 each week. Again, I am okay with the meals, even though some are tastier than others, and the serving size is too small. It is just not economical for me not that I am retiring and have lots of time to cook.
Here are the eighth and ninth Factor 75 meals I tried. I had both on Saturday for lunch and dinner.
This is the typical Factor meal with a chicken breast, some sort of mash, and vegetables, usually beans or broccoli. The flavor was good, but there was way too much sauce and not enough mashed potatoes. The right side of the container was basically chick and a sauce slurry. The chicken breast was good sized, but I thought it was too thick in the middle and the meat was not too tender. The potatoes looked like they were from a Marie Calendar’s frozen meal after heating because too much sauce mixed with too little potatoes. It is a 3 star out of five meal
For dinner, I had chicken with penne.
Unfortunately, Factor decided to use the small penne, which turned out too hard after cooking. I think if they had used the regular sized penne, this would be a pretty good meal. In contrast with the above meal, there was not enough sauce to cover the entree so there was a lot of dry pasta. Portion size also seemed small; I was starving this morning after having two Factor meals for lunch and dinner. This was also a 3 stars out of five meal.
I go back to my consistent complaint with Factor. I just spent about $25 on two meals and I am very hungry the next day. That seems ridiculous. Sure, it was delivered to my door, but the portion sizes are too small, and the meals are not that healthy if you look at the fat/saturated fat/cholesterol/sodium content. I could have a large pizza delivered and eat three meals at that price. I already paused the meals for this coming week. I will wait until I eat the three remaining meals, but I am almost certain I will cancel the service.
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Oops, I was looking around the Factor website to see how I could cancel or deactivate my account. I went through the entire process while taking screenshots and ended up just cancelling right now. The next post is a summary of all the screens. Again, I am certain the next three two meals will not change my mind.
Since I stopped the meal deliveries, I will probably only have twelve of the Factor entrees. There is only 20% discount on these meals, so they cost $12.62 each including shipping. I started with this one:
So. Much. Chicken.
This meal was fairly good, but it is difficult to mess up grilled chicken breast. The chicken flavor was decent, but the potato leek mash tasted salty. The chicken also only had grill lines on one side. Did they boil or steam the chicken breast, then put it on the grill briefly just to get the visuals? The vegetables were too soggy. I have been setting the microwave to 80% power for 2:30. Perhaps I am cooking the entree too long, so the vegetables are overcooked.
This was 3.5 stars out of five. Pretty filling but not worth $12.62.
I actually ate these on Monday and Tuesday night but forgot to do a review post. I did remember to take photos while I ate though.
Meal #5 was excellent. The flavor was good, though the green beans were bland despite all the garlic. The chicken breast was pretty good sized, but I ran out of the pasta before finishing the chicken. The mushrooms added a different layer of flavor than the chicken, and the entree was filling. This was a solid four stars out of five.
I do not know why the pasta is reddish in the website photo. The actual entree had white pasta.
The final meal in the first box was the taco bowl. I am okay with Mexican food but not a fan of the smell of cumin. It appears that this entree had a lot of cumin.
The website photos always look like there is a lot of food, when that is not true for most of the entrees. This is true for the taco bowl too.
First, it was impossible to open the sour cream cup. I managed to rip it down the center which makes it hard to pour. It reminded me of a Chipotle burrito bowl. I ended up mixing everything in the large tray compartment. With the name like taco salad, I thought there would be something crunchy, but that is a tostada. To accompany the meal, I heated up a whole wheat tortilla on the stove and made an actual taco. For me, the seasoning was too strong, and this was the first meal I did not finish completely. For me, this was two stars out of five.
The taco salad was the last meal of the first box. I got another box yesterday (Wednesday) and ate one of the meals for lunch today.
Weekend reservations at Ding Tai Fung in South Coast Plaza are impossible to get. Each time you go to the reservation page, all the weekend timeslots are full. After trying a few times, I noticed that future dates open one month in advance for reservations. Since February only has 29 days, today is the day that March 30th becomes available.
I set my alarm for midnight and went to the reservation page right away. I managed to get a noon reservation for four at 12:01 am. At 12;02 am, there were no more noon reservation slots. At 12:07 am, the 12:15 pm timeslot for March 30th was filled too.
Sigh. I will end up cancelling the reservation since I probably will not be able to find three other people to eat with me, especially if they have to drive from Los Angeles to Costa Mesa.
I got the second delivery for Factor 75 prepared meals. There is no taco bowl this time. Since you only get a 20% discount on the second box of meals, each of the six meals comes out to $12.62 including shipping. From tasting all six meals this past week, they are mostly tasty, and an okay deal at $8.50 per meal. At over $12? That feels too expensive for me. I have put a hold on the third week and will decide later if I want to get a few more boxes at 20% off, or just cancel the account.
Here are the meal selections:
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As a finance guy, I wonder what their margins are, and how that affects pricing. Is it worth it to offer someone like me 50% off and make a smaller margin versus not getting any sales from me at all?
Since the Factor meals have a best before date of February 28th, and I will get six more meals that day, I had two entrees today.
For lunch, I had Beef Bolognese, and this was a three-star meal. In the photo below, you can see some of the noodles were a bit dry. I have the same issue when microwaving Stouffer’s lasagna. Entrees are not packaged consistently, and any exposed noodles/pasta become dry and hard after heating in the microwave. The sauce had a lot of flavor and was tasty. However, there were not enough noodles, so I was just eating the Bolognese sauce by itself at the end. Finally, the zucchini was too wet after cooking and rather bland.
My parents came by my house after church to drop off some soup. It is my favorite soup which contains beef, tomatoes, and potatoes. Other versions also have lots of cabbage, but I prefer the simpler version. I was going to have it for dinner but decided to have another Factor entree.
This entree was by far the best Factor meal so far. You can see and taste the grill marks on the chicken breast. I got a knife this time and actually cut up the chicken. The mashed potatoes were also very good, but maybe a bit salty. The vegetables were also well done, served with mushrooms and a light sauce. All the previous entree vegetables were pretty naked, as if they were just steamed. I would give this meal four and a half stars and I could eat this every night if the price was lower.
After four meals, the food taste is definitely much better than Freshly, and something I can eat every night. As I mentioned in the first Factor post, you do not get very much food for the money. For meal #4, it was close to 350 grams instead of the usual 315 grams. Thirty-five grams is not very much, but the grilled chicken did seem more substantial, and I felt more fulfulled after eating as compared to the previous meals..
I believe I have a chickn tetrazini and some Mexical taco bowl left from the first order.
Since I have to eat these by next Wednesday (February 28th), I went ahead and microwaved a second meal tonight for dinner. This is what I had:
There was a small cup (upper left in photo above) of what appeared to be garlic butter. The instructions said to “remove cup” but did not tell me what to do with it. Leave it cold on-the-side? Warm it up and pour over the entree? Dip the chicken breast? Here is what the entree looked like after heating:
There was more meat in this entree compared to the previous meal. I gave it three stars out of five. The chick was not flavorful, even after pouring all the (cold) garlic butter on it. There were also no grill marks on the “grilled” chicken. So, was it really grilled or boiled or cooked another way? I wished they would give a bit more broccoli and fewer potatoes. I was too lazy to plate the entree again, and I also did not have a knife handy. I picked up the entire piece of chicken and took bites out of it. Maybe if I plated the entree and cut the chicken into strips, it would look more appealing. The potatoes were fine, but they ended up sitting in a layer of garlic butter at the bottom of the tray, so it was really greasy. I washed my hands twice and it still feels greasy.
Nutrition-wise, this meal was healthier than the previous one. There was less fat, cholesterol, and sodium, but it had a similar amount of protein. If they added a bit more seasoning to the chicken, I would give it a higher score.
Based on a friend’s recommendation, I signed up for a prepared meal delivery service called Factor 75. I have tried a couple of them before, the last one being Freshly. I did not like the food at all from Freshly. Maybe they were trying to make the meals too healthy? I remember them as dry and tasteless.
Here is the first meal from Factor 75:
And how it looks in real life out of the microwave oven:
The taste was good, but you can see from the nutritional information, there is a lot of saturated fat and sodium. The serving size was smaller than what was pictured on the website. I followed the microwave heating instructions exactly but did not plate the entree and ate it out of the plastic container. The chicken and vegetables were seasoned well and tasty, but the creamy cauliflower rice was a bit salty. The chicken thigh meat was tender, and I wished there were more meat in the meal. There was a layer of oil at the bottom of the tray, likely from whatever sauce they used, and contributing to the high fat content. I did finish everything though. For a microwaved meal, I would give it 3.5 stars out of five.
Would I buy it again? Let us look at the cost. Since I am living by myself, I signed up for six meals per week. There are plans from four to thirty-six meals, with the same shipping cost.
That works out to $15.32 per meal including shipping. For the first week, there was a 50% discount on the meals, so my order was about $8.58 for each meal. The next week is more expensive because the discount is only 20%. At full price, the meals are much too expensive. I feel with delivery, $10 per meal seems reasonable. Of course, if I go with the thirty-six-meal plan, the cost per meal drops to $11.27 so maybe the service works out for larger families. My order next week will be $12.63 per meal.
That was just one out of six meals. I will have to taste all six to see if I want to continue the subscription in March.
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For comparison, here is a local restaurant that sells prepared meals for $10 each and up. Someone in my church cell group brought this for dinner a few weeks ago. Sure, the selection is smaller, and you must go pick it up, but the food is good, and the price is right. I am sure there are lots of restaurants that offer this.
I am going to order a few meals from here once I can walk and drive.
Ever since taking the Six Pack Revolution (SPR) program last summer, I have been making a lot of frozen fruit smoothies. My freezer is full of frozen fruits from Costco and Trader Joe’s. However, while I was staying at my sister’s house, my parents tidied up my kitchen and I could not find anything. I am also out of unsweetened soy milk that is used as the base for my smoothies.
Since I do not have much food in the house after being gone for a month, I needed to make these smoothies. For the first one, I used a pre-made vanilla protein shake as the liquid base. Since it had a strong vanilla flavor, it made my smoothie taste weird. For the next one, I used water but also mixed in some powdered milk. This also tastes strange. I am likely accustomed to a specific taste profile after making and drinking smoothies for the past six months.
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In my freezer, I have Rubbermaid containers containing0 strawberries, mangos, blueberries, bananas, peaches, pineapples, oranges, and a berry mix with mostly raspberries.
I cannot sleep. The general numbness in my right foot is unbearable. I do not know if it is the cast, since my left foot is numb too. I still feel terrible overall, but not as bad as yesterday. My blood pressure seems in control since I did not have any aged cheese today, even though I do not really know if tyramine is the actual cause.
I did go home to my house today for about six hours and it was not as smooth as I imagined. The primary issue was that I fell off the knee scooter in my bathroom. The scooter is large and hard to maneuver in small spaces. In addition to banging my knee, I do not remember if I put any weight on my right leg, and if that is the cause of my discomfort now. It is also 72°F in the house but it feels hotter.
I am going to take on of the Norco pills to see if that numbs the numbness or makes me drowsy so I can sleep.
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Well, I did take a Norco and fell asleep. Right now, it is 2:30 AM so I slept for a few hours before getting up to go to the bathroom. Unfortunately, my blood sugar was low as I was chasing a high with extra insulin after dinner.
My sister does not have that many sugary snacks in her pantry.
I have not been feeling well since last night. It was not something specific like a fever or headache, but a general sense of not being well. Obviously, my ankle/foot is busted, but I just felt sluggish and unsettled. Sometimes it feels like I am on the verge of having a panic attack. There is definitely a mental issue that I am and still need to deal with. but this feels like something physical.
Since I only have a few diagnostic tools, I just checked my blood sugar (normal) and my blood pressure. I am using a wrist meter, and the reading came back as 220/120. Needless to say, that is a crazy high number. However, like my creatinine number, it has been fairly stable for weeks. When I went for the creatinine retest, I measured a 116/70 at Quest. This is normal for everyone and a bit low for me.
I read up online on reasons for sudden blood pressure rise and near the top of the list was tyramine. This is an amino acid that regulates blood pressure but is found in aged cheeses like parmesan. There were other reasons, but nothing was really relevant. I did see my SIL put in a lot of grated parmesan in the dinner dish last night, and I ate a Caesar’s salad today with what seemed like a large quantity of parmesan as well. I took an extra Metoprolol pill and will stay away from cheese for dinner to see if my blood pressure drops.
Or 鳳梨酥 in Chinese, is a Taiwanese pastry and dessert. It it my favorite Taiwanese food item for sure. I usually ask people traveling to Los Angeles from Taiwan to bring some. The last time I was in Taiwan, I went to the main store for ChiaTe and bought four big boxes to bring back with me.
I was just texting with a coworker. He is visiting Hong Kong and currently transiting in Taoyuan airport. I asked him to bring some pineapple cake on his return trip. Everyone has their own favorite brand, but I asked him to bring some from Sunny Hill. In the US, I can get it online, but it is super expensive.
This is on Weee! for $2.60 each piece. They also have pineapple cake from ChiaTe but it is a third party seller so the price is even crazier.
The cakes from good brands have very short “best by” dates. When I brought four boxes back from Taiwan, I had to hand them out quickly before everything expired. I see cheap pineapple cakes at the local Asian market, but they must have been shipped here on ocean containers and likely contain a lot of preservatives. It is still a delicacy when I can get fresh pineapple cake from a good brand from Taiwan.
This is my dinner tonight. Ignore the fact that I was just looking at an Instagram post of two coworkers eating gourmet food in Seoul, and thinking how sad my life is. I do not have a steamer, so I was using my fancy rice cooker, which has a steam mode.
I believe the instructions on the box were not geared towards a rice cooker because it said to steam for twelve minutes. I loaded up the rice cooker with water and put the frozen shu mai into the food plate. Just to be safe, I set the timer for fifteen minutes. Well, after fifteen minutes, the rice cooker shut off, and the shu mai were still slightly frozen. Not cold, but frozen. I restarted the rice cooker for another twenty minutes and I am patiently waiting.
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I was asked by my coworkers if I wanted to join them on their trip to Korea. One coworker went for a wedding, and the other visited Japan first. I originally thought I was going to Taiwan during Christmas for a wedding, but that fell through. Now my highlight for the holidays will be nine days of dog sitting as my sister’s family visits the in-laws.
This is ridiculous. I measured my blood sugar at 196 mg/dL before dinner, and the inpen app suggested I shoot eleven units of Humalog. I ended up injecting twelve units, then ate my salad. This the reading just now:
What was in the salad?
Not sure how that can spike my blood sugar by 125 mg/dL and it is still rising. I guess I was right for not getting some chicken fingers at Raising Canes on my way back with salad ingredients from Trader Joe’s.
The reading is now 323 mg/dL. I am going to shoot more Humalog.
Life w̵i̵t̵h̵ ̵D̵i̵a̵l̵y̵s̵i̵s̵ post-transplant (and CABG) 