wall street refugee

I a little past 8pm last night, kevin came out of the apartment office and started messaging furiously over his macbook pro, simultaneously reading a lengthy article on bloomberg. alerted by this somewhat abnormal behavior, i asked him what was going on?

apparently a writer at bloomberg, who had been hounding kevin, his current, and former colleagues, finally published the article he had been working on for months that evening. the title was "meet wall street refugees running bonds at freddie mac".

the article was filled with suggestive, yet unfounded innuendos, inaccuracies, and some outright errors. it is unclear why an editor would approve an article like this, which skirts around any real substance or an interesting angle, but it definitely cast a shadow over their team and processes.

it has now been nearly one year since kevin made the difficult decision to leave his career of 12 years at citigroup as a sell-side mbs trader to join freddie mac as part of a team which manages its $400 Bn mortgage portfolio. the transition required a bit of faith, patience, and flexibility, but my wall street refugee has far less political office nonsense, overnight stress, and work-related travel these days, and is happier as a result.

there is light at the end of the tunnel.

fried rice(s)

each night that we cook, we are inevitably left with rice that we cannot finish. instead of eating leftover rice the next day (shudder :p), we wrap the leftover rice into riceballs with saran wrap and pop them in the freezer. then over the course of a week or two, after the freezer has extracted the excess moisture from the riceballs, we defrost and use the rice to make a big batch of fried rice!

today, we made our fried rice the "traditional", aka my favorite, way: with simbala taiwanese-style sausage, egg, yellow corn, and green peas. we had some extra chicken breast meat leftover so we diced that up and threw it in as well. that is the dish on the left.

on the right hand side, we made a similar fried rice with the same ingredients as mentioned before, and added a few helpful servings of diced sichuan spicy turnips! it made for a spicy fried rice with smokey sichuan aromatic flavors!

in the evening, i whipped out my new cherry apple kitchenaid for an inaugural spin and followed this copycat levain chocolate chip cookie recipe to make a dozen of these monsters! i forgot to include a reference object to give you an idea of their size, but they are about the size of my fist :) i was pleasantly surprised by how easy it is to make cookies - i guess the intended sloppiness and size of the cookie make it a little easier too. and and oh so delicious right out of the oven!