Most mornings I can’t stomach breakfast. I tend to be drawn to sugar for that first meal. I’m guessing my sleepy tummy prefers something easy to digest. Unfortunately, I’m also overweight and often trying to avoid processed sugar. A while back I discovered a recipe for a homemade smoothie. I modified it according to my tastes and nutritional preferences and for months had it for breakfast every day. Continue reading
I love how making food turns into making other food which then morphs into yet another dish. Let me explain. Continue reading
I’ve been having a smoothie for breakfast almost every morning for the past few months. It gives me that sugary kick start I need in the morning, I crave sugar less (ok, just slightly less) during the day because I know I get to have a sweet snack in the morning, it’s easy to eat when my stomach is not quite ready for solid food and I look forward to the morning because I get to have something super yummy.
The problem with having a smoothie for breakfast every morning is that I go through the ingredients rather quickly. It’s not much of a problem since Costco has huge bags of frozen berries and mega jugs of juice, but I do wish their gynormous container of yogurt came in a non-fat variety. I had been switching between their large cheaper fatty version and Trader Joe’s smaller pricier non-fat plain yogurt, but it gets expensive and it’s a pain to go to the store regularly for yogurt or stock the fridge. Plus, what does one do with all those re-useable plastic containers?
I’ll tell you what one does, one makes their own yogurt at home and fills all those spare plastic containers right back up! As always, I followed the advice of a couple different recipes and incorporated the parts I preferred to create my own way of incubating bacteria. Here’s what I did: Continue reading
I, like many people, love a tasty rich cup of hot cocoa on a cool winter’s day. Although, it doesn’t get nearly as cold here as it did in MN, it’s still a nice pick-me-up in the middle of the full month of chilly rain. Well, and we also don’t turn on the heat in the winter here since hardy Minnesotans would never admit to using heat in California when the high rarely drops below 50 (at least in the sunny South Bay).
I used to use crappy packaged hot chocolate that contained trans fats and ingredients I couldn’t pronounce, but then one day I stumbled upon a recipe on the box of unsweetened cocoa I use for baking. I modified it a bit and it has since been the best hot chocolate that I’ve had the pleasure of consuming.
Continue reading
Our favorite Thai restaurant in the area so far is Krung Thai and although my favorite dishes are the special noodles of the house and pad see ew, I noticed that they had their recipe for pad thai up on their site so I decided to take a stab at it.
I changed it quite a bit based on my preferences and what I had access to, but overall it’s still pad thai and still quite delicious. I did overcook the noodles the first time because I just wasn’t vigilant enough and had forgotten how easy it is to overcook rice noodles, or any noodles for that matter. Next time I think it will turn out better if I go through the steps quicker instead of letting it cook so much in between (I have a tendency to run into the other room to check the recipe on my computer in between steps) and I plan to add some spicy hotness with crushed red peppers or powdered cayenne. You can find the original recipe on the Krung Thai site. Here is my modified version:
I’ve gotten close to perfecting my garlic mashed potato recipe. It occurred to me the other day that when I simply add minced garlic the flavor tends to come in short bursts. Instead, this time I incorporated the butter, cream, and garlic before mixing them into the potatoes. I’ve followed a few recipes recently that called for steeping things in warm cream to bring out the flavor so I thought, “why not do that with garlic?”. Here’s what I did:
Continue reading
At our wedding almost two years ago I was overjoyed to have Raghavan Iyer in charge of the dinner for our reception. I still hear from friends about how much they loved the food in the buffet so I was excited, when going through my recipes, to find instructions for each of the dishes we had at the tasting with Raghavan.
So far I’ve only made one of these dishes, but it was one of my favorites. It was surprisingly easy and turned out well both times I’ve made it. I accidentally bought sliced almonds instead of blanched almond slivers, but it turned out great nevertheless. The following recipe is from Raghavan’s book The Turmeric Trail: Continue reading
I love Matt’s Chocolate Chip Cookies. If you’ve never had them, you can get them at most co-ops or where organic foods are sold. A year or two ago I decided to try to duplicate their soft texture and subtle sweetness. It couldn’t be too hard considering one can actually read the ingredient list. The main substitutions I determined I would need from my regular Toll House recipe were soybean oil and wheat flour. Well, I wasn’t quite able to reproduce Matt’s cookies to my liking (until recently…but that’s a story for another blog post), but I was able to make some darn tasty cookies with similar ingredients.
Here’s my recipe and technique: Continue reading
I’ve been reading Crystal and Ryan’s blog, Cafe Cyan, ever since Crystal commented on one of my posts long ago, I checked out her site and thought, “pictures of food! Sweet!”. Well, the other day I came across their post about energy orbs and was curiously intrigued.
I’ve never really had the pleasure of eating dates much so I was a little hesitant about the ingredients, but they looked so yummy and seemed highly recommended so I decided to give them a shot and googled for the recipe and found it on Compassionate Consumption. She likes to call them “Bucky Balls”. I like that name better too, geeky AND tasty! Dave has taken to calling them Power Balls, just like the lottery!
I’ve included the recipe with my comments and additions: Continue reading
As an honorary Indian by marriage and daughter-in-law of someone who makes a mean chicken curry, I have long felt it is a skill I should have. I quickly realized that being taught by someone who has made it thousands of times over the years is not an easy feat. The instructions tend to include phrases like, “a little bit of this” and “some of that”. Nevertheless, for a few years now I have attempted to make chicken curry again and again by trying to reproduce what I had observed and simply experimenting with small changes. It never turned out bad, per se, just not quite good. I’d rate most of my attempts somewhere in the range of “edible”.
Finally, I decided to go the route I usually do when I taste something I like and want to make it at home. I googled it. Now, there are tons of ways to make it, but luckily enough I found a spectacular recipe for chicken curry right away. I’ve modified it slightly according to my tastes and the ingredients I keep in my kitchen: Continue reading
A little bit of wisdom 