Near the end of my trip I started to tell my friend Iris my list. "It's funny that none of these American foods are actually from America," she began. Of course I had anticipated her attack and had only said that I personally associate these foods with America, but make no claims as to their actual ethnic associations or origins. She backed down in fear and took another nibble of the fried Oreo we were sharing at the feast of San Gennaro.

Highlights:

Although it's not the right season (apparently this is a late summer, early fall sort of buzz), I've been all over these moon viewing noodles lately. They're from my favorite new cookbook, Washoku: Recipes from the Japanese Home Kitchen, and I can't get enough of them. Essentially they are udon noodles in a light, sea-n-soy broth with green onions, fresh grated ginger and a nearly raw egg. I added some enoki and shittake mushrooms because I can.

I put up with this sort of malarkey because I had let him convince me that being an ex-pat was a life that was filled with longing: for home, for friends and most of all, for food. How hard it must be, I thought, to move so far away from home and in an entirely different country. So I agreed to eat disgusting Swedish meatballs at Ikea, and in my heart, truly felt for the poor guy. I'd go to the Swedish store in Oakland and buy him funny little Swedish candies like Plopps, and just generally try and humor his reminiscences of how perfect life in Sweden was.

Having been an ex-pat now for coming up on three years, and having tried a lot of Swedish food, I now realize what a sap he was. Moving away from Sweden and missing Swedish food is like recovering from depression and missing that feeling of emptiness.

I can't say that there's not a lot of food from California that I miss--the burritos and Korean food particularly. When I was in Dublin, I missed them badly. But once I moved to London, which is a major city (much like San Francisco) I didn't walk around like missing the food of my home country was this cross I had to bear, and one that everyone else in the world should sympathize with. (Of course that doesn't stop me from shoveling as many super burritos down my gullet as I can possible stand every time I go back home.) I've learned that these things are manageable. I will probably change my tune once I move to Asia and can't find pancetta to put in my homemade tomato sauce, but for now, I'm surviving.

So I said I was going to have an all-ramen weekend and I damn well did. Above is the ramen that I spent about 7 hours making today. Why is that egg a funny color? Oh that's a seasoned soft-boiled egg, or ni tamago. Other toppings: spinach, green onion, toasted seaweed (nori), pickled bamboo, chasyu pork and kamaboko. Basically what I am trying to say is: in your face, humanity.

Other high point of the weekend: was in Fabric, one of the largest UK nightclubs and my vision of hell. I try to avoid at all costs, but when one of my pals from the Chicks on Speed was DJing there, I consented to grace the place with my presence. Alex clearly knew how much of an effort it was for me, because she played Spacer Woman and then says into the microphone "This is Italo disco! For Lina! She loves Italo!" Or something like that. Now Fabric isn't the sort of place where one would usually (or ever) hear dedications, so between that and the guy that followed us around trying to show us his abs, it was a pretty sweet night out.

Sushi was my favorite food as a kid, but apart from sushi, I never had any interest in Japanese food until I went to Tokyo last summer. I'm not going to bore you with the details, but I spent 10 days gorging myself. Then I missed my flight home--cried, stomped around the airport, ate a bowl of unagi and then went back to Tokyo and spent another day gorging myself. Heaven.

On my way out of town, before going back to Narita to wait stand-by for the next flight I stopped at a ramen shack. It was 5am and I couldn't resist one final bowl. Of course said bowl of ramen meant that I ended up missing the train and had to take a $200 cab ride to make it to the airport on time. Sort of puts that $20 ramen I posted about a few weeks ago to shame.

Every time I go to The Netherlands--which is pretty often at this point--I'm tempted to get this really expensive ramen in the airport on the way home. I mean, anytime I see ramen I'm tempted, but this place is particularly hard to ignore. The Amsterdam airport is pretty great by airport standards, except there are no seats. Other than the ones at the ramen shack. And I'm usually starving by the time I arrive. I like to think that it's the universe's way of telling me to eat more ramen.

I've given in twice now and although I'm horrified by the price, I'm also secretly delighted. Because I'm worth it.

Unfortunately, I don't live in Los Angeles (thank you, christ), so I had to make them myself. I've been penpalling with Jennifer of the EatDrinkTalk cooking school (read: I've been harassing her via email) and with her enthusiastic encouragement, decided to give it a go. Results below:

The picture doesn't do it justice because I still haven't read my effing camera book. This was one of my favorite meals ever. I made it with spicy pork, seasoned cucumbers, kimchi, seasoned green onions and seasoned soybean sprouts. However, I think almost any combo of Korean BBQ meat and banchan would be delicious. Beef bulgogi with kimchi and radish? Savage. Galbi with spinach and kimchi? Deadly. I think you'll have to include kimchi in everything if you want to be safe.

Recipes:

Spicy Sliced Pork aka Daeji Bulgogi

I took these pictures at El Tonayense in San Francisco's notorious Mission district. Back in the day, you could get a piping hot homemade tamale and a ballon of heroin from the same woman. She only kept one stored in her vagina, but I leave you to imagine which.

I visted my friend Liz in the Mission when I was in California. It certainly has changed. Maybe I've changed. I don't know. What I do know is that if I had walked around in the Mission with a big, expensive camera ten years ago, I wouldn't have a big, expensive camera to take pictures of burritos with anymore.

When I see a burrito, all swaddled up in aluminium foil, lying in its basket on a bed of chips, I often think of the baby Jesus in his manger.

So yeah, I know. Burrito joints with vegetarian options aren't "authentic." But this is San Francisco. Everyone's a veg these days, but they are missing out when it comes to burritos. My friend Duncan wrote something about trying to vegetarian and still eat burritos and I often think of it when I'm nearing the end of my burrito.

"And the grease pocket. The best part of a burrito is when you get down to the nub, where all the pork juice has filtered it's way down into the last bit of rice and beans and tortilla. Pure chewing satisfaction. Flavor country. Let's just say, when the water from the lettuce gets down there, it's not quite the same feeling, okay?"

When I lived in California, El Tonayense used to be one of my favorite burrito places. Then one time I found an entire piece of that wax paper that they put in the chip basket inside my burrito. I had eaten about half of the burrito when I got to the wax paper, which filled the rest of the thing out. It was pretty amazing to try and figure out how this fist-sized paper got in there. They offered me a new burrito, but who can eat more than one of those things? Since then, I'm happy to report, the only things in my burritos are the things that belong there.

I've been debating this one because I get the sense that the majority of the people on here who find me through foodie sites probably don't want to hear about my ongoing struggles with clinical depression and shitty boyfriends, but loyal readers of the site don't really have any interest in Vietnamese sandwiches.

So what's a girl to do? New blog? Old blog? More food? Less food? More depression? Can't offer you any less, 'fraid to say.

Sometimes I think that I'd probably be a lot better off if instead of people in my life, I only had Vietnamese sandwiches. This one is a ham and headcheese with pork pate from Banh Mi Ba Le Vietnamese Sandwiches in El Cerrito, California.

Vietnamese sandwich recipe:

I know I’ve written about Bangkok street food before. But like all obsessive, boring people, I like to come back to my favorite topics time and time again, worried that if I don’t mention it, it might just disappear.

The street food in Thailand was phenomenal. There were the dumplings, delicately balanced on a Styrofoam tray, doused in soy sauce and with nary a utensil save for a toothpick. They weren’t dumplings so much as thick rice noodles wrapped around a variety of vegetable fillings, and they weren’t delicious so much as they were mysterious. How is it that in a country where a vegetarian could starve to death (at a minimum, there’s fish sauce on everything) I managed to get dumplings filled with greens?

My first night in Bangkok I was alone and terrified. And by terrified I mean hungry and by hungry I mean ravenous. I was too timid, of course, to try and get food at any reasonable time, and my traveling companion wasn’t due to arrive until nearly midnight. So sometime after ten at night I ventured out of my hotel and wandered onto the streets of Bangkok. I needed to be at the hotel when my friend arrived and didn’t want to stray too far from there. I didn’t have a map, and between the jetlag and having no sense of direction to speak of anyway, making more than one or two turns could be disastrous. So I walked up and down the same street a few times, checking out all of the street food vendors and wondering how I was possibly going to order anything. These are the sort of things that paralyze me—not knowing how to communicate and being nervous about acting like an American dickhead, saying the same things over and over in English more and more loudly in the hopes that someone will finally understand me. So instead I just walked around until finally starvation drove me to stop at one of the cart vendors and attempt an order. This is probably a good thing because if I had walked up that street one more time, they would have taken me for a farang prostitute.

I pointed at a ground pork dish with chilis and holy basil, pad kaprao moo, which was served with a pile of rice for less than a dollar. It was so spicy that my nose was running and tears streamed down my face, but I was nonetheless grateful for the fact that I was gorging myself alone on a plastic deck chair perched on the curb of a nearly empty street, save for the woman cooking over a sterno flame under a tattered yellow and white umbrella.

At the Khao San Road (which we went to just to see what all the fuss was about, and hated) there were woman standing every ten feed or so holding giant woks and expertly frying eggs into steaming piles of pad thai. After watching a few of them, I finally realized why the pad thai I made never tastes quite right—apparently a least a cup of oil is required for each portion. I thought it was delicious and disgusting, but I’m known for having a stomach of steel. My traveling partner was less resilient, unfortunately.

There were little sweets that looked like miniature tacos, ready-made curries on carts parked on roads teeming with cars and minicabs. Sticky rice with all types of fillings and toppings, savory and sweet. There were the grilled bullfrogs on skewers that we avoided and the grilled everything else that we couldn’t stop ourselves from stopping for every ten paces or so. There was mangosteen and unripe mango and green papaya salad and bags of cucumbers with nam prik sauce. There were plastic bags filled with ice and condensed milk and flavors ranging from tea to blue raspberry, hollowed out coconuts with straws sticking out of them and plastic cups filled with all kinds of fruits, from limes to pineapple to watermelon and others that I didn’t recognize.

But more than the food, it was the whole street food scene that I was impressed by. A vendor would have a cart, some source of heat and possibly a few chairs. Sometimes they would have their husband or wife as their sous chef, some of them would have a friend standing their chatting their way through the curries or sometimes they would be alone. Some of them had terrible food and some of them had dishes to rival anything I've ever tasted. My favorites were the women with the blank faces wearing shirts with nonsensical phrases on them sitting on stools, gripping giant cookers with their florescent shorts-clad thighs and frying skewers of just about anything. I think about my current job, which involves skewering nothing but my soul and I pine for my own food cart.

The other night I made one of my favorite Korean dishes, ojinguh bokkeum, spicy stir-fried squid. I made it with not only squid, but mussels and shrimp as well, just for a laugh. The next night, soon after I polished off the leftovers, my flatmate came home for a chat. After about an hour of inane small-talk he finally got to the point. I'm being asked to leave my flat because my cooking stinks. As in, actually smells too bad for my Italian flatmates to handle. "We just didn't realize that you'd cook so much Asian food," he said lamely. "When we were advertising the flat we had decided that we weren't going to let any Pakistanis in for that reason, the curry, you know."

Interestingly enough, I had let some Chinese cabbage go to waste last week because I thought making my own kim chi might be sort of inconsiderate. Now that they've decided to evict me, though, I'm going to put a few prawns in the lining of their mattresses while they are gone for Christmas. We'll see who stinks then.

When I lived in New York I used to live above a pizza joint called 'Little Frankie's.' Ever the lazy slob, I'd order delivery from upstairs and sit around playing video games while the poor delivery man walked my pizza up four flights of stairs. I ate a lot of Little Frankie's during this period of my life. I think it's likely that I was also clinically depressed, but the pizza certainly did help temper that.

Little Frankie's pizzas were amazing. Very thin crusts and simple topping were the key. After I left New York and went to California I found a few places that had good pizzas. Dopo on Piedmont Ave in Oakland was one. But the wait for Dopo was ridiculous, and so were the prices. So I started making my own pizza. Not by my own hand, mind you. I bought fresh pizza dough at Trader Joe's and despite it already being made for me, spent a good long time wrestling it into a circular formation and onto a pizza pan. I also ate a lot of pizza during this period of my life.

But then when I moved to Dublin, I gave up on pizza. No one would deliver gorgeous thin pizzas, and no one wanted to sell me ready-made dough. I thought my pizza life had ended. But recently, being inspired by the grocery delivery services available around here, I decided to give it a go. Somehow, having yeast delivered just made the whole thing more manageable and I decided to make pizza from scratch. I'd been hearing and resenting Fran's casual "oh, we have homemade pizza twice a week at least" stories for years, so I figured I might as well make her recipe.

I was remarkably pleased with myself. The crust was thin but not mushy, my guest was delighted and I was full and smug. Pizza? Yeah, I made you.

Fran and Dan's pizza dough recipe, adapted from the Cook's Illustrated Best Recipe bible: Fastest Pizza Dough