Grilled Shrimp Satay with Peaches

A few weeks ago, when the farmers were selling the last peaches of the year, I decided to take advantage of the waning summer heat and took to the grill to make dinner. These recipes are quick, but they are certainly delicious and perfect for summer's last hurrah.

Grilled Shrimp Satay with Peaches
Makes 4 servings. Recipe from Bon Appetit.

Ingredients
6 tbsp smooth, natural peanut butter
1/3 cup dark brown sugar
3 tbsp rice vinegar
2 tbsp soy sauce
2 tsp chili paste (or to taste)
9 tbsp peach nectar, divided
3 peaches, pitted and wedged
16 shrimp, peeled and deveined
6 bok choy, halved lengthwise

Directions
Prepare grill over medium-high heat. Wisk together peanut butter, dark brown sugar, vinegar, soy sauce, chili paste, and 5 tbsp nectar until smooth. Season with salt and pepper to taste.

Arrange peaches, shrimp and bok choy on the grill. Brush with 4 tbsp nectar, then brush with 1/4 cup of the sauce. Sprinkle with salt and pepper. Grill until peaches lightly charred, shrimp are opaque and bok choy are tender.


Mound shrimp, bok choy and peaches on a platter. Drizzle with some sauce and serve with remaining sauce on the side.

I paired this main course with an equally peanut-buttery pasta accompaniment. Too much peanut butter? No such thing!
Nutty Noodles
Makes 4 servings

Ingredients
1/2 pound rice pasta, uncooked
1/2 cup smooth peanut butter
1 cup water
2 tbsp soy sauce
2 tbsp lemon juice
1 tbsp tahini
1 tsp crushed red pepper
1/2 tsp ginger powder
1/4 tsp garlic powder
1 scallion, sliced
1/2 cup peanuts, unsalted, chopped

Directions


Cook pasta according to package directions. Meanwhile, in a small saucepan stir together peanut butter and water. Simmer over low heat, stirring constantly, until the sauce is smooth. Stir in soy sauce, tahini, red pepper, ginger, and garlic powder. Bring to a boil, stirring constantly.


Drain pasta well, then add to the sauce. Toss pasta in the sauce until it is well coated. Plate pasta and sprinkle with scallions and peanuts.


What a nutty feast indeed! I will admit that after a while, all of that peanut butter does get to you...after a while. The side of noodles were good and had a different taste from the shrimp. Definitely very nutty with some other minor flavors from the soy and garlic. But the star of this meal was the satay. Adding in the peach flavors to the peanut butter was a great idea and it made the dish taste more complete and interesting. If you can still find some peaches in your area before the winter flavors take over in full, fire up the grill and give this recipe a shot.

Korean Rice Bowl

I've been eating a good deal of Korean food lately, so I thought I would try it at home. The April 2010 issue of Bon Appetit had a recipe for an easy take on a classic Korean dish that I thought would be perfect for a weeknight dinner.


Bibimbap is pretty much the poster child of Korean food. It's as much of an icon as pho is for Vietnam, tikka masala is for India, and spaghetti and meatballs are for Italy. In classic bibimbap, a combination of vegetables and bulgogi beef are served on top of rice with a spicy sauce and a fried egg is placed right on top. If you order bibimbap in a dol sot (a hot stone pot), the dish comes out sizzling and the egg starts off raw but cooks as you mix the food around.

In this simplified version, rice is served with slices of strip steak, asparagus sauteed with garlic and sesame, and, in keeping with tradition, a fried egg is put right on top. Add a side of kimchi and you're set. I enjoyed this dinner immensely because it felt rather healthy and fulfilling. When you see all of the ingredients in the final product, it feels so elemental. The fried egg helped to add some unxiousness to the dish after I popped the yolk and let it run into the rice. This version of the Korean staple is simplified, but it also maintains a combination of clean and satisfying flavors.

Shrimp & Pork Fried Rice

At Chinese restaurants, I have a love-hate relationship with fried rice. It is usually very tasty, but you can feel the fat from it moving from your mouth to your stomach, where it turns into extra adipose tissue and a sense of guilt. But when you make fried rice at home, you can control what goes into it, bending it to your will and your waistline. All stir-fries are a very quick process, so I could not take pictures of every step, but here are a good number of snaps to help you make your own delicious fried rice.


The key to a lot of cooking is preparation. But mise en place is essential in stir-fry and fried rice. You are cooking over high heat so everything has to keep moving very quickly. You can't be caught cutting your meat while your garlic is burning. There is a little bit of leeway, so you don't need to work like a machine, but efficiency is a must.

Ingredients
Makes 4 servings
3 tbsp canola oil, divided
12 oz shrimp, shelled, deveined
3 eggs, beaten with salt and pepper
2 tsp ginger, minced
2 tsp garlic, minced
1 lb pork, cubed
3 cup rice, cooked, cooled
3 scallions, trimmed, cut into 1" pieces
Sauce
2 tbsp soy sauce
2 tbsp rice wine
1/2 tsp salt
2 tsp sugar
1 tbsp oyster sauce
2 tsp sesame oil
1 pinch black pepper


1. Heat a large pan over high heat. Add 1 tbsp oil and heat until a whisp of smoke appears. Add shrimp and cook until just done, about 2 minutes. Be sure to keep everything moving when it is in the pan. You don't want to brown the ingredients, you just want to cook them very quickly. When cooked, remove shrimp from pan and wipe it out with a paper towel.


2. Heat another tablespoon of oil in the pan over high heat until a whisp of smoke appears. Add the egg mixture and scramble, stirring constantly, until it is just set. Remove eggs from pan and chop into small pieces. Wipe out pan.


Heat the last tablespoon of oil in the pan over high heat until a whisp of smoke appears. Add the ginger and garlic to the pan and cook until the garlic is light brown. Add the pork to the pan and cook, stirring constantly, until the pork is cooked through.


Add the cooked rice to the pan with the pork. Mix the rice thoroughly, being sure to break up any clumps. There's nothing more annoying than a ball of white rice amid your fried rice.


Return the shrimp to the pan and mix everything very well.


Turn heat down to medium-low. Add the sauce and scallions to the pan and mix everything thoroughly. Be sure the sauce is evenly distributed over all the rice. At this point, you can serve the rice, but I like to let it sit in the pan for a few minutes at a time, stirring occasionally, until some of the rice gets a little crispy. When done, place into a bowl and serve.


It took me about twice as long to type this post than it did to make the fried rice. It is amazing how quickly stir-fry makes a good meal. The fried rice was delicious and it had a clean taste to it compared to restaurant varieties. I felt good after eating it. Most of the ingredients are pretty straightforward, but it is the complexity of the sauce ingredients that control the end result. It could easily be tweaked with other Asian staples (mirin, rice vinegar, fish sauce, sesame seeds, citrus juice, hoisin, etc.) to yield an endless variety of fried rice dishes that can be made by this same process. You may not want to eat the fried rice at your local Chinese restaurant again.

Sesame Dessert

Asian supermarkets are a marvelous source of inspiration. If you feel confined in your culinary options, stuck in a cooking rut or simply in the mood for something different, just go to an Asian or Indian supermarket. They always have a different set of ingredients compared to your local grocer. Maybe you will find some frozen calamari that you can stuff. Or you could use some new and strange vegetable to give your everyday meals an air of mystery. Or, like me, you could see a package that piques your interest.


This is "sesame dessert." What struck me the most about this package is not only that the dessert is instant (like Jell-o pudding), but also the amazing black color. How many foods are naturally black? Char marks on the grill are black. Dark chocolates get very close to black. There are, I suppose, black beans too. To make pasta black, we have to turn to squid ink for some help. But colors are far more prevalent than pure black. Even a colorless white would appear to be more common: sugar (granulated and powdered), milks and creams, egg whites, and salt. But what does pure sable taste like? And how does one make it?


The dessert comes in a packet of a bluish-gray powder. You simply add boiling water to the powder and mix it well until it is homogeneous. Et voila! You're staring at pure darkness in your bowl. But don't be afraid of the dark. It tastes of toasted sesame. I expected a thicker consistency, but this soupy dessert turned out to be a little more watery. It is sweet, but not overly so, with a great taste of ground sesame seeds. I did grow tired of eating it after a few minutes, though, so I came up with an idea.


I probably should have let the sesame dessert cool first, but I thought it would be a great way to make some plain vanilla a little more interesting. The sweet sesame and vanilla worked well together. The ice cream gave the topping more consistency. This could have made a great milkshake too. I have a couple packets left still, so who knows where this sesame dessert will show up again?

Moon Cakes

I'm a little late on posting this, but I did want to comment on the delicious confections available this time of year: moon cakes. To celebrate the Mid-Autumn Festival (aka the Moon Festival), various Asian cultures serve up moon cakes. Us Americans have what could be construed as an obsession with sweets. We are the land of Coca Cola, Hershey's and Cinnabon. But, truth be told, we may have inherited our sweet tooth from some of our European ancestry (Belgian chocolate, French pastries, Italian gelato, etc.). My impression of many Asian cultures is that sweets are not a high priority. I've heard that fruit often serves as the final course of a meal. That's what this time of the year all the more interesting because of the abundance of moon cakes. These cakes come in a few varieties. This year I tried lotus seed paste and red bean paste, the latter of which is seen below. In years past I've also had sweetened mung bean. All have an earthy flavor, with a coarse pasty texture. The outer shell is tender but sturdy, thicker than most pastries or cakes. The cake itself is often shaped in various ways, including these small buns stamped with various characters, larger buns, small squares, and in the shape of a pig.


If you can find any moon cakes around, definitely get some before they're gone. For those in the Triangle area, I found these at the Grand Asia Market in Cary. They'll give you a perspective on how another part of the world celebrates with calories.

Jade Palace

In Carrboro is a nice little Chinese restaurant called Jade Palace. It looks like your everyday, average Chinese eatery, which is why my expectations weren't too high. But it seems this place has more to offer than you would expect.


My favorite dish was the sesame tofu. Most dishes with a sesame sauce are fried and served with a sugary syrup with some sesame seeds on top. This tofu was pan fried until it was crisp outside but still soft inside. And the sauce was focused on balancing salty and sweet tones with the sesame seeds. The net result was utterly awesome.


The dish I ordered was the honey chicken, which was more similar to normal Asian-American fare. The chicken was fried and served in what turned out to be a honey mustard sauce. While tasty, this dish did remind me a bit of fast food fried chicken. Next time I'll definitely stick with the sesame tofu since it was so different and unexpected. But our overall experience at Jade Palace was good: tasty food, quick and friendly service, and good (if not a little kitschy) atmosphere.

Asian Pizza?

Have you ever tried to make a weird meal on a whim just to see what would happen and if you could pull it off? That was the inspiration behind Asian pizza. I decided that pizza innovation has not often crossed into the realm of Chinese and Indian food. Sure, you can get Thai chicken pizza (very delicious, don't get me wrong), but I haven't seen much in the way of decent Asian flavors outside of a peanut sauce. Here's my lengthy and convoluted path to creating this wonderful International fusion.


Thanks to Lynne Rosetto Casper, I finally understand the keys to good stir-fry. There are still some shortcuts I've used that the purists will argue undermine the results. First of all, I don't use a wok. I have too many pots and pans to worry about storing a wok. Instead I have a large, deep saute pan. For cooking, I do use vegetable oil as it has a higher smoke point and does not alter the flavor of the food. For the five-spice beef above, I started by cooking my aromatics (ginger and green onion) in oil just until fragrant. After removing this from the pan, I wiped out any excess oil. Beef has it's own fat that will render to lubricate the pan and prevent sticking. I rubbed the beef with a fair amount of five spice powder and put it in the hot pan. I kept the beef in near constant motion to make sure it browned but didn't have a chance to overcook or cook unevenly. Once the beef was cooked, I returned the aromatics with equal parts oyster and soy sauces. After cooking to heat it through, I removed it all from the pan. The part that helped the most in all of this was preparing absolutely everything in advance. I'm pretty bad about chopping one ingredient while others are cooking, often to my own slight detriment. But this time I cut, seasoned and measured out every ingredient and had it on hand when I needed it. This made the stir-fry itself take less than 5 minutes total.

Since I love variety, I also prepared an Indian chicken salad for topping another pizza. This salad combines curried chicken with red grapes and cumined chickpeas. I did omit the yogurt in the chicken salad for fear that it would curdle or burn during baking.


Now for the full assembly using store-bought pizza dough. While the Indian chicken salad was sufficient for a pizza, the five-spice beef needed a medium (aka sauce). I quick sauteed some green onion shoots and whisked together a sauce of teriyaki, soy, hoisin, sesame seeds, and sesame oil. After spreading all the ingredients, I sprinkled the top with mozzarella cheese. It was difficult trying to think of a neutral cheese that would pair with Asian ingredients, but mozzarella worked well in this instance. After baking the pizzas in a 425 degree oven for about 30 minutes, I pulled them out and let them set up a bit before slicing. As a final touch on the Indian pizza, I put some of the cucumber raita right on top of the pizza (seen in picture). The chicken was well spiced and the cool yogurt of the raita counterbalanced any spice. The five spice beef, on the other hand, was sweeter with touches of anise. Both were quite marvelous in my opinion. Maybe I could sell the ideas to a pizza franchise...

Thai Pesto Shrimp & Nutty Noodles

When you collect recipes like I do (over 1000 so far plus those that are in my ~30 cookbooks), you end up with some odds and ends. These are the recipes for something that is on that borderline of being a meal or a just a side dish. I've seen these recipes and been tempted to make them, but they just feel incomplete. I managed to combine two disparate pieces into a wonderful whole.


First off, one of my recipes called for rice pasta. From my experiences with gluten-free foods, alternative pastas can leave something to be desired. Notta Pasta, though, does a decent job with their rice pasta, which comes in a few different types. It is worth noting that these noodles take longer to cook than the 3 minutes indicated on the packaging, but they still come out tender and lighter than normal pasta. Plus, I feel that rice pasta absorbs flavors better than normal pastas. To me it seems to be more of a blank slate, ready to take on whatever you're throwing at it.


To give you the big idea for the meal, I had the separate recipes for nutty noodles and Thai pesto shrimp. For the noodles, I combined peanut butter, crumbled tofu, soy sauce, rice vinegar, and sugar in a saucepan and heated it until the sauce was as smooth as possible. Some of the tofu did not "dissolve," but the sauce was still consistent in texture and flavor. Then I tossed in the cooked rice noodles. Simple and easy, but peanut butter is never lacking in flavor.

Briefly, for the Thai pesto shrimp, I placed cilantro, lime juice, peanuts, ginger, garlic, salt, pepper, and honey in a food processor, then streamed in the olive oil. The great thing about a pesto is that you need only three base ingredients: nut, greens (herb or lettuce) and olive oil. This means you can have an endless supply of different pestos that can pander to whatever flavor palette you want. The cilantro and peanuts in this pesto definitely give the dish the southeast Asian feel, and the other ingredients really help it to shine. Toss in some cooked shrimp and you're set. To put these two pieces together, I simply plated the pasta and topped it with the shrimp. Not only did each of the two portions of this meal have good flavor, but they combined incredibly well. Peanuts were the main linker, but the other flavors followed suit to make an incredibly satisfying whole.

Bahn's - 7/28/2009

I've tried Bahn's on 9th Street in Durham previously and found their rice vermicelli to be a little mediocre, but I was convinced to go on a Wednesday or a Saturday to try their vegetarian combo. I don't usually eat vegetarian because meat is too delicious, but this combo changed my mind on the taste of tofu. The dish comes with tofu in a black bean sauce that is a bit salty, but nicely flavored. The tofu cooks up nice and lightly fluffy. On the side is some ridiculously (in a good way) glutenous rice with some crushed peanuts on top and you either get a fresh spring roll (Saturdays) or broccoli and bok choy (Wednesdays). As a whole, the meal was well balanced and filling, but I still felt healthy enough to get a shake from a place a few doors down the street. I think this combo dish is one of Bahn's main draws because at least half of the people in the restaurant ordered it. So for vegetarians and carnivores alike, give the vegetarian combo a shot and you'll be pleasantly surprised.

Made in Manhattan - 7/12/2009

As I mentioned in the last post, I took a trip this weekend to NYC. I was only in town for a couple days, but there was a great deal of eating to be done.


After getting our stuff settled into our Pod (a decently cheap, but very nice and cozy place to stay on E 51st St. between 2nd and 3rd Ave., we hoofed it over to Chinatown to go to Joe's Shanghai Restaurant. If you've seen any of the dumplings filled with soup that I've posted here (usually from No. 1 Panda), these are another example. The dumplings had a pork filling and a wonderfully meaty soup (the website explains how to eat them if you need a tutorial). They served the dumplings with a ginger-infused vinegar that, when used sparingly, added to the experience of eating the dumpling.




While we did feel a little full after the dumplings, who could pass up the opportunity to enjoy some more Chinese food? We had some moo shu pork, which is always great with the slight plummy taste from the plum sauce. I ordered the lion's head. I've attempted to make this myself and it definitely did not turn out this good. The meatballs were wonderfully savory and lightly packed. The outer sauce is difficult to explain because it was so dark, salty and earthy. The sauce brought a full-bodied quality to the meatballs that could not be beat. Joe's was a great restaurant that is worth the wait and the hurried service because it is so gosh-darn good.


Two good tips while you are traveling around NYC are to keep your eye open for food on the go. There are innumerable food vendors roaming the streets, including hot dog carts, roasted nuts and ice cream. We found a farmers' market with everything from fresh cheeses to produce to kittens (to adopt, not to eat). Just down the street was a street fair with lots of food, crafts and various odds and ends. We had roasted corn with honey butter sauce (very excellent, seen above, though the holder's identity has been blocked out to protect his innocence), falafel and chicken souvlaki. While it was great to go down the 5-6 blocks of the fair, be sure to ask about prices first if they are not overtly advertised. I ended up paying $10 for the decent but not-worth-the-price falafel.


On most of my trips, I do my best to find a cuisine that represents the area I'm visiting. For this trip, I vowed to find a black and white cookie (among other items that just did not fit our time or stomachs). While strolling through the city, we spied Crumbs. The shop sells cookies, cupcakes and full cakes of all sorts. Among them were this "candy cookie" with M&M-like candies (very good) and my two-toned wonder which hit every criterion I remembered for this baked good. It was thick, cakey (in fact, it appears it was baked and then the bottom was frosted for the full, flat face), and the creamy icings were a wonderful duo of vanilla and chocolate. The next time you're in the Big Apple, be sure to try all of these recommendations as part of your NYC experience.

More Desserts than Food Again - 5/20/2009

This was a good weekend for eating. Some friends and I started by taking advantage of Restaurant Week at a French restaurant in downtown Durham. It's called Rue Cler. While we waited for our table (some patrons just don't know when to leave), we were treated to a tasting of some Rose champagne (Bugey Cerdon) and pommes frites. As an appetizer, I wanted to try the pate maison, which oddly enough tasted of Romano cheese. We had a 3 course prix fixe selection. I chose a salad with feta and pecans, shrimp with gnocchi and duck breast with potatoes au gratin (one of the best I've had). All were quite delicious in their own way, but the size of each dish was moderated to make up for the 3 courses. The prix fixe portion of the menu was set at $25. For dessert, we split a terrine au chocolat (an oddly delicious cross of a chocolate mousse with a dense chocolate cake) and a banana-caramel crepe. We chatted and had a good time until they kicked us out around 11pm (they didn't really kick us out, but we got the hint from the way they were cleaning up).


Here's a dish to feed a small army. It is a free-standing lasagna (aka lasagna pie). Instead of a casserole dish, it's made in a springform pan. There are 6 distinct and alternating layers in this dish: noodles, sauteed carrot and zucchini, sauteed spinach and mushrooms with basil, a ricotta-Parmiggiano mixture, tomato sauce (home-made), and mozzarella cheese. The only real trick is that the noodles are trimmed to fit in the round pan. It is baked for an hour, rested for 15 minutes and then unveiled for all to marvel at. I enjoyed this dish (and I'm continuing to enjoy the leftovers), though next time I would probably try to increase the Italian flavors a bit. But this was definitely an innovative recipe that will satisfy both meat-eaters and vegetarians.


I had a Merlot-blackberry sauce, made with vanilla, cinnamon and citrus, left over from a failed recipe, so I decided to use it for poaching pears. Pears are not one of my favorite fruit, but they are growing on me. The gritty nature of the flesh is the least appealing feature, but that's where poaching comes in. It softens the pear and adds some other flavors to distract your mouth. I peeled some medium-sized bosc pears, then poached them in the simmering sauce for about 5 minutes per side, then let them cook to room temperature. The real battle with these pears is making sure they are evenly cooked and colored without beating them up too badly or letting them cook for too long. But in the end, you're left with a sweet treat with full-bodied flavors. I accented mine with Ciao Bella blackberry-Merlot sorbetto (what a coincidence to find that at the store), a cardamom-vanilla whipped cream and a sprig of mint that I'm growing myself.


I received a sampling of Berry-Saffron Cookies recently that were, simply put, amazing. The story behind them is that they started as a chocolate chip cookie recipe that has evolved to incorporate non-traditional flavors so much that you would scarcely recognize the resemblance to the original recipe. This newer version contains a combination of strawberries (dried, I believe), sesame seeds, dark cocoa powder, turmeric, salt, pepper, and saffron, among some other possible flavors. The reason I liked these cookies so much is they are something you must savor to really enjoy. While eating them, you sharply taste the salt and a bit of pepper, but there's a background chocolatey flavor with hints of berry, meanwhile your entire mouth is filled with a plume of saffron essence. Unlike many other cookies, just eating one of these treats is very satisfying.


What do you do when you have a friend confused by baking? Help them out of course!


One problem with this solution that I did not recognize initially was that the item to be baked is from an Indonesian cake mix. The difference with this cake is that it is made of multiple layers that are sequentially baked on top of one another. The goal is to have lots of even, thin layers (easier said than done). As you may be able to see in the picture, the cake is surrounded by burnt shrapnel. Our end product was a bit of a diamond in the rough. The extended baking burnt a bit of the outside of the cake, so some cosmetic surgery was necessary. What was salvageable was an interesting cake, moist from lots of butter and a touch of rum in the recipe, possessing a flavor like vanilla and some other unidentifiable spices. This cake is undoubtedly better when made from scratch by a professional, but how many Indonesian bakeries are there around here?


I'm turning into a baking fiend. Someone in my lab mentioned celebrating something and I was all over it like a fat kid on a box of Ho-hos. I made this beauty of a coffee cake, flavored with raspberry and cream cheese. You start by making a crumb with flour, butter and sugar, saving some on the side. To most of the crumb, you add baking powder, baking soda, salt, sour cream, egg, and almond extract. This mixture is spread into a springform pan as the base of the coffee cake. On top of this is spread a mixture of cream cheese, sugar and egg. About half of a jar of raspberry jam is placed on top of the cream cheese mixture (I pretty much just marbled mine a bit), then this is all topped with slivered almonds and the reserved crumbs. This is all baked for about 55 minutes until it is golden brown on top (no real way of testing it for doneness without just cutting into it). My cake layer was a little dry, but the cream cheese and jam helped to alleviate this problem. Everyone seemed to enjoy it, especially evident from the way it was gone within some hours of it being put out. I'll chock this one up in the win column.

This Week in Cooking - 5/9/2009

Last post of the night, and it's a long one. Last weekend, I went temporarily insane and thought I would need all of this food to get me through the week. So I made this all in the course of 9 hours split over two days.


I brought back soup for lunch this week with mulligatawny, a spiced Indian soup. It is made with many different spices (garam masala, cumin, tumeric, etc.), chicken broth, lentils, chicken, celery, carrot, and cilantro. While I'm sure Indian people may make this dish much better, my version came out decently enough for satisfying lunches all week long.


I've wanted to shove a can of beer up a chicken's patoot for quite a while. Supposedly, using a can of beer inside of a whole chicken as it cooks helps to preserve moisture and tenderness in the meat. I was going to fire up the grill for the first time this year to make this, but it was raining, so I settled for the oven. After marinating the chicken in garlic, herbs and olive oil, I propped the chicken atop the beer can, then put it in the oven. Towards the end of the cooking, I glazed the chicken with apple jelly mixed with lemon juice. The chicken did come out pretty well, though it does look like it has a tan line problem...


As a side dish for the chicken, I made these pan-fried smashed potatoes. After boiling the potatoes until almost tender, you mash them partway, then pan-fry them in oil with salt and pepper. After cooking through, you top with shredded parmesan cheese. The great part about this side is that you get to have a boiled potato with a crispy shell and nice, salty cheese on top.


I haven't had fish in a while, so I made this dish. I marinated some mahi-mahi fillets in a combination of white wine, olive oil, salt, pepper, bay leaves, and thyme for about an hour. Then I simply sauteed the fish in the marinade until it was done (flaked with a fork). The meaty mahi held up well to the cooking, and the marinade had a nice combination of flavors.


Looking for a pasta dish with a sauce that's not tomato-, pesto- or cheese-based? Then try almonds. The sauce for this pasta is made by processing blanched almonds with some garlic and salt, then cooking it until it thickened in a pan. Peas and toasted almonds round out the flavors of this very innovative pasta dish.


Another good option to change up the routine is to use edamame, evidenced by these next two dishes. You can often find edamame in the frozen food section of the grocery store. After blanching the frozen soybeans, stir-fry them with soy sauce, oyster sauce, garlic, jalapeno, and pepper. This creates a delightful and flavorful side dish that will complement many different types of food. Think of them as lima beans except better.


Lastly in this montage of culinary wonder is this dish: grilled chicken with edamame skordalia. I'm not entirely sure as to what a skordalia actually is, but in this case, you process edamame with some water, salt, pepper, and parmesan. It is almost like mashed potatoes except more flavorful and better for you. Pairing it with this grilled chicken created a very satisfying dinner dish. And that's all the food I thought I would eat in a week. The only way I could possibly eat all of this would be if I was training to be a sumo wrestler.

A Sweet Interlude - 5/8/2009

Amidst all of this cooking, there was definitely time for some sweet treats.


Very briefly, since I refuse to give away the recipe, are congo bars, to which I may have made mention in previous posts. My version of these chocolate chip cookie bars came out decently chewy, especially since I undercooked them by about 5 minutes.


Another simple family recipe makes a tasty and relatively healthy dessert. Adding canned pineapple and sliced bananas to orange Jell-o is satisfying on most nights. A dollop of Cool Whip really makes it, though.


A not so healthy dessert is rice pudding. I've been searching high and low over the years for a good recipe and I finally have one. Too bad it involves three cans of coconut milk. But the pudding comes out creamy, the rice is tender but not mushy and the coconut (both cooked and toasted) make the flavor of the vanilla bean hit home.

Mothers' Day is this weekend and here is the sneak peak at what I sent my mom (hopefully she won't see this until she's already eaten some). My mom cannot eat gluten products, so I do my best to find recipes for treats for her to enjoy that she would normally not be able to eat. This recipe straight out of Southern Living uses only peanut butter, chocolate chips, vanilla, egg, and baking soda. And yet the cookies form a dough easily and look like normal chocolate chip cookies. Plus peanut butter always makes things better. So if you're looking for a tasty gluten-free treat or just want to forgo the flour, try these easy cookies.


A member of my lab brought in this international treat called Tokyo Banana. It's a bit like a banana-shaped twinkie with banana-flavored filling. I love Japanese treats because they are usually decent in quality and very innovative. Even better are the descriptions on the packaging: "People gather to TOKYO from here and there with memories of their home. And then, Tokyo gets everyone's home town."