Happy Thanksgiving

Happy Thanksgiving! I am thankful for being home and being able to cook a Thanksgiving dinner for my family.

I like fruit that still has the leaves attached =)

Frosty cranberries from the freezer

This became cranberry-persimmon sauce (recipe from Once in a Blue Moon blog)

OM NOM NOM

My brother joined us for dinner via Skype (he was still at school).

Garlicky green beans amandine

2 lbs green beans, trimmed, washed and blanched

A handful of sliced almonds

A small pat of butter

6 cloves of garlic, minced

Olive oil

Salt and pepper

Toast the almonds in a hot skillet. Add the butter and stir until it smells good and nutty. Transfer the almonds to a plate. Pour some olive oil to the skillet and when it's hot, throw in the garlic, stir for 30 seconds. Add in the green beans, sprinkle some salt to taste, and cook until done. Mix the almonds back in and serve.

Pan-roasted asparagus with Parmesan cheese (recipe from America's Test Kitchen Complete TV Show Cookbook)

Mandatory gravy - this is the only thing that I did not make (gasp! it's from Trader Joe's)

My mom made pan-fried yellow fish

And she also made sticky rice - oh so delicious! This is a must for our Thanksgiving dinner, every year.

Mashed potatoes - it's relatively healthy, but still nice and creamy, with only 2 tablespoons of butter, milk, and sour cream (this recipe came from the ATK Best Light Recipes cookbook)

Wine-poached pears for dessert (recipe adapted from Angela's Food Love blog)

Instead of the mascarpone filling, I mixed together a cup of rice pudding and a spoonful of honey and folded it into some freshly whipped cream.

That's it! I think this was my longest post yet.

Salmon Cakes

Pan-Fried Fresh Salmon Cakes -- with Parmesan cheese!

(Recipe from The New Best Recipes)

Mango Mousse Tart

A mango mousse tart for my mom - happy birthday, ma-ma!

Mousse recipe adapted from Passionate About Baking

I found that the ratio of the mango mixture and the cream was best left up to personal judgement since the 2 mangos I used yielded a lot more puree than what the recipe intended.

It's super fun making the wavy design on top; all you need is a toothpick!

Thai Curry Chicken

Thai Curry Chicken

10 oz coconut milk

14 oz chicken broth

2 tbsp fish sauce

2 tbsp Thai red curry paste

2 tbsp light brown sugar

1 large Japanese sweet yam, cut into chunks

1¼ pounds chicken breasts, cut crosswise into ¼-inch-thick strips

6 oz green beans, trimmed and cut into 1-inch lengths

A handful of chopped fresh basil

Salt and pepper, to taste

1. Bring the coconut milk, chicken broth, fish sauce, curry paste, and sugar to a boil. Simmer on low for about 5 minutes.

2. Add in the yam and simmer, covered, for about 8-10 minutes until tender. Add the chicken and green beans, cook for another 5 minutes.

3. Sprinkle in the basil; season with salt and pepper. Serve with white jasmine rice

Recipe adapted from America's Test Kitchen 30-Minute Suppers (Winter '09)

Apples

This past weekend was perfect for apple picking: chilly - but sunny - weather and the trees ablaze with color...

Fresh apple cider doughnuts!

Cortland apples

What to do with all these apples?

Bella smells... apple pie!

Mini apple pie (baked in muffin tins - recipe adapted from Weevalicious)

Still lots of apples leftover: cook up with some cranberries, sprinkle a quick streusel mix (oatmeal, sugar, flour, cinnamon, butter) on top, bake, and we have:

Cranberry apple crisp!

Happy autumn; keep warm =)

P.S. Is it just my computer, or do the photos look quite desaturated to you? Blogspot just makes everything look ill. Maybe I'll switch over to tumblr instead - no color issues there.

Sixteen

Happy birthday, Jessica

Mint chocolate chip ice cream cake.

Newman O's organic mint chocolate cookies - crumbled on top

Mint chocolate chip ice cream from the store - no ice cream maker yet :(

Brownie cookie base - recipe, halved, from A Dash of Sass

(this lovely photo taken by the birthday girl)

三杯雞 (San Bei Ji)

Tonight, my mom and I had a fun cooking competition. I had been wanting to make this delectable Taiwanese dish called San Bei Ji ever since I had it in a restaurant in Atlanta. Since there was a bunch of spare basil left over from making pizzas earlier this week, San Bei Ji was a great way to use it up. San Bei Ji is literally translated into "Three Cup Chicken." The name comes from the three main ingredients (besides chicken): soy sauce, wine, and sesame oil. Usually chinese rice wine is used, but we substituted it with some nice white wine.

Cooking with clay pots keeps the flavor in.

This is my pot of San Bei Ji. I kept it to the essential elements of the recipes: chicken, soy sauce, wine, sesame oil, ginger, garlic, sugar, and basil.

This is mom's San Bei Ji - she went easy on the soy sauce and put in shiitake mushrooms and a hot chili pepper, smart lady, for an extra hit of spice.

We gave my dad a blind taste test of our two versions of San Bei Ji. He preferred my mom's version with the spicy kick, but my two sisters liked the deep flavor of my dish. Everyone had a delicious meal of San Bei Ji.

三杯雞 (San Bei Ji) Recipe

Half a chicken, bone in and some skin on, cut into 1" pieces

10 slices of fresh ginger

10 cloves of garlic

About 1/4 cup each of soy sauce, cooking wine, and sesame oil

A spoonful of sugar

A handful of fresh basil

Shiitake mushrooms, optional

Hot dried chili pepper, optional

Heat up the sesame oil in a large skillet, throw in the ginger and garlic to build up flavor. Then add in the chicken, brown for a little bit, and add the rest of the ingredients. Give it a good stir and transfer to a clay pot if available (if not, just keep cooking in the skillet, no problem). Cook on low until chicken is cooked and sauce is reduced by a third. Serve with white rice.

Pizza Night

My little sister, Jessica, has recently taken up an interest in photography, and she has a pretty good eye for it. Jessica has been helping me take photos as I cook. So why not also try her hand at blogging?

Jessica here.

Tonight, we decided to make pizzas for dinner and each of us customized our pizzas to our individual likings. I chose to make a margherita pizza, because that's one of my favorites. (Too bad I didn't know that margherita pizzas don't have tomato sauce.) My 'margherita' pizza ended up with the extra ingredients of ham (another favorite pizza topping) and mushrooms, because we needed to use up all the ingredients we chopped, and tomato sauce. Of course, I also made sure to add lots of mozzy cheese! (Pronounced like "mott-see". That's mozzarella, in Jessica-speak)

Here's my pizza fresh from the oven.

That would be Jenn's pizza. Hers was super special.

For those of you who are gravely concerned about Beverly's lack of updates, no worries. I will be bugging her often.

Hors d'oeuvres! (That is my way of saying goodbye.) A bientot!

A Happy Birthday Cake

Happy birthday to my best friend.

Triple layer chocolate cake with chocolate raspberry ganache

Made with lots of love and lots of chocolate

Recipe from Sky High: Irresistible Triple-Layer Cakes via 17andBaking

Fresh Berry Gratin

Adele, this one's for you.

Delicious.

Recipe from Cook's Illustrated.

The leftover sauvignon blanc made a great sangria!

1 750mL bottle Sauvignon Blanc

1/2 orange, sliced

1/2 orange, juiced

1/4 cup Grand Marnier

1/4 cup sugar (or to taste)

1-2 apricots, halved and pitted

A handful of grapes

Mix sugar, orange juice, orange slices, and Grand Marnier together. Muddle the orange slices a little with a wooden spoon. Add the apricots and grapes and wine. Give it a few good stirs and chill in the refrigerator for a couple hours.

Chocolate Pasta

I finally made the chocolate pasta that I bought at Pike Place Market from my trip to Seattle. I threw together a berry sauce and reheated the leftover chocolate ganache to serve with the pasta. The pasta itself doesn't have much flavor to it even though it certainly looks chocolately, so the chocolate sauce really helped boost the taste. 

Caramel deLites Cupcakes

Happy birthday, Wojty!

Caramel deLites (not Samoas) cupcakes for my friend Ben W. 

The cast: brown sugar butter cupcakes, chocolate ganache, caramel, toasted sweet coconut topping, and toasted coconut flakes.

Caramel filling

Chocolate ganache poured on

Plenty of coconut topping

Recipe from cupcakeblog.

Pizza Bites

Clank Works has been busy getting their store/apartment ready for move-in. I usually like to join in the fun with painting, putting up drywall, and spackling. But today, I thought it would be nice to make a hearty dinner to keep them fueled, since they often start right after their day jobs and work late into the night. Pizza bites were a perfect option: easy to transport and no utensils required.

Recipe adapted from Tastefully Done.

I made my own pizza dough, used fontina in addition to the mozzarella, and substituted the pepperoni with Trader Joe's chicken sausage (a much tastier - and healthier? - variation, in my humble opinion)

Before. Parsley/parmesan/spices mix to sprinkled on top.

After the oven. So tasty with marinara sauce!

Stuffed French Toast

Cream cheese and strawberry jam stuffed french toast topped with fresh strawberries

(recipe from Minimally Invasive)

This is what I made for breakfast one morning for a hungry group of nine at the beach house. D and I went out to pick up some missing ingredients, including the star of the show Challah bread, but the first supermarket that we went to had no Challah bread to offer! So we went across the street to the brand new Harris Teeter to try our luck. Oh, were we lucky. They had exactly two fresh loaves of Challah bread about to come out of the oven, so we wandered the aisles for a bit while the bakers prepared the steaming hot loaves for us. How heavenly it smelled during the car ride back... well, the blessing of fresh bread turned out to be a bit of a curse as well when it came time to make the french toast. Soaking the slices of Challah in the egg mixture made it soggy as hell. Cooking the french toast made the outside nice and golden brown, but when I cut a piece open, a soggy mess of cream cheese, jam, and bread. So, in a last ditch effort, I popped them in the oven to try to dry them out. Either it worked, which I'm pretty sure it did (at least for the piece I ate) or I was in very very polite company =) Lesson learned: let the Challah bread dry out a bit before making this recipe for soggy-free french toast!

Spaghetti Hot Dog Squids

I saw this awesome idea posted on Apartment Therapy: The Kitchn, and had to try it.

Before cooking...

Ready to eat!

Can't go wrong with spaghetti and hot dogs. I was worried that the part of the spaghetti that were inside the hot dogs wouldn't be cooked thoroughly, and they didn't, but it was okay since it was cooked enough that there wasn't any what would have been very unpleasant crunchiness. It was fun to eat them like this... and practical, too, since you can just spear a piece of hot dog with the fork and a perfect portion of noodles comes with it.

Next time, I would like to try them with sausages, as suggested by a friend.

Mmm... steak.

I was in Maryland the past couple of days with D visiting his family. I offered to make dinner on Thursday evening; it's always such a pleasure to cook for everyone, and this is what we ate:

Dry-rubbed rib-eye steaks *drools* 

(recipe from Well Fed blog)

D handled the actual grilling part and some picture taking.

This is the mixture of spices for the rub: ancho chili powder, ground cumin, dried coriander, cayenne pepper, dry mustard, dried oregano, salt, and pepper. I also added a shake of garlic powder, just as an extra boost.

(This photo also by D)

Rice with yellow bell peppers and green onions (recipe from Masa Assassin). I used jasmine rice instead of long grain rice, which worked just as well.

My plate: steak, avocado, fresh salsa, rice, grilled corn and grilled peppers.