Houston: Mostly Asian Inspired Road Trip Food

I apologize for how long it took to get this out. There are lots of pics that I had trouble getting moved over, along with starting a new job and the things that go along with working in education. But here's the Houston post I promised so long ago.

Recently (like 2 months ago) John and I took a trip....down to Houston...in July. It was a very quick trip to go watch some people I like on YouTube who were doing a US/Canada tour, and it was my birthday present.
Obviously the 15 hours we were going to be in the car required snacks, as we don't often like big meals when we are traveling. I didn't think to do some of this until the way back, so there are not so many pics of the snacks.

Mexican Vanilla is essential in my family.

Homemade teriyaki beef jerky (that I made with my mom)

This was not at all as I expected.

Since the people we were watching live in South Korea (even though they are Canadian) and we were staying in the middle of Chinatown in Houston, I decided we'd get many of our snacks from the Cao Nguyen Asian Supermarket. It's the biggest Asian supermarket in OKC and it has a decent selection of Asian snacks.

One of our many many matcha snacks

For Asian snacks, we started with:
- Sweet: Matcha Pocky and Matcha Pocky Midi, Matcha Pejoy, Matcha Collon, Matcha Pioruettes, and Matcha Aero
-Savory: Cuttlefish jerky, seasoned dried seaweed

For non-Asian snacks, we started with:
Homemade teriyaki beef jerky, a dozen Eileen's frosted sugar cookies, all the new flavors of Lay's chips from their annual contest, La Croix Lime Sparkling Water, and Hi Brew Coffee - Mexican Vanilla flavor.


We also stopped by Panera on the way out for black hazelnut coffee and sandwiches.

We didn't really get any other food on the way down and got to the venue, and waited. After the awesome show, we went to our AirB&B place in Chinatown and crashed. We were super grateful for the water our host provided and really did crash without going to any of the cool late night places around us.

Me with Simon and Martina of Eat Your Kimchi

Our couples toothbrushes and Korean toothpaste.  

The morning, however, was a different story. We decided to try out a little Vietnamese-French bakery for breakfast, but they were closed for an emergency. Rather than try out their other locations, we went to one of the many gigantic supermarkets. The one we went to was a Korean supermarket called H-Mart. It was one of three or four within a half-mile from the apartment we stayed in. The store was easily the size of Cao Nguyen and I don't think it was the biggest one around. Each store was surrounded by a strip mall. Inside the strip mall was several restaurants, some medical offices, at least one bakery and one tea shop, as well as some massage places. Every block pretty much had a strip mall, some were a couple of stories tall with parking garages. If they didn't have a grocery store, they had a lot more bakeries, restaurants, dojos, tea shops, and massage places.

At the grocery store we got a few Asian sundries (chopsticks, a light-up ear cleaner) and some food. Canned coffee and tea are really big from what I've seen online and we got cold matcha lattes, matcha ice cream sandwiches (bad breakfast but I really wanted to try it), and smoked squid jerky.

Such cute lattes and yummy ice cream

Next we decided to go to a hole-in-the-wall Taiwanese bakery. It was a very interesting place. The guy pretty obviously makes some of the items out on a table in the middle. John got a taro paste filled bread and a onion bread. I got a "purple rice ball." It was an experience. We ate our bakery items and drank our lattes in the parking lot and headed out to our next adventure.

Rice, meat, fruit, nut ball

Green onion bread

Taro bread

Across the street was one of those two story strip malls with the parking garage. It had a Japanese "dollar store" type place that I wanted to look at, but the hours didn't match up between the internet and their store front. So we had 45 minutes to kill at the other stores. We elected to go into another bakery and a tea shop. John was sad that he hadn't got something with protein in his bakery item like I did before, so he got a "ham and cheese" bread, while I got vanilla cake with Hokkaido Japanese Milky Filling and we got a taro and green tea bread. We still had a few minutes left and went to one of the tea shops that had bubble/boba tea. They had house-made honey teas. John got a coffee milk tea with boba and I got a honey green tea with boba. I love tea like this and it was delicious.

Angelfood cake-like with white fluff

Boba tea is probably my favorite drink

It's a ham and cheese roll

Finally we got to the Japanese "dollar store." It was pretty cool. I got some sun sleeves and they had some really cool Bento making items. I wish I had the time and money to do that.

We took off and headed out to Dallas in time for IKEA and dinner at a Japanese restaurant. We just needed a couple things at IKEA for house project and picked up some kid-related stuff as well. Then we went to the Japanese robata restaurant. The food was incredible. I got a eel bowl, miso soup, seaweed salad, and green tea ice cream but I didn't feel comfortable taking pictures there.

All-in-all, it was a grand experience and we were able to enjoy so much good and new Asian food. Next time we go to Houston, we definitely plan to stay in Chinatown.