Aloha! We’re back from our vacation and we’re slowly easing into reality. The luggage bags are half-unpacked. That in itself, is a great feat. It’s hard to wake up again in hot Arizona, staring at the ceiling and doing rock-paper-scissors to see who needs to get up first (just kidding!!!). We were so spoiled with homemade meals from morning till evening by our friends in Hawaii. In fact, not only have we expanded our food selection (steamed artichokes with mayo, papaya with lemon juice, strawberries with agave nectar, etc.) but also our waistlines! Hahaha.

When I found my cooking mojo again, I made this chicken stew-ish dish that I grew up with in the Philippines. I would ask for “tinola” and stake my claim on the chicken legs with the skin. I was not concerned about extra weight then, obviously. These days we’re trying to be healthy. So instead of chicken with all the delicious skin, I cooked chicken tenders. I used soy sauce in place of fish sauce, but I would always recommend using the latter when you have it in your kitchen. All in all, it was close to the real thing and Dan liked our evening viand:

It’s a nice combination of the texture of chicken and that of chayote, and this is perfect with rice. Dan has never eaten chayote before this and I’m glad he liked it. :-)

Here’s the step-by-step cooking photos:

Created with Admarket’s flickrSLiDR.

It’s really a super simple dish to make so please, help yourself to the recipe!

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Do you have those moments when you think you should know (how to do) something by default as a result of your ethnicity (or perhaps last name, family, affiliation, etc.)? And then you refuse to seek guidance because “it’s in you”. It’s like assuming that as an Asian I should know how to cook rice perfectly without any measuring tools or timer.

That’s exactly what was going on in my mind when I embarked on this Pot Sticker Adventure. I was pretty confident I could pull this off by channeling my inner 1/minisculeth Chinese. A book I’m reading says this is what artists are prone to do — Wing It. Did I ever wing it. I just wanted to use what we had in the kitchen, including kale.

I think I added shredded kale, chopped carrots, green onions, salt, pepper to the ground pork. I can’t remember. I wrote down the ingredients but I could not find that piece of paper anymore.

I made the wrapper with equal parts boiling water and flour. [Please don't ask me what got into my head.] The sealing/folding left something to be desired, but it still resembled what it should look like. Somewhat.

In the end, my first pot sticker experiment tasted REALLY good for something that’s based out of nothing. Dan and I were more surprised than anything. The wrapper was not so good, so I’ll stick to pre-made ones next time. Other than that…yummy!

The dipping sauce, if you’re curious, was a mixture of light soy sauce, white vinegar and smashed whole clove of garlic. It’s a Filipino dip that’s normally used for roasted pig but I tried it with the pot stickers to balance the saltiness. Dan loved it. :)

What have you experimented/concocted lately? Share your links if you blogged about them.

I was thinking while shopping for dinner on Sunday, I noticed something out of the corner of my eye that was not there the last time I was there: Panko Bread Crumbs. I was squealing with my inside voice. Making Chicken Katsu would be fun! But there inlies my issues. The meat for the week I picked up was beef. Thick cut steaks, to be more specific. When I arrived home with my panko booty, I checked online for any panko beef recipes.

They did not exist. Oh, sure, people made SOMETHING with it, but as of the day I have been writing this article, I have never seen a public recipe involving it. I devised one of my own.

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One of the question during this week’s “Are You Smarter Than A 5th Grader” was: Any number with a power of zero is equals to what? I answered aloud : ONE. I still remember! I’ve retained something after two decades in school. Wow, there’s my shining moment. Haha.

My memory serves me better when it comes to food and my childhood, than math, though. [Fortunate or unfortunate? You decide.] The dishes I grew up with are slowly coming back to me. I have “cooking videos” in my head: of my mom, my grandmothers, and our maids. [I really don't remember the men in our family cooking, although I was told that my great grandfather, or his brother,...or something like that, was a great cook.]

I requested this viand of sauteed bean sprouts [called "togue" (toh-ge') in the Philippines] a lot for dinner when I was young because it cooks quickly, which means I can eat sooner, finish my homework earlier, and have time to do more crafts. Did you notice the order? Eat, ‘work’, play. I knew my priorities alright.

I vividly recall going in and out of the kitchen before meals, monitoring the progress of the dishes to be served on the table. I tend to ‘hound’ things that I want until I get them — a very OCD trait that have been carried on to adulthood, but I’d prefer to call it ‘being focused’. There was a schedule in my head as to what ingredients to put next, what to do, how long, and so on. I didn’t know that this would help me with the recipes decades later.

There’s nothing complicated about this dish, which I love. You’d be surprised with all the good flavors considering that it has very few main ingredients, which are healthy, too — chicken, mushrooms, bean sprouts. I chose thigh meat to ‘flavor’ this dish because it’s tastier than chicken breasts. You can also add soy sauce for the flavor, but I skipped it because the sea salt and pepper were enough for me.

To prove to you just how much of a no-brainer this is to cook, here’s the visual step-by-step cooking guide:

If you’ve never had bean sprouts, you better give this a try! Here’s the recipe:

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Things are busy here as it’s tax season, and with mommy and daddy filing their taxes for personal and their respective businesses, posting is a wee bit slower than usual. They’ve also been going out to see friends, which is always a good thing. The cocoa brownies weren’t posted as anticipated– our sincere apologies for those who are waiting.

Last week’s fares here at Gourmeted are:

• Lengua Estofada (Braised Beef Tongue) - A Filipino delicacy of beef tongue cooked in tomato based sauce. A toast to offal lovers.
• Pancake Breakfast with the Help of The Scale – Teddy helps daddy test out the new kitchen scale to make delicious pancakes. It’s a great new addition to our kitchen!
• How We Take Food Photos Part I: Tools and Equipment – The first of many in the series on food photography. Come and join us in our quest to take better photos of food!
• Dorie’s Best Chocolate Chip Cookies - Awesome chocolate chip cookies from a recipe that our friend, Patricia, posted about. Yumm!

Things we loved from neighboring food sites:

• Ben’s French Bread – Beautiful homemade bread that we wish we can make someday.
• Michelle’s Pretty Good for Now Buttermilk Biscuits – She’s still on the quest to find The One biscuit recipe, but this looks great to us! If you have a phenomenal biscuit recipe, come on over there and let her know…help a fellow foodie out.
• Elle’s Oven Baked Hooters Style Buffalo Wings – Need I say more? Can’t wait to try this with our Spicy Garlic Sauce

What’s up this week? Take a peek:

• Review of Sauce restaurant
• Part II of How We Take Food Photos: The Grey Card
• Ultimate Cinnamon Rolls

That’s it for now. Have a great week everyone. And happy eating!

We hope you’re all having a good Sunday. It’s bright, and warm and sunny here at our end.

If you’ve missed something, here’s a recap of what we had this week:

• Bittersweet Chocolate Pudding Pie – Lick-the-dish-clean good decadent chocolate pie.
• Cinnamon Rolls I – No-Rise Dough) - Joy’s first attempt at making homemade cinnamon rolls with cream cheese glaze
• Cinnamon Rolls II — Success! – The best payoff for not giving up…amazing rolls.
• Comfort Beef Stew – Winter’s last sip.
• Food Gossip Meme: He Says, She Says
• Linguine with Beef and Mushroom Sauce – The pasta that earned a nice compliment from Dan.
• Free Italian cookbook - Free cookbook for download until March 31st.

Also, I mentioned last week that we’ll be featuring recipes that we like, admire, and want to bookmark for future reference. It’s easier than trying to remember where to get them when we need the recipe. Go have a look at these delicious creations:

• Katy’s Fig and Goat Cheese Canapes – Easy to make snack that’s promisingly decadent.
• Pam’s Mom’s Clam Chowder – Could probably be the recipe that would finally get us to cook homemade clam chowder.
• Cheese Puff’s Water Fried Buns — Tender buns that look absolutely amazing and delicious
• Patricia’s Dorie’s Best Chocolate Chip Cookies — Just look at the those cookies!
• Dhanggit’s French Bread — Beautiful homemade bread.

A peek at this week’s ‘menu’ at Gourmeted:

• Cocoa Brownies

• Beef Stir-Fry
  

• Lengua Estofada (Braised Beef Tongue)

• We’re kicking off the series on How We Take Food Photos - from discussing the basic equipment, setting up your camera for taking step-by-step photos, to dealing with kitchen and dining table lighting, and more! A few people have asked about how we do things here, so we’re going to do a continuous series on food photography, and hopefully we can all learn from each other.

Dan and I dream about food and plan party menus way ahead of time. When we hosted Christmas Eve dinner at our place, rest assured everything was thoughtfully put together. Isn’t that crazy? Lately, all I can think about and keep feeding Dan is chocolate (can you tell?), thanks to this contest.

Anyway, back to what I was saying, I couldn’t help it. I’m a victim of autosuggestion — all those repetitive thoughts about chocolate, from all your beautiful websites and the Food Network chocolate specials, and now I feel like it flows through my veins and it’s haunting me! I have three chocolate projects coming up, just because I lose sleep thinking about making them — does that every happen to you? But I’ll save them for Valentine’s week.

For now, we’ll take a chocolate break today to give you something healthy. [I laughed when I read Arnold's comment yesterday that his doctor does not recommend visiting this site. Funny.]

I absolutely LOVE seafood, but Dan doesn’t. On the few occasions that he is willing to eat them, you bet I’m all over it. Last week we bought fresh shrimps and I asked if he wanted them for lunch and he said yes. What’s a seafood-deprived girl left to do? Scramble to find out what she can cook, make it as fast as possible, and feed it to him before he changes his mind! We both loved this Shrimp Stir-Fry experiment I cooked and I had to jot down what I did right after we ate so I’ll remember how I made it and what I made it with. All this hard work…haha.

Here’s a visual step-by-step cooking guide:

The recipe is behind the cut. Continue Reading

Last Saturday I suddenly had the urge to try making ginger chicken because we had ginger and I’ve never made that dish before. [How's that for cooking logic?] While Dan prepared the marinade and the meat for the herb crusted flat iron steak we were having for Sunday night, I cooked this for our late lunch.

It’s one of my Asian cooking experiments. I didn’t follow any recipe and just went ‘by taste’, so it could be very different from Chinese cookbook versions. [I haven't checked.]

I’m surprised and quite happy with the results: the chicken was tasty and perfectly tender; the sauce’s ginger taste was just right and it blended well with the onion flavor, plus it has a kick from the ground pepper; the mushrooms added a nice flavor and texture to the whole dish; and the carrots…are cute. This will surely be a repeat dish in our household. If you’d like to give it a shot, I’ve measured the ingredients and outlined the cooking steps below. Enjoy!

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