Spring is (almost) here!

Arugula and Strawberry Salad

Fresh arugula, strawberries, toasted walnuts, Parmesan drizzled with a balsamic vinaigrette. Peppery, sweet, and nutty -- spring is coming!

Superbowl Feast

Veggie Buffalo Chicken with ranch sauce


Black Bean Burger


Buttermilk Biscuits

+ Crab stuffed mushrooms, sweet potato ginger fritters, banana pudding, and strawberries in brandy!

el Mercat de la Boqueria

I was recently in Barcelona and made a stop at this world-famous market in Las Ramblas, la Boqueria. It is tempting, colorful, and odiferous. The merchants were all pretty friendly at 8 am (we went early to avoid the crowds). From what I could tell, shoppers include restauranteurs, residents, and tourists. I'll never forget the image of a butcher throwing an entire pig leg, toes and hairs akimbo, on the scale for someone to buy.

After a big of oggling and sniffing and poking around, I found the magic phrase that would make vendors happily chat up their products and eventually offer me a taste of the goods: "Tiene algo tipico de Barcelona?" (do you have something characteristic of Barcelona?)

The highlight for me was tasting this cured Spanish ham that I can't find the name of (due to my poor Spanish skills and lazy googling efforts)... it was shaved off a huge thigh, deep red in color, and super duper chewy. The butcher instructed me to eat it by pulling it apart into little shreds with my teeth. The taste was heavenly -- meaty, not too salty, a little oily.

The produce was enormous but coming from California (and spoiled by the selection of Berkeley Bowl and Alemany Farmers Market, and the perfect displays of Whole Foods), I wasn't all that impressed. The dried fruit was pretty good, all super sugary. They even had dried strawberries (fresas) which were strangely moist for dried fruit, but good!

Hares and chickens and pheasants, oh my!

Oink.

Enormous emu eggs

More meat stands than you can shake a stick at

Row of squirming sea creatures. The critters next to the lobsters (and approx. the same size!) were enormous prawns famous in Barcelona. The women working the seafood stand were so bad-ass. Cold as ice.

I want to live in this candy hill.

Some "especial" cheese that tasted like cheddar, dragon fruit that tasted like nothing, and some pretty good bread.

Huge ass pear

Ubuntu, I wunt u

beet salad

carrot gnochetti

Cauliflower in a cast iron pot

vegan carrot cupcakes

vanilla bean cheesecake in a jar

Happy Holidayzzz

I made these for my Aunts this year for Christmas since they loved the white chocolate cranberry cookies I made last year but thought they were too much work. The picture doesn't show the colors too well, but it made a pretty package!

White Chocolate Cranberry Cookies (from allrecipes.com)
In the jar:
1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
1/2 cup packed brown sugar
1/4 cup white sugar
1/2 tsp baking soda
3/4 cup white chocolate chips
1 cup dried cranberries

On the card, I wrote out instructions to mix together 1 egg, 1 tbsp of brandy (optional, add extra vanilla otherwise), 1/2 tsp vanilla, and 1/2 cup of butter, softened. Take out all the ingredients from the jar and mix in a separate bowl. Combine wet ingredients to the dry and mix well. Drop heaping spoonfuls onto baking sheet 2 inches apart and bake at 375 degrees for 8-10 minutes or until lightly brown. Let cool on wire racks. Enjoy!

Bread Success (Pretty Much!)!

I impulsively bought a block of wet compressed yeast from Rainbow Grocery yesterday and had to do something with it.This is my first western-style bread, using Mark Bittman/Jim Lahey's no-knead dutch oven recipe (http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/08/dining/081mrex.html?_r=1).

Although the recipe calls for instant yeast, the internet tells me 0.6 oz of wet yeast is equivalent to 2.25 tsp of instant. The block I bought was 0.5 lb, roughly 8 ounces, so I said what the hell, I'll chip a small piece from the corner off and see how it goes. The recipe requires so little work and just a lot of time waiting around for stuff to grow. It was pretty successful, although my dough seemed a bit more amorphous than it should, and the bread didn't rise as much as I'd hoped (see photo). The inside is still very light and airy, the crust is crackling and beautiful, and the taste is divine- salty, and yeasty; I'd say better than most of the loaves sold in bakeries (gasp!). In the future I will play around with different amounts of the compressed yeast and different room temperatures to see if I can achieve a more normal looking dough and higher rise.

P.S. delicious with mimolette cheese at 10pm

Thousand-year old egg, anyone?

I have one mission in life: to convince everyone I know that Chinese food does NOT consist of sweet and sour pork, orange chicken, or a medley of meat and veggies immersed in a sea of corn-starch thickened goop. I guess I can sort of understand the appeal of Americanized Chinese food, sort of like how you sometimes crave MickeyD's egg mcmuffins even though you know its not so good. Of course bringing thousand year-old egg into the picture doesn't help.

We had a proper Chinese/Taiwanese meal, legitimized by three Taiwanese guests fresh off the plane plus too-legit-to-quit pork belly A-chen and my half-claim-to-Taiwanese self. That makes for 4.5 of us right? We started off with pickled radishes, thousand year old egg and tofu, and green onion pancakes. I don't think many people are aware of Chinese cold dishes but they are a norm in any Chinese household. A made her famed hong shau rou, a recipe she snatched from her pops. The pork tender, the sauce addictingly sweet and all in all "salty as fuck" (as Allison likes to put it)-- it is delicious on top of rice. The rice, should be noted, is incredibly important--short grain and a tad sticky-- as the sauce should cling to the rice (like white on rice). I say this because I messed up the rice and bad rice is not acceptable nor salvageable!

Also on the menu included a vegetarian dish of bean curd, shiitake mushrooms, bamboo shoots, and green peas; sauteed Taiwanese spinach with garlic and ginger; shrimp sauteed in a shitload of olive oil and butter; a cold noodle dressed in sesame oil, black vinegar, soy sauce and hot chili garlic sauce topped with canned tuna/salmon/sardines (really, we had a choice of all three and it was surprisingly good); and lastly, E contributed a Korean-Chinese dish, Kimchi fried rice. I'm missing some pictures but I was too eager to eat...sorry!

Pickled Radishes

Pi dan dou fu (thousand year old egg and tofu topped with scallions, soy sauce paste, rice vinegar and sesame oil)

Cong You Bing (scallion pancake)

Hong Shau Rou pork belly (the cut normally used for bacon) braised in soy sauce, shaoxing wine, and spiced with whole star anise

Sauteed Taiwanese Spinach

Kimchi Fried Rice (with tofu) Sorry for the myspace-like picture