Long time no see! I’ve been snapping pics of everything, but I haven’t had time to come on and post for a bit – sorry about that! I may yet still be a bit shaky getting back into it, but I’m giving it my best!

We made a couple of hand-tossed crust pizzas the other day, this pic is of the pizza with olives and mushrooms (both canned – which tasted surprisingly great on the pizza). The first pizza has cheese, the second has velveeta because we didn’t realize that Hubby had used up all the cheese in at breakfast – was still good!

I’ve been meaning to review this since 2006 but I’ve never had a camera that would take photos that actually look like photos, so I had to wait. This is my favorite soup cup in the whole wide world, marketed by the Instant Noodle King brand this is a huge cup of soup for not a lot of money.

Why review an instant soup cup? Well there are several reasons for this particular choice. One is that in the Midwestern United States you just don’t see lobster soup, more or less ever. The bible belt has a tendency to shy away from products they deem to be gross or odd (like kimchi, unagi, abalone, wakame, etc.) so before I’d made my first Asian Food Grocer order, I’d never had it before in my life.

The reason I take so many photos of packaging and not just the food is because when I visit food blogs that review products, especially Asian products, the packaging is my favorite part and I always wish they’d take more photos of it!

This noodle soup is in a big, hefty bowl (about the size of two ramen cups put together) and is made up of a delicious fatty lobster base that has a dreamy warm, savory taste that I could drink by the cup and not get tired of. Into that we put a really fine egg noodle that softens even in hot tap water (which is all I had, so that was dreamy as well) and some delicious veggies like cabbage, wakame, corn and chives.

The soup only has to stand about two minutes to be edible but I’d leave it in for a full 4 or 5 if you’ve used tap water. As you can see from the photos I didn’t fill it up to the inner line (I left about a half an inch), and the reason was that the last portion I had tasted a bit watered down, but this particular cup was perfect so I’ll be leaving that much room every time from now on.

For those of you who can’t buy these at the store, you can get lobster egg noodle soup at AFG along with a bunch of other deliciousness, and they’re about a buck 70 a cup with savings per unit the more you buy. They’re definitely worth the price and the week-long shipping wait!

As you may know if you know me personally (since I can’t stop gushing), Laota and I purchased our first Asian Food Grocer package in almost two years this month, and it’s been agony waiting the 6 days for it to get here! We followed it closely on the FedEx tracking website, like children follow the Santa Tracker at Christmas time, and today it finally arrived, as always, packed methodically and undamaged – as is Asian Food Grocer‘s way.

We got some of our favorites that you can’t buy here, like prepared azuki, five spice powder, spring roll skins, bamboo chopsticks and white peach Yogu Time yogurt soft drinks. But we also got our favorite soup in the world, Noodle King’s Lobster Egg Noodle Soup, which is so addictive we tend to spend way more on it than we should!

Some new-to-us finds were a kind of low salt miso (with no MSG, which will be rectified when I prepare it lol), honey spiced umeboshi pickled plums for our onigiri and mix fruit mochi.

Today was actually the first time I’d ever had mochi and now I’m addicted! You can see some crappy photos below of all the fun things we bought – we’ve purchased through Asian Food Grocer since 2005 or 2006, and can’t say enough good things about them! We’ve never had a lost or misdirected shipment, never had missing goods, never had to pay too-steep shipping (the shipping for everything was about 7 bucks FedEx ground).

I’m actually reading the recipes on this website, all of which seem a bit on the complicated side (like Jerked Leg of Goat) and wondering if it’s something I could do? Some of the ingredients include ginger and dark brown sugar, it just sounds sweet, tangy and delicious. I’d love to try my hand at this, I wonder if it would be too hard to dress up goat meat for use in a bento box? I said pot stickers earlier, but this jerked leg of goat actually sounds like it would be great with rice if you cut it up into small pieces and filled out an empty niche in your bento box with it.

It would definitely be unique, plus goat is so good for you compared to other meats and is actually very low fat. The problem remains, as always, where do you buy goat meat? You can’t get it out here, though. I live in the middle of hog country and you’re lucky if you can get chicken or beef at a decent price, so until now I thought goat meat was out of the question because it was hard to come by out here. But the website I’m surfing right now, the one I’ve been talking about with all of these amazing goat recipes? It’s for a company called Gedalias that actually sells farm raised goat meat over the internet. It’s not expensive, they have a lot of different cuts including ground if you want to make burgers. It’s such a great idea! It would be a great gift for anyone you know who loves to cook and loves to try new things. If you’ve ordered from them, I’d love to hear about your experiences!

Product review, product review! Okay, so that’s obvious by the title, lol.

The product I’m reviewing today is a Dollar General brand named Clover Valley (I’m sure some of you have CV products!), which are often as good as the national brands. This time it’s their condensed Bean and Bacon soup.

First of all at 70 cents, it’s a great price for a condensed bean and bacon, with some of the nationals here being in the $1.50 range per can, so it’s a great money saver at less than half the price of a national brand soup. Secondly, it’s got a great flavor to it. Bit sour, very sweet, very bean-y lol. The bacon flavor could be a tad stronger, but this would be a great soup for a casserole because it’s flavor is so good.

It’s so cold right now and we just had some (yum!), it’s enough for four small portions or two large – can’t beat that! Overall I recommend it at 3.5 out of 5 stars – go get you some!

To be honest I didn’t check out the terms and conditions yet, so I have no frigging clue if this offer is about to expire or not, but either way it’s worth signing up since right now it seems to be going strong!

Speaking of tea, I have to force myself to stop blogging because ( yes, I am nothing if not timely ) the tea I’m steeping will get bitter if I don’t get into the kitchen and do something about it, lol!

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