19 posts tagged “food and cooking”
I'm still trying to figure out what quick and easy things I can make for our holiday party - with my belly getting bigger with baby by the hour, I'm looking for simple, no stress dishes - but I have found a recipe that I'm going to try for Christmas dinner.
I was planning on making risotto for Christmas but I think I'm also going to make Stuffed Duck Breasts Siennese-style from Mark Bittman whose recipe was printed in the NY Times today. I've been thinking about my mom's duck, which is my favorite and Asian-style but am not feeling up to the task of preparing a whole roast duck and eating it between the two of us, but this dish looks like it will be good, has the added benefit of going with the risotto that I planned to cook already, and looks pretty manageable.
Tonight, we were invited for Christmas Eve dinner with friends. I'm going to make Wild Rice with Butternut Squash, Leeks, and Corn. I don't know what the hostess decided to make for the entree but I do know dessert is set - she has a ton of homemade marshmallows (vanilla, cinnamon, apricot, pear, and black currant), chocolate caramels, and chocolate truffles. M is going to bring Stovetop Stuffing since he missed having that for Thanksgiving.
Later this week, I plan to make chocolate gingerbread, ginger spice cookies, and latkes. I might even try rugelach.
mmmm. I love holiday food. Now, if only baby will let me eat as much as I want.....
M and I are very happy to be able to cook again even if we're not cooking anything elaborate. More than 2 months of eating out, microwaving meals, heating up cans on a little electrical skillet in the garage, or grilling sandwiches on the Foreman grill definitely took their toll. We're doing our best to pretty much not eat out again and we're loving it.
Here are some of the things we've been cooking:
- Bistek (Filipino dish)
- Beef and Ginger ramen soup (Food network recipe was only so-so but it's made me ambitious to try making my own broth)
- Sorrowful rice (an old favorite and in joke from the God of Cookery)
- Fried rice with roast pork, peas, carrots, mushrooms, and egg (best batch of fried rice I ever made)
- Steak Fajitas with peppers, onions, and mushrooms spiced with cumin, cayenne, and lime
- Split pea soup with rosemary
- Chicken curry with naan (M did this one)
Tomorrow is a night to consume leftovers so we can have a lazy Friday night, but slated for this weekend and next week are 7 vegetable couscous with harissa, veggie pot pies, mushroom or butternut squash risotto, and maybe latkes for the start of Chanukah. I'm also thinking about baking chocolate gingerbread or ginger spice cookies for my co-workers as a little holiday gift and maybe even neopolitan cookies if I'm feeling really energetic.
It's so nice to have ingredients and so many options for meals. The kitchen is not done yet but it feels so much more civilized to cook at a real stove rather than heating something up quickly in the freezing garage and to be able to sit down in a chair at a table when we eat rather than on the floor.
We love our gas stove. So much quicker and more responsive than the ancient electric stove from the 60s.
Well, happiness is many things but one of them is a good big bowl of noodles on a cold night.
M and I are still kitchenless and were not in the mood to cook from our garage last night, so we tried a ramen shop that I've heard about for years but never got a chance to try. It's a cramped little shop called Ramen Halu and there was a wait list at 8pm on a Monday night although we got seats no problem. It was not cheap ramen as ramen goes ($24 for two people including drinks) but we enjoyed the ramen.
The bowls arrived. We bent over our bowls to taste the broth and a little noodle, and then we inhaled it all without speaking for the next few minutes. Our server was very happy with us.
It's been a long time since I've had ramen.
We will go back again.
Last night, I started thinking about how little time there was in the day, and I started doing the math and trying to break up my day to more effectively fit everything in. It was a little discouraging, especially since I feel so often that I do so little and everyone else seems to do so much, and it turned into a little brain teaser to play with all day. Anyway, this is a roundabout way of describing how I started thinking about quick and simple dishes for dinner and reminded me that I should jot down this recipe for spicy shrimp.
- 2 cloves of garlic, crushed
- 3T sunflower oil or EVOO
- 1t paprika
- 3/4t cumin
- 1/4t ground ginger
- pinch of cayenne or ground chili pepper
- 1/2 pound large frozen or fresh shrimp, peeled
- salt
- 2-3T cilantro or parsley, chopped
- Saute 2 cloves of minced or crushed garlic in oil
- Stir in spices
- Add shrimp
- Season with salt to taste and add herbs.
- Fry about 5 minutes or until shrimp is a nice healthy pink.
M has been nagging me about the holiday baking because although chocolate gingerbread cake, chocolate Guiness cake, chocolate chip cookies, ginger spice cookies, and oatmeal cookies are all well and good, these are not the best items to eat nutritiously and light. I have dutifully hunted for healthy recipes and last night made a pretty tasty curried lentil soup, which was healthy and filling without being heavy and had a nice spicy kick to it (I will experiment with the spices more though).
I have laid off the baking.
And then, this afternoon, I received a belated Christmas gift from my college friend Jo.
I am so glad that work has a gym.
Fisher writes about different moments in her life as they relate to food, from when she was a little girl in 1912, helping her grandmother with the canning, to living in France and Switzerland during the 1930s and ending with her trip to Mexico in 1941 as a widow. Her writing voice is reminiscent of the same time as Hemingway and Fitzgerald, and she writes about Europe before the war. Fisher is perceptive and reads people well, and she reveals them in her writing without being sentimental. There are a few stories where I learned rather more intimate details than I expected of the people around her, and one very funny story where a little yet indomitable waitress almost kills Fisher - partly against Fisher's will - with a surfeit of exquisitely prepared dishes. One passage that I particularly liked was about how she learned how to eat alone in public, which most people would shy away from, but which Fisher starts doing while traveling alone on a sea voyage. She eats simply and well and voluptuously and gains extreme pleasure and confidence from the act. It backfires on her on a couple of occasions, but I liked the independence and of her ability to give herself over to the moment and to know exactly what she wants. I suppose what I liked most was that although she had difficult times, she had a great deal of self-awareness and at least in the moments she discloses in the book, she lived her life well.
This one is rather big so I tore it in half and half was enough for breakfast. Later, I will make sandwiches.
My attempt at food photography. These are chives with the flower buds. I stir-fried these with a bit of shrimp and a little pork and young ginger. You don't want them to be over-cooked but just lightly stir-fry them so they have a little crispness to them. They have a nice garlicky bite.
My parents are visiting this week and certain childhood memories started bubbling up to the surface. A lot of the memories are food memories. I've been taking my parents around town to sample the local restaurants, mostly Asian cuisine which is what they are interested in, but once they discovered the Chinese grocery just around the corner from our house, my dad has been cooking every day. This is both a good thing and a bad thing. Good because I'm getting to eat Filipino food again - I do cook Filipino food on my own but there are a few dishes which M just doesn't have the palate for so I don't make - and bad because I almost instantly started gaining weight once they arrived.
So far, my dad has cooked chicken and beef asado, chicken and pork adobo, a dish of sauteed Chinese sausage and onions, garlic fried rice, tomato and onion salad with a little radish as garnish to go with the adobo, and right now, my mom is marinating her infamous BBQ pork (although we did have to visit 4 stores to find the country style pork ribs she wanted). I'm enjoying it both because it's good food and also because there are a lot of steps, which would never be included in a cookbook that he's passing on to me, lessons he learned from his grandfather. They're little steps I would never think of and don't quite understand but apparently they do make the difference, such as when you pour the vinegar and soy sauce in the pot you shouldn't stir it until it starts to boil or the asado will be too sour. It's good to learn these things and my house smells like vinegar and garlic.
As you can see, my dad sure likes his meat. And here's the memory that came to mind: my dad at the grill. After my dad was finished with being on first call at the hospital all night, he would stop at Kroger's - the local grocery chain - on the way home and pick up a few steaks. He'd drive home and before coming inside the house, fire up the grill outside, come inside to season the steaks, and head back out. He would do that all year whenever he finished a particularly long or hard shift at the hospital.
M was listening to us talk about it and said, we grill all year, too.
But you see, I grew up in Ohio and my dad still grilled all year long - even in the heart of winter. Before entering the house from the garage, he'd switch from his leather boots to his winter boots, change the nice coat he wore to work to the huge parka with faux fur-lined hood pulled up and tied tight so he'd look like an eskimo, and then he'd grab his plate of steaks and the tongs and trod out into the foot-high snow and bitter cold. As little kids, we'd set the table and see him re-enter the house with the steaks, snow flurries chasing him inside and chilling the room, and then we'd sit down and have a nice hot dinner.
I've been a bit stressed and overrun at work so I haven't been cooking lately and have reverted to going out. I'm going to try to avoid dining out so much this week, but I've had some very good food - nothing fancy - but good.
At Cupertino Square, we discovered HC Dumpling. It's one of the smaller restaurants in Cupertino Square. It's fronted by large glass windows and the room is crammed with tables and chairs draped in table linens and seat covers although the place is slightly dingy. The clientèle is mostly Chinese and the servers kept addressing me in Mandarin, furrowing their brows when I didn't respond in the same language. Luckily, D was there to order. Aside from the dumplings, the restaurant has a fairly wide selection of Chinese dishes such as beef shank, seafood, and veggie dishes such as eggplant with Chinese basil or lotus root. We will go back. We've only gone for dinner so far but I will try their lunch menu some weekend. The lunch menu seems like a good deal and includes dumplings, an appetizer, an entrée and a side dish or two.
The best thing about HC Dumpling is that they serve soup dumplings or xiao long bao. They're little steamed pork dumplings with a bit of soup inside. I believe that the dumplings are prepared with a bit of pork and the soup in gel form, so that when the dumpling is cooked, the gel melts and turns into hot steaming soup inside the dumpling. The soup can be a bit treacherous for the unwary because if one simply bites into the dumpling, the soup will spurt out and possibly hit one's face or stain a shirt. The trick is to place the dumpling on the spoon, take a small bite, and slurp up the soup. The first time I was introduced to soup dumplings was in a Chinese restaurant in Japan, so the dumplings bring back good memories.
In addition to dumplings, I learned how to eat raw oysters. AY had his 50th birthday party and had a raw oyster bar as the culinary spotlight. I'm not sure which had the greater part in my conversion: my taste buds changing or if I finally had good fresh raw oysters. The first time I had oysters was when I was six. My dad told me to just let it slide down my throat. I remember the oyster as being huge and it jiggled in my mouth as if it was protesting and trying to escape and I wasn't quite sure at six years of age whether the oyster was really a creature because it didn't look like any animal I had ever seen, so I gagged. I may have even cried. I had not touched raw oysters since that first experience although I have had cooked oysters such as Oysters Rockefeller - and in Oysters Rockefeller you can't really taste the oyster so much. For some reason, this time, the oysters were just delicious. They served Miyake oysters, which apparently hold up well against sauce but the oysters don't really need anything except for maybe a little squirt of lemon. They taste like little bits of the sea. Yum. It will be hard to eat cooked oysters again.
I asked the oysterman - who used to raise oysters himself but who is in semi-retirement now - where I could get good oysters in my area. He suggested The Fish Market, of which I haven't been a big fan possibly because I haven't ordered the right dishes there although I've always felt the place was a bit overpriced even if they do supply crayons, but he said that the chain actually raises the majority of their own oysters and that the new shipment always comes in on Wednesday, so go on Thursday night.
And finally, we went out for Thai food. We used to eat Thai food quite a bit at Brown and during the first few years we moved to California. When we moved to PA, we stopped eating Thai food because there aren't really any good Thai restaurants up there, but there is quite a wide selection where we live now. This time we tried Krung Thai by Valley Fair. We had chicken satay, deep fried rolls, shrimp toasts, very spicy drunken noodles, and "jungle" curry with beef. I also had Thai iced coffee which I always love although I thought their iced coffee was on the milky side. The curry was okay but everything else was good. On the down side, although the servers were very polite, they were understaffed so a bit slow. Also, the acoustics in the restaurant are terrible, making for a noisy environment, so it's not the best place to have dinner and expect to have a conversation. We'll have fun exploring other Thai restaurants near us though.
