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As I round the corner on finishing the Asian Tofu manuscript for submission next week, there is little time for complicated cooking. Nevertheless, a girl has to eat and I’m not one to give up good food just because I have a deadline to meet. I just figure out some simple things to make. Once in [...]
What started out as my pursuit of homemade Peking duck has turned into a pursuit of Sichuan fragrant and crispy duck. As I mentioned last week in my initial foray into cooking a whole duck, the deep-fried Sichuan preparation is often served instead of roasted Peking duck at Chinese restaurants abroad. In many of the Chinese [...]
Sometimes, a girl just needs to bake cookies. Food stylist Karen Shinto and I had a phone meeting recently to sketch out a game plan for an upcoming Asian Tofu photo shoot. After we got all of our work squared away, we chatted about recent food discoveries. One of the things that she mentioned was making a [...]
Even though I shop at a year-round farmers market, Thanksgiving marks a special time of the year. It’s not only because I’m shopping for the turkey holiday feast or that autumn’s cool weather bounty of cauliflower, carrots and broccoli have started arriving. It’s more because I go into a wistful mode about certain vegetables. After [...]
Late summer early autumn is when chiles are at their fruity-spicy best. I make it a point to see what’s available at the local farmer’s markets. Chiles are a hot (pun intended) thing to grow these days and farmers such as Melody Ranch, a local farm in Watsonville near where I live, tries out new [...]
Last year I had a freak accident while traveling in Southeast Asia. I fell and put a hairline crack in my front teeth. Ever since then, I’ve neither been able to gnaw on ribs nor bite into corn on the cob. My dentist warned me against it, lest I aggravate the injury. We’re heading into [...]
The past seven days have been filled with terrific things and uncomfortable inconveniences. Last Saturday, we had a freak storm in Santa Cruz that brought hail and nonstop rain, resulting in a 44-hour power outage in our neighborhood. Our home is on a crazy power grid and we annually lose power but we’d had never [...]
Sometimes I conflate things in my kitchen and on my plate and they work well. For example, last week’s conversation about western ways to use Asian foods and ingredients and the heartbreaking disaster in Japan resulted in my making Mexican carnitas with Japanese dashi. I had Japan on my mind and lots of dashi stock leftover from [...]
Vietnamese Tet sticky rice cakes (banh chung) are a must-have for the Lunar New Year. When they’ve just been cooked, refreshed through a one-hour boiling, or warmed in the microwave oven, they are fabulously good. Each mouthful is redolent of the tea-like fragrance imparted by the leaves that the cake is wrapped in. But if [...]
Crab Rangoon are deep-fried wontons stuffed with a piquant cream cheese and crab filling. While it is not considered a classic in Asia, it is a popular item on all-you-can-eat Asian American buffet spreads and Chinese-American menus. Most often times, there’s just cream cheese in the wonton, which leaves me crabby. To get my fill [...]