Thats’ right, FREE. And what’s more, each time you download the cookbook a dollar (up to $100,000) is donated to America’s Second Harvest, a national charity that secures and distributes more than two billion pounds of food products annually. What are you waiting for? Hurry, the free download is only until March 31st.

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I’ve seen the TV commercial for it two nights ago, but I found out about it from Katy (thanks, girl!).

A last hurrah for stew as it begins to hit the 80′s here in the Valley. In fact, I’m getting a bit too warm just looking at these photos.

It was perfect on a cold night. So if you’re looking for something hearty and warm to eat, have a bowl of this!

Here’s the recipe: Continue Reading

I’m from the School of Perfectionism. Just ask Dan and he’ll tell you that when I don’t park straight, or the car is sticking out — it aggravates me and he’ll have to pull me away because I want to fix it. Let me fix it…just let me fix it! He finds it hilarious and tells me to let it go. Argh.

When the cinnamon rolls didn’t live up to my expectations, there’s no question I’d make them again until I get the results that other people achieved. I needed to know what I did wrong (as you can tell from my comments here, I did some research on the possible reasons for the non-rising dough) and make it right. The next evening, I worked on a new dough (Sorry, Bean) and paid attention to the details.

“Try and try until you succeed” was the corniest motto from gradeschool that I remember. I made fun of it a lot of times, but look who’s laughing now –

I’m just glad this second try was a lot better. It was a nice encouragement as a new baker.

Go ahead, take a bite…take a piece of heaven with that cream cheese glaze:

Mmm…enjoy the sweet taste of success: the batch of cinnamon rolls that gave me a good night’s sleep.

So what did I do differently this time?

1. I used less flour. No overzealous flouring this time. In fact, it was sticking to my hands, but I persisted.

2. I warmed up the milk really good (130ºF) AND dissolved the yeast in it. Dan’s mom reminded me to do this before I made them. I guess I didn’t warm it up enough the first time!

3. I mixed the dough manually — by hand. The recipe called for a stand mixer but we don’t have that. I used a hand mixer for the first mixing, then it’s all spatula and hand from there.

4. I made sure the “warm draft-free area” was really warm. The day I made the first batch, it was cold in the apartment. I placed the bowl with the dough in the oven, and realized after 2 hours that it was too cold in there. :( The second time I warmed up the oven, turned it off and let it cool off for about 10 minutes, then put the dough in to rise. I did the same thing for the 2nd rising to get these plump dough rolls [unfortunately, with melted butter, too]:

5. The dough after the first rise was light and airy, and smells yeasty as it should be. My hands and nose suddenly recalled the pizza doughs I made years ago (3 of them — my first ever rising dough)…it was like instant recognition. Eureka!

6. I didn’t over-flatten or over-roll the dough. I kept a light pressure to spread it into 1/4-inch thickness.

** What I would do different next time: Start checking the rolls after 15 minutes. Twenty minutes turned it too brown.

It doesn’t hurt to give a recipe a second try. It’s good to learn from one’s mistakes and make the necessary adjustments for next time. You just might be surprised with something so good and satisfying:

If you want to make these, I’ve included the recipe below. If you have useful tips for making cinnamon rolls, I’d love to hear them! Continue Reading

Now it’s my turn to answer –

[Don't forget, you can answer the meme through the Comments OR post it on your own blog/site!]

What were you doing 10 years ago?

I was completing my second year at the community college pondering my transition to Arizona State.

What were you doing 1 year ago?

I was waking up at 5:30 in the morning to drag my bum to work. (And on rare occasion, saying good night to Joy ;) )

Five snacks you enjoy:

1. Cookies

2. Pretzels

3. BBQ chips

4. Chex Mix

5. Chocolate

Five things you would do if you were a millionaire:

1. Sleep.

2. Start a business.

3. Buy a house with a big kitchen (Yes, toys too…)

4. Travel a bit.

5. Buy myself a Tesla, Joy gets the Jaguar.

Five bad habits:

1. Rushing to get things done

2. Stressing the small stuff.

3. Being Easily distrac….what was that?

4. Not working out.

5. Eating too much junk (see above)

Five things you like doing:

1. Coming home to Joy.

2. Cooking.

3. Gaming.

4. Watching movies.

5. Reading.

Five things you would never wear again:

1. Tidy-Whiteys

2. Turtlenecks (if I can avoid ‘em)

3. The same clothes twice without washing first. (It counts!)

4. A size extra small

5. Polyester

Five favorite toys:

1. My Laptop

2. the Wii

3. My car

4. The Waffle Maker

5. The TV (which was donated by a family friend)

Elle tagged us for some Food for Gossip Meme.

For our family and friends who are wondering what a Meme is, it’s just like when you were kids and you had notebooks [remember "autograph" or "slam" books] where everyone gets to answer all sorts of different questions from factual to silly ones [Who can forget the super corny "What is Love?" and "Who is your Crush?"]. Basically, that’s it…only done on the web.

** If you’re up for it, share your own answers in the comments — Yes, we’re tagging YOU! This is fun! **

Food Gossip Meme

What were you doing 10 years ago?

Finishing my bachelors from the University of the Philippines, enjoying life as always.

What were you doing 1 year ago?

Same time last year, I was here in Scottsdale for Dan’s company party. I was daydreaming about my two-week Hawaiian vacation with my best friend, Alice. Good times. :-)
Five snacks you enjoy:

1. [I'm there with you, Elle -- ] Chocolate

2. Potato chips

3. Tortilla chips with some cheesy dip

4. Cheese

5. Kashi Tasty Little Crackers, cheddar flavor

Five things you would do if you were a millionaire:

I recently had a dream about this and I was quite surprised at what I decided to do in my dream –

1. Allocate money to family, including college trust funds for the nieces and nephews, maximizing it without them having to pay tax.

2. Bring our families on a tropical vacation…woohoo!

3. Buy a decent house with a big kitchen, with all the nice gadgets.

4. Invest wisely for retirement.

5. Keep doing what we love — cooking — and do something more for and with it through studying, starting a business, and give back to the community through food and cooking.

Five bad habits:

1. Doing too many things at the same time, and shun sleep if I can get away with it.

2. Buying more books and magazines, thinking that I have all the time in the world to read them.

3. Snacking a lot.

4. Keeping all letters and cards I receive.

5. Not packing light. [I guess I'll have to stop flying with US Airways!]

Five things you like doing:

1. Reading.

2. Cooking.

3. Weekends with Dan.

4. Traveling to new places, trying out new restaurants…

5. Visiting parks, galleries and museums.

Five things you would never wear again:

1. Aqua Net! HAHAHAHAHA

2. Purple sneakers

3. Boy’s cut, and be told I look better as a boy. [What the..?!]

4. Wool-based clothing without any lining, unless I want to itch all day.

5. I honestly can’t think of anything more.

Five favorite toys:

1. Nikon D80

2. Macbook Pro

3. Fountain pen

4. Can Photoshop be a toy?

5. My LG mobile phone that lets me check emails and gives me directions.

In March Bon Appetit‘s issue, Molly of Orangette had a recipe for homemade cinnamon rolls in her monthly column. Dan’s mom told me that she tried it and it didn’t rise the first time when she followed the recipe exactly, but the second time when she added the yeast into the warm milk before adding the other dry ingredients, it worked. This makes perfect sense to me from what I can remember when I successfully made believable pizza dough two years ago and I did that as well.

Unlike Molly, I do not have any fears of yeast except when I think about the experiments we made with yeast in school — makes me cringe. I’m okay with yeast, and I was confident and very hopeful about making these rolls even if the closest I’ve been to making them were the Pillsbury ones. Classy. I took a lot of pictures during the process. I was drooling and imagined arias of Thank You‘s and You’re Wonderful‘s from Dan when he tries them. [In my head, everything is theatrical. There's either a dramatic wail or a cry for joy...nothing in between. I blame being a Leo for that.]

Meet Bean, the promising seed of dough that I thought would come to life. He was very pinchable.

I think this is where my first problem lies: I could have put too much flour. After doing some research last night, I read that some people have a tendency to over-flour the dough for fear of it sticking to their fingers. Uh, that would me.

Continue Reading

In December’s issues of Bon Appetit magazine, it featured a year in review of the best recipes of the year. The winner last year was a chocolate pudding pie, Bittersweet Chocolate Pudding Pie with Creme Fraiche Topping, as the official title of the dessert dish. This one little dish is what started our chocolate posts. Enjoy our recreation of the dish.

Continue Reading

In case you missed anything the past week, I’m here to tell you what we had here:

• Chocolate Dipped Marshmallow Cake Cones – Ice cream cones filled with homemade strawberry marshmallow, topped with devil’s food cake and dipped in Callebaut milk chocolate
• Sedona Sights — photos of pretty Sedona, AZ from our weekend trip
• Boiled Beef Soup — mommy’s Filipino recipe of her childhood favorite comfort food called “Nilagang Baka”. Made with beef soup bones, beef brisket, cabbage and spinach. Great for the cold winter days.
• Chocolate Covered Craving — We asked YOU what kind of chocolate you want. So far the Dark Chocolate camp has the majority of votes. You can still vote here.
• In Defense of Milk Chocolate – Milk chocolate has been neglected and have been dissed by chocolate purists for years, but it’s now making a comeback.
• Rotelli with Shrimp in Creamy Drunken Tomato Sauce – Pasta in tomato sauce with creme fraiche and a kick of white wine.

Here’s a peek at what we’ll be featuring this week:

• Bittersweet Chocolate Pudding Pie
• Comfort Beef Stew
• Linguine with Beef and Mushroom Cream Sauce

Next week we are also going to have a weekly roundup of recipes and articles we like from other websites.

Are you having an Oscar’s Party tonight? What are you going to eat?! What’s a-cookin’ in your kitchen? We are going to make cinnamon rolls! Yipee!

How’s everyone this weekend? We hope you’re all having a good one and eating well. It’s sunny here, but still cool. I apologize for those who might be jealous looking at the picture. For someone who has suffered through years of Vancouver winters, it’s a nice change to see sunshine peering through the blinds in the middle of February. If you’re freezing out in the snow or counting the days until spring or summer, I’m bringing the sunshine to you.

We hit some hundred golf balls yesterday morning [again, don't hate us...hehe] and don’t you follow my example because I didn’t wear a glove. I was left with blisters on both hands and when we got back home for lunch, I was sore, cranky and the last thing my brain and body wanted to do was exert any more effort than the required minimum. As much as I’d like to stick to our new year’s goal of providing step-by-step visual guides for our recipes, it just didn’t work out yesterday. I initially thought that this What-would-you-like-to-eat-for-lunch-honey? -Oh-okay-I’ll-see-what-I-can-come-up-with-in-20-minutes dish won’t make it to the site so I didn’t bother taking photos while cooking.

Surprises of surprises, we both finished two platefuls of it and I was this-close to licking my plate clean. I mean…Wow. Loved it! How can I not share the recipe (as much as I can remember of it) after that?

I wanted a creamy sauce but we didn’t have heavy cream like we usually do, and honestly I am not going to make a supermarket run just for that. Instead, we had leftover crème fraîche that we bought for Dan’s Chocolate Pudding Pie [I made him promise to post about that soon!]. I’ve never used creme fraiche for a dish, but it’s still cream so it should work right? I chose my favorite go-to pasta tomato sauce base, Muir Glen Tomato Basil which doesn’t have any overpowering flavor that you can easily transform it into whatever you like, really. I had the last minute idea to add lemon juice along with the parsley at the end, which gave it a light refreshing kick. The overall result was more than I’ve ever hoped for — it was smooth and creamy, but not too much that you can’t eat a lot of it, and all the flavors just blended together so wonderfully. I hope you try it.

So without further ado, here’s the recipe: Continue Reading

First of all, thank you for voting on the chocolate survey. Thanks for satisfying yet another one of my, “I wonder…?”

In a food community I frequent and where I posted about the strawberries, a few gave me flack for using milk chocolate. It felt as if I announced I read pocket paperbacks to a theatre full of elitist bookworms. Que horror! Sadly, milk chocolate gets a bad rap. I’m not sure why. Do chocolate snobs feel holier than thou for eating “purer” chocolate? Do you feel better that you can appreciate it when others can’t? Are those limited to dark, sugar-free chocolates for health reasons wish they could go back to their milk chocolates? Is one type better than the other? OH? Why? Why can’t we all be entitled to eat whatever chocolate we like without getting an upturned nose and asked why we like “crap”? Sharing a box of chocolate varieties would be hellish then if we all wanted the same thing. I’ll take the caramels and milk chocolates and feel free to fight over the darks, thanks.

I eat all kinds of chocolate, and prefer one over the others depending on my mood. I’m an equal opportunity eater and I try to be as open-minded about other people’s preferences as much as possible. When I read the comment that I made someone cringe because I used milk chocolate, I was instantly reminded of what Nick Hornby said about reading on the preface of his book, Housekeeping Vs. The Dirt:

“…reading for enjoyment is what we should all be doing. [...] I simply mean that turning pages should not be like walking through thick mud. The whole purpose of books is that we read them, and if you find you can’t, it might not be your inadequacy that’s to blame. “Good” books can be pretty awful sometimes.

The regrettable thing about the culture war we still, after all these years, seem to be fighting is that it divides books into two camps: the trashy and the worthwhile. No one who is paid to talk about books for a living seems to be able to convey the message that this isn’t how it works, that “good” books can provide every bit as much pleasure as “trashy” ones. [...] Read anything, as long as you can’t wait to pick it up again.”

This is similar to what the NY Times article Dark May Be King, but Milk Chocolate Makes a Move** mentioned from an interview with a chocolatier:

“These pure origins are because we chocolatiers want people to think that chocolate is serious and adult like wine, but underneath it is not,” said Stéphane Bonnat, whose family began making chocolate in 1884. “The first thing we have when we close our eyes and taste must be the pleasure we remember from being 10 years old.” And that pleasure, almost invariably, was from milk chocolate.

I implore you to read the article when you have the time, because as fellow foodies I think we need to be informed. It’s important to learn to embrace the fact that we have choices exactly because everyone has different tastes, and it shouldn’t mean that one taste is superior over the other. It’s food…it’s there to be enjoyed! You might not like it, I might not like it — does that mean it’s bad? Who’s to say what the other person should like? That said, dark chocolate is not the end all and be all.

If you think milk chocolate tastes and costs ‘cheap’, you need to expand your horizons and check out your gourmet shops. You’d be surprised at the quality and range of prices for all sorts of chocolates. One of my favorites is the Green & Black’s with 34% chocolate — smooth as silk, and it has a nice sweetness to it that is not overpowering.

I love it when people take pleasure in their food because it brings them joy, and not just because it’s the hottest trend in town or the coolest thing to be seen eating. Let’s eat for our own pleasures and be merry. Cheers and Happy Friday!

** Thank you for pointing out this article.