The Saucy Choppers

No Recipe's Lamb With Green Chili Masala

2012-02-07T08:00:00.000-08:00

Winter is finally here! Time for warm stew-like dishes to replace a real heater. Not only that, these usually require little real hands-on time and the end results make me look like I'm a cooking genius to other people.

Of course I'm not a cooking genius! That's why I got my recipe from No Recipes. Haha! You didn't really think I could come up with stuff like this myself, did you?

First set of mix:
- 1 tbs kosher salt (I thought this turned out to be too salty, so maybe just half 1 tbs would be fine)
- 1 tbs cumin powder
- A bunch of ground black pepper

Second set of mix:
- 1 tsp cumin seeds
- 1/2 tsp mustard powder (the recipe called for black mustard seeds, I'm not fancy!)
- 1/2 tsp fennugreek powder (the recipe called for fennugreek seeds, again, I'm not fancy!)
- 1/4 tsp fennel seeds

Note: I wasn't creative enough to make that smiley face, I can't take credit for it.

Seven, you read that right, seven jalapeños peppers quartered and de-seeded.

One giant onion sliced.

A thumb-size chunk of dried tamarind and about 1 tablespoon of hot water mixed into a paste.

I got a chunk of 3.28 lbs of lamb leg! The label lied, it said "semi-boneless," and I was being stupid so I only saw the "boneless" part. As it turned out, "semi-boneless" meant it still had a bone in it! What the hell? If it has a bone in, therefore, it's not boneless! What does semi-boneless mean, anyway?

I saved the bone for the next broth adventure, but the rest of the lamb got cubed and mixed well with the first mixture. *Remember, that's the one with the salt and pepper*

Heat up some oil in a large pot to brown the lamb cubes. This is what I learned: the oil and pan has to be super hot for this to work. You want to really brown two (or four) sides of lamb cubes. I made the mistake of being hasty and not wait for oil to get hot and basically ended up with some pale pieces.

Remove the browned lamb cubes from pan. Add more oil to the pan.

Add in the second mix. Stir around like crazy to toast the seeds. In my case, only the fennel and cumin seeds get toasted. Throw in a chunk, and by a chunk, I mean, about 1 tablespoon of garlic ginger paste. Stir that around quickly.

Add the onion slides and stir like mad. I decided that it was too dried, so I added a delicious tablespoon of butter. Let it cook for about 10 minutes or until the onion is all soft and squishy.

Add back the lamb cubes and their juices, stir to distribute. Then cover and cook that stuff on medium low for 1.5 hours. That's right. Sit back, relax, do other stuff. Basically, you want to cook the onions into soup!

Time's up! 90 minutes passed. Throw in the jalapeños and taramind paste.

I thought it was also too dry, so I added in about 1 cup of my pork bone broth. Of course you can use water or other types of broth. Again, stir and cook for another 1.5 hours!

You're almost done now! Do the following:

1. Scoop out to a bowl.
2. Dust it with plenty of black pepper.
3. Throw on some cilantro.
4. Devour.

One end note:
- It was really good. No complain there. However, I think if I added a bay leaf and some stewed tomatoes, the sauce would be amazing!

I'm planning to make this again with the bay leaf and stewed tomatoes.

Have fun pretending to be a cooking genius!

Cantonese Soy Sauce Chicken

2012-02-04T08:00:00.000-08:00

I don't think they serve this dish at many Chinese restaurants in America because this is just too... Chinese? I just know that this stuff is delicious and we used to eat it infrequently as a kid. I'm not sure why, but that was how it was. If you have access to a well stocked Asian grocery, you should be able to find bottled soy sauce chicken marinade similar to this. That's similar to a soy sauce chicken marinade as far as I can tell, and that stuff is delicious.

I did some snooping around the internet for a recipe since my mom doesn't remember her recipe. It's been a long time; I can't blame her for forgetting. Anyways, the internet told me that the star players involved were: ginger, garlic, soy sauce (duh), star anise, cinnamon stick, sugar, and water. Cooooooooool. So I just kind of threw that stuff together in a dutch oven in whatever amounts I deemed acceptable.

Ingredients:
2 star anise
1 cinnamon stick
2-3 tablespoons of julienne ginger
4 cloves of crushed/bruised garlic
2 stalks of green onions, diced
a whole bunch of sugar*
3 cups of water
3 cups of soy sauce
Chicken. However much you want to eat.

* So so so sorry, kids. I have no idea how much sugar I put in here. I put in like 1/2 a cup of sugar, but it just didn't taste sweet enough. I kept adding a little more and a little more and I have no idea how much I actually added. It must have been somewhere between 1/2 cup to a whole cup of sugar. I'm sorry. :( Just taste your marinade and carefully add in your sugar a little bit at a time. It should taste like sweet soy sauce.

1. Combine all ingredients into a dutch oven except for the soy sauce. Bring it to a boil, and then lower it to a simmer for 15 minutes.

2. Add in the soy sauce and stir your mixture. Taste the marinade and adjust the flavor as necessary. Bring to a boil.

3. Add in your chicken. Bring to a boil, and then reduce heat to a simmer. For chicken drumsticks, simmer for 15-20 minutes depending on how big they are.

You can keep this marinade forever. No joke. After you finished your first batch of chicken, save the marinade! You can continue to use it and make soy sauce chicken until you've used up all the sauce! I've made like 20 batches so far, and the marinade just gets tastier and tastier!

When I was looking for online recipes, this one recipe told me that I should keep a one to three water to soy sauce ratio. That meant something like one cup of water to three cups of soy sauce. Do not follow this ratio. That's what I did for my very first batch of chicken, and holy moly, it was like eating concentrated soy sauce. I didn't know how the marinade was supposed to taste, so I assumed that even though it was so soy sauce-y, that my chicken wouldn't be. Wrong! Your chicken will taste just like your marinade. Surprised? So if you taste test it, and it's too salty or sweet or whatever, your chicken will be too.

Here's the finished product. I served with white rice with an egg (over easy) on top. Super tasty!

To end this post, I'm going to tell you that I felt super Asian making this dish, and I smelled like sweet soy sauce for a month. It was awesome. :)

Serious Eats' Halal Cart-Style Chicken And Rice With White Sauce

2012-01-28T08:00:00.000-08:00

The Chopping Block came over and gave me all sorts of Indian spices. I'm talking about like 20 pounds worth of Indian spices! She's so nice, right?! So I decided to make some sort of quasi Middle Eastern/Indian food. I saw this Serious Eats recipe a while back and bookmarked it. Now that I have my turmeric and ground coriander powder, I have no excuse not to make it.

Ingredients:

For the chicken:
2 tablespoons lemon juice
1 tablespoon chopped fresh oregano*
1/2 teaspoon ground coriander
3 garlic cloves, roughly chopped (about 1 1/2 tablespoons)
1/4 cup light olive oil
Kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper
2 pounds boneless, skinless chicken thighs, trimmed of excess fat (6 to 8 thighs)
1 tablespoon vegetable or canola oil

For the rice:
2 tablespoons unsalted butter
1/2 teaspoon turmeric
1/4 teaspoon ground cumin
1 1/2 cups long-grain or Basmati rice
2 1/2 cups chicken broth
Kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper

For the sauce:
1/2 cup mayonnaise
1/2 cup Greek yogurt
1 tablespoon sugar
2 tablespoons white vinegar
1 teaspoon lemon juice
1/4 cup chopped fresh parsley*
Kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper

To serve:
1 head iceberg lettuce, shredded**
1 large tomato, cut into wedges
Fluffy pocketless pita bread, brushed in butter, lightly toasted, and cut into 1 × 3-inch strips**
Harissa-style hot sauce***

* I was too lazy to get fresh herbs, so I used dried herbs.
** I was too lazy to get iceberg lettuce and pita bread. Are you sensing a pattern here?
*** I have sriracha. Good enough, right?

1. Chicken: Combine the lemon juice, oregano, coriander, garlic, and olive oil in a blender. Blend until smooth. Season the marinade to taste with kosher salt and black pepper. Place the chicken in a 1-gallon zipper-lock bag and add half of the marinade (reserve the remaining marinade in the refrigerator). Turn the chicken to coat, seal the bag, and marinate the chicken in the refrigerator for at least 1 hour and up to 4 hours, turning occasionally to redistribute the marinade. Do not marinate the chicken longer than 4 hours or it’ll get a mushy texture. If you must delay cooking the chicken for any reason, remove it from the marinade, pat it dry with paper towels, and refrigerate until ready to cook.

2. Remove the chicken from the bag and pat it dry with paper towels. Season with kosher salt and pepper, going heavy on the pepper. I decided to bake the chicken instead of pan frying it like the recipe called for. This is because I am lazy, and there's so much chicken that I would have to do it in batches. So I greased up a half baking sheet and put my chicken on.

3. I set the oven to 350 degrees, and I set the timer to bake the chicken for 30 minutes. I was in the office and didn't hear the timer go off, so I think the chicken baked for 45 minutes or something ridiculous. It was a little dry, but it was alright. Let the chicken rest and then cut it up to 1/2- to 1/4-inch chunks. Transfer to a medium bowl, add the remaining marinade, cover loosely with plastic, and refrigerate while you cook the rice and prepare the sauce.

4. Rice: Even though I have a dutch oven, I decided to not follow the recipe (which meant making it in a dutch oven). I decided that I was lazy and I was going to use my rice cooker. I dumped the rice, turmeric, cumin, salt, pepper, and chicken broth into the rice cooker. I made sure to mix the rice so the spices were distributed evenly and then I turned the rice cooker on.

The rice was peeeerrrrfect. It was nice and fluffy and everything. For the amount of chicken broth, I actually just used the measuring guidelines from my rice cooker, so I'm not too sure if it was 2-1/2 cups or not. Oops, my bad.

5. Sauce: In a small bowl, combine the mayonnaise, yogurt, sugar, vinegar, lemon juice, parsley, and 2 teaspoons black pepper. Whisk to combine. Season to taste with salt. To be honest, I ran out of mayonnaise, so I only had 1/4 cup of it. So I filled the rest with Fage 2% Greek yogurt.

Sauce!

6. To serve: Return the entire contents of the chicken bowl (chicken, marinade, and all juices) to the skillet. Cook over medium-high heat, stirring occasionally, until heated through. To serve, divide the rice, lettuce, tomato, and toasted pita bread evenly among four to six plates. Pile the chicken on top of the rice. Top with the white sauce and hot sauce. Serve immediately, passing extra sauce at the table.

Here's a photo of the rice, chicken, sliced tomatoes, and globs of white sauce. It was delicious. I had planned on topping it all off with a fried egg and some hot sauce, but I forgot! I'm a totally failure! :( Oh well! It was still delicious as is.

On the bright side, here is the Chopping Block cleaning my dishes. It was awesome. I am lazy. Did we already establish that?

So I enjoyed this meal so much that I've actually made it on repeat for like a week. Ridiculous, right? I was seriously obsessed with eating this for every meal. I've switched up the oregano with some fresh cilantro because I just felt that oregano is too... Italian for this dish. I think it came out pretty decent with cilantro. I also decided to add some horseradish to the mix just for kicks. It was alright. I added lots of sriracha too, which was awwwwwwesome. That stuff is so awesome!

Oh, also, no, my chicken was never halal. Gasp. Hope the title wasn't confusing!

Soon Dubu Jjigae (Korean Soft Tofu Soup)

2012-01-27T18:09:00.000-08:00

At first I wanted to make a portabello mushroom and cabbage soup because I just happen to have those things and I wanted soup. It somehow evolved to watching Maangchi make this Soon Dubu Jjigae, and then I wanted it so badly!

Most (if not all) of these ingredients requires that you go to a well stocked Asian grocery store. I went to a Korean grocery store near Japantown in San Francisco. The prices aren't cheap though!

Ingredients:
Broth Base:
5 Anchovies
3 large shittake mushrooms
1/2 onion
3-4 pieces of kelp
5 garlic cloves
5 cups of water

Soup:
1 cup mixed seafood
7 oz of beef (any cut is fine, I used round eye)
2 tbsp red pepper paste
1 tbsp miso paste (I used red miso)
2 tbsp fish sauce
18 oz of soft tofu
2 sprigs of green onions, chopped
sesame oil
an egg for each person
cabbage (optional)

This is what all the ingredients look like (minus the fish sauce that I forgot to put in the photo). I think it cost me about $20+ total (excluding the beef). This is because I didn't have any of the ingredients! Shame on me, right?

These are the ingredients for your broth base. Starting from the upper left hand corner (going clockwise), I have chopped onions, sliced mushrooms, kelp, anchovies, and garlic. I would recommend you not slicing your shittake mushrooms right now.

To make the soup base, place all ingredients into a pot and bring to a boil. Once boiling, turn it down and simmer for 20 minutes. Now you're done with the soup base!

Here are some of the items for your soup. I have pictured the mixed seafood, beef, hot pepper and miso paste, green onions, and a pack of dashi seasoning. If you don't want to buy all that stuff for the dashi broth, you can buy packages of dashi seasoning, which is like a stock bullion.

To make the soup, heat up a heavy bottom pot (like a dutch oven). Add in the beef and cook until almost done. Add in the red pepper and miso paste and stir.

This is what your beef will look like.

Fish out the shittake mushrooms from your soup base and slice (if they weren't already).

Take two cups of your broth and pour it in with the beef. Add in your fish sauce.

I accidentally added a little too much fish sauce. Oops! It was a little salty.

Bring to a boil and add in your mushrooms, seafood, and tofu.

Bring this to a boil and add in green onions. Boil for about a minute. Drop in your egg(s) and cook for about two minutes.

Add in a couple drops of sesame oil per bowl and you're ready to serve!

This was really good, and to me, it tasted pretty darn authentic (not that it matters). The only thing I would change would be to put in a little less red pepper paste. I am a giant weenie and it was too spicy for me! In the later batches I made, I decided to add in some cabbage, which was awesome, so I would suggest you add some too. Also the texture of the tofu is really important. You do not want to get extra firm tofu. You want to get the softest silkiest tofu you can find. It really changes the texture of the soup, and the softer tofu is way more delightful.

"Better Than Sex" Coconut Cake

2012-01-21T18:00:00.000-08:00

Every Christmas my boyfriend's aunt would make a delicious coconut cake. Again, I was too shy to ask for the recipe, so I looked it up online. I guess there are lots of variations for the cake, but I think this recipe closest resembles her cake. She doesn't put pineapples on it, and personally, I think pineapples on this cake would be weird.

This cake does take a little prep time though. The cake has to be cooled in the refrigerator overnight. Depending if you're going to whip your own cream or use Cool Whip, Cool Whip needs to thaw in your refrigerator for 4 hours. So yes, lots of prep time!

Ingredients:
1 baked white cake
1 can (14oz) of sweetened condensed milk
1/2 can (8 oz) of coconut milk*
1 container (8 oz or roughly 3 cups) of Cool Whip
1 cup shredded coconut

This is my sister's cat, Furious. He's super friendly. :D

1. I found half a bag of white cake mix in my sister's cupboard, so I thought I'd use it. I filled in the other half with some baking flour and sugar and just made the box-cake-mix as directed. You can make your own white cake from scratch if you want! It doesn't matter. I just wanted to use up this half box, that was all. You want to make sure you bake the cake in whatever serving dish you're going to use because it's almost impossible to move the cake once it's done.

One baked white cake.

2. Now it's time to poke all sorts of holes into your cake! So when you're waiting for the cake to cool a bit, mix your can of sweetened condensed milk with your coconut milk. Pour it over the cake very slowly making sure that the milk mixture seeps into the holes. I used a spoon to kind of smear the milk mixture around.

Mixed coconut milk and condensed milk.

Hole-y cake.

It might look too liquid-y at first, but don't worry, the cake is going to soak it all up.

3. Put your cake in the refrigerator until it's cold. Once it's cold (and won't melt the Cool Whip), spread some of that Cool Whip all over it. Top with it all off with some shredded coconut.

This is what the cake looks like after an hour in the refrigerator.

4. Leave cake in the refrigerator overnight so all the flavors get soaked up by the cake.

Nom time!

* I got this 14 oz can of coconut milk, and I thought, "What the hey, I'll just pour the remainder of the can on top of the cake too!" But the lesson learned is that this makes it too "coconuty." So don't do it!

Tonkotsu Ramen With Braised Pork Belly

2012-01-14T06:00:00.000-08:00

I basically have nothing great going on in my life so I made tonkotsu ramen with homemade broth. Tonkotsu ramen is pork bone ramen; that is, ramen noodle floating in broth made from freaking pork bones. Do not be confused with tonkatsu which is a pork cutlet which I have no idea how to make.

In addition to the broth, I also made Japanese braised pork belly to go with the ramen. Through my research, I've found out that there's a version of braised pork belly in every single Asian cuisine. I've only had Vietnamese braised pork belly and the Chinese twice-cooked bacon.

So the broth first. I followed the recipe from Tess's Japanese Kitchen.

I got the following items:

One pig's foot! About two pounds. Ask the butcher to slice it into small pieces for you. If you go to the Asian market, you can get this for less than $2/lb or something ridiculously cheap like that.

A piece of pork neck bone. Same tips as the pig's foot. It doesn't look like bones there, but believe me, there were bones with pieces of meat pathetically attached.

Boil the foot and the neck bone with about 10 pieces of chicken wings.

Boil until all of the brown gunk and junk get separated from the bones (about 5 minutes on rolling boil would do).

Drain and rinse with cold water.

Return the foot, neck bone, and wings back to the pot. Add in 1 onions (quartered), 1 leek, and a chunk of smashed up ginger.

Oops. I forgot that you can add a few pieces of seaweed, too.

Pour in enough water to cover everything and bring to a boil. Then lower the heat to simmer and let the thing sit on the stove for 7 hours. As you can see, my pot is teeny tiny so I made do with the amount of water. Occasionally, I checked the water level and added in more.

After 7 hours, do this set up: giant bowl, strainer, then cheesecloth, or in my case, two pieces of Viva paper towels. Pour the broth through and strain the broth.

Note: I did not get paid for mentioning Viva, but I will tell you that they are the best paper towels I've ever used. They're like pieces of soft soft cloth.

It got a little sloppy at the end...

Et, voila! Fresh pee! Just kidding, IT'S PORK BONE BROTH! I actually got about 8 cups of broth (about twice what you see there) in the end. By the way, if your pee somehow looks cloudy like this, it's NOT normal, please consult a doctor because you're probably dying of some horrible disease. Okay, fine, I kid about that last part, too. But really, go see a freaking doctor!

Note 1: notice that I did not add any salt to the broth. This served as my "base" broth so that it'll stay "pure" for whatever usage I might have later besides making ramen.

Note 2: I made the broth a couple of days ahead of the final ramen day, so I kept it in tupperware in the freezer.

Note 3: I carefully stripped the bones of whatever meat is left to save the meat for later use. However, I sneaked in a taste and the meat was very very bland and dry. That is understandable since it sat in boiling water for 7 hours, so all of the fat and flavors were lost to the broth. However, I think if I drench it with BBQ sauce, it'd be edible.

Now onto the pork belly part. Helen sent me this recipe which was the one I used.

One pound pork belly, cut into strips about 1" thick.

Brown all sides with some oil.

Throw in some sliced ginger from a chunk about 1" long. Also add in a tablespoon of ginger garlic paste. Stir around quickly.

Toss in 3 tablespoons of sugar. Stir and flip and do whatever you can to coat the pork pieces with sugar. You will see a bunch of these photos because they were too pretty not to share.

The recipe said to add sake but I didn't have any, so I just added enough water to cover the pork plus about 1/4 cup of soy sauce and 2 star anise! Your kitchen should smell like heaven. I let that thing stew for 2 hours.

Dude!

Duuuuuuuuuuuuuuuude! I sliced each pieces into three thinner pieces.

These are the vegetables to be included in my ramen: Shanghai bok hearts (that's what the grocery store named them), watercress, chives, chive blossoms, and enoki mushrooms.

Some fish cakes. I did not make these.

Here's the tricky part.

1. Scoop out about 4 tablespoons of the fatty brothy watery stuff from your pork belly pot into a large bowl (you can add more later if you want). In another large pot, start heating your pork bone broth.

2. Cook some ramen. Use a slotted spoon to scoop out the noodles and add them to your large bowl of pork belly broth.

3. Use the same water to flash boil the vegetables. Remove vegetables from boiling water and add to the bowl of ramen.

4. Layer on top the sliced pork belly and fish cakes.

5. This is when your pork bone broth should begin to boil like mad. Ladle the pork bone broth into the large bowl of everything.

6. Add a dollop of chili garlic if you like.

7. Stir it up to mix well. Eat like a true fatty.

I know this sounds really complicated and filled with crazy steps, but they're really not. I will demonstrate this with the condensed recipe version that you can print out without my silly pictures.

Tonkotsu broth
Braised pork belly

My verdict of the whole ordeal? We all have our lazy days where we just want to cook top ramen with some vegetables and an egg for extra flair. Fair enough. I do that often. However, if you have time or nothing going on in your life like me, I suggest you make this at least once. The end result is freaking awesome(!) and it's a nice experience to learn to make stock and braise bacon.

Thumbprint Cookies

2012-01-07T21:20:00.000-08:00

These jam filled cookies are one of my favorites! Someone brought these cookies to our Christmas party and I had to make my own! I was too shy to ask this person for their recipe, so I found one from Land O'Lake Butter. :)

Ingredients:
1 cup butter, room temperature
2/3 cup granulated sugar
1/2 teaspoon almond extract
2 cups flour
Jam of your choice

Instructions:
1. Preheat your oven to 350 degrees. Mix butter, sugar, and almond extract together until well blended.

2. Get rid of your mixer or whisk or whatever you're using. It's time to get your hands dirty. Pour in the flour and mix with your hands until it's well blended and no more visible clumps of flour. I couldn't get you a picture because my hands were a mess and I was too lazy to wash them. The finished mixture will be very dry and crumbly, but don't worry!

3. Roll the dough into 1" diameter balls and place them 2" apart.

4. Using your thumb, smoosh the center of the balls! This is super fun! The edges of your cookie will be crumbly, but this gives it a nice texture and I like it. If you don't, you can smooth it out.

5. Fill each thumbprint with 1/4 teaspoon of jam. I used boysenberry jam. :D

6. Bake for 14 to 18 minutes or until edges are lightly browned. Let stand 1 minute on cookie sheets; remove to wire cooling rack.

These were so good, I ate 6 of them straight off the baking sheet. I am terrible, I know. If you really want to go crazy, you can sprinkle a bit of sugar on top of the cookies before baking so you'll get some sort of almond shortbread sugar cookie. :D

Diabetes Cookies

2011-12-31T15:12:00.000-08:00

I attempt to end this year with a post so it doesn't seem like I was such a slacker. I present to you fatty butter and sugar cookies. This is the story of my end-of-the-year baking fuck up and how I give my friends diabetes for life!

Jenny sent me this link for 12 cookies recipes for 12 days of Christmas. I decided to make the Chocolate Peppermint Sandwich Cookies. So I started with all the correct ingredients:

BUTTER!

Flour, cocoa power, baking powder, and salt. So I proceeded to cream butter and sugar, then egg and vanilla, etc.

I thought I did everything correctly, except after some times chilling in the fridge, my dough wasn't doughy. It crumbled like this.

I even made the filling with 2 more sticks of butter and 3 cups of powdered sugar.

So creamy and delicious!

Since I didn't have peppermint flavoring, I decided to use creme de menthe. It was good enough.

But what shall I do when my cookie dough is all crumbly and not working? I only have 1.5 sticks of butter left and my go-to cookie recipe needs 2.5 sticks of butter!

"But, LeTran, you can reduce the recipe." You say.
"I'm way too lazy for that!" I reply.

So I used The best homemade chocolate chip cookies in the entire world! because someone assured me that it tastes just like my go-to cookie recipe...maybe even better. Great! I only need one stick of butter.

Here's the result:

A spoonful of cream on one cookie.

...then another cookie topping it all off.

Like an Oreo cookie...only with chocolate chips instead. Oh, and yeah, with the crazy amount of pure butter and sugar on this one, it guarantees to give people diabetes. Nom!

Bonus, I made a brownie monkey "cake." It wasn't a cake, it was just a block of brownie.

Pulled Pork

2011-12-18T15:20:00.000-08:00

First off, I have a few of apologies that I need to get out of the way; but I have a peace offering in the form of a cat picture.

1. I'm so sorry for neglecting this blog.

2. I'm so sorry for not having a pretty final product photo for this recipe. The reason being is that I was getting ready for finals, so I planned to cook a pot full of pulled pork to feed myself for at least 2 or 3 days. The way it actually turned out was that when it was finished, I got so hungry that I ate all of the pork in one day. Then I spent the other days starving.

3. I'm sorry, Helen, for making you do all of the updating!

The ingredients!

- 1/2 cup (packed) of brown sugar
- 1 tablespoon cayenne pepper
- 1 tablespoon paprika
- 1/2 tablespoon mustard powder
- 1 tablespoon garlic powder
- 1 tablespoon salt

Mix them well to form a rub. Rub dub gub pub!

Slice half of a sweet onion.

Get out a big pot, throw in about 3 tablespoons of butter, melt that shit! Add the sliced onions and cook on medium heat until they're nice, soft, translucent, and aromatic. That should be about 15 minutes or so. Be sure to stir often so the onions won't burn. I think onions and butter is a match made in heaven or something because it's too delicious.

Cut up 3 lbs of pork shoulder into large cubes. Approximately 3"x3" is fine. Wash your stinky dinky dirty hands. Use those now clean hands to massage the dry rub into the pork. Imagine the pork shoulder cubes as the shoulders of your favorite lover or something and massage in the rub. Yes. Do that until the sugar is melted and the whole thing resembles a sticky mess.

Your onions and butter should be done about now.

Add the pork into the pot. Pour in enough beef broth (you can use vegetable broth if you like) to cover the pork like so.

Be adventurous, add in some spicy peppers! I think habanero peppers are super pretty. My original plan was to add two but I think I decided not to be crazy and only put in one.

See? Only one pepper!

Add in about 1/4 cup of ketchup. More if you like.

Cover with a lid and cook for 3 hours on low medium heat. My stove dial was from 1 - 10 and I cooked it on #3. Every half hour or so, I flipped the pieces around to make sure that the sides floating on top didn't get too dry.

This was what it looked like after 3 hours. I fished out the meat and shredded them with a fork. Slathered of some those tasty gravy from the pot on top and ate it plain just like that.

But if you are fancy pants and want things to be done right. You should shred the pork with a fork, add in some BBQ sauce of your choice and wedge that mess between two buns and eat like a somewhat civilized person.

Banana Cupcakes with Peanut Butter Frosting

2011-11-20T08:00:00.000-08:00

I love peanut butter and banana sandwiches; it's one of my all time favorite breakfast/snack foods. I remember when I first read about it in 3rd grade and we had to read this vampire bunny novel. The main character was making a banana peanut butter sandwich, and at first I was like, "Man, that sounds gross!" Of course I had to try it, right? And it turned out to be awesome. A few years ago I decided to add some honey on top, and it was marvelous. More recently I saw a photo from my friend where he sprinkled a bunch of cinnamon on top of it, and of course I had to try that too, and it was even more awesome! Anyways, I've decided to turn this awesomeness into cupcake form!

So where do we start? I did a quick Google search and found a recipe from Bon Appetit and Cookies and Cups. My recipe is an adaptation of these.

Ingredients:
Cupcakes
(makes 12 cupcakes)
1 1/4 cups cake flour
1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1/4 teaspoon salt
1 box of Jello banana pudding
2 very ripe large bananas, peeled
1/2 cup sour cream
1 1/2 teaspoons vanilla extract
3/4 cup brown sugar
1/2 cup (1 stick) unsalted butter, room temperature
2 large eggs

Frosting:
1-1/4 cup room temp peanut butter
8 oz room temp cream cheese
2 tbsp milk
1 tspn vanilla extract
1-1/2 cup powdered sugar

Miscellaneous:
Some honey
Some cinnamon

Directions:
Cupcakes:

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees and line your cupcake pan (with 12 liners).
2. In a large bowl, sift together dry ingredients (flour, baking powder, baking soda, and salt). Set aside.
3. In a separate bowl (or food processor), mash the bananas until ... well mashed? Stir in the sour cream and the vanilla extract until smooth.
4. In yet another bowl, cream/whip butter until fluffy. Add in the sugar and whip until well combined. Add in the eggs one at a time and beat until smooth.
5. Grab your mashed bananas and slowly add mix it into the butter/sugar mixture. Now slowly add in your flour mixture. You can mix by hand to make sure you don't overmix your flour.

The cupcake batter will be on the very thick side of batters.

6. Fill each liner with about 1/4 cup of batter. Stick it in the oven for about 20 minutes. Use a toothpick to see if your cupcakes are done. If it comes out clean, then the cupcakes are done cooking. I over filled my cupcake liners, and it took me 25 minutes until they were done.

7. Leave cupcakes in pan for about 10 minutes before taking them out and letting them cool on a rack.

Frosting:

This is pretty much the same recipe I used in the Inside Out Peanut Butter Cup cupcakes recipe. In mixer, beat peanut butter and cream cheese until fluffy and combined. Add in milk and vanilla extract. Mix in powdered sugar. You may not need to use all the powdered sugar so add it a little at 1/2 cup at a time until it reaches your desired consistency and/or sweetness. Also, just a fair warning, you're going to have A LOT of frosting.

Miscellaneous:

After your cupcakes have cooled, get our your piping bag and tips and frost the cupcakes. After they've been frosting, sprinkle a little bit of cinnamon on each of them and drizzle some honey.

... AND YOU'RE DONE!

Spicy Italian Sausage & Lentil Soup

2011-11-16T08:00:00.000-08:00

I was talking to the Chopping Block about lentil soup earlier and how we find it rather bland. So I decided to try to liven this soup up with some spice and lots and lots of meat. Okay, so maybe this is more like a hearty sausage soup with a dash of lentils, but whatever, it's all good. I made this soup twice, once with some Italian sausages from the butcher and once with some pre-cooked sausages from the deli aisle. I recommend the butcher stuff. The photo above was with the pre-cooked stuff.

So I did some internet sleuthing and came upon recipes from My Baking Addiction, Martha Stewart, and Epicurious, which I used as a guideline to making my first batch of lentil soup.

Ingredients
1 1/2 cups lentils, picked over and rinsed
1 lb spicy Italian sausage, casing removed
3 strips (3 ounces) bacon, cut into 1/2-inch pieces
1 tablespoon saved bacon fat
1 large onion, chopped
3 medium carrots, peeled, and diced
1 cup chopped celery
3 garlic cloves, minced
3 diced tomatoes
4 cups chicken broth
1/2 teaspoon dried thyme
2 bay leaves
1/2 teaspoon cumin
1/2 teaspoon ground ginger
1/2 teaspoon graham marsala
1 tablespoon chopped cilantro
1 tablespoon balsamic vinegar
Coarse salt and freshly ground pepper

Mmmmmm bacon.

1. In a large bowl, cover the lentils with boiling water and allow to sit for 15 minutes. Rinse, drain, and set aside.

2. In a large pot, add the Italian sausages and brown the sausage until it is cooked through. Remove sausage and set aside.

3. In the same pot, add bacon over medium-low heat until browned and crisp, 8 to 10 minutes. Remove bacon from the pot and set aside. Save 1 tablespoon of the bacon fat and leave it in the pot.

Mmmmmm bacon & sausages.

4. Add the onions, carrots, and celery into the bacon fat, and cook until softened, about 5 minutes. Stir in garlic, and cook until fragrant, about 30 seconds. Stir in tomatoes, and cook 1 minute.

5. Add the chicken stock, sausage, bacon, drained lentils, thyme, bay leaves, cumin, ginger and graham marsala to the pot with the vegetables, cover, and bring to a boil. Reduce the head to low and simmer until lentils are tender, about 30 minutes. So you may think adding ginger is kind of weird, right? Well, my mom really likes adding ginger to all sorts of soups, and it's always turned out fine & dandy for her, so why not? And what's with this graham marsala, right? What's that doing in there? The Chopping Block said you mostly just like her lentils in a curry, so we decided that adding some graham marsala will help liven the soup up.

Lentils!

Lentils & meat!

6. Scoop out about 1/3 of the soup (make sure not to get any sausage or bacon in here) and put into a blender to puree. Mix it back in with the rest of the soup. This part is kind of hard because there's meat EVERYWHERE. It took me a while (~5 minutes?) to sort out the lentils from the meat. So then when I made a second batch of lentil soup, I decided to put the sausages in AFTER the lentil were done, but I don't recommend this because then the soup lacks some of the flavor from the sausages.

7. Stir in vinegar. Taste the soup and adjust as necessary with some salt and pepper.

This was how the first batch of soup looked like.

This was my second batch of soup where I topped the soup with the sausage instead of cooking it with the soup.

I know this doesn't look great, but I swear it was super tasty! I made like 16 cups of soup in two days, and it was gone in a matter of minutes!

Pumpkin Ginger Cupcakes with Ginger Cream Cheese Frosting

2011-11-11T14:00:00.000-08:00

Remember my last pumpkin cake post? Well I finally got myself a cupcake mold and a piping bag! Yay! Since it's still Fall, I wanted to make more pumpkin stuff! So like a few days ago over at My Baking Addiction, Jamie posted these cupcakes that sounded awesome! So that's what we have today, some awesome pumpkin ginger cupcakes.

Ingredients:
1/3 cup finely chopped crystallized ginger I used "Ginger Chews"
1/4 cup water
2 cups all-purpose flour
1 (3.4 ounce) package instant butterscotch pudding mix
2 teaspoons baking soda
1/2 teaspoon kosher salt
1 tablespoon ground cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon ground ginger
1/2 teaspoon ground allspice I used ground nutmeg instead
1 cup butter, room temperature
1 cup white sugar
3/4 cup light brown sugar, packed
4 large eggs
2 teaspoons pure vanilla extract
1 (15 ounce) can pumpkin puree

For the Cream Cheese Frosting
16 ounces cream cheese, softened to room temperature
1 1/2 - 2 pounds confectioners’ sugar, sifted
1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract
ginger syrup from above recipe

1. So I didn't find any "candied ginger" at my local Safeway Grocery store, but I found some Ginger Chews at Trader Joes. So ginger chews are different than candied ginger, as it turns out. I recommend sticking to some crystalized/candied ginger instead of the ginger candy I got.

You want to put your ginger pieces in 1/4 cup of water and put it in the microwave on high for two minutes. Set aside. You're going to reserve the liquid for the frosting later.

2. Sift the dry ingredients (flour, pudding mix, baking soda, salt, cinnamon, ground ginger and allspice) into a bowl and set aside.

3. Beat the butter and sugars until light and fluffy, about 2 minutes. Beat in eggs one at a time until thoroughly incorporated. Add in vanilla and pumpkin puree beating until combined, scraping the sides of the bowl as needed.

4. Gradually add in the flour mixture, mixing until just combined, scraping sides of bowl as needed. Beat it on low so you don't over mix your flour. I just mixed it by hand.

5. Use a small mesh sieve to strain the ginger from the sugar syrup. Keep syrup for cream cheese frosting. Mince the ginger and use a rubber spatula to gently fold it into the batter. So with the TJ Ginger Chews, they just melted into the syrup... so I have no pieces of ginger in my cupcakes. :(

6. Using a large cookie scoop (3 tablespoons) divide the batter between the prepared muffin wells. As you can see from the photo below, the batter is super thick, and a little difficult to fill the liners.

7. Bake in the preheated oven for 20-22 minutes or until golden and the tops spring back when lightly pressed. Cool in the pans for about 10 minutes before removing to cool completely on a wire rack.

8. Cream together room temperature cream cheese until the texture becomes creamy. With the mixer of low, slowly add the confectioners’ sugar until thoroughly incorporated and smooth. Add vanilla and ginger syrup and mix to combine.

9. Frost your cupcakes!

Garlic Horseradish Mashed Potatoes

2011-11-07T07:00:00.000-08:00

You know what I love? The Cheesecake Factory. I know, I know. The Cheesecake Factory is probably the worst food in the world, but who can resist their avocado eggroll appetizer or their delicious cheesecakes? You know what is one of my favorite things from them? Their mashed potatoes. With a little snooping around the internet, I found a little recipe (that I've adjusted) just floating around on a whole bunch of different sites. There seems to be some mixed reviews, but I can honestly say that this mashed potato recipe comes pretty darn close!

Ingredients
3 lbs of red potatoes
1 stick of butter
1 head of garlic, roasted
2 tbs of cream
1/4 tsp horseradish
1/2 tsp parsley
Lots of salt

1. A head of garlic takes about ~40 minutes to roast, so do this first! Have the oven heated to 400 degrees. Peel the papery skin off the garlic (while keeping the head whole). Chop off the top of the garlic, and make sure to get all the gloves. This will make it a lot easier to get the garlic out. Place the head of garlic on some foil and pour like a tablespoon of olive oil over it. Ball up the foil and toss it into the oven.
2. Once the roast garlic is done, take it out and pop out those little suckers. I added some sea salt over them in the photo below.

3. While the garlic was roasting, you could clean your cute little potatoes and quarter them. Put them in a pot of water and bring to a boil. Turn the heat to low and let them boil for about 20 minutes or when you can easily stick a fork into the potatoes.

4. Once the potatoes are soft, drain out the water. Drop in the stick of butter into the pot of potatoes and mash away. Add in the cream, garlic, horseradish, parsley, and salt. Mash, mash, mash!

Pretty tasty! Honestly, I think that the garlic and horseradish was too subtle, so if I were to make it next time, I'll definitely double those two ingredients.

Beef Chuck Pot Roast

2011-11-03T01:03:00.000-07:00

(Image courtesy of The Chopping Block)

The Chopping Block has been really nice to me (strange, right), so in return I invited her over for dinner along with our friend Brendan and my neighbor Chris. My sister and I went grocery shopping, and we got this four pound beef chuck, which is perfect for a beautiful pot roast!

I've been very impatiently waiting to try out this recipe from America's Test Kitchen for almost a year now. I've made it before but not exactly following the recipe completely. So this time, I tried to follow it as closely as I felt possible.

Ingredients:

3 ½ to 4 pound boneless beef chuck-eye roast, pulled into two pieces at natural seam and trimmed of large knobs of fat
kosher salt
2 tablespoons unsalted butter
2 medium onions, halved and sliced thin (about 2 cups) I used one onion only
1 large carrot, chopped medium (about 1 cup)
1 celery rib, chopped medium (about 3/4 cup)
2 medium garlic cloves, minced or pressed through garlic press (about 2 teaspoons)
1 cup beef broth, plus 1 to 2 cups for sauce I used Chicken broth instead
½ cup dry red wine, plus 1/4 cup for sauce I omitted the alcohol
1 tablespoon tomato paste I used two Roma tomatoes instead
1 bay leaf
1 sprig plus 1/4 teaspoon chopped fresh thyme leaves
ground black pepper
1 tablespoon balsamic vinegar

1. Sprinkle pieces of trimmed meat with 1 tablespoon salt and let stand at room temperature 1 hour.
2. Adjust oven rack to lower-middle position and heat oven to 300 degrees.
3. Heat butter in heavy-bottomed Dutch oven over medium heat. When foaming subsides, add onions and cook, stirring occasionally, until softened and beginning to brown, 8 to 10 minutes. Add carrot and celery; continue to cook, stirring occasionally, for 5 minutes longer. Add garlic and cook until fragrant, about 30 seconds. Stir in 1 cup broth, ½ cup wine, tomato paste, bay leaf, and thyme sprig; bring to simmer.

4. Pat beef dry with paper towels and season generously with pepper. Using some kitchen twine, tie each piece of meat into loaf shape for even cooking. I am not that talented in this area, and my loaves were pretty sloppy. Oh well!

5. Nestle meat on top of vegetables. Cover pot tightly with large piece of foil and cover with lid; transfer pot to oven. Cook beef until fully tender and sharp knife easily slips in and out of meat, 3½ to 4 hours, turning halfway through cooking.

6. Transfer roasts to cutting board and tent loosely with foil. Apparently I was supposed to strain the broth liquid through mesh strainer and discard bay leaf and thyme sprig before transferring to a blender. Opps! I just measured about four cups of vegetables, broth, and balsamic vinegar and blended everything together. Then I poured the sauce over the sliced meat!

Although this looks like a long post, the actual cooking of the pot roast is super easy. It's just time consuming (four hours of baking!).

Pumpkin Cake with Cream Cheese Glaze

2011-10-05T19:53:00.000-07:00

Oh my god! It's that time of year again! That time of year when you walk into your grocery store, and it's stocked with pumpkins! Can you help but buy a ton of pumpkin (and pumpkin related groceries)? I think not! And if you can resist, there is something wrong with you, my friend. Last year around this time of year I made a pumpkin loaf with Iva. This time it's a cake instead of bread! Yay!

Mmmm. Pumpkin.

So I bought a can of pumpkin and I was considering making a different pumpkin bread, but the I came across Smitten Kitchen's pumpkin cupcakes recipe, and I just had to make it! Of course I varied the recipe a little because I didn't exactly have everything it called for... like a cupcake pan. Oops. So I made a cake instead. :D

Ingredients:

1 stick unsalted butter, room temperature, plus more for greasing pans
1 cup firmly packed dark-brown sugar
1/3 cup granulated sugar
2 cups cake flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1 teaspoon ground ginger (I didn't have this on hand. :|)
1/2 teaspoon ground nutmeg
1/8 teaspoon ground cloves (I also do not like cloves, so it was also omitted.)
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper (This sounded too weird, so it was also omitted.)
2 large eggs
1/2 cup buttermilk mixed with 1 teaspoon vanilla
1 1/4 cups canned solid-pack pumpkin (I used almost the entire 15 oz can, which is like 1/2 cup more than needed)

1. Preheat the oven to 350° (175°C).

2. From reading all my food blogs, a nifty trick to get your butter to room temperature is to use a microwave. Heat up the butter for 10 seconds and then turn it. Do that until the butter is softened. But... if you are a prepared person who took the butter out an hour beforehand, you can skip that step! Beat the butter and sugars on medium speed until fluffy. Add the two eggs one at a time.

Your mixture should look kind of like this:

3. Combine all your dry ingredients. I like to sift my flour while I'm adding it into the mixture. You want to alternate adding the flour and milk mixtures, beginning and ending with the flour. Beat in the pumpkin until smooth.

This photo was pre-pumpkin.

4. Spray (or butter) your 9" spring form pan. Pour batter in it, and gently level.

5. If you're using a 9" spring form pan, it takes about 35 minutes to bake through. Do check with a toothpick to make sure that cake is done though!

So a note here is that since this recipe is meant for cupcakes, this cake is pretty fragile (due to its size). It is suppppppper soft and delicate. I wanted to transfer it on a baking rack, but midway through my motions of lifting the cake, I decided that would be a bad idea. So I just left it in my spring form pan.

6. While the cake was baking, you can make your cream cheese frosting. In Smitten Kitchen's recipe, she's using a full on thick cream cheese frosting, but I decided to go with a cream cheese glaze. Because I am a terrible person, I don't really have exact measurements for you, but here's a list of the ingredients I did use:

1 (8-oz) block of cream cheese, softened
powdered sugar
pinch of salt
tablespoon lemon juice
milk
touch of honey

Basically I just added more milk than you would normally so it's thinner.

Here's how it looks like in a bowl:

AND THEN YOU EAT!!!!

OOooOooOooooo. Look at the steam coming off of it. Niiiiiiiiiice.

So onto a more "personal" note, I'm no longer shooting photos with my phone! Huzzah! Did you guys notice?! I just got a Canon 40D, and it's my first SLR camera, so bare with me as I learn how to use it! :D

Pizza Dough

2011-09-26T16:07:00.000-07:00

I've been baking a lot of pizza lately because it turns out that making pizza is really easy. Seriously! All it takes is time, so plan ahead. It'll at least an hour for your dough to rise. The recipes say that you can refrigerate the dough overnight and use it the next day as well.

I've made a few different different including one from Simply Recipes and one from Epicurious. It's all pretty much the same. It's always the same ingredients, just in different proportions. Today I'm showing you one from Epicurious.

Ingredients:
3/4 cup warm water (105°F to 115°F)
1 envelope active dry yeast
2 cups (or more) all purpose flour
1 teaspoon sugar
3/4 teaspoon salt
3 tablespoons olive oil
herb seasonings (optional)

1. Pour 3/4 cup warm water into food processor. Stir in yeast and sugar. I used brown sugar, but it really doesn't matter. Let stand until yeast dissolves, about 5 minutes. I decided to use a food processor because it's SO MUCH easier. Whenever I mixed the dough by hand, I always lose about 1/3 of the dough because it's stuck to my hand. With the food processor, everything is really tidy.

Your yeast will rise slightly like above.

2. Dump in the flour, salt, olive oil, and any additional seasonings into the yeast.

3. Pulse the mixture in your food processor. At first you're going to think you need more water, but stop! Don't add more water. Your dough will come together soon enough.

See how clean that is? There's no dough stuck anywhere, just a nice awesome ball of dough.

4. Oil up the ball of dough with some additional olive oil and place it in a bowl. Put plastic wrap on it to make sure all of it is covered, if you don't, a skin will form around the dough. I preheated my oven at 200 degrees for about five minutes just to make sure the oven is warm. Then I turned it off. I just wanted a nice warm place for the dough to rise for an hour. You can put it anywhere that's warm.

5. After an hour, your dough would look like this:

Now comes the fun part. Punch it down! Don't worry, it's fun!

6. I suggest working on a floured surface and use a rolling pin to roll out your dough.

After rolling it out, you might want to brush on a little bit of olive oil onto the crust, but whatever! Do what you want. Top it with whatever your favorite toppings are. Put it in the oven for like 20 minutes at 400 degrees.

I made a thick bready crust pizza and a normal thin-ish crust pizza.

Glutinous Rice Balls

2011-09-13T19:00:00.000-07:00

What is a glutinous rice ball? It's a chewy ball of dough that's filled with sweet sweet awesomeness. In Chinese they're called Tong Yuen (Cantonese) or I guess Tang Yuan (Mandarin). "Tong" means soup and "yuen" means round. You can read about them in this Wikipedia page.

I came across this post on Serious Eats earlier this year, and I have wanted some since then. My mom used to make these from time to time when I was younger, but she hasn't made them in 15 years, and I've totally forgotten about them until now! The version I'm going to make is going to be my mom's version instead of the Serious Eats one, which is more "traditional" (I think). I'm not sure since I've only ever eaten my mom's tongyuen (and I guess mine too).

Ingredients:
(this makes enough for three people)
1 1/2 cups glutinous rice flour
2 tablespoons regular rice flour or tapioca starch
1 cup warm water
Chopped up brown sugar slabs
Salt

I walked four miles to Chinatown to get this stuff! It's exactly the same packaging as I remembered when I was little. The flour was $0.75 each and the sugar was $0.99 (no tax in Chinatown, yay). I remember when they used to be like 55 cents! :O Sorry, this is totally a nostalgic post.

1. First thing you want to do is to chop up your sugar slab into small little cubes. You're going to use these as the filling.

2. Now mix the dry ingredients together. Add half cup of water and mix. Now carefully add a little bit more water. You want to get it so the dough sticks together but is dry and easy to work with. If you use the whole cup of water, your dough will be too wet.

It should be something like this consistency.

3. Traditionally, you'd roll out the dough into a long 1" diameter rope and then chop off 1" pieces, but I'm lazy and I just pulled off pieces of dough from my bowl. I rolled them into balls and then pushed my brown sugar into them and then rolled them into balls again. You want to dust your working surface with rice flour so it doesn't stick. I like to pack my little balls with as much brown sugar as it can hold. :) You can make them as big or as small as you want, so don't worry too much about size. I actually like them smaller.

4. While you're making your little balls of dough, bring some water to a boil. Once the water's boiling, turn it down to medium heat. When you're done with the filling, dump the balls into the hot water. You want to stir it around immediately so it won't stick to the bottom of your pot (or together). You want to boil them until they float to the top.

5. According to Serious Eats, you just eat it with the soup it was boiled with, but there are many variations. I think a popular one is a ginger syrup, but in my version, we're going to just add salt to the "soup" or you can make more hot water. What? My tongyuen is already sweet, the salty soup makes for a nice contrast. ... and it's how my mom makes it.

I tried filling some of these with a coarsely chopped peanut, sugar, and coconut flake filling, and bleh. It was awful. The peanuts tasted like boiled peanuts, which I guess is what it is.

Mac 'n Cheese

2011-09-10T10:00:00.000-07:00

I invited the Chopping Block over for dinner, and I made her some macaroni and cheese! I also served it with some sweet carrot mash, some cornbread (with corn kernels hidden inside), and some barbecue ribs.

Recipe was adapted from the Pioneer Woman and Smitten Kitchen. This is more like a classic macaroni and cheese recipe, but you can always get fancier with some bacon or fried eggs. Almost Bourdain's macaroni and cheese has mushrooms, onions, and bacon!

Ingredients:
1/2 stick unsalted butter, plus more for casserole
Bread crumbs (I used panko)
2 cups milk
1/4 cup all-purpose flour
2 teaspoons coarse salt, plus more for water (for boiling macaroni)
2 teaspoons (heaping) Dry Mustard
1 teaspoon of ground nutmeg
1 teaspoon of freshly ground black pepper
1 teaspoon of teaspoon cayenne pepper
1 teaspoon of dried thyme (or fresh Thyme)
1 teaspoon of seasoned salt
1 cup grated Gruyère
1-1/2 cups grated cheddar cheese (for sauce)
1/2 cup additional grated cheddar cheese (for topping)
8 oz elbow macaroni

1. Boil water with some salt and a dash of oil. Once water comes to a boil, throw in your elbow macaroni. You don't want to cook it all the way through since we're going to be baking it for another 20-30 minutes later. So you want it cooked on the outside and underdone on the inside. Transfer the macaroni to a colander, rinse under cold running water, and drain well.
2. In a microwave-safe bowl, melt the butter. Stir in the flour until well combined. Heat up a saucepan, and cook the mixture for about a minute. Pour in the milk and whisk everything together. Continue to whisk the mixture until it's bubbling and thickened. Remove from heat.
3. Add all your seasoning into the sauce. Whisk until well combined. Now whisk in the 1-1/2 cup of cheddar and all the Gruyere cheese until it's a nice uniform sauce (where all the cheese has melted). You want to taste your cheese sauce now to make sure you've added enough seasoning. Adjust if necessary.
4. Mix your pasta into the cheese sauce. Mix well.
5. Pour the mixture into a greased casserole dish. Sprinkle the remaining 1/2 cup of cheddar cheese and enough breadcrumbs to cover the top. Bake until golden brown, about 20-30 minutes. Let the mac 'n cheese rest for 5 minutes before serving.

The reason I mixed the flour and butter in a separate bowl is because I was afraid I was going to burn it, but if you're a pro at this, it's okay to do it all in the pan and skip the microwave.

Nice thick bubbly sauce (after step #2).

Creamy cheesy sauce (after step #3).

Step #4! I actually had a very high sauce to pasta ratio, so I added more pasta to it (maybe 10 oz total).

And dinner is ready!

Now you get a bunch of fatties to help you eat all this food! The "barbecue" ribs were made in the oven following this recipe. You get a really nice onion chutney after everything is baked, and you practically don't even need additional barbecue sauce!

White Cake with Lemon Curd and Cream Cheese Frosting

2011-09-07T15:15:00.000-07:00

Following up on the lemon curd post, we're going to use it to make a cake! A delicious lemony cake!

I got the recipe off of Epicurious, which I made some adjustments to since their recipe was for a giant cake, and I am only making a small little itty bitty cake.

Ingredients:
1-1/4 sticks of unsalted butter, softened (plus additional for greasing pans)
2-1/4 cups cake flour, sifted (plus additional for dusting pans)
1 teaspoon baking powder
pinch of salt
3/4 cup milk (whole preferred)
1/2 tablespoon vanilla extract
1 cup sugar
4 large eggs, whites and yolks divided
pinch of cream of tartar (optional)

I separated the ingredients into four sections:

I snuck in some cream of tartar to help stiffen the egg whites, but you don't have to.

1. Arrange oven rack in middle position and preheat oven to 350°F. Butter cake pans and line bottom of each with round of parchment. Butter paper, then dust pans with flour, knocking out excess.

2. In large bowl, whisk together flour, baking powder, and salt. In small bowl, combine milk and vanilla.

3. In bowl of electric mixer fitted with paddle attachment, beat together butter and sugar on moderate speed until light and fluffy, about 5 minutes. Reduce speed to low. Add 1/2 of flour mixture and beat until just combined. Add milk mixture and beat until just combined. Add remaining flour mixture and beat until just combined, then raise speed to moderately high and beat 10 seconds. Transfer to large bowl.

4. In clean bowl of electric mixer fitted with the whisk attachment, beat egg whites (and cream of tartar) until they hold stiff peaks.

5. Fold 1/3 of egg whites into batter to lighten. Gently fold in remaining 2/3 of egg whites until just incorporated. Divide batter between prepared pans and smooth tops.

6. Bake cakes until tops are springy to touch and testers come out clean, about 30 minutes for 6-inch cake, 45 minutes for 9-inch cake, and 60 minutes for 12-inch cake. Cool cakes in pans on racks 30 minutes. Turn out cakes onto racks, peel off parchment, and cool cakes completely.

This is the batter after step 3!

The cake cooling in it's pan waiting to be transfered to the cooling rack!

As for the cream cheese frosting... It's just a block of soften cream cheese that's been beaten until fluffy and then add powdered sugar and cream until you get the texture you want. Maybe throw in some vanilla extract. Easy peasy. You don't even need a recipe. I made the Chopping Block whip up the frosting. :D

To assemble the cake, slice the cakes to however many layers you desire. I wanted five layers, so I made five layers. Put down a layer of cake, top with lemon curd, stack another layer of cake and repeat. Then you frost the whole thing with your cream cheese frosting! The Chopping Block and I got a little crazy with the piping tips, but it was so fun! She's a great cake froster! She made a "crumb" layer and everything. I'm telling you, she's super fancy.

Lemon Curd

2011-09-02T00:44:00.000-07:00

Finally! A post after an entire month! I'm sure you've been wondering what I've been up to, right? Well, I drove my little Honda Fit across country from Pittsburgh, PA back to San Francisco (with my two cats)! I reunited with Gandalf except now Gandalf and Megatron don't get along. My mom also fell in love with Gandalf (as well as Furious), and so Gandalf has become my mom's cat. So that's the update!

So what I have for today is this delicious lemon curd recipe from David Lebovitz. I've made this a couple of times, and it's always fantastic! Not a single change needs to be made. Before we start, I'm going to warn you that we're not going to use a double boiler, which I think is pretty freaking awesome. As David Lebovitz says, we're going to be dare-devils today.

Ingredients:
1/2 cup (125 ml) freshly-squeezed lemon juice (about two lemons)
finely grated zest of one lemon (optional)
1/3 cup (65 g) sugar
2 large egg yolks
2 large eggs
pinch of salt
6 tablespoons (85 g) unsalted butter, cubed

1. Zest your lemon (if using).
2. Juice your lemons! Depending on the lemons, I get about 1/2 cup of lemon juice. There's no need to be exact!
3. Add your juice, zest, sugar, eggs, egg yolks, and salt into your (cold) sauce pan. Whisk everything together until it's well combined. Throw in your cubed butter.
4. Turn on your heat to low until the butter is melted.
5. Now turn your heat to high! Whisk continuously! You don't want a flan! Once your curd starts bubbling, it should also thicken up enough to cover the back of your spoon (or whisk). Then you're done!
6. Let cool and refrigerate. The colder it gets, the thicker it becomes.

I found this zester on the sidewalk next to the dumpster. Another man's trash is another man's treasure, right? The Chopping Block said a homeless man probably used this zester for his bunions before I picked it up. Oh well! On a serious note, this zester grates really fine zest.

Squeeze, squeeze, squeeze! Almost half a cup is good enough! I left all the zest and some pulp in here.

So once everything's cooked, the curd is still a little thin. See how it doesn't really coat my whisk? That's completely okay! Also, if you want, now's the time to run your curd through a cheese cloth to remove all the zest and pulp. I didn't do this because I think the finely grated zest and pulp adds character/texture to my curd, and I kind of like that, but you should do whatever feels right for you!

This is how the curd looks like after you've chilled it overnight. It's really thick now!

So what do you use lemon curd with? Tons of stuff! I've made this Trifle a few times (with raspberries and strawberries), and it's wonderful. I've also mixed it in with some greek yogurt! You can pretty much put it onto whatever you want!

Potato-less New England Clam Chowder

2011-07-19T19:01:00.000-07:00

You know what I hate? Potatoes in my clam chowder. Seriously! I always feel like I'm getting ripped off when I get a bowl full of potatoes with one or two clams, and because of that, I started to hate potatoes in my chowder. That delicious starchy vegetable has become a bane in my side, so I decided to get rid of it completely. You heard me right. Blasphemy.

So sometimes I feel like a renegade because I am too lazy to look up recipes. I made this chowder purely on my instinct on what should be in it, and it turns out that I'm pretty much unprecedented. Hmmm. Oh well! I think it turned out super duper delicious; in fact one of the better chowders I've had.

Ingredients:
1 carrot
4 stalks celery
3/4 onion (any kind)
1/2 large tomato
1 bay leaf
3 cloves garlic
1 chicken breast
1 cup of water
1 10-oz can of baby clams
2 strips of bacon (reserve rendered fat)
4-5 tablespoons of flour
1.5 cups milk (whole or 2% preferred)
1 teaspoon red wine vinegar

1. Place carrot, 2 stalks of celery, tomato, garlic, bay leaf, and chicken beast in with water and clam juice (from your can of clams). Add some salt and pepper (you can add more later). Bring to a boil, and then turn it down to a simmer for 30 minutes or until your carrot is tender. (You're making a vegetable & chicken broth.)
2. Cook two slices of bacon on medium heat. I find that if you cut them into tiny pieces before frying, they pieces are more crispy than if you were to crumble it after you've cooked the strip, but then the fat is harder to separate from the bacon pieces. Reserve the rendered fat in a bowl.
3. Slice the celery and dice the onion. Cook them together in the same pan you cooked the bacon in and drizzle with as much bacon grease as you want. The more bacon grease, the more bacon-y your chowder will be.
4. Now I drained the soup stock from the vegetables and meat. You just want the stock. I temporarily stored the stock in a smaller sauce pan.
5. In the pot that you were first using for the soup stock, dump your celery and onions (with some more bacon grease) into it. Once it's heated through, make your roux by dumping your flour in and stirring. Now pour your soup stock back in and stir, stir, stir. Heat until soup boils.
6. Pour in your milk and your clams. You just want to heat it through. Add in your red wine vinegar. Now it's time to eat!

_________________________________

I really just had to get rid of some chicken breast because I have a giant Costco bag of chicken and I move in two weeks! Although I do think the fresh vegetable/chicken broth is what really makes the soup. It gives the chowder a sweet taste.

I made this soup twice. This was the first stock, much messier, right? :)

Mmmm. Bacon!

>< My stove is so dirty! I don't know what happened! But but but you can see my rendered bacon fat off to the side. NICE!

I didn't really know how to properly make a roux, so the first time I did it, I mixed it in with the vegetables because I was afraid that I was going to get little dumplings in my soup (from clumpy chunks of flour), but that didn't happen! Phew!

I went to Panera and they ran out of their French baguette, and I was so disappointed! I had to get this other bread, and it did not go well with the chowder... So I just ate the soup by itself!

Japanese Curry

2011-07-13T23:15:00.000-07:00

I think I picked up on another craze in addition to the burger craze. It's curry!

Being a weirdo, I've never really had Japanese curry before. That is, it has never crossed my mind to order curry when sitting at a Japanese restaurant. I had, however, tried a spoon or two of the curry off someone else's order. It had never strike me as good enough that I would pass ordering sushi for curry, so I continued to eat just sushi to meet my Japanese food requirement. Stupid, I know. That's just like only eat phở and say that I always eat Vietnamese food. Silly me.

To rectify this problem, I made Japanese curry found over at No Recipes. Don't worry, he provides recipes.

It all starts with some onions and carrots. The recipe said 2 onions, but that seems a little crazy to me so I only used 1 onion and 4 small carrots.

"Pureed" half a large apple because the recipe called for a small apple.

I caramelized the onions with 1 tablespoon of butter and a bit of olive oil on medium heat while I cut 2 lbs of chicken into cubes. I used skinless and boneless chicken thighs.

I also chopped up 1/2 of a kabocha squash and 1/2 a head of cauliflower.

When the onions are caramelized, I added the chicken into the pot to brown them all over.

When the chicken bits were all browned and pretty, I added 4 cups of water, the carrots, and the squash cubes into the pot and let that cook on medium high heat until the carrots and squash are tender. Remember to skim off the gross fatty stuff and foam at the top once in a while.

Time to make the roux by melting 3 tablespoons of butter. Pretty, no?

Melted butter met with 1/4 cup of flour.

The original recipe said 2 tablespoons of garam masala OR curry powder. I have both, so why not used both? I added 1 tablespoon of garam masala AND 1 tablespoon of curry powder. They got stirred really well.

Not done with the roux yet! No, sir! A bunch of chili powder (however much you can handle), a bunch of ground black pepper, 1 tablespoon of ketchup, and 1 tablespoon of tonkatsu sauce.

Put this back on the stove on medium heat and cooked until all were lumpy and started to crumble. Then it was ready to wait for the curry.

Back to the main pot, I added the cauliflower and my apple "puree." Stirred.

Ready for the grande finale? I ladled out some of the broth in the main pot, mixed with the curry paste and dumped everything back into the main pot. Added a bunch of peas and simmered for about 10 minutes until everything was incorporated. Of course, I stirred very frequently because I couldn't tear myself away from the delicious pot. At this point, I decided that it was curry-y enough so I added about 1/2 a tablespoon of curry powder.

Nom!

Turkey Pesto Burgers

2011-07-08T20:50:00.000-07:00

I love turkey. I felt bad when our neighborhood had some super cute wild turkeys roaming...

I seriously fell in love with them last fall...

But cow hurts my belly... and The Guy refuses beef anyway...so I guess I should be glad i can buy it ground. 4 years of poor vegetarianism is seriously enough for a lifetime...

And while I don't have a grill, I thought "Gee 4th of July is a hotdog/hamburger holiday!" so Pesto Burgers it was!

The recipe I (roughly) followed asked for:

Ground Turkey
Basil Pesto
Garlic
Feta

My Pesto was from Trader Joe's--bought and used on pizza a month ago, but the bottle remained far from depleted. Mind, it needed to be used (hence, part of the inspiration for the burgers :P)

Garlic--I wrestled with my garlic options: fresh garlic, a jar of crushed garlic, or garlic salt. I settled for a touch of the crushed.

My feta had been bought and used for a salad almost a month ago. While the original recipe called for a precise amount, I dumped whatever I had in the remaining container.

I mixed the pesto, garlic and feta together. Then added the ground turkey. I mushed it with my hands, because that was easiest. :P

The original recipe said: "Make 4 patties" ...I got 7. So whatever.

I simmered some sliced mushrooms in olive oil and balsamic vinegar and then shoved them aside.

The burgers themselves I cooked in olive oil. Onto the burgers went: Turkey Pesto Patty, lettuce-that-needed-using-and-was-not-originially bought for burgers, tomatoes that were bought for sandwiches, sandwhich pickles, mushrooms and mustard...

if you see a pattern to my cooking, you're right. See how lazy I am?

But is was nummy and got rave reviews from The Guy and his Mother, who was our guest on the 4th :)

"Grilled" Romantic Heart

2011-07-07T20:00:00.000-07:00

The below conversation happened in Vietnamese:

My mom: Do you want some lettuce?
Me: What kind of lettuce?
My mom: Your favorite lettuce, remember? [in English] heart romantic!

That was how my mom referred to hearts of Romaine. It's incredibly cute. From now on, I'm going to call Romaine lettuce heart romantic lettuce instead.

Let me tell you about a silly little love affair between the beautiful and delicate Heart Romantic Lettuce and the bad bad Delicious Bacon boy who stopped the sweet lettuce in her track via a heart attack.

Once upon a time, there was this beautiful Heart Romantic Lettuce dressed in layers upon layers of beautiful frilly tulle. She met a boy called Delicious Bacon who made her heart fluttered like butterfly wings on a warm spring day (because his fats clogged her arteries with love).

Unfortunately, beautiful Heart Romantic Lettuce met the Evil Knife and Teeth wielder a.k.a. me! I cut off her hard base and sliced her in half, length-wise. Mwhahahah!

To make the poor Heart Romantic Lettuce suffer even more, I drizzled her splayed body with 1 tablespoon of olive oil and gave the balsamic vinegar bottle a few rigorous shakes. Some salts were sprinkled into the wound. And to further mutilate this beautiful thing, I popped her into the oven, turned it on BROIL - low for 5 minutes.

Meanwhile, the Delicious Bacon lover rushed to his beautiful Heart Romantic with all the speed he could muster. Even for someone who consisted of 80% fat, Delicious Bacon was surprisingly fast. He collected quite a few black pepper bugs on the way (because he was moving so fast). Too bad Delicious Bacon's fat ass was no match for the Evil Knife and Teeth Wielder and he was cooked slowly medium high heat.

"Slow cook that shit!" screamed the Evil One gleefully.

Once the fat on Delicious Bacon boy had made enough sweet sizzling music to the Evil One's ears, he was removed from his pool of fat and his dried up body laid on a piece of pristine paper towel.

But no! The Evil Knife and Teeth Wielder was not satisfied! She pulled out her knife and chopped him up like a wood chipper.

The Evil One decided that 5 minutes on low broil wasn't enough of a torture, so she switched the broiling to "high" for another 2 minutes. With a twisted mind like this Evil One, she decided to throw the tragic lovers together on a plate and annihilated their love with her sharp teeth.

This shit is delicious!
-- The Evil Knife and Teeth Wielder

Brownie Roll Out Cookies

2011-07-06T12:19:00.000-07:00

I've been baking a lot lately. I don't know why but I find baking simple cookies a relaxing activity. So when Helen sent me this brownie roll-out cookie recipe from Smitten Kitchen, I felt like I had to make it right away...because I was um..."stressed out" and needed some relaxing.

Two sticks of butter softened and sliced for the ease of beating. The recipe called for 1 stick salted and 1 stick unsalted, but I only had unsalted. Frankly, my palate is too unrefined to tell the difference, so I didn't care too much.

Because I have a love for brown sugar, I used 1 cup of granulated sugar and 1/2 cup of brown sugar.

Beat sugar and butter into a fluffy mixture. I got used to this step by now.

I beat in two eggs, one at a time. Can someone explain to me why I always have to add one egg, beat to mix, then add in another egg, beat to mix, etc.? I don't understand what is the significance of these steps? It seems like it would be just the same if I throw in all the eggs and beat at once.

The recipe said to add 1 teaspoon of vanilla extract but seriously, I just poured in a bunch. Words on the street is that the human males are attracted to the smell of vanilla more than the odorless female pheromones. In this case, I should have males flocking around me at all time, but I didn't see any! What the hell, words-on-the-street?

2/3 cup of those cheap Hershey cocoa powder!

Added to the butter-sugar-egg-vanilla bowl to be mixed. To prevent blasting myself and the kitchen with a coat of fine cocoa powder, I draped the bowl with a piece of paper towel like so. Disaster averted! Well, not entirely averted, but disaster was greatly decreased in intensity. Of course, you can use a kitchen towel, too. It would provide more coverage.

In a separate bowl (it's not a blue bowl anymore), I mixed together the following:

3 cups of flour
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon baking powder

I added about 1/3 of the flour mixture back to the blue bowl (the one with the butter and eggs), covered with the paper towel and mixed. Then, repeat!

I took out a chunk of dough and rolled it out with my fancy pance rolling pin. I used the set of cookie cutter my sister got me for Christmas a couple of years ago.

The cookies got baked in a 350 degree F oven for 8 minutes. Actually, I had two sets of cookie cutters, one large set and one small set. For the large cookies, I baked for 8 minutes and the smaller cookies, I baked for 5 minutes. As you can see, I'm using my new fancy pance cookie cooling rack that Helen got for me for no reason! I have a lot of cooking/baking related stuff from people. It's awesome!

A whole pot full of cookies! Yeah, a pot because I didn't have an air tight container large enough to store them all. Then I put a lid on top of the pot and taped over the vent hole on the lid. I'm a ghetto baking genius!

Bonus giraffe cookie!

Condensed version of the recipe from Smitten Kitchen:

Ingredients:

2 sticks soften butter
1 cup granulated sugar
1/2 cup brown sugar
2 eggs
1 teaspoon vanilla
2/3 cup cocoa powder

3 cup all purpose flour
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon baking powder

Directions:

Preheat oven to 350 degrees F!!!
Beat sugar and butter together until fluffy.
Add 1 egg at time and beat to mix well.
Add vanilla and beat to mix.
Add 2/3 cup cocoa powder to the mix, cover bowl and mix well.

In a separate bowl, mix together flour, salt, and baking powder.
Add flour mixture to the sugar/butter mixture in small quantity and mix until all are incorporated.

Dust a rolling surface with some flour and roll out a chunk of dough at a time until dough is about 1/4" thick.
Cut into shapes with cookie cutter.
Mix the leftover dough with new dough and repeat.

Bake cookies for 8 minutes, remove from oven and let cool on cooling racks.

Smitten Kitchen was right, these are not your regular sugar cookies. They are more like brownies: chocolaty, soft, and chewy.