How to Burn Down the Kitchen Without Really Trying

Dark Chocolate Spaghetti 7/18/11

2011-08-01T23:00:00.000-07:00

When Julie and I went to Maker Faire a few months ago, we were drawn to 2 demonstrations of molecular gastronomy, a new technique for cooking and looking at food that explores the science behind it. For example, one demonstration was of carrot juice caviar, made by mixing the carrot juice with calcium lactate and using a eyedropper to drip it into a bath of sodium alginate, where it solidifies. Neat stuff.

For graduation, Julie and her family got me a nice molecular gastronomy kit to try some of these things on our own. It came along with a DVD with demonstrations of various ways to use the tools and substances, which mostly involve changing the form of foods: turn ketchup and mustard into little balls, make foam out of garlic, etc. The footage is very chic as well, with no voiceover, an upbeat, jazzy soundtrack, and perfectly clean and careful execution.

Since I happen to have a large slab of dark chocolate lying around, we decided to try one recipe to make dark chocolate spaghetti. It's exactly what it sounds like: dark chocolate in the shape of spaghetti.

The first step in making it is to melt the dark chocolate and combine it with agar, a substance similar to gelatin (or jello). Once it's boiling and mixed, it gets poured out into another container where it begins to take shape.

Using a syringe, we forced the dark chocolate mixture into tubing, which was then suspended in an ice bath to cool it down. This step ended up being particularly fun and not too difficult.

The real trick came with getting it out. After it cools for a bit, you use the syringe again to force air through the tubing, which pushes the dark chocolate out the other end. Or so the video led us to believe.

There were some issues. First, the dark chocolate didn't form a perfect vacuum or wasn't completely solid, so when the air was forced in (with great effort), it would create a bubble alongside the chocolate instead. When it did come out, it did so very suddenly in one big push, though that would often cause the dark chocolate to fracture as well.

And it was accompanied by the squeezing sound as all the air got through, so I understand why the video had music playing over instead. To summarize, brown semi-solid coming out, accompanied with sound. It was very appetizing.

Even so, we managed to get a couple good, long strands out before the bulk of the chocolate in our container began to solidify. We tried to microwave it and give it a second chance, but there was no luck there, either. In the end, there was much wreckage.

But enough successes. We took the best strands, draped them over some strawberries and graham crackers, then put some whipped cream on top. It was yummy.

Julie the Pie Maker 7/10/11

2011-07-16T12:30:00.000-07:00

As Holly mentioned, 7 of us went berry picking last weekend and each ended up with somewhere between 3 and 4 pounds of olallieberries. Similar to blackberries, olallieberries are a cross between two other types of berries that I also had never heard of before but are also in the same blackberry-type family. They're longer than blackberries and a little less sweet and more tart. With so many berries ripening at the same time, however, Julie and I decided to put it all into a pie.

Before this summer, I hadn't made a pie on my own ever before. I had certainly helped and watched my mom make a few apple pies when I was growing up, but since I had never had a pie pan over the past 4 years, I never had a chance to figure it out. Given how infrequently my family made pies, I didn't think I was missing much. I was better-educated in making cookies and stir-frys instead.

Julie, however, apparently participated in much more pie making when she was growing up. When we made a blueberry cream pie a few weeks ago, she expertly rolled out the crust to the right size without any tearing, a feat that she replicated again for this pie. And since her parents had grown blackberries in their garden, this pie was right up her alley. She asked her mom for the recipe for both the crust and filling, neither of which we had any difficulty with. Then came assembling.

One nifty trick I had learned from my mom was to roll out the pastry on a piece of wax paper (and in my family, wax paper doesn't come from a roll; it comes from an opened breakfast cereal bag), place the pan over the dough, then just flip it over. With that, the bottom crust is done, along with all of my ability in pie assembling. An unfortunate truth about pies in my family is the top crust. It often turns out fine, but it does end up puffed up far higher than filling, which settles. Julie the pie maker, however, had just the solution: the lattice.

I'm sure you've seen it, and if you haven't, there's a picture below. Instead of the solid crust, there are strips of pastry woven together, forming a loose mat, and frankly, it looks hard. Julie had mentioned before we started that we were planning on doing this, and to me, that sounded like a mess waiting to happen. She seemed confident, though, and I was more than happy to let her lead.

First, she rolled out the top crust into a circle, like the bottom crust. Then, using a sharp knife, she cut strips of the dough all the way across. Starting from the middle, we took the longest strip, laid it across the middle of the pie, then did it again in the other direction. Whenever 2 strips crossed, we just lifted the strips as needed to weave them together. With the leftover strips, we reinforced the outside crust, which was then protected with a tin foil shield to avoid burning it. After a little milk brushed for browning and sugar sprinkled on top, into the oven it went. About 40 minutes later, we had this:

Just about every step of assembly went exactly as planned, and the pie came out baked pretty much perfectly. The lattice held together, and the shield kept away all of the burnt spots.

After we let it cool a bit, we each cut ourselves a slice, pairing it with some vanilla ice cream. Were we more patient, you might not see the liquid run into the gap in the picture in the upper left, but it was worth it. The ice cream and olallieberry pie blended together very nicely: tart olallieberries against sweet vanilla, warm filling against the frozen treat, and flaky crust against the smooth cream.

Using olallieberries worked quite well, I think, as the sugar added to pies means that the berries themselves don't need to be that sweet. At the risk of lowering the pies of my past, this was probably the best pie I had ever had homemade. Years of practice and experience really pay off, especially when it was someone else's.

Living up to this blog's name (7/4/11)

2011-07-06T20:49:00.000-07:00

With 4 years of experience, I think we've mostly gotten past the humbler beginnings. Mostly. Except for this 4th.

On the weekends, Julie and I swing back and forth a lot on our choices for meals. On the one hand, weekends are lazy, and there tend to be a lot of leftovers from potlucks. On the other, weekends are a full day to do longer cooking projects. On the 4th of July (an honorary weekend day), we decided to go for it and do some baking. I found what seemed like a nice recipe for rosemary and olive oil rolls and began to put it together.

A single summer of maybe 5ish efforts at bread baking isn't a tremendous amount of experience, but seeing the recipes gave me the first red flag when it had only 3 cups of flour in it. Having packed twice that much bread flour into a loaf before, I was a little skeptical, and when the dough got to 3 cups, it wasn't even close to being ready. Not wanting to deviate from the recipe too much, I added in 3 tbsp more of flour, at which point it looked more lifelike. Still trusting the recipe, I turned it out onto a floured surface, floured my hands, put my hands in the dough and got this

I have worked with brownie and cookie dough that held together better than this! Julie furiously fed me more and more flour, and every time I worried that we would put in too much and throw off the ratio, the dough would stick more. We ended up adding at least another cup of flour, and probably a lot more than that.

Eventually, I got past my dough-webbed fingers and managed to get it into a ball and be done with kneading. The next few steps went smoothly, and we popped them in the oven for their 20-25 minutes while we prepared our red, white, and blue salad.

About 10 minutes later, we saw something steamy or smoky coming from one of the burners. At first, I was worried that I had turned one of the surface units on, and various containers were sitting there. Seeing as that didn't appear to be the case, I just assumed that it was steam from the oven. When it didn't stop, I took Julie's advice and peeked inside the oven.

I have never smoked any meats before, but I have been at barbecues and camp fires. I didn't realize it from the surface units, but smoke is smoke, and when there isn't supposed to be smoke, dinner probably isn't going to turn out well. I quickly took them out, and after Julie and I managed to start airing out the kitchen with a fan and open windows, we saw the perfectly blackened bottoms of the rolls.

In retrospect, if we were going to screw up the baking process, this was a pretty good way to do it. Since the bottom was completely blackened and crispy, the tops pulled right off, and we got warm roll tops out of it.

Recipe makers are just as fallible as anyone else, but I think this truly the first big disaster that I have had. The pumpkin pancake recipe didn't quite get the consistency correct, but this recipe was just wrong. I realize the recipe says to bake "... or until golden brown," and maybe the oven here isn't perfect, but there's a big difference between 10 and 20 minutes.

Had the recipe worked, they would have been nice dinner rolls, but nothing special. The rosemary and olive oil ended up being mostly lost and far too subtle to make it work. Rejected.

Still, Julie had the idea for and put together a nice red, white, and blue salad composed of spinach, strawberries (red), blueberries (blue), feta cheese (white), onions (more white), and some leftover balsamic vinaigrette. In retrospect, the green from the spinach gives us red, white, blue, and green, which could basically be any flag in the world. Consider us open-minded in celebrating the 4th of July.

California Melts

2011-07-06T20:38:00.000-07:00

As an avocado aficionado, I couldn't wait to have a meal with avocados in the spotlight. Kevin suggested California melts as a good way to use up some extra bread and cheese we had, as well as something that wouldn't overpower the avocados. In addition to the avocado, we used whole wheat bread and Muenster cheese from Trader Joe's, and a delicious heirloom tomato from the farmer's market.

I thought the heirloom tomato was far better than anything we had gotten from the grocery store, but Kevin didn't seem to notice a difference in the taste test we did. I'd like to say that it's my refined palate, but I'm probably just more used to tasting heirloom tomatoes, since my parents grow them in our garden.

We used a cute little pan left for us to use by Kevin's subletters. I was pretty worried about flipping the sandwich, but the tiny pan had little room around the edges for stuff to slide around. The cheese melted nicely, as well, which also helped to cement things together. Yum.

1 Fish, 2 Fish, Steamed Fish, Fried Fish (6/29/11 - 6/30/11)

2011-07-01T00:35:00.000-07:00

For almost a year now, Julie has been raving about her dad's maple plank salmon, sometimes done with fish fresh from Pike's Place market in Seattle and hand-carried on a plane to be eaten at home. For just as long, I have been raving about the steamed fish my mom prepares. In its best form, she steams a white fish, then pours oil, garlic, ginger, and soy sauce over the top for a very traditional Chinese steamed fish. So fish was bound to happen.

It was bound to happen in spite of my current diet (note that I said it was "loose" before) and that I can't remember having ever prepared fish before. Since Julie was equally untrained, we decided that we might develop our fish cooking skills on cheaper fish before really being able to enjoy good cuts. At the beginning of the week, we picked up frozen sockeye fillets at Trader Joe's with plans to use them later on.

I forgot to take pictures of the first effort, but since we had nothing in mind for the salmon, I asked my mom for her recipe for preparing salmon in my favorite style. I can remember as far back as 3rd grade, one of my mom's standard dinner recipes was tin-foil Chinese salmon. In retrospect, it makes a lot of sense since it's pretty easy to prepare, and there's no reason to get fancy when you have a kid like me who loves it.

Tin-Foil Chinese salmon
~8oz salmon fillet (the weight isn't too important; just cook more or less)
1 or 2 cloves of garlic, crushed
1 small hunk of ginger, minced
2 tbsp soy sauce
1 tbsp oil (veggie works fine)

1. Preheat oven to 400F. (my mom always used the toaster oven)
2. Wash the salmon fillet and pat dry so that it isn't so fishy. Place in a piece of tin foil large enough to wrap it.
3. Spread the garlic and ginger over the top of the salmon. Pour the soy sauce and oil over that.
4. Take the long ends of the tin foil, pull them together ("hot-dog style"), then roll together the ends to seal. Roll up both of the far ends so that it's a complete seal. Place into another pan or sheet.
5. Stick it in the oven for 10-14 minutes, or until you can "smell the garlic".
6. Pull it out, let it sit, then transfer the tin foil over to another plate, and unwrap. Serve with steamed (white) rice and steamed veggies.

Thinking over the recipe now, it really is exactly the same recipe as for a legit Chinese steamed fish, except with the tin foil as an easier method of preparation. Unfortunately, I was unaware of how dark sockeye is, and without much experience cooking salmon, I stuck it back into the oven twice, thinking it was still too pink. The result was a little chewy, but otherwise the exact deliciousness that reminds me of possibly the second most regular dinner I ate growing up, next to Chinese stir-fry. And given how much I like it, I think it's probably the meal from which I have derived the most total enjoyment in my life. Paired with some cooked spinach and carrots and white rice, the meal came together quite nicely.

So Wednesday, scheduled as "salmon" on the whiteboard on my fridge, went well enough, and since Thursday had no label and the package came with 2 fillets, our destiny was pretty set. Having already done a steamed fish, we wanted to do something very different. While watching a New York Times video about baking pizza from one of my new favorite internet video stars, Melissa Clark, I saw a link for salmon from Mark Bittman, the Minimalist, on a simple pan-fry method. We mimicked his method as best we could from my pantry and got a simple dry rub put together from cumin, paprika, and fresh cilantro.

Fried as directed, it went pretty quickly, with the major snafu being that when I flipped, the rub had already burned a bit. The final result was good: the salmon was cooked pretty much perfectly, and the flavor of the dry rub came together pretty well from our haphazard substitutes.

There were a few lessons, though. First, paprika burns fast: this site seems to confirm my suspicion about what happened. I'm not quite sure how I would've gotten around that, other than perhaps to flip sooner. Even so, I could still taste the paprika lightly, and the aroma was great. Second, the fresh cilantro didn't do much. In its fresh form, it probably would've worked better as a garnish.

I'm super-psyched about this particular recipe, however, as I think it'll be a great learning tool. The cooking method is reliable and a good skill to have. The real magic, however, comes in the customizability of the rub, and trying different things will help us figure out what spices matter. A tip Julie got about learning to cook was to try food before and after adding ingredients to see what the effect is. What's nice about this rub is that we can get 2-3 stages of a rub by applying it at different mix-in points for ingredients, with several strips to compare bite-by-bite.

The big lesson this time was about cumin: cumin is really good. I have used it in various cooking before, but just as part of a recipe. This time, the simple rub and its resistance to the pan-frying process made its flavor very strong, which I liked.

Julie enjoyed the salmon-cooked spinach-rice mix/pairing so much, we decided to do it again. To try something different again, though, Julie sauteed the spinach with some onions and garlic, and it was a very nice complete to the salmon. It was a very simple meal with some pretty nice results and a good look at how the same base of ingredients (salmon, spinach, and rice) can turn out vastly different meals by changing the spices and preparation method.

Our Muffin Tops 6/19/11

2011-06-20T23:02:00.000-07:00

If you've been keeping track over the years, you'll note that this is the 4th summer of college cooking, which (hopefully) means that we're done with college cooking and moving onto better things. Sort of yes, but more on the college part than the cooking part as we're back with more creations and the calamity that follows it. This year, my primary accomplice will be Julie in a spacious, better equipped kitchen by the graces of my mom (which I think was a graduation gift).

Last year, you may have noticed that I was trying out a lot of bread, which was intentional. This year, we have a few themes at work. First, my sister Nicole has nudged me towards a vegetarian diet, which I'm loosely following. I have no reservations about eating meat but probably won't have a lot of that around. Second, California has wonderful agriculture all-around, conveniently available at farmers' markets, so we'll try to buy more from there and eat seasonally. And finally, Julie mentioned that she was interested in learning how to cook Chinese food. I think my appearance may deceive her into thinking that this will work out, but I'll just throw in random Chinese words that sound like they could be food and use plenty of soy sauce to fake my way through teaching.

But that's not where we're starting. This past weekend, I wanted to break in some of the equipment my sister carried through checked baggage from Texas. With so many berries around, I thought that muffins might be a good choice. After finding nothing in my fairly large collection of delicious bookmarks from food blogs, I went into the very scary Word documents my family has compiled, and we picked out a recipe for blueberry streusel muffins.

I'm certain I have witnessed my mom make muffins before, and I have baked many different things, too, but when we started these muffins, I had the distinct sense that I had never done this before. Particularly, the recipe called for the butter to be cut into the dry mixture but presumably not mixed all the way in. So how much was I supposed to mix it? I took a cue from my bread-baking last summer and went for pea-sized, which seemed to work out.

Until this point, I had been mixing by hand, and when I discussed this with Julie and Holly later over dinner, they both commented that they had rarely ever mixed by hand. Count me as shocked. I only used an electric mixer when it was called for specifically, which happened perhaps twice all of last summer. My family had always made our cookie dough mixing by hand, and although it seemed like a little work, my mom swore by the strength gained through mixing. Right now, I can still imagine her looking over her glasses, speaking emphatically and wagging her finger. Maybe because she does that for a lot of things.

Anyways, like brownies or pancakes, the recipe called for it to be barely mixed, at the risk of lumps. And since the blueberries needed to be treated gently, that was a good break from the more difficult mixing, though Julie actually did most of the manual labor there. I'm really chivalrous like that.

After that, it was little work to scoop it into the greased pan. When I talked about it with my mom later, she had the good tip of not just greasing, but also dusting with flour to help the muffins out easier since we were baking them directly into the pan.

Baking went just fine, and it appears that our oven is in working order. 30 minutes later, we pulled these out, with the crumbly streusel very nicely decorating the top. You can even see the monster we had in the background that was made with the leftover batter. It was like a giant muffin top i.e. delicious.

Unfortunately, the muffins didn't quite come out of the tin as planned. They didn't stick; that was good news. The problem was that the inside was so soft and moist that I ended up tearing through quite a few of them trying to pull them out. Julie was not worried as it meant more snacks for her, and enough came out presentable enough that we gobbled up the ones that really fell apart. See Mr. Leaning Muffin shying away from the camera in the back left of the picture below.

Otherwise, the muffins came out great. The blueberries stayed intact, the streusel was yummy, and the muffin top and the inside had just the right consistency.

I would absolutely take the recipe without modification. What did need some change was my muffin-removing technique. Overall, we managed to mostly do the right thing in terms of mixing without knowing so. If you're going to take a shot at muffins, I recommend reading this guide, which explains how to deal with all of the ambiguities in the mixing process. From the description, it sounds like this recipe we used was a textbook example of a muffin recipe.

Except for the explaining part in the directions. That would've been helpful.

Blueberry Streusel Muffins

2 ½ cup (625ml) AP flour

1 ¼ cup (300ml) sugar

½ tsp. (2ml) cinnamon

1 Tbsp (15ml) baking powder

1 cup (250ml) butter
2 eggs
1 ½ tsp (7ml) vanilla
¾ cup (175ml) milk
2 cups (500ml) blueberries

Combine dry ingredients. Cut into butter(sic) until it is in tiny pieces. Remove ½ cup (125ml) for topping. Combine milk with eggs & vanilla. Add to dry ingredients, stirring until just moistened. Fold in blueberries. Spoon into greased muffin tins, sprinkle with topping mixture. Bake 30-35 minutes at 350F (180C).

Other Goodies

2011-01-06T00:46:00.000-08:00

Before getting back into the quarter, I wanted to do a little more cooking, mainly in the form of very sweet things. First, I wanted to use my cooking thermometer and try something new, so I tried a recipe for toffee. The name of the recipe is no lie: equal parts sugar, butter, and semi-sweet chocolate chips, and you're waiting for 285 degrees F.

Although there are a few horror stories in the comments, I had no problems with it burning or it separating. I was stirring quite a bit, and because of that, it didn't brown quite as much as it should have. Although I could've waited longer when it hit 285, I figured I wouldn't risk burning it just so it looks a little darker and translucent. The chocolate chips melted nicely, and I had no problem spreading it. It does take awhile to be sure it's set before breaking it, but actual making time was super-quick.

Second, I made peppermint snickerdoodles for a cookie swap we did. As to be expected, the food photography suckered me in, and mine didn't turn out anything like. Unlike my experience with the pumpkin pancakes, I should've drawn upon my general knowledge and chilled the dough before baking. The cookies are supposed to spread, but they spread far too much and didn't set very well before that and needed to be baked for far longer than specified. Also, it might work better to press the peppermint bits on top instead of rolling. The pieces near the edge ended up melting completely, and it didn't appear to work as well as it did in the blog I got the recipe from.

They also ended up a little hard from overbaking. Overall, I'm pretty dissatisfied with how they turned out, but it's okay because the toffee covered me in the goodies department. The rest of the cookie swap went great with additions such as shortbread, spicy chocolate cherry cookies, 2 types of chocolate chip cookies, rum cookies, chocolate oatmeal thingies, hazelnut-chocolate chip cookies, and probably other things I don't remember. We actually have a problematic number of cookies sitting in my room, but it's absolutely happier than no cookies.

Pumpkin Pancakes 12/16/10 - 12/17/10

2010-12-18T17:46:00.000-08:00

Having heard that a fellow blogger is going through many days of pancakes, I'm not an expert, but I did make pumpkin pancakes from this recipe here. My discovery about pumpkin-flavored food is that you can take any food, add pumpkin puree and pumpkin pie spices, and you have something new. Examples include a pumpkin pie cake Holly and I made for Tom last year, a pumpkin drink at Jamba Juice that was basically liquified pumpkin pie, and this pancake recipe here.

The batter came out very wet, as expected, but it was also fairly thick. A few critical errors were made in the process of making the pancakes. First, I was trying to cook them on medium-high like regular pancakes, but it turns out that the pumpkin means that it doesn't cook through quite the same. The first batch of them came out a little burned and undercooked because of that. The lesson there is to follow the recipe, even if it goes against your intuition. Another batch was thrown by the large amount of oil that ended up in the pan because of the large spout on the oil pourer we have here at home.

The recipe made far too many pancakes for just me and my sister, and I got another shot at it the next day with more of the batter. Medium heat worked better, but it was slow, and still didn't have the consistency I was hoping for. I'm uncertain what could be different about it, whether the batter should've been spread more in the pan or the batter was just too wet, but it could use some tweaking. Regardless, the pumpkin and maple syrup worked pretty well together and made for 2 tasty brunches.

PS Steak 'n Shake is inferior to In-N-Out. It looks good but isn't quite as good.

Cooking at home - 12/14/10, 12/16/10

2010-12-15T22:47:00.000-08:00

I'm always proud when I bring a little creativity to the kitchen. Whether that's a technique, like opening a can of pumpkin puree by stabbing it with an apple corer, or a substitution, like maple syrup for vanilla extract, meals seem more impressive when I know exactly what happened to make it so. Despite that fact, I fantasize about having a large kitchen, fully stocked with spices, an array of kitchen gadgets, and high quality cookware and bakeware, all impeccably cleaned and organized. Thank goodness that exists here at home.

I never cooked much at home as my mom always did all of the cooking without complaint or requests for help, like much of what she does for us. At home now for the break with much enthusiasm for cooking, my efforts are still primarily for my own edification instead of a substantial contribution to the functioning of this household. I put together a list of things that I wanted to take a stab at over this break. I started with something simple, however, when my sister Nicole insisted I use a jar of red curry paste she had brought home. I found a recipe for pineapple chicken curry, which we were mostly stocked for. Since Nicole was out of town for the day and my mom had dinner plans, I was cooking for myself. I trimmed down the serving size, wrote up a grocery list (complemented by my mom's coupons), and went about making myself dinner.

My first trip to Safeway at the beginning of my first cooking summer with George was strange. I, of course, had been to the grocery store many times with my mom, and I had even gone to that Safeway before on snack runs. That first trip was different because I was shopping to feed myself fully, with a grocery list cobbled from the flyer that week. I have since become far more comfortable with grocery shopping and have come to enjoy it.

I didn't need much on this trip to Randalls since we were mostly stocked, but we definitely didn't have coconut milk. I drove the 5 minutes, got my cart, and headed for the front door. I first saw who I think is the mom of a fellow band member from high school as I was walking in, but I briskly walked past to avoid an awkward encounter with a mistaken identity. Being a division of Safeway, Randalls stores are quite familiar to me, though I felt somewhat strange again, like during my first Safeway trip. Safeways and Trader Joe's around Stanford have students walking through often, but the Randalls in quiet Texas suburbia are filled with middle-class adults with their own houses and families. In the baking aisle, I encountered a high school couple trying to pick out the right type of squeezable frosting for their baking adventures. Although they were far closer to my age than any of the other shoppers I had seen, a glance back from their cake mix to my cart reminded me that it wasn't quite like that. At self-checkout, I was trying to scan a barcode on a coupon when an employee pointed out that I should cover the extra barcodes. I thanked him, scanned it, then looked back at him. He looked very familiar, and when I looked at his name tag, it just seemed to fit. A Facebook search just now informs me that, yes, he was a classmate in high school, but in that moment, I don't think I could've related to him at all.

Cooking went as smoothly as possible upon getting home. As I mentioned, I halved the recipe believing that the recipe was sauce-heavy anyways, which it was, though I kept the vegetable proportions. The chicken got substituted by roasted chicken in the fridge, which didn't work quite as well since it was drier being pre-cooked than raw chicken, which presumably would've come out more tender from cooking in the sauce. My mom told me to skip the fish sauce since I would only use a little, and I substituted soy sauce, which was fine. And not being a fan of bamboo shoots, I used carrots. In all, it turned out fine.

In fact, the curry turned out so well that Thai curries go on the list with Italian as being potentially not worth paying for. I made it, and it suited my palate. My exposure to Thai is limited, and it's likely that restaurants achieve far better results; I just can't tell.

This evening, I helped my sister cook, primarily by chopping vegetables and stirring while she directed the effort and made the decisions. We made Peanut Butter Noodles, which also hit the same sort of tangy taste from my curry.

This also turned out fine. The most alarming part about it was the little chunks. With chunky peanut butter, garlic, and ginger, there were small, unidentifiable, sauce-covered pieces at the bottom. Although I love peanuts, I dislike biting into ginger (though I couldn't cook without it), leaving me in quite a quandary about whether to go for the bits. Moral of the story: note the rough size of all particles in a meal, and be sure to cut to make them all distinguishable.

The True Origins of Fusion Food 11/26/10

2010-11-26T19:45:00.000-08:00

This evening, I decided to reward myself for having walked from Palo Alto to my dorm 3 times over the last 3 days due to busted bike lock and subsequent shenanigans by putting a little extra effort into dinner (and taking the time to write this). We're on break right now, which means that my house's chef is out, and I have been eating strange meals. In any case, tonight was spanakopita in an egg night. Or maybe it was Greek omelet night. Or maybe it was egg bruschetta night. Or maybe it was egg sandwich night. I'm still not quite sure.

Last Friday, Holly and I planned a dinner (which might get blogged at some point) for a few friends, with quite a few hands contributing to the effort. Since we don't feed ourselves regularly, we had to buy many odd ingredients, and that left me with many leftovers. The most relevant ingredient were from bruschetta that Holly had made. I didn't want to just have bruschetta, though, so I scrambled to put something together.

From left to right are eggs, a lazy/ignorant man's version of bruschetta using leftover feta, olive oil, and dried tomatoes, and the filling for the omelet including garlic, onions, parsley, and spinach.

The omelet was supposed to be somewhat reminiscent of spanakopita using the above ingredient and goat's cheese. A little toasting later, I split the omelet up and had my final meal:

It worked. It tastes exactly what you think it would taste like: a spanakopita omelet bruschetta open-faced sandwich. It could use some ingredient balancing, extra effort on the bruschetta, and a few fresh herbs, but I'm proud enough to post. The lesson of this meal is that there appear to be 2 possible origins for fusion food. One, someone is indecisive about eating different cuisines and just does all of them. Two, there are half leftovers from two different cuisines that will only constitute a meal when combined. Given that, fusion food only sounds good because we forget the gross combinations pretty quick.

Houston, We Have A Lot of Fruit

2010-08-26T12:54:00.000-07:00

Note: I'll try to keep this post fairly short, and not get too nostalgic on you guys..

I can't believe summer's basically over now.. (we actually have another month until it's over, but summer at Stanford is definitely coming to an end already!). Today's my last full day on campus, my last full day living in my, Steph, and Tara's cozy home (a.k.a. "Jared's crummy apartment where everything breaks"), and — most importantly, of course — my last full day cooking for myself.

Admittedly, I haven't cooked as much this summer as I thought I would. What we've been eating around this household? I have no idea.. But we've been getting by, somehow. However, every time I cooked it was an adventure, and every time either Steph or Tara cooked, it was a delicious, new experience. So cheesy (not literally), I know. :)

I decided to cook myself one last lunch today. Rummaging through our fridge, I found that we had a TON of strawberries (thanks to Steph's sweet mom who visited last week!), and a few perfectly ripe mangoes. I wanted something light and refreshing for lunch, and I knew these strawberries and mangoes would do the trick.

So I decided to make some salsa. :) I made the non-blended kind (is there a technical term for this?). I diced up some strawberries, a mango, an onion, some parsley, and a jalapeno, then threw in some olive oil and balsamic vinegar, squeezed in half a lemon, tossed the whole thing and called it good. And voila!

Some good looking, colorful salsa. :)

Of course, I did all of this while I had some chicken baking in the oven (my new favorite way to cook meat). I marinated my chicken in the morning, with some oyster sauce, soy sauce, sesame oil, garlic, and honey.

I topped my chicken with the salsa and called it a meal. :)

A really simple, easy-to-make, light meal — perfect for these toasty days we've been experiencing.

Tara made some delicious guacamole (which I like to pronounce "wok-a-mole-ee," but found out a few days earlier that I'm a fool for not pronouncing the G) that I think this salsa would go fantastically with. Now all we need are some chips or tortillas..

I'm flying out to Utah tomorrow to spend a few weeks with my sister. I might keep updating this blog with my Utah food adventures (because I'm very well aware that 98.6% of what I do with my sister is eat..). But, just in case if I don't..

Happy end-of-summer, guys! Thanks for the delicious few months on campus. :)

(Also, if you want some salsa and/or guacamole and great company, stop by our apartment! Haha.)

Keep eating,

Holly :)

We Must Go Deeper 8/22/10

2010-08-24T21:31:00.000-07:00

Summer is winding down here on-campus as internships and jobs come to an end. Our group had one last potluck and decided to go for perhaps the best idea, originated by George, I believe: the Yo Dawg/Burrito/Inception/Hamlet potluck. In other words, all food needed to be food inside of food.

I thought long and hard on what to do and was constantly dissatisfied with what I was coming up with. I know many people talk about strokes of insights, and I think that's perhaps the best description of my idea. When I woke up Sunday morning, I immediately thought of stuffing strawberries, and the rest of it fell into place.

First, I wanted to stuff the strawberries with some sort of custard or pudding. I decided to do flan since it seemed relatively easy and exotic. The syrup and filling both went just fine.

No new recipe goes untarnished, however, as I was juggling a few tasks and forgot to put the foil on top of the flan in the oven.

Had this been my only contribution, this would've been disastrous. Since it was only stuffing, however, and would be cut into pieces anyways, presentation was less important.

The next step would be to stuff and dip the strawberries. Trader Joe's had some gargantuan strawberries (maybe 2-3 inches at the largest), so I hulled them and stuffed them with flan. I tried to cut out cone-shaped pieces to fit into the strawberries, but I ended up just stuffing it in. It lost some of the consistency, but that was suspect anyways.

Dark chocolate from Trader Joe's. Given everything I was planning, I decided to go dark since I figured there would be enough to make it sweet. The steamer was a blessing as it made melting the chocolate a breeze. You can see the shortening on top to make the chocolate easier to work with.

My sisters cautioned me about stuffing with flan in case it melted or fell apart while in the strawberry covered in molten chocolate, but the flan held together quite well, and I never had to worry about it. Into the refrigerator they go.

In good fashion, however, 3 layers wasn't enough. We must go deeper. Particularly, foods inside of themselves is even better, so the last layer (a tip from Ben) was strawberry mousse, a combination of something custard/pudding-y and using parts of the inside of the strawberries cleaned out earlier.

I had just bought about half of the strawberries, so they weren't extremely sweet, and the amount of sugar in the recipe was pretty low. Unfortunately, after mixed, it's too late. I should've tasted the strawberry puree before mixing it in. Oh well.

Overall, I was pleased with how it turned out. They got more hubbub than I was intending and thus were perhaps a little underwhelming, but I picked up a few techniques along the way and was satisfied that I wasn't just passing along loads of sugar.

As I said, things are wrapping up here, so there might not be a lot of action for awhile now. We'll update as things come up, though, so keep tuning in.

Grub around Portland 8/10/10 - 8/14/10

2010-08-15T18:26:00.000-07:00

I promise I'm still cooking. I copied George on Monday and made mushroom stroganoff because we needed to finish off mushrooms and yogurt. Lesson: yogurt and lemon juice is not the same as sour cream. And always remember to compensate for unsalted butter.

But this past week, I was in Portland, and thanks to a few tips from my fellow bloggers, I tried to eat the best I could find around. Here's what I hit.

Vegetarian warak enab (dolmas) from Al-Amir, a Lebanese place in downtown Portland. Strangely, the restaurant is in a very classic brick building, though with Lebanese decor, it sort of works. My Middle Eastern palate isn't too refined, but I enjoyed it even though I didn't think I liked dolmas before.

Rose garden panini from J Cafe. We went because it was close to the convention center, but it ended up being very good. I think I'm a sandwich guy, and that was a good panini sandwich, made with "gorgonzola, provolone, roma tomatoes, mixed greens, red onion and artichoke hearts." Beyond quality ingredients and good panini-ing, what made this sandwich really special was that each bite was slightly different. With so many different things in it, about the only constants were the crunchy bread and gooey provolone. I like homogenized food, but this sandwich was great.

Alligator jambalaya from Montage. Montage was out of our way, but the tip from our resident Portland expert Holly was spot on. Admittedly don't know much about Cajun food, especially being from Texas, but the jambalaya was good. It was spicy, but not too spicy: just enough to burn a little in the back of the throat. It was salty, but not too salty. And the alligator was interesting. I don't think I have ever eaten reptile before, but it worked.

And their tin foil work on leftovers is amazing.

"Old Dirty Bastard" from Voodoo Doughnut. An oreo and peanut butter donut tastes exactly like what you think it would. So it was pretty good.

Veggie and tofu pho from PHO PDX. Delicious. The noodles and broth were great, and I felt so done after finishing my bowl. About the only bad thing I can say about it was that I bit into a pepper I had just thrown into the soup, and I had to take a break from my meal until my mouth cooled down.

Chicken pizza of some sort from Rovente Pizzeria. I was pooped and wanted to get something fast, junky, and on the way back to our hotel. Big, greasy, New York-style pizza sold by the slice. It was nothing special, but it hit the spot.

Penne arrabbiata from Built to Grill, a food cart. Fairly simple as far as pastas go. The menu specified "roma tomatoes, fresh basil and parsley, red pepper chili flakes, marinara," and it was good. The portion was huge and ended up being enough for an afternoon snack as well. I often complain about Italian restaurants being overpriced, but this batch didn't bother me too much.

Rockfish from Southpark Seafood Grill and Wine Bar. The rockfish was cooked well, but I don't particularly enjoy super-ritzy restaurants with small portions and fine wines. Actually, the meal was somewhat bland, even though the fish was cooked well. Still, it ended up being a great dinner because of great company. A Canadian, American, Chinese, Japanese, and Belgian walk into a restaurant. It turns out that other countries have even more screwed up education systems.

Momo's plate from a Kathmandu Cafe at the Portland Saturday Market. It's described as "The MOMO Roasted Garlic-Ginger all spiced meat-filled dumpling's steamed and serve with rice, lentils and salad Grandma Chanchar's venerable recipe." Good stuff. Rice and lentils is always solid, and the dumplings were good as well.

Elephant ear with sugar and cinnamon, also from the Portland Saturday Market. I say a lot of foods taste like death, but this would be dying happy. Each bite is buttery, sugary, and cinnamony goodness. Even better, the thick parts are doughy and chewy, and the thin parts are crunchy. A fantastic topper to the taste of Portland.

Grub around LA 8/6/10 - 8/8/10

2010-08-10T22:54:00.000-07:00

This is supposed to be a cooking blog, but when we're not cooking, we're still eating. And because food is food, and I love writing about food, here are a few quick hits of food from around LA on a recent road trip.

Ben's plate from Falafel King in Westwood next to UCLA. I got a falafel sandwich myself, which was very tasty. A little greasy, but good.

$1.50 for an ice cream sandwich with any 2 cookies and any ice cream at Diddy Riese in Westwood. Mine was a white chocolate macadamia nut cookie and a candy chip cookie with butter pecan ice cream. Delicious.

Fish tacos from Shamrock in Wilmington by the port. Fresh, cheap, good. Also sampled hibiscus, orange, and tamarind drinks and horchata. Highly recommended.

Pan roasted idaho trout from the Westside Tavern in west LA. Food was decent, though pricy. Very nice ambience, though, especially after a very crazy day. Be sure to order at least a soda when you go, just to get their ice cubes.

Breakfast at Leland's under the wonderful hospitality of his parents, including scrambled eggs, pancakes, fresh fruits, bacon, sausage, scones, bagels, yogurt, and more. I had greek yogurt with granola and at least 3 different fruits mixed in every morning. So good.

The pancakes are notable only because they're from a can. Yes, you spray the batter out just like reddiwip. The benefits include being able to make fun shapes and very light pancakes since it's so well aerated. Downsides include a slightly sour taste and the fact that it CAME FROM A CAN. Tip: when it says medium-high, it's not joking, but because the batter tends to be a little thin, you have to watch it like a hawk. After witnessing a few failures, I tried making the pancakes on medium to be safe. Although the outside browned nicely, the inside ended up being dry, likely because there isn't a lot of batter in there. Medium-high to get a crispy outside and fluffy inside.

Dim Sum Disappointment 8/1/10

2010-08-02T20:08:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, a few of us went into SF to see a performance of "The Magic Flute," and we planned to also stop in chinatown for dim sum. A friend touted "City View Restaurant" as the best dim sum around, and having not found a satisfactory place myself, I was willing to try something new. But I was wary. Intentionally sounding racist, my friend is white, and I questioned his authority on the quality of a dim sum place. I tried to keep an open mind, however and went into the restaurant ready to eat some of the best dim sum ever.

The wait at the door wasn't too long, though not having a hostess immediately on-hand was strange. My shrimp-sense began to tingle when I saw how clean the place was, followed by deep suspicion from the high non-Chinese to Chinese ratio. We were seated about 15 minutes later, and as to be expected, the carts immediately began to swarm.

We first got baked bbq pork buns, which was alright. Although they tasted fine, I was surprised by how small the buns were, and even more by how little actual pork was inside it, filled mostly with the sauce instead. Other carts came quickly, and I was surprised at how much non-traditional dim sum food there was, such as peking duck and orange chicken. Although there's nothing wrong with these dishes, I was fairly certain that this wasn't my traditional dim sum. I also found the selection somewhat lacking. All of the big ticket items, like shrimp dumplings, sticky rice, and rice noodle rolls made appearances, but I was hoping to find the stranger stuff as well, like tripe, greasy chicken feet, and other appendages.

When it came time for the bill, I was distinctly unsatisfied. We received more understuffed dumplings and sesame balls and small portions of rice, and there wasn't enough variety to continue to order other fun things. Although I'm aware that the kitchen tends to put out items on cycles, I couldn't quite forgive them for not having any fried turnip cake. The real kicker, however, was the check, which came out to roughly twice as much as I thought was fair for the portions and maybe a quarter more than I would've been fine with paying. That, of course, led to me to undertip even beyond my typically low percentage for Chinese restaurants and the poor service.

I considered completely panning the place in this review, but it's more fair to say that it simply didn't cater to me. Had I been looking for a clean place that serves Chinese-American dishes (which I freely admit can be very tasty) and was willing to pay for it, City View Restaurant would've been a great stop. I, however, was hoping for a cheap, filling, more varied dim sum, so consider my expectations unmet.

Karrot Kake for Kevin!

2010-08-01T14:45:00.000-07:00

This weekend has just been packed full of different events, a whole lot of random activities, and three birthdays.

Yesterday in particular was our very own Kevin Leung's 21st birthday!

Kevin decided to gracefully host brunch at his apartment yesterday afternoon. I definitely hope he blogs about the deliciousness that came from his kitchen yesterday (blueberry pancakes, parfaits, and homemade hashbrowns!).

Of course, I couldn't let Kevin's birthday slip by without baking him a cake. I decided to make carrot cake with cream cheese frosting. This recipe has been my go-to carrot cake recipe ever since the first time I tried it last year, and this was actually my second time making it this summer.

The cake had two layers, with cream cheese frosting between the two layers, and coating the outside of the cake. I usually just make the cake plain, because I'm always afraid someone will be allergic to nuts or despise wrinkly grapes, but this time I decided to toss in some raisins and candied walnuts (I secretly got Kevin's walnut approval at Trader Joe's with him on Thursday). Let's just say the additions were a definite improvement.. :) Of course, I had leftover batter, so I made some cupcakes for everybody as well (whoops, forgot to catch a photo of those).

I might possibly be the worst cake decorator ever, but I knew I couldn't just leave this cake plain... So I decided to spell out Kevin's name with chopped walnuts, raisins, and carrot shavings. Haha..

It says "KEVIN"!

Happiest 21-year-old you'll ever meet. :p

I hope you enjoyed your cake and had a wonderful birthday, Kevin! :)

Cheesecake! 7/29/10-7/30/10

2010-08-01T00:35:00.000-07:00

Yesterday was my friend Alex's birthday, and because I didn't come up with a gift idea, I decided I would instead combine his birthday with National Cheesecake Day and bake him a cheesecake. Emailing back and forth with Holly and Tara, I decided to try out this recipe from smittenkitchen for new york cheesecake. Although I had no springform pan, 0 of the $14 worth of cream cheese, and no experience making cheesecake, generosity from Holly, a quick trip to Safeway, and overconfidence from having seen my sisters do it allowed me to forge ahead alone.

The crust went well as my blender turned graham crackers to dust, and I patted all of the bits into the pan.

The filling was relatively easy to put together as well since there are so few ingredients. I ended up using the zest from a lemon on a tree outside and a lime that's been sitting on our table for awhile now. Although the recipe called for lemon and orange, I ended up liking the kick that the lime gave. I didn't think it would make a big difference, but having tasted it, I think I'll be slightly disappointed with any plain cheesecake I ever have again.

Although the ingredient list was easy, this cheesecake is my first solo encounter with the electric mixer. Although less of a workout than by hand, it can easily get out of control, as I learned. In preparation, equip yourself with a large bowl, not a small one like mine that ultimately only barely fit all of the filling.

With mostly just the cream cheese at the beginning, it was a fight. I also learned not to lift the mixer too far out of the bowl while it's still going. What was intended to be some extra movement to blend various parts of the filling resulted instead in splatter. There was filling on my hand. There was filling on my foot. There was filling on my shirt. There was filling on the wall.

Lesson learned.

Mixing was tough going until I got the eggs in. I think the liquid helped some, but I realized later that aeration is a big part of the electric blender as well as it increased in volume significantly. I was, however, quite proud of my work with the eggs. I saw the 2 egg yolks in the recipe and figured that I could do it after having seen my sisters do it. When it came time, however, I panicked. I quickly found instructions online, and it worked perfectly.

The filling fit into the pan nicely. The recipe claims that the cheesecake should flow over the edge of the crust, so perhaps I should have blended further, but with the filling so high in my mixing bowl, I didn't want to risk it.

Baking could've gone better. I got distracted with cleaning up during the 12 minute blast at the beginning, and when I looked right at 12 minutes, the top had already browned, and the crust had burned. Although I blame my oven thermometer, I should've been paying more attention, so keep that in mind. I had a very hard time determining when it was done as the texture on the top of the cheesecake didn't reflect my experience with eating cheesecake at all. As the recipe says, however, it was firm (sprung back) around the edges and a little wobbly on the inside, so I let it cool. I picked away the worst of the crust around the top, though I learned upon serving that the damage was quite deep.

The ugliness of the top was perfectly covered by delicious compote that Tara made, completing the cheesecake for a much nicer presentation, other than the outside crust.

I thought the filling went quite well. The zest worked, and the consistency seemed right. This particular cheesecake was very rich, which is certainly not a bad thing, though slices of it are best if very small.

The crust should've gone much better. First, it shouldn't have gotten burned, so if something is baking at 550, I'll probably pay more attention. Second, I think the sides were somewhat dense anyways. When I was packing the pan, I remember compacting the corner quite a bit, and that part of the crust was like a rock when I bit into it. The crust along the bottom worked well, though, so I think I just needed to pack better along the upper sides.

Overall, I think it went well enough for a first run. I should be better if I try again, though I think cheesecake is only fitting for special occasions. The electric mixer is now in my repertoire, so perhaps more cake-making is in my future.

Of Small Mammals and Salads 7/15/10, 7/23/10

2010-07-23T00:51:00.000-07:00

I really don't have too much to say about these things, but I had the pictures on my phone and figured they should go up.

About a week ago, I went with my Uncle Ben and a friend to Zibibbo, a trendy restaurant in Palo Alto. It's definitely pricier than I'm used to, but at least we got a chef's table. I enjoyed watching the rotisserie.

I also figured I would try to go for something special, so I ended up getting rabbit with a honey-thyme sauce (I think) over egg noodles.

Let me save you the effort: it tastes like chicken. The texture of the meat is smoother, less stringy, but there are many more bones. Had I not been told otherwise and given just the meat, I might never have known that it wasn't chicken.

I think I might have just told everyone a method of feeding me "exotic" meals very cheaply.

Anyways, I wasn't feeling like cooking anything for dinner tonight. That, however, did little to change my process. I still gathered many of our ingredients, cut them into smaller pieces, and mixed them. This particular no-cook variety, however, goes by "salad."

My mom makes a great spinach strawberry sesame salad, and since we managed to get a good amount of strawberries, I figured I would try it. The final ingredient list ended up being lettuce, red onions, mushrooms, tomatoes, strawberries, raisins, dried cranberries, and almonds. Not knowing how to dress it, I took some inspiration and put together some oil and vinegar with just a little soy sauce and sugar.

The meal did fail somewhat on the carbs front, so I ended up having leftover couscous as well. Tips on protein and carbs in a salad would be much appreciated as I would love to make it a complete meal.

THIS... IS... PERSIAN FOOOOOD!!!!

2010-07-20T00:07:00.000-07:00

More khoreshts!!

I decided to make khoresht-e-karafs (celery stew) for tonight's dinner and it turned out surprisingly good! I mean, it was kinda sorta like what I would have had at home. so kinda sorta authentic! And it wasn't difficult at all. All that I needed to do was:

1) slice 3 medium onions (probably the most difficult part of cooking this meal)
2) cut 1.5 lb lean beef stew meat into smaller chunks
3) let onions and beef brown in pan with about 3 tablespoons veggie oil
4) add salt and pepper and turmeric (1/2 tsp + more to taste) to onions and beef
5) add 2 cups water, cover, and let simmer on low heat for 30 min
THEN
6) chop lots and lots of parsley and mint. Like... 2 bunches of parsley (2 Trader Joe packages) and a good handful of mint

7) chop 7 or 8 stalks of celery
8) fry celery in pan for 10 min with some oil

9) add in parsley and mint and fry for 10 min more
10) add lime to the meat
11) add meat mixture to celery and herbs
12) add a little red wine vinegar for a little more sourness (we ran out of limes)
13) simmer until saucy

14) warm up leftover rice :)

and VOILA. :)

Annndd theennnn: chocolate caramel pecan cupcakes for dessert :) I made them last night instead of sleeping (originally for my brother but i ended up making like 1000 so we got stuck with about 950 of them). We force fed one to Kevin (microwaved it and topped it with vanilla ice cream and EVERYTHING!! He got the royal treatment).

I'll share the recipe later. It's SUPER easy.

Khoresht-e-Portugal

2010-07-17T22:42:00.000-07:00

In the motherland, the word "khoresht" or "khoresh" (depending on what dialect you're using) basically always refers to a sort of stew. It's actually a pretty common type of dish. I mean, when I lived at home, I must have had khoreshts 5/7 nights for dinner. There are plenty of khoreshts, so it's tough to get tired of them. There's khoresht-e-bademjan (eggplant), khoresht-e-fesenjaan (pomegranate stew), khoresht-e-karafs (celery stew), and plenty more.

So what you need for this khoresht-e-portugal recipe is: water, salt, chicken, carrot, and a whole lotta Cristiano Ronaldo. mmmmm. oh so good.

Ok but really, *in greek accent* "as many of you know, the word "portugal" is come from the Persian word "porteqal," which mean "orange." So, okay? Here tonight, we have, ah, stew and orange."

There you have it. Orange stew. So, just so you know, I decided to make this because of the massive amounts of orange and carrots just left sitting in our apartment fridge with no definite plans for the future. My reasoning went a little bit like this: "I have most the ingredients? Ok. Easy enough. This is a done deal."... or so I thought. Little did I know just how much effort it would actually take.

This epic journey started with collecting the ingredients (see here for approximate list. Not exactly the same, but just about). As I mentioned before, this didn't seem like a big deal since we already had most of them, but the ones that we didn't have took a whole lotta time and effort to get my hands on.

First-the 2 tablespoons of candied silvered orange peel. Since we had four oranges, I peeled them ALL and blanched(/removed the bitterness from) these and candied them by boiling them down with lots of sugar and lots of water (4 cups of each?)

They came out a little something like this:

Then came a little bit of orange-flavored-sugar-water simmering and BAM. We got ourselves some serious syrupy/marmalade-y goodness.

And with some cute packaging, we got ourselves a definite winner.

(Oh, but also, when packaging jam or jelly or marmalade, you must take great precaution and sterilize your jars in boiling water like so:

yeah...)

Although I only really needed two tablespoons, I was happy to have more (great with toast and butter. YUM! oh, and if you want some, please do let me know!)

DONE. Well, done with making one of the ingredients... Next obstacle: obtaining the other few but very difficult to find random ingredients including: advieh and saffron. Advieh, the "Persian spice" in the ingredients list (@George: our 7th spice girl, I guess?) can be made with cinnamon, cumin, cardamom, saffron, nutmeg, and dried rose petals (+ other spices if you desire). I was definitely about to make it myself, but then luckily remembered that I had bought some last year and left it in an unlabeled bag in my brother's spice shelf. It took a bit of (literal) sniffing around, but I found it (phew!). He also had a bit of saffron on hand as well! I was very lucky (fyi-saffron is ridiculously expensive).

So once I had all the ingredients, I finally got to making the khoresht with a side of "chelow" or rice. For some reason, the rice turned out a little mushy and the bottom didn't burn (which is a bad thing to me since when you make Persian rice, you want the bottom layer of rice to get golden and crispy and mmm, it's so good), but oh well. It was still a'ight.

Now the khoresht. It consisted of a couple things: the stew itself and an orange topping. The topping was made by dropping the slices of four oranges into a pan with simmering red wine vinegar, lime juice, sugar and saffron and was left to soak up all the goodness until the stew was ready.

The stew itself was a big ol' mixture of the other ingredient, but could have been left on the stove to simmer longer to thicken. The end result?

THIS:

and a very classy candlelit dinner with Ms. Holly Ho. spectacular.

Something Smells Fishy Here...

2010-07-17T19:44:00.000-07:00

What's for dinner?

A dish that has what might be the highest "deliciousness to effort" ratio.

Some time last week (or two weeks ago...), I decided to make some baked salmon, asparagus, and rosemary potatoes for dinner. I had never made this dish before, but I remembered having it while I was visiting my sister last summer. When I asked her for the recipe, she assured me that this was basically a "fail-proof" recipe. i.e. It's so easy to make, you couldn't possibly mess up!

First, the rosemary potatoes:

I just diced a few Yukon gold potatoes, tossed them in olive oil, rosemary, salt, and pepper, then spread them on a baking sheet and threw them in the oven.

Next time, I'd definitely cut down on the olive oil a bit (I didn't realize how much I put in), and cut the potatoes into bigger cubes (so you don't end up with little rosemary potato cubes).

Second, the salmon:

Slightly "drench" the salmon with soy sauce (the filets should be swimming in soy sauce -- but not drowning in it!), then sprinkle it with brown sugar.

Toss the filets into the oven right along with the potatoes (which have hopefully already been sitting in the oven a for a few minutes).

Finally, the asparagus:

Lightly sprinkle the asparagus with olive oil, salt, and pepper. That's it. Seriously.

Toss it in the oven alongside the salmon and the potatoes. Trust me... The timing works out perfectly. It's almost magical.

Potatoes, salmon, and asparagus -- all sharing the oven. :)

The final product: tender salmon, crispy potatoes, and juicy asparagus. Mmm...

Tara decided to contribute to the meal by suggesting we have cantaloupe topped with vanilla ice cream. This combination initially sounded so bizarre to me, but I could never doubt Tara's taste buds.

The result? A deliciously refreshing dessert. :)

Rainbows and Sauces 7/9/10

2010-07-13T00:49:00.000-07:00

This past Friday, the kitchen was empty. Usually at least Ben is around for dinner if not guests, but for dinner this evening, I had the place to myself: put on some smooth jazz, sip sparkling cider, and speak with long vowels. I didn't want to put too much effort into dinner, but this evening wasn't going to be a ramen night. A few months ago, some program on the Food Network demoed an easy way to do Hawaiian-y sort of pork with pineapples and red onions, so I figured I would try something similar. I took some inspiration for the sauce and went for it.

The sauce was brainless to put together. Good sauces often seem very tricky; I can't imagine doing marinara from scratch better than from a jar, and anything involving simmering has much to large a chance to fail. This particular sauce, however, was fairly easy to do. Because Trader Joe's doesn't carry canned pineapple, I was short on its syrup, but I put together what juice I could extract from the spears, syrup, bbq sauce, vinegar, brown sugar, and soy sauce. Very easy because there's no point of no return: taste a little, adjust as needed. I ended up adding quite a bit more vinegar than I thought I'd need.

For the actual contents of the meal, I chopped up a few different vegetables, the pineapple spears, and a small piece of chicken.

Some of the onions, some of the pineapple, the chicken, and carrots went in first to be cooked some, then stirred in the sauce and left to simmer and soak in some of the flavor. I actually ended up having far too much sauce and needed to drain it back out since it wasn't boiling away very quickly, but I found myself with a very colorful mix after adding the last of the pineapple, onions, and green bell peppers, plus some red pepper flakes to kick.

I put it over rice, using the extra sauce to flavor the rice, and loved it. In retrospect, it was really just a mix of a bunch of colorful and tasty items into a sweet & sour & salty dish. Maybe not too impressive, but I'm proud of myself for having added sweet & sour to my stir-fry repertoire. Now to find bitter...

Mufcakes

2010-07-10T14:04:00.000-07:00

After much pressuring from my dear roomie, Holly, I've finally uploaded a few batches of cooking photos. So I'll start with my first kitchen adventure: Lemon-Rasperry Cupcakes (which I was inspired to make because of - guess who! - HOLLY! what a gal!).

Ok. So I've never really been good with judging cooking measurements and how much of what you need, but I was a bit skeptical when looking through the ingredient list for these pups. So if you check out the recipe which I grabbed off Epicurious.com, you'll find that it calls for 3 CUPS OF POWDERED SUGAR (split 50/50 between the actual cupcakes and the frosting). Ok. So maybe that's kind of normal for cupcakes... but when the recipe only makes a dozen? I'm not too sure about that. (If you ate one of these darling cupcakes, don't think about that too much. You might be distraught at just how much powdered sugar you ingested per cupcake).

Anyways, other than that, there weren't too many surprises along the way. Actually, things went pretty well until I pulled them out from the oven and found they had overflowed and attached to the pan.

This was the biggest problem because the cupcakes turned out to be way too flakey and crumbled at my every attempt to remove them. By the time I finished fighting with the little guys, I ended up breaking 8 of the dozen.

That's ok though. Still all the same :) So a little decoration of either lemon or raspberry icing and a couple fresh raspberries on top and VOILA! We got ourselves a bunch of beauties.

Lovely things. Oh, but wait! What's that I see at the bottom of the cakeys?

....SURPRISE!

A yummy raspberry jam filling :) One of the best parts of the cupcakes. The other best part? Lemon zest. mmmsooogood.

Final decision about these cupcakes? Pretty good. But I decided they aren't actually cupcakes. They are much too dry and flakey to be cupcakes... So what are they? Muffins? Nah, too sweet...

Mufcakes?

Peach Salsa 6/3/10

2010-07-06T21:36:00.000-07:00

I'm a very narrow-minded cook. Particularly, I tend to think that food is only for meals. Other than the occasional batch of cookies, the time I spend in the kitchen is only to prepare dinner. Fortunately, Ben seems to have food on his mind a lot more than I do, so from soda to late night pudding, there's usually something going on in the kitchen. A few days ago, that turned out to be salsa.

Admittedly, it started as a topper for some chicken that had been marinated, but we just kind of threw everything that we had in, including tomatoes, onions, green bell peppers, jalapenos, peaches, honey, and more.

To be honest, I thought making salsa was a lot harder than this, but with the original Spanish for it just being "sauce" (according to this very good Times article), I guess we couldn't go wrong. Particularly, I thought there was some crazy involving boiling tomatoes, but it doesn't really matter as long as it tastes good. The blender made quick work of the ingredients, giving us a strangely colored liquid:

The peach flavor is a little light, but it makes a nice sauce for dipping chips and chicken-based dinners:

It's a little bit spicier than we were shooting for, though that doesn't start to kick in until the third or fourth bite. My main concern is actually an unfortunate characteristic of my stomach, where fresh fruit and a full stomach can cause violent reactions. The ache is pretty worth it, though because this stuff is good.

So it turned out we already had enough pancake mix.

2010-06-30T00:25:00.001-07:00

For our first-time-we-have-all-been-together-this-summer potluck, I thought curried chicken waffles with mango would be pretty tasty, so I made some impulse pancake/waffle mix purchases. A little over a week later, and Kevin and I are still working away at a pancake mix surplus. (I say pancake mix because our first and only attempt at waffles ended in a pretty massive fail.) In the past weeks, Rains has already seen blueberry pancakes, mango pancakes, and blueberry, mango, walnut pancakes. Tonight's dinner was our first shot at getting real creative with pancakes. Curried spinach pancakes are go!

We wound up using something like this recipe minus any actual proportions. It was pretty simple. We tossed the spices into the frying pan, gradually introducing the shredded spinach. It came out a little something like this.

I always expect it, but it inevitably catches me off guard when big things like spinach and onions cook down so much. Oh Spinach, I remember when you were Thiiiis Big!

All this business got fried for a while, and then blended. (I am thankful for at least one kitchen appliance that I am fairly sure of how to use.) Now here is the novel part, especially for all you plain pancakers out there:

(curried spinach goo)

(pancake batter)

(curried spinach pancake batter)

At this point, Kevin escaped to work, but I was lucky enough to have George as my Guinea pig. Of course, having already tasted the spinach goo, and knowing that pancakes usually taste pretty magnificent, it would have been a pretty big surprise for the sum of the two tasty parts to not be tasty as well. But yeah. They came out pretty good, and I think I would make them again. Actually, unless sleepwalking Kevin finishes off the leftover batter, I think I will make up some more tomorrow.

Yum!

Unexpected Options 6/25/10

2010-06-30T00:15:00.000-07:00

This is technically not our own cooking, but I like to think about this as a general food blog, so restaurant reviews and all are fair game. This particular post is far less than that but interesting enough to me to warrant a post.

I was in Washington DC this past weekend, and after arriving on a red-eye, I ended up quite hungry at the Dulles Airport. My friend pointed out a Chipotle, and at 9AM, I wasn't absolutely drawn to it, but I was tired enough to accept it. Besides, I was hungry enough at that point to eat an entire burrito. Here's what I saw on the menu:

If you can't quite make it in the glare, yes, the Chipotle at Dulles has a breakfast menu, being the breakfast burrito. I myself ended up getting a breakfast burrito with chorizo, also a special option here, and it was good. The burrito actually isn't that different from their regular offerings: other than the chorizo and subbing potatoes and scrambled eggs for the rice, they offer the exact same options on the assembly line.

After a bit of investigation, I found out that Dulles requires food vendors to have breakfast options, thus making this Chipotle apparently the only one in existence that goes beyond their standard menu. It's only offered from 6-10 AM, but if you're in the right place at the right time, definitely give it a try.

Summer Baking 6/20/10

2010-06-23T00:16:00.000-07:00

My family makes awesome food. Between grandparents who owned a restaurant, a mom and 2 sisters, I got to tag along on a lot of exciting meals. I tend to borrow a lot from all of them: general Chinese cuisine awareness from my grandparents, stir-fry technique from my mom, vegetarian options from my sister Nicole, and a gourmet touch from my sister Lisa. Growing up, however, we were primarily a cookies family, with the occasional cake. Ever since we left Canada and its superior flour (according to my mom, at least), the bread machine has disappeared in our family, with most of our bread being of the "best thing since" variety. Having developed enough cooking skill to avoid food poisoning and live at a subsistence level, I thought I would try to develop some particular skill that hasn't been big in the family yet, and I chose baking bread.

I'm still not sure whether it's supposed to be hard or not. And yes, there are some things that aren't hard, such as making Kraft mac 'n cheese. I've had this as a project for awhile, and my mom helped me pick out the last bread book I should ever need: "Bernard Clayton's New Complete Book of Breads, Soups, and Stews." It's a combination of his bread book and his soup and stew book, with just about 1000 pages. I read the prep section and looked over the recipe for "the first loaf" ahead of time to make sure that I had the time and ingredients to make it for the potluck, and it didn't seem so hard. Let's discuss how it went.

The recipe appears to be a basic white bread. Nothing fancy added and hopefully simple enough to start with. The initial part went well. I didn't kill my yeast, though I'm also not sure if I got my water warm enough since my dough failed to "double in bulk" as expected. Before that, though, my first mistake came in the initial mixing. I perhaps become overzealous in getting to work with the dough, and while it was still very wet, I began mixing with my hands since I was reading the "by hand" method. Unfortunately, I missed the verb in the instructions, which specifically said to "beat by hand." Oops. I lost some my ingredients when I went to wash my hands off, though after that, things went better.

When it came around to the end, I pulled the bread from the oven, and it looked and smelled pretty good from the outside.

After my initial test, however, I found that the bread was quite dense. I guess that's okay if you like your bread doughy, but it wasn't quite the result I was hoping for.

I am not entirely sure why it happened, though I have many theories, including not baking enough, adding too much flour, and not kneading enough. The primary suspect, though, was the lack of rising. As I mentioned, I couldn't really tell if my dough had "doubled in bulk," which I think means that it didn't. I don't have a cooking thermometer to know how to treat my yeast, though hopefully I'll learn through experience.

I'm hoping to bake at least once a week, maybe twice a week on good weeks. The unfortunate part is that baking bread takes a long time, and I can't see myself being able to prepare it in time for dinner at any point on a weekday. Tips on time management welcome!

As a final note, you should all also check out Holly's baking blog at http://hollyho.tumblr.com/. Holly is an awesome baker, and maybe she's too modest to hawk her other work here, but I'm not. Get excited: there's food talk everywhere.

The 6th Spice Girl Should be Asian Spice

2010-06-22T14:01:00.000-07:00

Asian supermarkets really have it all, don't they? You get great samples, boxes of instant ramen (the good kind), groceries for dirt cheap that make me feel like I'm probably taking advantage of some illegal immigrants somewhere, but most of all there are those hard to find Asian flavorings that you just don't see anywhere else (dried fish shavings anyone?). So, it shouldn't come as a surprise that after a glorious return from the "neighborhood (hey it's just down the street!)" 99 Ranch Asian supermarket this past weekend, Steph, Kevin, and I excitedly decided to put our recent acquisitions to good use immediately and make something with Asian flavors for lunch.

We started with the fresh thick noodles that Kevin had just purchased. And, in the good 'ole cooking from the heart style decided to just let our whim and fancy dictate what else would go in to it. Ultimately, we decided on using chopped garlic, green onions, and white onions to flavor the oil, adding in soy sauce, to make that archetypical "Asian flavor". Sadly, we had decided to forego buying the MSG we saw on the shelves at 99 Ranch, otherwise we could have had an authentic umami experience. We topped the noodles off with some bok choy, bean sprouts, and ground pork fried with various seasonings that we added on whim.

One of the first problems we ran into was opening the soy sauce bottle I had just bought. Kevin, with his arms of STEEL, ripped the little knob that was supposed to open the bottle right off. So, to remedy this, we skewered the plastic through with a chopstick, leaving a small opening. Hence, I was able to feel like a real pro as a shook the upturned bottle of soy sauce vigorously over the meat: BAM! Ya like that, Emeril? Steph was not quite as amused and finished chopsticking the hole in the top of the bottle, making it bigger.

Another problem was the noodles. Poor Kevin and Steph spent what must have been 15 minutes peeling each noodle individually and putting it into the pan. Steph's suggestion of putting water on the noodles first fell on deaf ears, and the two continued their laborious task. It was decided that little kids would probably enjoy the process. Isn't this how justifications for indentured servitude always begin? Alas, the noodles that were so meticulously separated STILL happened to stick together during the frying process. Interviewed after the fact, Kevin only commented that he used to cook on the streets and it got so competitive that one time he saw a guy get so angry he threw a wok and it went through his friend's heart and he died at the sink. Leung added, "Say Queensbridge, ey!"

In the end, the noodles turned out wonderfully. We were worried with the lack of salt available to us that seasoning would be a problem, but the dish was quite flavorful. The noodles were a great texture and took in oil and spice well despite sticking, and the pork really added good taste. Altogether I think it was a massive success. And, of course, what was most important, was that the three of us were able to all get together and whip something up together. Our ability to step over racial boundaries (Chinese, Singaporean, Canadian) and just cook some good Asian food was really commendable in my eyes. Next time, I might even suggest we get some Japanese and Korean friends in on it!

The Last Wonton

2010-06-22T00:40:00.000-07:00

Steph (with minor help from George and myself) made an incredible wonton soup dinner tonight. Unfortunately, I fail again at being the camera man. :(

However, I did capture some unique footage of Steph eating her "last wonton."

Context: We made a ton of wontons. The result? Seconds. And thirds -- for all three of us. The last swoop consisted of 15 wontons. I was stuffed by that time, so I elected to only eat 3(out of courtesy, of course.. didn't want to wimp out and make George and Steph eat all of them). George and Steph decided to be fair, each filling their bowls with 6 more wontons! George consumed his share without difficulty. Steph, on the other hand.. Well.. I'll let the video speak for itself.

Question of the night: Did Steph ever eat her LAST wonton?? Guess we'll never know.. (we would know if my camera didn't decide to run out of memory two seconds too soon).

I'm actually not sure what Steph put into these wontons (other than shrimp and pork?), so I'll leave the rest of the post to her. :) (Hopefully she'll edit soon.)

Happy eating,

Holly :)

Let the Potlucks Begin!

2010-06-21T17:21:00.000-07:00

The group (well, most of the group) reunited in Kevin & Ben's apartment last night for the first of many awesome summer potlucks.

The potluck was a complete success! Everybody contributed exciting, delicious dishes, and we had every course (from appetizers to desserts) covered. Here's what everybody brought:

Kevin: homemade white bread & tuna casserole

Julie (Kevin's guest): chocolate chip cookies

Ben: curry chicken w/ mango waffles & homemade ginger ale (why are you so awesome, Ben?)

Steph: milk tea w/ boba

George: sesame soba noodles

Leland & Joe: beer, iced tea, & soda

Me: cream cheese wontons

Chris (my guest): salad (equipped with apples, cranberries, and your standard veggies, lightly tossed with a raspberry vinaigrette

Here are some photos of (part of) the potluck.

George's sesame soba noodles.

My cream cheese wontons (& sweet chili sauce).

Chris' salad.

Kevin's tuna casserole.

The set-up.

In the pot: Steph's boba

In the pitcher: Ben's homemade ginger ale

On the cutting board: Kevin's bread

The whole picture-taking thing kind of slipped my mind after I put my camera down to get some food (food.. always distracting me). I really wish I could've gotten a shot of Ben's delicious curry & mango waffles, Steph's addicting milk tea boba, and Julie's perfectly-soft cookies!

Thanks to everybody for coming/contributing to the potluck! You guys are all sorts of awesome. Hopefully we'll be able to do this whole potluck thing often! :)

Happy cooking,

Holly :)

How to Fake Foreign Cuisines 6/16/10

2010-06-17T00:32:00.000-07:00

Welcome back! Summer has arrived again, bringing along beautiful weather, long days, summer jobs, and summer cooking. I (Kevin) am as excited as ever to start cooking again, and this time, I've brought on a few friends to write and hopefully show you a meal that goes correctly. Enough with the pleasantries: what's been happening in my kitchen?

So far, not a lot, but I've only been in 3 days, and one was eating out (where I forgot to take a picture and therefore will not review). Even so, I'm very optimistic about this kitchen. It's not any larger than the kitchens of past summers, but this time, I'm blessed to have the resources of the sublessors to work with. I think that in itself will deserve a post soon, but I am again derailing myself.

Tonight, I knew I needed to tackle some of the chicken I had sitting in the fridge. Because I don't have the skill of my grandma, the patience of my mom, the healthy drive of my sister, or the desire for top quality meats of my former roommate, I ended up with thigh meat, which I think was ultimately a better purchase than breast meat. Breat meat is super-dry, right?

I also mentioned that a ton of friends are also going to be around this summer, and we've talked very excitedly about spending lots of time together and doing potlucks and dinner parties. Even though most of them aren't back yet, I figured I wouldn't start the summer slowly and invited KevBaum and Steph (2 potential contributors to the blog) for dinner. Since I'm still waiting on a few supplies from my sister, I decided to do a simple chicken pasta dish in the spirit of perhaps one of the best meals of last summer.

While KevBaum put together a salad and vinaigrette, I chopped up some onions, garlic, red bell pepper, and tomatoes. The first lesson of the summer was a quick look on the always reliable internet to see what I was doing wrong with garlic in the past. I've never had a garlic press, and chopped garlic never quite got me the results I was looking for. If you're too lazy to check out the website, here are the 2 big things I learned: 1) don't refrigerate garlic and 2) you can crush garlic by pressing down with the flat of the blade after chopping. It works!

The chicken was a slightly more complicated process, but also very easy. The night before, I took out the chicken to season it some. I looked up what the right Italian seasonings are, and ended up using some olive oil, basil, oregano, rosemary, red pepper flakes, ground rainbow pepper, and coarse sea salt. When I put it that way, it sounds a lot classier than my former method of just using the premixed Italian seasoning. I fried it with the onions and garlic. Thankfully, I remembered fairly early to cover it, and when I pulled it to chop it up, I think it slightly undercooked as desired.

Fortunately, my main technique in cooking is stir frying, which is somewhat difficult to completely screw up. It also transfers nicely to other cuisines: when I use bok choy and soy sauce and put it over white rice, that's Chinese stir fry; when I use zucchini and olive oil and put it over pasta, that's Italian saute. I guess I'm just naturally talented at cutting up everything in the kitchen, throwing in arbitrary amounts of random spices, and pushing around everything in a pan.

Unfortunately, I forgot about how important timing is. While KevBaum is trucking along with the salad and has enough time to wash dishes as well, I forget to boil the water and end up waiting forever for the pasta. Because that went slowly, I decide to wait on frying anything, forgetting that it does also take time to cook chicken all of the way through. Because of that, KevBaum takes over the pasta, which ends up sitting on the counter for a few minutes as I wait to have the chicken cooked and chopped and the vegetables sauteed to mix together.

The timing ends up being unintentionally perfect as we decide to sit down and eat just as Steph arrives. Dinner goes great as I remember how much better meals are when you have company instead of, say, eating alone, watching a youtube video of a Starcraft 2 replay. That's just a hypothetical, completely made-up, non-factual, imaginary event. Of course.

Overall, I was pleased with how it turned out. Because the post-mortem is necessary, I probably would've added a little more salt and pepper to the mix after adding the pasta. Although the saute went well, a light coat of olive oil doesn't quite give the same flavor as a real sauce. Moreover, the chicken was just a little bit drier than I had hoped. When I pulled the pieces off the pan the first time, they looked and tasted fantastic. Unfortunately, I think cutting it up afterwards, throwing it back on the pan, and letting it sit while we ate salad let some of the juice out. I'll probably try cutting up the chicken before frying it up the first time to see if that goes better. If anyone has an expert opinion on the topic, feel free to chime in.

So that's about it. Pictures will come shortly when Steph gets around to emailing me the pictures she took with her iPhone. I'm excited to get more adventurous in my cooking this summer. Particularly, I have one food project/goal that should hopefully be a reliable source of stories throughout the summer, though you'll have to wait on that one.

Here's to a new summer.

3 Meals of varying effort and the lessons 8/8/09 - 8/9/09

2009-08-10T22:17:00.001-07:00

Our summer in Mirrielees is ending this weekend, and so does cooking. This last week is mostly just running down our stock of food, so I'm pretty sure there will be little to speak of. I did anticipate, though, that we would have pasta meals ahead, but this time, instead of getting spaghetti sauce, I figured we could work a little harder and make our own.

It's a little unfortunate that Lee doesn't like tomatoes, but it was the best base I could think of, so I got some nice tomatoes on the vine at Safeway, then found a recipe that we could probably achieve. We don't have fresh basil, but we do have Italian seasoning, which I highly recommend for any lightly stocked kitchen. It sounds, smells, and tastes classy, but is cheap and greatly reduces the number of ingredients you need on hand. Huge win.

Our other important trick here was the red pepper flakes. These are probably more of a specialty item, but they're often stocked at important college food sources, like pizza places. I myself stole them from the fridge at the office after apparently ordered pizza but couldn't take the heat.

So I didn't take any pictures along the way, but it went well. I learned on the first tomato that there actually is a wrong way to cut them where you end up squeezing all of the juice out trying to puncture the skin. Going tip first seemed to help afterwards, but I'll probably ask my mom or sisters for future reference about how to do that right.

One thing I liked about this recipe is that it isn't intricate. You prepare everything (mainly being cutting) then throw it all into a pan and let it sit.

I realize my camera has definitely gotten redder and looks fuzzier than I remember, but here's the final product. It was a little watery since my difficulty in cutting means a lot of the juice drained from the tomatoes, but I'll be more adept next time.

For breakfast on Sunday, I knew I needed to return to my #1 food: the omelet. It was easy and very tasty. This time, I even managed to slide half of the omelet off the pan and fold over. I was really proud of myself.

And for my final act on Sunday night, I went with my friend Ben to a Mongolian BBQ place in Mountain View on Castro St. It was one of the first places we saw, and our desire to get good value on our meal attracted us to the buffet. I think that Mongolian BBQ is all about the sauce, and being a buffet, it had to be beaten as well. Screw the carbs, grab the more valuable stuff and try lots of sauces. Highly recommended if you happen to be in the area.

So I think that'll probably be it for this summer. Just because I realize that a lot of my posts are just captions on pictures, here's a little content for you on what I learned about cooking this summer:

1) There's a lot of failure when you try new recipes. You can avoid a lot of that failure by actually thinking about what the dish will taste like when you're done. Sadly, a lot of what we cooked was determined by what we had in stock, and I was excited enough to see something that we could do, worried only about what it'd make after that. This probably could've been avoided by

2) Plan meals. A lot of our meals were figured out the day of. Which is fine if you're well-stocked and have lots of fresh ingredients. That doesn't work so well if you don't have a lot in your fridge and a good amount of the rest is frozen. Preferably, I would have an idea what I wanted to eat for the next week when I went to the grocery store. That way, instead of finding recipes to fit my food, I could find food to fit my recipes.

That sounds really cheesy and cliche.

3) Cooking isn't nearly as time-consuming and messy as it sounds. I was a little surprised with the chicken pasta recipe when there weren't a ton of dishes to wash, though there's really no reason why it should have. I needed a pot for pasta, a knife and cutting board for the ingredients, and a pan, spatula, and top to throw everything into. That's simple. And since Lee was in a rush in that meal as well, we multitasked and got the sauce done while the pasta was cooking, making cooking no slower than using a jar of Ragu.

Granted, it does take planning, and it does take more work than a frozen pizza, and there are certainly times when I care about having an extra 5 minutes or don't feel like moving a fingernail. But cooking has been worth it this summer, and I'm glad to have gone through the effort.

I thought it was just an old PC... 7/30/09

2009-07-30T19:57:00.001-07:00

It probably shouldn't surprise you that many of my meals have been determined by what needs to be used up. In this case, we had gotten some tortillas awhile ago for burritos and quesadillas, and it actually takes awhile to work through a package of those. I had slowly worked them down to just 2 left, which were the most demanding thing I saw when I looked in the fridge for dinner. When I saw we didn't have much other protein/filling food readily available and only a few eggs left, I realized I had enough to find a recipe.

If you haven't used it, allrecipes ingredient search is perhaps the greatest thing ever. You know what ingredients you have to use, and you know what common ones you don't have, and plug and chug for a recipe. In this case, I came across a migas recipe or two. Perfect.

Apparently, the idea is that you can fry tortilla bits with eggs to get something amazing. The recipe said to soak them in the eggs first, which yielded this concoction.

Doesn't look super tasty, but it's too late to turn back.

I had a last bit of lunch meat ham and some onions already in the pan. After a little more frying, the eggs unsurprisingly browned a bit, and it was done.

This also shouldn't surprise you, but it tastes like what it sounds like: eggs with bits of tortilla in it. No surprises here. Even so, it was filling. Were I to do it again, I think I might try the other approach and fry the tortilla bits first, then pour the eggs over it. As it is, it just turned out to be eggs with chewy-ish tortilla bits in it. I think it might be worth a try to get crunchy bits of tortilla in there instead for something a little more distinct.

On a completely unrelated note, though, I highly recommend microwaving your vegetables instead of boiling them. It takes about 5 minutes for broccoli and carrots and the hardy type, and even less time for the leafy varieties. I only go tot test it out recently since we were microwave-less until recently, but it works great. You don't have to wait for the water to boil, you don't have to toss a bunch of water, and it doesn't leak all of the nutrients into the water. I think it's basically equivalent to just straight up steaming vegetables (I'm thinking like the bamboo-y steamer thingies), which I think is a good way to do it. Anyways, I think it's a lot easier. I got a nice batch of maple-glazed carrots with absolutely minimal work doing it in the microwave. Huge win!

A ton of samosas - 7/18/09

2009-07-20T22:47:00.000-07:00

From time to time, I try to be a good brother. In the span of about a year, that has happened maybe twice. The last time I visited my sister Nicole in Berkeley was last Thanksgiving. I amassed enough guilt up until now that I went to go visit her again this weekend.

I think I mentioned in my regular blog that most of my family's tradition now is based on food. That also means that most of our interaction now is based upon food. I BARTed to Berkeley with my bike because I had sent links to my sister about ice cream places in Berkeley that got mentioned in MSNBC articles as some of the best ice creams places in the country. When I got there, we went to the farmer's market and got Himalayan food. Honestly, I couldn't tell the difference from Indian food, but it was good either way. After that, we biked to the ice cream place, which was good. We got back to her place, went down to the Berkeley marina, then back to her place to make dinner.

Probably for the best, Nicole is vegetarian, so eating with her means that she gets the first pass on recipes. The three things she came up with were orzo and potato parmesan, samosas, and edamame burgers. I haven't had samosas in awhile, so that was the pick.

The recipe takes more ingredients than I have available in my kitchen, but it wasn't too hard to make. The dough was pretty much just flour and yogurt. Having a mixing bowl is much better than using the rice cooker bowl.

The filling was mostly just potato, so there was some labor involved. Being the younger and less experienced sibling, that was my job. It all got mashed down with some seasoning and cooked in a pan with the peas and some sauteed stuff.

The last step is to fill. I'm not quite sure what the art to making samosa triangular is, and we didn't venture to find out. Instead, Nicole just rolled out circles, and I filled them like the fried dumplings we do at home. Except a lot bigger.

Usually samosas are fried, and you gotta love the taste of death. A good part of this receipe is that it actually calls for it to be baked, albeit with oil on the sheet.

I guess the other plus with baking and the flat shape is that the samosas were evenly cooked through. The last samosas I remember having were at the dining hall on campus, and although the outside was tasty and flaky, the middle was still cold. Such is frozen samosas thrown into a deep frier.

Nicole also made a yogurt-based dipping sauce that tastes pretty dilly. I think it's just a generic sauce, but it went well with the samosas.

They ended up pretty good. It probably could've been a little spicier, but the skin was well-cooked, and the filling was filling. It also made 18ish, I think, and with a side salad, I think a meal is maybe 2 of these. I think Nicole will be eating the rest all week, so these will last you awhile and feed many.

Now With Less Pepper - 07/11/09

2009-07-11T18:59:00.003-07:00

One of my best memories cooking last summer was an incident with cheeseburger macaroni because it is the perfect example of what dorm cooking is like. It includes:

- subpar ingredients

- bizarre innovation to get those ingredients to work

- massive fail due to panic

Take a look at the photos from that post. The first mistake was improper shaking technique. The bigger one was not removing the excess pepper swiftly and instead diluting our meal with water. It came out really weird.

Since we had ground beef again, I thought I would prove that I had become more skillful from a summer's worth of cooking experience. Here's what I had:

Like most of what i eat, almost all of my vegetables went in. That includes carrots, onions, green bell pepper, and mushrooms. The ground beef is there with peppercorns and black pepper to give it a kick. And that would all be wrapped up with the ground beef in salsa.

I dealt with the base first and cooked and completed my Kraft mac n' cheese before doing anything in the pan.

I was just talking to Julie about mac n' cheese, and I've determined there's just something classically good about Kraft instant mac n' cheese. The ingredients are trash, especially compared to what you can get at a restaurant, but I can't imagine preparing it any other way.

So to make a long story short, it worked. Ground beef browned first with some black pepper, then veggies in next. After those cooked for a bit, the salsa put it all together with the sauce, making this:

Your call whether that looks good or not. All I'm saying is that it was delicious. Dorm cooking can be good if you stay light on the panic.

Porkchop Sandwiches? 06/06/09

2009-07-11T18:59:00.001-07:00

Well, not exactly. And you'll actually probably want to stay here, because this is a short post. I just wanted to throw in my approval for a marinade recipe.

It calls for coals and pork blade steaks, neither of which we have. It worked out just as well with an electric stove and pork chops. Leland put it to marinade for a couple hours without the sour, so the pork chops actually came out just sweet from the honey.

Throw some boiled veggies and some rice on the side, and it's a complete meal. Great marinade.

A Bunch of Baking 7/2/09 - 7/4/09

2009-07-04T14:36:00.000-07:00

Last summer, we avoided baking much at all. Past that it requires another set of ingredients, we didn't have a real cookie sheet or bread pan. Having accumulated a few more items for our kitchen this year, we decided that we could branch out and put the oven to better use.

We've used a tremendous amount of cheese and hence have a lot of grated cheese. Constantly looking into the fridge reminded me of a recipe for cheddar biscuits that my mom has that was absolutely delicious.

2 cups (500ml) AP flour ½ tsp (2ml) salt ¾ (175ml) milk

1 Tbsp (15ml) baking powder ¼ cup (50ml) cold butter

1 Tbsp (15ml) sugar 1 ¼ cups (175ml) shredded Cheddar cheese

In a mixing bowl/food processor, mix dry ingredients. Add the butter to the flour mixture, cutting it in with a pastry blender until the mixture looks like a coarse cornmeal. By hand, stir in the shredded cheddar & toss to combine. Add the milk all at once & stir until it forms a soft dough. Dump onto a lightly floured surface & knead by hand 10-12 times. Roll out the dough to ½ inch (1cm) thickness. Cut into rounds (2 inches/5cm) and place on ungreased baking sheet. Bake 450F (230C) for 12-14 minutes, until lightly browned on top and nicely puffed.

They don't have a really strong taste, but baked into cookie size pieces, they're really addictive. The baked cheese is fantastic, so if you're looking something light on the side of a main dish, I highly recommend them. Sadly, I forgot to take pictures that day, but the leftovers will appear in a picture below.

Yesterday, we figured we should use the chicken that we had in the fridge. Since we end up going shopping weekly, don't have a lot of freezer space, and aren't stalked for Y2K, our meat tends to go week-to-week. We'll buy something on Wednesday and try to eat it by Saturday while it's still fresh. This week, we hadn't touched the chicken breasts yet, and with last week's bread leftover, breaded chicken sounded good. I knew the steps to do breaded (flour, eggs, bread crumbs), and with salt, pepper, italian herbs, garlic powder, and parmesan in our pantry, I figured we were set.

And it all went well. Again, I forgot to take pictures until we were done, but everything went smoothly. It was absolutely delicious; the breading tends to lock in liquids against the meat, and since chicken breasts are lean, you get the juices but not the fat. Put with pasta and marinara sauce (with some vegetables cooked in) with leftover cheese biscuits, it was a very filling meal.

For our final trick, we baked cookies for the 4th. That's celebration, right? Unfortunately, I forgot that we're missing just 1 or 2 things for baking cookies. Most notably, we don't have brown sugar or molasses. Looking over recipes on allrecipes without either brown sugar or vanilla extract, we came across a gluten-free recipe for peanut butter chocolate chip cookies. I've never baked flour-less cookies, but the recipe got high reviews, so we tried it.

Of course, we halved all the amounts, but we put it together and came out with a mass of sugared peanut butter with chips thrown in. Definitely not conventional dough

We had scooped out most of it by the time I got there, but you can see that it looks a little thick and un-doughy. Also note that the best mixing bowl that we have is the bowl for my rice cooker. Go figure.

Anyways, we baked them and tried them. The massive amount of peanut butter means they came right off the sheet, and actually probably even fried the cookies some.

Since we don't have any nuts, we went with m&ms, so more chocolate. They're actually pretty good, but it's like eating a rock. After two, I was done.

We'll see what other people have to say about them, but we'll probably want to get more ingredients before trying any other cookie recipes.

Peanut Sauce 6/28/09

2009-06-29T20:30:00.000-07:00

Familiar food is good, but I find it's more fun to try new, exciting recipes and dishes. We had decently good success rate last summer, but George and I had pretty low standards (it being our first time out), and George was pretty handy with the frying pan. On the other hand, Leland is actually familiar with non-Chinese cooking and eats Italian food regularly at home, so we get a different touch.

Another boon is that this year, we've found time to go to Safeway before midnight. This means we can get fresh meat and seafood from the dude and not just the freezer. Because it was on sale, we got some shrimp, figuring the recipe would come. Lee had the idea of combining it with a peanut sauce for a little Thai influence, and we found a recipe that we could mostly make.

Cooking with peanut butter has always given me trouble, and I thought we would get it this time. Once we started making the sauce, though, the liquid evaporated fairly quickly, and although the recipe said the sauce would be thick, I still thought it looked a little dense.

But it was too late to turn back. On a side note, we lost a little out the side of the pan, and it got stuck beneath the coil. Thankfully, we got a fixit request in a couple days before, so our now operational fan kept the smoke detector calm.

After the sauce goes in the shrimp, then the carrots and red bell peppers (we didn't have any snow peas). We tried to water the sauce down some, but it continued to evaporate quickly, leaving us with this:

I promise it looks scarier than it was. My camera phone seems to have developed a red tint beyond what the red bell peppers should've contributed. Anyways, we dumped the pasta in then served it up for dinner.

On a scale of week-old roadkill to filet mignon-infused gel in a delicately cured banana leaf, I'd give it a 6. It was more good than bad, if not exactly what we were expecting. We thought it was going to be Thai-ish, but it actually tasted somewhat originless. Even so, peanuts, shrimp, and a little kick make a nice combination.

So how would I changed things? Given a second chance, I would've gotten all the ingredients.

Back in my Element 6/26/09

2009-06-29T20:27:00.000-07:00

After last summer, George stuck around for a couple weeks, then ended up in non-dorm housing. Since he needed to feed himself and I didn't, he took the rice cooker and was apparently using it very heavily.

Since he was still cooking for himself at the beginning of the summer, he kept using it, until this past weekend when he went home. I had been floundering a bit at the beginning of the summer without it, so given the opportunity, I immediately got it back and put it to use soon after.

Nothing says easy, home cooking with rice like stirfry. After days of subbing in pasta and ramen, I was back in my element. Our stock of vegetables was good enough to get some variety, and I laid everything out to see what we had.

We had done quesadillas with chicken a day or two before and had some leftovers, so I chopped up some chicken breast that morning and marinated in soy sauce, garlic, and chili powder. It looks like I had onions, mushrooms, spinach, broccoli, carrots, and red bell pepper on the counter as well, so I was set.

And it turned out really well. I was a little scared trying to handle everything solo, but other than the rice, the pieces mostly timed correctly, and after some corn starch magic, I had a complete meal.

Perhaps it's just been too long since, but that was definitely one of the tastier things I've eaten recently.

It was very good.

A Classic Breakfast 6/20/09

2009-06-29T20:25:00.000-07:00

Weekends are for brunch. It's a time for hearty meals that are better than just cereal, and with a full kitchen, I knew we could rival Wilbur brunch.

I've mentioned before that I'm an omelet addict, so that's what we made first. Thanks to my mom, I have a quality frying pan to cook things. My taste in omelets is pretty standard: ham, onions, bell peppers, mushrooms. With some salt and pepper on top, it comes out great:

The big improvement this summer over last is the addition of a toaster oven. Unfortunately, we didn't manage to secure a microwave, so leftovers come with me for lunch at work. I can, however, finish off more of the bread this way. Leland and I have slightly different tastes in bread, and a loaf is a lot to eat. Late night PB&J and morning toast though are great filler. With a cup of cran-orange, an omelet, and toast, weekend brunch is delicious.

Back in the Kitchen! 6/17-6/18 2009

2009-06-20T00:53:00.000-07:00

In case any of you care, I did have a very good school year. So, back to cooking!

This year, I (Kevin) have unfortunately lost my good partner George in the line of cooking. He actually has a pretty good spot just off campus. Now, my new partner is Leland, the kid who lived across the hall last year and is around this summer for an internship. We drew together into Mirrielees, so we have the same accomodations as I did last year, with a few more tools, a few less tools, a little more experience, and a little less caution to cook with.

My first indication of difference was when we went shopping. Last year, shopping with George usually meant a lot of different veggies, a little meat, and a lot of attention to getting away as cheap as possible. With Leland, I'm forced to realize that that's not the only way to shop; he's more conscious of "the issues" and gets more organic stuff and looks to make sure everything is of high quality.

So our first meal was going to be some combination of chicken and pasta. Unfortunately, we don't have the rice cooker, so I now have to find new bases for my meals. For our inaugural meal, we went with a Cheddar Chicken Spaghetti recipe. We didn't have the pimientos or cream of chicken noodle soup, but we did have other veggies and campbell's chicken noodle soup, so we called it even. To add more to the meal, we sauteed some mushrooms and onions, though in retrospect, we probably should've used our red bell pepper instead as it's much closer to the pimiento. Because it's a baked recipe, it took awhile to make. Not until we started to cook did we realize that we didn't actually have a good oven container to put it into. I tore several sheets of aluminum foil and molded something similar to a bowl for it:

With mixed results. When we ate it, it wasn't bad, but it also wasn't particularly tasty. There were 2 major missteps here, in my opinion:

1) Not adding more flavors. Running down the list, there's nothing strong in the recipe. Chicken, chicken soup, milk, cheddar cheese, onions, mushrooms, salt, pepper. All good stuff, nothing to make the dish special

2) Not actually have cream of chicken soup. And we only have skim milk. When we pulled it out, the liquid was still at the bottom, so instead of baking the pasta into something more like a casserole, it just ended up being pasta on top of a little soup.

At least it was still edible.

So take 2. Thursday evening, I get back starving. Given our supply of meat, we could either go for porkchops or meatless. Since we had a couple pieces, we threw half in the freezer and cooked half. Having whipped it up on the spot, we didn't have much time to marinade, but I put together a mock barbecue sauce with soy sauce and ketchup (anyone seeing the mistake coming?). Add a little pepper and garlic powder, and let it soak while cutting up the veggies.

We again sautee onions and mushrooms, throwing the red bell pepper this time. That turns out alright, so I take those off the pan and throw the porkchops on. After cooking for a second, it starts to give off a bitter odor. It's not necessarily bad, but only vaguely what I was expecting. After cooking it through, which took very little time because the pieces were cut so thinly, I throw the veggies back in, put the rest of the sauce over, and serve.

So the bitter smell definitely existed, and it definitely came across in the flavor as well. After thinking for a second, I realized it was probably the sugar in the ketchup. Thinking back, usually bbq sauce is put on the ribs/steak just before coming off the grill; the cold bbq sauce with the hot meat.

But it actually came out alright anyways. The taste was definitely beyond tangy, but the "bite" was still good. It definitely wasn't bbq sauce, but still good.

So we'll see what we come up with in days to come. Without rice or another Chinese guy as a sidekick, I'll be doing a lot less stirfry. Apparently, Leland has some good Italian cooking influence from his mom, so maybe we'll see some of that?

Time to Wet Your Appetite

2008-08-24T20:00:00.000-07:00

Announcement: The prodigal blogger returns!

At last, I have woken up from my long slumber... To commemorate this occasion, I thought I'd depart a bit from my usually DRY writing and tell you a bit about Kevin and my attempt at making soup!

Yes, lame pun aside, making the soup was quite the experience. All the soup recipes we found online pretty much all agreed on a couple things: 1) Soup takes a lot a lot of time and 2) Soup requires a lot a lot of flavor. So, you could say, that it really tested our patience and pushed us to be more BOLD.

For our soup recipe, as with, sadly enough, all of our recipes, we basically just threw everything we could into it and prayed for it to work. Look at all the stuff we stuffed into the pot:

I personally believe that the hard part was the cutting and the preparation... After that, it was all... well... waiting... a lot of waiting...

The second challenge after the waiting part was the seasoning part. The problem with all those great things we put in was that they have no strong taste by themselves. And, since soup is more than half water, without the proper seasoning, it would basically only taste like watered down veggies... ick... So, we nuked it with this:
Yum! = D

And with that, hold an hour, and BAM! We had soup!

Success

2008-08-21T21:07:00.000-07:00

I mentioned earlier that Kesav not only deprived us of his presence, but also his car, ending our weekly Safeway runs. The inconsistency of the food situation caused me to realize how ridiculously convenient dining halls are. One can get a wide variety of well-cooked food just by paying for a meal plan and showing up at pre-arranged times. We, on the otherhand, are usually in a fight for what we can make with what we have, usually with priority to the oldest food. Fortunately, George's parents came into town for a week and graciously gave us food to fill our fridge. Though I guess they kind of have a vested interest in not seeing their son starve.

Their infusion was quite refreshing, as we had a large supply of foods we likely wouldn't have picked for ourselves. In particular, we got several, large bell peppers, which led to our likely final, presentable offering: stuffed bell peppers.

Like all other determinations, this recipe was picked because we got pretty close to the ingredient list. Unfortunately, I've learned that most stuffed peppers recipes call for ground beef as the meat, with the pork sausage here being unusual. We, however, just have chicken. So chicken it was.

Everything came together very nicely. In typical fashion, we misjudged how long various parts would take, and boiled the bell peppers first, while the stuffing took much longer. Because we had to cleave the recipe down to smaller servings, we approximated measurements, and came out to a fairly solid stuffing when the cheese was thrown in:

After thrown into the bell peppers with cheese and tomato sauce to top, and a 30 minute bake:

And it came out great. The stuffing was as dense as it looked, but tasted great, even with the chicken substitution. My only regret is that we only have white rice, which doesn't come out as crunchy or hard as long-grain, but everything mixed together well anyways.

So with a menu based heavily on ripening surplus and constant shortage, we manage fairly well. I'll be heading home Saturday morning, so our culinary adventure has ended. I would write about it here more, but I think I'll do a more extended cover of the summer in my main blog (shameless plug!). I, however, would cap off cooking as this, especially based on this last meal.

Cheaper, better, and more fun than a meal plan. That's a success.

Second Second Chances

2008-08-20T20:58:00.000-07:00

George asked me to help out with another dish (ketchup), so thank you for your patronage, and I apologize for your pain in reading this.

Because of our perpetual shortage of more delicate flavors, we haven't been able to redo recipes, to hone our wild culinary flailing. But from earlier purchases, George and I ended up with several pieces of chicken in the freezer. Combine that with an endless supply of pasta in the form of mac and cheese boxes, and the right google recipe search was for chicken pasta.

Exactly a week ago, we found a recipe called "Brooklyn Girl's Penne Arrabiata," which we mostly had the ingredients for. The extension necessary for this pasta dish was breaded chicken. Since week-old bread also resides in our fridge, I pulled some of that and put it into the oven to turn into crumbs.

I didn't quite think it through, though, and left the pieces whole. After one check, I tore it into little shreds and let it that bake. Altogether, it just didn't quite turn out how crumbs should. With some eggs to cover the chicken, here's how that came out:
Yeah, the crumbs were kind of chunky...

...so the breading looks kind of chunky. It ended up covering it better than it looks.

We went through the rest of the recipe, which just made a glorified tomato sauce since we don't have any basil (or canned tomatoes soaking in garlic and olive oil).

Overall, it came out alright, mostly because the ingredients weren't bad. The recipe altogether, however, was somewhat bland. We followed as the recipe instructed to let the chicken simmer in with the sauce, and that, of course, killed the crunchiness of it. I would guess that the breading in the recipe was just to let the chicken soak up the sauce, but since our sauce wasn't particularly tasty, it only came out alright.

Come today, we assess our fridge situation, and determine that this time, we need to use up the large bag of spinach which had been sitting in the cripser. We prepared quite poorly, and actually didn't determine what we would do for dinner until I came back from work. On that, I hastily defrosted another piece of chicken into ice water for the very clearly named, "Chicken Breast with Spinach."

This time, when it called for breaded chicken (with slightly different instructions), I did what I should have the first time and shredded the bread before it went into the oven. I did this several more times as it baked, then used a spoon to mash it to bits. I left the crumbs in a look too long, so they came out darker. The finer texture, however, definitely made this set better. The three step process of flour, then eggs, then crumbs, also worked much better. The flour thinly coated the chicken, which turned into a somewhat adhesive layer with the egg, which stuck much better to the smaller crumbs. How nice.

The chicken browned on the pan in butter, then cooked when lided, and turned out great. The other major aspect of the recipe was, of course, the spinach, which seems like a very hard thing to do wrong. I, however, learned a little more about cooking. Very early on, I learned that it's very easy to underestimate how much vegetable to cook. Spinach, for example, dies when it hits the boiling water. Knowing this, I put in two more handfuls than I thought we needed. Which still wasn't enough. And thus, I've learned a special application of Hofstadter's Law, as Hofstatdter's Law of Spinach:

Raw spinach always produces less cooked spinach than you expect, even when you take Hofstadter's Law of Spinach into account.

Even so, it cooks very quickly, and I let the pot have its way with our entire supply, which formed the foundation for this:

The chicken turned out far better this time, and while the flavor was limited to some salt, pepper, and butter (since we don't have parmesan cheese), it still turned out great. I'm quite pleased with how much better the breading came out this time over last time, which makes me happy to know that I've learned something in the kitchen this summer. Considering that I'm going home very soon, improvement is definitely something I'm proud of. It means I won't starve in the future just because I'm sick of ramen.

Second Chances

2008-08-12T22:37:00.000-07:00

Due to the absence of a car, George and I missed our Safeway run last week. Fortunately, while our fridge emptied, our stomachs remained full with some timely intervention. Most notably, a lunch trip to Round Table, Kesav getting late-night Domino's, and free Pizza Chicago thanks to Mirrielees. Which means that our "cooking" was reheating pizza for a couple days, but it turns out there's some art to that. So this time, all you (two) fine readers will get a discourse in pizza take two.

So at the bottom of the pile is cold pizza. I know few who say they like it, but that seems like a lie. I don't know anybody who likes cold bread, and there's something special about gooey cheese. No comparison.

Next after that comes the microwave, with the primary weakness that all it does get it hot. My experience has been that microwave pizza ends up burning the roof of the mouth with the cheese while the crust remains chewy. Or it doesn't get hot enough. No thanks.

With the Round Table, I went back to the oven. That, however, seems to take quite awhile, and it's fair to say that a second chance in the oven can't quite restore pizza to its quality the first time around.

I'd like to preface the final portion of this: I did not develop this method myself. But then again, many of our creations are adaptations of online recipes. So the real cook here is Google.

So the last tactic I found was the pan. The flat bottom mimics a pizza stone fairly well, and with some patience, the results are amazing. The obvious difficulty of the pan is that the surface (touching the pizza crust) is the hottest, while the rest doesn't really warm up. To avoid burning the crust, turn the heat down to medium-low. To increase the heat to the rest of the pizza, apply the lid.

The results are amazing. I say (and George agrees) that Domino's came out better the second time than the first. I thoroughly dislike Domino's Pizza, but the reheated pizza I ate was fantastic. The crust comes out to an almost cracker-like crunchiness, but still feels right with the thicker layer and dough. The cheese–if you're willing to wait for it–melts into a goo, and only being on medium-low heat, the pizza is just cool enough to hold in your hand and eat right out of the pan, but well-within good warmth. Pen it up: to my taste buds, pizza goes right there next to tamales as far better the second time.

My Obsession

2008-08-05T18:09:00.000-07:00

During the school year, I had brunch at Wilbur dining every weekend, and that was the best offering we got all week. Mostly because of omelettes. For as long as I can remember, I've been attracted to the omelette line at fancy hotels, on cruise ships, and anywhere else I could get it. And even into our apartment, my obsession continues every week on either Saturday or Sunday morning.

It's hard to say what I really like about omelettes, but it seems to fit the same approach to our regular cooking: everything goes in. Well, everything relatively standard, that is. Fortunately, that manages to fit much of what we stock in our fridge. Just this weekend, I had a fairly solid (but nowhere near loaded) one including green bell peppers, mushrooms, ham, and onions.

I've been experimenting some with how I cook it, and I think I've found one I'm satisfied with. I use the smallest skillet and let the bottom of the (two) eggs cook. While the top is still wet, I dump the other items in and do an amazing flip to get that stuff cooking against the skillet.
(pre-flip)

A restoring flip is followed with some cheese, and after the cheese melts and bottom fries just a little more, it's closed and plated.

I diced up a little too much onion this time, so I threw it on top, raw and crunchy. Completed with some salt and pepper!

Right now, you might be thinking, "Kevin; once a week is hardly an obsession. And you didn't even do anything that unusual with it." So yes, I do like my omelettes fairly pure. The obsession continues as omelettes appear in my other meals.

I mentioned about my ramen dishes, and this past week, I just couldn't stop adding stuff to it. After dumping the vegetables in to boil with the ramen, it still looked somewhat lacking, so I took George's advice and dropped in a whole egg (no stirring) to cook as well. After draining the water, I realized I could either go with the beef seasoning or add in some lunch meat, cheese, and real seasoning.

So I basically just had another omelette.

But it doesn't end there. A few days later (and after burrito night), we still had some tortillas left. I had done a regular quesadilla once already, so I decided to do things a little differently. Like omelette-style.

I had to use the lid to make sure the egg cooked before the bottom completely burned, but it came only slightly extra-crispy, and had a great filling inside.

One day, I'll find something that doesn't go well with eggs and random vegetables. In the meantime, I think I'll have a lot of things to try.

Burrito Night 8/26/08

2008-08-03T16:13:00.000-07:00

Apartments in Mirrielees are mostly triples, and our other roommate has, so far, been left out of the blog. Welcome Kesav. Kesav is Indian and vegetarian, and he works bizarre hours for bio research and spends many evenings either playing Indian music or attending Jazz concerts as part of the Stanford Jazz Festival. As such, he spends most of his nights eating out, though when he's available, we always invite him to join us in the kitchen.

Not quite knowing what's easy and vegetarian, I asked my (vegetarian) sister near the beginning of the summer about easy choices. She mentioned several dishes, but the one that seemed most appealing was the burrito night. Since then, I bugged George and Kesav about doing burrito night. That week, the timing looked good, so at Safeway, we picked up large tortillas, fresh tomatoes, extra salsa, black beans, chicken, grated cheese and burrito mix.

Saturday night, we all jumped into the kitchen after a day at the Gilroy Garlic Festival eager to prove our kitchen as proficient as Chipotle. We roughly divided ourselves into teams with George on the frying, Kesav with the fresh vegetables and other small tasks, and me on the beans.

George seems most fond of his wok-like frying pan (for cooler areas and flipping) and did a great job on the chicken and fajita vegetables.

The beans were fairly easy to deal with. Beans first, some water, the mix, and wait until the water boils away. Turn the heat down and let the steam rise out of the simmer.

In our last step, we separated out some of the beans for Kesav then mixed the chicken into the rest of the batch.

And a pile of fresh vegetables to top it.

Because it isn't really worth it to have a full kitchen set for only a summer with a kitchen, I happen to only have plastic, compartmentalized plates. I needed a flat surface to put my burrito on and found the classic solution to that and the potential.

The burritos were absolutely delicious and as good as any I've ever had. A little more time-consuming than other meals, but stirring beans takes no attention, and we had a great time talking and shifting around while cooking. Burrito night was absolutely as good as it can be.

Watch out Chipotle. You just got served by Mirrielees 421.

Jump Back 8/24/08

2008-08-02T20:12:00.000-07:00

We've tried Scampi. We've had steak. We've done a thousand variations on stir-fry. The difficulty of our meals has varied widely, but even with the simpler food, it's taken some attention to cut up meat and steam vegetables. Not this time.

Much of our protein comes from meat, but because we shop once a week and don't have a lot in the freezer, we tend to run out in the days leading up to that important weekly ritual. In preparation, we bought canned baked beans for that shortage. Unfortunately, we couldn't think of anything in particular to with the beans we had, since they were already sitting in sauce and had instructions on how to use them. So we just followed instructions.

Beans and rice are a solid combination. Probably a staple in many diets. And for a ridiculously simple meal, it was delicious. We put some rice in the rice cooker, dumped the beans in our saucepan, put some cabbage in (because we figured we needed something else and our theme, of course, is that everything goes in), added a little barbecue sauce for flavor, and let it simmer.

Mixed in with the rice, it was by far the densest meal we've had so far. Perfectly simple, perfectly filling.

I'm impressed with the variety of meals we've tried (more varied than we blog about) and how we've actually tried to do better than typical college food, but I can appreciate that every meal doesn't have to have 7 different elements mixed into a masterpiece. Sometimes simple just tastes good.

The Casserole (6/17/08)

2008-08-02T12:24:00.000-07:00

It looks like blogging has been derailed, so George has asked me to help him catch up over the next couple days. Steel yourself for it.

Before arriving in our apartment, we both knew that we wanted to take full advantage of the kitchen and really try to create something tasty for our tongues. Even so, life seems to provide numerous distractions, and with food available in many places outside of the home, real cooking effort often doesn't seem worth the hassle. In preparation, George brought a large amount of boxed macaroni and cheese.

On the previous day, we had decided to get ground beef at Safeway with no particular idea about how we would use it. In our usual fashion, we IMed back and forth while at work and eventually decided to try Beef Macaroni Casserole. It took several substitutions, including pasta sauce for tomatoes and barbeque sauce for worchestershire sauce, and our entire supply of ground beef, and we did our usual work of using almost all of our seasoning and vegetables in the fridge, but we remained faithful to the theme of the recipe.

It ended up looking very good, and the various parts all came together into something delicious. The baking step wasn't particularly effective in anything other than melting the cheese, but it certainly wasn't any worse for it.

Cooking with a kitchen like ours often seems to force us to use whatever's on hand, but I guess we've learned to try new combinations, discovering what works and what doesn't. Who doesn't love a little fusion?

Gourmett

2008-07-21T21:27:00.000-07:00

On Mondays, George and I have asynchronous schedules, so we decided it would be the weekly "fend-for-yourself" day. I'm usually short on time, so I turn to our shelf of ramen for a meal. But I can't convince myself to eat only ramen. I promised myself I would explore different culinary opportunities, so I've been trying to find new ways to treat old recipes.

There's an excellent blog called the "Official Ramen Homepage" where new recipes with ramen are posted regularly. I would seem to be a prime member of the target audience, so it's a step up from what I know. It, however, is also somewhat of a slap that I didn't have the right ingredients for even a ramen recipe and had to substitute lemon juice for lime juice in last week's Lime and Pepper Beef Noodles. But they were still better than regular ramen.

This week, I tried the Easy Peanut Sauce Ramen, a wonderful gift with the simplicity of ramen and the great taste of peanut butter. It came out fairly well and would recommend it, though I'm not quite sure about the measurements on it, as mine came out very peanut-buttery and not so salty (though the comments have the opposite complaint). I would offer pictures, but I feel that would deter you from trying it as it looks far worse than it tastes.

Ramen, however, isn't the most filling meal, so I supplemented it with another snack right now. We seem to almost eat our bread every week, but some ends up in the fridge after a week. As such, I've eaten a lot of grilled cheese sandwichs here. But like ramen, I want to experiment, so today, I found a recipe for an onion-cheese sandwich. We happen to have a small jar of dijon mustard, so I tried that as well. The additions were barely noticeable, but nice. Here's a picture, though it looks just like regular grilled cheese.

There's not always enough time or supplies or effort to create a great meal, but even in a kitchen as bare as ours, one can find new foods, new combinations. In the end, I just ate ramen and a grilled cheese sandwich (with a kraft single, not even real cheese) this evening, but it's a little more. Not quite gourmet, but maybe gourmett.

As You Like -or- What I Learned in 4 Years in High School Language Class

2008-07-19T22:48:00.000-07:00

A couple days ago, I decided I'd try out one of the recipes stuck deep in my mind from the days of high school. Every once in a while, my Japanese language teacher offered up Japanese culture days through the Japanese Club at Westview High. Unfortunately, I was usually busy during those times and only got the chance to attend one of them, but the one I did go to is the reason why this post exists today.

During that after school session, my Japanese teacher, Mr. Bangerter, taught us how to make okonomiyaki, a popular Japanese munchie. It's like the equivalent of a pizza and pancake mix, except the "dough" is primaily made up of cabbage. These cabbage cakes almost literally translate to "as you like it" in Japanese, and, indeed, in Japan, hungry customers will make requests as to what kind of "toppings" go on the okonomiyaki.

It ended up being the perfect recipe for that evening, as we were a little short on meat and even shorter on ideas. We basically took most of the veggies we could find in the refrigerator and threw them into the okonomiyaki. There was such a variety of junk that I'm really a little hard pressed to remember it all.

Throughout the cooking process, I complained constantly about the lack of true okonomiyaki toppings. We didn't have the dried benito shavings or the mayonaise or even the special okonomiyaki sauce that I remember made okonomiyaki taste so good. However, as we've learned through this whole cooking experience, having the real thing doesn't matter, having the proper substitutes is key! I looked it up earlier, and I found that while we didn't have a cure for the lack of mayo and the benito shavings, we could substitute the special sauce. Many of the recipes I saw online used Worcertershire sauce instead of okonomiyaki sauce. Well, we didn't quite have Worcestershire sauce either, but barbeque sauce is basically the same, right? Anyway, we were at least 2-degrees away from the real thing!

And, overall, the Japanese cabbage cakes worked. They were hearty and most importantly tasty! Also, it was not a bad way of flushing down a whole bunch of our older veggies. Either way, this meal is a tribute to those 4 years of Japanese and the teacher who stuck it through with my class and me!

Please note the artful product placement, take that Micheal Bay!

Coke Makes the World Go Around (Part 1)

2008-07-14T22:18:00.000-07:00

Alas, after this week of silence, I have finally returned to report on a whole weeks worth of kitchen shenanigans. Unfortunately for me, I've spent a lot of the last week cooped up in my office, spending more evenings working than cooking. As such, its been a week of either fairly quick meals at home or dinner out with the office.

However, I will provide you all with a smattering of the interesting meals Kevin and I cooked up. The most important news is that we got a bunch of pork chops from Safeway earlier in the week and so, we've been trying our best to cook it up in all different ways.

However, one of the standards we've been trying to keep up with in all our pork meals is using coke as a marinade. The sugary flavor makes it perfect for Kevin and I, poor college students without a real means to find any better things to throw in a marinade. Though Kevin was first skeptical of the idea, good finally reigned triumphant as he was finally persuaded to give it a try.

Luckily for me, it turned out to be a hit!

First on the hit parade was pan frying the pork. Kevin mainly took the charge on this one, as I was slaving away at work when our late dinner time rolled by. It was pretty normal; though, we decided that it could have used a little more of that coke marinade. We were both excited to see how it would turn out, but while the pan fried pork only whetted our appetite for the coke, it didn't quite satisfy our hunger.

The next pork project I took on for myself. This time I went back to my old classic of stir frying. I took the rest of our green beans (which were truthfully disintegrating in the crisper), some mushrooms, onions, and minced garlic to cook a basic pork dish. Of course, a little coke had to go in that marinade, too. Again, this didn't quite meet my expectations. While the stirfry tasted good, the pork was more carmalized than anything else, as the coke basically just stuck around the edges of the meat. And, overall, it was quite salty, so maybe I used a little too much soy sauce as well. Either way, it was another notch in my belt for cooking with pork.

Our last pork recipe, however, was excellent. I believe that it harnessed the power of a fully operational coke taste. This time we decided to roast the pork. We let it sit in some marinade first, but even as it was roasting, it was covered in the juicy goodness of our now expertly mixed marinade. What really made the dish superb was what we had the pork with. Instead of the boring and oft-used rice that we all know and love, Kevin and I decided on pasta. So, we sauted together some spinich, mushrooms, onions, and garlic, chopped up the pork, and put the entire mixture over some macaroni (no cheese this time). We topped off the savory dish with some good old fashioned Safeway brand tomato sauce.

We were both a little skeptical at first. After all, this was our first time using that macaroni since the first time with out pepper disaster. But, this time it turned out great. While we certainly didn't make enough veggies (which were truly delicious), the combination turned out to be very good. This time, I swear, we could taste that slight hint of coke taste as we dug into our hearty concoction.

The theme of this week seemed to be a mixture of things. First, the pork played a big role in each of the meals we made. Second, the coke also had a starring role in the success of our pork dishes. Finally, more as a positive externality than anything else, was the theme of using up all of our veggies as they were getting old (or in the case of the green beans were already old!).

Stay tuned for pictures!

Neither Creative nor Difficult, but Different

2008-07-10T22:12:00.000-07:00

Thank you all so much for allowing me this opportunity to guest write. I'm Kevin, George's roommate, coming off the bench for a short while.

Lunch today was prompted by old bread and inspired by V for Vendetta. The only escape I know for week-old bread is to grill or toast it, and lacking a toaster oven or toaster, to the skillet is was. Not feeling in the mood for grilled cheese at the time, I looked to egg-in-the-basket. Fairly simple: butter the pan, cut a hole in bread (I used the top for our chili powder container), put the bread in the pan, dump an egg in the hole, and grill away.

The burner isn't quite even, so you can see the egg run off to the side.

With a little pepper and salt, it came out great. The egg itself was over-easy (never popped the yolk), so using the bread to wipe up that was nice too.

In Search of Scampi

2008-07-05T23:23:00.000-07:00

Kevin and I decided a while ago that we would try to branch out from the stir frying we did and try something new. The perfect subject for our exploration was the shrimp we had wasting away in our freezer. We originally planned to cook up the shrimp a few days ago, but the meal ended up getting delayed over and over again. Alas, tonight, we finally got our chance to try our hand at it!

The first hurdle we came across was settling on a dish to make. After some deliberation and many denials by Kevin of my humble plea to just stir fry the suckers, we settled on making scampi. Little did we know that from this step we embarked on an arduous journey to find the perfect recipe. First, the recipes all used white wine, which we couldn't really justify to ourselves to get. Then, when we found some recipes for scampi without the wine, they ended up being recipes that made enough servings for a dinner party. With the two of us still a little afraid of doing our own measuring, we decided to just forget about the wine limitation and go for a recipe that was to our proportions so we would at least get the right amount of flavoring, right?

Kudos to Food Network for a simple set of instructions! In fact, I could say that employing the recipe was probably less effort than finding it! True, we had to make a few minor substitutions, but I believe that Kevin and I were true to the heart of the recipe.

One of the key substiutions we had to make was replacing shallots with onions. Now, the recipe called for two shallots, which Kevin and I deduced to be smaller than onions. So, we made a battlefield call to just put in a qhole onion. I don't know if you know what a whole onion looks like chopped up in a few bits, but wow, it looked like a lot more than we needed.

The question running through both our minds was, "Will this be another pepper panic?" We held our breaths, closed our eyes, diced the onions up, and plunged them into our sizzling concoction. Luckily for us, the onions stayed in for long enough that they seemed to disappear into the sauce. A taste test later revealed that we were saved from another possible disaster!

Nothing too eventful went on during the preparation of the dish. We had to sort of scramble around and try to do a bunch of things at once, as we got the pasta boiling, the shrimp simmering, and the garnish chopped at about the same time. Of course, all this moving around from one station to another left our kitchen in an aweful mess!

But, all in all, I'd say it was pretty successful. The taste was definitely there, surprisingly even with the lack of wine. Then again, any dish with THAT much butter and THAT much olive oil is bound to taste good.

Our first really planned out and thought out meal resulted in a little reflection for the two of us at the dinner table. Just as Kevin said to me today, it'll be interesting going to resturants and ordering what we ourselves have been making. There'll always be a nagging thought whenever I get the scampi that "Gee, I think I could have done that, and for much cheaper, too!"

But, without further ado, here was our dinner:

Marco...

Polo.

Cooking up Coupons

2008-07-04T00:45:00.000-07:00

Yes Yes, perhaps it a little unfair to be blogging about food someone else cooked for us, but alas Kevin was afraid that if I left any words unspoken, you, our readers would fear that we were relapsing into the normal college diet of ramen and pizza.

No, we have yet to resort to that! However, all of yesterday, frantic instant messages between Kevin and I signified that we really had no plans for dinner. Though we had bought some shrimp quite a while ago and planned on cooking it yesterday, we realized we were completely out of supplies! With our resident chauffeur and roommate Kesav out for the evening, Kevin and I were at a loss for what to do.

So, on a whim, we decided to go out on the town for a quick meal in Palo Alto. We flipped through Kevin's coupon books, we looked online, and we wracked our brains. A dozen shrugs and blank looks later, we found two great coupons to Darbar, a nearby Indian restaurant. On our way out, Kevin and I picked up Mark, and we biked it up together to town.

This was the second time I went to Darbar, and I still only have good things to say. Equipped with the two buy one get one free coupons from various books we acquired during our freshman year, the three of us ordered 4 dishes (with leftovers in mind, mind you!): the Chicken Tikka Masala, the Chicken Do Piayza, the Aloo Palak, and the Malai Kofta. We shared all four dishes along with sides of Nan and rice.

While the food service took a little long to pick up our orders and serve us, it was well worth the wait. I thought the two stand-outs of the lot were the Chicken Masala and the Malai Kofta. Regretably, I didn't think to take pictures (that'll change next time), but they were very tasty. The Masala was very similar to the same dish I've had in other places. It was very thick and heavy in cream with large chucks of chicken. It was chocked full of flavor from the spices and sauce. I especially enjoyed the generous proportions of chicken. The Malai Kofta was similarly tasty. I've never eaten Malai Kofta quite like I have at Darbar. Where as before, the fried cheese balls in the dish have been small, Darbar serves two large fried cheese balls in its creamy sauce. Together with the nan and rice, these two dishes were perfect (having growling stomachs filled with our own cooking helped to).

As good as Darbar was, it was pretty hefty on the college budget. Even with our two coupons, we paid $40 including tip for our dishes. Don't get me wrong, it was a great deal, but take this into account; our meals at home thus far probably even out to about 3 or 4 dollars for the BOTH of us! In fact, our meal of roast chicken tonight was fantastically cheap!

Here's a preview:

Leftovers: The Final Frontier of Fine Dining

2008-06-29T22:48:00.000-07:00

Well, all bad things must come to an end, especially when it's leftovers. And today, Kevin and I discovered, that finishing off those leftovers doesn't in itself have to be a bad experience.

Earlier this evening, when we realized it would come to leftovers, Kevin and I were worried and rightfully so. Remember that peppery disaster from the last post? Due to the unfortunate potency of the sauce, we had quite a bit left over. We were desperately grasping for answers as to how to survive another bout with that stuff.

What could we do with a bowl of ground beef sauce saturated with pepper? Kevin used up some of it to make an omelette this morning, but for dinner we needed something that would just kill completely smother the peppery taste from the beef. We thought and thought, coming up first with the idea of boiling up some of the bok choi we bought the other day. Yes, the bok choi probably would have diluted the death touch of the pepper sauce but meat sauce over a bed of boiled greens? Ehhh... There are worse meals, right?

Luckily, the perfect answer came to us in cubes of bean curd. Tofu is notorious for its bland taste, and while in any normal circumstance this may have been cause for worry, for Kevin and I tonight, it was more a cause of celebration. The tufo would match perfectly with the meat sauce.

In fact, with our plan to stir fry the two together, our new dish encrouched upon the Chinese dish, Ma Po Tofu. However, with the southwest salsa and spices we threw in, it wasn't quite the Chinese dish we knew and loved. So, just did we make? What started as leftovers turned into our first real excursion into the new and popular world of fusion cooking.

With that in mind, as I worked my skillet, stirring the tufo and the meat sauce together, I looked over to the Canadian Cardinal from Texas next to me and blurted out, "Ma Po Texan Tofu!"

And, just so as not to offend the bok choi, we cooked up some of that, as well (it was starting to get old anyway). With some chopped ginger, garlic, and green onion, both dishes looked to be a hit.

Our meal of Ma Po Texan Tofu and Bok Choi! Over rice, of course:

Pepper Panic

2008-06-28T08:38:00.000-07:00

First Lesson Learned: Good in theory is not necessarily good in practice.

Last night, Kevin and I looked in our fridge and an adequate answer didn't really appear for the nagging question of what to eat for dinner. We surveyed the field and decided that we best should finish off the rest of our spinach. I read the label for the ground beef and realiz
ed that it was about time we used that up, too. It was as I read that label that a brilliant solution struck me: Cheeseburger Macaroni! Luckily there was a similar style recipe on the label of the ground beef.

The Inspiration:

The Result:

Doesn't look too bad right?

Well, that's what I thought, until a catastrophic lack of perception caused me to dump a fifth of our container of black pepper into the mixture. Panic ensued showing our unfortunate lack of real culinary expertise, and instead of trying to scoop it out, we just stirred it in and added about twice the recommended amount of water.

So, in the end not only did it cause massive heartburn, it wasn't thick enough to make a good sauce for the macaroni.

Second Lesson Learned: Two wrongs don't make a right meal.

Steak, it's what's for dinner... again

2008-06-26T20:48:00.000-07:00

Well, to do a little backtracking, Kevin and I broke into a steak last night for dinner stir frying it with some left over baby carrots, onions, and basically whatever we could scrounge for. After that meal, we found that our still massive chunk of steak was slowly browning. So... tonight we took a shot at pan frying it!

Luckily, last night, we also restocked on some veggies, too. What resulted was this:

We marinaded the steak in a mixture of soy sauce, crushed black pepper, crushed chili pepper, and salt. Unfortunately, the longer piece of steak on the left was sitting in marinade for about 4 hours, while the other short and stocky fella only roosted for about 4 minutes before hitting the pan. Important lesson there, there is a reason why the pros marinade for a long time!

Next, in the oil and grease left over from the steaks, we sauteed some garlic, onions, and mushrooms. Some of the onions were in for a little longer than they should have been, but the mushrooms were great.

With a little bit of rice, our meal of steak in onions and mushrooms turned out much better than either of us expected. Maybe eating steak twice in two days isn't all that bad after all.