Javier Pena, Cowboy like me and right where you left me. Pedro pascal, love story

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Cowboy Like Me

pairing: javier peña x reader

warnings: NSFW 18+ (MINORS DNI), vulgar language obvi, fingering, squ!rting, age gap (reader is 20+), maybe little bits of angst and drama scattered somewhere in the middle, one pushy and creepy dude?, me writing this over a very long period and refusing to reread it and/or revise 🤠

words: 3.8k

a/n: thank you for this PERFECT request casting. right where you left me is coming up soon as well!

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And the tennis court was covered up with some tent-like thing, and you asked me to dance but I said, “Dancin’ is a dangerous game.”. Oh I thought, this is gonna be one of those things. Now I know I’m never gonna love again.

Summertime in Laredo, Texas was as hot as it was boring. Half the town flocked together every Saturday night, desperate for their small-town entertainment fix, be it a new romance or a fist fight. Every week there was something new for everyone to gossip about, something new to distract from the heat.

You pulled up to the party in your old pickup truck, your two best friends sitting in the bed with their boyfriends. Hopping out, you adjusted your denim shorts and tank top—this wasn’t an elegant affair by any means. The smell of rain and dirt flooded your senses as you stood in the dirt parking lot, waiting for your friends to climb out of the bed.

“How many fights do you think there’ll be tonight?” Your best friend approached you, her boyfriend being tugged along behind her.

“Hopefully none.” You chuckled and watched as the other couple started to walk with you. The five of you had been close since kindergarten, the boys having been shaped completely by the three of you girls, and likewise.

You took after them the most, picking up their love of all things dirt and danger. They called you the cowboy of the group, your noncommittal and crass way about you having become your entire reputation.

One thing that you didn’t seem to get from them given their utter devotion to their girlfriends was your bachelor lifestyle. You were too smart of a girl to ever think you’d settle down with any of the men in your small town, at least not now while you were still young and had options.

Though the men you entertained never complained to your face, every Saturday night became a game of which two of your current flings would start a fight. And every Saturday night, you watched from across the makeshift tent at the tennis court while two pathetic men attempted to earn your heart through violence—the least appealing thing they could possibly do.

Finally arriving at the tennis court, you passed a truck belonging to your neighbor, Chucho Peña. Your closest male friend leaned over to you and his girlfriend, whispering. “I heard that Chucho’s son, the famous one who helped catch Escobar—“

“They didn’t catch him, they shot him.” His girlfriend corrected.

“Fine, the one who helped shoot Pablo fucking Escobar.” He squeezed her closer playfully, making her chuckle and you gag at the sweet sight. “Anyways, that’s pretty fucking cool, right? I wonder if he’s going to be here.”

“I doubt it,” you shrugged, not finding it in you to care much about the hometown hero you’d been hearing about since middle school.

“I wonder if he’s hot. My older sisters talk about him like he put the moon up in the sky.” Your friend commented as the five of you stepped into the party.

It was crowded, even more so than usual, but you still never failed to turn heads as you walked through the area full of picnic tables surrounding the dance floor.

“Gonna go dance, okay?” Your friends leaned in and whispered over the blaring country music, earning a nod from you as you pointed across the court to the beer coolers.

“Gonna go get drunk.” You replied with a cheeky smile, splitting away from the group.

As you arrived to the coolers, the usual group of tios surrounded it, no doubt gossiping just like their wives across the court. You smiled at the only one you seemed to enjoy speaking to, your neighbor and family friend, Chucho Peña.

“Hola, Don Chucho,” you smiled and pointed at the cooler he was sitting on. “Puede pasarme una cerveza?” [Can you hand me a beer?]

“Si, si. Javier is guarding the good cooler. This one’s for the kids, mija.” He pointed over into the corner at a mustached man who was nursing a bottle of Corona and staring out at the crowds of people. Your lips parted as you took him in—he was hot and you could fully see why your friend’s sister was so obsessed with him. “Oh, have you met Javi? I think he was gone by the time your family moved here. Let me go introduce you—“

“No, no. Stay sitting, Chucho.” You shook your head at him, giving him a smile before starting toward the intimidating man in the darkened corner.

As you approached him, his eyes raked over your entire body, causing your cheeks to turn hot. You nodded at him, offering him a smile as you pointed to the cooler beside him.

“Sorry, just grabbing a beer.” You bent down and lifted the lid of the ice-chest, Javier’s eyes looking down at you as you reached in to grab whatever brand your hand landed on.

“You just drink anything?” He commented as you stood upright and made a sour face at the fact that you grabbed a Budlight.

“Builds character.” You shrugged and tapped the metal cap. “Do you have the bottle opener?”

“Oh, yeah.” He reached into the back pocket of his way too tight jeans and pulled out the tool, handing it over to you, his fingertips grazing yours as he did. Javier watched you with curiosity as you peeled the cap off, handing him the tool before taking a big chug of the cold ale. He couldn’t decide whether or not you were his type—you were physically beautiful enough, that was for sure, but there was something about you that scared him a bit. It was as though he was looking into a harsh mirror, showing him a much prettier version of his own self.

And the skeletons in both our closets plotted hard to mess this up. And the old men that I've swindled really did believe I was the one. And the ladies lunching have their stories about when you passed through town, but that was all before I locked it down.

“You new in town?” Javier asked, trying to lace his tone with indifference, but his constant eye contact seemed to show otherwise. You shook your head and turned to look out at the crowd, your shoulders brushing as you mimicked his stance perfectly without meaning to.

“No, well, I wouldn’t say so. Moved here ten years ago.” You tipped the bottle back and sipped your beer again before turning to the side to look at him. “What about you?”

“Been gone for a while. Might as well be the new guy. Everything’s so different.” He seemed to be taken away by a mix of nostalgia and regret, and it suddenly felt too intimate to be watching him as he spoke. Eyes turning away, you caught a glimpse of the man you were hoping to avoid tonight—an ex-something that really was just an awful lay.

“Ugh, shoot me now.” You groaned and turned around, facing the metal fencing and studying it like it was a work of art in effort to avoid his eyes. Javier turned his head and studied you again, this time the slightest of smirks on his lips.

“Already hate me that much?” He flirted, unsure of what suddenly came over him besides his obvious physical attraction to you.

“No—well, not yet—no. It’s this guy that I slept with once who was awful…like, truly the worst sex I’ve ever had.” He turned back to the crowd with a wider smile now, amused and hopeful to spot the man in question. “He’s the one wearing his cowboy hat backwards.”

“Ah,” he nodded and spotted the guy immediately. “Him?”

“Him what?”

“You slept with him?” He asked again, turning his body to you, his smirk now undeniably lustful as you locked eyes with him. With a chuckle you smiled at the ground. This was your favorite part of the whole dating thing—the build up, the witty back and forth—but it was something all too hard to find in this town.

“What, think he’s too good for me?” You asked with a smirk, raising your eyes back to his. He smiled at you and slowly shook his head, eyes flickering to your lips.

“You know you’re too good for every guy here, so why do you even do it? Isn’t it boring?”

“Very.” You chuckled and turned around fully, taking in a sharp inhale as you watched the unwanted ex walk to you. “Can you get me out of this?”

“Want to dance with me?” He asked, nudging his head at the dance floor. You bit your lip and shrugged.

“Dancing is a dangerous game.” You warned, grinning up at him and almost challenging him.

Javier chuckled as he took your beer from your hand, shocked by the fact that it was almost nearly empty, and set it down on the cooler along with his. As your ex arrived and began to speak, Javier slipped his hand around the small of your back and gave him a patronizing smile. “Sorry, she’s busy.”

You were all smiles as he brought you out onto the floor, his hand warm against the dip in your back. Javier watched you with a grin as he spun you around his finger, catching you again and pulling you in close.

“Very smooth, Mr. Peña.” You beamed up at him, studying his dark brown eyes and that smile of his that probably got him whatever he wanted since birth. “You dance with a lot of girls you just met?”

“It’s my favorite way to do it.” He winked at you before dipping you. You giggled and felt yourself being swept away by him in a way you’d never felt before. It felt too natural, being in his arms and trading wits. It wasn’t at all like your usual endeavors—and you loved it. “Saw you talking to my dad earlier. You two know each other?”

“Yeah, I live next door. Well, my family does. I’m just staying with them for the summer before I go back to school.” He nodded, giving you an impressed look.

“What’re you studying?” He tilted his head as he studied your naturally pretty face, fingers trailing over your skin as he tucked your hair behind your ear.

“Law,” you groaned. Javier’s eyebrows raised as he thought about just how similar the two of you were. It both thrilled and terrified him to meet someone so…perfect. “What about you? What’re you doing now that you’re back?”

“Still figuring that out, I guess.” He shrugged and lifted his eyes, looking out at the dance floor rather than you. You felt yourself accidentally hitting a nerve, eyes falling to his chest. “You know, I’m still curious as to why you ever slept with a guy so…below your league.”

“Well, there’s only so many men in this town to mess around with.” You shrugged, surprising him with your honesty. “Not that I’ve slept with every man I’ve messed around with, though. I’ve gotten pretty good at being able to tell who’s worth it and not.”

“Lapse of judgement, then?” He asked with a smirk, eyes meeting yours again. You felt your face turn hot as his hand slipped a little lower, resting on your tailbone now. You couldn’t utter a response, not when every part of you felt electrified, so you landed on a simple nod. “What about me?”

“What about you?”

“You said you could tell whether or not a man’s good in bed,” he replied, his tone thick with lust. You chuckled at his boldness and watched him swipe the tip of his tongue across his bottom lip. “What do you think about me?”

“I, uh—“

“Javi? I haven’t seen you in years!” You were cut off by the slowly aging town beauty queen, her red hair making her stand out in every crowd. She smiled brightly as she cut in on your dance, muttering some halfhearted apology as she whisked him away.

You scoffed at the sight of you standing all alone in the middle of a dance floor, such a stark contrast from your usual Saturday nights. With a chuckle and the shake of your head, you walked back over to the cooler, grabbing another beer before walking through the dance floor to find your friends and take your mind off of that devil in disguise.

“He never even asked for your name,” you reminded yourself in a whisper as you started to daydream about what could have been. The fact that you were even daydreaming about a man at all was telling enough. Javier Peña left an impact on you, regardless of however short your interaction with him may have been. He offered you a taste of a true connection, something you’d been longing to find since coming home for the summer, and in an instant he was swept away by an older woman.

“There you are,” the ex found you midway through the dance floor, spinning you into him as though he’d been studying every move Javier had made on you. “Thought you were avoiding me or something.”

“Well, even a clock is right two times a day.” You gave him a pained smile and patted his shoulder as you tried to walk away, but he only moved with you, blocking your exit. “Listen, I’m just not looking for anything serious right now.”

“We don’t have to be serious.” He offered with a pathetic smile, making your eyes roll.

“I don’t want to be casual with you either.” You finally snapped before trying to walk away again. This time, he grabbed your wrist to keep you near. “Let me go.”

“No, I want to dance with you.” You tried to calmly shove him away, but it was no use—the brute was twice your size. Thankfully before you could decide to fully swing your fist at him, a familiar face stepped in and pulled you away, keeping you hidden behind his—oh my god—broad figure.

“Why don’t you do the smart thing and go home, kid. She doesn’t want to dance.” Javier stared him down until he was walking off, Javier watching him as he left the tent before turning around to study your state. “You okay? Did he do anything?”

“No, no. Just couldn’t take no for an answer.” You chuckled at your own sudden fluster, totally forgetting about the entire incident now that Javier was right in front of you, staring down at you with those fucking eyes. “Where’s, uh, where’s Miss Laredo 1986?”

“I don’t know. Not with me.” He shrugged, a smirk playing on his lips as he studied your jealous smile.

“You’re worth it.” You blurted out with a grin, eyes lowering to his chest as you poked his stomach.

“What?” He chuckled.

“You’d be good in bed, so you’d be worth it.” You clarified with a flirty smirk and a bat of your eyelashes. Javier chuckled again and bit his cheek to hide his grin as his eyes lifted to scan your surroundings.

“Do you wanna go for a drive?” He asked suddenly, tipping his head back towards the parking lot. You took a deep breath as you thought about his proposition that would no doubt end in something filthy and passionate.

“A drive sounds nice.” You nodded and allowed him to drape his arm over your shoulder and walk you out of the party, your friends whistling at you as you passed them at the entrance.

“I told you he was hot!”

Now you hang from my lips like the Gardens of Babylon. With your boots beneath my bed, forever is the sweetest con.

The drive with Javier through the backroads was silent, but it never felt uncomfortable. Some old Merle Haggard song played faintly on the radio as he pulled the truck over, putting it in park before finally turning to you. He took a moment to appreciate your face in the moonlight, a smile playing on his lips as you turned to him.

“Wanna go look at the stars?” He nudged his head back at the bed of his truck, your body turning in your seat to look out of the rear window.

“I don’t think I’ll be able to focus on them with you next to me.” You finally spoke, voice soft and almost husky as you reached over to put your hand on his denim-covered thigh. Javier’s breath hitched at the action, his eyes darting down at the contact, watching as you inches your fingers closer to where he wanted you most. “You don’t even know my name…”

“Y/N.” He whispered, his eyes lifting to yours to take in your shock. “Asked my dad after our dance was interrupted.”

“Javier?” You scooted closer and slid your hand up to palm his length, lips ghosting over the shell of his ear as you spoke. “I want you to touch me.”

“Cariño,” He praised in a whisper, his hand holding your face as he pulled you in for a hungry kiss. You took your cue to straddle his lap, your ass hitting the horn making the two of you jump. “Here, lay down.”

Javier expertly flipped you so that you were laying across the seat, his body hovering over yours, lips kissing every inch of your skin he could find.

“It feels like a crime to be fucking you somewhere like this.” He shook his head as his eyes followed his hands, traveling across your wanton and warm figure beneath him. “You deserve sex in a bed. In my bed.”

“Well, let’s call this a test run, then.” You smirked at him and pulled him down by the neck until his lips were crashing with yours again. Javier made quick work of your daisy dukes, tugging them off you and discarding them on the floor of his truck. His fingers reached for your mound, expecting to feel cotton but only feeling you. He pulled away from your lips and shivered as he looked down at your bare cunt, more than turned on by your lack of undergarments. “What? I like to let her breathe sometimes.”

“It’s hot.” He chuckled and leaned back in, kissing you with more hunger than before, his fingers dipping into you wet folds. You arched into his touch, moaning straight into his mouth as he slid one thick finger into your dripping entrance. He moaned back at the feeling of your warm slick surrounding his digit, smiling against your lips before pulling away. He sat back against his door, your body spread open and on full display in the moonlight, his finger curled inside you the only contact you were sharing.

“Fuck,” you panted in a whisper, the sinful squelching sounds of your arousal filling the cab of the truck as you watched him curl his fingers in and out of your heat. Javier’s bottom lip was held between his teeth as he targeted young soft spot inside, his other hand palming himself through his jeans. “That feels so good…where did you learn that?”

“Remember Miss Texas?” He smirked at you and sped up his pace, your thighs trembling as an unfamiliar tension built in your belly. Not knowing what else to do, you squeezed your thighs together, moans now slipping from your lips like breaths. “Come on, baby. Let it happen. Let yourself feel good.”

“Fuck, I don’t know—fuck!” You squeezed your eyes closed as you came in a new way, a surge of wetness covering the leather seat beneath you as you shook.

“Fuck, yes. Good fucking girl, baby. Squirting for me just like I knew you would.” He leaned back over your body and forced your thighs apart, situating himself between your legs as he found your mouth. You hugged his broad shoulders and wrapped your legs around his waist, hips grinding up in hopes of finding more relief. “What? You want me to fuck you, baby girl?”

“Yes!” You shivered at the timber in his tone, eyes peeling open to look up at him. He was grinning and shaking his head at you, tongue swiping over his bottom lip.

“I don’t think I wanna fuck you right now,” he spoke, suddenly making your stomach churn with rejection. Your lips parted to demand an explanation, but he chuckled and interrupted you instead. “I want to fuck you tomorrow. After you come to dinner with me.”

“Wha—“

“And then I want to take you back to my house. Wanna lay you out on my sheets.” He leaned forward and kissed your pulse, sending a new wave of arousal to your center. “Want to spread you open just like this. Then I want to fuck you with my tongue before I fuck you with my cock. How does that sound cariño? Better than a quickie in my truck?”

“I mean—“

“That was rhetorical.” He chuckled and kissed your lips, this time his touch more gentle and affectionate. “Let me take you on a date. Then…then we can do all the filthy things you’re thinking about.”

I've had some tricks up my sleeve. Takes one to know one. You're a cowboy like me…And I'm never gonna love again.

“I don’t date.” You bit your lip, somehow not believing yourself at the typically true statement. “But, I suppose every cowboy’s gotta settle down at some point.”

“It’s best to find someone who gets it. A cowboy like you.” He smirked, winking at you before sitting up. He found your shorts and helped them back on, reaching in the back seat to grab a spare towel he used to clean the dirt off his hands after a day on the ranch. He wiped up your mess with a satisfied grin, your cheeks flushing at the amount he had to wipe up.

“So embarrassing.” You blushed when he tossed the towel out the window.

“My littering?” He asked with his smirk still on, turning on the ignition and headlights.

“No, my…mess!” You laughed at yourself, gesturing at the seat. Javier rolled his eyes and reached over, grabbing your chin and pulling you in for another kiss.

“That was the sexiest shit I’ve ever fucking seen, querida. I’ll gladly clean up that mess any day.” He pecked your lips once more before turning back to the wheel, putting the truck in drive.

“You really want to take me out tomorrow?” You asked, suddenly understanding the smitten feelings of Miss Texas.

“Of course I do.” He reached to rest a hand on your thigh, rubbing your skin a bit.

“Fine. But nothing fancy or super romantic. Keep it casual.” You tried to seem heartless, but he could hear the smile on your face.

“The cowgirl doesn’t like fancy. Got it.” He chuckled and pulled into the lot of the party, putting his truck in park before turning to you. “You live next door, huh?”

“Yeah?” You asked, furrowing your brows in curiosity.

“Guess that makes you my cowgirl next door.”

“Oh, lord. I’m gonna regret meeting you.” You chuckled, watching as his brows furrowed in confusion. “I’m never gonna want anybody else now that I know you exist.”

“Good.”

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I GOT TICKETS FOR JJK 0!!!! IM GOING WITH MY BROTHER BC I HAVE NO ANIME FRIENDS BUT STILL, IM GOING TO SEE IT!!!

shut up shut up shut up shut up shut up shut the fuck up i want to be you so bad

“Extremely detailed character sheet template”

Character Chart

Character’s full name: Caleb Akamori ( last name given to him by the Grand-master )

Reason or meaning of name: Caleb was chosen by his mother , but Akamori has a interesting background . mori [ meaning forest ] . the Grandmaster gave him this last name because he knew his spirit was as big as strong as and as old as a forest .

Aka [ meaning red ] was given because it was foreseen the evil in his that was to come . finally coming to Akamori . “ the evil will come first and then you will find your true spirit “

Character’s nickname: commonly known as the Cyberninja by most people , also among the Darkness Clan they refer to him as Doragonsureiyā ( Dragon Slayer )

Reason for nickname: he is known as Cyberninja because any photos captured of him he is in his prototype armor . Now he is know as Doragonsureiyā by earning this name , because he killed Doragonrōdo ( Dragon Lord ) a general of the Darkness Clan thought to be the most powerful ninja alive .

Birth date: June 9th , 1999 Physical appearance

Age: usually i write him at 18 - 20

How old does he/she appear: 20 but appears to be 25

Weight: 235 lbs

Height: 6 foot 3 inches

Body build: extremely fit and athletic 

Shape of face: not round but not oval either sort of a middle ground normal face 

Eye color: blue , a deep blue like a ocean .

Glasses or contacts: neither

Skin tone: lightly tanned .

Distinguishing marks: X shaped scars across the front of his chest and a scar across his throat ( received from a very intense fight ) 

Predominant features: his dark blond hair and his deep blue eyes .

Hair color: dark blond ( almost black )

Type of hair: straight

Hairstyle: messy ( always looks like a good messy though . )

Voice: deep voice , amazing bass singer .

Overall attractiveness: 8/10

Physical disabilities: none 

Usual fashion of dress: usually blue jeans , with a tee shirt with ripped off sleeves , dog tags tucked under his shirt , tennis shoes , and a coat if its cold out .

Favorite outfit: white tee shirt with the sleeves torn off , blue jeans , and tennis shoes .

Jewelry or accessories: his dog tags ( never come off his neck ) Personality Good personality traits: loyal , caring , kind , brave , courageous , unselfish , and outgoing . Bad personality traits: usually very overprotective , hot headed , and can be clingy . Mood character is most often in: focused Sense of humor: can be a bit dry , but if you get him going he’ll loosen up . Character’s greatest joy in life: helping others Character’s greatest fear: losing those he cares about and being alone again Why? he has been alone most of his life to be outcast again into the cold darkness by himself . What single event would most throw this character’s life into complete turmoil? a friend dying . it would send his mind into utter chaos . Character is most at ease when: he is around someone he trusts Most ill at ease when: he is worried about something , before he goes into a fight . Enraged when: hahahah . if your the wrong person just look at him wrong . Depressed or sad when: he is by himself Priorities: protect , regain his honor , and eventually settle down . Life philosophy: treat others as you want to be treated If granted one wish, it would be: to have his family back  Why? they were murdered when he was just a boy , didn’t even get to say goodbye . which has cause irreversible trauma to him . Character’s soft spot: just show him you care . Is this soft spot obvious to others? NO !! Greatest strength: his fighting skills and magic Greatest vulnerability or weakness: his short temper Biggest regret: long story short . he feels responsible for a civilian being murdered . Minor regret: not seizing the moments when he has the opportunity Biggest accomplishment: thats a tie between him becoming a master ninja , and building his prototype armor Minor accomplishment: ... quitting his addictions . Past failures he/she would be embarrassed to have people know about: his drinking and drug problem he used to have Why? he is very ashamed of it Character’s darkest secret: his curse and demon  Does anyone else know? yes Goals Drives and motivations: his biggest goal is to eliminate the darkness clan and to eventually live out a normal life . Immediate goals: to become a better fighter everyday and maybe a little bit of a better person everyday .  Long term goals: to eventually settle down , rejoin his clan , maybe have a family ? How the character plans to accomplish these goals: four words . blood , sweat , and tears . How other characters will be affected: nobody knows what the future will hold . Past Hometown: New York ( to the best of his knowledge ) Type of childhood: his childhood was very dark and scaring . 5 is a very young age to be all grown up , but his situation called for it . Pets: his pet Koi fish ( given to him by the Grand-master ) and his pet Cerberus  First memory: falling asleep in his mothers arms Most important childhood memory: going fishing with his dad . Why: it was one of the only good memories he has of his childhood Childhood hero: ninjas ( needless to say he followed them quite well ) Dream job: N/A  Education: he registered education is 6th grade , but he is very smart . often when working he will do the math in his head rapidly often involving advanced calculus . Religion: none Finances: n/a

Present Current location: New York Currently living with: himself Pets: his pet koi which resides in Japan , and a pet Cerberus  Religion: none Occupation: assassin and master ninja Finances: well off Family Mother: deceased Relationship with her:N/A Father:deceased Relationship with him:N/A Siblings: brother Relationship with them:N/A ( still looking for him ) Spouse: none Relationship with him/her:N/A Children: none Relationship with them:N/A Other important family members: anyone he calls a friend . Favorites Color: Yellow Least favorite color:red Music:rap and country Food:fruits , vegetables , junk food , ECT ... Literature:spell books Form of entertainment:training Expressions:laughter Mode of transportation:car , motorcycle , feet , teleportation . Most prized possession:picture of his family  . ( touching it is a good way to loose some fingers ) Habits Hobbies: smithing Plays a musical instrument? guitar Plays a sport? no How he/she would spend a rainy day: training , inventing , sharpening his weapons , patrol . Spending habits: weapons Smokes: has quit Drinks:has quit Other drugs:has quit What does he/she do too much of? training What does he/she do too little of?resting Extremely skilled at:combat  Extremely unskilled at:expressing any form of emotion Nervous tics: none ( he is trained to hide these ) Usual body posture:tall , informal , and downright intimidating . Mannerisms: very polite Peculiarities: extremely secretive Traits Optimist or pessimist?optimist Introvert or extrovert?extrovert Daredevil or cautious?daredevil Logical or emotional?can be both Disorderly and messy or methodical and neat?methodical and neat Prefers working or relaxing?working Confident or unsure of himself/herself?unsure Animal lover?YES Self-perception How he/she feels about himself/herself: the his not good enough , he doesn’t deserve  One word the character would use to describe self: secretive One paragraph description of how the character would describe self: ( character speaking ) “ well i try my hardest but a lot of times i feel like i am not good enough , i know i could be better and i have a whole world that doesn’t even know that i am protecting . maybe one day this will all finally end . What does the character consider his/her best personality trait? kindness What does the character consider his/her worst personality trait?temper What does the character consider his/her best physical characteristic?muscles , if you can sneak up on him on a good day you might caught him flexing in front of the mirror . What does the character consider his/her worst physical characteristic? the scars scattered across his body . How does the character think others perceive him/her: hot tempered , probably hated , reclusive , untrustworthy . What would the character most like to change about himself/herself: his life Relationships with others Opinion of other people in general: he knows the world can harsh and cruel but ha also has seen a lot of good in it also . Does the character hide his/her true opinions and emotions from others? not really , most of the time he is quite blunt . Person character most hates: himself Best friend(s): Dove ( @beyondthetemples ) , Red ( @champofpallet ) . Love interest(s): Dove Person character goes to for advice: his adopted father or his brother .  Person character feels responsible for or takes care of: Dove Person character feels shy or awkward around: not anyone , most of the time . Person character openly admires: N/A Person character secretly admires: Dove Most important person in character’s life before story starts: his brother After story starts: his adopted family and all his friends

found here

tagged by : @beyondthetemples

tagging : @champofpallet , @tameradabsol , @sky-mxxn and anyone else who want to do it .

                       𝖎𝖓𝖙𝖗𝖔𝖉𝖚𝖈𝖎𝖓𝖌 — 𝖇𝖆𝖊𝖐 ‘𝖘𝖆𝖒’ 𝖘𝖆𝖓𝖌𝖏𝖚𝖓.

hi hello. i’m cait, i’m 25, i go by she/her pronouns and i live in cst! i am a hot mess who loves causing her characters pain & angst…. i also love ruining their lives on a daily basis.

this is my babe sangjun who’s a lil bit messy ( much like most of my characters ) and you can find basic stats / bullet point bio / basic personality info / basic plot ideas & stuff like that for him under the cut! if you want more in depth info message me bc honestly this intro post is … oof !!! it’s also kinda long so lemme apologize for that as well !!!

but i am super excited to be here and i can’t wait to plot with ya’ll & love your babies !!!! if you’d like to plot, please feel free to IM me on here, ask for my discord or like this post & i’ll come to you !!!

tw: mentions of alcohol / alcoholism, drugs / drug abuse, bullying & violence.

                                         BASIC INFO ( PT 1. )

FACECLAIM: min yoongi + suga + rapper. CHARACTER NAME: baek 'sam' sangjun. PRONOUNS: he/him. GENDER: cismale. AGE/BIRTHDAY: twenty-six. + june eleventh. ZODIAC SIGN: gemini. ROOM: haean + 2e.

                                           OTHER INFO

POSITIVE TRAITS: determined, hard-working, charismatic & adventurous. NEGATIVE TRAITS: hedonistic, short-tempered, impulsive & blunt. OCCUPATION: bouncer at club arena / underground fighter. ( future ceo ) SONG THAT DESCRIBES THEM: i'm not sorry - dean. HOW LONG HAVE THEY LIVED AT THE YUJAEN?: six years. FOUR MUSE AESTHETICS: leather jackets, bruised knuckles, blurry evenings, late night snack runs.

                                      BASIC INFO ( PT 2. )

full name: baek sangjun. nickname(s): sam, san, jun. hometown: seoul, south korea current location: yongsa, south korea. ethnicity: korean. nationality: korean. gender: cismale. pronouns: he/him/his. orientation: pansexual. occupation: bouncer / underground fighter. language(s) spoken: korean, english, japanese, spanish, french, chinese.

                                PHYSICAL APPEARANCE.

face claim: min yoongi. ( suga ) of bts. hair color: frequently changes, currently platinum blonde. eye color: brown with a small hazel ring. height: 5'10". weight: 169. build: athletic. tattoos: he’s got a few stick-n-poke tattoos scattered across his body, though most aren’t visible when he’s wearing clothing. piercings: these, double helix in left ear & tongue.

                                             HEALTH.

physical ailments: alcoholism, allergies, drug abuse, lactose intolerance. neurological conditions: back pain / muscle spasms, carpal tunnel. allergies: shellfish, pollen, mold. sleeping habits: all over the place, usually tosses & turns for a while before falling asleep. rarely gets more than 4-5 hours of sleep a night. eating habits: horrible, relies on fast-food & take-out most of the time. loves 'comfort foods’. exercise habits: goes to the gym at least three times a week, less if he’s been in back-to-back fights. body temperature: hotnatured. addictions: alcohol, tobacco, cannabis, gambling, sex. drug use: frequent. alcohol use: frequent.

                                       PERSONALITY. ( PT 1. )

label: the cataclysmic. positive traits: determined, hard-working, charismatic & adventurous. negative traits: hedonistic, short-tempered, impulsive & blunt. fears: heights, flying, confined spaces, drowning, commitment. hobbies: arcade games, astronomy, billiards, board games, boxing, card games, comic books, cooking, motorcycles, poker, reading, video games, weight training, yoga. habits / quirks: believes in demonic possession, believes in ghosts & spirits, believes in karma, carries a 'lucky’ item with him everywhere, fights for animal rights, fights for gender equality, fights for human rights, fights for the legalization of cannabis, fights for marriage equality, meditates, always has change in his pockets, owns an outrageous amount of shoes, counts stairs, experiences episodes of depression, boxes, collects packs of playing cards, doodles on everything, gardens, loves board games, paints, plays with fire, plays poker, plays video games, randomly wanders around when bored, sings well.

                                               FAVORITES.

season: fall. color(s): army green, black, red, gray. music: all genres, doesn’t care for country. movies: action, comedy, horror, suspense. sport(s): hockey, basketball, baseball. beverage(s): whiskey, soda. food: comfort foods. animal: dogs.

                                                    FAMILY.

father: baek jaejin, sixty, ceo. mother: baek chansook, fifty-four, ceo. sibling(s): younger sibling, nineteen. children: n/a. pet(s): a siamese cat named ramen ( back at home with his parents ), a bengal cat named shiva ( back at home with his parents ) & a seven month old austrailan sheppard puppy named indy ( lives with his sibling. ) family’s financial status: upper class.

                                                   EXTRAS.

mbti: entp-a. ( the debater ) enneagram: type 8. ( the challenger ) temperament: choleric. hogwarts house: slytherin. moral alignment: chaotic neutral. primary vice: wrath. primary virtue: diligence. element: fire.

                                                BIOGRAPHY.

born in seoul, south korea.

parents were very well known ceos, both running very successful corporations.

and of course, they wanted sangjun to follow in their footsteps.

parents were pretty strict and didn’t really allow him to do well.. anything.

however, they did buy him whatever he wanted and spoiled him in that way.

and due to both of those things combined, he started to rebel at a really young age. ( i’m talking like 10 )

so he’d sneak out, graffiti people’s houses and break things and the likes.

never got caught for it, though, knowing that if he did his parents would have kicked him out and probably disowned him for his behavior.

but one of the reasons he never got caught being a rebel was the fact he was bringing straight a’s in school, was always the very top of his class and from his parent’s perspective? he was a model child.

however, he hated that, hated having to live under his parent’s shadows and be this cookie-cutter version of himself they wanted him so desperately to be.

but he played it off, juggling the 'angel’ side of him with the rebellious tendencies that continued to grow worse and worse with each passing year.

god, high school was so different, though. he’d rebel more and more every single day, pushing the limits of getting caught.

however, word got out pretty quickly about just how wealthy his family was and kids started to bully sangjun for it, causing his anger to get the better of him until he lashed out so bad it landed one of those bullies in the hospital for copious amounts of injuries.

of course, his parents were pissed. grounded him for a solid month and in that time, he learned each and every way he could sneak out of his house at night, wandering the streets of seoul at all hours.

one of those nights he happened to run into a group of people who also went to his school, but instead of them bullying him for whatever reason, they commended him on standing up for himself like he had & told him there was a way to let out the pent up aggression that ended up sending a kid to the hospital.

his curiosity was lit up that night, eager to figure out what the hell they were talking about and a few days later, he was introduced to a scene that’d become far more intoxicating that anything he’d ever experienced before.

underground fighting. no rules, no shadows he had to live under, tons of money for each win under his belt? it was the life he never knew he wanted, but the second he got a taste of it, he wanted more.

so those late night strolls turned into him sneaking out of the house only to meet up with his new group of friends, all of which were clad in full black outfits .. traveling to some random person’s basement ( or abandoned buildings of numerous kinds ) only for sangjun to be able to release every single bit of pent up aggression he carried out on some stranger who’d never remember his name.

his parents? they were just as clueless as before, though, sam continuing to excel in school as well as his fights so much so that he found the perfect balance.. learned how to hide the scrapes and bruises from his mother & father all while continuing to be the top of his class.

not to mention he was juggling all of that and his acting career all at once, trying to hide certain things from his parents and the rest of the world because he knew it’d ruin his reputation.

however, due to the amount of stress that sat upon sam’s shoulders on a daily basis, he let himself slip up on his 21st birthday, parents stumbling into his apartment only to catch him drunk & high with a bunch of strangers surrounding him.

it was a moment he’d been scared of his whole life, worried his parents would just disown him right then and there...

but in all honesty? it was the most freeing night of sam’s life.

he didn’t have to pretend to be someone he wasn’t anymore, didn’t have to pretend to be a pure and innocent little thing who never did anything wrong. didn’t have to live up to the high expectations he’d set for himself so many years ago and god, he was hooked.

his parents not disowning him and continuing to pay for everything he wanted only fueling him to continue the downward spiral, living his life to the fullest, doing whatever the hell he wanted to... whenever the hell he wanted to.

                                      PERSONALITY. ( PT 2. )

hides behind a wall of sarcasm, cockiness, anger and lust.

doesn’t really care to get to know people and had a tendency to push people away before they get too close to him. ( though it’s all a ruse. )

wears glasses to read and mess w computers, but hates them a lot and probably won’t wear them if people are around.

has two different wardrobes, one for when he’s around his parents. that consists of suits & dressy attire. and then one for when he isn’t that consists of ripped jeans, t-shirts, sweats & everything in between.

is …. stubborn as hell and refuses to ask for help with anything.

his motorcycle is literally his baby ??? like he ?? has a problem ??

fluent in a lot of languages, picked them up so that he didn’t need translators at his parents meetings and the likes.

lowkey worried that people will figure out that he’s actually v scared & stressed on the inside because that’ll cause him to start having to deal with his feelings, and he doesn’t wanna do that.

is the biggest flirt you will ever meet?? like if he’s speaking to you… its usually flirty as hell unless it has to do w business ( both his parents & his fights ) or he’s just known you for centuries ?

will try to get everyone to go to bars n parties with him because that’s his life in a nutshell ??

drinks..heavily..  like every night?? it’s a problem tbh.

nerd on the inside though like owns so many comic books, loves to play video games, read books, plays piano.. loves to sketch, paint & the likes.

he cares… god he cares so much about people and the world but he pretends to hate everything because it’s easier than letting people in.

full of horrible and cheesy pick up lines and jokes and frequently texts people said pick up lines and jokes.

owns a book that is full of nothing but blank pages and keeps it on his coffee table because he ‘relates’ to it.

is a highkey hoe but he tries to keep it on the dl ( he fails… miserably. )

super into fitness as it’s a way to keep him away from drinking every evening. ( that doesn’t work for him tho, oof.. )

also has bruised knuckles 24/7 & some other injuries he gets from his fights, plays it off like he’s just clumsy.

anger issues af. needs to get them in check.

actually super kind and caring once you’re able to see get past his wall?? which is really hard tbh but if you’re able to? he’s so loyal and caring it’s unreal.

has a bad habit of smoking whenever he’s stressed out, which is usually all of the time so he smokes…. more than he should ( though he won’t admit to being stressed out,,,,, ever in his life. )

highkey into cuddling and all the cute shit like that but would literally never tell a soul because then they’d see that he isn’t the ‘hardass’ he pretends to be on a daily basis.

is a burnt cupcake who has 'decent’ intentions but has extremely horrible execution skills.

                                                 PLOT IDEAS.

bad influence. ( on your muse. )

best friends.

childhood friend.

competition.

confidant.

cousin.

current hook up(s).

drinking buddies.

drunken hook up.

enemies that used to be friends.

enemies.

exes who ended on bad terms.

flirtationship.

frenemies.

friendly competition.

friends that used to be enemies.

friends with benefits.

good influence. ( on sangjun. )

hate sex.

one night stand(s). ( past & present. )

partner in crime.

party buddies.

past hook up(s).

ride or die.

social media friends.

trouble makers.

unlikely friends.

The neighbor chapter 1

Dean Winchester had decided to start over, forgetting his previous life as a hunter, with a new name, new home, and new start. What happens, when he rents out the second floor of his house, and Y/N Y/L/N shows up, an old friend and fling? Can she even recognize him anymore? And what happens, when a new threat emerges on the horizon?

A/N: This is the new series, I’ve been working on! I’m so excited to show you guys this one, and I hope you’ll love it as much as I do.

Send me an ask, if you want to be added to the taglist!

As always, remember I always say yes to requests and feedback feeds the writer (IT IS AIR).        

Genre: AU-ish

Pairings: Dean x reader (eventually)

Warnings: Language

MASTERLIST

The neighbor Masterlist

Buy me a coffee – find my list for commissions here

New beginnings

 “Are you sure, this is what you want? I mean, you could just take a break…” I rolled my eyes at my friend, Donna. “Donna, I’m not going to want to go back. I want something else in life, seriously.” She crinkled her nose and frowned at my words. We’d been having this conversation for the better part of this month, but I wasn’t budging – I wanted out, and I wanted out now.

“And you’re going to find a new start in Marysville?” She frowned deeper. I huffed, and closed the box, I was holding, shut with some tape, before setting it down. “Donna, I get it, it’s far away and all that crap, but it’s a small town in Kansas, not many people live there, I’ll probably not meet any hunters, and there’s a dude renting out the second floor of his house for cheap.” I sighed and rubbed my forehead. “Donna, don’t you get it? I need to get away from this. I can’t… I won’t lose anymore. I don’t want people to die around me or be close to death myself. I’m tired of motels and dodgy bars. Please, can I just… Can I just get to make this one decision for me?” She sighed and quickly embraced me.

“I’m not saying I’m happy, that you’ll be halfway across the country, and that I have to let my best friend go, but I get it. I promise, I won’t badger you about it, or make you come back, but only if you PROMISE to answer your phone every time I call.” I hugged her back and pulled back a little with a smile. “I promise.”

When we had loaded my small car with all the boxes, that fit in there, I turned to Donna. “Can your car handle the trip?” I shrugged and gently put my hand on the hood of my baby. “She’ll be fine. She’s handled worse.” I said with a smile. Donna hugged me closely again, and I could feel the hot tears hitting my shoulder. I chuckled a little and clapped her back. “I’ll be fine, Donna. Can you tell Jody goodbye for me?” She nodded and wiped her eyes. “Be careful, okay?” I nodded and got in the car.

“Don’t worry, I know how to punch a few dicks, if it comes to it.” I said with a grin, as the engine roared to life; Donna laughed and waved at me, as I sped down the small road leading out of my hometown, and onto the highway to my new life.

  As the twilight fell over the road, I felt my eyes droop a little. I had been driving for almost 7 hours straight, and I could feel it in my legs, my ass and my head – I felt a thousand years old and my car must have felt the same, because it had started to rattle a little, and the hood was steaming slightly. The good thing was, that I was nearing my destination – I had seen signs for Marysville for the last stretch of the highway, and I could – soon enough – stop, let myself and my car rest.

I couldn’t help but feel a twinge in my chest; the idea of leaving everything I knew behind, made my chest cramp. My friends, my life, everyone I knew, was staying behind, while I went out and found something new for myself. I wasn’t exactly the type of person, who would just run off, but I couldn’t do it anymore. The hunter’s life, the fact, that people were dying around me, was not something I could do anymore. I couldn’t handle the loss anymore.

I turned down on a little dirt road, the darkness of the night coming in all at once; the headlights of my car shone brightly in front of my car, lighting up the gravel, that crunched under the wheels of my car. I yawned. I hated driving long distances alone – I felt isolated, plus, my ass was beginning to fall asleep. I kept driving, checking the GPS a few times, so I knew I was on the right way. As I turned right on an even smaller road, I saw a dark house, small squares lit up, as the lights were on. It seemed quaint and sort of cute – not something I’d imagine a guy living in, at least not alone.

I turned my car off and looked up at the looming house. It was quaint and looked to be a light blue or a white color, but the darkness surrounding it made it hard to see. I sighed deeply, wondering if I should turn around and go back home, back to what I knew, when a hard knock sounded from my window. I shrieked loudly and floundered a bit, turning to look at the tall man next to the window. I breathed deeply and opened the door to step outside.

“I’m so sorry, did I scare you?” The man asked with an apologetic tone. He was huge. He reminded me a bit of an Ent, and it was scary to look up at; his hair hung in his face, and he looked somewhat familiar. A huge beard covered his face, but he didn’t look unfriendly – his eyes were shining brightly in the dim light from the lights in the windows, and even though he towered over me, I didn’t feel intimidated. I smiled.

“No, don’t worry. I just… Was in my own world, I guess.” He frowned a little, a flicker of something in his eyes. “Oh, yeah. I get that.” He nodded, looking at my car. “So, I’m not your landlord, I’m just here to help. He’s my brother, and he’s currently out. But,” he smiled widely at me, “I’m here to help you get settled. You’ve got some stuff, you want me to carry?” I nodded, and quickly popped my trunk and the backseat door, opening up to the boxes, I had stuffed in. “Alright, let’s get going.”

When the last box had been loaded into the small, but nice apartment on the second floor, he smiled at me. “I didn’t think I got to introduce myself. I’m Sam.” I smiled and accepted his outstretched hand, shaking it. “I’m Y/N.” His eyes flickered again but smiled quickly. “So, your landlord is my brother. He’s working pretty hard these days, but I guess you’ll see him soon. His name is David, but he’ll probably introduce himself, when you meet him.” He smiled and opened the door.

“He told me that you can use whatever you like. He stocked the fridge for you, but the water might not be going until tomorrow, so if you need a shower, you can use his. It’s downstairs, first door on your left.” I smiled. “Thank you, Sam.” Sam nodded. “I’m not really around much, but I’ll pop in from time to time. See you around, Y/N.”

He left my apartment, and I was left to my own; I looked around with a soft smile. It was small, but perfect for me. An open kitchen, with what looked like all new appliances, was right in front of me, and led off to the small living room, where all the furniture was already there. I stepped further in and saw the open door to the bedroom.

Everything was in a very calming, eggshell white, with light wooden floors. Everything looked amazing, and even without my stuff on shelves, it felt like home. I quickly began to unpack, putting stuff on shelves, getting my clothes in the wardrobe and just trying to settle in. My mind raced about my landlord – the way he had done this apartment made me intrigued – even more so, because he was out so late on a normal, Thursday night. Not that it mattered, but he was mysterious to me. I finally placed the last picture on a shelf and smiled at it. The picture of me, Donna and Jody brought a little homesickness to my stomach. They were the best people, I had ever met and even though they were older than me, I considered them my best friends. I quickly took a picture of me giving thumbs up next to the picture and sent it to Donna and Jody.

I felt sweaty and dirty, so I decided that the last thing to do for the night, was to take a shower. The bathroom was beautiful, shiny white and there was a shower/bathtub-combo, which I instantly imagined myself soaking in, every night with a glass of red wine. I smiled as I turned the knob, but nothing happened. I tried again, groaning as the tap continued to not spout water. I threw my hands up in defeat, and stomped out of the bathroom, towel in hand, and got out of my apartment, walked down the stairs, and opened the door to my landlord’s apartment.

It was in the same tone as mine, but less decorated, almost as if he just moved in – I didn’t look at it too much. I already felt weird being in a stranger’s apartment, and it felt like an invasion of privacy to snoop. I quickly found the bathroom, that mirrored mine, and turned on the water. The water steamed up and I quickly stripped down, stepped under the warm stream of water, and sighed in relief.

I scrubbed my body down, ridding myself of everything resembling sweat, and stayed in the shower, until my fingers started wrinkling. As I gathered the towel around my body, I pondered if I should put on my old, baggy clothes, stained with sweat, to go upstairs, but thought better of it – it was, after all, only ten steps up, and I was going to bed. I wasn’t going to put on sweaty clothes to do that.

As I stepped out, clothes in hand, I bumped straight into a hard, firm body, making me let go of my towel, which caused it to fall to my ankles. I looked up, almost as if in slow-motion, and stared into the most beautiful, green eyes I had ever seen. His face was perfect, a dark blond beard covering his lower half of his face and freckles were scattered over his nose and cheeks. He was perfectly handsome. He looked shocked, but a smirk was playing on his lips as his eyes flickered to my naked chest.

I squeaked and quickly gathered my clothes, running out of his place and up the stairs, slamming the door behind me.

I guess I just met my landlord.

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Jealousy Calls [Emily Field x Fem!Reader]

Request: Can I request an Emily x reader where the reader is hanging out with Ali, and ignoring Emily's calls, getting jealous, but it ends with the reader confessing her feelings to an angry Emily Fields?

Pairing: Emily x Fem!Reader

A/N: I'm sorry this took so long and I hope this fits the bill lol. Also, thanks for the request, love bug... I don't know why I called you that, it just felt right haha.

We also just recently hit another milestone. We at 722 followers now!! That’s amazing!!

A/N/N: Also...a big thank you to my Scott, @fandomnsfw for beta’ing this in the middle of the night for me. (also just made up a word so...)

Words: 1.6K

As the rain hit the windows of the dusty, abandoned warehouse one late night, the lights of the police car grew closer and the smell of old wood choked those in the warehouse with its powerful lingering scent, the group of friends that had broken into the warehouse started to panic. Not only because of the police cars that wearing becoming closer by the second, but also due to the horrifying information they had discovered on their masked huntsman who had been toying with the group since their friend's funeral and the pursuers newest victim. 

Emily jumped into action, no longer hearing the sound of the rain or the police sirens over her own heartbeat and the engaged ring tone emitting from her phone. "She isn't answering!" Emily almost yelled before remembering where she was. She felt her heartbeat speed up as thoughts ran through her head like race cars on a track 'She could already be dead...or worse, being tortured by A'.

"She's probably fine, Em" Aria spoke up from beside Emily, trying to comfort her as best she could whilst also trying to convince herself. A had taken a lot from each of these girls and they had all seen what A was capable of, which only turned their thoughts more grotesque at the idea of A being near their Y/N.  

Spencer began to drag her friends out of the warehouse, being the unassigned assigned leader of the group with the most responsible head. As soon as they had left the old abandoned building they instantly became drowned in the harsh downpour of rain, the police cars could be heard from a street away.

The police cars came whizzing past on the small country road, travelling so fast to the abandoned warehouse that they hadn't noticed a car in a small opening of trees that the group of friends were currently hiding in.

Once the coast was clear, they headed back to their hometown of Rosewood, to the relative safety of their homes. All anyone could hear was the quickened breaths of everyone in the car and the puddles on the country road being crushed under the tires. "She could just be asleep" Hannah broke the silence, now that they were in the clear their minds went back to their friend. "It is, like, the middle of the night".  

As soon as the country roads turned to tarmac as the car arrived at the edge of town, the girls became anxious to find their friend and save them from the same torment they have had to endure for a number of years now. "She still isn't answering" Emily whined after still no answer from ringing her friend, for what seemed like the hundredth time.  

"Oh, she did say she was going to Allison's to study after Emily shot her down, maybe she is still there." Hannah added, her usual quirky honest personality backfiring in this instance. Emily glared at Hannah, knowing full well what Hannah meant and how false she was. Y/N had asked to join the group in the search thinking that they were going shopping. To anyone else, Emily's sudden rejection would have seemed rude but Emily's friends knew that it was due to Emily being protective... That's not how it felt for Y/N.

Y/N looked down to see her phone ringing for the tenth time that night, all from the same person. She was currently sitting on her friend's bed. Revision books scattered across the bed, none of them opened. "You should answer that" a friendly voice spoke up, breaking her out of her daydream.  

"No, not yet, Ali" Y/N spoke softly "I need more time".

Y/N had gone over to her friend's house to "study", initially that was what they had planned but neither one could be bothered since they had too much on their minds. Instead, they ended up chatting and discussing life and plans and relationships into the early hours of the morning. Alison had always been the best at giving advice, Y/N had thought, and so she decided to ask for advice on a problem she was having at the minute, Y/N had feelings for a friend. It was a problem that millions of people have and it always feels like the most troubling thing. y/n didn't want to ruin her friendship by confessing her feelings, no one ever does.  

"I don't know, y/n, I thin-" Alison was cut off by a car screeching to a halt outside the house.  The two friends shared a look before they stood to see through the window. Out on the street was a car with four people jumping out of it.  

Y/N rushed downstairs, Alison barely keeping up. They had reached the front door as they heard the first large knock. As Alison opened the door, Y/N moved away from the door so as not to be ran over by the hoard of people about to enter the house.  

As soon as Emily walked into the house she spoke to Alison "Have you seen her? Have you seen Y/N?" She spoke with urgency,  anxious for the answer.

"Emily, I'm right here" Y/N answered from beside her friend, just out of Emily's view.

Emily began to smile, relief washing over her until she saw what was in Y/N's hand. A phone. Emily had been calling multiple times this past hour, none of which had been answered causing Emily to become more and more anxious.

"You've had your phone with you? This whole time?!" Emily's voice rising as she spoke, looking at Y/N in complete disbelief. "Do you have any idea how worried I was? I thought something had happened to you" Emily carried on her rant. "I rang and rang and you didn't even bother to shoot me a message saying you were safe?" Emily was on the verge of shouting now which hadn't discouraged Y/N's smile of amusement if anything it had grown. "Why are you smiling like that?" Emily finally snapped.

"Because. You're acting like a mom" Y/N giggled, finding this whole situation oddly amusing.

"It's not funny, you could have been hurt and I wouldn't have known. Instead, though, you were here... with Alison" Emily spoke unamused and a hint of jealousy managing to seep through.

"Emily, I wa-"

"I mean, what was so important that you couldn't have picked up the phone?"

"well, I wa-" Y/N tried again.

"What was so important that you would risk your life?"

"If you'd liste-" Y/N felt herself become annoyed, Emily wouldn't listen since she was off on a rant. Normally being one of sound mind, this was odd behaviour for Emily. She continued yelling at Y/N about being irresponsible. She continued ignoring her friend's explanations... Until finally. "I WAS HERE TALKING ABOUT YOU!" Y/N finally yelled, quieting Emily who now looked rather hurt. (Like a lost puppy, if you will)

"You came here to talk about me?..behind my back?" Emily felt crushed, the girl she was in love with admitted to completely stabbing her in the back.

"not like that, Em" Y/N mumbled, scared she had hurt the person she cares about most. "I needed some advice...". Before Y/N could finish her sentence, Emily walked out on the verge of tears, she wasn't one for letting people see her cry and now was not the time to start. "Wait" Y/N shouted running after her friend, who she wished would be so much more but feared that now she would be so much less. "please wait" It was more of a whimper than actual words but it got Emily to stop.  

There she stood in Allison's driveway, back turned to Y/N but Y/N knew she was willing to listen. At first, Y/N couldn't say anything, she didn't know what to say or more so she didn't know how to say it. Would it ruin things between them? Would she reject Y/N again? She didn't want to lose her but knew if she didn't say anything meant that she would lose her anyway. "I... I needed advice" Y/N spoke with a large sigh.  

"advice?" Emily's confusion could be heard by the group of friends that stood in the house on the other side of the door listening in on the intimate conversation, hoping that things would go well for the pair.  

"Yeah, I...the truth is..." Y/N paused as she tried to find the correct words to describe how she felt. Out of all the words in the English dictionary, the only word that sounded right to her was the word 'Love', as cheesy as that is. "I really lik...Lov-"

"Love? You love me?" Emily asked, cutting Y/N off before she could say those magic words. It wasn't that she didn't love her back but the fact that she was protecting herself for if she heard Y/N say she loved Emily and then it not be true she knows she would feel heartbroken.  

"Yes" Y/N mumbled, "I do... I didn't want to tell you because we're friends, ya know... I didn't want to ruin that because you didn't like me bac-".

"But I do love you back" Emily cut her off.

"You do?". Emily just nodded, a slight smile forming in realisation although she was still nervous about what the next move was.  

The pair had moved closer to each other as they confessed their feeling, now to standing almost chest to chest.  They could both feel the pull as they leant towards each other, eyes never leaving each other’s.  

SLAM

"Hannah!" Aria yelled from inside the house. The pair looked over at the front door of Alison's house to see their friends stood in the doorway. The noise had been Hannah accidentally slamming the door open in efforts to see what was happening outside.  

Chile Oil Is So Hot Right Now

Chile oil is very much on trend. | sasaken/Shutterstock

As chefs and restaurateurs create their own versions of the condiment, chile oil has reached cult status here in the States

Back in 2011, shortly after taking ownership of the 100-year-old Nom Wah Tea Parlor, Wilson Tang wanted to sell jars of branded chile oil. But his first batch did not meet the labeling requirements for bottled products according to the Department of Health, and he shelved the idea in order to focus on the restaurant’s bread and butter: in-house diners.

Nearly 10 years later, Tang came back around to the idea. “We had everything ready to launch right before we closed up operations for COVID-19,” says Tang. He released Nom Wah’s first batch of chile oil on the restaurant’s webstore, and it sold out within hours. Once operations are back up and running, Tang hopes to sell the product again, in Nom Wah restaurants and online.

Today, he finds himself in the company of other restaurants and small businesses selling a signature bright vermilion, sediment-thick chile oil. Tang says he was even inspired by fellow young, New York-based entrepreneurs, including Eric Sze of 886 and Lucas Sin of Junzi Kitchen, who each offer branded chile oil that was for sale in their restaurants’ physical locations before they closed to in-house diners due to the coronavirus. (Sze Daddy, the chile oil from 886, was available online but has sold out; Junzi’s chile oil can still be purchased online.) San Francisco’s acclaimed Chinese restaurant Mr. Jiu’s has its own Chile Crisp Sauce, part of a lineup of sauces in partnership with Williams-Sonoma. Jason Wang, owner of the New York City chain Xi’an Famous Foods, which specializes in the cuisine of the western Chinese province of Shaanxi, also recently began to sell signature chile oil packets, by popular demand.

“I saw someone drinking it once,” says Wang, of his chile oil, before he made the decision to sell the packets separately. “People were saying, ‘I’m going to send this to my friend across the country.’” All locations of Xi’an Famous Foods are currently closed due to the coronavirus, but the chile oil can still be purchased online.

None of these business owners could have predicted that their chile oils would become vestiges of an experience that’s no longer available — dining at their establishment — for the lucky customers who bought them. They were intended to leave visitors with a lingering aftertaste and remind them to come back soon. According to Sze, who estimates that 886 sold about 60 jars per week when it was open, “A lot of people finish their meal and are like, ‘I’ll take a jar.’”

Now, as the timeline for reopening remains blurry, retail items from restaurants have become a hot ticket, and shelf-stable chile oils have been anointed a pandemic pantry must-have for those longing to give their home-cooked creations a whiff of spicy-restaurant nostalgia. But what is chile oil? What does it have to do with “chile crisp”? And why is everyone seemingly crazy for spicy, chunky, oily hot sauce in the first place?

When it comes to chile oil — or “chile crisp” — the first thing that pops into many people’s minds nowadays is Lao Gan Ma, a mass-produced, Chinese brand of chile sauce that’s gained a cult following in the United States. Inexpensive and widely available, its Spicy Chili Crisp condiment in particular — which some fans simply call Lao Gan Ma — is so popular that it’s increasingly seen as a benchmark for oil-based chile condiments, and the prototype that some restaurants have looked to to set their versions against. “Lao Gan Ma has too much of a monopoly. We wanted to offer something a little different,” says Sze.

Lao Gan Ma [official]

The Chinese chile sauce brand Lao Gan Ma makes a spicy chili crisp.

However, there is some confusion over what exactly “chile crisp” means, and if it’s an entirely different type of product from chile oil, or a variation. “I’ve actually had Chinese friends who were like, ‘What’s chile crisp? Oh, it’s chile oil?’” says Lisa Cheng-Smith, founder of Yun Hai, an exporter of small-batch sauces from Taiwan. A condiment from a small Sichuan-Taiwanese maker called Su Spicy Chili Crisp was the first product available through her ecommerce business, and its best-seller. And while it’s been made for generations, Cheng-Smith gave it a new, English name for its U.S. debut. “I didn’t start calling it ‘chile crisp’ until I started selling it. I always just called it ‘chile oil,’” says Cheng-Smith.

“Lao Gan Ma has five different products, and only one is called Spicy Chili Crisp,” says Jenny Gao, founder of Fly By Jing, a brand of Sichuan ingredients with a signature product called Sichuan Chili Crisp. She says that she was taking cues from other references of the term “chili crisp” when she decided to name her product Sichuan Chili Crisp — in particular, a recipe for chile crisp in the Mission Chinese Food cookbook, published in 2015. That recipe, by Danny Bowien and Chris Ying, is inspired by Lao Gan Ma, “our favorite brand of the stuff,” the authors write. But it’s also a two-part recipe for “Chili Crisp and Chili Oil,” whereby the latter is produced simply by straining out the solids from the infused oil.

Products called “chile crisp” as opposed to chile oil typically have a higher ratio of particles in them than oil. Those particles are the chile flakes (and often garlic, shallots and any number of other ingredients and spices) that are sizzled in the oil to infuse it, becoming crispy in the process. This textural component is what many find irresistible about Sichuan Chili Crisp, Spicy Chili Crisp, and similar high-particle oils. They’re also typically seasoned with salt, soy sauce, MSG, and occasionally fish sauce or other savory agents like fermented black beans.

“I consider chile oil like soy sauce, in that it’s a cooking ingredient,” says Gao. “I view the chunky Spicy Chili Crisp from Lao Gan Ma and my Sichuan Chili Crisp as a condiment — I rarely cook with it; I use it as a topping.”

But in reality, these roles are not so strict, and one person’s idea of a cooking ingredient may be another’s condiment. “You can cook with dried chile pepper flakes and you can also just scatter it on pizza,” says Gao.

“Chile crisp”-labeled oils can still vary a lot in taste, too; Cheng-Smith thinks that Lao Gan Ma’s Spicy Chili Crisp is saltier and more laden with MSG than others — the product is “good in a junk food-y way.”

But whether it’s called a crisp or an oil, the idea of a spicy, chile-based topping that isn’t a vinegar-based sauce has little precedent in the U.S. For generations, when Americans wanted to kick up their entrees with a little extra heat, they dabbled thin, red droplets of a pepper sauce. There are thousands of sauces like this: cayenne- or habanero-based; red, green, or yellow; with the addition of fruit for balance or adorned with grim reapers on their labels. And while fierce proponents of Crystal and Frank’s Red Hot may argue about how much these sauces differ, when it comes to the general style, they don’t.

The taste for vinegar-based chile sauce is, of course, not just limited to Americans. The Southeast Asian chile sauce sambal olek is similarly bright and tangy, with a smack of fresh garlic, although it’s chunky in composition. Sriracha, a smoother, thicker, sweeter chile sauce created by a Vietnamese American in California, is also vinegar-based, with no oil to speak of.

A chile condiment that is not only oily but earthy, toasty, and cooked rather than highly acidic and fresh-tasting is still something of a novelty, found in Asian groceries or from the beloved restaurants that sell theirs. Walk down a typical American supermarket’s hot sauce aisle and you probably won’t find anything like it.

But as Tang saw it, with Chinese food more mainstream than ever, the time was right to sell Nom Wah chile oil. And, as he and other restaurateurs profess, a great deal of customers request a chile condiment with their food. Sriracha, Cholula, and other vinegary sauces are not the right complement for everything.

“You wouldn’t take out Tabasco and douse it on Chinese food because it doesn’t go together,” says Gao. “But with oil-based sauce, it’s just a better fit for Chinese cuisine.”

For more than a century, milder cuisines from China dominated the Chinese food enjoyed in the United States. That began to change after the U.S. lifted restrictions on immigration from China in 1965. Before then, the first waves of immigrants from China, who created the canon of Chinese-American staples like chop suey and egg foo young, were Toisanese, from Guangdong Province, whose traditional cuisine employs little to no spice. Much later on, Cecilia Chiang’s San Francisco restaurant the Mandarin introduced Americans to Northern Chinese cuisine, like Peking duck, which also happens to not be very spicy. After the floodgates were lifted, chile-laden cuisines from all around Asia brought new meaning to the word “hot.”

But before these cuisines reached the states, a taste for spice spread within China. “Chile peppers didn’t even arrive in China until 200 years ago,” says Gao, whose hometown is Chengdu, Sichuan province’s capital. “They arrived in the East... then slowly moved throughout China, and it took off in Sichuan because of the climate.” Many other parts of China, such as Hunan Province, also boldly employ chile peppers, but Gao says that Sichuan food is so well-known in China and throughout the world because its cuisine is all about complex flavor combinations, like ma la — the combination of chile heat and numbing spice from Sichuan peppercorns. “There’s dozens of flavor profiles in Sichuan cuisine; their chefs have really mastered what flavor can be.”

Diana Kuan, author of Red Hot Kitchen, a cookbook focused on the many varieties of Asian hot sauces, lived in China from 2007 to 2009 and witnessed the rising popularity of Sichuan cuisine in the country, especially in Beijing, where she was based. For the last few decades, as people — such as the laborers from the countryside who helped build China’s modern cities — migrated within the country, their cuisines mingled. “I think people are beginning to like spicy food more in southern China and Hong Kong, so there will be a little dish of chile sauce to go with dim sum,” she says. “In every city you can find some sort of spicy cuisine, so nowadays it’s pretty much ubiquitous.”

Hence, chile oil is not just enjoyed in Sichuan Province, where it would typically receive a touch of Sichuan peppercorn. Lao Gan Ma is, after all, a brand from Guizhou Province, whose signature flavor combo is a spicy and sour; Xi’an Famous Foods’ chile oil has distinct spices from China’s western provinces, including cumin; Su Spicy Chili Crisp has a scattering of sesame seeds; 886’s Sze Daddy sauce nods to the Taiwanese condiment sha-cha sauce, which has a touch of sweetness; and Nom Wah’s chile oil is a simple infusion of dried chiles and oil.

“Some regions might use fermented soybeans… in the Guangdong region they make theirs often with peanuts,” says Lucas Sin, chef-owner of Junzi Kitchen. The methodology differs, too. Sin, a 2019 Eater Young Gun, says that the different terminology throughout China used for these oils can offer clues into how they are made.

“Hong you,” which translates to “red oil,” is what many people in China, such as in Sichuan province, would typically call chile oil. Another generic term for chile oil used throughout China is “la jiao you” — which translates directly to “hot pepper oil.”

“We actually make you po la zi,” says Sin. He explains the character for “po” denotes the act of pouring the oil over something. (One might translate this term to “spicy pour-over oil.”)

Junzi’s signature chile oil employs this simple pour-over method: you take your spices and aromatics, place them in a heatproof vessel, and pour sizzling-hot oil over them at once. Other chile oils, such as Fly By Jing’s and 886’s, for instance, employ a longer cooking process where the chiles and aromatics are added in sequence, and cooked until the whole concoction is toasted and infused just so.

But, just like their English counterparts, these Chinese terms are often used interchangeably. And there are ever newer terms and variations being invented for a similar crispy, chunky, oil-y chile product. The grocer Trader Joe’s, for instance, makes a particle-rich chile condiment called Chili Onion Crunch.

Every cook, restaurant, and producer lends their own creative spin to this rudimentary vehicle for spice and flavor. Sin describes his dad’s famous homemade chile oil — something that he’s “kind of famous for” in his circle of friends and family. He dices the garlic by hand and simmers it slow and low for hours along with dried chiles and sesame seeds. There’s a lot of room for creativity, says Sin. “Most likely, we just make the chile oil that tastes the best to us.”

Cathy Erway is the author of The Food of Taiwan: Recipes From the Beautiful Island and The Art of Eating In: How I Learned to Stop Spending and Love the Stove.

from Eater - All https://ift.tt/2VZlvFt https://ift.tt/2KXu65l

Chile oil is very much on trend. | sasaken/Shutterstock

As chefs and restaurateurs create their own versions of the condiment, chile oil has reached cult status here in the States

Back in 2011, shortly after taking ownership of the 100-year-old Nom Wah Tea Parlor, Wilson Tang wanted to sell jars of branded chile oil. But his first batch did not meet the labeling requirements for bottled products according to the Department of Health, and he shelved the idea in order to focus on the restaurant’s bread and butter: in-house diners.

Nearly 10 years later, Tang came back around to the idea. “We had everything ready to launch right before we closed up operations for COVID-19,” says Tang. He released Nom Wah’s first batch of chile oil on the restaurant’s webstore, and it sold out within hours. Once operations are back up and running, Tang hopes to sell the product again, in Nom Wah restaurants and online.

Today, he finds himself in the company of other restaurants and small businesses selling a signature bright vermilion, sediment-thick chile oil. Tang says he was even inspired by fellow young, New York-based entrepreneurs, including Eric Sze of 886 and Lucas Sin of Junzi Kitchen, who each offer branded chile oil that was for sale in their restaurants’ physical locations before they closed to in-house diners due to the coronavirus. (Sze Daddy, the chile oil from 886, was available online but has sold out; Junzi’s chile oil can still be purchased online.) San Francisco’s acclaimed Chinese restaurant Mr. Jiu’s has its own Chile Crisp Sauce, part of a lineup of sauces in partnership with Williams-Sonoma. Jason Wang, owner of the New York City chain Xi’an Famous Foods, which specializes in the cuisine of the western Chinese province of Shaanxi, also recently began to sell signature chile oil packets, by popular demand.

“I saw someone drinking it once,” says Wang, of his chile oil, before he made the decision to sell the packets separately. “People were saying, ‘I’m going to send this to my friend across the country.’” All locations of Xi’an Famous Foods are currently closed due to the coronavirus, but the chile oil can still be purchased online.

None of these business owners could have predicted that their chile oils would become vestiges of an experience that’s no longer available — dining at their establishment — for the lucky customers who bought them. They were intended to leave visitors with a lingering aftertaste and remind them to come back soon. According to Sze, who estimates that 886 sold about 60 jars per week when it was open, “A lot of people finish their meal and are like, ‘I’ll take a jar.’”

Now, as the timeline for reopening remains blurry, retail items from restaurants have become a hot ticket, and shelf-stable chile oils have been anointed a pandemic pantry must-have for those longing to give their home-cooked creations a whiff of spicy-restaurant nostalgia. But what is chile oil? What does it have to do with “chile crisp”? And why is everyone seemingly crazy for spicy, chunky, oily hot sauce in the first place?

When it comes to chile oil — or “chile crisp” — the first thing that pops into many people’s minds nowadays is Lao Gan Ma, a mass-produced, Chinese brand of chile sauce that’s gained a cult following in the United States. Inexpensive and widely available, its Spicy Chili Crisp condiment in particular — which some fans simply call Lao Gan Ma — is so popular that it’s increasingly seen as a benchmark for oil-based chile condiments, and the prototype that some restaurants have looked to to set their versions against. “Lao Gan Ma has too much of a monopoly. We wanted to offer something a little different,” says Sze.

Lao Gan Ma [official]

The Chinese chile sauce brand Lao Gan Ma makes a spicy chili crisp.

However, there is some confusion over what exactly “chile crisp” means, and if it’s an entirely different type of product from chile oil, or a variation. “I’ve actually had Chinese friends who were like, ‘What’s chile crisp? Oh, it’s chile oil?’” says Lisa Cheng-Smith, founder of Yun Hai, an exporter of small-batch sauces from Taiwan. A condiment from a small Sichuan-Taiwanese maker called Su Spicy Chili Crisp was the first product available through her ecommerce business, and its best-seller. And while it’s been made for generations, Cheng-Smith gave it a new, English name for its U.S. debut. “I didn’t start calling it ‘chile crisp’ until I started selling it. I always just called it ‘chile oil,’” says Cheng-Smith.

“Lao Gan Ma has five different products, and only one is called Spicy Chili Crisp,” says Jenny Gao, founder of Fly By Jing, a brand of Sichuan ingredients with a signature product called Sichuan Chili Crisp. She says that she was taking cues from other references of the term “chili crisp” when she decided to name her product Sichuan Chili Crisp — in particular, a recipe for chile crisp in the Mission Chinese Food cookbook, published in 2015. That recipe, by Danny Bowien and Chris Ying, is inspired by Lao Gan Ma, “our favorite brand of the stuff,” the authors write. But it’s also a two-part recipe for “Chili Crisp and Chili Oil,” whereby the latter is produced simply by straining out the solids from the infused oil.

Products called “chile crisp” as opposed to chile oil typically have a higher ratio of particles in them than oil. Those particles are the chile flakes (and often garlic, shallots and any number of other ingredients and spices) that are sizzled in the oil to infuse it, becoming crispy in the process. This textural component is what many find irresistible about Sichuan Chili Crisp, Spicy Chili Crisp, and similar high-particle oils. They’re also typically seasoned with salt, soy sauce, MSG, and occasionally fish sauce or other savory agents like fermented black beans.

“I consider chile oil like soy sauce, in that it’s a cooking ingredient,” says Gao. “I view the chunky Spicy Chili Crisp from Lao Gan Ma and my Sichuan Chili Crisp as a condiment — I rarely cook with it; I use it as a topping.”

But in reality, these roles are not so strict, and one person’s idea of a cooking ingredient may be another’s condiment. “You can cook with dried chile pepper flakes and you can also just scatter it on pizza,” says Gao.

“Chile crisp”-labeled oils can still vary a lot in taste, too; Cheng-Smith thinks that Lao Gan Ma’s Spicy Chili Crisp is saltier and more laden with MSG than others — the product is “good in a junk food-y way.”

But whether it’s called a crisp or an oil, the idea of a spicy, chile-based topping that isn’t a vinegar-based sauce has little precedent in the U.S. For generations, when Americans wanted to kick up their entrees with a little extra heat, they dabbled thin, red droplets of a pepper sauce. There are thousands of sauces like this: cayenne- or habanero-based; red, green, or yellow; with the addition of fruit for balance or adorned with grim reapers on their labels. And while fierce proponents of Crystal and Frank’s Red Hot may argue about how much these sauces differ, when it comes to the general style, they don’t.

The taste for vinegar-based chile sauce is, of course, not just limited to Americans. The Southeast Asian chile sauce sambal olek is similarly bright and tangy, with a smack of fresh garlic, although it’s chunky in composition. Sriracha, a smoother, thicker, sweeter chile sauce created by a Vietnamese American in California, is also vinegar-based, with no oil to speak of.

A chile condiment that is not only oily but earthy, toasty, and cooked rather than highly acidic and fresh-tasting is still something of a novelty, found in Asian groceries or from the beloved restaurants that sell theirs. Walk down a typical American supermarket’s hot sauce aisle and you probably won’t find anything like it.

But as Tang saw it, with Chinese food more mainstream than ever, the time was right to sell Nom Wah chile oil. And, as he and other restaurateurs profess, a great deal of customers request a chile condiment with their food. Sriracha, Cholula, and other vinegary sauces are not the right complement for everything.

“You wouldn’t take out Tabasco and douse it on Chinese food because it doesn’t go together,” says Gao. “But with oil-based sauce, it’s just a better fit for Chinese cuisine.”

For more than a century, milder cuisines from China dominated the Chinese food enjoyed in the United States. That began to change after the U.S. lifted restrictions on immigration from China in 1965. Before then, the first waves of immigrants from China, who created the canon of Chinese-American staples like chop suey and egg foo young, were Toisanese, from Guangdong Province, whose traditional cuisine employs little to no spice. Much later on, Cecilia Chiang’s San Francisco restaurant the Mandarin introduced Americans to Northern Chinese cuisine, like Peking duck, which also happens to not be very spicy. After the floodgates were lifted, chile-laden cuisines from all around Asia brought new meaning to the word “hot.”

But before these cuisines reached the states, a taste for spice spread within China. “Chile peppers didn’t even arrive in China until 200 years ago,” says Gao, whose hometown is Chengdu, Sichuan province’s capital. “They arrived in the East... then slowly moved throughout China, and it took off in Sichuan because of the climate.” Many other parts of China, such as Hunan Province, also boldly employ chile peppers, but Gao says that Sichuan food is so well-known in China and throughout the world because its cuisine is all about complex flavor combinations, like ma la — the combination of chile heat and numbing spice from Sichuan peppercorns. “There’s dozens of flavor profiles in Sichuan cuisine; their chefs have really mastered what flavor can be.”

Diana Kuan, author of Red Hot Kitchen, a cookbook focused on the many varieties of Asian hot sauces, lived in China from 2007 to 2009 and witnessed the rising popularity of Sichuan cuisine in the country, especially in Beijing, where she was based. For the last few decades, as people — such as the laborers from the countryside who helped build China’s modern cities — migrated within the country, their cuisines mingled. “I think people are beginning to like spicy food more in southern China and Hong Kong, so there will be a little dish of chile sauce to go with dim sum,” she says. “In every city you can find some sort of spicy cuisine, so nowadays it’s pretty much ubiquitous.”

Hence, chile oil is not just enjoyed in Sichuan Province, where it would typically receive a touch of Sichuan peppercorn. Lao Gan Ma is, after all, a brand from Guizhou Province, whose signature flavor combo is a spicy and sour; Xi’an Famous Foods’ chile oil has distinct spices from China’s western provinces, including cumin; Su Spicy Chili Crisp has a scattering of sesame seeds; 886’s Sze Daddy sauce nods to the Taiwanese condiment sha-cha sauce, which has a touch of sweetness; and Nom Wah’s chile oil is a simple infusion of dried chiles and oil.

“Some regions might use fermented soybeans… in the Guangdong region they make theirs often with peanuts,” says Lucas Sin, chef-owner of Junzi Kitchen. The methodology differs, too. Sin, a 2019 Eater Young Gun, says that the different terminology throughout China used for these oils can offer clues into how they are made.

“Hong you,” which translates to “red oil,” is what many people in China, such as in Sichuan province, would typically call chile oil. Another generic term for chile oil used throughout China is “la jiao you” — which translates directly to “hot pepper oil.”

“We actually make you po la zi,” says Sin. He explains the character for “po” denotes the act of pouring the oil over something. (One might translate this term to “spicy pour-over oil.”)

Junzi’s signature chile oil employs this simple pour-over method: you take your spices and aromatics, place them in a heatproof vessel, and pour sizzling-hot oil over them at once. Other chile oils, such as Fly By Jing’s and 886’s, for instance, employ a longer cooking process where the chiles and aromatics are added in sequence, and cooked until the whole concoction is toasted and infused just so.

But, just like their English counterparts, these Chinese terms are often used interchangeably. And there are ever newer terms and variations being invented for a similar crispy, chunky, oil-y chile product. The grocer Trader Joe’s, for instance, makes a particle-rich chile condiment called Chili Onion Crunch.

Every cook, restaurant, and producer lends their own creative spin to this rudimentary vehicle for spice and flavor. Sin describes his dad’s famous homemade chile oil — something that he’s “kind of famous for” in his circle of friends and family. He dices the garlic by hand and simmers it slow and low for hours along with dried chiles and sesame seeds. There’s a lot of room for creativity, says Sin. “Most likely, we just make the chile oil that tastes the best to us.”

Cathy Erway is the author of The Food of Taiwan: Recipes From the Beautiful Island and The Art of Eating In: How I Learned to Stop Spending and Love the Stove.

from Eater - All https://ift.tt/2VZlvFt via Blogger https://ift.tt/3dlcoF3

“Ever think we should try to re-establish that connection that we made during last summer’s days?”

A running motif in Saves the Day’s first few albums that doesn’t pop up as much throughout the rest of their discography is the idea of place. Three of Can’t Slow Down’s 14 tracks reference locations in their titles. I could easily understand why five suburban New Jersey* teenagers would be looking outside their hometown for inspiration, but these songs have little of that classic “leave this town” pop-punk aesthetic; they don’t really even seem to be channeling specific styles or ideas from the places they namecheck. Instead, in typical Saves the Day fashion, each song dives into a more personal tale, a specific memory, story, or feeling related to the state in question.

Appropriately for a song named after their home state, “Sometimes, New Jersey” is the most conventional of the three tracks, a short and sweet encapsulation of the rush of young love. Conley may sum the song up by declaring it “real fucking romance,” but it’s really romance at its most base level: that first rush of liking someone and them actually liking you back, and the fantasies of how amazing that first date will eventually be. It’s a baseline that Conley/the narrator will build all subsequent romances off of, and it’s also a baseline for the band’s experiences, a contrast to the other two location-based tracks.

“Nebraska Bricks” is the starkest contrast, one of the few songs in Saves the Day’s catalog to break away from Conley’s narration, instead taking the POV of a middle-aged midwestener trapped in a dissolving marriage and looking to reinvent themselves as a “brick,” someone tough enough not to feel pain anymore, and strong enough to shake up the status quo (I always picture the narrator as a beleaguered housewife, but the song never specifies their gender). The song is Conley stretching himself in a way he rarely does even in subsequent albums, but still showing his same trademark attention to emotion and personal detail.

My favorite of the three songs is “Hot Time in Delaware” [embedded above], and not just because it name-checks my home state. It’s easily one of the most memorable tracks on Can’t Slow Down, opening with a sample and then a fun bass sting, and closing on some pretty tremendous dual-vocal harmonies (let me tell you, this part is very fun to sing along to in a car with a good friend, which is one of the most important rubrics for judging songs).

The lyrics make me think of summer camp, with the narrator reflecting back on a summer romance and wondering if there would be any way to rekindle it. What would they have to do to make it work? He closes things out “hoping that [the girl] will change,” but the rest of the song makes it pretty clear that both have already changed too much for things to go back to the way they once were -- he’s lost his idealism, and they’ve already dropped some of the habits that once brought them together in the first place. “Hot Time in Delaware” is a song about nostalgia in more ways than one, not just recapturing the fleeting feeling of a summer romance in Delaware, but the painful impossibility of ever going back to the way things once were.

All one can really do is move forward, which is exactly what Saves the Day does. Just one year after Can’t Slow Down they released their second album, the iconic Through Being Cool, which revealed that their relationship with place had already evolved significantly.

“The Vast Spoils of America (From the Badlands Through The Ocean)” is a song that could only be written by a version of Saves the Day with a year of touring under their belt. Conley’s fascination with the beauty of nature really starts to shine through on this album, but may be at its peak throughout “The Vast Spoils of America**,” the first half of which is devoted to recounting the splendors the band has encountered on tour, the mountains of California and the swamps of the south and even the wonder of Kansas’ sheer flatness. It’s a brief and necessary shift in perspective for the band, a reminder that there are always things out there bigger than, grander than our problems.

Still, emotions and relationships are the True North that Saves the Day will always return to, and thus the second half of the song digs into what these new experiences mean to the band -- and their conclusion is that, for all the wonders of America, they’re eager to return home and see the people they left behind after three weeks on tour. If Can’t Slow Down’s take on place revolves around the idealism of youth, on dreams of worlds yet unseen and the memories of places just out of reach, then “The Vast Spoils of America” is the counterpoint, the voice of experience saying that any place can be beautiful when viewed with fresh eyes, yet it’s the people there that truly make a place worth loving.

*Saves the Day is very much a New Jersey band, especially in Can’t Slow Down, which is heavily influenced by seminal Jersey act Lifetime. Chris Conley would leave Jersey for NYC shortly after the album’s completion to attend college, and the four current members of the band are scattered across the country (California, Nashville, Chicago, Philadelphia), but Saves the Day and New Jersey have retained a special connection nonetheless. Seeing Saves play a New Jersey show is always a magical experience.

**This is actually a little ironic, as then-lead guitarist Dave Soloway is given lead songwriting credit on this song.

Captain Harlock - the Eternal Exile

‘’I could not bide in the feasting halls, where the great fires light the rooms – for the winds are walking the night for me and I must follow where the gaunt lands be, seeking, beyond some nameless sea, the doom beyond the dooms.’’

- The Outgoing of Sigurd the Jerusalem-Farer (by Robert E. Howard)

[I found this old Harlock article when I was cleaning out my inbox. It is 3 years old, I think, but still a gem. Admittedly, I was going through a minor bout of depression when I wrote it. Enjoy]

Planet Earth, homeland, fatherland, motherland, country, state, province, city, hometown, castle, neighborhood, street, flat, house, bedroom…home… Every human on this planet has a home…except a certain kind of person: the self-aware wandering exile.

Almost every person on Earth has a place in this word – some plot of ground, some house, some mansion, some room in a apartment complex, some farm, some ranch, some commune, some monastery, some trailer, some street corner, some bridge, some park bench, some tent, some little place where we can go to at the end of the day that is, whether in a big way or a small way, theirs…their own little place were we can rest and be at peace – for a time, at least. I have a place. And no doubt ninety-percent of the readers of this post (if there are any) are reading it from the comfort of their own allotted places – their bedrooms most likely, which are their most intimate and personal expression of their homes.

We take are homes, our cities, our countries, for granted. Whenever we leave, say, on vacation, it is a novel and exciting experience because we are leaving our home, our familiar surroundings and all that they imply – and going to a place that is not our home – to be in other cities, other states, other countries among other people that are different from us. We may be gone a day, a week, a month, or even a year – but we know, no matter how much fun we’re having – or not having, not everyone likes to travel – we know deep down that we are not at home…which is part of the whole experience: to leave home, for a time, and then return to it. We know, at the end of the day, that our home, our town, our neighborhood, our house, our bedroom, will be there for us when we come back. Even if it is a mundane place compared to were we have just been, we are grateful to be back, to be again in familiar surroundings on our own turf, to sleep once again in our very own beds, to slip once more into the comfort of our old routines and ways. Only when we are away from home do we truly appreciate and miss it – and only by having homes do we find ourselves yearning for strange and unfamiliar places (I want to visit Europe, for example – though I doubt I’ll ever have enough money to do so) that are not our homes.

To be homeless is considered a dreadful or tragic thing – especially in the West, and the quicker one gets out of a state of homelessness and finds a stable home within his community the better off society views him. For the Germanic/Norse/Anglo-Saxon peoples of Old Europe, banishment and/or exile was the most feared of all punishments or states. To be banished from one’s clan or nation was worse then death – it was a living death – without his lord, or his people or his homeland, a person ceased to exist, in a way. The long and heartrending Old English poem, fittingly titled ‘The Wanderer’, tells of a lone warrior, the sole survivor of a now-dead (via war and destruction) clan who journeys across the freezing sea in a little boat in search of a new lord and a new home. Although the man is in a state of exile through no fault of his own, the mental, spiritual and physical agonies he undergoes are no less painful and his sorrow and grief no less potent. Separation from one’s people and homeland, either as punishment or by necessity, is rarely considered a good thing.

However, there some people who do not really have homes, or homelands, or even a people. Yes, they have a certain race of people to which they are bound to by blood and a birth-country which they are a citizen of (these two facts are inescapable, if you are born on planet Earth) and even a house they might live in or own – but even so, they do not really have a home. In their hearts and minds, they are exiles – even if they aren’t actually living in a state of exile (meaning they haven’t been officially banished or cast out of their families or countries).  Some of them are mentally ill or suffer from personality disorders that keep them from fully engaging with their families, cultures and societies, even if they genuinely want to. Some, however, being natural-born introverts and loners, have looked about them and found both current culture and society wanting, and have deliberately distanced themselves from it – if not physically, then at least mentally, emotionally and/or spiritually. They may dwell within the world, but they are not of it – they are strangers in a strange land where everyone else it at home, outcasts in an alien realm that has little to offer them in terms of happiness, fulfillment or meaning. Their hearts burn silently for their own secret Arcadia, that privet Utopia of the soul that only they can enter and dwell – a place they can truly call home, constructed of all their hopes and dreams that no one else seems to share. Such is the doom of the introvert, the loner, the exile, the outcast, the one who walks the narrow road alone. Such is my doom…and such is Harlock’s. Maybe it is yours as well. We know who we are.

Such is the containing state of Space Pirate Captain Harlock. Harlock is an exile of the most heartrending kind: his is completely alone. Yes, this seems like a false statement at first – after all, doesn’t he have a crew with him most of the time, as well as numerous friends scattered throughout the colonized universe? Yes, he does, and I do not mean to downplay their roles in his life or their struggles, but when one looks at the big picture, Harlock is genuinely alone in that there is no other person (except his best friend Tochiro – who keeps dying on him) whom he can truly share his dreams and hopes with (or, rather, there is no person he wants to share his true dreams and hopes with). Harlock’s exile is complex in that it is both a punishment and a freely chosen state – one that he seeks as well as one that he wishes (at times) to leave. In both the original Space Pirate TV series and the Arcadia of My Youth film, Harlock is ‘officially’ banished from Earth by both governing Prime Ministers (one of which is a lazy, incompetent boor and the other a bought-and-owned puppet-ruler) under pain of death. However, it is just as easily arguable that Harlock would have turned his back on the collective patheticness of humanity and self-banished himself to avoid becoming like them or at least to avoid living under their rule. He doesn’t need anyone to tell him to leave. It is quite obvious that he can no longer remain there. By the time one Prime Minister gets around to publicly announcing his intentions, Harlock is already far from the planet, blasting off into the depths space without waiting to learn that he no longer welcomed or wanted. The grim foreknowledge of his fate seals him emotionally against the doom of exile and he stoically excepts the hand that is dealt to him, as unjust and unfair as it might be. ”Oh, you fools…dance to you’re heart’s content on that small world of yours [Earth]. Our world is the whole of space!” he defiantly cries at the closing of Arcadia of My Youth. Like the romantic Western gunslinger of yore who rides off into the sunset after his task is done, Captain Harlock flies off into the Sea of Stars after he has done all that he can do for his fellow ungrateful humans living on a tarnished, decaying Earth that is no longer fit to be a home to a true man like himself.

Yet as disillusioned as he is, Harlock can’t fully turn his back on humanity or completely abandon the Earth. In Harlock’s world, individual countries and cultures have all become united and fused as one – you are either a human living on planet Earth or a human living on some colonized world somewhere in space. But Earth still remains a special place, a place even Harlock hopes will one day become beautiful again, with men living as true, valiant men – not as slaves to alien races or cowards shackled by hedonistic lifestyles. In the end, Harlock defends and fights for the Earth not so he can be acclaimed as a hero, be freed of his outlaw status and settle down to a nice domestic life – he fights so his few friends can build a future and have a genuine life on the beautiful blue-green planet of their birth. Whether they want to or not, Harlock bids his comrades – Tadashi, Kei, Mayu, Rebi, Masu, Dr. Ben, Dr Zero, Tetsuro and others to leave his ship and help set things right again after much war and destruction has damaged the word. Planet Earth has been saved, but not for the Captain. Deep down, Harlock knows that his way of life, his mode of existence is abnormal and that it cannot be shared by his other friends for too long. So he leaves them – for the Sea of Stars is his Sea, and somewhere out there he will find one day find his ‘final resting place.’

For it is Harlock’s own personality and way of life that sets him apart from the bulk of humanity, predestining him to a life of loneliness and isolation. Coming from a long and unbroken line of Germanic pirate-knights who have been forever yearning for the freedom of the skies and, later, for the oceans of space, it is not really surprising how the life(s) of Captain Harlock turned out. In Arcadia of My Youth, 1,000 years ago, Harlock’s ancient ancestor, Phantom F. Harlock II, after stowing the ancestor of his best friend, Tochiro Oyama on his Messerschmitt fighter plane during WWII and flying to the safety of neutral Switzerland, express this beautiful yearning for Arcadia, for his home [which then could still be found on Earth], all those ages ago with graceful and poetic words:

Phantom F. Harlock to Tochiro: ‘’Tochiro, do you want to go back to Japan?”

Tochiro: ‘’Naturally! What about you, Harlock?"

Harlock: ‘’Yes, the place I need to return to is Arcadia: Heiligenstadt, my home, whose forests and lakes are likened to that ancient Greek paradise – the place where my youth will forever run through the green fields. The homeland of the Germanic pirate-knight Harlock Clan. At the end of the journey, all my kinsmen think of their homeland. We hear the voice of Arcadia’s pirate-knight spirit calling.”

This is the curse and torment of Space Pirate Captain Harlock: what was true for his ancestors is just as true for him – he is still looking for Arcadia, desiring Arcadia, remembering Arcadia, dreaming of Arcadia. But the Arcadia of his youth no longer exists; Earth is not the same as it once was – so Harlock roams the Sea of Stars searching for it, and he has yet to find it. Instead, all he finds is evil, conflict, war, loss, tragedy and death. And what is worst of all, Harlock is surrounded, hated, feared and hunted by people who don’t give a damn about beauty, or peace, or valor, or sacrifice. Harlock’s presence is an agony to many because he is, in a manner of speaking, the last true man – an agonizing reminder of what mankind once was, and what it no longer is.

The way Harlock looks, dresses, acts, moves, thinks, feels and lives is entirely at odds with most the human race during his time. Apart from a few close friends, admirers and crew-mates, everyone else is either scared witless of him or wants to kill him. The rulers of Earth blame him for all their mistakes and problems. Huge bounties are placed on his head – as well as Tochiro’s, when he is alive –  and whole fleets of battleships are dispatched by his enemies to scour the galaxy for him, never giving him a chance to properly rest or find a new home. Trouble follows him almost wherever he goes, and many good friends wind up dying in his arms as a direct or side result of choosing to aid and/or associate with him. To be a comrade of Harlock’s and a member of his crew is a choice not to be taken lightly. Yet Harlock never forces anyone to join him or swear alliance to him. It is the Arcadia’s Jolly-Roger ‘flag of freedom’ and whatever is inside their hearts that they must fight for, and if they ever want to leave, Harlock will not stop them. Indeed, Harlock has given entire crews the boot after the main mission has been accomplished and the main baddie defeated; knowing that they are better off on Earth now that the planet is once more a liberated place they can thrive in and trusting them set to it in order.

But Harlock is never to join them. The doom of being an outcast hangs over him even after the struggles are over, and this time it is Harlock himself who is responsible for the isolation and exile that defines him as a person. He really has no home apart from the Arcadia. And while the battleship is his haven and place of refuge, it is also – in a way – his prison: the near-indestructible shell that barricades him off from the rest of humanity. Without the Arcadia he wouldn’t fully be Captain Harlock. And that is how Harlock ultimately desires it. He embraces the solitude, the ‘life wandering space, looking for a place to die.’ He is an eternal exile – stoically traversing the galaxy with the abiding spirit of Tochiro forever by his side, looking, forever looking, for the true Arcadia, the one and only place where he can finally be at peace.

To read my other Harlock articles please go HERE

Chile Oil Is So Hot Right Now added to Google Docs

Chile Oil Is So Hot Right Now

 Chile oil is very much on trend. | sasaken/Shutterstock

As chefs and restaurateurs create their own versions of the condiment, chile oil has reached cult status here in the States

Back in 2011, shortly after taking ownership of the 100-year-old Nom Wah Tea Parlor, Wilson Tang wanted to sell jars of branded chile oil. But his first batch did not meet the labeling requirements for bottled products according to the Department of Health, and he shelved the idea in order to focus on the restaurant’s bread and butter: in-house diners.

Nearly 10 years later, Tang came back around to the idea. “We had everything ready to launch right before we closed up operations for COVID-19,” says Tang. He released Nom Wah’s first batch of chile oil on the restaurant’s webstore, and it sold out within hours. Once operations are back up and running, Tang hopes to sell the product again, in Nom Wah restaurants and online.

Today, he finds himself in the company of other restaurants and small businesses selling a signature bright vermilion, sediment-thick chile oil. Tang says he was even inspired by fellow young, New York-based entrepreneurs, including Eric Sze of 886 and Lucas Sin of Junzi Kitchen, who each offer branded chile oil that was for sale in their restaurants’ physical locations before they closed to in-house diners due to the coronavirus. (Sze Daddy, the chile oil from 886, was available online but has sold out; Junzi’s chile oil can still be purchased online.) San Francisco’s acclaimed Chinese restaurant Mr. Jiu’s has its own Chile Crisp Sauce, part of a lineup of sauces in partnership with Williams-Sonoma. Jason Wang, owner of the New York City chain Xi’an Famous Foods, which specializes in the cuisine of the western Chinese province of Shaanxi, also recently began to sell signature chile oil packets, by popular demand.

“I saw someone drinking it once,” says Wang, of his chile oil, before he made the decision to sell the packets separately. “People were saying, ‘I’m going to send this to my friend across the country.’” All locations of Xi’an Famous Foods are currently closed due to the coronavirus, but the chile oil can still be purchased online.

None of these business owners could have predicted that their chile oils would become vestiges of an experience that’s no longer available — dining at their establishment — for the lucky customers who bought them. They were intended to leave visitors with a lingering aftertaste and remind them to come back soon. According to Sze, who estimates that 886 sold about 60 jars per week when it was open, “A lot of people finish their meal and are like, ‘I’ll take a jar.’”

Now, as the timeline for reopening remains blurry, retail items from restaurants have become a hot ticket, and shelf-stable chile oils have been anointed a pandemic pantry must-have for those longing to give their home-cooked creations a whiff of spicy-restaurant nostalgia. But what is chile oil? What does it have to do with “chile crisp”? And why is everyone seemingly crazy for spicy, chunky, oily hot sauce in the first place?

When it comes to chile oil — or “chile crisp” — the first thing that pops into many people’s minds nowadays is Lao Gan Ma, a mass-produced, Chinese brand of chile sauce that’s gained a cult following in the United States. Inexpensive and widely available, its Spicy Chili Crisp condiment in particular — which some fans simply call Lao Gan Ma — is so popular that it’s increasingly seen as a benchmark for oil-based chile condiments, and the prototype that some restaurants have looked to to set their versions against. “Lao Gan Ma has too much of a monopoly. We wanted to offer something a little different,” says Sze.

 Lao Gan Ma [official] The Chinese chile sauce brand Lao Gan Ma makes a spicy chili crisp.

However, there is some confusion over what exactly “chile crisp” means, and if it’s an entirely different type of product from chile oil, or a variation. “I’ve actually had Chinese friends who were like, ‘What’s chile crisp? Oh, it’s chile oil?’” says Lisa Cheng-Smith, founder of Yun Hai, an exporter of small-batch sauces from Taiwan. A condiment from a small Sichuan-Taiwanese maker called Su Spicy Chili Crisp was the first product available through her ecommerce business, and its best-seller. And while it’s been made for generations, Cheng-Smith gave it a new, English name for its U.S. debut. “I didn’t start calling it ‘chile crisp’ until I started selling it. I always just called it ‘chile oil,’” says Cheng-Smith.

“Lao Gan Ma has five different products, and only one is called Spicy Chili Crisp,” says Jenny Gao, founder of Fly By Jing, a brand of Sichuan ingredients with a signature product called Sichuan Chili Crisp. She says that she was taking cues from other references of the term “chili crisp” when she decided to name her product Sichuan Chili Crisp — in particular, a recipe for chile crisp in the Mission Chinese Food cookbook, published in 2015. That recipe, by Danny Bowien and Chris Ying, is inspired by Lao Gan Ma, “our favorite brand of the stuff,” the authors write. But it’s also a two-part recipe for “Chili Crisp and Chili Oil,” whereby the latter is produced simply by straining out the solids from the infused oil.

Products called “chile crisp” as opposed to chile oil typically have a higher ratio of particles in them than oil. Those particles are the chile flakes (and often garlic, shallots and any number of other ingredients and spices) that are sizzled in the oil to infuse it, becoming crispy in the process. This textural component is what many find irresistible about Sichuan Chili Crisp, Spicy Chili Crisp, and similar high-particle oils. They’re also typically seasoned with salt, soy sauce, MSG, and occasionally fish sauce or other savory agents like fermented black beans.

“I consider chile oil like soy sauce, in that it’s a cooking ingredient,” says Gao. “I view the chunky Spicy Chili Crisp from Lao Gan Ma and my Sichuan Chili Crisp as a condiment — I rarely cook with it; I use it as a topping.”

But in reality, these roles are not so strict, and one person’s idea of a cooking ingredient may be another’s condiment. “You can cook with dried chile pepper flakes and you can also just scatter it on pizza,” says Gao.

“Chile crisp”-labeled oils can still vary a lot in taste, too; Cheng-Smith thinks that Lao Gan Ma’s Spicy Chili Crisp is saltier and more laden with MSG than others — the product is “good in a junk food-y way.”

But whether it’s called a crisp or an oil, the idea of a spicy, chile-based topping that isn’t a vinegar-based sauce has little precedent in the U.S. For generations, when Americans wanted to kick up their entrees with a little extra heat, they dabbled thin, red droplets of a pepper sauce. There are thousands of sauces like this: cayenne- or habanero-based; red, green, or yellow; with the addition of fruit for balance or adorned with grim reapers on their labels. And while fierce proponents of Crystal and Frank’s Red Hot may argue about how much these sauces differ, when it comes to the general style, they don’t.

The taste for vinegar-based chile sauce is, of course, not just limited to Americans. The Southeast Asian chile sauce sambal olek is similarly bright and tangy, with a smack of fresh garlic, although it’s chunky in composition. Sriracha, a smoother, thicker, sweeter chile sauce created by a Vietnamese American in California, is also vinegar-based, with no oil to speak of.

A chile condiment that is not only oily but earthy, toasty, and cooked rather than highly acidic and fresh-tasting is still something of a novelty, found in Asian groceries or from the beloved restaurants that sell theirs. Walk down a typical American supermarket’s hot sauce aisle and you probably won’t find anything like it.

But as Tang saw it, with Chinese food more mainstream than ever, the time was right to sell Nom Wah chile oil. And, as he and other restaurateurs profess, a great deal of customers request a chile condiment with their food. Sriracha, Cholula, and other vinegary sauces are not the right complement for everything.

“You wouldn’t take out Tabasco and douse it on Chinese food because it doesn’t go together,” says Gao. “But with oil-based sauce, it’s just a better fit for Chinese cuisine.”

For more than a century, milder cuisines from China dominated the Chinese food enjoyed in the United States. That began to change after the U.S. lifted restrictions on immigration from China in 1965. Before then, the first waves of immigrants from China, who created the canon of Chinese-American staples like chop suey and egg foo young, were Toisanese, from Guangdong Province, whose traditional cuisine employs little to no spice. Much later on, Cecilia Chiang’s San Francisco restaurant the Mandarin introduced Americans to Northern Chinese cuisine, like Peking duck, which also happens to not be very spicy. After the floodgates were lifted, chile-laden cuisines from all around Asia brought new meaning to the word “hot.”

But before these cuisines reached the states, a taste for spice spread within China. “Chile peppers didn’t even arrive in China until 200 years ago,” says Gao, whose hometown is Chengdu, Sichuan province’s capital. “They arrived in the East... then slowly moved throughout China, and it took off in Sichuan because of the climate.” Many other parts of China, such as Hunan Province, also boldly employ chile peppers, but Gao says that Sichuan food is so well-known in China and throughout the world because its cuisine is all about complex flavor combinations, like ma la — the combination of chile heat and numbing spice from Sichuan peppercorns. “There’s dozens of flavor profiles in Sichuan cuisine; their chefs have really mastered what flavor can be.”

Diana Kuan, author of Red Hot Kitchen, a cookbook focused on the many varieties of Asian hot sauces, lived in China from 2007 to 2009 and witnessed the rising popularity of Sichuan cuisine in the country, especially in Beijing, where she was based. For the last few decades, as people — such as the laborers from the countryside who helped build China’s modern cities — migrated within the country, their cuisines mingled. “I think people are beginning to like spicy food more in southern China and Hong Kong, so there will be a little dish of chile sauce to go with dim sum,” she says. “In every city you can find some sort of spicy cuisine, so nowadays it’s pretty much ubiquitous.”

Hence, chile oil is not just enjoyed in Sichuan Province, where it would typically receive a touch of Sichuan peppercorn. Lao Gan Ma is, after all, a brand from Guizhou Province, whose signature flavor combo is a spicy and sour; Xi’an Famous Foods’ chile oil has distinct spices from China’s western provinces, including cumin; Su Spicy Chili Crisp has a scattering of sesame seeds; 886’s Sze Daddy sauce nods to the Taiwanese condiment sha-cha sauce, which has a touch of sweetness; and Nom Wah’s chile oil is a simple infusion of dried chiles and oil.

“Some regions might use fermented soybeans… in the Guangdong region they make theirs often with peanuts,” says Lucas Sin, chef-owner of Junzi Kitchen. The methodology differs, too. Sin, a 2019 Eater Young Gun, says that the different terminology throughout China used for these oils can offer clues into how they are made.

“Hong you,” which translates to “red oil,” is what many people in China, such as in Sichuan province, would typically call chile oil. Another generic term for chile oil used throughout China is “la jiao you” — which translates directly to “hot pepper oil.”

“We actually make you po la zi,” says Sin. He explains the character for “po” denotes the act of pouring the oil over something. (One might translate this term to “spicy pour-over oil.”)

Junzi’s signature chile oil employs this simple pour-over method: you take your spices and aromatics, place them in a heatproof vessel, and pour sizzling-hot oil over them at once. Other chile oils, such as Fly By Jing’s and 886’s, for instance, employ a longer cooking process where the chiles and aromatics are added in sequence, and cooked until the whole concoction is toasted and infused just so.

But, just like their English counterparts, these Chinese terms are often used interchangeably. And there are ever newer terms and variations being invented for a similar crispy, chunky, oil-y chile product. The grocer Trader Joe’s, for instance, makes a particle-rich chile condiment called Chili Onion Crunch.

Every cook, restaurant, and producer lends their own creative spin to this rudimentary vehicle for spice and flavor. Sin describes his dad’s famous homemade chile oil — something that he’s “kind of famous for” in his circle of friends and family. He dices the garlic by hand and simmers it slow and low for hours along with dried chiles and sesame seeds. There’s a lot of room for creativity, says Sin. “Most likely, we just make the chile oil that tastes the best to us.”

Cathy Erway is the author of The Food of Taiwan: Recipes From the Beautiful Island and The Art of Eating In: How I Learned to Stop Spending and Love the Stove.

via Eater - All https://www.eater.com/2020/5/4/21240144/chile-oil-chili-crisp-pantry-staple-trend-explained

Created May 4, 2020 at 08:37PM /huong sen View Google Doc Nhà hàng Hương Sen chuyên buffet hải sản cao cấp✅ Tổ chức tiệc cưới✅ Hội nghị, hội thảo✅ Tiệc lưu động✅ Sự kiện mang tầm cỡ quốc gia 52 Phố Miếu Đầm, Mễ Trì, Nam Từ Liêm, Hà Nội http://huongsen.vn/ 0904988999 http://huongsen.vn/to-chuc-tiec-hoi-nghi/ https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1xa6sRugRZk4MDSyctcqusGYBv1lXYkrF

Last week, I traveled to a border community in South Texas to witness firsthand the human impact of the crisis brought about by President Trump’s cruel immigration policies.

I’m emotionally raw from the trip. How our country treats immigrants coming to our nation — many fleeing violence and oppression in their home countries — will haunt me for a long time. Many of us have ancestors who came to the US fleeing famine or oppression. None of us would want one of our ancestors treated like we are currently treating people at the border.

The first thing I did after landing in McAllen, Texas, just after midnight on Sunday morning was drive to the border crossing nearby, the Hidalgo-Reynosa International Bridge. I wanted to see the process endured by asylum seekers — people seeking a legal path to becoming US citizens — and what their first encounter with America is like.

In the dark morning hours, I walked the length of the pedestrian bridge. As I crossed into Mexico, a Mexican official urged me to be extremely careful. “Cuidado” (“watch out”), he kept saying, driving home the point that crossing into that community in Mexico at that time of night was not safe.

I walked back into the US, along the very path so many others have walked to seek asylum at the port of entry on the far side of the bridge. But halfway across, stationed precisely on the line dividing the US from Mexico above the Rio Grande — some few hundred yards from the building where asylum seekers can legally present themselves to American immigration officials — were three Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents. Their job was to prevent people seeking asylum from setting foot on US soil.

The bridge was empty that night, but we learned later that many refugees are made to wait for days on bridges like this one or told to come back another time. They’re prevented from formally seeking asylum. Border Patrol officers readily admitted to me in the darkness that’s what they do, saying “no capacity.” It seemed like more of an excuse than a reality.

These same border officers also warned me, as the Mexican official did, that it wouldn’t be safe if I crossed into Mexico, adding that I “definitely had eyes on” me when I was over there. I wondered how could they tell these families, many with children, to go back into a situation they knew was dangerous. And I thought of the many vulnerable families trying to legally claim asylum at this crossing point who ended up deciding their only option was to try another, more dangerous way into the US — after being forced to wait for sometimes days in the middle of a bridge in the heat of Texas without readily available food or water.

Facing this painful decision, and denied the ability to legally present themselves for asylum, these desperate humans fall into a Trump trap: They became what he has termed “illegals” who are “infesting” our nation.

Later that morning, I sat in a federal court proceeding for another perspective on the Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” immigration policy. It’s led to a flood of immigrants being criminally charged with illegal entry misdemeanors.

The entire courtroom was full, every seat taken by immigrant defenders — some who I assumed were forced to enter the US illegally after being denied an opportunity to legally enter at a port of entry. Most of them looked young; I wondered if some of them were even 18. At least 70 were people shackled at the feet and packed sitting shoulder to shoulder. It seemed these immigrants hadn’t had a chance for a change of clothing or even a shower — the courtroom smelled strongly of stale sweat.

The magistrate judge was patient and kind and seemed to recognize the dignity of those before him as well as the impossibility of accepting so many pleas at once. But none of these people got a rigorous defense or a court hearing that properly reflects a country that purports to have the greatest system of justice in the world. The judge went down the row and repeated the same charges over and over and over again — and in the end, often weary voices mostly just uttered, “Culpable.” Guilty.

Individuality and an abundance of different circumstances were reduced to a huddled mass shackled at the ankles. I witnessed no questions about why specific people had come to the United States, no questions if any of them came with children or other family, whether they feared for their lives, or what drove them over the border. It was heartbreaking to watch these individuals be reduced to case numbers en masse.

I also visited Catholic Charities’ Humanitarian Respite Center — a temporary shelter in McAllen that provides a warm shower, water, food, and a place to sleep for those who are fortunate enough to be released from custody. It was here I found a wellspring of hope; Sister Norma and the many volunteers who help run this center are doing an astounding job, working around the clock to help people with nowhere else to turn. I met people from all over the country, from California to Iowa to my hometown of New Jersey. Their determination and unconditional kindness represents the best of who we are.

Unfortunately, volunteer nurses and other medical professionals told me that many of the children they treated who had come from detention centers were dehydrated; some had fleas or had come down with chicken pox and other illnesses.

Tears were shed as these volunteers and medical professionals called on me to help change policies, to help ensure that we took better care of the children in our nation. I was moved by their descriptions, their sense of hurt at what they were witnessing and their determination to keep helping. I was impressed by a group of New Jerseyans I met who had found out that a couple of medical student volunteers were running out of money and, knowing how invaluable people with medical training were to the shelter, offered to pay their hotel bills so they could stay longer. They didn’t just preach love for their neighbor — they were living it without exception or qualification.

After visiting the bridge and the courthouse, and hearing about the conditions endured by some of these children coming out of government custody, I headed to the Customs and Border Protection detention facility to see their process for detaining immigrants and how they treat people in custody.

In one section of the detention center, people were packed like sardines into cages from front to back, shoulder to shoulder, with barely any room to move. All you could see were horizontal, exhausted bodies lying on the ground — you could barely see the floor; the rustling of the foil blankets detainees were issued was a constant sound.

Call it what you want — a prison, a detention center, a camp — it was some of the more difficult conditions I have seen in a US facility of any kind.

In the section for children, families were sitting behind fencing that resembled cages, several of them scattered through a big room. Doors were open that allowed more circulation and less crowding than in the other areas, but it still felt like a large cage.

I saw children of all ages. A couple of very young children did not have a parent or guardian with them. It was good to see that many of the border agents held the children and clearly tried to comfort and nurture them (though agents were told that they are not allowed to touch children, even to comfort them). I honor these CBP officers for their compassion amid so much distress.

It was good to see facilities for showers and where dirty, dusty clothing from long, difficult travel could be washed and eventually returned to the immigrants.

Yet I left there with a strong conviction that we could and must do much better by the children. From the facilities to the processing to even the extent of the medical evaluations, our nation could and must do a lot better to reflect our values in the way we treat immigrants to our soil.

From my trip to the border, one thing is abundantly clear: We are at a moment of moral crisis in America.

We have a president who tweets:

“We cannot allow all of these people to invade our Country. When somebody comes in, we must immediately, with no Judges or Court Cases, bring them back from where they came. Our system is a mockery to good immigration policy and Law and Order. Most children come without parents …”

Donald Trump wants to heighten fear, stir stereotypes, and exaggerate our nation’s vulnerabilities while denying our country’s unparalleled strength and unmatched power to help others — denying our ability to effectuate pragmatic policies that improve our safety and affirm our values.

The people I talked to in McAllen, including Republican-appointed court officials, love their nation and their border community deeply. They want a fair system for all, a system that recognizes the humanity of our neighbors. There were so many pragmatic people in this border community who know we could do so much better — that our current behavior makes America less safe and less strong in the long run. They believe that when America stands up and does the right thing, even if it’s more difficult in the short term, we grow stronger, safer, and more noble.

People in border communities know that none of our families made it to where we are on our own — not mine, not yours, and not President Trump’s. We all had a helping hand, support from strangers and friends. All of our ancestors experienced acts of grace, mercy, and forgiveness and countless small acts of kindness.

Right now in the border crisis, there are agents of love and agents of fear. My hope is that we don’t let fear and the hate it yields divide us beyond repair. Despite the heartbreak I saw at the border, I will always have faith that in America, ultimately, love prevails.

But nothing is automatic. The arc of the moral universe does bend toward justice, but like our ancestors before us, we must be the arc benders.

Cory Booker is a US senator representing the state of New Jersey and a member of the Senate’s Judiciary Committee, which has jurisdiction over immigration and naturalization policies in the United States. Before being elected to the Senate in 2013, Booker was the mayor of Newark.

First Person is Vox’s home for compelling, provocative narrative essays. Do you have a story to share? Read our submission guidelines, and pitch us at [email protected].

Original Source -> Cory Booker: I went to the US-Mexico border. What I saw there horrified me.

via The Conservative Brief

Chile oil is very much on trend. | sasaken/Shutterstock As chefs and restaurateurs create their own versions of the condiment, chile oil has reached cult status here in the States Back in 2011, shortly after taking ownership of the 100-year-old Nom Wah Tea Parlor, Wilson Tang wanted to sell jars of branded chile oil. But his first batch did not meet the labeling requirements for bottled products according to the Department of Health, and he shelved the idea in order to focus on the restaurant’s bread and butter: in-house diners. Nearly 10 years later, Tang came back around to the idea. “We had everything ready to launch right before we closed up operations for COVID-19,” says Tang. He released Nom Wah’s first batch of chile oil on the restaurant’s webstore, and it sold out within hours. Once operations are back up and running, Tang hopes to sell the product again, in Nom Wah restaurants and online. Today, he finds himself in the company of other restaurants and small businesses selling a signature bright vermilion, sediment-thick chile oil. Tang says he was even inspired by fellow young, New York-based entrepreneurs, including Eric Sze of 886 and Lucas Sin of Junzi Kitchen, who each offer branded chile oil that was for sale in their restaurants’ physical locations before they closed to in-house diners due to the coronavirus. (Sze Daddy, the chile oil from 886, was available online but has sold out; Junzi’s chile oil can still be purchased online.) San Francisco’s acclaimed Chinese restaurant Mr. Jiu’s has its own Chile Crisp Sauce, part of a lineup of sauces in partnership with Williams-Sonoma. Jason Wang, owner of the New York City chain Xi’an Famous Foods, which specializes in the cuisine of the western Chinese province of Shaanxi, also recently began to sell signature chile oil packets, by popular demand. “I saw someone drinking it once,” says Wang, of his chile oil, before he made the decision to sell the packets separately. “People were saying, ‘I’m going to send this to my friend across the country.’” All locations of Xi’an Famous Foods are currently closed due to the coronavirus, but the chile oil can still be purchased online. None of these business owners could have predicted that their chile oils would become vestiges of an experience that’s no longer available — dining at their establishment — for the lucky customers who bought them. They were intended to leave visitors with a lingering aftertaste and remind them to come back soon. According to Sze, who estimates that 886 sold about 60 jars per week when it was open, “A lot of people finish their meal and are like, ‘I’ll take a jar.’” Now, as the timeline for reopening remains blurry, retail items from restaurants have become a hot ticket, and shelf-stable chile oils have been anointed a pandemic pantry must-have for those longing to give their home-cooked creations a whiff of spicy-restaurant nostalgia. But what is chile oil? What does it have to do with “chile crisp”? And why is everyone seemingly crazy for spicy, chunky, oily hot sauce in the first place? When it comes to chile oil — or “chile crisp” — the first thing that pops into many people’s minds nowadays is Lao Gan Ma, a mass-produced, Chinese brand of chile sauce that’s gained a cult following in the United States. Inexpensive and widely available, its Spicy Chili Crisp condiment in particular — which some fans simply call Lao Gan Ma — is so popular that it’s increasingly seen as a benchmark for oil-based chile condiments, and the prototype that some restaurants have looked to to set their versions against. “Lao Gan Ma has too much of a monopoly. We wanted to offer something a little different,” says Sze. Lao Gan Ma [official] The Chinese chile sauce brand Lao Gan Ma makes a spicy chili crisp. However, there is some confusion over what exactly “chile crisp” means, and if it’s an entirely different type of product from chile oil, or a variation. “I’ve actually had Chinese friends who were like, ‘What’s chile crisp? Oh, it’s chile oil?’” says Lisa Cheng-Smith, founder of Yun Hai, an exporter of small-batch sauces from Taiwan. A condiment from a small Sichuan-Taiwanese maker called Su Spicy Chili Crisp was the first product available through her ecommerce business, and its best-seller. And while it’s been made for generations, Cheng-Smith gave it a new, English name for its U.S. debut. “I didn’t start calling it ‘chile crisp’ until I started selling it. I always just called it ‘chile oil,’” says Cheng-Smith. “Lao Gan Ma has five different products, and only one is called Spicy Chili Crisp,” says Jenny Gao, founder of Fly By Jing, a brand of Sichuan ingredients with a signature product called Sichuan Chili Crisp. She says that she was taking cues from other references of the term “chili crisp” when she decided to name her product Sichuan Chili Crisp — in particular, a recipe for chile crisp in the Mission Chinese Food cookbook, published in 2015. That recipe, by Danny Bowien and Chris Ying, is inspired by Lao Gan Ma, “our favorite brand of the stuff,” the authors write. But it’s also a two-part recipe for “Chili Crisp and Chili Oil,” whereby the latter is produced simply by straining out the solids from the infused oil. Products called “chile crisp” as opposed to chile oil typically have a higher ratio of particles in them than oil. Those particles are the chile flakes (and often garlic, shallots and any number of other ingredients and spices) that are sizzled in the oil to infuse it, becoming crispy in the process. This textural component is what many find irresistible about Sichuan Chili Crisp, Spicy Chili Crisp, and similar high-particle oils. They’re also typically seasoned with salt, soy sauce, MSG, and occasionally fish sauce or other savory agents like fermented black beans. “I consider chile oil like soy sauce, in that it’s a cooking ingredient,” says Gao. “I view the chunky Spicy Chili Crisp from Lao Gan Ma and my Sichuan Chili Crisp as a condiment — I rarely cook with it; I use it as a topping.” But in reality, these roles are not so strict, and one person’s idea of a cooking ingredient may be another’s condiment. “You can cook with dried chile pepper flakes and you can also just scatter it on pizza,” says Gao. “Chile crisp”-labeled oils can still vary a lot in taste, too; Cheng-Smith thinks that Lao Gan Ma’s Spicy Chili Crisp is saltier and more laden with MSG than others — the product is “good in a junk food-y way.” But whether it’s called a crisp or an oil, the idea of a spicy, chile-based topping that isn’t a vinegar-based sauce has little precedent in the U.S. For generations, when Americans wanted to kick up their entrees with a little extra heat, they dabbled thin, red droplets of a pepper sauce. There are thousands of sauces like this: cayenne- or habanero-based; red, green, or yellow; with the addition of fruit for balance or adorned with grim reapers on their labels. And while fierce proponents of Crystal and Frank’s Red Hot may argue about how much these sauces differ, when it comes to the general style, they don’t. The taste for vinegar-based chile sauce is, of course, not just limited to Americans. The Southeast Asian chile sauce sambal olek is similarly bright and tangy, with a smack of fresh garlic, although it’s chunky in composition. Sriracha, a smoother, thicker, sweeter chile sauce created by a Vietnamese American in California, is also vinegar-based, with no oil to speak of. A chile condiment that is not only oily but earthy, toasty, and cooked rather than highly acidic and fresh-tasting is still something of a novelty, found in Asian groceries or from the beloved restaurants that sell theirs. Walk down a typical American supermarket’s hot sauce aisle and you probably won’t find anything like it. But as Tang saw it, with Chinese food more mainstream than ever, the time was right to sell Nom Wah chile oil. And, as he and other restaurateurs profess, a great deal of customers request a chile condiment with their food. Sriracha, Cholula, and other vinegary sauces are not the right complement for everything. “You wouldn’t take out Tabasco and douse it on Chinese food because it doesn’t go together,” says Gao. “But with oil-based sauce, it’s just a better fit for Chinese cuisine.” For more than a century, milder cuisines from China dominated the Chinese food enjoyed in the United States. That began to change after the U.S. lifted restrictions on immigration from China in 1965. Before then, the first waves of immigrants from China, who created the canon of Chinese-American staples like chop suey and egg foo young, were Toisanese, from Guangdong Province, whose traditional cuisine employs little to no spice. Much later on, Cecilia Chiang’s San Francisco restaurant the Mandarin introduced Americans to Northern Chinese cuisine, like Peking duck, which also happens to not be very spicy. After the floodgates were lifted, chile-laden cuisines from all around Asia brought new meaning to the word “hot.” But before these cuisines reached the states, a taste for spice spread within China. “Chile peppers didn’t even arrive in China until 200 years ago,” says Gao, whose hometown is Chengdu, Sichuan province’s capital. “They arrived in the East... then slowly moved throughout China, and it took off in Sichuan because of the climate.” Many other parts of China, such as Hunan Province, also boldly employ chile peppers, but Gao says that Sichuan food is so well-known in China and throughout the world because its cuisine is all about complex flavor combinations, like ma la — the combination of chile heat and numbing spice from Sichuan peppercorns. “There’s dozens of flavor profiles in Sichuan cuisine; their chefs have really mastered what flavor can be.” Diana Kuan, author of Red Hot Kitchen, a cookbook focused on the many varieties of Asian hot sauces, lived in China from 2007 to 2009 and witnessed the rising popularity of Sichuan cuisine in the country, especially in Beijing, where she was based. For the last few decades, as people — such as the laborers from the countryside who helped build China’s modern cities — migrated within the country, their cuisines mingled. “I think people are beginning to like spicy food more in southern China and Hong Kong, so there will be a little dish of chile sauce to go with dim sum,” she says. “In every city you can find some sort of spicy cuisine, so nowadays it’s pretty much ubiquitous.” Hence, chile oil is not just enjoyed in Sichuan Province, where it would typically receive a touch of Sichuan peppercorn. Lao Gan Ma is, after all, a brand from Guizhou Province, whose signature flavor combo is a spicy and sour; Xi’an Famous Foods’ chile oil has distinct spices from China’s western provinces, including cumin; Su Spicy Chili Crisp has a scattering of sesame seeds; 886’s Sze Daddy sauce nods to the Taiwanese condiment sha-cha sauce, which has a touch of sweetness; and Nom Wah’s chile oil is a simple infusion of dried chiles and oil. “Some regions might use fermented soybeans… in the Guangdong region they make theirs often with peanuts,” says Lucas Sin, chef-owner of Junzi Kitchen. The methodology differs, too. Sin, a 2019 Eater Young Gun, says that the different terminology throughout China used for these oils can offer clues into how they are made. “Hong you,” which translates to “red oil,” is what many people in China, such as in Sichuan province, would typically call chile oil. Another generic term for chile oil used throughout China is “la jiao you” — which translates directly to “hot pepper oil.” “We actually make you po la zi,” says Sin. He explains the character for “po” denotes the act of pouring the oil over something. (One might translate this term to “spicy pour-over oil.”) Junzi’s signature chile oil employs this simple pour-over method: you take your spices and aromatics, place them in a heatproof vessel, and pour sizzling-hot oil over them at once. Other chile oils, such as Fly By Jing’s and 886’s, for instance, employ a longer cooking process where the chiles and aromatics are added in sequence, and cooked until the whole concoction is toasted and infused just so. But, just like their English counterparts, these Chinese terms are often used interchangeably. And there are ever newer terms and variations being invented for a similar crispy, chunky, oil-y chile product. The grocer Trader Joe’s, for instance, makes a particle-rich chile condiment called Chili Onion Crunch. Every cook, restaurant, and producer lends their own creative spin to this rudimentary vehicle for spice and flavor. Sin describes his dad’s famous homemade chile oil — something that he’s “kind of famous for” in his circle of friends and family. He dices the garlic by hand and simmers it slow and low for hours along with dried chiles and sesame seeds. There’s a lot of room for creativity, says Sin. “Most likely, we just make the chile oil that tastes the best to us.” Cathy Erway is the author of The Food of Taiwan: Recipes From the Beautiful Island and The Art of Eating In: How I Learned to Stop Spending and Love the Stove. from Eater - All https://ift.tt/2VZlvFt

http://easyfoodnetwork.blogspot.com/2020/05/chile-oil-is-so-hot-right-now.html