Five Spice Peanuts

These peanuts make a wonderful accompaniment for cocktail hour and a great snack any time! I’ve tweaked a recipe for pecans to use more common Chinese ingredients, peanuts and five spice powder. But I’ve left in the butter – not very Chinese, but it really helps glue the spices to the nuts, and everything’s better [...]

Braised Peas

Spring has definitley sprung in SoCal – I think we may actually get a few days of it before summer hits – and with it spring brings some fantastic English peas. We’ve been putting them in risotto, making stirfried rice with them, and just enjoying them steamed. Here is a simple stirfry version if you can [...]

The White House Garden

This 60 Minutes clip is worth 1,000,000 words – need anyone say more?
http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=4867014n
Apparently Michelle Obama has taken Alice Waters’ advice to heart – three cheers for the new White House Vegetable Garden! But really, Mrs. Obama, why not beets?!?

Asparagus with “Hollandaise”

Must be spring: asparagus is flooding the farmers’ market in SoCal, so I hope things are warming up in the rest of the country, too! Here’s a twist on asparagus served with hollandaise – it’s certainly lower in fat than that classic sauce and adds some protein to a vegetarian meal. Just remember cooking the [...]

Cooking Personality Disorder

It’s really time to get back to posting some recipes, but humor me one day more – I found this to be an interesting exercise (and being in the middle of not one, but two piles of real estate paperwork, I simply haven’t had time to play in the kitchen!) I recently blogged about the [...]

The Joy of Supersizing?

Just about everyone has a cooking “Bible” – at my mother’s house, it’s the old Betty Crocker cookbook she got for her wedding. I have coveted that cookbook since moving out on my own 20+ years ago! When I moved into my own apartment, my father bought me a “new and improved” Betty Crocker cookbook, [...]

Clams with Fresh Basil

I have not come across too many uses for basil in Chinese cooking, but occasionally you can find a dish on a Chinese menu that is made with something called “nine-layer pagoda,” (jiuceng ta) which is, according to the Evergreen Seeds site, also known as Thai basil. Thai basil has a stronger flavor and a [...]

Food News

There’s a fun bit of history on Cashew Chicken in the New York Times: “Missouri Chinese” explores how this dish has become part of an American city’s heritage. It reminded me of driving cross-country from Vermont to Colorado with my father – I was on my way to my first job out of college, and he was [...]

The Future of Food

I finally got around to watching The Future of Food this weekend. By now this movie has become one of the cornerstones of the local/organic/sustainable movement, often quoted and referred to and listed as a resource by such writers as Michael Pollan among others. But somehow it had sat at the foot of my Netflix [...]

In praise of the cherimoya

This post is neither here nor there, perhaps having nothing to do with Chinese food, but I just had to write about a new fruit the kids and I have discovered – cherimoyas!
After receiving a free sample, we have been buying delicious ones at the farmers’ market from Thys’ Ranch, one of my favorite vendors [...]