Pan Roasted Clams - Delish!

Made this for dinner last Wednesday for C and I as a predinner to the Japansese curry we were also cooking. The recipe is from David Chang's Momofuku cookbook for Pan Roasted Bouchot Mussels with OS but since I'm too scared to cook with mussels (ever since Tony Bourdain said he does not eat them in restaurants because of the unknown of how they are stored and held), I substituted clams. C loved them and said they were really good.

Now that I have more free time with school being done (did I mention I was taking grad classes--I got a 4.0 this semester) and it is lonely cooking for one, I have been trying to cook Sunday night dinners for some of my friends. This past Sunday, I made my own duck ravioli and then 12 pounds of clams. We ate almost all of them, but saved a few for my roommate who was at work at the time.

I forgot to take a picture of the homemade ravioli because I was busy cooking everything else. I did not love them, but my dinner guest said they were good. I served it with a demi-glace sauce. I also saved a lot of the duck fat to be used another time. Mmm..

Just Another Sunday

Everything is fabulous these days. I've been really happy and satisfied with 2011 so far. I just can't believe it is almost the end of April already!

J and N visited for the weekend. It was great and fun to catch up, not to mention all the laughing (even if it is at my expense...). I ended the relaxing weekend with baking all Sunday afternoon and having my usual Sunday night dinner at R&C's.

Blueberry Mochi Cake before going in the oven.

Result: Delicious. I love the texture of mochi and this was not too sweet. For the recipe, click here.

Chai-Spiced Crumb Coffee Cake. The crumb is my favorite part of coffee cake. I had about 3/4 of cup of crumb left. I should have sprinkled more in between the layers of the batter.

Because I did not think the chai spices were dominate enough. The cake was slightly dry for my taste as well. R said it was really good and he would pay money for it though. :) For recipe, click here.

Broken Glass Jello. Really easy to make. Super colorful.

And easy to share. The only hard part is waiting for the jello to set. I do not have much patience so waiting overnight for the final product was very difficult, but the results were well worth it. I don't normally like jello, but these were so fun and summery. For recipe, click here.

And I made mushroom and leek risotto for the Sunday dinner but I left in a hurry and forgot to take a photo. It was tasty though, just so you know. Happy Baking.

2010 in Baking

So it's been awhile. I cannot believe it is 2011 already. It's been crazy these past few months with work and prepping to start graduate school this spring (first day of class is next Tuesday, eek!). I have not even been keeping up with the blogs that I read, much less finding time to write my own. I am going to try to post slightly more frequently, but no promises. In the mean time, I figured I mind as well post up pictures of food I made before 2010 ended that I never got around to doing. In no particular order:

Pumpkin Stuffed with Everything Good (everything being cheese, bacon, bread, thyme, cream, etc.). Best recipe of 2010. From Dorie Greenspan. I heard her talk about it on NPR around Thanksgiving time and had to make it. So easy to make and so delicious.

If the pumpkin was the best recipe of 2010, these french cheese puffs are number two. I could easily eat a dozen of these. This is a David Lebovitz recipe and is fairly simple to make. I like to use a smokey cheddar or a saltier cheese. I also like to eat them plain or add a piece of salami with it. Either way, they are amazing!

Chocolate Macarons filled with Nutella ganache

Three cheese (Brie, Gruyere, Fontina) fondue with Champagne

Blueberry Oat Bar

Fourth of July Red Velvet Cupcakes

Tres Leche Cupcake (a la Martha Stewart)

Soba's One Year Old Birthday Cake (took the Wilton Basic Cake Decorating Class). Made KAF's classic yellow cake paired with Wilton's buttercream frosting.

Zucchini Bundt (to be honest, I can't really remember what this was, but I think it was zucchini).

Strawberry Daifuku (strawberry wrapped in red bean paste wrapped in mochi)-another YouTube Cooking with Dog recipe.

Lemon Cupcakes with Whipped Cream Frosting

One of my best friend's sister saw that I had a made a cake for Soba for her birthday and asked if I would make one for her dog, Drama, tenth birthday. I agreed and made the top 8 inch cake suitable to be eaten by a dog (carrot cake with peanut butter honey frosting and cream cheese honey decorating frosting) and the cupcakes fit for human friends (vanilla cupcake with buttercream frosting and white chocolate bone accent).

Mini pumpkin cheesecake-Joy of Baking recipe adapted to cupcake sized portions so it is more easily shared.

Harry Potter Cupcakes in celebration of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 1. Movie was amazing! I can't wait for the part two. Chocolate mint cupcakes with thicken whipped cream frosting.

Chouquettes: French Cream Puff filled with Nutella cream (adapted from David Lebovitz's recipe)

2010 was not too shabby, but it sure went by fast. I am expecting great things in 2011. Happy New Year!

Dragon Island Phoenix Chinese Restaurant

My aunt and uncle just opened a new Chinese restaurant so I helped them build a small website (my first one) It wasn't showing up in search engines so I googled how to do it and they said to post the link in a indexed site, which my blog is. So here's the link for Dragon Island Chinese Restaurant in Phoenix: www.dragonislandphoenix.com.

Hope this works.

My Best Friend on CNN

My best friend, Samuel Burke, has worked for CNN for the past year on Amanpour. Currently, he is working on the program Clix on CNN en Español. Please tune in to watch and support him if you get CNN en Español. Here's a sample:

Samuel Hood Burke CLIX CNN en CNN en Español from Samuel Hood Burke on Vimeo.

Obie Turned Two!

Obie turned two years old on May 7th. We decided to throw him a birthday party because earlier that week, there was a Groupon for Maribelle Cakery for $20 and I wanted to eat cake.

If you have not signed up with Groupon yet, please do so by clicking HERE. They will send you daily deals for the cities you choose. They have some really great things. To date, I have gotten 5 bottles of wine for $25, a car wash and wax for $14, $35 gift certificate to a local restaurant for $15, and the cake for $20. It's free to sign up and if you use the link above, I'll get a referral bonus, so thanks in advance!

Back to the party. It was actually really cute. We invited a few friends over and two of them brought their dogs. The adults got cake and ice cream and the dogs got lots of dog treats and doggy ice cream. Obie threw up about 30 minutes later, like a real kid who ate too much and got too excited

Our friends brought him lots of presents as well. After the cake and ice cream, we took the dogs to the dog park that is down the street. They played at the park for awhile, but it was so hot that there were not that many people there. Soba swam in the lake for a bit, but we left shortly after that because our friend's dog got stung by a bee.

I think the humans were more wore out from the party than the dogs because after the park, I promptly napped for about 4 hours. Happy Birthday lil guy!

Cold Soba Noodles

Summers in Southern Arizona gets ridiculously hot so one of my favorite things to eat for lunch is cold soba noodles. It's so quick, refreshing, and delicious!

I cooked the soba noodles in a large pot of soft boiling water (no rolling boil like you do with pasta and no salt!). Drain and rinsed in cold water. You can soak them in an ice bath, but I was too hungry to wait so mildly cold and not completely chilled was fine with me.

Then, you can add anything you like to it. We used shitake mushrooms, green onions, dried seaweed, and added a raw quail egg. I know making the tsuyu sauce is not too hard, but nowadays there are so many brands of tsuyu in Asian markets, it just makes things easier. I bought the Danya sobatsuyu the other day at Lee Lee's and it was just as tasty.

T had these Asian dishes and platter lying around so we finally used them. We're not usually this fancy ;)