Since I was mute for a week, I find myself on a posting roll tonight. It helps that I took a two-hour nap this afternoon and now am wide awake with nothing better to do.

My parents met me in San Diego on race day and drove me back to their home in San Gabriel (about 12 miles east of LA; a 2+ hour drive from San Diego). That evening we had dinner at my cousin’s new house in South Pasadena, but Mom was the chef. She prepared a few dishes in her apartment kitchen, we stopped at Sam Woo’s BBQ to pick up some Ginger Chicken, then one of my cousin’s prepared a chinese-style chicken soup.

Considering the state I was in when I arrived (not just tired, but depressed, you can read all about it here), and after trying to watch my food intake for so long (in addition to what I was eating, how much I was eating), this was the kind of comfort food I needed, though I didn’t know it until I was stuffed to the gills, yet still trying to wash down one more slice of watermelon.

Here is (most) of the meal. At some point I put the camera away because I was too darn busy eating …

Tomato Tofu Soup.

Spicy mustard greens (A bit too spicy for my taste. My cousins and parents had an at-length conversation about whether this was a spicy dish or not. 5 out of 6 said not spicy. 5 out of 6 were nuts. It was spicy.)

Ginger Chicken from Sam Woo’s. A take-out staple. Sorry for the fuzziness, but you get the idea.

This next dish was surprisingly my favorite. My mom used to always make her scrambled eggs WAY too salty. It was pretty gross (sorry, Mom). In this dish, eggs and scallions, she added crunchy radishes. I’m not sure how the radishes were prepared (like the chinese-style pickled ones that come in a jar, though it wasn’t that pickled tasting. Just the texture was similar). And, she toned down on the salt. I kept coming back to this one. She told me she’d tell me what was in it, but she never did. That’s her style.

Again, sorry for the fuzzy pics. Don’t know what was wrong with me this day.

What, you were expecting something different when I said “Mom’s home-cooking” and “comfort food”? Maybe you pictured creamy mac and cheese, or a tuna casserole? Well, we’re Chinese for crying out loud.

And, by the way. We don’t do Kung Pao. We don’t do Sweet n Sour. We do this. And we do it very well.