Dear Dumplings

Mmm... lunch... Yesterday night I happen to spot a thread on forums about Chinese food. Rave reviews about the usual lo mein and fried rice and dim sum along with cracking those fortune cookies and what not. Well I wanted people to know and I'm sure many do that there are tons of all these fantastic different types of Chinese food. Living in New York City has definitely offered me and many people a taste of various types of culture around the world. One of the best places to find inexpensive cuisine is between Aster Place, St. Mark's Place, SoHo, all the way to Little Italy and Chinatown. I recommend you to not stay on the beaten path and to explore the quiet neighborhoods. Trust me it won't disappoint you. There are numerous little treasures of cute out door restaurants, jazzy comfy places. There is simply not enough time for me to explain all those tiny hidden treasures. There are plenty of blogs and info about it.

BTW an awesome site that I usually go look for new places is Menupages. A site dedicated to reviews of hundreds of restaurants in NYC. Everyone uses the Zagat which personally I don't read because usually from my experience once restaurants get into the Zagat all of a sudden their prices skyrocket. Not cool. Granted many of those restaurants are awesome but sometimes a girl wants a cheap good meal.

Like any other country/nation food differs from area to area and today my mom decided to buy Shanghai Dumplings other know as xiaolongbao or little dragon buns. These tender dumplings are usually filled with pork or crab or a combination meat inside swimming in a soup like sauce. Now these are served steaming hot in a bamboo type steamer and usually in groups of 6-9.

Okay these are the tools needed to eat these so called "properly" which are chopsticks, soup spoon. The large ones that curve at the handle. Oh and also they usually have black vinegar with a bit of ginger. Personally I don't use it but my family LOVES it, oh and it has a very pungent smell too.Okay you know those wooden chopsticks they give you sometimes? Well Supposedly if you happen to break them so they're even it's some type of good luck or something. As you can see above I don't exactly have that luck today. lolol.

Okay first off these buns taper on the top use your chopsticks (there are many ways to hold one) to only grasp the top like above and once there's a successful liftoff just quickly slide the soup spoon underneath to support it. Now rotate it so one side is up and nibble a small piece. Wait for it to cool a bit and drink some of the soup.

Now enjoy the rest of meal! Now people have always wondered how do they put the soap inside the sealed dumpling? Well they freeze large drops of the soap and put it inside with the uncooked meat and seal it off. So when it steams the soap melts and the meat cooks. It's basically a little steamer inside the dumpling. The magic is all in the soap base it gives the meat the flavor and it's a well kept secret. Here are some of my favorite dumpling places.

Shanghai Cafe
100 Mott St, New York 10013
Btwn Canal & Hester St
Phone: 212-966-3988
( The crab and pork one is simply scrumptious and try their rice cakes which are like large slivers of noodles fried with assorted meats ) Oh yeah they don't accept credit card so be prepared with cash... their items aren't very expensive though.

Joe's Shanghai
9 Pell St, New York 10013
Btwn Doyers St & Bowery
Phone: 212-233-8888
(This is probably the most well known place for Shanghai dumplings and everyone knows it's not their dozens of waiters that want you to hurry up your meal to serve the next customer, its the dumplings. Their dumpling soup is simply fantastic! I really love the homey and strong flavor yet the meat is tender. There's usually a line that starts around 7:30 or 8pm so be early or be prepared to wait.)

There's also a similar dumpling house next to Joe's Shanghai but I do not like the place just due to the service. They're very bias against women or so when I last visited. The entire time I was there the waiter did not even ask me or look at me, instead he asked my friend who was a guy what he wanted and even asked him what I wanted. Hello! I'm not invisible! I can order my own stuff all by myself!

Anyways if you visit or live in NYC I always encourage you to explore the great city! You are bound to find a diamond in the rough!

Eat hearty!

Magnetic Personality?

Howdy from NYC! I was walking to my fridge to do my usual raiding when I saw all the little magnets my family has collected over the years. Most are the flat ones that double as business cards and what. I also have a magnetic board in my room that came with magnets that holds all my schedules and important notes. Well I made some magnets of my own which are the ones above! My Dizzy Busy Mom magnets, they have a good magnet on the back and sprayed with protective coating of acrylic. The biggest problem was finding good magnets. The ones I found were called "craft magnets" which are decent and I found them in Pearl Paint. Don't use the magnetic tape... I brought some and they don't work. I decided to do a bit of research on magnets for crafting. There are mainly three that I see... one is the craft magnets they're usually light and thin and only good for light items like paper and foam. They are the ones that usually come with self adhesive on the back (not guaranteed to work), next are ceramic magnets that are thicker and stronger versions of the craft magnets and those are the ones I use. They're also slightly heavier and you have to stick them on yourself with glue. I use Elmer's and it's held up fine on my board. The next are neodymium or (super) magnets, these are light, not that much more expensive then the other magnets requires you to stick them on and is very strong. The only ones I've used were ceramic and they hold a good 2-3 sheets of paper that's fine. I got my info from this Craft Store Online. By the way suppliers on etsy also sell these. Here are some of the great magnets I found on etsy. Above is from Mooremagnets. I see her a lot in forums and I love her magnets. She's specializes in magnetic boards that also include magnets in punchy colors and designs. What I like about the one above are that they are magnetic boxes that you can slip pencils/ pens and markers in them. Perfect to use on any magnetic board and you can always switch off the pen if you like or if it runs out of ink. Check it out!.


When I was browsing under magnets this little critter above just shot to me. It's this awesomely cute felted magnet! I love the texture, the simple designs and the colors! This is brought to you by the little new store MarcieMayFibers. I think they are just the cutest little things.
Okay I'm a little bias to origami paper and design so I really loved the ones from Gamiworks. These are chiyogami paper of tiny goldfish in clear tiles. It's like having a koi fish or goldfish pond on your fridge. What can be better then that? Plus it comes in that super convenient box!

Magnets are fun and can be dangerous if you don't use them correctly or swallow them. How can magnets be dangerous? Well for one eating one is highly NOT recommended. You laugh but there have been toy recalls because the magnets of toys came off so easily and kids ate them resulting in surgery. Here's a pretty darn important list for all you people with kiddies.

Toy safety tips for the holiday season:

For children under age eight, avoid toys that have sharp edges and points.

For children under age six, avoid sets with small magnets, which could cause serious injury or death if swallowed.

For children under age three, avoid toys with small parts, which could cause choking.

Helmets and safety gear should fit properly and be worn by children using riding toys, such as skateboards or in-line skates.

Improper use of projectile toys, such as rockets or darts, could result in serious eye injuries. The toys are for older children.

Keep toys appropriate for older children away from younger children.

Battery chargers and adapters can pose a burn hazard for children. Adults should supervise charging batteries and pay attention to warnings on the chargers.

Look to toy labels for age guidelines and safety recommendations.

Choose toys that suit the child's age, abilities and skills.

Select toys with a sturdy construction.

Discard all plastic wrap after gifts are opened.

Source: U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission

Anyhos this post became much longer then I expected. LOLOL..
This is Meek signing off!

Packages! Packages!

Hello! Hello! I hope everyone loved the cupcake special! Today well actually yesterday was special day. I got my 10th sale! WOOT! Making small goals is absolutely awesome awesome! So I decided to add extra punches to the packages! Well it took me a while to figure out what to do to make it special! Oh yeah before I forget USPS has a lot of neat things to help you with packaging stuff... for example (this I learned from the etsy forums) you can arrange for them to pick up packages from your home (not sure how this works for apartment buildings but shrugs?) and they also give out free FREE FREE packaging supplies. Don't believe me? Click here at USPS. Which is pretty darn neat!
Well being the darn rebel I am I package all my things in bubble envelopes. No not the ones that you can easily pop and have that satisfying POP! POP! noise from Staples. I'm sure there are cheaper places out there but Staples is so close by and I am lazy. So whoever buys from me I check out their store and profile. Based on that I draw designs on the envelope. For this one, the person loved to travel in an RV so... yeah that's my attempt at drawing a traveling RV. It's kind of not as professional and stupendous as many I've seen before there's a whole flickr (image/blog type) network with some mind blowing packaging ideas here Packaging Flickr.

The pictures are bad because I packaged it at night after my boring night class. I wrap them in tissue paper with a band of origami paper around it. I also include my business card and this little tag since its holiday season and I didn't want to sell the tags. Thought it would be cool.

I loved the positive feedback for the cupcakes and my How - to 's so I'm planning on making more reviews and How - to 's in the near future. So keep an eye out on the left side bar under How - to's!

Until next time... thumbs up ... (-b^^)-b

CupCakes! CupCakes! Cupcakes!

Are you tired of eating processed candy bars, bags of chocolate and what not? Well I got the perfect remedy! The every tiny but mighty cupcake! I've never eaten too many cupcakes in my life but this weekend my old college roomie wanted to celebrate her birthday a bit early since we all have work and school on her birthday which is today. HAPPY BIRTHDAY MIN!!!! Well she was raving about this cupcake place in New York City in the west village. She found this cupcake place from a blog that was dedicated to cupcakes! It was a gloomy day but there was still a lot of people milling around. West Village is this pretty hip neighborhood where the buildings are old fashioned with those ye olde signs but with a modern twist. There are tons... I mean tons of tiny little bakeries, restaurants and stores. Many of them are famous little gems. I suggest if you ever go to NYC or live here go visit the area there's always something new.
The cupcake place we visited is called as their logo states "Batch - a take out bakery, dessert shop, and everything sweet by Chef Pichet Ong." Click on it for the direct link to their site. Above is the picture of the menu and really unique card they have in their quaint little shop. The shop itself is small but very welcoming. I kind of regret not having taken a picture but on the shoppe window is this very comfy white sofa with a coffee table filled with various cooking and retro magazines.

I also picked up this nifty postcard as I love post cards. Well I really love design on it but it turns out to be advertisement for this really awesome website called DailyCandy, which is this unique site that reviews new fashion, food and fun what is really cool is that it's not just a "NYC" thing they have reviews of new stuff from very popular cities like Boston and Seattle. It even goes international to include London also. I'm not very fahsiony but I really love the simple design of the website, anything that's easy to navigate and also looks nice is always a plus in my book. By the way etsy people... they also do advertisements and if this site is in tune with your shop maybe it's a great way to promote your shop.

Okay these are the four cupcakes I brought for my buddy... of course she choose them. These are actually 4 of the 5 top cupcakes in the store. We proceeded to sit in a Starbucks and slowly try them. Unfortunately sweet coffee does not go well with cupcakes so I suggest a tall glass of milk. These small cup cakes are about 2.5" x 2.5" (I'm eyeballing it)

The first one we tried was the Carrot Salted Caramel Cupcake. I'm not a big fan of carrot cake but this one was really good! It was moist with a light hint of cinnamon and bits of carrot. The cream inside and the frosting was this wonderful salted caramel lime creme and I was surprised because it had that pitch of sourness that just made the cupcake taste so good.

Next was the Devil Cake and this one was heavy and very chocolaty. Perfect for a chocolate lover and for those who can't handle too much may want to pass on this. The frosting is dusted with this sparkling sugar and it looked almost too good to eat! The middle was this luscious creamy chocolate fudge.

Lemon, Lemon, Lemon cupcake was a bit hard in contrast to the cupcakes above and had this rather plain taste but the lemon inside was pleasantly tart and definitely loads of lemon. The frosting had this hint of lemon too.

I didn't get to try The Velvet though my roomie raved about it. I was at cupcake overload. I think the people looking at us got hungry because all of a sudden they wanted to go eat dessert lolol. So if you're in the area go stop by and see it for yourself.

BTW etsy also sells awesome bake goods. I haven't tried it myself but I've heard rave reviews. Stop by www.etsy.com and search for cakes, candies, cupcakes, maple syrup almost anything you can think of.

Happy Birthday!!
Sweet Cupcakes to all!!

Btw I created a new section to the left on any "How to" instructions

How to make a puffy Origami Crane

Phew welcome to my little One Wish Crane collection number 6 out of 1000. Just 994 more to go! Since I've always been meaning to write a how-to on origami today's a great day as any! I've been making origami since I was little but it was not anything fancy just cranes, boxes, boats and airplanes. Recently I've wanted to try other things. There are many great origami how-to videos and sites here on the Internet just Google away. This is my how-to on making a puffy body crane the same as the crane used in the decoration above. Before we get to that... Origami is an ancient art of paper folding and there are many types of origami paper with hundreds if not thousands of different designs. Personally the thinner origami paper which are sold at any craft stores are much easier to fold then the thicker ones. You use any type of paper to fold origami... loose leaf, construction paper... etc. Well let's get started:

First step is to get a square origami paper and turn it on the side with no design.

Fold it in half across. Make sure every crease is crisp and straight. That is key to folding a neat origami anything.

It ends up looking like this

Open it and fold it half way on the other side.

Open it to the non design side and it should have the straight creases above.

Now fold it diagonally and it forms a triangle.

Fold the triangle across to make a smaller triangle.

Now carefully open one side of the triangle like above and fold it down making a diamond shape.

Do the same to the other side.

Now take the upper part of the diamond and fold it against the middle line like above.

Do it to all four sides until it becomes the kite shape above.

Open the "kite" and just fold in the flap. It should easily fold in, no problem.

Do the same for all the sides and you end up with the shape above.

Open the flap up like above.

Now take the point of the sides and fold it straight against the middle like above.

Do it for all sides and it should look like the picture above.

Now fold the wider flaps down so two flaps point down and two flaps are up.

Open to the thicker and longer of the flaps.

Fold it in so the thicker flap is folded in half.

Now gently pull out the thicker flap on both ends. One end will be the head and the other end is the tail.

Now choose one end and just nudge it down the middle to form the head.

Take the other two flaps and gently pull them down. The middle section should puff up as you pull the wings. If not just gently push the center and it'll puff right up.

Ta-da! Your very own puffy crane! I like it better then the ones that are flat without the puffiness in the middle. Hopefully my explanations and pictures are clear. They're perfect to do with kids and you can decorate them and what not. You can also string them up like what I did when I was young across a room. It's great decoration and you can add sparkles and glitter so they shine in the light. Also as I mentioned in one of my posts before that folding 1000 cranes would grant you a wish.

Happy folding!! =D

Blue Blue Day

Indeed today is a blue day! Well actually outside is gray and gloomy but I feel blue... not sad blue just blue is my mood today. I sure wish I brought one of those 99 cent mood rings way back when lolol. After a long time I finally posted my new Angel Meekiyu. I really like the way they turned out because I was hesitant about using feathers and glue. That can be quite a sticky situation! It took a while to get small matching little feathers and putting them in the back. I also got reviewed by an awesome etsy seller MuyInMolly . She's a very successful full time crafter that makes awesome jewelry! Go check out her blog and shop. Also she has a lot of really great ideas and advice on running a shop so you really should take a look. My critique was about tagging and I learned A LOT about tagging my items.Anyways the feathers are from two bags of black and white feathers I used to make a costume for an anime convention in Baltimore called "Otakon." Above is the costume me and my mom made. Basically I drew and designed it and my mom sewed it. This was my pre-sowing phase and the wings I made from Bristol paper and feathers. The whole thing took 5 hours. I'm way to shy to put a picture up of what I looked like with them on but I was surprised a lot of people recognized my character and took my picture. It was extremely cool! I've already planned my costume for next summer. Below is the character I cosplayed as. To read more about the awesome world of cosplay just click the wiki link. This is Rakka a little well "lost angel" I've seen a few episodes and read the summary. It's actually quite sad and makes one wonder about. The anime she's from is Haibane Renmei. I think me and mom did an awesome job! Go mom! Woot!

Till later... peace and LOVE!

Voting Lines and Etsy Surprises!

Alright if you haven't heard like a billion million times... yes go out there and vote! When I went out at 8:30am there was a line extending around the block in the voting place right next to me. I went out again at 11:30 and the line was still a block long... wow that is just weird. This is the first time I have seen this before where the lines just keeps building and building. Then again I am in a very populated area of Manhattan but once I think in this area there are like two other places nearby to vote and I wonder if the lines are so long? It's great for such a hefty turn out this year! I'm not one for politics so I'll leave it as is.
Ack the quality is really bad but my item was featured in a treasury today! It's from a buyer only account which I'm very surprised! I got a message from a fellow seller that was also in the treasury. For a better look click this link Earth and Sky!! if you click on all the pictures and comment... some combination of that increases the "hotness" of it and it has a good chance of being on the front page of etsy! So click away! Another reason why I was so happy is that I got a sale yesterday night... really late... I didn't even notice until two items were missing from my inventory. I'm thinking... what the... where they go... and suddenly I notice 9 sales... wait a minute wasn't it just 8 before? I went to double check my paypal and email... and its my first sale of the month! November is looking good for me! =D
Here's my newest little Meekiyu. Firefly Meekiyu. This one reminds me of the time where me and my boyfriend was driving around his neighborhood and then he stopped. He grabbed a bottle and told me to follow him. We went to some brush and forest by a parking lot and he told me to look carefully. And what do you know there were fireflies everywhere. He caught some inside a bottle and gave it to me. It was such an unexpected and sweet gesture that it just completely swept me off my feet. He's not the most romantic person in the world but sometimes he just stops my heart when he does something so completely unexpected. =D

Sweet embrace and cheery face!