Blogger Challenge: Coconut Milk!

I was so excited when Carrie picked the secret ingredient this week and it was coconut milk. I've actually had a can in the cabinet for a few weeks, with the intention of making this Thai Coconut Soup. I love Thai food, but I've never actually cooked it. It was really quite exciting!

Squirrels love Thai Coconut Soup. You have to watch out for them.

As a side note, this is also my favorite pot to cook in - it's an enameled cast iron dutch oven.

Recipe:

Saute 3 sliced garlic cloves, 3 tablespoons grated ginger, 1/4 cup chopped lemongrass, 1 teaspoon each cumin and coriander and a Thai chile in oil.

Add 1 sliced raw chicken breast and 1 sliced onion, cook 5 minutes.

Add shredded bok choy, 4 cups water, 1 can coconut milk, cilantro, and two tablespoons fish sauce. Simmer 8 minutes.

Notes:

This was really delicious. I didn't use the Thai chile, because I was concerned that it might be too spicy. Fish sauce smells really strong, but it was pretty mellow when cooked into the soup. It was really fast to make, with the one exception being that it me forever to grate the ginger. I'm going to call this my most successful week yet!

Here are some of the other coconut milk recipes from this week:

At Two Friends Cook: Indonesian Coconut Chicken, Coconut Scones, and Chicken Satay

Brazilian Soup and Pan de Coco

Pumpkin, Sweet Potato, Leek, and Coconut Milk Soup

Basil Chicken in Coconut Curry Sauce

Blogger Challenge: Rhubarb!

The blogger challenge begins with: rhubarb! I settled on rhubarb crisp after a few missteps, since pies were ruled out. This is my first time having ever tasted, much less cooked with rhubarb, and it was an interesting experience.

This morning at the Santa Monica Farmer's Market, I considered myself quite lucky to be able to find fresh rhubarb, since it seemed like everyone else had to get it frozen. After wandering about the market a little longer, I headed home. Only when I get there, I realized I no longer had any rhubarb. So, back I went, only to find it at the bagel stand.

Then, as I was getting to start on the glaze for a rhubarb-glazed pork roast, I discovered I had only purchased enough rhubarb for 2 cups chopped, when I needed 4. So, off to Ralph's to supplement with frozen, only by then it was too late for glaze. Hence, the crisp.

So... the crisp is... okay. I don't love it, but I wouldn't say that I dislike it either. The topping is made of oatmeal, brown sugar, cinnamon, nutmeg, and butter. The rhubarb is more tart than I expected. I think I might like to try making a pie with it someday, but certainly not tonight. I have had way too many rhubarb adventures for one weekend.

Over at Two Friends Cook, you can see Carrie's Wild Blueberry Rhubarb Pork Chops and Sarah's Rhubarb Pudding Cakes (which look beautiful... my food photography skills are still a bit lacking). Can't to see what everyone else has made.

That's all for this week, but keep an eye out, because the next week? It's time for Blogger Challenge: Coconut Milk!

Paula Deen's Luscious Lime Cheesecake

This is the cake that I made for Travis's birthday. His review is "a perfect cake". I think it could probably use a bit more lime, it was awfully sweet. I actually had the same issue with Paula Deen's lemon bars when I made those. There just isn't quite enough citrus flavor.

I didn't cover the full cake with whipped cream as the recipe called for, because Travis is vehemently opposed to whipped cream in both principle and practice. And, after all, it was his birthday. But I did add some to my slice and thought it was good.

Ingredients

1 (18 3/4 ounce) package yellow cake mix
4 eggs
1/4 cup vegetable oil
2 (8 ounce) packages cream cheese, at room temperature
1 (14 ounce) can sweetened condensed milk
2 teaspoons grated lime zest
1/3 cup fresh lime juice
1 teaspoon vanilla
1 (8 ounce) container Cool Whip, or 2 cups heavy cream, whipped with 1/2 cup sugar until stiff
lime slice, for garnish

Directions

Preheat oven to 300 degrees. Reserve 1/2 cup dry cake mix. In large bowl, combine remaining cake mix, 1 egg, and oil. Mix well (mixture will be crumbly). Press evenly in bottom and 1 and 1/2 inches up sides of greased 13x9 inch pan.

In same bowl, beat cheese until fluffy. Beat in condensed milk until smooth. Add remaining eggs and reserved cake mix and beat 1 minute at medium speed. Stir in lime zest, lime juice and vanilla. Pour into prepared crust. Bake for 50 - 55 minutes or until center is firm.

Cool to room temperature. Chill thoroughly. Spread Cool Whip over top. Cut into squares to serve. Garnish with lime slices.

Iron Chef Blogger Challenge

So, my friend Sarah had this awesome idea for an Iron Chef Blogger Challenge. Essentially, she and some her friends will be choosing a secret ingredient every week, cooking a recipe with it, and blogging about it. There are rules and time frames and everything. And I get to participate!

This will be happening over at Two Friends Cook, a blog that Sarah and her friend Carrie started to stay in touch via food, since they live in different states. They have graciously invited me to post over there with my results each week.

If anyone else wants to participate, let me know - even if you don't think you can do it every week or post the blogs yourself. We can work it out!

We'll be taking turns picking secret ingredients, and I'd love some suggestions, either in the comments or on Facebook. For a sneak peek, this week's secret ingredient is rhubarb, but we aren't allowed to make pie. I hope you'll check out the results when it's done.

Sugared Peanuts

It's a very special blog day! I decided to document the process of making sugared peanuts, step by step. They are really really good. I think this would also be good with almonds.


To start, you'll need two cups of raw peanuts and a cup of sugar. You'll also need water and salt. It took me a pound of raw shelled peanuts, a meat mallet, and about 30 minutes to get 2 cups of raw peanuts. You may want to skip this step if you can find already shelled raw peanuts. But, there also something sort of cathartic and fun about the shelling process. Additionally, you should be pre-heating your oven to 300.


Dissolve the sugar and salt in 1/2 cup of water over medium heat. Add the peanuts. You need to cook this, stirring it pretty often, until the peanuts are completely coated and there is no syrup left. It doesn't seem very likely for a while, but it will work. I promise!


See! It totally worked. Sugared peanuts! Yes, that is also my finger. I guess I'm pointing at them? No, I'm not really sure why.


Put the peanuts on a cookie sheet (the recipe says un-greased, but I like to put some non-stick foil on pretty much every pan I put in the oven). Spread them out as much as you can. Bake them for 30 minutes, and stir them every 5 minutes. Don't stir them too vigorously, or peanuts will fly about your oven, and you'll have to fish them out before they start a fire. It's unpleasant, trust me.


And then they're done, and super delicious! Seriously, I wish I had some more right now. We snacked on them here for several days. Apparently I missed a tiny bit of syrup that got onto the pan with the peanuts, but it just turned it to something that tasted a bit like peanut brittle (and came right off the non-stick foil, ha!). Not a bad problem to have.

So there you go! You should really try these, they're one of my favorite things that I've made lately. Like candy, but you can pretend like they aren't bad for you because of the protein involved. Good luck with that.

Catch-up Time!

It's catch-up blog time! These photos are actually in reverse order of when they were taken, due apparently to my inadequacies at uploading.

During this time, I also braised some leeks. Having never had leeks, I found them delicious. However, in the photo, they looked horrifingly unappetizing.

I also made some hoecakes and some oyster stew, neither of which came out very well. The hoecakes were too thick and so didn't really fry up crispy. The oyster stew was just plain bad. The butter kept separating from the cream and it was way too spicy. But oh well, it happens, right?

Finally, I seem to be missing a picture from Imo's Pizza in St. Louis. I don't usually like thin crust pizza, but this was really good. It wasn't too tomatoey, the toppings were under the cheese, and it was a bit more acidic than a lot of pizza. I ate way too much.


This is my Mom, Travis, and I sampling some original Ted Drewes frozen custard in St. Louis. It was amazing! They have many other flavors. The one that caught my attention the most was called The Great Pumpkin, which was pumpkin pie mixed with the frozen custard and topped with whipped cream and cinnamon. Yum!


This is a fried scallop sandwich from Malibu Seafood. The scallops and the fish there are really fantastic, but this sandwich was really only so-so. The cheese was too thick and not quite melted, and the scallops really had no inclination or reason to stay in the bun where they belonged.


These are some blonde brownies I made, which if I must say - they were delicious. They were a big hit at my office too. Nutty and chocolatey without being overwhelming. It's a Paula Deen recipe, so of course not good for you in any way whatsoever.


This is a sampling of goods that I got from Wonder Bakery in Downtown LA. The two smaller pastries weren't very good, in fact, I can't even remember what the top one is. The longer thinnish one is a BBQ pork bun. I think it might have been better with regular pork instead of BBQ, I wasn't a big fan. However, the square item is honey cake, and it was sooo good. It had that great spongeiness of angel food cake, but with better flavor. I highly recommend it.


And finally, this is a honey-glazed cornish game hen with rice pilaf. It was really good too and also a Paula Deen recipe. Sadly, I didn't really like the rice as much after getting the glaze and hen-juice all over it. The things I do for the sake of bad food photography. Seriously, I know the photos need a lot of work. Travis says something about white-balance, but I don't even know what that means.

So that's it! I'm all caught up on my food blog! But, I'm still cooking, so hopefully more to come soon. Today I found some raw peanuts at the Santa Monica Farmer's Market, so I'm hoping to roast those. Plus, brussel sprouts are in season, and I have some fresh salmon from Santa Monica Seafood to play with. Sounds like a fun weekend!

Last China Blog

So, in an effort to get caught up on this whole blogging thing, I'm throwing out one last China food blog. Yum!


This whole fish was really good. We had fish like this a few times, always with this sort of sweet and sour crust on it. It was quite delicious, if difficult to eat family style. In the back right, there is a plate of baby bok choy - we must have had this at every meal. In fact, there were several times that the vegetarians in the tour group pretty much subsisted on baby bok choy and rice.

China did not seem to be an especially vegetarian-friendly country, or at least not the places we ate on our tour. One man in our tour group seemed especially frustrated that they seemed to think that vegetarians only ate vegetables (I was never quite sure exactly what he wanted. He complained one day that a friend of his took him to a Peking Duck restaurant in Beijing the night before the tour started, and all he had to eat was grass. I never figured out if he was being literal or not.) Once, they threw in some tofu, and that seemed to appease him a bit.


Mmm, this was from our dumpling feast in Xi'an, possibly my favorite food of the whole trip (the closest contender is some homemade noodles we had outside of Xi'an). After a number of cold dishes, some noodles, etc. we started the dumpling feast. There were either 17 or 19 types of dumplings in all - enough for everyone at the table to have one of each. My favorites were some of the seafood and duck, least favorites included something so spicy I couldn't breathe and this walnut thing (too thick, ugh). They were also shaped beautifully - many of them were shaped like the food that was in them. I found this link that has more pictures of the restaurant and dumplings. By the time we left, I was so full I thought I might explode, and we had to walk what felt like miles (but Travis insists was not far at all) in 110 degree heat.

There are more pictures on my flickr site of foods that I saw but didn't eat: stinky tofu, soup dumplings, a steamed bun restaurant, and something very tentacle-y. Just click on the China set on the right hand side.

There was so much amazing food on this trip - the first thing we ate still stands out, which was this amazing fried rice and dumplings at our hotel in Beijing, which we ate while extraordinarily jet-lagged. We couldn't understand how we could be expected to eat so much food, and we eventually gave up, embarrassed. Only later did we learn that it is customary to serve too much food, and it was be considered rude to ask for less or to complain about it being wasteful or anything like that.

That in itself should give you an idea of how hospitable and friendly the Chinese people generally are. China is really an amazing place. The people obviously love their country, and they are so proud of it's sights, sounds, and food - most people we saw seemed to take a great deal of pleasure in seeing tourists enjoy their surroundings. It seems like I have so much to say, but I think wraps it up pretty well. Next, I'm on to catching up on the various things I've cooked and eaten since getting back to California! Yay!