Music!

To those that know me well, I enjoy listening to music.  However, I don’t fret about quality as much as some people do.  I actually think 192 kbps for mp3s is good enough to listen to.  I can bear the size increase for 320 kbps for a slight incremental benefit in quality.  But the sound quality for flac does not warrant the sometimes three fold increase in size.  When I look at it, most of the time, I’d need to have very expensive sound system to notice the quality difference.  And frankly, I listen to music in my car, at the gym, at work and at home so the quality difference will be pretty unnoticeable.

Currently, my iPod music library is full of anime and anime character songs at the moment.  I have some classical as well as trance music as well too.  I also have some albums that anime seiyuus put out.  I have a few random instrumental only music albums.  To some, it might be a pretty eclectic collection.  

But music is all a matter of personal taste.  And I’ve noticed that the one type of music that I’ve pretty much stop listening to is a broad genre I call “American music.”  It’s a broad category of American artists/groups in pop, alternative, and rock that have signed under the big record companies.  Oh sure there are some songs I enjoy listening to (Snow Patrol’s Chasing Cars, Coldplay’s Viva La Vida) but these gems are very rare.  I find much of the music that is given air play are not worth my time to listen to.  I don’t know if its the composer or the conglomerate machine that decides what “sounds good” when the songs are recorded.  

Perhaps the RIAA and the big record companies need to start putting out good albums so their music CD sales will start rising?  Oh wait... maybe they should have spent all the money that was used to sue people into producing better music.  Or even better, spend all that money into developing a new business model (hello iTunes!!).  Ten years ago, during the height of all the mp3 downloading, no one would want to spend close to $20 on a CD for only two or three songs.  Aside from the fact that you could probably get the album for free off the Internet, even the hit singles would cost $5.  Totally not worth the money.  The record companies unwillingness to break up a CD into song components and charge a “fair market vale” for hit songs was probably their undoing.  

But all that’s in the past now... what’s still for certain is... I enjoy anime music much more than any other genre.  It has much better melodies, beats and emotive response than American music.  I want you to listen to an awesome song with pictures from my favorite anime, Aria.  This Makino Yui song represents the epitome of what I love about anime and anime music.

Gourmet Food Trucks (11)

Re:  Ludo Truck


So there’s this chef called Ludo Lefebvre (wiki) who help plan the menu for this truck.  I’ve honestly never heard of him maybe some of you have.  But this truck came on the scene a few months ago.  I’ve been meaning to try it but never really got a chance to do so until recently.

This truck offers fried chicken (not shown), chicken strips (the middle strips) and this fried chicken ball (the two fried things on the outside).  I’m not a big fan of having to pick bones so I ordered chicken strips and the fried chicken ball.  The chicken strips didn’t seem to be very spectacular.  They honestly tasted like something you’d get from Ralph’s or Chicken Now.  The fried chicken ball however was uniquely different.  It had this creamy herb sauce in the ball and tasted very good.  This truck also offered four different types of dipping sauces.  I tried the bernaise and honey bbq.  

Unfortunately, neither of the sauces appealed to me.  The two chicken orders also came with a cole slaw with a very vinegar type dressing.  The cole slaw would have tasted better if it weren’t so vinegar-ish.  I think the sourness of the dressing took the taste away from everything else.



On a side note, the cole slaw should have a lid to prevent accidental spills.  I didn’t know these cole slaw didn’t have lids so I put them in a bag in such a way that the dressing leaked out onto the passenger side chair.  =[





Re: No Tomatoes

I’ve never had Dosa truck or India Jones truck.  This truck is also new into the LA food truck scene.  I believe they said it was only their first month in operation.  They certainly are not listed in the twitter feeds I normally visit.  I tried their Chicken Tikka Masala over rice.  Aside from not having enough sauce, this tasted very much like a normal dish you’d find at a typical Indian restaurant.  The price for the amount though was pretty good -- six dollars for a good amount of rice and curry.  After having this, I wonder how the other two Indian cuisine trucks taste like.

Re: Mighty Boba Truck

Boba Milk Tea with Taiwanese style treats like fried popcorn chicken and sweet butter toast.  The milk tea is pretty good though the standard mix is a bit sweet for me.  Supposedly they are willing to remake the milk tea to make it more or less sweet.  Perhaps they should have a number system to determine the sweetness for a better customization.

The popcorn chicken is like Tapioca Express' popcorn chicken.  It's really nothing special.  I would however like to try the sweet butter toast.  These toasts are usually 1-inch thick with sweet butter cream.  I think its the same type of cream that is found in some of the Taiwanese bakeries bread (which is very good).

Re: Dumpling Station

Finally I don't remember if I had blogged about Dumpling Station in the past.  I may have and probably wasn't too impressed.  I wasn't too impressed again after having deep fried kimchi pork and beef dumplings.  Maybe I'm just not ordering the correct type of dumpling?

Gourmet Food Trucks (10)

Re: Patty Wagon

The company I worked for has a monthly company sponsored luncheon.  Somehow my chats about food trucks with the HR person responsible for setting up the catering convinced her to get a food truck for the luncheon.  Patty Wagon apparently was able to fit the bill.  Patty Wagon offered “unlimited sliders and french fries” for a set amount of time.  

The sliders were decent.  I think the brioche bun they used gave the gave the slider a pretty dry taste.  Adding condiments (ketchup/mustard) didn’t really help making the burger moist.  I used the sliced tomatoes in hopes of adding some juice for the bun to soak up.  They also didn’t have onions.  No onions!!  That is wrong on so many levels.  Their meat was really good.  I don’t know if its because the meat comes from grass fed cows.   But I suppose this whole grass fed meat was something that makes Patty Wagon “uniquely” different from all the rest of the “hamburger” food trucks.

The french fries were cut in a unique way.  It looked as if it was peeled since the fries were unusually flat and long yet wasn’t very curly.


Re:  Lee’s Philly

Philly Cheesesteak Korean BBQ style.  I had the chance to try them out once by ordering just a taco.  I had already bought dinner from the Dumpling Station and Shrimp Guys and just wanted to see what they taste like.  Man their Kogi Beef taco was good.  They overfilled the taco not only with meat but with the crunchy cabbage (or lettuce) topping.  Unfortunately to eat this taco was to be a very messy eater.  In the end, I had a very difficult time picking up the taco by hand and resorted to a fork.

After the initial taco, I went back a week later looking for dinner.  I bought two tacos (one beef one chicken) and a kogi beef cheesesteak.  The cheesesteak was amazingly good.  Although it wasn’t very spicy, it still had a slight kick.  What made it very good was the juices from the meat soaked into the bread softening it up.  Each bite was had a korean yet gooey cheese flavor.  This cheesesteak got messy very fast.  I had a hard time picking up the cheesesteak and ate it with a fork after two bites.  The tacos were also eaten with a fork too.

I think this place has better tacos than Calbi.  Their tacos might be better than Kogi’s as well.  The wait certainly is better than Kogi’s although lately they have been getting more business so wait time is somewhat longer.


Re:  CheTruck

There is no website for this.  They recently opened up and bill themselves as an “Argentinian cuisine” truck.  I’m not expert in South American food so I honestly don’t know if its “authentic” or not.  One of their specialty dishes was the empanadas.  I ordered the three different empanadas they had - beef, chicken and pork.

The beef and pork were really good.  The beef actually reminded me of the Brazilian Ta-Bom Truck’s beef pastel.  The flavoring was very similar to each other.  The pork was very good.  It was the last item I ate so it had cooled a bit already.  But I think it would have been really good fresh out of the deep fryer.  The last empanda wasn’t as good as the other two.

Gourmet Food Trucks (9)

I’ve been raving about how good No Reservations Catering Truck is for the past few couple posts.  Their garlic fries is definitely the best that I’ve eaten.  The aoili sauce is a great complement to the fries. Here is a picture of these fries.

I hunted them down last week.  Their special was a Szechuan Chicken Taco.  It was great.  The chicken in the taco was very juicy and had great flavoring.  The onions and cilantro added a more distinctive Asian flavor. Doesn’t this look good?

LA Street Food Festival

Held at the Rose Bowl this past weekend, quite a few food trucks were on hand to showcase their respective cuisines.  The event had 58 food trucks of which I had only tried 10 of them.  And even of these 10 trucks, I’ve only consistently gone back to only 2 trucks -- Grilled Cheese Truck and FrySmith.  These two were a “must eat” in my opinion for Evelyn and Emi.

I tried to take as many pictures as possible, but I usually end up eating all of it before I remembered.  Overall, because of the lines, I wished we could have had more opportunities to eat some of the other ones.  

We ended up tasting:

- Dogzilla (japanese inspired hot dogs).

- Mariscos (Fish tacos)

- Ta Bom (Brazilian)

- Tamales from somewhere.

- Cupcakes a Go Go (cupcakes)

- FrySmith (Rajas and Kimchi Pork fries)

- Grilled Cheese Truck (Cheesy macaroni with pulled pork)

- BBQ ribs from somewhere.

- Crepe’n Around. (Sweet Crepes)

- Fresh Fries (Sweet Potato fries with peanut butter and nutella)

- Kabob N’ Roll (Chicken Kabob).

- Cool Haus (Ice Cream Sandwiches).

The public album can be found here.

This was such a cool event. I hope more people I know will go for the next event.